Cosmic Indifference

I find myself on a giant rock that spends its time orbiting a spherical fire. This concerns me. It apparently concerns others, too, because they compassionately lay siege on my mind with a number of competing instructions for what to do after finding myself on the aforementioned flame-bound rock. But let’s not concern ourselves with their misplaced concern, for they are almost certainly wrong. Instead, let’s go back to the original setup: me, the rock, and the fireball. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Every moment of unbearably powerful love, every masterful work of art, everything we’ve ever done goes unnoticed by the spherical duo. They’re indifferent, really. Oh, and the rest of the universe feels the same way. This cosmic indifference reduces me to a feeble question: Is it serious—is this vast arena of experiences we call life serious? Does it warrant a response deeply rooted in emotion? Or are we better off taking things lightly and carrying laughter with us through every experience?

It certainly feels as though our lives matter. Natural selection has left its mark here: we struggle to live even if we fail to love life. Most of us don’t need to be told that life matters, we dive in headfirst. But we stay curiously close to the surface, leaving the depths largely unexplored. Consider this: How often do you laugh after something leaves you emotionally vulnerable? How many misplaced chuckles find their way into discussions about murder, genocide, or some natural disaster?

We don’t know how to respond, and so we very quickly inject levity into the situation. We’re unknowingly using humor to defend ourselves against strong negative emotions. This defense allows us to face situations that would otherwise leave us debilitated. But humor has a darker side: it gives reverence to nothing. We laugh in the face of tragedy, but perhaps we should fall silent instead. We laugh because we don’t know what else to do, but perhaps it is time to learn.

Just as humor allows us to escape from tragedy, it protects us from ecstasy. It seems that we are not merely afraid of feeling pain, but of feeling at all. For feeling leaves us vulnerable and uncertain. Moments of intense connection with others are incredibly difficult to sustain. After we share kind words or stories about our lives, we almost universally feel compelled to break out of the moment—to come up for air. Even presenting these words to you is difficult because I run the risk of appearing foolishly sentimental. But what I’m proposing is simply that we give credibility to our emotions. Cosmic indifference would scoff at the idea of life’s significance (if it ever took the time to notice). But even if we concede that human life isn’t important to the universe, it’s still important to us. And, really, what more do you want?

So our living in an indifferent universe doesn’t eliminate the possibility of meaning—far from it. We have evolved the capability for both detached humor and profound emotion. We can live a deeply meaningful life. We see the beauty of life, but we also see the darkness within it. To allow ourselves to feel profoundly means facing both the beauty and the horror of life. To live lightly—through humor—means discarding the richness of life in favor of playfulness.

Does this playfulness lack depth? Is it an immature response to life when compared to the notion of responding with profound emotion? If we take that line of thought too far, we would discard laughter and replace it with profound emotion. But such a life is too burdensome. Fortunately, these two responses aren’t isolated from each other. A robust sense of humor can exist alongside a profound sense of meaning and emotion. The deployment of either response is a matter of practical wisdom. Some situations need to be faced and felt to their fullest extent. These are the experiences that give our lives meaning. But not all situations call for that kind of response—not all experiences need to be deeply meaningful. What’s essential is that we know when to laugh and when it’s important that we do otherwise.

Beyond the Instrumental

As my source of meaning shifts from the celestial to the earthly, I begin to cherish what I once neglected. Friendship. Family. Beauty. Reaching back into my earliest memories, I find a longing for intimacy and connection. But it was consistently displaced by an admonishing awareness that my true longing should be for intimacy and connection with the divine. Human connections were implicitly instrumental. Friendships mutually strengthened faith. Strangers were opportunities for proselytizing. The scope of my existence was eternal, and in a quiet way it seemed foolish to fill my time on this planet with transient concerns. Family was valuable, but the uniqueness of those bonds was lost on me. Their love, their attention, and their instruction were all useful insofar as they enabled me to fulfill the call. Beauty, too, was subsumed under this divine mission. A magnificent oak tree was not a source of wonder, but an argument. So too with sunsets, waterfalls, and sprawling mountain ranges. They were useful for fortifying belief and furthering the cause.

Morality, perhaps above all, was made into an instrumental matter. With heaven on the horizon and fire at our heels, we're bribed into obedience. Within this perspective, all motivation is reduced to selfishness. I don't help you because of empathy, compassion, or respect for life—I help you because such actions are required for my entrance into heaven, and my escape from hell. It is a view that, essentially, treats us like children.

These were my ideas, vivified in the corridors of my mind but impotent in the world. Instead of defining me, they haunted me. These views, though consistent with my Christian metaphysics, had little correspondence to my actual experience of life. In my own way, I always knew that friendship, family, and beauty were good in and of themselves.

Falsifiability

I found this little anecdote in the book Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar, and couldn't help but share:

Two men are making breakfast. As one is buttering the toast, he says, "Did you ever notice that if you drop a piece of toast, it always lands butter side down?"

The second guy says, "No, I bet it just seems that way because it's so unpleasant to clean up the mess when it lands butter side down. I bet it lands butter side up just as often."

The first guy says, "Oh, yeah? Watch this." He drops the toast to the floor, where it lands butter side up.

The second guy says, "See, I told you."

The first guys says, "Oh, I see what happened. I buttered the wrong side!"

Realization

It's strange, how moments of illumination can hit you without warning. I've recently sought in vain for the reason that potentially-fatal arguments against religion have little to no affect on many of those who hear them. "Chalk it up to a blind faith, or some sort of belief-perseverance", I would say to myself. As potent as those forces may be, I knew they did not stand alone. Today I realized another, and perhaps vital, aspect of this ability to nonchalantly shrug off devastating arguments.

I dub it the non-informed shrug.

In this moment I realized why it had been so easy for me to deconvert - indeed why I was quite ready to when it finally happened. The reason philosophy had such a profound effect on my religious beliefs was that I knew full-well what my religious beliefs meant and, further, what it meant for them to be true.I had also spent considerable time investigating the various defenses of Christianity. So when philosophy presented its arguments against religion, I knew Christianity had not the dexterity nor the robustness to survive such an onslaught.

I quickly turned to those who seemed confident in their faith (i.e. pastors, campus ministry leaders, seminary students, and websites answering questions submitted through e-mail), and was met with excuses and ridiculous answers to philosophy's questions. Most were taken back - both by my being the one asking the questions and by the very nature of the questions. The questions philosophers raise are not addressed in popular Christian apologetic manuals. Soon, I could taste Christianity's falsity in the very air around me.

So, by virtue of being informed, I was unable to ignore the questions. I realized that it was not merely I who was without an answer, but everyone who proclaimed Christianity. It is this state of being informed that crafts the crucial distinction between myself and the non-informed shrugger.

They feel secure in their belief in spite of their inability to answer the question because they think a theologian somewhere has answered the question. "Your question has an answer, I am simply not that intellectual and can't be bothered with looking into such things." They are able to discount the potency of the question by discounting their intelligence. "Since my religion is right, my inability to answer the question doesn't bother me. If you were to go talk with a theologian or pastor, I'm sure they'd set you straight."

I suppose I think about the theoretical underpinnings of my beliefs more than most.

Victims

Daylight
Politics a dim sight
Freedom, Equality, Justice
Victims of Hindsight