Reverence for the Sacred: An Atheist Perspective

The first time that I moved out from “home” was during my senior year in High School. My older brother got an apartment, and invited me to move in with him. I worked a part time job in retail, and having chosen to go to college, I was saving what money I could by cutting my expenses to the bone. Our apartment was not reliably stocked with food, and I was so determined not to touch the money that I squirrelled away that I would eagerly run to the corner store to buy a can of fruit when I scraped up a little change, or would sometimes walk several miles in the summer heat to my mom’s house to fix a bowl of Top Ramen. In my spare moments I read voraciously. Some of the books I read included Thoreau’s “Walden,” Bakunin’s “God and the State,” Kevin Bales’ “Disposable People,” Michael Walzer’s “Just and Unjust Wars,” Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” a collection of essays on Communism entitled “The God That Failed,” and many more. Some of these books I bought at the expense of food.

In spite of the many things that I could have been unhappy about, it was a wonderful time in life for me. I was quite happy, and spent much of my free time running through the local woods, hanging out by the Willamette river, and causing mischief such as leaving messages in advertising spaces on shopping carts and on newspaper dispensers, as well as removing advertisement brackets from shopping carts or ripping ads up from the floor of the grocery store. I spent hours in the woods marveling at the miracle of life and reflecting on deep questions. My reflections deepened a passion in me that has never left me, a passion that drove me to the edge of madness at times, but that inspires me at my best to be great.

Consider it how you will, life is an experience of the miraculous. In our vast universe of mostly inert, dead matter we have here on Earth the miracle of biology, originating over four billion years ago. Outside of bacteria and other microbes, life like that which we know is closer to only a half billion years old, and it was another one to two hundred million years before life on land became a thing. It was less than a quarter of a billion years ago that mammals appeared, primates only about sixty million years ago, the first hominins about six million years ago, and the first anatomically modern humans a mere quarter of a million years ago. Civilization in its earliest forms is only about ten thousand years old. All of this is to say that the process that brought you to where you are, reading this, has been epic.[1]

Our Sacred Heritage:

I have always viewed the process that brought us what we have with a sense of reverence. This includes the awe inspiring majesty and magnitude of our universe itself, and our magnificent planet Earth. It includes our greater family of all life, and the process by which not only ourselves but also our distantly speciated relatives, represented in the other forms of life on earth, came to be in their present forms by which we know them. And of course it includes our own species, and the incredible process that brought us to our present form in which we now exist. The challenges that our ancestors faced to survive to the present and spread themselves around the world are humbling and inspiring.

And we are a most remarkable species indeed to be able to appreciate these things at all. Much of what we are we share in common with other animals, but it is our minds in particular that set us apart, endowing us with a set of unique capacities that have enabled us to think abstractly, learn and pass on knowledge, and use that knowledge to manipulate the physical world in ways that no other animal does. This knowledge and experience passed down is our own particular sacred heritage that gives us our culture, our technologies and tools, our language and our ways of interacting. It gives us the vast possibilities of what we make of ourselves and our world, made possible through thousands of years’ worth of building on structures of abstract thought and the ability to pass that process to subsequent generations to continue the work that was started long ago. And quite incredibly, it allows us to enhance the process along the way by way of cultural exchange between different groups of people. The legacy of civilization, thought, and literature that we have inherited is awesome.

Why it Matters:

Some YouTuber, and I don’t remember who it was,[2] coined the term “matterism” to describe the obsession among Millennials with wanting their lives to matter, wanting what they do to matter, and in the context of the video, often expressing that through involvement in social justice activism. Perhaps I am caught up in a generational zeitgeist, for certainly it has always been important to me that I make a difference. Such a desire is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the purpose to which such inspired efforts are put. Life as a sentient being is a magnificent gift, and it does honor to our ancestors and our great Sacred Heritage that we work toward greatness. It is not for everybody, and greatness is not required, but it can be a worthy endeavor for some.

That being said, some people’s ideas of greatness can be colossally destructive.

We are not just the inheritors of a great legacy, but the keepers of it, and the creators of a continuing legacy. We hold great responsibility to the future generations. We have been impoverished many times over of something that we cannot get back by the careless, destructive, and evil actions of people past, and those are things that we cannot offer to our descendants either because they are gone forever. Likewise it is our responsibility to take care that we do not destroy, nor allow to be destroyed, the great things that we owe to our future generations. This is not to advocate the insane notion of freezing the world into a stasis, for that too would be a betrayal, were it possible, of our future generations. In particular, I’m referring to the Western culture that allows the greatest expression of our human potential to be expressed, a culture that is under threat in the present from within and from without.

There are many things worth preserving – the natural world, ancient monuments, heirlooms, family histories, practical knowledge, scientific knowledge, so on and so forth. More important are the scientific method itself, the philosophical method, the use of logic, critical thinking, and reason. Most important are the cultural values that encourage and enable greatness to manifest on every scale according to the desire and ability of each individual, Western Enlightenment values of liberty, and of free speech, and a culture that values our heritage in the first place. A pro-civilizing, pro-humanity culture. We are blessed to have inherited such a culture, and dishonor our ancestors and especially dishonor our descendants if we fail to preserve it for them.

That is what inspires me to act.

 

Thanks for taking the time out of your day to read my thoughts. It is my sincere intention that I provide you with value, and I would love to hear what you have to say in the comments. I am committed to posting something every week, and if you like or are interested in what I have to say, subscribe. I appreciate your time and attention, and until next week, all the best!