Why religion might be worthwhile even if God doesn't exist...
Dome of St. Sophia Cathedral, Harbin, China – one of a handful of Christian churches left in Mainland China and perhaps the only one with permission to display a cross.
The muted glow of hundreds of candles; the litany of saints intoned against harmonious chords, as mellifluous as an Enya track; the burnished gold and silver of the chalice and the crucifix, set off by white lilies and yellow-green palm fronds twisted into crosses: These elements synergized into what I think of as the Easter Vigil Aesthetic, creating a feeling of comfort, community, and context. The older I get and the darker and more deconstructed our beautiful, troubled world becomes, the more I long for the transcendent peace that used to descend upon me during the weekly Catholic masses of my youth.
Like so many other fallen Catholics, I am well-equipped with arguments against the existence of God as well as participation in such a fallible institution. Yes, I acknowledge the necessity of an Aristotelian "unmoved mover," but such a primal creative force is a far cry from the benevolent, anthropomorphic God of the three "O's" claimed by the Abrahamic religions. At the end of the day, perhaps it was the pragmatic proposal that participation in the Church was unnecessary that I found most compelling. Surely there had to be a better way to reap the benefits of membership in a spiritual community, the thinking went – one that didn’t involve countenancing such bigotry, abuse, and hypocrisy?
As the twenty-first century ages out of adolescence, however, I am forced to ask myself and my fellow Millennials whether we have actually walked this other, less trodden spiritual path. It has been 141 years since Nietzsche declared that God is dead, and postmodernism is in full swing. Everywhere I turn, the hallowed Self reigns supreme, from the curated hells of social media, fraught with self-harm of every imaginable variety masquerading as “living our best lives”; to the halls of political power, where bad-faith actors advance Machiavellian agendas; to the institutions of higher education, where endless reexamination of self-identity in terms of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and economic class has done little except stoke grudges and widen the divides that separate us.
Many of my peers have proclaimed their dedication to “energy” and “spirituality rather than religion.” Upon closer examination, however, this often means little more than choosing from a rotation of nebulous, in-fashion, and conveniently unproblematic principles like gratitude, self-love, and boundary-setting. Removed from a wider framework of specific, actionable beliefs contextualized by history and catechism, these often reveal themselves to be little more than “just so” rationalizations of what we want to believe and how we want to act.
Without more rigorous spiritual systems headed by dedicated leaders to guide us, how many of us can honestly say that we sit down for an hour each week to engage in earnest, thematically guided self-examination, spiritual contemplation, and goal-setting, then systematically apply the fruits of such reflection throughout the rest of the week? What’s more, even if we do so individually, how do we achieve wider change without connection to a like-minded spiritual community?
In an age of anything-goes subjectivity, I find myself gravitating back toward the enduring truths and strictures of my youth:
That we are all brothers and sisters, and that from every angle our differences are vastly outweighed by our similarities
That we all err, and that forgiveness of ourselves and others is crucial to a peaceful and purposeful life
That physical appearance is unimportant, a distraction from our deeper purposes
That professional and social recognition, as well as material possessions, are poor benchmarks by which to measure our worth, and that pursuing genuine, lasting good for ourselves and others often involves ignoring or forsaking them
That addiction to instant gratification is a kind of cancer, and that very few worthwhile pursuits in life yield their fruits immediately
That the good works that we perform are maximally beneficial to our spirits if they are accomplished quietly, without expectation of public acknowledgement, gratitude on the part of their recipients, or reciprocit
That one day all of us will leave this earth, and that even the greatest, shZiniest lives leave no more important legacies than the powerful, mostly unrecorded impacts that we have on the lives of those around us every single day
I remember a passage that I came across in the one philosophy course of my undergraduate career. The question at its heart was whether, if a broken compass guides a lost traveler out of the wilderness by pointing to a North that turns out to be another direction but that nonetheless leads him or her to safety, can it be said that the compass provided some form of truth even though its readings were false? Similarly, if religion ends up being objectively false, but it helps people to lead better lives than they would have otherwise, can it be said that it contains some truth?
Having seen the peace and hope that the Catholic paradigm provided my grandparents as they raised children and grandchildren, guiding them from the time that they were born to the final moments in which they confronted their mortality, and having experienced the cultural and spiritual freefall that has resulted from an entire generation suddenly abandoning this mode of life, I am increasingly amenable to the argument that organized religion, as flawed as it is, is necessary. In this trying world, we are all in foxholes, and perhaps it can be said that among those of us who would cling to hope and meaning, there can be no true atheists at all.
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