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Being an atheist (quick! run!) and a skeptic, I had hesitated about writing a part of my baseline called “spirituality”; later, after I decided to do it, I thought I’d simply write a short post about using the term to mean “awe of the universe and life”, with no supernatural connotations.
However, today at lunch I finished Steve Pavlina’s book, “Personal Development for Smart People”, and its final chapter is about spirituality. And I liked his definition of it: your beliefs about how the universe works and about your purpose/role in life. From that, I can proceed.
Current Status:
As I said in the beginning (what, you haven’t run away yet?), I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in any god or gods, or in anything supernatural; not out of any “dogmatic materialistic belief”, but simply because I, like Carl Sagan, believe “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. If you tell me you have a dog at home, I’ll believe you without evidence, but if you tell me you have a dragon at home, I’ll demand evidence; in the absence of it I’ll think you’re either lying or crazy. And no supernatural “event” has ever had any more evidence than “so and so saw” or “so and so wrote”, which amount to mere hearsay, even if it happens to have been written millennia ago. I’m not closed-minded; it’s just that, to paraphrase Sam Harris, my beliefs scale with the available evidence. If there’s none, there’s no belief – always keeping an open mind to any evidence in the future, of course. But so far there has been none.
Contrarily to what many believers claim about atheists, my life isn’t depressive, hopeless, grey or nihilistic; not believing in an eternal soul or an afterlife makes my life more precious, not less.
But talking about my beliefs, or promoting atheism, reason and skepticism, isn’t the purpose of this blog. All of the above only had two points: to show how my atheism isn’t a “problem”, isn’t making me unhappy, or limiting my personal growth; and to allow me to talk about “spirituality” without having my readers think I’m a “true believer” or a new age mystic. I’m not either.
To me, the universe is a fascinating, mostly unknown (but not unknowable) place. Being alive and allowed to learn, to discover, to develop your knowledge, to find out how things work is exhilarating. Unlike some (the kind who complained about Newton “unweaving the rainbow”), I don’t make a virtue of not knowing, but I look at that as the beginning of a trip, with the anticipation and the excitement of so many new things to experience and learn ahead. A mystic will either claim (permanent) perfect ignorance or perfect knowledge; I, on the other hand, treat lack of knowledge as the beginning of a new adventure. And in this respect I couldn’t ask for more.
As for my purpose in life… I don’t know.
Really. And I admit it readily, without shame or embarrassment.
I don’t think it’s unknowable to me, though. I believe it’s something I’ll find out eventually. In fact, I expect this blog to help me in that respect (as with many others).
Goals:
To discover / determine my “purpose in life”, and realize – or make sure – that it’s a good one.
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