Interesting personal exploration of her atheism by the lovely Jane Caro
For Jane Caro, there is no higher power. She explains why she's an atheist to her bootstraps.
I'm an atheist for the same reason that most believers are members of their particular faith: I was born into a family of unbelievers.
I have had flirtations with religious belief. I was a precocious reader and many of my favourite authors were profoundly religious Victorians (George Eliot, the Brontës, Mrs Gaskell). Heavily influenced by their spiritual world view, I used to try saying prayers secretly at night, waiting for some kind of momentous spiritual experience (I was also a horribly melodramatic and exceedingly morbid child). As far as revelations went, however, I experienced nothing and, as a result, grew bored with my own grandiosity and soon gave it up.
Many years later, as an unhappy young woman struggling with a mental illness, I sought solace in religion. I earnestly tried to believe there was some kind of higher power. I was never much tempted by any particular brand of religion. A true child of the 1970s, I sought spirituality.
When, thanks in part to the skilled and compassionate help of a secular psychotherapist, I finally made the breakthrough that helped calm my irrational anxiety and dissipate my depression, I was filled with gratitude. I wanted to place this sense of grace with someone or something bigger than myself or my therapist, and so I tried to believe in some kind of supernatural force that had helped me resolve my fears.
I was never quite convinced, however. In fact, I had a second breakthrough listening to Richard Dawkins explain his theory that religious faith is a misfiring of the gratitude impulse. As he explains it, as herd animals, human beings are hard-wired to feel gratitude and repay debts: reciprocity holds the herd together. But good things also happen for reasons outside human agency. After a week of rain, your wedding day dawns fine, warm and sunny. You feel immense relief and gratitude, but whom should you thank? Who can you repay? A god, of course, that's who. After my own experience, I understand the need to give thanks to something. So as an explanation of why humans invented gods, it makes perfect sense to me. I think that's the essence of my lack of belief, in fact: that it just makes sense.
I come from a household of intellectuals. I was brought up in an atmosphere of passionate argument and discussion. No quarter was given around our dinner table to age or experience. If you put forward a proposition, you were expected to defend it. Our family get-togethers were (and still are) noisy, argumentative and intense. Lazy, illogical thinking earned you scorn and ridicule.
Many of my friends fled our dinner table in horror at the furious verbal exchanges that were so common there. Indeed, my sisters and I sometimes joked that we ended up marrying the only boyfriends who could withstand the onslaught. They proved their worth and courage by coming back for more. (Unlike many of my friends raised in more religious households, all three of us are still married to those same brave men.)
The arguments that earned respect were those that made sense. Belief alone didn't cut it; there needed to be some kind of evidence and proof. And while the arguments could be intensely passionate, there was much humour and honesty around our family dinner table.
My parents didn't fit neatly into any particular box. My mother was a stay-at-home mum (at least while we were young) who was a passionate feminist and free-market capitalist. She was also unequivocally, scornfully atheist, having been brought up a Methodist. Her view was (and still is) that religion is all about blokes.
My father's family was probably Jewish once upon a time, but there is literally no memory of that. He was a very successful businessman, a lifelong liberal in the English rather than the Australian tradition. He was (and still is) energetic, opinionated and funny. He has always claimed to be an agnostic. He treats everyone as an equal, even his children. We benefited immeasurably from this.
Little was disapproved of in our household, except dishonesty and lying. You could swear, lose your temper, drink, smoke and have sex. At 18, when I wanted to move in with my boyfriend (now my husband of 37 years), my mother gave me – a full-time university student with only a part-time job – an allowance so I wouldn't be financially dependent on him. My parents applied logic to their decisions, not tradition or fear of what other people might think. They valued independence – not just of behaviour, but also of thought.
I was brought up to be sceptical, particularly of the establishment and of entrenched power and privilege. I was brought up to fear certainty and celebrate doubt. I was taught to despise pretension, pomposity and self-importance. I was encouraged to see the gap between the rhetoric of the powerful and their actions, and to point it out. I was encouraged to ask the difficult questions.
Atheism is more attached to questions while religion is more attached to answers. The religious fear doubt, the atheist celebrates it. When it comes to the really big questions – like the nature and meaning of the universe – my lack of knowing does not bother me at all. I admire cosmologists and astronomers whose curiosity about the space that surrounds us drives them to explore, ask questions and posit hypotheses. When they discover something, I read with interest the stories about it in the media. But just as it took us millennia to discover every corner of our planet, I suspect, as far as knowing the universe is concerned, we're a little like a few tribal Neanderthals a couple of hundred thousand years ago setting off into an unknown ocean in a rickety canoe.
I think my lack of need to understand, explain or control unknowable things like the cosmos, and my comfort with its indifference to me and my fellow creatures, stems from a very human experience – my introduction to parenthood.
My first child, a daughter, was born prematurely. My forewaters broke at 34 weeks and I was admitted to hospital and ordered to stay in bed in an attempt to maintain the pregnancy. After a week, I was told my womb was no longer sterile due to the leak, and that my baby would have to be induced at 35 weeks to prevent infection for both of us. I was also injected with steroids to accelerate the development of the baby's lungs. In a previous era, both my baby and I would have died agonisingly of infection. Thanks to science, today this is a relatively minor problem.
The birth itself was fairly uneventful (thank you, epidural) and Polly was delivered at 2.5 kilograms, a healthy weight for a 35-week-old. Her Apgar score, which assesses the health of a newborn baby, was an excellent 8, then 9 when routinely rechecked five minutes later. We spent another week in hospital, during which she was treated for jaundice (very common in premature babies), but she seemed to be thriving, and we were discharged with every expectation that all would be well.
The next day, however, I noticed thick white snot running from her nose and that night I could neither get her to feed nor settle. Feeling like a paranoid new mum, I insisted we drive to the children's hospital and have her checked out. She was immediately admitted with suspected respiratory syncytial virus, which causes bronchiolitis and remains the biggest killer of babies under one. It is particularly dangerous for premature babies.
After a few days in the babies' ward, the worst happened: Polly stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated. It happened twice on the ward, and a third time while she was being intubated in intensive care after having been assessed as the sickest baby in NSW and given the last available intensive care paediatric bed in the state that night. I had been trying to breastfeed her when she first gave up trying to breathe, and it remains the single most terrifying moment of my life. I remember thinking that I'd only known her for 13 days and yet, if she died, so would I.
The next morning, a friend insisted I talk to a neonatologist who was also a grief counsellor. He had trained as a counsellor when he had lost a child of his own. When we met in the hospital coffee shop, he wasted no time on the niceties. He just said the following, words I've never forgotten and that have formed my approach to parenting and to life (and, it seems, the universe) ever since. "Terrible things can happen," he said. "They can happen to anyone. There's nothing special about you and nothing special about Polly. Danger is reality, safety is an illusion."
Perhaps it reads brutally, put down bluntly on the page like that, but as he spoke metaphorical bricks fell from my shoulders. I gave up making secret bargains with a god I didn't believe in, casting superstitious magic spells about room numbers and days in hospital, and trying to pre-disaster everything by imagining the worst. Instead, I accepted that what would be would be. I stopped seeking safety. And as I stopped seeking safety and certainty, as I gave up trying to control what might happen and just accepted the reality of what did, my anxiety fell away.
Terrible things can happen, they can happen to anyone. We are all children of an indifferent (but not malevolent) universe. Of course, wonderful things can happen, too. Polly survived with no ill effects and is now a robust and productive 24-year-old.
I love my kids, my family and friends. I love my country, my planet, my home. But I can't save them, control them or make them safe. No one and nothing can protect me or them.
American physicist Lawrence Krauss told the audience at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne that scientists now understand the universe is about 70 per cent empty space and 30 per cent dark matter, and that everything else we can see – stars, galaxies and so on – makes up less than 1 per cent. "Cosmology has taught us you are far, far more insignificant than you thought," he said.
I don't need the universe to have meaning or purpose. I'm happy for it just to be. If a meteor is hurtling towards earth as I write, no doubt I will be momentarily dismayed when I realise the world and everything on it is about to be destroyed, but does that mean it matters? In the greater scheme of things, I doubt it.
That's the thing about us atheists: far from the arrogance we are usually accused of, ours is a fundamentally humble position – we do not believe humanity is in any way special. For the atheist, there is no vertical structure to the universe, with a god at the top, men next, followed by women, then all the animals, reptiles, fish and insects, with amoebae and bacteria at the bottom. For atheists, particularly when confronted with the vastness of the universe, amoebae are us.
Edited extract from For God's Sake: An Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim Debate Religion, by Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein, Simon Smart and Rachel Woodlock (Pan MacMillan).
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/losing-my-religion-20130625-2ouww.html#ixzz2XesE3svL
