In my first piece about atheism here, I wrote that religious believers should not have a monopoly on concepts like spirituality, awe, inner peace, and even prayer. Recently, I began to think about that statement a little more closely.
I was talking with a friend about belief. She said, "I believe in God. But I don't define God. I don't know how. I just pray to God, because it makes me feel better."
I thought about that. I am an atheist. I've called myself an atheist since I was 16 or so. When I was 15, I started leading a congregation in prayer. I am a lay clergy member. I still remember vividly the first time I stood behind the podium, in front of the congregation. Their faces blurred together. I opened my mouth to sing, shaking and terrified and feeling like a child who had somehow stumbled into an arena much too advanced for her, and I had no idea what would happen. I had no idea if my voice would be there. But it was. I began to sing, and as I sang, I felt the space change. I felt a connectedness that I'd never experienced before. There was something binding all of those people, with their blurry, upturned faces, to me, and something binding me to them, and something binding us all to something bigger. The something bigger, I felt, was both all living people and all of history. I didn't think to call it God. Despite the religious setting. Despite the spiritual connotations, I knew as strongly as someone knows that they feel God's presence that I did not feel God's presence.
And I never have.
But it becomes a little blurry sometimes. The line between belief and non-belief, I mean. The definitions on both sides can be so easily expanded to encompass everything. My mother likes to tell me, "You just don't define God broadly enough." According to her, I'm a believer, I just don't know it.
I tend to think that people are what they say they are. Otherwise, someone else always has to decide, and that other person doesn't ever have the full story. There is a long, complicated, possibly sordid, and definitely thrilling history that has led to my identity as a non-believer. I couldn't begin to explain it here, because it'd take too long. And it'd be beside the point. The point is that people tend to get stuck on the concept of God. And everyone has a different idea about what God means. And all of those ideas come with different rules. So that when our identities blur and blend and the colors bleed together slightly, everyone yells, "See! I told you so! You're not what you claim to be!"
For example, I sometimes catch myself praying. Maybe "prayer" is the wrong word. When my friend said, "I pray to God" to explain her personal belief system, and to clarify that she fell on the side of "belief," as opposed to "non-belief," I suddenly wondered what it meant to pray. I suddenly felt something a little like guilt. Because I knew that I'd done something that could definitely be defined as praying. And I knew exactly when it had happened. Not just once, but many times.
It was always during the Amidah, the climax of the Jewish liturgical service, when the congregation is standing together. We sway and bob, davening with the familiar gentle rocking motions. And on the bima, I face the ark and hold my siddur (prayer book) against my chest and think about my life. And I ask for something. The text of the Amidah petitions God. I must have learned the beseeching nature of the experience long before I understood any of the words. I don't remember anyone explaining it explicitly. But I always knew what to do at that point. Ask for something.
"Please...Allow me to better appreciate the joy in my life, and to better reject the sadness."
I never said "God." It was never, "God, would you...." It was just a request. From me, to -- I never knew, or cared to know. The world? Myself? Nothing at all? It never felt relevant.
Had I cheated, somehow, on my atheism? Had I slipped up and grown dependent on a relationship with a God I didn't even believe in?
I don't think so. I don't think that "cheating" exists in this context. It isn't a game. And the rules are arbitrary. I wasn't slipping up or cheating. I was thinking about my life in a context where self-reflection is formalized and encouraged in the shape of prayer. I was using a tool readily available to me.
Prayer is deeply powerful. It comes in too many forms to count. It sports a breathtakingly enormous fan base. People who practice it like an art, people who take it incredibly seriously, people who use it for healing, people who do it casually, people who make a living studying it by hooking up Buddhist monks to EEG sensors. And, apparently, me -- a person caught constantly between her culturally religious identity and her non-belief.
I know a lot of people will want to tell me that I simply don't understand. That if I pray, I'm doing something religious, and am therefore a believer. They will want to tell me that I'm writing out of a place of profound confusion. Well, maybe I am. Maybe I'm confused about the need for painfully simplistic definitions. And the need to give absolutely everything a name and a designation. Maybe we need new words for different types of the thing we call prayer. But more than that, maybe we need to let atheists pray once in a while. Without God. As radical and paradoxical as that might sound. As fundamentally incorrect as that might sound. Maybe we need to just let atheists pray.
Follow Kate Fridkis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/eatthedamncake
Friendly Atheist » The Atheist's Prayer
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2:05 PM CST
Quote :
..."Their faces blurred together."...
Stage fright. The best of the best suffer it; some move on to become the greatest of actors when they defeat the multi-eyed beast.
You don't learn to appreciate your own distinct individuality til you learn to appreciate the individuality of others. That will take time. A long time; in a culture that is insidiously and inextricably diminishing the importance of the individual on a daily basis.
Kudos to Paddy Chayefsky.
J.B.
8/8/10
But, just because I felt I needed help, just because I desperately wanted something to protect my wife from harm, doesn't mean such a power exists. I didn't pray but I certainly recognize the primal urges that push one to consider that possible source of assistance.
Contemporary Jewish theology has been almost totally ossified ever since. Little wonder then, that Jews, who are suppose to know better than any other people what prayer is, are now as confused as anybody else.
His teachings are an extraordinary example of how a judgement proclaimed with such conviction may be nevertheless entirely wrong in every detail: being Aristotelian, and identical with the fundamental tenet of Scholasticism: a classical form of Greek rationalism that served to undermine every revealed truth about G-d in the Torah. Formally speaking, we have nobody to pray to...
This could be the reason why "my soul prayeth, but my mind is unenlightened!"
"Prayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional connection to God, or any deity, through deliberate practice."
Perhaps she means something else...
/Some of the commenters here are naturalists. They think that there is nothing going on besides natural processes, and any invocation of transcendental process or experience is essentially a delusion.//
Not necessarily a delusion, but certainly indistinguishable from one...
The blogger is a transcendentalist. A person can be a transcendentalist with or without a belief in God. A transcendentalist has in inner sense that there is more to the universe than can be understood by science and empirical verification.
Some of the commenters here are naturalists. They think that there is nothing going on besides natural processes, and any invocation of transcendental process or experience is essentially a delusion.
You say po-TAY-to, and I say po-TAH-to.
Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to.
To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to.
Let's call the whole thing off...and then go out for a beer.
You believe in magic. You have "faith" that there is "something more" going on here. Something that can be tapped into by a special kind of thinking. You aren't an atheist. You just don't believe in the god of your parents.
Atheists don't pray. It wouldn't occur to them.
And, most of the prayers of modern religionists deal with greed, venal things, sensual feelings, and sometimes gross inhuman desires. Why would any self-respecting atheist want to become part of such a sordid world of madness?
There are often greedy delusions in the mind of the praying believer. E.g., the professional boxer who prays to Jesus to help him beat the crap out of his opponent. The businessman who prays for the destruction of his nearest competitor. It was through lies from the pulpit and instructions that man constantly prays that created so many phantasms, dogmas, and delusions in modern religion.
2:30 PM CST
"Whitley2009", whoever you are, I've been meaning to fan you for some time. I was going to recommend Georges Bataille's "Death and Sensuality" to Ms. Fridkis, but I suspect she's not yet ready for it. I could be wrong, but of course that would be a calendar event...
Fanned.
J.B.
8/8/10
Sounds like something out of a fortune cookie or a talking point.
I'm sure Jung had some grand point to make, but I can't see it for you use a needle like a sword.
2:15 PM CST
...If you're going to appeal to "authority" by "quoting" Jung, at least quote him accurately, and not out of context, to serve your own ends; whatever those ends may be...uh..."Weirdwriter" ...
J.B.
8/8/10
"Bidden or unbidden, God is present," is one way I've heard the quote. also, "Bidden or unbidden, God is." BTW, have since learned that Jung took this quote from the writings of Erasmus. That's were you'll find the context.
We all have "our own ends" -- mine in this case was only to applaud Ms. Fridkis, spiritual search, which I believe all humans have, whether there's a deity involved or not.
I always like the image of the professional boxer who gets down on his knees before a match and says: "Lord Jesus, help me beat the crap out of my opponent tomorrow. Thank you, Jesus. Amen."
I'll take awe and inner peace, but I don't want any spirituality or prayer.
"I know a lot of people will want to tell me that I simply don't understand. That if I pray, I'm doing something religious, and am therefore a believer. They will want to tell me that I'm writing out of a place of profound confusion. Well, maybe I am."
You seem confused to me, but I'm not going to tell you what to do or what label to put on yourself. Just don't expect that I will necessarily think you're making sense.
"I am an Atheist and I Pray" is a better title than "Let Atheists Pray Too".
2:40 PM CST
...True...she did not consult us...I waited and waited next to my landlock, til finally I had to move on...
Fanned.
J.B.
8/8/10
The author of this little piece suggests that athiests engage in self-delusion as she apparently does.
Sorry, Ms. Fridkis, but that dog won't hunt.