Of course there’s the facile argument that in choosing to define oneself by saying that something doesn’t exist presupposes its existence, but that argument carries with it the obvious fact that it is not really an argument at all. As author and film critic David Denby once wrote in an entirely different context, “I understand the point of that critique; I admire its wit and its rug-pulling aggressiveness. But I think such remarks are no more than half-truths . . . And anyone who refuses to see this may be refusing to take responsibility for his own intellectual efforts.” My stance on the existence of god is in no way a defining statement of myself any more than people who say they are a dentist or a lawyer are making a statement about the totality of their lives. But there are people for whom their belief in an imaginary deity is a defining statement about their lives. And that, to me, bespeaks a monumental lack of imagination as well as a refusal to take responsibility for their lives. What’s worse is that they want to impose their own belief system upon others in the misguided notion that their fantasy is somehow the only valid reality. What Simon Critchley did for me, in a wonderfully clear and succinct way, was to articulate exactly why they do that.
Critchley begins his introduction by launching right into the reason why so many people have glommed on to the most recent mythologies for the last two millennia, and that’s the fear of death. Actually, he calls it “the overwhelming terror of annihilation.” Though immediately after that he sort of undermines the importance of that phrase by talking about the fear of pain associated with dying or the fear of what’s on the other side. But those seem to be minor points in comparison to the loss of self, the complete “annihilation” of one’s unique consciousness. I remember a story I heard by Wayne Dyer--from back in my New Age days--where he was participating in a guided meditation and everyone was asked to imagine themselves floating above the room, then outside above the building, then above the clouds, and finally looking down at the Earth from space. That’s when the guide drops the bomb and suddenly asks them to imagine the Earth without them on it. It’s a fascinating exercise because it points out the fact that people don’t like to contemplate the end of their own existence.
Critchley then addresses how most people deal with the impending end of their existence in this way: “What we seem to seek is either the transitory consolation of momentary oblivion or a miraculous redemption in the afterlife.” This momentary oblivion can take many forms, from drugs and alcohol to consumerism and sports, or any kind of popular entertainment like TV, movies, or social media, while the belief in redemption in the afterlife is the fairy tale of religion. Critchley quotes Cicero and Montaigne in the alternative to these to methods of avoidance and comes to “an astonishing conclusion: the premeditation of death is nothing less than the forethinking of freedom. Seeking to escape death, then, is to remain unfree and run away from ourselves.” And he ends this idea by stating that, “The denial of death is self-hatred.” Christopher Hitchens used to talk about something similar when discussing the Islamic jihad mentality and associating that denigration of life with the same ideas present in Christianity. In all such thinking, that a better life awaits after death, human life is devalued and can thus be used to rationalize and condone murder in examples like the Crusades, the Inquisition, and others too numerous to list.
Philosophy, then, offers a way out of this desperate deception. By embracing the very nature of our finite selves, we give ourselves the freedom to live and work and think as we choose. Life, physical human existence, becomes our raison d'être, and the cherishing of that life in all its forms becomes a moral imperative that exceeds all of the platitudes of religious hypocrisy ever uttered. Critchley then goes on to examine Socrates in some detail in what is really a second introduction. The death of Socrates in many ways highlights this reaction against free thinking, but the political overtones of the case as well as the man’s eccentricities tend to disguise the more elemental nature of the event, namely that freedom of thought equals freedom of life. All of this leads to the greatest line I have ever heard by a philosopher in the way that it demonstrates the actual thinking of the man. “When a man told him, ‘The Thirty Tyrants have condemned you to death,’ he replied, ‘And nature them.’” It’s a beautiful sentiment that so accurately captures the essence of what it really means to be alive. To live in fear of death, by comparison, is a prison, and the self-denial and diminishment of life that comes from the self-delusion of religion is absolutely tragic.
This leads, quite naturally, to the idea of philosophy as something quite distinct from the acquisition of knowledge. Philosophy does not pretend to know. That, quite ironically, is the domain of those who profess to have faith. Philosophy is the acquisition of wisdom, and to be wise one must not “know” because that is the point at which learning stops--which, again, says a lot about the defenders of faith. “Philosophy begins,” says Critchley, “with the questioning of certainties in the realm of knowledge and the cultivation of a love of wisdom.” What is clear about those who pursue religion as a path to certainty is that they have become so afraid of death that are willing to trade their current lives for that certainty, though it is anything but. And the self-absorption and hypocrisy that necessarily must accompany such a belief is as destructive a force against humanity as any that has ever existed. What I am most thankful for is that this delusion is obvious to those who will open their minds and see the real truth. No more do I have to fear death, and in the process I have embraced actual life in a way I never knew possible before. Atheism: if there is a god, it’s what he’d want us to believe.
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