Following on the heels of the scientific revolution, The Enlightenment celebrated the power of human reason to make sense of the natural world, which undermined faith in our traditional religions. In the euphoria that accompanies success, some suggested that because we could understand the workings of the universe there was no room for God, never pausing to question why God could not be, at least in part, understandable. Even though this non-sequitur was rejected by most enlightenment thinkers, it took root in the popular imagination and spawned atheism.
Atheists are especially opposed to the idea of a personal God – the immanent dimension of God described in my essay “Is the universe meaningless?” But how can the universe not qualify as a personal God in relation to us, especially when it has recently been posited to include a conscious dimension that called life into existence. And what is the universe if not personal? Is there anything more personal than being formed of its material, subject to its forces without respite, bound to experience both suffering and joy on its behalf, and ultimately having to give it all back in that most intimate of all experiences: death.
The principal difference between atheism and theism is not that atheism denies God, but that it substitutes the sterile, secular word “reality” for the fecund being of God. This trick closes the mind even to the possibility of meaning, and with that, a large measure of the human experience that we associate with the soul, which is the locus of experience. When we deny God, we also deny our own soul.
It matters not one wit if every detail of every traditional religion is proven impossible because they are all just models of God. Nor does it matter how much of the universe is predictable by scientific theory – they are all just projected onto the universe. Theology and science both create models of the Real that exist only in the mind, but ultimately the Real cannot be contained by any model – it just is. This is why “letting go” is such an important part of life; being our full selves requires us to let go of beliefs that limit our lives by blinding us to the Real. I hope to expand on this in a separate essay.
The reason that some people have been cut off from their own soul is that the idea that there is no God has not been effectively challenged. Once God is denied, the soul becomes neglected by the family and culture that surrounds the child. Even when neglect is out of ignorance it has the same effect.
Neglect is an insidious poison. It has no substance. It is defined by “absence,” the absence of care, and in turn it creates absence – the absence of joy that is the soul's only need, desire and fulfillment. And because its nature is absence, it is extraordinarily difficult to treat. It even looks as if there is nothing there to cure, and thus it is the ultimate demon.
Neglect sends a soul-destroying message: that you don't matter, that you are meaningless, invisible and worthless. It is the most pernicious form of abuse because it torments its victim without pause, destroying the capacity for joy, and yet it has no form at which to point and say "there it is, there is my tormentor." Even emotional abuse leaves a trace in the mind that can be recalled and a villain identified, but neglect destroys without touch and leaves no hint that anything was ever there, not even one memory of one event. Having no substance, no barrier can prevent its spread until it consumes its victim as surely as any cancer.
The soul unseen becomes invisible even to the ego born to serve it, and over many generations of godlessness the entire culture becomes blind and its members invisible. We become people devoid of meaning, trapped within our own ego's hallucination of reality, which for some is a fate worthy of the designation of “hell.”
But there is a villain, and that villain is we who have hastily accepted the presumption that there is no God and therefore no soul, and thus nothing sacred or meaningful, not even the child who brings the joy of existence into the world.
For most of my career as a scientist I wondered why something as mundane as “the pursuit of happiness” was included in the United States Declaration of Independence. It seemed so subjective, which is a sacrilegious word to a scientist. But as important as science has become, it is the pursuit of happiness that proves to be the more profound, for happiness is found in the soul and its import is captured by the biblical quote,
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” - Mark 8:36 KJV
To put it another way, what could be worth the price of your happiness when, as Aristotle pointed out, your happiness is the deeper goal of every pursuit and is both the meaning and purpose of human existence.
In my essay, “Is the universe meaningless?” I wrote:
“Joy is both the purpose and birthright of every living thing and its absence is an indication that the soul has been bound and gagged within. The absence of joy should be seen as a symptom of an underlying illness with social, intellectual and psychological components, and approached with an eye to curing it as one would want to cure any other disease.”
The disease in question is the denial of God and subsequent neglect of the soul. The cure begins by recognizing one another first as a soul, and only then as an object, because we are both the material universe and a drop of its soul called into existence to experience joy.
Atheism was born during the Enlightenment based on the presumption that because we could understand the universe, there must be no God. This was recognized as a non-sequitur by most philosophers of the period but the idea still took root. Today it exerts a profoundly negative influence on the Western mind that encourages our neglect of the soul.
And neglect is the ultimate demon.
Steve Brule
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