Believe in Nothing, Not Even Belief

“I’ve found that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing.” These words I’ve borrowed from be an unlikely source, Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist monk.* Suzuki is making the point that your beliefs will get in the way of perceiving reality. If you try to accept the party line as is without personal investigation, you’ve applied a rationalization that is not your own, a self-serving forced explanation simply to legitimize your existence. Suzuki:

“But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing, knowing that there is some reason why a phenomenal existence of such and such form and color appears, then at that moment you will have perfect composure.”

This is not the desperate “everything happens for a reason” rationalization to which many cling that comes from a need to have some sort of cosmic validation, but the knowledge that there are genuine causal relationships that can be discovered in the world. We can learn, and we can accept what we find as is without a forced cosmic referent that is really a projection of our suffering, our need for personal consideration. If we put to rest the idea we expect to find a definable primal cause, we can gain our composure. There is literally nothing there. So in the words of Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) from Zombieland, we can “nut up or shut up.”

I’m not advocating that atheists should become Buddhists. That would be stupid. It was part of my post-Christian path that I later rejected. What’s interesting about Zen is that its adherents are very skeptical about accepting their own rationalizations; they reject ad-hoc explanations. They often chide each other for accepting untried beliefs. If you simply regurgitate Buddhist dogma for your master, he will likely slap you across the face.

But what is a belief? It implies that you are providing some explanation that is meant to give a primal causation that invariably cannot support itself. It is a faith that has no evidence. For religious folks this is a mechanism to cut off further inquiry, to allow their poor little minds to rest. Sure, in colloquial usage, a belief may be simply a reference to something with which you would like to be identified as in, “I believe that all men are created equal.” But that is not really what is predominantly meant when we profess a belief.

For an actualized materialist this of course makes no sense. If we don’t know why we are here, what might have happened before the Big Bang, we know that it’s illegitimate to paste in some ad-hoc nonsense simply to agree with our fearful and hopeful desire that someone be in charge and that everything must make sense. If there is something that can’t be explained, it really is okay to hold our judgment until more evidence comes to light. Our world will not come to an end, and we won’t end up with meaningless lives because we can’t explain every god damn thing. This really is the high road on which atheists can travel.

So I propose that we should eliminate the word belief from our vocabulary. If you catch yourself saying that you believe in something, your bullshitometer should be going off. This should be followed by sober doubt that you are just projecting your primal fears or trying to make a rationalization to agree with your stupid human tendency to try to tie all your other unsubstantiated suppositions into a pretty, palatable bow. There’s no room for belief in a material world. Nut up or shut up, folks.

* Suzuki, Shunryu. 1971. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Shambhala Publications: Boston p. 17. http://tiny.cc/a7r1a

Spiritual Atheism

I guess not all atheists are strict materialists, and I don't intend to alienate everyone that counts themselves among our ilk simply for advocating terms such as "spiritual." However, I'd like to share a cautionary tale. I was a Christian about 25 years ago, and it took me about 10 yrs after that to be able to wean myself from all woo-woo. Most notably I started practicing Zen Buddhism, because it allowed me to practice something, anything, that wasn't overtly religious, but yet allowed me to project my uncertaintly about spirituality into the cosmic void.

The Japanese form of Zen Buddhism per Dogen (13th Cent.) taught by Shunryu Suzuki seemed to provide a very agnostic view of the universe, and allowed me to have some sort of practice (whatever that exactly means). In the end, though, I realized that what I was doing was in fact trying to supplant one type of religion for another. More specifically I saw that I was indeed projecting my last shred of doubt and fear about the truth of atheism.

There is something to the conjecture of anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists that we seem to have evolved to think in religious terms, that we seem to be built to want to have experiences that allow us to take part in forces that we don't understand and assume to be part of ultimate causation. So we now have to ask ourselves whether or not the sort of awe of the universe that some have been advocating (sometimes called Einsteinian, because he seemed to endorse this) or the connectedness even atheists might feel to the grandeur of the cosmos is simply not the same sort of projection that I mentioned earlier. I still feel this awe as The Spiritual Atheist does at the complexity of life and magnificence of the workings of the universe, but is it real? Is there some woo-woo left in me as well?

Read about the Spiritual Atheist at http://www.spiritualatheist.co.uk/