My Atheistic Moment

I experienced my first truly atheistic thought, or more accurately, an atheistic wave of terror overcame me. The actual feeling, or thought, (I cannot tell which, or dissect the moment any further, the experience was mental and emotional but definitely not separable into distinct spheres, the entire experience lasted only a second as I suppressed the horrifying conjecture immediately, my body literally spasmed in dread) came about accidentally. Various mental images preceded it. That night I watched War of The Worlds, it was pathetic, maybe Mr. Wells tells it better than Cruise and Spielberg, but this movie had no character development at all, or story for that matter, our hero is a spineless coward, all the relational problems have depressingly cliché endings, happy of course, and the little girl’s screams account for half the dialogue. The movie opens with a shot of one microorganism squirming about, and then it zooms out to show hundreds, then millions of squiggly microbes, we continue to zoom out and eventually see that they are all contained within a miniscule water droplet on a leaf.

This scene, these invisible amebas form the starting image of that scary thought. The second conception present was from The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky quotes a Turgenev character who claims that after you die you become nothing more than the “burdocks growing on your grave.” Third, the familiar bible phrase, “dust to dust”, and the creation of Adam, in the same dust whirlwind I have imagined since hearing the story in my childhood. So these thoughts are swirling, thoughts swirl right? or at least that’s what Rowling’s pensive would have us believe, the Half-blood prince was rather disappointing, Harry Potter and Half a Story I’d say, no conflict at all? a grand set-up, …with these thoughts swirling, the triggering synapses spark! I consider Aristotle’s diagnosis, “man is by nature a political animal,” and the animal in mind at the time was those microscopic blobs, jerking aimlessly in a puddle of sludge. All at once, I imagine my entire existence consisting of an instantaneous evolution from ameba to azalea, parasite to protea (if I have a choice in the matter I’ll grow up as a protea in North America, it’s South Africa’s national flower). Imagine those movie scenes where they film a busy road for one night and then show the film in fast forward so you see the whole night in a few seconds, with thousands of headlights forming streaks of light underneath changing skies revealing speedy time travel. That is how I imagined my life, an animalistic blur between poles of invisibility and cemetery decoration.

As I said before, I had an accompanying physical reaction, I hunched, and tightened my back and shoulder muscles, call it a vigorous shudder. I repressed it quickly with familiar arguments: my moral capacity could not evolve; evolution could not produce emotion, etc. But the psychological defenses fail, the sheer magnitude of the possibility overwhelms rationality and hope. In other words, more precise but less eloquent: the “what if” overwhelms the “it couldn’t be” and the “that means … and I don’t want it to be that way.”

It is the same with other speculations of mine; hell for instance, the mere possibility of everlasting suffering might be worth manipulating belief, or worth that “gruesome continual suicide of reason.” And if I fake it really well, could that save me? In retrospect, I am amazed that I used to believe that salvation could occur instantly, in one moment of sincere belief. How come that moment gets eternal fame? That belief of instant salvation recognizes the peculiar structure of time. For instance, a person can “live for those moments” or define their life as a success or failure based on the experience of a few seconds compared to years of mediocrity.

What if all our moral speculation is as silly as an ant contemplating the eternal implications of stealing the crumbs from my cake? What difference is there between me and that ant if I progress from sperm to corpse to flower? What will morality mean then? Decidedly nothing! After blabbering a reassuring string of falsities, I remembered that maybe all my claims, thoughts, desires for justice, good, and truth, serve me best as elaborate self-deceptions which prolong my existence. And that in my weakness I perish precisely when I abandon pretty ideals. O the comforting pages of Beyond Good and Evil are treating me marvelously, from section 59, “It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury their teeth in and cling to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of that instinct which senses that one might get a hold of the truth too soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough.” I was about to explain the quote with insertions into the quote, but suddenly I felt an obligation to the author as the language strikes me so vigorously that I am forced to recognize brilliance. I haven’t felt that in a long time, or rather I grew up with that assumption, I used to be repulsed by the ability to quote a person and “correct” their words simply by putting [it in brackets]. Then I read it everywhere, and now I do it unflinchingly.