On Religion

In the ever-ongoing series of skirmishes between the believers and the non-believers, the religious and the secular, the faithful have a powerful weapon at their disposal, the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Unapologetically Catholic talk show host Stephen Colbert directed this interrogative at unrepentantly atheistical Ricky Gervais recently and poor Ricky was unable to offer any answer at all. This question, arguably intended as rhetorical, originated with the seventeenth-century co-creator of calculus Leibniz and can be unpacked into two different queries: "What is the cause of the universe?" and "Why is the universe the way it is and not some other way i.e. why for instance does Planck's constant have the value it does and not some other value?" This question is so devastating because atheists almost always have difficulty answering it, while religious people can simply respond "God". But the religious position is less secure than it seems. When you think about it, the religious person's answer explains nothing. The question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" –– and God is arguably something, not nothing. If a religious person answers his own question by saying "God" the atheist can simply retort, "And why does God exist?" Unless the religious person wants to propose that God created himself, all he's done is displace the problem a step,  moved it up or down the ladder a rung. What caused the First Cause? The religious answer answers nothing. The atheists do in fact have ways of dealing with this question, could talk about the principle of plenitude or the anthropic principle. Ricky was caught off-guard – it is not fair to spring Leibniz on an unsuspecting guest.

In this post I am going to talk about religion a little but perhaps I should say something first about this blog. I have almost no idea who is reading it or how many people are reading it and so often take cues for what to write about from the late night comedic programs I follow. I saw the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight and almost got the feeling that some of its writers must have read my blog because they seemed to be dilating on a subject I talked a little about in the post "Consensus Reality"; in the same episode John Oliver cautioned his viewers to get their news from responsible, credible news sources and not "some idiot's blog". Well, I'm an idiot and I keep a blog but if you're reading it, dear reader, it can't be wholly idiotic. More pertinently, I watched an episode of Real Time in which Bill Maher brought Jim Jeffries into the discussion, interestingly not long after I mentioned both of them in a post. Jim said that he didn't mind either religious people or atheists but he hated agnostics, saying that he always wants to tell them "Get off the fucking fence!". In this post I want to try to get off the fence.

All my life I have most usually been an atheist. I was raised atheist by atheist parents (although I went to Sunday school when I was little). Later in life as a side-effect of terrible stress, I felt, often, that I might need to adopt a religion but, having been always an atheist, I had no default religion to fall back on. Should I become a Catholic because I quite like Pope Francis? Should I start attending Anglican services because I was baptised an Anglican? Should I become a Buddhist, a Jainist, a Scientologist, a follower of some Vedic religion? It seems all religions are equally valid paths to a higher truth, and all equally pretty much baloney, are all a little mystical insight mixed with a lot of fiction. Nowadays, I simply describe myself to others as a flakey hippie, a person who consults his Magic Eightball in times of uncertainty and half-believes his daily horoscope, and leave it at that.

People come to religion in different ways. Most folk are raised within a particular religion or are assimilated into one by friends or pavement-pounding evangelists. Some come to religion because of mystical experiences and I am in a way one of those. In this blog I have talked sometimes about my experiences when psychotic. Readers might want to know – how much of this stuff do I really believe? The answer is 'not much'. For example, during the summer of 2009 and 2010 when I was continually talking with Jess and Jon, I thought Jess's dad was Mark Sainsbury, then a current affairs show host here in New Zealand; when I started spending time with the real Jess in 2011, I found this 'fact', like many others I thought I had learned about her, to be not only false but silly. In very early 2010, Barack Obama told me (in my head of course) that he had met me once in Hawaii; years later I established that it wasn't possible for me to have met him because the year I visited Hawaii he was already living and working in Chicago. And yet I still find it difficult to suppose that I made everything up. Often it seemed that profound truths were being revealed to me, in cryptic or coded form, that my delusions and hallucinations had hidden meanings even if I couldn't understand what was happening at the time they occurred. I would often receive premonitions of future events but these premonitions didn't help me predict these events; I wouldn't know what an adumbration signified until the event it presaged had actually occurred, sometimes a day later, sometimes many years later. Thus my identification as a flakey hippie. It is difficult to remain a strict rationalist when one has experienced both clairvoyance and precognition.

In 2011, I remember, I met the real Jess for coffee at a bookshop. She looked at me bleary-eyed and said, "I heard you on the radio last night!" She apparently had heard me talking about etymology on the National Program and even had woken up her mother to say, "Andrew's on the radio!" At the time, I found it flattering that she could imagine this about me but also knew it to be something like an hallucination or delusion. I was (then as now) unemployed and not then the author of a world-famous blog. To spell it out, there was no reason anyone in the world would have wanted to interview me on the radio. It was silly. I told her, perhaps patronisingly, what I then believed about psychosis, that it was 1% truth, 99% bullshit. I wish I hadn't said this now. In a way she had latched onto a deeper truth. Even though what she had heard that night was all 'in her head', if life had turned out differently for me, it  might not be that incredible for someone to interview me about etymology on National Radio.

Psychosis can profoundly unsettle a person's idea that life is meaningless. I have talked a little about the psychotic episode I experienced in 2009 and 2010 – but the most profound and harrowing mystical experience I ever suffered did not occur in 2009 or 2010 but in 2014 and before I talk about it I need to set the scene a little by mentioning an issue in theology and religious studies generally, the debate between those who think God is 'immanent' and those who think God is 'transcendent'. To say God is immanent is to say that He is omnipresent, everywhere, to say that He permeates, pervades, saturates all creation; to say God is transcendent is to say that He is separate from the universe, exists outside of it, is independent of it. This problem may seem hopelessly obscure. Indeed it is an issue that only really bothers mystics and those who have had mystical experiences. I can't see your average bible-thumper expending much mental energy on a problem so seemingly recondite, abstruse, but it has engrossed many serious thinkers about religion for thousands of years.

Around Easter 2013, as I have said before, I started voluntarily seeing psychiatrists again; I wanted, as I have also said before, it finally on the record that I was straight. In late January or early February 2014, I was unofficially put under the Mental Health Act and 'persuaded', by which I mean coerced, to go to a Respite facility. I suddenly went from taking no medication at all to taking 10 or 12.5 mgs of Olanzapine every night, along with the sleeping pill Zopiclone and the anti-anxiety medication Lorazepam. I was being bullied into taking all these drugs and it had an dire effect upon me; it felt most of the time like I'd had a lobotomy. The time I spent at this 'Respite facility' was truly horrible. I literally thought I was in Purgatory. I spent every waking moment thinking about Jon and Jess. Every day social workers or nurses, people I had never met before and would never meet again, would visit me to assess how mad I was. After two or three days there when I could bear it no longer, I ran home to my mother and didn't go back. Shortly after this 'observation period' I was officially put under the Mental Health Act, meaning that ever since I have been legally compelled to come into the treatment clinic every four weeks to receive a long-acting injection of 300mgs of Olanzapine. I felt then and have felt since that I was officially diagnosed schizophrenic, and put under a Compulsory Treatment Order, basically for saying that I was straight.

It was during my last night at this 'Respite facility' that I had my most awful religious experience. Very early in the morning I woke up, left my room and went into the yard for a cigarette. When I turned my gaze to the night sky, I observed that, although the clouds remained motionless, the stars were moving incredibly fast. The firmament was literally wheeling over me. I felt like I was at the centre of the universe, that time itself had accelerated, that I was having a first hand experience of something like God. Up until that night, the times I had thought of God, I had thought that if He existed He would be Immanent; that night it became apparent that he was Transcendent, that He abided completely outside of his creation. Not only did He transcend it, He was omnipotent, capable of completely suspending every law of physics people normally think inviolate. All the rules physicists had ever discovered were utterly arbitrary and He could change them at His slightest whim. He was transcendent, He was omnipotent, but more than that, He was utterly foreign, utterly alien, absolutely inhuman. He certainly wasn't 'omni-beneovalent', he wasn't benevolent towards anyone in the least. It was a paradox. At the one time I was having a first-hand experience of God, I was the centre of the universe; on the other hand, He didn't give a shit about me, simply didn't give a shit about any individual human at all. He wasn't my Father, He wasn't my friend, He wasn't human in the slightest. I was the centre of Universe but the Universe was completely indifferent to me. It was the lowest point, the absolute nadir, of my life.

It might be that if I were to pick a religion, the best choice would be Gnosticism. Perhaps a person doesn't pick his religion, perhaps a person's religion picks him. Gnostics are known for having religious experiences inspired by contemplation of the stars. I seem to have been being nudged towards Gnosticism for a long time. Gnostics, as I mentioned in the post "An Interpretation of A Couple of Rock Songs", often have religious experiences such as the one I experienced and some songs that are arguably Gnostic include "Violet" by Hole, "Just a Man" by Faith No More, "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop and "Let Me In" by REM.

I don't know whether I have expressed this religious experience perfectly. If the reader wants to read a short story I wrote that alludes to this experience, I recommend "Starlight", an earlier post in this blog.