Suprised by Skepticism: Our Amazing Capacity for Misery

I am always shocked when I come face to face with a real, well-spoken, committed atheist, like Mr. Adam Gopnik over at the New Yorker.

I guess that after living for so long in a small community of Christian friends, I just begin to suppose that everyone lives and thinks the way that I do! I find it hard to believe that there are people out there that have read the works of Christians like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and have not been moved by their articulate faith and convicting common sense... I find it hard to believe that someone could come face to face with such robust representations of the truth and find the strength to be skeptical, and I have to thank the boys over at lex orandi for reminding me that such people do, in fact, exist!

Of course my experiences with half-hearted agnostics have been far more plentiful than my encounters with such atheiests. The average American seems to have a kind of vague hostility toward serious religion that is based more upon the fear that we might try to take their toys (and tiny pleasures) away from them than on anything else. But every once in a while I meet an atheist that is really committed to being miserable when faced with the alternative, and it slaps me back into an awareness of just how serious our spiritual battle is... and how lightly I have tended to take the plight of the earnest doubter.

There are people out there that have looked at the best evidence and simply refuse to believe that it points to God! It is not so much that the arguments of these "serious" atheists are any more compelling than those of the half-hearted agnostics - both stances ultimately boil down to a kind of preference in the end - but rather that these arguments are very articulate in their slight of hand... they lead a person that is not listening very closely (or doesn't want to listen very closely) into believing that religious people are just "up tight" dreamers who obsinately fight for the truth of a metaphysical reality that works just as well as a personal fantasy. The mystical, they argue, can make people just as happy when they "know" it to be false as when they believe it to be true... so why argue about it?

The hole in this argument is, of course, obvious to any religious person when it is stated in this way! People like C.S. Lewis who, in finding the Faith, have found what they had been searching for their entire lives do not experience their conversion as a kind of compromising wish-fulfilment... the encounter is greater than any other experience before it, and it reveals all of their little hopes and dreams to be mere echoes of their adoration for the true love of their souls. The new convert, likewise, is not fooled into believing that his religious experience is important primarily because it is a fantasy that makes him happy. Such arguments may be plausible to skeptics in their dark caves of isolated thought, but one of the really surprising things about our daily encounters with the average "man on the street" is that the Faith really does ring true to created ears. As many times as I forget this when I flinch at sharing my faith, most people (including myself) are able to put up with very difficult doctrines when they finally come into contact with the solid reality of Christ - and they would never buy the idea that the objective truth of God's existence is an unimportant factor in their belief! To the great consternation and confusion of ardent atheists, our faith is such that we feel it must be obstinately asserted, because the tangible reality of our claim is exactly what matters about it!

So why do these "serious" atheists persist in downplaying our experience, and why do so many people seem to scoff and excuse their way out of dealing with real religious conversion? It is, I fear, not so great a mystery! Each of us have an astounding capacity for enduring misery in the name of maintaining control of our own world. If the skeptical atheist is right about anything, it is this very tendency in human nature to ignore reasonable solutions in favor of clinging to a personal hope. We have all been victims of this kind of pride to some extent or another, and lest we start to point fingers we should be reminded of exactly how widespread this kind of sickness actually is!

How many of us have given up happiness at one point or another in order to settle for a world that we can control? How many have ended a healthy, helpful relationship by trading a friend's offer of forgiveness for the personal control of staying angry? How many have endured addiction and poverty of all kinds rather than submitting to the kind of help that would make us call these things wrong, admit our defeat, and give them up for a better life? We are proud creatures! And as complicated, educated, refined and articulate as our excuses become, we cannot avoid the ultimate reality that our choices are often motivated by this very tendency to reject what is good in favor of what we feel we can control.

So are we right when we say that there is a God? Mr. Gopnik will tell us that we simply like this story because it makes us feel safe, and he will go on to recast every Christian experience in this light. A free mind can choose to compare the wonderful fantasy of C.S. Lewis and the robust faith that he holds and decide that the fantasy is the real part and the faith is just an awkwardly tacked-on fabrication. He can read the wild stories of G.K. Chesterton and smirk in the belief that it was natural human enthusiasm that inspired this joy in spite of his forgivable religious delusion. But what he cannot honestly claim is that this conclusion is any more accurate or less subjective than that of his religious opponents... and in the end it is he, and not the religious person, that the burden of proof falls upon.

An atheist like Gopnik refuses to accept the witness of millions of Christians throughout history, who have all claimed to experience a level of communion with the supernatural. While Christians are able to acknowledge all of the skeptic's experiences of earthly happiness and joy as valid, Gopnik's principles will not allow him to acknowledge the Christian's claims as even possible. Such a dilemma forces the atheist into a tight spot... he must either hold to his personal belief and choose to ignore or explain away experience, or he must give up his personal belief and entertain the idea that the world may not be completely explained and under control - that he may be subject to a being that he cannot overpower and that he may never come to fully understand!

May God have mercy on the souls of us who are faced with this dilemma! We are all capable of extreme denial in such cases, when our pride is on the line. We are all vulnerable to the kind of skepticism that would rather be master of our own small, dead world than except the reality of that which we cannot master. As much as we would like to believe it impossible, there are many, many people (even people who call themselves Christians) that will willingly take hell over Heaven when they realize what it really means for Heaven to require the death of self. If sin is a sickness, it is a sickness that we can learn to love as we love our own being.

The devil originally dwelt in the presence of God, and the demons still know that Christ is king... but all of these beings found it in themselves to choose to turn from this knowledge for a chance at their own kingdom. Whatever ignorance there is in such a decision, we cannot downplay the role that real choice plays.

C.S. Lewis himself writes, at the end of his Narnia chronicles, of such severe skepticism when the dwarves are faced with heavenly realities at the end of time. Like our own Mr. Gopnik, these dwarves sit in the middle of Aslan's country and obstinately deny that they have left the little tent on their own world. Where there is light and beauty they see darkness. Where there is luscious landscape they see canvas walls. All the beauty is, to them, merely tricks of their imagination, and all of the joyful calls of those around them are merely jealous mocking or deluded fantasy. Their presuppositions will not let them see the promised land or the goodness of Aslan, so they are bound forever by their own delusion to sit on the ground and miserably assert that they are great and wise to see through all of the silly talk of "Aslan's country". They are confident that they know all there is to know about the world, and they content themselves with the thought that even if they are not very happy, they are at least very right!

May God save us all from such delusion!

The Dark Arts: Or, Why I Still Don't Like Depressing Poetry

It seems to me that, after my last post on John Mayer, I might take a little time to fill out one of the concepts that was assumed in the post (and a lot of my criteria for judging art), but wasn't argued for very persuasively.

I despise a certain kind of depressing art. Agree with me or call it a fault if you like, but I have always had a bone to pick with artists who feel good about foisting their morbidity upon us without giving us a way out... and I think that I have good reasons for feeling this way!

Quickly, let me clarify that I DO NOT MEAN that I don't think there is a place for stories with darker themes or sad subject matter. My distaste isn't as simple as not liking to mourn with those who mourn (I actually believe that this kind of charity is vital in a culture with as much heartache as ours, and those of us who, for reasons of maintaining their own personal happiness, refuse to comfort others in pain or to deal with the real problems that exist in the world have a serious problem of their own). Pain and sadness are a real part of life, and as creators we make art about these experiences too.

What I AM talking about is a certain tendency in all of us sub-creating beings to "modify" our stories in order to make ourselves the heroes of our own tragedies... and also a certain kind of weakness that seems to let us prefer to wallow in our pain rather than to seek a way out of it.

I am melancholy all the time. Nothing is more painfully apparent to me than the problems of the world, the gravity of my sin, and the terrible plight of those born into bad circumstances. But it is Hell that chooses to dwell on these things because it has nothing better to expect. It is Satan that chooses to be satisfied with becoming the hero of his own tragedy rather than allowing himself to humbly assume a supporting role, and I guess that I always tend to find a slight tinge of this false martyrdom in every melancholy artist I have met - not the desire to cope with the pain that is experienced, but rather the kind of pride that would give up Heaven in order to cling to their claim of injustice. Though I often struggle with pride, I cannot imagine the sort of sickness that would move a person to "love" their own brokenness enough to choose "authenticity" over the humiliation of healing. The kind of artist I admire is one who can look at all of this filth and mire in the face and refuse to give up on hope. The kind of artist I admire has an inexplicable joy that just cannot be crushed. Is there anything in the world more poetic than this?!

The kind of hero I want to follow is one that can go to the cross "for the joy set before him". If our hearts cannot hold within them the hope of glory even as we walk through the valley of death, then we are souls better fit for condemnation than for Heaven. The great saints chose to give themselves up for the life of the world and laughed for joy as they did it. It was not because they were sick and grieved, or because they preferred the company of sombre people, that they visited the sick and comforted the grieving... it was the deep and all-pervading joy of their hearts - the truly supernatural life of Christ within them - that moved them to tend to the pain of their brothers and sisters in need.

I have nothing to speak against people who suffer genuine, undeserved pain. These people deserve all of our genuine, earnest help and charity. But as storytellers, we have the responsibility to lead the way toward life and truth. The devil may sulk and pity himself, but we must be beacons of the very real hope that we possess (by no merit of our own). If we tell dark stories, let them be about the shallow futility of our sin, the patiently enduring goodness of saintly men and women, and the ever-available redemption of Christ that bashes its way through even the darkest parts of our nature.

More than anything, I love the hero that is able to say "peace be with you" before he goes into battle. There is nothing more "real" than this hero, even if he doesn't seem to fit in our world. The melancholy artists will sneer and barely be able to stomach such a sentiment... and they have good reason to feel this way. They are sick down to their very core, and the world that they live in does not operate on such principles of hope as we have described above. They think that we are cheating in our analysis, and by the rules of this sick reality they are right! The feeling of nausea in the face of hope is a "natural" one, given this sickness... and the only thing we can hope is that this sickness will eventually lead to death - unto the death, that is, of this so-called "natural" state of decay and corruption, knowing that the core of our being, after all, does not belong to this world we have described.

If we feel a little queasy when redemption is mentioned, perhaps it is an indication that we have yet to fully realize the life of Christ within us. On earth, the most "real" things we experience may in fact be pain and suffering... but let us not be fooled into thinking that these are the most real things that exist! I feel the thrill of other-worldly intrusion every time I read Christ saying "blessed are the poor in spirit"... not because it makes sense in our world, but because it bears witness to an intruding and redemptive truth. It is only in a Christian world that an artist can make the story of a tiny hobbit that takes the One Ring to Mordor. Though Nietzsche would scoff at this "pitiful" case of "wish fulfillment", I wonder could he stand to look into the eyes of the martyr and to see the beatified smile on his face - a smile not of desperate delusion but of knowledge, love, pity and blessing - or would he be undone by the reality of otherworldly joy?

I will take this kind of storytelling over merely natural morbidity any day. I despise the small artist that desperately clings to the little glory of his own decay... and I bless the artist that is willing to admit that the natural result of coming to realize the utter bankruptcy of one's own being (as well as the utter mess that one has made of one's world) is not to justify it or to glorify it or to "accept it" (may God curse that terrible modern conclusion) but to eagerly look for the hope that first preached to us the resurrection of the dead and the supernatural life that we can find in Christ.

John Mayer... that's what you're missing, bro... and even if you don't realize it yet, I'm glad that you aren't letting yourself be satisfied with less.

Heavier Things

Without a doubt, this is John Mayer's best album to date. Sure, it lacks the musical enthusiasm of his younger days and the musical polish of his latest work, but thematically this is really John at his best... and before you start to argue with me, let me give you three reasons to believe me.

1. The album sits, like everyone's best album, right in the middle (thematically) of the creator's two crazy extremes, holding in remarkable tension his thirst for significance and his longing for home. It is remarkably tempting for all of us (much less an artist like Mr. Mayer with his fame on the line) to cop out of dealing with one or the other of these extremes, or to paint oneself as a martyr in one's failings or hardships, but this album is John in the best possible place he can be... where it is still possible for him to see both extremes clearly before him, and where we feel his understanding of life has caught up with his earnestness of expression just enough to produce a real honest look at his own priorities, experiences, shortcomings and failures. It is his own choices that have taken him away from happiness and brought him to the edge of being disgruntled, and he has both the sense of irony to doubt the purity of his own aspirations in songs like "Something's Missing" and "Split Screen Sadness", and the youthful drive and eagerness to hope for a real solution in songs like "Clarity" and "Home Life". Like Switchfoot's Learning to Breathe, this album represents the pinnacle of the artist's unique creative power and identity, falling into the neither the flat and sometimes shallow immaturity of the early work nor the self-indulgent lamentation of later efforts. The struggle of the album has exactly the virtue of bringing the artist to a breakdown or an impasse without hardening him to the natural response of hopeful longing. Here one finds both responsibility and hope, and I'm all for an honest look at something like that!

2. The album has some beautifully crafted moments. John Mayer has a remarkable way of capturing the essence of a struggle in music and clever lyrics. To reprint them here would be to do a great injustice to the effect, but listen to the seventh track ("Split Screen Sadness") and tell me that you aren't moved by the rendering of the song to feel a certain kinship with the man. You root for him in this album, and listening to his desire for change makes you want to change yourself!

3. This album is the best because home wins. Anyone who really listens to John struggle feels that fame and self-service leave one with "something missing"... and that if anything is worth "kissing the ground" and putting down roots for, it's got to be something like "home". Of course there is a lot to be said about the insufficiency of earthly homes... but in our day and age one really can stand to hear a lot more about settling down and giving up our pursuit of "greatness" for the acquisition of loving, rooted relationships. Personally, I have a hard time keeping myself from tearing up every time I listen to "Clarity". It's worth it, John! It's worth it! Let's both have the courage to make that eternal vow and to hope for something unchanging! Let's give up our seflishness and personal aspirations and look to protect something real instead!

Hooray for divine discontent... and hooray for any album that leaves us unsatisfied with ourselves and makes us want to be more than we are!

The Danger of Demonizing: Truth and the "Other Guy"

Though we would all like to think that we are "just being reasonable" in holding to our own particular beliefs, the truth is that, no matter what you believe, there will always be many, many intelligent people out there that disagree with you! If you are anything like me (or most radio talk show hosts), this poses a persistent and irritating problem - namely, how to account for these people and their aberrant beliefs. Certainly you can ignore those who disagree with you, or simply choose not to think about the fact that they do disagree, but chances are that sooner or later you will have to come to grips with the difference and decide both what you think of "the other guy" (i.e. what his "problem" is), and how you are going to deal with his disagreement. Holy Wars and Abolitionist Movements aside, I believe that most of us have already, in fact, made several of these subtle decisions in our minds and are already experiencing, to some extent, the (good or bad) consequences of our own particular choices. I do not think, however, that we have always made the right decision with regard to the treatment of our fellow contender!

As far as I can tell, we have three options regarding what we think of those who disagree with us - we can choose to believe that they are intentionally ignoring the truth because of a character flaw in themselves (i.e. their pride will not let them tolerate the idea), we can sympathetically insist on their ignorance of the truth (i.e. they simply haven't heard that one compelling argument for the idea), or we can (perhaps too humbly) assume that the other person must disagree because she or he knows more about the subject than we do (i.e. their vast scientific research must have offered compelling proofs for the validity of the idea that I am simply not aware of).

Of course, all three of these options have their own unique faults and virtues, and it would be easy to argue that most of our actual encounters with the people that hold to these opposing beliefs actually evoke a complicated mixture of two or even all three of these responses in us. Obviously, we will not always consider other people experts in every field of belief, just as we should not consider all people to be willfully ignorant of the truth! More often we will listen to disagreement with a kind of sincere curiosity, aware of the many factors that play into both our own and the other person's beliefs and assumptions. I think that this is healthy... Most of the time charity will require us to hold on to our own beliefs tentatively, knowing as we do that though we must act on what we believe to be true, we are often mistaken about the details of our understanding through our own faults and ignorances! All too often, however, I feel that we do not offer all people this "benefit of the doubt".

Where most of us tend to get into trouble is where our deep and cherished beliefs (those that we consider to be vitally important) come into question. Here we feel that we must bare down and refuse to give up ground. Here it is that zealots on both sides put their feet down and start enlisting soldiers for the Crusade... and to some extent this makes sense! If there is anything that is too important to budge on, it is certainly the fundamental basis of our thought and action (such as the existence and nature of God and/or our origin and purpose as human beings). Over such things even "rational" Atheist writers like Hitchens and Dawkins take the gloves off and prepare to relentlessly pummel the opposition without prejudice to education, vocation, or background. If a wrong idea, after all, is causing thousands of people to perish in futility, isn't it worth fighting? If a source of revelation about the nature of the world seems to present itself clearly and articulately to our understanding, aren't we somewhat justified in our adamant insistence that our opponents attend to this source? Occasionally this kind of relentless zeal even spills over into inter-denominational Christian debates, with proponents on both sides refusing to budge.

My wife and I have been bemoaning the poor treatment that many of our High Church leaders have been giving Low Church Evangelicals as of late. Of course, when we ourselves sat on the other side of the fence we bemoaned the grief that Evangelicals gave the High Church leaders with equal distaste, but thankfully the humility of my wife has always pointed us toward our own faults first! On both sides it seems that a certain "demonizing" tends to occur, where we begin to downplay the role that ignorance or differing perspective plays in an opponent's beliefs (even zealously held beliefs), and defensively begin to feel that our opponents are wicked masterminds - orchestrators of destructive and manipulative conspiracies - instead of people that are fighting for what they believe to be important. This rendering of our brothers and sisters can hardly bring about any good! Even if a person is truly wrong in their beliefs, the humility of our Christian faith certainly demands that we first react to our brothers and sisters with kindness and charity, knowing that we ourselves were rescued from a pitiable ignorance and wickedness of heart by the unmerited grace of God! Orthodox Christians especially ought to feel no personal entitlement when it comes to correct personal knowledge, begging the Lord as we do to let us not "judge our brothers" but rather to "see our own sin". In every case, charity demands that we see those with opposing views as honest seekers of the truth - fellow men and women who hold to their beliefs out of the same mixture of sincerity and ignorance that motivates our own understanding. When we do this, we frequently find that particular issues are not as simple and "straightforward" as they seem to be upon first glance! People with radically different perspectives than our own have, in fact, rather strong and compelling reasons for believing what they believe, and if these reasons seem rather less compelling than our own reasons for believing the opposite, we must nonetheless allow these reasonable persons the uniqueness of their particular backgrounds, training, and values.

This, of course, plays into the second part of our original question, which was how we ought to deal with those that disagree with us. There are, without a doubt, people who are mistaken about very important things. The existence of multiple perspectives by no means invalidates the existence of absolute truth... it only complicates our understanding of it! Like others of my own faith, I feel that we must, as witnesses of the revelation of God, stand firm in our belief, both that He exists and that our purpose is to be united to Him in His body, which is the Church. Outside of this understanding I can make no sense of the world or our purpose here. This belief does not, however, preclude my imagining the circumstances that would lead a person to believe the opposite! It is my duty as a Christian - indeed as a human being - to treat the Atheist with the same respect and kindness that led me to the Church of Christ in the first place (including a genuine sensitivity to the person's fears and hesitancies), knowing as I do that my own beliefs are shaped greatly by my encounters with other people. If wickedness is leading a person to ignore the truth, then no amount of hatred or forceful argumentation will change their mind, and they ought to be loved or even pitied rather than abused, as they are victims of their own sin and no worse than any of us in our own sin. If sincere ignorance is keeping a person from knowing the truth, then stern rebuke and "straw man" lampooning is only a great cruelty that will sooner turn that person away from the faith than draw them to it. If superior understanding is leading a person to disagree with you, then you make yourself ridiculous by refusing to listen to their perspective! In any case, it is safe to assume that every person has sincere (or at least understandable) reasons for believing what they believe... and before we "demonize" them, we ought first to see what has led them to their conclusions!

As Christians we need fear no truth. The great saints of our faith had the humility and wisdom to see that "innovations" like the doctrine of the Trinity, rather than representing a departure from the belief in one God, actually affirmed that belief and helped to deepen our understanding of the Godhead. St. Paul had the good sense to trust the vision of the Lord that He received, to turn from his zealous persecution of the Christians (inspired as it was by his admirable zeal for God!), and to accept the very doctrine that had led him to persecute the Church in the first place. As firmly as we hold to our articulations of the truth, we have lost our way if we come to the place where we cannot undergo a similar roadside conversion...