My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

How does one respond to this logically complete, but small and cramped eternity? Chesterton continues,

“[If] you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument…

I suppose we should say something like this: 'Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business…? How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."

‘So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!"

– (Chesterton, 1908)

The examples he gives are different, but the cramped eternity Chesterton describes is that of New Atheism. It reduces the riotous, bountiful beauty of all that is—quarks and galactic super-clusters, laughter and tears, burning sunsets, the wind in the mountaintops, the heart-aching beauty of a Bach cantata, a mother’s loving arms, and much more—to the clean well-lit prison of one single idea. In so doing, it robs its acolytes of a richness they know nothing about and replaced it with a worldview they must contradict in their daily lives to remain fully human. New Atheists imagine themselves to be “free-thinking” moral agents living in a world where justice, mercy, kindness, and tolerance of others matter… where the hopes and dreams of the sentient creatures who walk that world are sacred... even though those creatures are nothing more than a blind collision of atoms in a purposeless universe driven only by laws that cares nothing for them—a world that will someday obliterate our very memories in the fiery conflagration of a quantum bounce or slowly grind us down to feeble Hawking radiation lost in an endless sea of empty space-time. If this is not the spiritually contracted insanity Chesterton describes I have no idea what is.

Einstein once said, “No problem was ever solved on the level of consciousness in which it was created.” In a world where extremists fly jet-liners into skyscrapers and blow up abortion clinics, we cannot rid the world of Fundamentalist hatred with more Fundamentalism—especially that which masquerades as a defense of “science” and “reason” but avoids genuine dialogue. There is no defense against such things like a clear, reasonable demonstration of something better. For this to be possible we must be willing to acknowledge our limitations and genuinely consider ideas contrary to our own. Information must take precedence over opinion; tolerance must replace “mocking, ridiculing… in public.” And most importantly, dialogue must replace mere sparring. Cursing the darkness might make us feel better, but it will never enlighten anyone or give our children a better world.

Though I often fail to show it in my words and actions, my New Atheist friends are precious to me. Whether they embrace my views or not, I long for them to be whole… to have worldviews borne of a soundness of heart and soul as well as mind. I haven’t the hubris to imagine they need me to lead them to that place. Lord knows, my own worldview is as much in need of work as anyone’s.