Friends and Religion

Two preoccupying topics of late have been friends and religion, first the latter.

It seems as I get older that I have less a tolerance for atheists and more of a general tolerance for the monotheists and other religious types. Even though this second group tends to be ignorant of the nature of the universe, they at least function with a baseline of morality, even if it is an accident of their creed. Through hundreds of years of apology, plagiarism of Stoicism and other accidental injections, Christianity, for instance, has in modern times mustered to teach a decent moral code – although not exceptional. At the risk of making a hasty generalization, Christians tend to be mild mannered, restrained and respectful, I do not immediately fear that I will be exposed to viciousness and vile acts in their presence.

In earlier years I was a firebrand against the Abrahamic religions, mainly because the metaphysics, logic and to a lesser extent, the moral maxims, of those systems tend to obfuscate the truth and to muddle man’s natural rational process, at times also weakening his willpower and self-esteem. As I get older, I realize that this still applies, but must remain as a caution to me alone, for the great majority of people are better off with religion than no religion. There is no substitute for an examined life, but if one lacks the inclination or ability to examine their life, as I suspect a great many people do, to create and act by a philosophy of life, then they are left with nothingness, a nothingness which they too readily fill with wasteful and self-defeating pleasures. As an aside, I must say that simply “giving” someone who has recently parted with the habits of religion a philosophy of life, even if it is of superior skill and wisdom, is nothing but an act of converting them to a new religion.

This leads me to my next point. While the most exemplary and moral people I have encountered have been principled and self-examining atheists, deists and pantheists, I would say, at fear of making a hasty generalization, that most without religion live degenerate lives. This is an ongoing dilemma for me, as with the rejection of religion also comes the reckless and destructive indulgence in food, drugs and sex. I have always seen through the futility of both projects: belief in absolutism, and hedonism. Yet all my friends are atheists, and lacking the rigor of philosophy in their lives, lead shadow lives which are incompatible with my esteem and dispositions. As it is, I stay around until the drugs and promiscuous eyes come out, which they inevitably do, and then I depart. But such a life is the life of a wolf, and loneliness is an all too familiar bedfellow. It is as if in rejecting the existence of a god they automatically reject all moral and physical restraints, tossing discretion and prudence to the wayside, considering all deliberative or ethical thought to be “bullshit.” How can such people be trusted to do the right thing? If they cannot, what use are they as friends? How can they be expected to raise and educate children? In this sense I am deeply worried about the future, which will inevitably be an atheistic world.

This is a matter of considerable cognitive dissonance for me, as the older I get, the less I am able to identify with my peers. At the core of my estrangement is my abstinence from drugs and promiscuous sex- which seems the way and good of life for the vast majority of the peers I encounter. I thought that age would temper what I hoped would be a high school-college phase of self-destruction, but many of them persist beyond their dorms, spending endless hours and nights in self-destructive binges. The years of intoxication and muddle have destroyed their imagination, creativity, reason and humor, reducing them to shells of what they once were. Even those who appear superficially healthy are at their cores deeply disturbed individuals, the extent of their dysfunction revealed by the intoxication of the poisons they ingest. I think ten times faster than they do, making me feel immediately bored in their presence, and when they do manage to produce coherent sentences, they have nothing wholesome to speak of, instead reveling in their own vices and tortures. They work to achieve the bare minimum, and fixate on feeding their endless bastion of want and desire. Again, these are generalizations, those of which I try to convince myself do not represent the case, yet my feelings are always reinforced whenever I let my guard down and let myself attend one their nightly destruction rituals. I wish I were greatly mislead, yet the truth is contrary. Why should I be expected to make friends with these people and why should I consider their behavior to be normal?

So I have come to slowly prefer Christians to these other folks. Christians tend to understand the innate value of life and of people, of love and of community. They are this country’s most common proprietors of the “golden rule,” basic moral teachings that are essential for the conduct of a human being. Rather than prostitute each other and preach to a cult of the lowest common denominator, the Christians have standards for their behavior. While the reasons for their behavior may be unexamined, the behavior in itself is nonetheless moral. While there are many pretend Christians, even the “gold cross” wearing variety are still influenced by a cultural lattice of ethical behavior. Ultimately, if you get a bunch of families and elders together in one place (a church) to discuss the good of life, the latter is the inevitable result.

And this is what is missing from the lives of my peers – any sort of community place, any sort of social responsibility or obligations. They live shadow lives, out of sight of their elders and parents, their church of congregation is the mall, where they worship the desires that encumber and entangle them. The only obligations for my peers are to themselves, and they accordingly wreck and ruin their way through life, trampling those in the way to their next best fix or purchase. Ayn Rand would be proud.