Grimoire of an Atheist: Anything Interesting

“What the fuck has that got to do with ANYTHING INTERESTING?” -Richard Dawkins

I was listening to Alex O’Conner’s “Within Reason” Podcast while I completed a ten hour drive last week. A great Podcast to listen to if you’re interested in casual philosophy, religion, and okay science (I’ve been a fan for a long time Alex but I’m not convinced you nor I are qualified to really speak on “science”).

I let it play through the one’s I queued up because I wanted to listen to Justin Sledge from Esoterica talk about YWHW and then the Demiurge, then it played an older episode with Richard Dawkins. Honestly, an interesting podcast just from a history of atheism perspective. Dickhead Dawkins is an important figure in the atheist movement and has contributed greatly to atheist discourse and, regrettably, memes.

I’m generally not interested in the mind of a man who starts off a discussion equating “religion” to “wokeism” because “wokeism” isn’t a word used by someone wanting to have a good faith discussion about something they don’t like or don’t understand, but that realization made me want to know more about him because I think he is the quintessential disenchanted man.

##Enchanted versus Disenchanted world views

I have been reading “Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed” by Wouter Hanegraaff to sort of give me a better framework for interpreting occultism or “Western Esoterica” as is apparently the more correct idea. And one of the frameworks that really sings to me is the idea of the Enchanted World. In short, through most all of human history, religion, philosophy, and science have been very powerfully intertwined. For the most part this was due to necessity. We don’t have enough answers in any one “field” to really constitute it being a separate field. So, we keep them combined and inseparable for millennia.

To an enchanted person, they will always see the connection between this material world, their soul, and the great Absolute (whatever that is be it god/the Goddess/Flying Spaghetti Monster) and this makes everything feel important and connected. There is beauty in the smallest parts of life because that is the goddess at work. There are lessons in mundane emotions because you are one with the universe so no emotion is too big. It’s the world of whimsy and love that truly I think I want to suspend my disbelief and live in.

Yet there is a foil, the disenchanted man doesn’t see this deep connection with everything and only sees what is completely rational. If there isn’t a scientific field studying it, then it’s Not anything interesting and probably needs to go away.

Here’s a quick Wikipedia blurb on this

The history of the ideas is pretty interesting too. Hanegraaf believes this world view is new and is what allowed science to take off in the 1600’s. By separating the Natural Sciences from the questions of the soul and god, scientists were able to exist parallel too and mostly independent of gods and the oppressive church. No longer do we have to kill a man for making a scientific discovery that, because it proves old ideas wrong, is a heresy. Now you are simply learning the exact mechanisms through which god made things how they are! You will no longer be burned for thinking humans are made up of tiny humans because you don’t understand atoms!

Then as science advanced, we started to see people like Dawkins appear who have no attachment to the metaphysical realms of religion at all. You can now live your life happy with all the answers of science and psychology to make yourself feel better. No longer do you need the rituals of a god or your own musings to answer any tough questions. At the very least you can get some ideas on what to think or, realistically, enough evidence to gaslight people on your opinion as truth instead of real research.

Anything Interesting

Truly, that was the story that triggered this in me. Alex O’connor has told the story a few times now on his Podcast but the most recent telling is what triggered this whole thought bubble. Its an interview with Emily Gureshi-Hurst an Atheist theologian and its such a good Richard Dawkins quote because it exemplifies my frustration with him and the new atheist movement that I’ve had the entire time (16 years!) I have been an atheist. The story goes

“I had this conversation with Richard Dawkins in a car Park once, after I told him on this podcast that I didn’t think his treatment of Thomas Aquinas five ways was particularly comprehensive being all of two pages. And he asked me at this event, like, well, what would you have had me do? And I said, well, you know, you treated all kinds of causation as if they’re one thing. And he said, well, do you think there are different kinds of causation? I said, yeah, I think so. And he asked me to explain. So as best I could in about 30 seconds, tried to explain hierarchical and like linear causation, to which he interrupted the last sentence of my little speech by saying, I remember the exact words, what the fuck has that got to do with anything interesting? Thank God I’m not a theologian.” -Alex O’Connor

What a boring take. It’s just not interesting to talk about theology says THE FOREMOST PROMINENT FIGURE IN THE RELIGIOUS DEBATE SCENE!

I can’t imagine dedicating such a large portion of my life and free time to “debating” people on an Idea that I fundamentally don’t find interesting. His entire motivation was wanting to be the smartest person in the room. He only argued against the existence of god from strictly his evolutionary biology background. He wanted the spectacle of standing up to a christian orthodoxy. He helped set the standard that anyone can easily clown on even the best trained apologeticicist by simply, not reading their stupid book.

And that’s such a boring way to engage with religion and then the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a very useful way to remove one’s self from a debate with a theist. It is such a debilitating move to simply ask why I should consider the bible/quran/torah is truth. Why should I even consider it as a history book? At best in can be another “The Illiad” but we don’t take that as gospel. Dropping a holy text to the level of a Homeric Epic I think is fair but sweeps the feet of any arguments for god they have and then you can bully them for not having faith in their god if they have to use outside evidence for their claims. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

There is a very toxic sub current to this mindset though. This virulent search for truth in a “fuck your feelings” mindset has always lead to harassment of anyone deemed outside of a simple understanding of “basic biology”. Nu-Athiests have always been bigots because it “biologically doesn’t make sense to be gay” or “you can’t change your biological gender” and I’ve always thought they were annoying.

Imagine wanting to understand the world and those who inhabit it, but you completely reject the concept of “feelings” because they “aren’t real.”

Feelings, my friends, are real. They are how we experience the world and our place within it.

Feelings as a basis for the Enchanted World

Feelings, psychological responses, brain chemistry, neurological rewiring, etc, etc. is the enchanted world. Allowing your emotions to be felt and your world view to be open to interpretation. To write symbolic poetry in your mind to put into words the feelings you have about this material plane. That is where the enchanted world of the divine exists.

I really do think that is the cross roads for religion and spiritualism. I personally believe that’s where it stops, the mind.

All magick exists in that it is simply an expression of our intentions. It is a psychological trick to make us be the change we want to see happen. You casting a spell is you telling your subconcious to get into gear working towards that goal.

See my blog post here and also here for more.

And I know what that means for that whole shtick about the bible. It means we have to acknowledge people really do have strong feelings about the bible and that there is something more than pure facts and logic that is needed when engaging on those topics. It means there is some similar line between “wokeism” and “religion” but that that isn’t inherently evidence against it but a necessity for nuance in such discussions.

I am saying that, while useful for “winning” debates, Dawkins disenchantment is not conducive to a productive conversation.

Feelings are the driving force of humanity. At the core of all human action there is an emotion we are reacting too and it is our feelings we are trusting to guide those feelings. Even if we have a feeling to trust “rationalism” above emotions, it is still some inherent emotion that is causing such an attachment.

Conclusion

There are things in this world we have yet to understand and we may never understand. I think we have done the world a disservice in academia by ignoring the emotional angle for things in Dawkins time and we’re still seeing the repercussions of “Toxic Rationalism” in thought. Modern scholars are doing much better considering this and I think the increase in intersectionality has been a massive blessing to the Liberal Arts and even the Sciences.

It’s unfortunate that this old problem has been solved, but the conservative old guard has turned this Academic problem into a Political one. People like Dawkins who are wrong and no longer contributing to the discussions in a good faith manner end up as fuel for the censorship of good scholarship under our new authoritarian regimes.

Dawkins first made the claim that something simply wasn’t interesting, which is his right to not be interested, but then he added to an ideology that hurts people. That second sin is much much harder to forgive.