The Act of Giving Thanks in an Atheistic and Materialistic Time – Mark Rich

There is a minor question floating about in web-space: Who do atheists thank if they don’t thank God? Their answer is that they thank science and the people who actually do the things for which they are thankful – farmers for growing food, emergency workers for saving lives, etc. – instead of thanking some imaginary god who did nothing. (The times in my career when I have served rural churches I don’t recall any atheists ever going around thanking the farmers, but never mind…)

Believers readily rejoin that they do not neglect to thank the actual people who actually do things, along with thanking the providential Creator. OK, so far so good.

The deeper question I’d like to reflect on here is, Who is doing the thanking? Isn’t it a person, an ‘I’ who is more than the sum of her/his biological parts?

Atheism is becoming fashionable again these days, and the contemporary ones are for the most part a likable lot – funny, earnest, well-meaning except when it comes to religion. But as with many things in American culture, it is also about an inch deep, and that will not do.

The inevitable partner belief to atheism is apsychism, the non-existence of the soul (don’t bother looking up the word; I just coined it). Richard Dawkins happily serves up both opinions whenever asked in order to sell more of his book The God Delusion (and no, I’m not going to post a link to it!). The idea that humans have souls – indeed, that we are souls – goes quite naturally in hand with the idea that God exists. So the slightly-more-thoughtful atheists like Dawkins obligingly round out their circular arguments by insisting that not only does God not exist but that humans are also no more than amazingly complex fleshbots whose psychic existence fully stops along with the end of their biological functions. According to them the consciousness of being an ‘I’, while temporarily fun, is finally no more than an illusion that extinguishes along with biological existence.

I have two arguments to make in response to this double foolishness that is apsychism. The first is rather technical; the second is much more humane.

First, the soul, or the self, or the ‘I’ is not an illusion. Let’s take an example from dreaming. Early morning is one of the chief times when we all dream, and those are the dreams we most remember. (I’m only writing here about ordinary dreams, not visions). While we dream we live fully within the dream. Whatever is happening in it – happy, sad, weird, frightful, funny – we experience firsthand, as actually living it while we dream it. It is only when we wake up that we suddenly realize that those experiences were not actually happening, but were only dreams. That is, those illusions produced by our subconscious can only be seen as illusions in relation to some other, more real state which we experience when awake. The very experience and concept of illusion necessarily requires the experience and concept of reality or truth in order to be comprehensible.

(By the way, I’m not at all arguing that our dreams have no value or meaning or reality. They surely are the workings of our subconscious minds, which operate quite naturally in symbolism. One of the reasons I enjoy reading the Bible is that those writers so easily, naturally, and powerfully use symbols, while we dopey moderns flee symbols, imagining that anything that can be said must be said literally!).

So the argument that the ‘I’ or the soul is an illusion falls flat logically, for that could only be a true statement if there were some more real ‘I’ or soul in relation to which the individual soul is quickly and immediately seen as unreal or less real. Nothing can be illusory except by comparison with that which is real.

The only awakening, if you can call it that, that atheists have to point to in support of their assertion is that one simply ceases to exist once the brain stops functioning and one dies. But that doesn’t really prove anything; it’s just an extension of their unsupported assertion. Darn, it’s hard to prove a negative!

There is in fact a far more real ‘I’ than our little personal ‘I’s – namely God – and without knowledge and experience of God we little ‘I’s do in fact become filled with our own illusions, becoming less and less real as we become more and more deluded. This is why the fiercest critics of human illusions – that is to say, of idolatry – are prophets preaching the word of God. Atheists do criticize, often rightly, the idolatries of religions, but their critiques are never as powerful as those of the prophets who speak for God.

The second and more important proof that the soul or self is real is our own experience of life itself. Life is not merely lived, but it is also experienced by us, by an actual person. All our life experiences – suffering, rejoicing, hoping, despairing, loving, learning, being awed, envying, sorrowing – these all happen to and are experienced by us, by the part of us that is the whole (as Aristotle would say), which is our soul, our self, us. So the real proof of the soul’s reality and existence is the felt experience of life itself. (Similarly, the best proofs of God’s reality are those more-or-less direct experiences of God that people sometimes have.)

Conversely, computers never experience anything no matter how advanced they are. They don’t have souls. They can react to an ever-wider range of stimuli – only insofar as they are programmed to do so – but they experience none of it at all, lacking the thing that experiences.

The reason atheists must tend toward denying the existence of the soul is that the soul is the transcendent part of us, the part that is most like God, who is full transcendence.

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Now let’s do a little ideological analysis. It is no accident at all that the three most important and powerful (in the worldly sense of power, but not at all in the divine sense of power) atheists in human history are Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong, the three greatest mass murderers in human history. Yes, I know that the kinder, gentler contemporary atheists have no murderous intentions, and they are eager to prove that by blaming religious folk for all human violence. But facts are still facts.

I contend that it is no mere historic coincidence that atheism is coming back into vogue at the very same time that corporations and their mega-billionaire masters are ruling and ruining the world as never before. Atheism/apsychism is the perfect ideological complement to contemporary corporatism and statism, just as it has historically been to every kind of destructive hegemonic power.

Let’s listen to Wisdom of Solomon 1:12-2:24.

12.	Do not invite death by the error of your life, or bring on destruction by the works of your hands;
13.	because God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.
14.	For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.
15.	For righteousness is immortal.
16.	But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death; considering him a friend, they pined away and made a covenant with him, because they are fit to belong to his company.
	Wisdom of Solomon 2
1.	For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from Hades.
2.	For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts;
3.	when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.
4.	Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and overcome by its heat.
5.	For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up and no one turns back.
6.	“Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of the creation to the full as in youth.
7.	Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no flower of spring pass us by.
8.	Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither.
9.	Let none of us fail to share in our revelry; everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment, because this is our portion, and this our lot.
10.	Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged.
11.	But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless.
12.	“Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training.
13.	He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord.
14.	He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
15.	the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange.
16.	We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father.
17.	Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
18.	for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
19.	Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance.
20.	Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”
21.	Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them,
22.	and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls;
23.	for God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity,
24.	but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.

 

That’s from the late first century BCE. Truly there is nothing new in the world!

This extensive passage rightly sees through the essential connections between the denial of God(1:12-16), the denial of the soul (2:1-5), the wanton misuse of creation (2:6-9), the oppression of the poor (2:10-11) and the attack on those who value and defend the poor (2:12-20).

When the world is ruled through organized violence and organized greed then both the value of all humans (including those icky poor) becomes demeaned and the power of God becomes grossly inconvenient and even hateful. The author of Wisdom calls that ideological connection a covenant with death. The globalized oppression of the poor and the destruction of the ecology by the corporatized establishment is essentially connected to the denial of God and the denial of the soul. If no humans have any inherent transcendent worth, then we must only live for the satisfaction of our bodily pleasures, and those who can best do that are rightfully the winners in the global race toward wealth and death.

Christians will also recognize the similarity of 2:12-20 to the crucifixion of Jesus.[i]

There is truly enough and more than enough religious narcissism in the world, through which many evils can and do come. But let also recognize the narcissism of atheism and its corresponding denial of the soul, which serve so nicely the selfishness of the powerful.

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So what in the world does all this have to do with the American holiday of Thanksgiving?

Almost nothing, insofar as the American holiday of Thanksgiving is about much food and football followed by much shopping. But the act of giving thanks is a very spiritual, soulful act, whatever the occasion. Through it we transcend our selfishness to recognize, address, and value not only the stuff in front of us and the people around us, but also the Giver of it all and us all. The fact is that the whole universe is a miracle and every part of it a gift, and it is no accident nor biochemical quirk that we can see this truth and love it. This act of giving thanks is itself more precious than all the material stuff for which we give thanks, for it arises from our small transcendent I to the great Transcendent One, the Ground of all Being.

Let’s finish then with Paul’s advice to the Thessalonicans, some of whom had already died, possibly under persecution: “See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thess 5:15-18).