Default Atheism

Some Hispanic coworkers have been making comments lately. Apparently I look like Jesus to them. This isn’t anything new for me. I’ve been suffering the Jesus shtick since high school. It’s annoying that it’s always JESUS, though. I don’t know why it couldn’t be someone awesome like Dürer instead [pictured left]. People don’t really know who that is these days I suppose. But I digress.

I made the assumption that these young men, these co-workers of mine, were Roman Catholics, and it turns out I was right. They asked if I was a Catholic, too. No, I said. What are you then? Jewish? Hah, I wish. Buddhist? Muslim? Atheist? Well, I’m more of an agnostic, I told them. But then I thought about that a bit and realized it wasn’t really so, because this skeptical agnostic tendency leads me to not believe in any deity. Which makes me an atheist after all.

Shit. Atheism by default. It’s a crappy place to be. Because, you know, it’s not that I don’t want a religion. It’s just that there’s nothing out there appropriate for me. Maybe if it wasn’t butchered up and Frankensteined into Christianity O-so-long-ago, paganism would be an option. But that’s not what my ancestors brought to Plymouth Rock. No, they brought a book of tribal Hebrew mysticism and a touch of pervy Faustian secularism. And whatever might have been pure about that has been corroded away by generations of sterile individualist materialism. What joy.

Essentially, I have no legitimate ethno-culture to speak of. Perhaps the answer is as Christopher Langan suggests: a new priesthood that understands God via logic and mathematics; an elite of high intelligence and spiritual curiosity, focused on using ancient (mythic) and modern (scientific) wisdom to decipher the language of the divine and translate the cosmic metaphysical truths into anthrop-digestible language.

But to what degree can I rely on others to do this for me? Perhaps it’s time, as Nietzsche says, to break those old tablets and make new ones myself. Until then I am doomed to atheism by default. As always, it’s time to get to work.

Shayne