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| Dad and my nephew, Brent, in the hospital room. |
***
There has been no shortage of family hugs and prayer while Dad has been in the hospital struggling with cancer and all its complications. The former, I believe, is great for returning my dad to health; the latter, however, places me in an awkward position around room 5054 at Northside Hospital. For some time now, there has been a rift in religious beliefs – albeit a peaceful, healthy one – between my family and me, but the only other time I experienced the width of that rift was when my maternal grandmother was terminally ill with brain cancer. Since then, there have only been the regular dinner table blessings, which I haven’t closed my eyes for since I was a teenager. Now that the possibility of death is back in the picture, I’m seeing more clearly the dangers of religion than I could when I was younger.
To preface, I am not religious. While there are cosmological questions I hope to resolve for myself, I consider myself an atheist. As I understand it, a god is an ethereal consciousness transcending reality itself, able to create, dispose, or alter it at the slightest whim. However, existence is independent of consciousness, not the other way around. We implicitly grasp this in our first breathing moments, first observing with the senses that there is an outside world. After doing so, the instance of that observation allows us to identify ourselves as a sentient being – as a self. But for the concept of self to be possible, it must exist in relation to some other thing or things, an external reality that has a finite and specific identity. In summary, to be conscious is to be conscious of some thing. It is then impossible to be conscious of only ourselves.
God, on the other hand, is a being whose nature, by definition limitless and omnipotent, does not abide by any laws. Far from being a source of objective reality, he exerts primacy over all existence simply by willing it. Paraphrasing Bishop George Berkeley, we are all ephemeral ideas in the mind of God. Either the universe is a created extension of this consciousness, as in the religious view, or the universe is synonymous with it, as in the pantheistic view. In either case, God is a being that is conscious of nothing but himself, but this is a contradiction, as the concept ‘self’ is only possible to a being that first performed an act of extrospection. I often hear the reply, “Okay, so existence exists – and so does God. What is the contradiction?” However, this is no different than proposing, “Existence exists independent of consciousness, and so does this consciousness upon which existence depends.”
Taking it a step further, this “consciousness”, without a relationship to the demands of an external reality, would be unable to perform even the simplest of actions. To do so, it must first recognize an incentive, in other words, make value-judgments. But its ability to formulate value-judgments would be no more efficacious than a rock’s ability to perform the same task. A rock is an example of inanimate matter, which may change form with time, due to erosion or an increase in temperature, but its atomic components are indestructible. It doesn’t have any needs or desires, nothing is for or against it. Even if a rock were somehow supplemented with a consciousness, the rock would have no ability to formulate and fulfill values without basic needs. Similarly, God is an infinity with no voids to fill. Nothing is for or against it. Unable to perform the simplest of value-judgments, such an entity would be far from omnipotent. Any consciously chosen action presupposes a value-judgment, yet somehow this arbitrary being has found the universe to be a worthy project. Really, God is nothing more than glorified stagnation. Enter Occam’s Razor.
Returning to my dad’s situation, I was staring from the window in his hospital room one evening at a violent storm lurching on the horizon. Something about Southern summer storms always gets me in a mood to thinking long and hard, something about the way the smell of the air changes. Dad was sleeping and Mom was watching the Dr. Phil Show, excitedly echoing his pontifications. While I sat there zoning out the program, I thought about reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra two summers ago by the lake: “God is dead,” one of the lines read.
If anyone is even slightly familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, those are probably the words of his they recall, and probably misinterpret too. Considering the context of the quote and the historical trends of the time, Nietzsche wasn’t literally writing God’s obituary. Rather, it was a prediction of the future.
Leading up to the Age of Enlightenment, it was commonly held that God was the fountainhead of meaning. Life’s purpose was fulfilling spiritual needs, awaiting a future vindication of the spirit in Heaven through closeness to God. It meant denial of the realness of this life, sacrificing in ascetic observance for the one that would come next. Many under this totalitarian rule of the medieval Church suffered, even embracing a life of poverty and material depravity – but Heaven would come. It had to.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, held a counterintuitive perspective on this orientation: Religion promotes nihilism in its adherents and especially in its dissenters. Both the era in which he lived and those that followed fulfilled his prediction. Scientific progress increasingly relegated former religious institutions and observances to the margins of history, and from their absence grew a newer and fuller nihilism as a reaction: materialism (not in the colloquial sense of loving material possessions, but the reductionist view that all reality is purely mechanical, leaving no room for human consciousness). It wasn’t long before new dogmas, such as Marxism, Nazism, and fascism, dismissed the reality of today in hope or despair of an “inevitable” future, just as the religious faithful had done for centuries.
As time passed, even more nihilistic movements took root, these more subjectivist than materialist, denying both today and tomorrow, such as modernism, postmodernism, Dadaism, avant-garde, modern egalitarianism, etc. Western civilization went for so long under the arbitrary notion that purpose simply wasn’t possible without God and so took the Church’s bait, locked into the false alternative it created, and embraced that life was meaningless. Nietzsche’s fears were justified; whether the narrative is God or materialism or postmodernism, each promotes the dark destruction of nihilism, some more so than others.
Before that stormy afternoon, I held a distant and vicarious comprehension of these big ideas and movements from the books I read, but from my perch in the hospital room, I recalled all the past experiences in which I was personally affected by nihilism. I saw the role, sometimes subtle, other times deliberate, that it played on an individual level rather than the large societal scale that Nietzsche described. Nihilism was, in fact, something I had to overcome after discarding my own faith, in which my exposure to the ideas of Ayn Rand led me to realize there was an alternative of purpose and existence that didn't include God. On the other hand, I witnessed others discarding their faith only to succumb to mindlessness and self-destruction.
Since Dad was first diagnosed in May of 2007, I have had a fear that Christian nihilism would get the best of him, mainly because of what I went through with my grandmother. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer eight years ago and fought it into remission. Three years later she discovered two tumors in her brain, and instead of opting for radiation treatment she decided it was God’s will for her to leave this earth. I will never forget it. She passed away in May of 2005. I often wonder: Had it not been for religion, would she still have resigned herself to death as she did? Perhaps she was just too exhausted to bear the burden of more treatment and Heaven appeared as a beacon of emotional comfort in her mind. At least to me, the answer is lost and so is a woman who was the salt of the Earth.
My dad, however, has been resilient. Time after time, despite his religious convictions, he has opted for aggressive chemotherapy treatment since diagnosis, even at the physically lowest of lows. And still, despite dour news delivered by his oncologist just the other day, he still does not want to give up on this life. In his words, reminiscent of his days as a talented athlete: “Leave it on the field.”
In the past two weeks, religion has reared its head in our room a lot. Some from friends, some from family, some from their church, even some from the nurses. It has made me worry about Dad, hoping he won’t take the course my grandmother did. But life can be more beautiful than it can be ugly, and I think he knows it. I just hope it sticks. Realistically, I can say nothing in most circumstances, because removing the existential rug from my father, or my family, may be even more lethal at this stage. As with Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, religion’s nihilism is dangerous but not so much as outright nihilism.
After making an extraordinary recovery in ICU, we had an extensive conversation back in his hospital room. One of his concerns he expressed was that he got back to Coolray Field to watch the Gwinnett Braves play. “You got it,” I said. When we were alone in the room a few days later, he told me he knew where I was philosophically, that he admired me for it, but also hoped I wouldn’t shut the door to God and Jesus Christ. For nearly two weeks I’ve heard those two names dropped a lot, mostly from people assuming I share their beliefs. They’d tell me that I need not worry, that if he died, he’d be in a better place. At times it’s difficult for me to sit through, not because it’s annoying, but because I’m well aware of the implications of religion after my grandmother’s death. Through the family prayers, through the church members’ prayers, everything. And yet, let me stress, underneath it all is benevolence. I am certain these are people that truly value my dad, so I don’t want to discount their benevolence, but rather an intellectual error – one I fear could be the death knell. The better place is here, on this Earth, on the field.
Their prayers are a pathological symptom of both subjectivist and intrinsicist views of reality. As I understand it, prayer has two other forms besides repentance: requests for change in the course of causal relationships and requests for spiritual direction. The former is subjectivist, and the latter intrinsicist. In the subjectivist form, the person performing the prayer to God, a divine revisionist of reality, seeks to manipulate reality to a form compatible with their wishes. The subject, disregarding the law of identity, asks that the object act against its metaphysical nature. The intrinsicist form of prayer consists of an epistemic approach in which knowledge is requested. This knowledge may be intended for existential purpose, reconciliation of religious ideas with reality, emotional confusion, etc (at least those were some of mine once upon a time). While the result of a subjectivist prayer is obvious – reality either conformed to the request or did not – the result of an intrinsicist prayer is more subtle. “Answers” manifest themselves as revelations, which are signified by dreams or events perceived in day-to-day reality. I remember in Sunday school a long time ago the story of Joseph who interpreted the dreams of the Egyptian pharaoh: “Then the seven years of famine began, just as Joseph had predicted. The famine also struck all the surrounding countries, but throughout Egypt there was plenty of food” (Genesis 41:54, New Living Translation). In this view, gathering knowledge is not a task to be performed by the cognitive mechanism, but by whims and emotions: spiritual alarm clocks signifying the reception of new insights.
Through my experience, I have noticed a correlation between the results of others’ prayers and their emotional reactions. Suppose someone bows their head to pray before calling it a night. The prayer has one of two outcomes: yes or no. If the “answer” is perceived to be ‘yes’, then the individual performing the prayer typically feels God’s presence, which is met with joy. Thereafter, the individual believes him or herself to be on the correct path and gives credit to God for bestowing wisdom where the individual is allegedly incapable. On the other hand, the “answer” may be perceived as ‘no’, in which case the individual still feels God’s presence, although, it may not be immediate (God may be testing the individual for whatever reason, such as in the Biblical story of Job). Regardless, the individual gets the feeling that God is unsatisfied with their choices, which is met with any number and combination of negative emotions: sorrow, confusion, frustration, etc. At this point, the individual believes that he or she has deviated from God’s plan, and that he or she is at fault. The correlation is interesting, because the spiritual ruts theists get into usually seem to be in conjunction with decisions that are unwise regardless of a supernatural presence.
At the root of each prayer is self-hate, denial of the individual, a perception of innate culpability. Everything is achieved through submission to a higher power. Ironically, closeness to God is achieved not through using the mind, which God supposedly created, but by reversing its natural processes. That is, emotions replace the intellect as the cognitive mechanism. I recognize, however, that a deliberate, comprehensive denial of the mind is common only amongst fundamentalists. Most of the religious folks I run into don’t openly devalue the mind, but do so implicitly, perhaps unaware of their doing so. Either way, these individuals are socially conditioned from the time they are children to believe man is lost without God. But as Galileo mused: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
By embracing a view that man’s mind is impotent, the religious relegate all existential meaning to a noumenal realm, which cannot be directly perceived. Enter prayer: the conduit to the eternal. All of a sudden, phenomena give rise to the impression that God is behind anything unexplained (i.e. miracles). Consider this claim: An event is unexplained by current scientific knowledge, therefore the event was caused by a higher power. All in all, it is just an arbitrary claim, which can be neither validated nor invalidated. Epistemologically, knowledge of God has not yet existed in the same way that we have knowledge of the tree existing outside our window. Then theists claim that God is infinite, that he transcends being and knowledge, and the human mind is just too small to grasp such a being in all its great magnitude and complexity. But what does it mean to be infinite? To be infinite is to be of no definable quantity, without identity, and a being without identity is, in fact, not a being at all, but a non-existent.
And here I am in room 5054 thinking all this crazy shit, not saying a word about it. The prayers just keep coming.
***
My father, David Charles Adams, passed away early on a Sunday morning, August 1, 2010. He was admitted into ICU just a couple of days earlier while I was in Athens trying to move into a new apartment. When I received the phone call from Mom, I panicked. Here I was trying to stuff an apartment’s worth of a college kid’s shit into plastic bins, cardboard boxes and garbage bags. For those who don’t know, I am a champion of chaos, not organization. However, to my luck, Chelsea – the queen of organization – showed up and had me out of there in no time. Also, Jon and his mom came in the next morning and finished up where we had left off. I am forever grateful to each of these people for helping me get back to my dad.
After rushing back to Northside Hospital in Forsyth, I entered a room where I saw something pretty mundane in a hospital, but horrifying to a son and a friend. Tubes running down his throat; IV cords attached to ports on his arms, chest, and abdomen; pouches filled with fluids of indescribable colors; monitors beeping and scanning. This is death. But as Dad had put it just a few weeks earlier: “It is what it is.” He was absolutely right, but at the time it seemed much more than that.
I had the kind of father that seemed almost invincible, a paragon of integrity. Throughout my life I had heard stories that are almost unimaginable in the present day. By himself around thirty years ago he kept an angry racist mob in Wrightsville, Ga., from entering a high school to commit violence, he was the principal and coach of the legendary Herschel Walker, and he pulled some of the best pranks you’ll ever hear of. I know it seems romanticized, but it’s real life. Aside from all this, Dad was very devoted to my brother and me, and he wasn’t insecure about showing affection like a lot of males are.
So you can see it was excruciatingly hard to see him in that ICU room. A life once so rich and imaginative had turned on a dime. I say that because it appeared he was going to pull through and be able to leave the hospital right before I left for Athens. But the truth always sets in. After three years of aggressive chemotherapy the cancer had finally become resistant to treatment. According to the doctors, he had also developed a blood infection, which would require dialysis if it was in our interest to keep him alive for a short while longer.
My mom, my brother and I met privately to decide whether to proceed with the dialysis or let nature take its course. Whatever it was, it was to be unanimous. Independently, we each knew what had to be done, because we did not wish more suffering on Dad. Dialysis was just too much to put him through, so we had the nurses taper the drugs and remove the ventilator. Truthfully, it was the single hardest decision I have ever made, but it was a decision we could each be at peace with. Even though he was irresponsive, we had our last words with him and then gave the signal to the nurses. I watched as the lines on his monitor flattened and the numbers dwindled to zero.
It was a hell of a thing to watch a human being die, especially my own father, but my worst fears were alleviated. First and foremost, he wasn’t suffering anymore, and second, he fought stubbornly to the end. He left because he had to – “It is what it is.” To me, I saw this as a brilliant display of the human spirit; a triumph over what I had feared nearly the entire summer.
***
We didn’t get to catch another Gwinnett Braves game together, which sucks a big one, but maybe someday when I feel I can handle it, I’ll go back to Coolray Field and watch some baseball for him. And when I’m there, I’ll think about the summer when I spent nights in that stuffy hospital room with Dad. I’ll remember how he stayed true to his life in this world – the only world.
What does this say to you? I have no clue, but here’s what it says to me: Don’t divorce yourself from reality. All the things that are commonly held to be impossible without God – existence, coexistence, truth, meaning, purpose, morality, virtue, honesty, goodness, happiness, hope, love, benevolence, beauty, imagination, excellence, peace, harmony, order, justice, freedom, rights – are available to me here and now without God. Many choose to postpone Heaven to an ethereal nothingness, but I’ll have it now – here – and when I do leave, I won’t have the capacity to care that I’ve left. I’m creating it with a proper, objective relationship to reality, and I’m happier for it.
“Leave it on the field.” -- David Charles Adams (1943 – 2010)
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