Death, Rebirth, and the skeptic (metaphorically speaking)

I've got a full blown case of Halloweenitis now. Damn, but I love this time of year.

Mostly, I love the symbolism of this time of year, and of the whole holiday, especially in its pagan roots. Death! Rebirth! Renewal! A time of transition, of liminality. In-betweenness. Which, really, for humans can be scary stuff. We like things nice and settled, mostly. Only life doesn't quite work that way, does it? We always get hit with those unsettled times. The transition moments, when for a bit it's hard to say whether we are this or that, or maybe something else entirely.

Those transitions, that's the stuff of horror and other scary stories. Maybe why we like it so much. It's not just the meditation on death and all that -- it's the dealing with moments of change and transformation.

Watching the atheist community, you get to see a lot of that. I'm one of those members who never did the religion thing much. But many, of course, did. They had to grapple with something that was a huge part of their life. Let go of it, or maybe even have it torn away. And often enough thrust...nowhere. Into Limbo, an in-betweeny place with no sense of whether there is something to be had on the other side, or if there is even an other side.

I have so much respect for people in that boat, the ones who have made that journey. Because that's some scary shit. It takes courage. And it strikes me that this is what lies at the heart of skepticism -- embracing that liminality. Refusing the easy answers, the certainty, the solid ground, and setting out into the unknown, never knowing for sure if there is another shore. Or, really, not seeking a shore. Just seeking. A journey with no end point. No enlightenment, only the promise of always being enlightened.

And Halloween, Autumn, this whole topsy-turvy time of year, it's a good time to meditate on that. Embrace it. Let the wildness of the season sink in and embrace the change. Knowing that even as things die -- our certainties and beliefs and safe little thoughts -- new things will be born. Scary shit, but fun. Me, I've been embracing it a bit the last week or so. Doing some writing like I haven't been doing for a while, thinking and planning, finding ways to upend my life and kill a few things so that new things can grow.

Fidelity vs. Faith, or Nonbelievers at the holidays

The Guardian has a short article about The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, a book coming out about, well, atheists and Christmas. It served to remind me that soon we will be mired in another dismal round of the ol' War Against Christmas nonsense.

I mean, sure, there's atheists who don't do Christmas. People, after all, vary in their tastes. For some, it just isn't their thing. Maybe they were Christian once and now feel weird about the holiday. Maybe they have family-induced issues that turn them off from the holiday. Maybe -- gadzooks! -- they come from a background where Christmas wasn't really a part.

Whatever. Fact is, though, that most atheists and other nonbelievers continue to celebrate the holiday, often with great gusto. And some Christians choose to get mad, because after all Jesus is the Reason for the Season, and the secularization of Christmas has led to consumerism and selfishness and gay marriage and who knows what other horrors.

Of course, Jesus isn't the Reason for the Season, and never was. As we nonbelievers like to point out, over and over, our words falling on largely deaf ears, Christmas is way older than the particular body of myths that adhered to the Man from Judea. People playing the Evil Secularist Misappropriation of Christmas card might want to pull out those huge planks of wood stuck in their eyes, first. To rework a line from Bono, Christians stole Christmas from the pagans, and we're stealing it back.

But all that, really, misses the point. The point, actually, as to do with something from the last post -- the things people hear when they hear words. Many people hear "atheist" and they don't just hear "person who doesn't believe in a god or gods." They hear, instead, something like "someone who utterly rejects every thing that is good and decent, like kindness and ordered society and puppies."

Comte-Sponville makes, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, a distinction between Faith and Fidelity. Faith is, well, faith -- a blind, unreasoned acceptance of something as being true. Fidelity is a adherence to a tradition or set of traditions -- think of it as membership in a culture. You agree to certain principles, values, you name it. You have fidelity towards them. It isn't faith, because of course it can be a reasoned thing -- heck, the American Revolution was founded on the notion that people could withdraw fidelity, in a fashion, and bestow it on something else. They rejected the King -- they didn't reject society. Their values, and the values of the English back home, were pretty similar. They didn't reject any of that, just one little piece.

For many people, they hear "atheist" and they don't just hear a rejection of Faith -- they hear a rejection of Fidelity to the culture as a whole. The two are conflated, and in most cultures, have long been so in popular thinking. To question God was to question the King. Heck, in ancient cultures they often made it more direct, and made the King a god! But it is conflation -- the two don't have to go hand in hand. Fidelity can exist without Faith (and vis versa -- Comte-Sponville notes that Faith without Fidelity is a very, very scary thing. But that's another post).

Why do so many atheists celebrate Christmas with such gusto and cheer? Or, for

Image via Wikipedia

that matter, celebrate other holidays like, say, Halloween, or Thanksgiving in the U.S.? Because we may not have Faith, but we do have Fidelity. We like our culture. We grew up in it, we're attached to it. Celebrating Christmas is one of the ways that we celebrate that fact. Christmas is part of who we are -- the carols, the food, the pretty lights and the Christmas trees. So we celebrate, and have fun. We may have thrown out the baby Jesus -- except for the carols, many of us love those -- but we haven't thrown out the bath water.