Atoms (a revision, first issued in 2013)

 Partially as a reaction to the victory of proposition 8 in CA (banning gay marriage), emails among people in my email loop began arguing that this indicates that organized religion and its practices allow doctrine to trump fundamental morality.  A few even contended that religions are bereft of morality.  The anti-doctrine folks argue that doctrine seeks to control behavior, especially moral behavior (i.e., ethics).  And the pro-doctrine folks argue that the anti-s basically don’t know religious doctrines.  They both might be right.  Let’s consider a look at both sides.  I’ll get to atoms toward the end.

First, what is church doctrine?  More to the point, why is church doctrine?   Church doctrine among Christian sects (including Roman Catholicism) is grounded in the Sacred or Hebraic Laws of Judaism.   Without the Sacred Laws, no Christianity.  The doctrine of this and those of all other religious doctrines are to sustain the believers in their beliefs, give them a system that makes sense out of the nonsense of being human.  All doctrines offer an explicit or implicit contract (e.g., the Ten Commandments) gathered around articles of faith (Christians have the Apostles’ Creed or simply The Creed). 

One either accepts them or does not.  To accept is to express a desire to have faith (blessed by omnipotence to belong to the believing group and its aspirations); to not accept is not to belong.  The doctrine embodies a code of moral and ethical standards.  To violate any stipulation of the code is to distance oneself from the core group and to create personal doubt.  Questioning and/or doubting initiates the slippery slope.  It’s not so much that one becomes a sinner; it’s that one displays a lack of faith. And, by the way, you can’t believe your way into faith (Unlike most English nouns, the word “faith” has no tansitive capacity—can’t be used in the verb position—it is transformative, not transactional.).  And if you lack faith, you lack moral standing.

So morality or moral standing is very much a part of believing.  The doctrine maintains that we are known by our behavior or moral actions around the issue of free will.  We can choose to follow the contract or not. The Puritans, for example, had a sub-contract called the Covenant of Works, which generally maintained that we express our condition of grace (having faith) as we display it in our good works, contributions to the society of saints (i.e., believers).   The morality of doctrine wants to keep the community together by the adhesion of common belief.  It’s like the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.

Which leads me to what most people call secular humanism.  That too concerns the viability and integrity of the human community through its efforts to declare the correct behaviors in order to make sense and safety out of our divine comedy (yes, the Greeks had a much clearer system for all this—humanity’s efforts form the light entertainment for the gods).  The humanist doctrine is a little scary, though.  In it, we humans are basically alone. We share the idea of free will, but we have only immediate consequences, especially the good consequences.  We have a system of morality, but only we can speak for its legitimacy.  What is moral for us might and often does violate someone else’s moral code.  For example, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” for me might mean my goal is peace and well being, whereas for someone else in the next block it might mean as much greed as he or she can muster by whatever means necessary, which might include some suffering for me and others in the community.  It is, after all, a moral code. In the best of all possible worlds, the humanists believe that humans are basically a good lot, who by and large look out for the welfare of others, and who will benefit by that, because the others will return the favor. This so-called Golden Rule is based on one of the Christian beatitudes, love (or caritas).  But notice that it relies on an article of faith.

This is where the atoms come in.  One of America’s most famous and most derided poets, Walt Whitman, is also perhaps the most religious in both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular humanist tradition.  His detractors see him as a hedonistic primitive, not worthy of any moral consideration whatsoever.  And he was not only homosexual but perhaps also bisexual.  Yet this poet embraced the nobility and extraordinariness of all humans and all things.  He observes the natural world and everything in it as the glorious and exhilarating expression of endless spiritual energy, which is impossible to give a name.  He tells us this up front in his “Song of Myself.”

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,


And what I assume you shall assume,


For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

…

Creeds and schools in abeyance,


Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,


I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,


Nature without check with original energy.”

That is, all physical things are atomistic.  We can know them by what we see and by what we can examine.  But ultimately when we get down to the atom, we are confronted by a mystery.  What is the source of the force and energy that binds its matter?  And because we can’t know, we are better off to hold questions and creeds in “abeyance” and simply exalt in being alive.  That is the Whitman article of faith.   Being or having been human is miracle enough.   And this energy never ends.

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

So much of what we humans are and do is incomprehensible and mysterious.  Libraries and databases bulge with attempts at comprehension and explanation, but ultimately these are unsatisfactory.  And the attempts fall short just when we think they are ready to present the sought after revelation.  So we are left to continue wondering.  Those of us who continue the pursuit continue the search.  Those of us, like the believers and Whitman, are satisfied that all is a mystery that will or will not be revealed when we stop being.