VALIS

One of The Internet's favorite terms of insult is "undergraduate." I've used it myself! It suggests intellectual shallowness, a lack of rigor, hastily drawn conclusions, habitual over-generalization, and philosophical dilettantism. For these and other reasons, I'm tempted to hurl it at Robert Wright for this travesty of an effort at conciliation, and yet to do so would be an insult to actual undergraduates, so many of whom could doubtlessly recognize Wright's room-temperature, bowdlerized Spinoza, made even less interesting, if that is possible, by a dull sprinkling of the weak anthropic principle.

These are tired arguments--I mean: God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. That's circa 1662, y'all. Hell's bells, you can find this sort of thing in Ecclesiastes, which is in the fucking bible! There's no point in pointedly refuting Wright, who apparently believes he's stumbled upon something novel, poor bastard. His argument is that "faith" or "belief" or what have you is infinitely malleable and universally reconcilable to our material understanding of the universe, if only everyone agrees that neither faith nor belief possess any attributes. This is true, as far as it goes; an affectless non-system of not-belief is indeed limitlessly amenable and amendable. But look, I am an atheist, confirmed and absolute in my belief that there is no universal intelligence or intelligences, but I am not so much not a Jew that I didn't say the kaddish for my brother, and my withered affiliations with that religion prompt me to reply abruptly to the sheer . . . presumptuousness of Wright's argument and others like it: a god that is not God is not god.

I feel this very acutely, very personally. It was not difficult for me to leave religion behind. I did so at an early age and have not regretted it. I am no more bereft at loss because I know there is no persistence of self in an afterlife; if anything, I find myself far less dismayed, shocked, and terrified of our inherent mortality than friends and family who do believe--or profess to believe--that a young man like my late brother now resides in some recumbent paradise. I am not troubled by some sense that I lack purpose. And yet I find myself vestigially insulted by the suggestion that there neither is nor is not a god (or gods, I suppose), but, take comfort!, there is some or other kind of bullshit, half-assed, insubstantial, wafting demiurge that is the equivalent of the sum total of natural law and can be revised without end as soon as our descriptive, scientific powers render one more non-aspect of this non-entity transparent and explicable. How dull, boring, and unnecessary.