Thank the devil for atheists

A new acquaintance has got me thinking.  Actually, I’m wondering if that’s the main reason I need new acquaintances.  Perhaps the real reason my life seems so stagnant is the lack of interesting people to pull me in new directions. 

But I digress.  This particular one is quite vocal about his atheism.  He is, as you’d expect, scathing of the assorted idiocies of organised religion, and on that we’ve had a great old time agreeing with each other.  It got me thinking that it’ll be a pity when it ends, after he finds out I’m not actually an atheist.  I have, after all, long considered myself a pantheist.  Which is to say someone who pisses off atheists and believers alike by saying they’re both right and both wrong, and will they please shut up already and let us get some sleep. 

So I asked myself why it is I believe in a god anyway.  It’s been a long time since I examined my beliefs.  And pantheism after all is such a watery version of theism, is it necessary at all?  Which of my collection of beliefs are necessary, and which are just faded souvenirs of my travels? 

I think my belief in reincarnation is necessary.  After all, it underlies my ethics and my explanations of personality.  Reincarnation of course necessitates a belief that mind is independent of matter.  So, no materialism or determinism obviously.  I’ve also considered myself an idealist – that is, one who considers mind or the subjective as primary.  That matter is an expression or a form of mind, rather than, for instance, the other way around. 

But then I started wondering, why?  I mean, it seems silly to suggest that mind springs out of matter.  But to suggest that matter springs out of mind, how is that any less silly?  I mean, what evidence do I have for that?  Of course, that’s what all the emanationist traditions such as Hinduism teach, but hey, I’m not a Hindu.  Couldn’t it just as easily be that both mind and matter, both subject and object, spring from something else again?  Don’t think it’s a new idea.  It’s the answer Robert M. Pirsig arrived at in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

I guess it’s all a question of origin really.  If mind comes from matter, then the question is, where did the big bang come from?  If matter comes from mind, the question is, what mind?  And you usually end up with an answer of some kind of super-mind, in other words, god.  But what if you say they both came from a third thing?  Where does the origin question take you then?  Is the answer still something that would be characterised as god, or a god, or has it gotten so theoretical that no-one could bothered asking where it came from? 

Oh, and another thing.  If matter begins with a big bang and ends in a big crunch, and mind begins with individuation and ends with merging, how are the two so different?  How is it that we call the thing from which consciousness theoretically comes from and ends in, God, while what matter comes from and ends in is merely a question asked by the smart-arse up the back of the class, who felt cheated when the textbook didn’t bother to even pose the question? 

It’s easy to say I’m a pantheist and pretend that that solves everything, but that only makes a vague statement about where consciousness is, nothing about it’s origin or destination, it’s evolution or movement.  Not unless you stick some kind of consciousness-central in the picture.  If you do, I’m not sure it’s necessarily "my friend in the sky", but it’s not exactly animism either. 

What the hell’s a god anyway?  And what’s not?  I think I’ve confused myself.