As a spiritual person, I found it quite shocking when my equally spiritual husband showed me an article titled ‘Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority’ which appeared in a website for a US university (University of Minnesota). The article refered to a study of 2,000 households across the US in which interviewees saw atheists as ‘self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good’ and ‘that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common core of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that core has historically been religious’. Atheists were also the group most Americans were ‘least willing to allow their children to marry’ and whom they saw are responsible for most of society’s ‘moral decline’, ‘rampant materialism’ and ‘cultural elitism’.

Hmmm, I wonder how many Atheists these 2000 folks actually know? And which ones do they know? Do they know the sort of atheists who are apalled when ministers of religion appear in newspapers sued for pedophilia? Are they talking about the sort of atheists who man counselling hotlines taking calls from battered spouses and survivors of child abuse and incest within ‘moral’, ‘religious’ homes which taught them never to ‘tell’? Are they talking of atheists who care about global warming more than taking the family to church in the four wheel drive? Are they talking of atheists who march against war and the destruction of rainforests? I’m sure there’s some ‘bad people’ atheists, but theres also some ‘bad people’ religious people too.
As a bestselling author of what are considered highly spiritual works I have to ask whether I’m any more immoral, selfish or materialistic than any religious person I know. Yet the fact is that religious people also often find solace and understanding through my books. I don’t advocate selfishness, immorality or materialism, I advocate humility, individuality, equality, tolerance and putting one’s ‘beingness’ before appearances.

I advocate not striving for some higher place up the heirachy but coming to terms with not comparing oneself unfairly to others, with coming to respect oneself and live in the moment with trust instead of living in a tangled labyrinth of projected fears and worries.

I advocate seeing ourselves in others and finding them within ourselves and that this is where the spirit lives, in our impact on each other and that counts whether we are strangers or shared 10 seconds at a bus stop without realising or whether this is a beloved grandma, that its all equal. That is hardly the discrimination, separatism, social judgement, self-righteous moralism I encounter as endemic in many religions.

I make a spiritual connection with nature in all its forms and forces. I don’t curse natures extremities because I value balance and I know subtlety and passion are two sides of the same coin. I make a spiritual connection with art in life; the pattern, theme, feel, form, movement and music of all things, animate and inanimate.

I know few who love the world so plainly without discrimination. I strove to understand diversity in all its forms and the relativity of all subjective perspectives that spring from the incredible variety of cultures, chemistry patterns, genetic inheritence, patterning, experiences, environments, cultures, strengths, obstacles and opportunities that make every one of us unique and vastly different so that there is no ‘one’ truth, only that which resonates with each of us at a given time. I have seen more harm occur in those who torture themselves with beliefs or in reactively swinging against them, than those who dare to see life as it is, in its pragmatic, logical, aesthetic and, yes, spiritual, simplicity.

I have an information processing difference, called Autism, but there are many on the autistic spectrum who are religious. Many find it easy, even preferable to be given a set of beliefs they are told are THE RIGHT ONES and to live by them. But I have travelled the world and experienced many social classes and cultures, those with all manner of talents and challenges, and I know that the ‘right ones’ in one of these places are not the ‘right ones’ touted in others and hence, the only ‘right one’ is that which we each come to a place of peace with. It may be an organised religion, or it may not.

If I find God, I’ll let you know. As for a moving experience of ‘god-ness’, I have that daily.

When I die I am happy to know my vehicle has worn out, that the nutrition to my brain, the blood sugar and blood oxygen will have stopped reaching my neurons and hence, like flat batteries in a toy, they won’t work anymore. As a result I’ll experience none of the thoughts, feelings or physical activity these neuron firings allow me to experience (sure, I might have a few last sudden spiritual experiences as those neurons thorw up their last sparks).

Once the nutrition to my brain has stagnated and stopped circulating, generating, my sense of ‘I’ will leave me along with all capacity for consciousness which is a function of those firing neurons. There will be no ‘I’ to die, for all it is is an experience, a ‘self consciousness’. My vehicle will lose its capacity to animate and become inanimate and decay. It will give up its non-circulating nutrients to the soil and feed weeds and plants.

Yet I will live on in the nostalgia of every stranger on a bus stop I never spoke to, because we pick up far more pre-consciously than we can consciously, and also through the friends who took a piece of the pattern, theme and feel that was once the lived experience of me and who will carry that to a million more strangers, a rock, a plant, the patting of a cat long after my name and face are forgotten and long after people remember or known where the influences have come from; memes outlive genes.

And for me, this is enough. The concept of God is that of an all knowing, all powerful, ever present being. Consciousness continues as long as life does in some form. We are all powerful, even in our choice to give up power or choose not to exercise it. We are all ever present when even the tiniest glimpse of our existence was experienced by something, someone, anything.

I don’t know of God, but I know of ‘god-ness’. As a spiritual atheist, that is certainly enough for me to develop a sense of ‘right and wrong’, to have moral boundaries and see little point in rampant materialism and a poverty in outright selfishness. Luckily for me, I married another spiritual atheist. Seems we deserved each other.

… Donna Williams *)

http://www.donnawilliams.net