An atheist's Apologia

Recently I have made several sharp comments towards believers and towards  religious belief in general. This led me to thinking about my spiritual path towards the truth of atheism, and how this informs my responses to Christian ist comments here. Are you a little annoyed? Well, I threw in the language about the spiritual path just to alert you that this may be a prickly diary for some of you. Did you ever think how it might annoy an atheist, or a Buddhist for that matter, to hear a Christian describe his "spiiritual path" to the one truth. As an aside, let me mention a famous spiritual voyager of the 1980's---M. Scott Peck. His book, "A Road Less Travelled", was on the NYT paperback bestseller list for over 600 weeks, as I recall. Hailed as authentic visionary then, he later descended into madness, becoming an extremely conservative Catholic, and claiming that literal demonic possesion was behind the evil acts of countless people.

Spiritual journeys are dangerous. Why so? On the one hand, such a journey must have an interior component, with all the psychic risks that entails.
On the other hand, a search for knowledge of God has such a vague goal. How can you even know if you are making progress? What are the benchmarks? Are there well-known side paths that can lead you astray? As a matter of fact, there is a large literature on this subject, both Christian and non-Christian. Years ago I read a fascinating counter-Reformation meditation manual which talked of many of these risks. I'm not sure of the title---it could have been "Cloud of Unknowing", but may have been something else. This was a long time ago.
In my opinion, speaking strictly as a layman, Buddhism and Hinduism do a much better job descibing the internal spiritual paths, and its specific risks. In my opinion also, this kind of journey into one's self has nothing per se to do with a God; rather, it is the act of mapping one's own psyche, including the place of the mapper himself. Can one reach enlightenment in this fashion? That some self-improvement is possible this way seems undeniable to me.

Am I digressing? Well, the path towards atheism can meander just as the path  towards God. In my late teens, I read some religious literature in a not unusual search for understanding. My background was mainstream Episcopalian, although my father was also associated with a charismatic church more like an Evangelical parish, although it was Episcopalian as well. Thus, I was exposed to the usual dogma, as well as to less common (at the time) practices such as speaking in tongues. I certainly can't deny that there was  a yearning to find something greater than what I conceived of as the purely physical universe.

Given my background, and given a spiritual curiosity, how did I end up an atheist? To answer that question, let me wander again, this time to the present day. My sister is a recently ordained priest, and in a recent visit with her family, I went to church one sunday. I spent some time perusing the prayer book. What struck me for the first time was how the language of prayers is very alchemical at its core. There are very specific bargains struck with god, to get specific (spiritual) results by saying certain formulas. I had never noticed this before: the Christian doctrine had seemed like one vast but simple structure, with a couple of propositions about God being all you needed in order to understand it. Far from that is the mainstream church! But even at the core, the language of resurrection and the washing away of sin through sacrifice, what do we have but magical thinking which would be at place 10,000 years ago: make a symbolic act to an unseen god to deal with consequences of a mysterious aspect of the world---in this case, the human condition as a thinking, reflecting being in a natural world which seems oblivious to him; this natural state mistaken as a sign of some unremembered offense against the unseen God. The existential terror at the heart of the Christian eucharist is profound. And the magical thinking, the alchemical bargaining, are no different from astrology.

While I did not have this revelation about religion 20 years ago, what drove me away from the church 20 years ago, and ultimately into the not very loving embrace of atheism, was the love of truth. In today's world,  religion is full of so many statements that are simply, obviously not true; so many rituals which obviously have no effect. I felt it was both dishonest and disrepectful of me to attend church when I shared none of the belief. Have I lost something? Sure. I miss the camaderie of shared belief and joy, and I thought the people in my parish were caring and wonderful, by and large. But how could I stay with them if I did not also believe? I could not.
Have I gained something in return? Oh  yes, more than you can measure.
I think I have stayed true to the deepest heart of religious inquiry, which is to look for the truth about the universe and god. The truth is that god is a fiction, but the universe itself is so magnificent that if you open your eyes to its wonders, you cannot miss the small fiction of a never seen God.
Among the many wonders of the universe are the human mind, the social world, the interior search for true consciousness, art; these remain, inviolate from any new ontology, because they are our experience, not the added layer of interpretation which was religion.

As  a small, last word, a particular reason for my somewhat hostile reaction to religious expression here is that I think religion has so little to offer towards solving the political problems we have today.
Can religion help us fine tune our values? Of course. But can it help with the incredibly technical economic, social and environmental problems of the day? Not so much.

UPDATE I: Was M. Scott Peck a raving lunatic in his later years? Several people objected to my characterization of Peck's "descent into madness" as I called it. My comment was based on my recollection that he came more and more to believe in literal demonic possession, along with exorcism.As I recalled, in  "People of the Lie" Peck was flirting with the idea of demonic possesion as being actual; later, I read he strongly  backed the idea.  Check out this interview and judge for yourself:
http://www.beliefnet.com/...
As far as I'm concerned, the man's statements in later years on this subject are an embarrasment to any rational person, and certainly more embarrasing to the pscyhiatrists than Harvard pyschology professor John Mack's relatively harmless delusions about UFOs. Based on the browsing I did today, I stand by my earlier characterization of Peck losing his mind. I think he was a textbook example of the dangers of the so-called spiritual search. Whatever your opinion about the possible validity of the answers one might get, I think it's undeniable that the risk of filling your head with rubbish or delusion is quite high when you go searching for tangible evidence of the divine in your life.

UPDATE II: Per my last update, just reflect on the sad case of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross as well. I really admire her for the early, courageous attempt to make a rational inquiry into the dying experience. In later years, however, I understand that she delved into the occult, attending seances and otherwise trying to contact the dead. Her case I do not know as well as Peck's, but I'm sympathetic to her, as opposed to Peck, whom  I found to be a pompous, preening, arrogant fool ,to judge from his writing. If you know and loathe the know-it-all character of the pyschiatrist George Huang on Law and Order SVU as much as I do, you'll get how I feel about Peck.