The Comfort of Suffering

This quote from an article I was recently reading got me thinking about the role of suffering in apologetics (and this is kind of a recurring theme in the part of my head that I affectionately label “dark & twisty"):  “Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced. Where there is not any replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat” (Christ, cited in “The Cambridge Companion to Atheism” 244) ß(Yes it amuses me to no end that I get to cite Christ from a book on Atheism).

My life has not been a tight little ball of joy over the last couple of years. In fact, it’s been quite messy and quite a lot of it has been quite fucked up, not to put too fine a point on it. A lot of that can be directly linked to the very messy fact that I am a raging alcoholic, even if I am in recovery and quite quite sober. Part of the point of this blog is to write down and to share about the process of (re)learning what it is to be a real person again without running to a fifth of whiskey every time I get uncomfortable with myself, the way that I am feeling, or who I am. And part of that is that I am now dealing with a huge amount of extremely uncomfortable fallout as a result of abusing the privilege and greatness of alcohol (it really can be a fantastic thing, it’s just that I’ve trashed my relationship with alcohol) and some pretty dire and very real life consequences. 

This has not caused me to turn to religion. Having been in the military as well, one thing that absolutely drives me crazy is the argument that there are no atheists in foxholes, which is simply a trite way of assuming that life crises or things like that make people want to revert to religion, even if they had rejected it at some point. That may be a story for another time, so lest I get too distracted, I’ll leave that particular little slice alone.

The point that I’d like to make is that so many apologists turn to that sort of argument as proof that because human beings tend to turn to these psychological supports in times of crisis, there is some kind of ontological reality behind them. I do not take the story of me not reverting to “familiar structures” in my own recent times of life crises and hardship as any sort of evidence or proof of the atheistic worldview. Rather, I take it as a counter-argument to those who hold up the stories of those who do indeed turn to religion for solace in times of trial or need as evidence of the reality and/or benefit of faith. In other words, those stories are no more evidence for the ontological reality of the things behind the symbols and rituals of faith than my story is evidence for their unreality. It is, in fact, non-evidence.

So now I have used far too many words to say that all of that is nothing whatsoever. So what? Can it be said to mean anything at all, all of this is shit that I’m trying to trudge through? In some way, I don’t know that I’d ever actually have become an atheist if it hadn’t been for alcohol. That introduces some very tangled up things, though, that I’m still trying to untangle. It can be a very touchy subject for a lot of people, too, since the temptation (and in many ways, I think AA encourages this, even if unwittingly) is to reject everything that one was as an alcoholic as being inherently evil. However, it’s just not true. But that’s for a different post, I think.

Christ, Carol, cited in "Feminism and Atheism." The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Ed. Michael Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 233-49. Print. <== Look, I know that citation format is not precisely correct, but I didn't feel like poring through MLA to figure it out, so Meh.

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