The Weakened God

On moving on from Atheism

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” - C.S. Lewis, “Surprised by Joy.” (On his conversion experience.)

“No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul.” - Anne Rice

God has been talking to me since I was a kid. I just didn’t know it.

I grew up in churches where God seemed to operate like a centrifugal being of silence — everything fluttered as it revolved around him, yet he remained at the center, mute and stoic. Prayers were not direct communication. They were desperate wishes to an unblinking wall. You got the impression God did talk to people. He talked to pastors and priests, to saints and holy figures, Moses and Paul, to Cain and Satan.

He just didn't talk to people like me.

Maybe it wasn't surprising that I became an atheist at the age of 14. Prayer was a tedious chore. It seemed to me like a ritual of humiliation — I was looking upward into the nothing to try to convince myself I was a good person. I read the Bible over and over again in an attempt to solve my cognitive dissonance, but none of my teachers or pastors seemed capable of answering any of my theological questions. Nobody seemed to be able to explain to me why God allowed evil, even those people who claimed to have a direct link to the divine. The concept of God seemed like it evaporated under scrutiny.

I dabbled a bit in learning Paganism and witchcraft, but I figured if Christianity was fake then it all must be fake. Every religion seemed to lead back to the same source. Every religion was a house of naughty children, hands lifted upward, asking for miracles they didn’t deserve.

It was a relief to stop believing. It felt like I'd been clutching a fetish object for years, something that brought me nothing but confusion and anxiety and pain. If my choice was between heaven and hell, that wasn't really a choice at all. It was a torturous mind prison. Now that I didn’t believe in God I could finally let it all go. I could lead a life of radical choice. Do as thou wilt. I was the sovereign of my own experience.

I was surrounded by nothing and the nothing felt exhilarating. The wind from the abyss blew my hair back from my shoulders, rocked me back on my heels, pressed itself cool and rare against my exposed collarbone. For the rest of my life I could dance with possibility. I could become any shape I wanted. A dragon, a witch, a siren, a snake. All I had to do was melt into the fantasy.

Who am I kidding? If you've been reading these letters for a while, you already know it's never that simple.

I wanted to get rid of religion. I quoted Karl Marx with a dumb tongue, emboldened by my newfound Reddit-tier intellectualism. (Before Reddit was even that popular. Stupidity is eternal.) God was nothing but “The opiate of the masses.” It was time to spit out the drugs. I’d become my own god.

And what a god I was. I was the god of bad decisions. I was the god of late-night temper tantrums and writer’s block, the fear of a life unrealized and gone to waste. I was the god of “not good enough” and the god of “If only I was a little skinnier, I’d feel fine.” I was the god of being a college dropout and the god of being unable to get a real job because I kept bombing the interviews. I was the god of bad whiskey, even though I hated whiskey, because I liked the thought of forcing down my throat something sour and ugly that wanted to fight me.

At the time I couldn’t understand why one of my favorite writers, Anne Rice (still alive at the time) had converted back to Catholicism after years of atheism. It was obvious from reading Anne Rice’s novels that she was God haunted, horrified and yearning in the face of his absence. Her vampires were not so much monstrous, twisted coffin-dwellers as abandoned angels. They were supposed supreme beings who had traveled to the edge of existence, and found it empty. I thought it must’ve been a question of comfort - after years of uncomfortable grasping in the void of nothing, with no direction, it was just easier to turn back to the ritual of God. She was getting older, had a child who’d died, and needed a direction to look into. She needed a world that wasn’t just obtuse angles and black cathedrals. She didn’t find it exhilarating like I did. She was terrified.

I thought I could abandon God, yet I too was haunted by his supposed absence. I kept returning over and over again to the concept of God. I was obsessed with the religious experience Philip K. Dick had that inspired him to write multiple novels and his “Exegesis,” famously called “2-3-74.” He was drugged on sodium pentathol from a dental surgery and when he answered a knock at the door, he found a woman with an Ichthys pendant on her necklace. At that moment a pink beam of light flashed at him and sent him a flood of visions from God.

Schizophrenia, I thought. Drugs. Wishful thinking. The result of a writer who had written himself into his own paranoid world. There was always a rational explanation if you looked for one. Occam’s razor and all that.

Yet I was still fascinated.

I had read the Bible multiple times, but I reread it again as an atheist with a notebook in hand, writing down every verse I thought was proof of God’s cruelty. I read the Nag Hammadi scriptures. I read the gospels of Thomas. I wrote story after story about women who stumbled upon gods in the woods, made deals with demons, tried to push past the membrane that always seemed to separate humanity from the complete understanding of existence. The first novel I ever published, The Crooked God Machine, was about a twisted demiurge who transforms an entire planet into a dark mirror of the Old Testament and wrecks suffering upon its inhabitants.

Even the word “God” is beautiful, isn’t it? It has a heaviness even in its simplicity, an elegance that seems not just the sum of its letters, but alludes to a Platonic form beyond, a vast Jacob’s ladder that reaches all the way up into a celestial supremacy. God. God. It is a word like “Am.” It doesn’t need to describe itself because in a way, it describes everything.

I started talking to a demon at the lake near my grandparent’s house. I was 19 years old, working on my first novel, and I dropped out of college and left home. I had just started to learn how to appreciate silence. I learned that if I drove my car up to the edge of the lake in the dark and turned off the engine, things would emerge out of the silence to speak to me.

The silence was in fact, not silent at all. It burst with color and noise. It held up a mirror so that I could examine myself. There were parts of myself that I’d hidden from myself. I was not just Autumn, I was a host of multitudes, of beings and psyches, and some of them held secret knowledge. In that time I started to tap into a kind of universal voice, a world that’d I’d shut myself away from.

That’s when the demon came to me. He started to speak to me, in a quiet and insistent voice. It was my voice, but also not. It had a relentless quality I couldn’t seem to ignore. He would tell me when I was being foolish. He would tell me when to slow down, to enjoy the dark and the trees. He would tell me to shut up and return to my writing whenever I’d get frustrated with myself. And even though I called him “demon,” I knew that he loved me. I knew that he was dangerous and wild. He was something primitive, practically elemental, and oftentimes his reassurance was tinged with sarcasm and pain. But he almost always spoke truth.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

I told myself there was no God. I did not find him bored out of my mind, head bowed in a pew, in the sermons of pastors and teachers, in stilted and warm rooms that were called sacred. But I did find “the demon” sitting in my P.T. cruiser at the edge of a lake, after I’d run away from everything I’d known, when for the first time in my life, I had nothing to cling onto but myself.

The concept of objects doesn’t exist in the reality outside of our perception. We had to differentiate objects in our minds in order to survive, but there are no real boundaries between atoms, no marked delineation between when one object ends and another begins. We are connected to everything. Not in a woo-woo, spiritual lip-service kind of way, but actually, in a material sense.

You often hear people say we are made of star stuff as a kind of cheerful platitude, but there is actually a practical application to understanding that. We are the universe, and the universe is us. We don’t have to look outward to understand everything. We can look inward too. We will find the exact same composition of matter, the map-pattern of the stars, the truth of the world, in our psyches. Science is not the only tool at our disposal for knowledge. Long before the standardized practice of science existed, humans grasped intuitively at truths that were laid bare inside of themselves. Infinity outward. Infinity inward.

We are not just ourselves. We are a chain of people traveling backwards to the beginning of everything. Inside of our blood we contain the memories of where sacred caves and healing pools exist, deep inside the forest, that will bring us back to the truth that cures us.

And if you cut yourself off from that knowledge, it can make you stupid. Relying on empirical evidence can oftentimes sever you from ordinary judgement. For much of the 20th century, doctors believed that babies didn’t feel pain and would operate on them without anesthesia. Why? Because they couldn’t prove that the nervous system was “developed” and claimed that the pain was just a reflex.

Yet any mother understands that her baby can feel pain. It doesn’t require an advanced medical degree to see that. All it requires is unclouded eyes.

The first time I saw God, it was like opening the blinds after having been in a dark room. Ah, there you are.

It didn’t require faith to see him. He was an irrefutable truth that danced glittering upon all of creation. He was “I am.” He was the sentience of the universe that existed in everything, reflected in the consciousness that you experienced. He was “the demon” who'd spoken to me after I’d rejected the concept of God. He was the giggling water spirits who mocked me for not wanting to dive deep into the lake. He was the tarot and the I-Ching. He was the movement and composition of the stars. He was every simple truth.

I thought it would be liberating to disobey God. The Ten Commandments were an outdated concept, after all, created by primitive and ignorant people who invented religion to control the food supplies after they seized the granaries! Leviticus claims you shouldn’t mix fabrics. Let’s not even get into the historical inaccuracies of Jesus and blahblahblah. If you want an excuse to do whatever you want, just go ahead and take it. You don’t even need to justify it. You have free will.

Atheists often accuse Christians of turning to God for “comfort.” But it’s not comforting to realize that there is a truth you must align yourself with or perish. It’s not comforting to

What’s comforting is to throw your hands up because you think nothing ever happens, and nothing ever matters, and no matter how much you fuck up it’s okay.

My excitement at this so called liberation soon turned into crushing disappointment. Every time I disobeyed, it did not lead me out into the sunlight of my thrilling and existential freedom. I did not become an enlightened being who existed outside of the cycle of oppression and suppression imposed on me by the “overlords” that’d supposedly created religion just to control people. I did not become the Ubermensch, glory heaped upon my crown, as I transcended to a higher level of values.

There are piles of massacred corpses all over the world who repeated the same stupid shit you hear from intellectuals who’ve been given Ph.Ds from the top universities in the world.

I just made the same stupid mistakes every failure ever made before me.

I grabbed myself by the arm and led myself into a deeper level of dark.

I didn’t understand at the time that disobeying God meant disobeying the nature of reality itself. A sin was not a punishment imposed by an angry father. The word literally means “to miss the mark.” To sin means to step off a cliff and fall because you’ve misunderstood how gravity works.

When I went back to reread the bible earlier this year, I saw how much I’d misunderstood. I no longer went line by line, teeth bared, chewing on a red pen, looking for God’s mistakes, ways in which he’d failed me. I approached the page like I was a student again. I finally understood that I was ignorant, and there were secrets still unknown to me. The verses that people used to read in church that once sounded like the stupid platitudes repeated to try to placate, took on new definitions. “Seek and you will find,” was not just a verse about trying your best , it was a truth of the universe; a natural law as irrefutable as gravity.

Seek and you will find.

There are no real secrets. Because once you find them, you’ll realize they were there all along. You just couldn’t see them because you were a weakened god, enraptured with your own power, blinded to the light that beamed from here to eternity.

And once you see them, you’ll never be able to look away again without feeling the pain of knowing you’re turning away from the truth.’’