the apatheistic consensus

'Heretic' and the death of New Atheism

To be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens onto a space of comprehensive ruin.

Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzche”

Shortly after the events of 9/11 and the beginnings of antagonizing Islamic cultures as the new East by which the West could position itself against—came a moment which will likely be remembered as an anomaly, where a movement called "New Atheism" became immensely popular. People were not only eager to reject a religion they might have been raised with, but supported a new kind of intellectual schema by which all religion was understood to be a type of cultural abscess. It cannot be remedied, it cannot be fixed. It must be removed. This was the perspective shared by these famous, debate-hungry men. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett. Bill Maher. They weren't public intellectuals, really. They were pop culture superstars. (With the exception of Dennett who I do find a genuinely imitable philosopher of mind). God is Not Great and The God Delusion were runaway hits, and Sam Harris has remained a permanent fixture in pop culture with his book and podcast output alike...

But, as many have noted, we have come to the end of the "New Atheist" era as such. Dawkins and Hitchens are no longer acclaimed as intellectual saviors. If they're brought up in casual conversation, it will likely be in a negative light. I'm not totally privy as to why the popular culture has shifted away from this realm of thought, but I do have a few observations in regards to it.

a few theses

(1) The fiery rhetoric of Dawkins was in vogue when popular culture was happy to embrace a vision of the world as a dichotomy between nations/peoples embracing freedom, democracy, and rationalism versus those that were “irrational” and “tribalistic”. The New Atheist moment found traction with conservatives, those who were apathetic about politics, and especially the contra Bush liberals. The perceived global dichotomy among American liberals in the 2000s was the "rational" and the "irrational". But the perceived cultural dichotomy among liberals in the 2020s is the "open-minded" versus the "narrow-minded". Stubbornness and sticking-to-your-guns and calling Muslims idiots was no longer cool in the era of open-minded social progress. And the fiery style of rhetoric transferred from New Atheism to the Alt-Right and the intellectual "dark web" through the fleshly vessel of Jordan Peterson. He bridged the gap between the edgy teens nodding along to Christopher Hitchens to the edgy teens nodding along to Ben Shapiro. I think the question of how to treat issues around immigration played a vital role in this shift. I used to actively watch and enjoy “The Amazing Atheist” (sigh), and if you watch this video you can basically see the atheist-to-alt-right movement happen in real time.¹

(2) Despite the shift away from New Atheist attitudes, in the world of Hollywood and popular fiction, villainizing religious people is still a common trope. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, after all, there are plenty of religious people in real life who operate like villains. I think the moment when Rainn Wilson (who is of the fascinating Bahai faith) openly criticized the villainization of Christian characters in mainstream media, is an emblematic example of shifting attitudes. He was met with widespread criticism from liberals who often use reasoning and rhetoric from the New Atheists, even though the liberal consensus had moved towards embracing Islam as "on their side". In many ways, the rhetorical style of the New Atheists has now been adopted by the religious right, while the anti-religious reasoning of the New Atheists have been adopted by the socially progressive left. Yet both groups are equally likely to turn their backs on the New Atheist movement as anything definitive.

(3) It's also worth noting that the rhetoric of liberals often resembles that of the Evangelical Christians arguing against the New Atheists in the 2000s. This is the precise reason many in the alt-right sector cite for their journey from atheist to conservative.

(4) More on this later, but many of the New Atheists have distanced themselves from their own movement. Sam Harris has slowly embraced a vague Buddhism inspired practice of "mindfulness" and Dawkins has dubbed himself a "cultural Christian".

Heretic (2024)

This brings us to Heretic. This is a fascinating film, technically well-made with excellent acting and suspenseful direction. Like many horror films, it engages with religious themes. Horror films throughout the 20th century took to depicting Christianity qua cosmic goodness by default. Films like The Exorcist feature priests as their protagonists, and the crucifix-as-weapon trope is still common even today. Villains in horror have often been anti-religious, Satanic, or both. Longlegs' reveal that its villain is a Satanist felt underwhelming to me—but perhaps people in 2024 are nostalgic for the Satanic panic and the cults of the 70s in a way that I don't understand. Villains who were religious themselves have indeed become a bit more commonplace in horror, (though let's not forget that Muslims have been consistently demonized in the action genre since the 80s) but I'd like to suggest that the villain of Heretic is himself of the New Atheist ilk. And the fact that he's a villain puts the film itself in a very interesting place, where it accepts the New Atheist argument, rejects its character, and ends up nowhere—not even in a proper nihilism. This narrative dynamic makes this film an interesting demonstration of what I theorize is the post-New Atheist cultural consensus around religion: apatheism.

Heretic is a chatty thriller. Dialogue makes up the majority of the film. Lots of close-ups.² It follows two young Mormon missionaries in their attempt to convert an isolated, intellectual, and depraved Hugh Grant. He's the titular "heretic": Mr. Reed. A bookish anti-religious philosopher who has devised an elaborate scheme to show the young women that religion is nothing but control and manipulation. Much of the film relies on the arguments its making.

Many of the points Grant's character makes are straight out of the playbook of the New Atheists. These kind of arguments were the absolute bread and butter of New Atheist, especially among popularizing, less academic figures like Bill Maher.³

In some ways, it is actually tremendously helpful that Heretic is resurrecting all of these New Atheist arguments and putting them in one place: it shows a common thread of intellectual dishonesty.

hereticus erratas

First, let's hear the argument of Mr. Reed.

First, he talks about Abrahamic religions:

Judaism is the OG monotheistic religion. It's should by a wide margin have the most number of practicing members. And yet it makes up only 0.2% of the world's population. Why is that? Why is the original less popular than the Iterations? Is it any less truly than the others? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are all iterations of the same source material. These sects have many of the same characters and histories albeit presented with different meanings and perspectives.

Then, he offers a theory of messiah myths as all derived from the same fictional story.

Mithras, performed miracles, he was marked by the side of the cross.

Horus, walked on the water, was crucified, had 12 disciples.

Krishna, he was a carpenter, born to a virgin, baptized in a river, rose from the dead, and descended into heaven.

This little gathering depicts twelve gods who were born on December the 25th, all of whom, predate existence of Jesus. I am sorry, but it is impossible to ignore the influence of one narrative upon another, or to ignore the fact that all these stories iterate into... Star Wars, episode 1, the Phantom Menace. Can you imagine thousands of years from now? People accepting Jar Jar as a significant religious figure.

Let me address a few of these anti-religious myths. I'll be treating the arguments that Grant's character makes as genuine points, and while this approach will not evaluate the quality of the fictional film itself, I think it's important to acknowledge just how thinly researched a lot of the arguments in the film are.

First of all, the idea that Judaism is the "original" monotheistic religion. Zoroastrianism is older. This well known. Plus, the popular notion that Judaism is Christianity without the extra stuff added is an insulting simplification. It's much more helpful to conceptualize the history of Abrahamic religion as originating from a shared history. Christianity and Judaism as we know it today (primarily in the Rabbinic form) both emerge in response to the historical moment of Second Temple Judaism. Judaism is just as dynamic and creative as any other religious tradition and has not remained static since its conception, in fact, Judaism developed in relation/response to the development of Christianity. The Talmud, the text second to the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) in rabbinic Judaism, was written in the 5th century AD and contains references to Jesus.⁴ And lest we not forget Islam, which was developing around this same time. Muhammad himself was born in the Ancient Near East to a family, not of Jews or Christians, but of hanifs, which were practitioners of an Abrahamic monotheism that centered on the figure of Abraham (as opposed to Moses or Jesus). While one could try and simplistically reduce this to a single sequence of variations (Judaism -> Christianity -> Islam), this is intellectually dishonest. These major world religions all emerged from a rich, cultural soup. Hellenic culture plays a massive role, and Zoroastrianism had a direct effect on much Abrahamic theology. So the whole concept of Judaism being "the OG" and asking why there are less Jews is a fallacy.⁵

The other myth, one of the most tired and played out new atheist arguments, is that the narrative of Jesus is just one variation of an otherwise identical savior narratives... There were tons of gods like that! the argument claims, they were all born of a virgin on the 25th of December, all died and were resurrected. But these claims seem to always be riddled with inaccuracies. First of all, there are many similarities between Jesus and other figures, both real historical figures and mythological ones... This is partially due to the fascinating way history seems to "rhyme" (though it never repeats) and due to some mysterious way that certain narrative structures recur across cultures, which we can admit is a phenomenon without going full Joseph Campbell. (And quite frankly the way spiritual narratives recur makes me more intrigued about the possibility of spiritual realities, not less. Human cultures never seem to start atheist, and I don't think that's due to a lack of intelligence.)

These are blatant myths about religion. And to be frank, I think they are pretty identical to the content of Bill Maher's Religulous. Watch the below clip, and observe just how similar the structure of the argumentation is to the monologue in Heretic on the savior myth:

It's clear to me that the filmmakers' could have put in a more nuanced and well-researched argument. But they chose not to. Maybe because they saw Religulous a couple decades ago and took it on good faith. Maybe they're not lifting it from Maher, and they got it from even more embarrassingly from where Maher got it from, an infamous conspiracy theory "documentary" called Zeitgeist... or maybe its because they saw memes on Facebook like this:

long term brainrot from Zeitgeist

As far as I understand, all this bullshit spouts from the same source: Peter Joseph. He's only as reputable as Alex Jones.

To tackle some specific claims made in Heretic… First, not even Christians believe Jesus was born on the 25th. That's just the modern Western date to celebrate a holiday that happens to celebrate that occasion. If someone tells you Jesus was born on December 25th, they don't know the first thing about Christianity. Heretic references to three of the most common figures given as examples of what Christianity was allegedly ripping off: Horus, Mithras, and Krishna. These are worth diving into a bit.

Horus

Horus, the Egyptian god of the sky, was he born of a virgin? No. Things aren't so easy in Egyptian mythology. Isis was said to have reconstructed the body parts of her dismembered husband Osiris, but was missing his penis. So she constructed her own and then used magic to bring him back to life. After having sex with Osiris and his fake penis, she got pregnant with Horus. (Aren’t the similarities to Matthew 1:18-25 stunning?!?!)

But did Horus die and come back to life? Not really. The Pharoahs were often understood as incarnations of Horus while they were alive. And then when they died they became Osiris. This dynamic has little to do with the idea of physical resurrection of a specific person and is more about deities supposedly manifesting temporarily in humans.

Mithras

Mithras was less of a robustly understood narrative figure, and much more of an icon of worship. Mithras like Horus was not a historical person, (unlike Jesus or Muhammad, etc). Mithras was a Roman god which seemed to have some degree of influence from the Persian, Zoroastrian god Mitra, although its tough to say much more on that relationship. Recent scholarship has moved away from drawing a line of connection between Mitra and Mithras. There's no main narrative about Mithras that is known to modern scholarship, but there is literature that uses him as a character. He is associated with caves. Many images and sculptures survive depicting Mithras and one of the most traditional images of him is him being born from a rock… Which isn't exactly the same thing as a virgin birth.

Mithras is mainly notable for being revered within a specific spiritual practice of the Mithraic Mysteries. This spiritual practice was highly secretive and contained rituals such as bathing and wine drinking. Now, here we actually see some similarities with Christianity, though not with Jesus per say. But it's important to note that the perception that the Mithraic cult was Roman might give one the impression that it was pre-Christian. But again, a lot of these things were happening around the same time. Mystery Cults were a pretty big deal around the time of early Christianity and the first few centuries AD. Numerous Christian writers accused Mithras practitioners of plagiarism, not of their story but of their rituals.

But don't take my word for it. Let's look at what religious studies scholar, Dr. Andrew Mark Henry, has to say. "We have zero writings from people who worshiped Mithras in the Roman Empire. No narratives, no mythologies or origin stories or theologies. No writings of any kind. Anyone who says otherwise is either mistaken, or they are referring to older Persian texts, which as I said earlier, might not have had any influence at all in the Roman Mithras cult." ⁶

It is probably because of the early Christian polemical writings against this religion that makes the atheists of today compare the two. Ironic indeed.

Krishna

The comparison between Jesus and Krishna adds insult to injury. Krishna was not born of a virgin, and was not even the first child of his parents; was not a carpenter but a "gopi", a cowherd, and was never “baptized” in a river—how could he have been? Baptism was developed out of Jewish ritualistic practices hundreds of years after the writing of the Mahabharata! At least with Mithras and Horus one can speculate out of sheer ignorance, Vaishnavism is well-documented and widely practiced. And deliberate religious illiteracy is not without consequences.

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But, in Heretic's favor, one can always insist that it is not the truthhood of the argumentation, but what the argumentation reveals about the character dynamics that really matters. This is fair enough, though I'd insist that the dialogue in the film is just... really-not-that-great. The film especially overplays its hand when it has one of the closeted Mormon girls, Paxton, towards the end cite a somewhat obscure study from the 2000s which supposedly disproves the efficacy of prayer (in this case, meaning the literal healing of medical ailments). Regardless, the film ends up in a place that is somewhat telling about popular culture's attitudes towards religion.

Over the course of the film, Paxton is supposedly convinced of the fact that religions are merely systems of control. So Paxton largely buys into Heretic's argument, but rejects the method. The parallels to the liberal movement away from New Atheism, here, are strong. Paxton cites this study and then proceeds to call prayer merely a beautiful idea. She says "sometimes its nice to think of someone other than yourself, even if its you", which is by far the most beautiful and poetic line in the film (prayer as self-reflexivity through an Other is a compelling idea) even though it is couched in one of its least believable moments. The audience is left with the impression that the anti-religious people were right but that they went too far and abandoned basic human ideas of decency. Sounds quite a bit like how popular culture treats the likes of Richard Dawkins nowadays.

Zhaungzi

Funny enough, in Heretic there is even a hint of the Harris-style embrace of Eastern spiritual methods... Which is represented even more broadly by the SBNR (spiritual but not religious) camp. Though the Abrahamic religions get a thorough bashing, Eastern religion gets a citation. Specifically, Grant's character references a passage in the Zhuangzi that is actually popular among atheists (the reason for that will become clear in a minute): the parable of the butterfly. But this parable and the popular understanding of it are actually a mistranslation. The translation referenced by Grant's character is the one by Herbert A. Giles, which has erroneously shaped much of the Western understanding of the Taoist belief system:

Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly, there is necessarily a barrier. The transition is called Metempsychosis.

This translation carries much philosophical baggage from the Platonic tradition, particularly in its usage of the pronoun I, a relationship which Taoism scholar and philosopher, Hans-Georg Moeller, draws out with a comparison to the myth of Er in Plato's Republic. The character in both is someone going through a psychic transformation (metempsychosis), and thusly through a process of forgetfulness and remembrance mediated by doubt. The presence of philosophical doubt is key, which is one of the main themes in the history of Western philosophy. In Moeller's words,

After Descartes, Western philosophers are often seen as experts in doubting [...] the tradition of Western philosophy has combined these three motifs—remembrance, the being of the "I", and doubt—in various ways. One could very well write a history of Western philosophy by following the development of these notions. In Giles's translation, Zhuangzi appears to be a paradigmatic Western philosopher in an ancient Chinese robe!⁷

I won't go into it too much here, but the parable was not meant to show the transcendence of the self, but get around the illusion of the self. It is meant to show that "the butterfly is fully the butterfly, and that Zhuang Zhou is fully Zhou".⁸ There is no continuous subject in the poem. There is no I. It shows the "equivalent reality of all experience".⁹ In other words, in Taoism, "everything is real".

Westerners love to bring up Zhuangzi's parable in relation to the so-called "simulation theory", which is (somewhat humorously) in vogue among internet-atheists nowadays. This is precisely the way that it relates to the narrative developments in Heretic. This very Cartesian ideas of doubting what is real and what is fake has back to us in a pseudoscientific cloak.

It's clear that what many intellectuals seek in Eastern religious thought is a way to explore concepts they have otherwise designated as preposterous, such as the world as a creation ("simulation"). With an evocation of Lao Tzu, they can now safely explore concepts of the self, the absolute, and mysterious, emergent qualities in nature without needing to deal with pesky associations with the Christian idea of God. But sadly, this is an intellectual tradition based on ignorance. Traditional Taoism not only talks about God, but a trinity of them.¹⁰ And the Buddhists? They have far more gods than the Abrahamists, not less.¹¹ Though their understanding of the so-called gods is different… and of course they are, because it’s a different religion!

apatheism fills the void

What sort of cultural consensus is implied by a film like this? It may be too presumptuous to claim Heretic has to bear the marks of sort of cultural consensus regarding religion in order to receive the acclaim its received; but I think Heretic can be taken as a sign of the times. If you make a New Atheist your villain, you imply something in its wake. As the old phrase goes, nature abhors a void. Thus, I think Heretic is representative of apatheism. By apatheism, I don't mean agnosticism, which is a perfectly respectable and articulate position. Apatheism is the disengagement with questions of theism and atheism. Apatheism says, "I don't care and neither should you!" As discussed in my previous essay, on talking about religion, this is the attitude that fuels a deliberate embrace of religious illiteracy; it is the refusal to engage with or respect the multitude of religious traditions in the world. This is exactly the trajectory of the aforementioned Bill Maher's thought who identified himself as an apatheist:

Bill Maher, in his recent interview with Piers Morgan, refers to himself as an "apatheist." Meaning: an "apathetic atheist." Maher says, "As for the 'apathy' part, we just don't think about it [viz., 'God' and 'religion']."¹²

After all the viscous debate about history and metaphysics... What should we do? Maher suggests we shrug our shoulders. The default position for the young and hip used to be New Atheism, but now it is apatheism—it is the safe, default option.

It's easier than making a positivist argument in favor of atheism, as great minds like Bertrand Russell have done, which leaves you open to being corrected and critiqued. But you know what can never be truly critiqued? Apathy. And it's hardly a solution to anything, be it politics or religion. One only need to look at voting rates among apathetic youth to see that disengaging is never neutral. You can't be neutral on a moving train, as the phrase goes.

And in many ways, this is even where Richard Dawkins himself ended up. He now identifies as a "cultural Christian". My rather cynical analysis is that this is a way for him to dodge his reputation as a rude guy. Atheist "culture" doesn't have any imperative to be nice, but Christianity does, so now he wants to retcon his image with it. Dawkins' engagement with the religion really only seems to run that deep:

In an LBC interview with Rachel Johnson, he declared himself to be a ‘cultural Christian’, declared Christianity to be a ‘fundamentally decent religion’, and lamented the way in which in London, recently, the city was more decorated with symbols for Ramadan than with those of Easter.¹³

The anti-Muslim bent of the New Atheists is now fully revealed. It used to be that they were merely defenders of the wars in "reaction" to 9/11 (see: Hitchens) but now their biases have fully emerged. They don't like religion, but they like western civilization... Unfortunately, you can't put the cart before the horse.

But ultimately “cultural Christianity” is just another name for nihilism. It provides no real answers to fundamental questions. It provides us no real basis for living. As I've discussed previously Nietzsche (who has very little in common with the New Atheists) insists that Christianity is actually a type of nihilism, that it does not see meaning in our real, lived, immediate experience. Passively accepting Christianity and thinking that a Jesus hat will "save" you, rather than taking seriously concepts such as the metanoia (transformation) of the believer... You will find that you have a lot in common with Richard Dawkins.

And no wonder the villain of Heretic is essentially a Dawkins stand-in… We can no longer stand this type of person—not even Dawkins himself can stand Dawkins—and yet we are still enchanted by the arguments. Because the structure of these particular arguments themselves resemble not just a "rational" argumentation, but conspiracy theory. It's perfectly reasonable, from my view, to hypothesize around what kind of higher intelligence a "fine-tuned universe" could suggest... and it's perfectly reasonable to offer rebuttal to that argument and insist we would need better evidence to assume anything like the existence of beyond-human creative intelligence. But the likes of Dawkins and Maher went on to insist that historians throughout the ages have deliberately deceived us, that Jesus as a historical person was a myth. To argue this, you must assume that religion itself is a conspiracy. And assume they do:

The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. [...] And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.¹⁴

The consensus in popular media seems to find arguments like this agreeable. And yet, they want the person delivering this conclusion to be nice. Mormon nice.

So Heretic ultimately takes the side of a young Mormon girl who has lost her faith. It presumes all religions to be functionally equivalent to Mormonism and worth rejecting.

religiosity as human experience

Where does one go from there? Well, in the film she stumbles outside and sees a butterfly. The framing and score suggest to us a kind of sign-of-God. But then in an evocation of Zhuangzi, the butterfly disappears. Was it really there at all? The apatheistic consensus doesn't tell us that it wasn't a sign of God... It simply says in response: "who cares?" The apatheist reposts the Horus and Mithras meme and they don’t really care if it’s true or not. Who cares?

But every answer we give has its effect. In Lacan's words, every letter finds its destination. If it's not too much of a digression: here's Zizek's interpretation of Lacan's reading of The Purloined Letter,

When I recognize myself as the addressee of the call of the ideological big Other (Nation, Democracy, Party, God, and so forth), when this call ‘arrives at its destination’ in me, I automatically misrecognize that it is this very act of recognition which makes me what I have recognized myself as – I don’t recognize myself in it because I am its addressee, I become its addressee the moment I recognize myself in it. This is the reason why a letter always reaches its addressee: because one becomes its addressee when one is reached.

And this is perhaps the best of understanding the New Atheist movement: it was a type of political party, it was an ideological big Other. The fervent supporters of atheism recognized themselves in the call, even though there was no one calling. And like any organizing world view, it concealed its machinations. New Atheism emerges from specific material conditions (dare I say privilege? 😳) and is rooted in an assumption that the world itself operates as a machine—an assumption that ironically emerged from Christian thought in a very specific region (Europe). Aquinas' clock in the sands seems to have grown into a whole tower, though the ocean has swept it away. The alarms were sounded and the trumpets blared in the 2000s, but no real solidarity between the atheists of the world came about. And how could it? What in common, really, does the atheist worldview of a Dawkinsian have with that of the state paradigm of North Korea? Even the physics of atheism implies a metaphysics. And if we push on atheist materialism enough, we find all sorts of weirdness. Take a look at the recent scholarship around consciousness and its relationship to our understanding of evolution and one is left with the impression that "resolving" metaphysics truly is not as simple as disbelieving Santa Claus. After all, the type of uncritical religion being bashed by atheists is precisely the metaphysics of Santa Claus, it is a simplified, commercialized, and, yes, Westernized adaptation of a profound and deep metaphysics emerging from the geographic East.¹⁵

All the truly interesting questions still go unasked, namely: why does no culture seem to "begin" atheist? Why does it seem like human beings are incapable of operating without a big Other? Why is theism (be it poly or mono) the rule and atheism the exception? To assume the so-called “God-shaped hole” is a biological accident, would be unsatisfactory.

Let me do what apatheism can't, and offer an actual generative perspective. Religion, spirituality, and belief in consciousness is part of being human. And to repress this drive directed towards a higher power is to deny you the full spectrum of human experience. There's a weird thing that happens to many people who believe in a higher power and actually use interfacing with this higher power to live their life, and it is called inner-peace.

Why do we need to conceptualize something other than ourselves to commune with in order to access this inner-peace? I'm not exactly sure, but it really seems to work. Zadie Smith, speaking on David Foster Wallace's notions of spiritual practice, said:

The moment when the ego disappears and you’re able to offer up your love as a gift without expectation of reward. At this moment the gift hangs, like Federer’s brilliant serve, between the one who sends and the one who receives, and reveals itself as belonging to neither. We have almost no words for this experience of giving. The one we do have is hopelessly degraded through misuse. The word is prayer.¹⁶

Beyond all the fife about prophecy and afterlife, this is the real stuff of a fully lived life. Of living life on life's terms, and not insisting reality conform to our will will, and not being disappointed by the fact that the world outside is bigger and more complex than the world inside our head.

Again, here's my beloved DFW on the subject:

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.”¹⁷

Basically, I insist that not caring is not really possible. The apatheistic consensus is an ideology of its own... albeit a hypocritical one. It's materialism without fangs. (At least Marx believed communism was a specter.) It insists that we be kind to one another, though it provides no why, it is hypocritical of any religious account of metaphysics, and yet benefits from them... perhaps most tellingly, it sees the value in meditation but does not insist on the dissolution of the ego. For, if there can be said to be any form of universal wisdom radiating from all major religious traditions, it is this: whatever God is, it's not you.

That means you, Bill Maher.

1. This line from that vide is especially representative: “[Gentrification] is making [neighborhoods] look nicer and fixing the economic slumps created by the high crime and poverty rate in black community. I know, I know, it displaces lower-income residents. But let's see, what would I rather have: a slum filled with thugs who would probably shoot me as soon as look at me, or shops cafes restaurants hotels and apartments? What a tough fucking choice!”

2. I hesitate to call it Bergman-esque, but it sort of is…

3. After all, it’s a lot easier to dispute history than it is to rebuke an argument.

4. See: Jesus in the Talmud by Peter Schäfer

5. One of the mormon girls does push back, saying he hasn't accounted for the Holocaust.

6. Henry, Andrew Mark. “Cult of Mithras Explained”

7. Moeller, Hand-Georg. Daoism Explained. 46.

8. Ibid. 49.

9. Ibid. 47.

10. They are called “The Three Pure Ones”.

11. Henry, Andrew Mark. “Is Buddhism an Atheistic Religion?”

12. Bill Maher's Hypocritical "Apatheism"

13. CARE, "Richard Dawkins, a Christian? The rise of ‘cultural Christianity’ in Britain…"

14. Maher, Bill. Religulous.

15. Let's not forget, in this festive season, that the original, St. Nicholas was a real person and lived in modern day Turkey

16. To Toil and Not to Seek for Rest: Prayer in Infinite Jest

17. Wallace, David Foster. This is Water.