Letter to a Young Atheist

It appears you're suffering the very thing that atheists believe themselves immune to, but nonetheless experiences sooner or later: a crisis of faith. For atheism is faith, faith in faithlessness as an existential lodestar, and is therefore susceptible to instability, wobbling, and doubt like any other creed.

My intention is not to preach. I'm simply suggesting that an atheistic worldview saddles one with many burdens, if indeed she sees in it more than simply an excuse for egoism or nihilistic hedonism. But I suspect you seek a principled atheism, and, as a former atheist myself ("to everything there is a season"), that is a vexatious proposition, because stalking the minds of every atheist is a capital-w "Why?" — why do a kindness, when their is no balance sheet, no celestial scorecard on which my deeds, good or bad, are recorded? Recovery from doubt and Weltschmerz must proceed from a close consideration of this question, along with an equally close consideration of its answers' practical implications.

The dizzying and often depressing thing about atheism is that it radically alters one's relationship to time. One has no hereafter to appeal to as the arbiter of life's meaning; one must demand that the here-and-now justify itself, and time's celerity complicates the issue. Destinations tend to color the experience of the journey. If annihilation lies on the horizon, how can it not influence every step toward it?

Nietzsche despised Buddhism because it robbed life of tragedy. We know the reasons why he despised Christianity. All that was left was to embrace the tragedy of temporal existence, to aestheticize the grim tones of fell inevitability. Denying God His existence is only the first step. The universal mechanism continues to run, sweeping one's short existence along with it. When I was an atheist, I found I constantly negotiated a treacherous course between the Scylla and Charybdis of horror and banality, the latter in many ways being more fearsome. The one thing I took consolation in during my godless salad days was that whatever was, was fitting — an appropriate just-so-ness that, as I constantly reminded myself, at that moment couldn't have been otherwise, because it wasn't otherwise; a sort of secular dharma, I guess. It was difficult for me to distinguish it from garden-variety fatalism, and of course a host problems concerning freedom, choice and autonomy came in its wake; but it worked for me at the time. I had to affirm the moment and its attendant event in their particularity, had to say "yes" to them if only because it was healthier than saying "no." This attitude of insistent affirmation, this "yes-saying," I learned from Nietzsche, and it suited me for many years, until events in my life unfolded that made principled, Nietzschean atheism no longer a proper fit. If you're interested, I'll share with you some day what it was that turned me from this path.

Your former roommate's death, I guess I'm saying, has confronted you with a true test of your (non)faith's resiliency. Does the situation, precisely as it is right now, present you with satisfactory answers, without recourse to the past, now the fixed record of history, or the future, an indistinct nebula with the void behind it? Simply now, as you think and feel it? If it does, then you can credit your atheism as the right conviction, and find the very explanation you crave in the contemplation of atheism itself.

Those who would challenge your heretical views are champions of dogma, not faith. For if they were true champions of faith, they'd respect, even encourage, your atheism, because you've found it a suitable thematic of your personal narrative. Anyone who aims to save you is doomed to failure, even without your active resistance, because what that individual doesn't understand is one cannot "saved" one already "saved" — by atheism, in your case.

God died for our sins; the God who died for our sins died — a classic instance of Hegelian double-negation, the only truly negating negation. The space is clear to make your own meaning. Perhaps this second sacrifice is God's greatest gift. The only interpretive material you have, however, is what's before you: the event of your friend's death, her once existing, your current existence, your eventual death. Nothing outside, aside, beside, below, above or in addition to. You must make matter and phenomena explain themselves strictly on and in their own terms.

They appear harsh, those words I just wrote. I don't mean the to be. I just wanted to pass along to you the best articles of my former (non)faith in the hope they comfort you, and, more importantly, fortify your heart and mind against future assaults upon them. I also send my condolences.