Oprah, atheists, and metatheists

So Oprah Winfrey recently made a stunning comment to atheist long distance swimmer Diana Nyad. After Nyad had identified herself as an atheist and talked about how her experiences of awe and compassion didn't depend on any belief in gods, Winfrey replied, "Well, I don’t call you an atheist then."

Winfrey got her start in daytime talk here in Baltimore and I remember her as a local news anchor before she got World Famous, so I've always been inclined to cut her extra slack. But man, that was just rude and stupid. It's no different than if someone were to tell me that they didn't take the Bible literally, and I were to reply "Well, I don't call you a Christian then". It would only display my ignorance of what makes someone a Christian.

(Yes, some Christians fight amongst themselves about what constitutes a "real" Christian. But outsiders don't get to participate in that debate -- and most of that debate is rude and stupid and displays ignorance of what makes someone a Christian.)

Now, Nyad was quite happy -- gushing, even -- about her interview by Winfrey. But various net.atheists and advocates of informed and mature discussion have not been so thrilled.

Nyad went on to talk about some new-agey ideas about the "soul" and an afterlife. And response to that on the interwebs has revealed that some folks have a different misconception about atheism than the one Oprah displayed: namely, that an atheist can't believe in these things.

A person can defintely be an atheist yet believe in souls or other supernatural phenomena. "Atheism" means "not theism", "not belief in god(s)"; the term does not mean "philosophical materialism" or "scientific understanding of the world". One can quite well believe in souls and reincarnation without beleiving in a god or gods running the system. There are plenty of Mahayana Buddhists who believe along those lines. (Yes, other Buddhists would say that such a belief is a mistaken interpretation of Buddhist teaching, but the question here is not "who is right" but "what do people believe.")

"Atheist" is a negative descriptor: it says what one is not (a theist), not what one is. If you don't believe in gods, you're an atheist, regardless of what else you do or don't believe. An atheist can believe in souls, UFOs, Bigfoot, telepathic transmissions from Sirius, 9/11 paranoid conspiracy theories, Marxism, Objectivism, platonism, or any other irrational ideas, and still be an atheist, solely on their non-belief in gods.

Which leaves just one question: what is a god?

Now here, perhaps, Winfrey might have been trying -- in a confused way -- to make a valid point. It's true that the most popular notion of a "god" is some sort of person-like "Supreme Being" being existing outside the material universe and yet able to influence it in some way. Even if that idea makes no logical sense -- if something has a material effect, it is ipso facto either material or supervenes on the material -- it is pretty much the way most human beings have conceived of the divine. Given that we have a great deal of our brains devoted to recognizing and dealing with other people, perhaps that's not surprising.

But if we get away from the Judeo-Christian-Muslim idea of the "King of Kings", and the Greco-Roman-Celtic-Norse pantheons of extremely powerful magical persons, is there some useful nugget to be sifted from the ashes of all that god-talk?

Hinduism has its pantheon, true, but it has beyond it the idea of brahman, the ineffable divine ground of being. (How much of this idea might ultimately be attributable to Buddhism, I'll leave it for the scholars and historians to debate.) Taoists say:

There is something formlessly created
Born before Heaven and Earth
So silent! So ethereal!
Independent and changeless
Circulating and ceaseless
It can be regarded as the mother of the world

I do not know its name
Identifying it, I call it "Tao"

Similarly, when we strip away the folk aspects of Shinto, we're left with something more about a feeling, an attitude, than something personifiable and nameable.

Even Christianity speaks of the "Holy Spirit", something less person-like than the "Father" or the "Son".

What if we were to take the idea of the Holy Spirit and strip away the supernatural associations of "spirit", and look for something closer in nature to "the spirit of the law" or "the spirit of play"? What if we considered "spirit" as "that which inspires"? Surely no one will dispute the existence of inspiration as a human experience.

When we speak of the "spiritual" in this sense, we are asking, "What inspires you"? No heavenly patriarchs, no supernaturalism, no dogma needed.

Is this atheism? Is this theism? It seems quite orthogonal to the question of whether some god or gods exist. Those stuck in the personification of spirit might not see how non-believers in the big daddy in the sky can still find inspiration, while those who prefer a non-personified inspiration might wrongly believe those who merely prefer a personified image to be stuck in some sort of dogma.

I recently, finally, got around to reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Besides the famous "monomyth" of the hero's journey, another idea that Campbell discusses is how in most mythologies (mainstream Christianity specifically excepted, to all our detriment), the gods ultimately serve as pointers to something transcendental. As I was considering this idea, a word popped into my head:

Metatheism -- "beyond theism", beyond gods.

It's perhaps an obvious coinage, and a quick web search shows that a few other people have thought of it before, but no uses have really taken off. So I'm going to feel free to use it to refer to this notion of going beyond "theism" or "atheism", to matters of the deepest inspiration that lie beyond questions of dogma, personification, or supernaturalism.

Don't tell me about what you believe, what dogma you subscribe to. Tell me what inspires you. What lifts your heart, makes you feel larger than yourself? That, I'd like to hear -- just so long as you don't insist that I find the same tales and images inspiring myself.

If that idea resonates with you, then regardless of your belief or non-belief in gods, or your identification as theist or atheist, I invite you to adopt the label "metatheist".