Atheists and atheists

[Campello]

There are two types of atheists: those who do not believe that God exists and those who strongly believe that God does not exist. The former are reluctant to believe what they have no experience with. The seconds do not admit that there may be something above their experience. The difference is the same as between skepticism and the presumption of omniscience.

Above the distinction of atheists and believers there is the difference, noted by Henri Bergson, between open souls and closed souls. I will explain it my way. As everything we know is circumscribed and limited, we live within a dome of uncertain knowledge surrounded by mystery on all sides. This is not a provisional situation. It is the very structure of reality, the basic law of our existence. But the mystery is not a homogeneous paste. Without being able to decipher it, we know in advance that it extends in two opposite directions: on the one hand, the supreme explanation, the first origin and ultimate reason of all things; on the other, the abysmal darkness of the meaningless, the non-being, the absurd. There is the mystery of light and the mystery of darkness. Both are inaccessible to us: the half-light sphere in which we live buoys between the two oceans of absolute light and absolute darkness.


The immemorial symbolism of the “heavenly” and “infernal” states marks the position of the human being at the center of the universal enigma. This situation — our situation — is one of permanent discomfort. It requires an active, difficult and problematic adaptation from us. Hence the soul’s options: openness to the infinite, the unexpected, the heterogeneous, or the self-hypnotic closure in the enclosure of the known, denying the beyond or proclaiming with dogmatic faith its homogeneity with the known. The first gives rise to the spiritual experiences from which myths, religion and philosophy were born. The second leads to the “prohibition to ask”, as Eric Voegelin called it: the repulsion to transcendence, the proclamation of the omnipotence of socially standardized methods of knowing and explaining.


Religion is an expression of openness, but it is not the only one. The simple sincere admission that there may be something beyond the usual experience is enough to keep the soul alert and alive. It is possible to be an atheist and be open to the spirit. But the militant, doctrinal, uncompromising atheist opts for the peremptory refusal of the mystery, delighting in the hatred of the spirit, in the eagerness to close the door of the unknown to better rule the known world.


Dostoevsky and Nietzsche well saw that, when transcendence was abolished, all that remained was the will to power. The one who forbids looking up makes himself the impassable top of the universe. It is a tragic irony that so many nominal adherents of freedom seek to achieve it through anti-religious militancy. Religions may have become violent and oppressive at times, but anti-religion is totalitarian and murderous from birth. It is no coincidence that the French Revolution killed ten times more people in one year than the Spanish Inquisition in four centuries. Genocide is the natural state of “enlightened” modernity.