Telling someone how I am is getting easier. Telling someone who I am is getting harder. In this cultural moment when many are realizing identity is a powerful construct - one that carries very-real-world consequences - the pressure to identify as something, anything, can be overwhelming. Here’s a list of people I am or boxes I check: Male, Straight, Democrat, Republican, Moderate, Radical, Bald, Hairy, 1st generation, 2nd generation (depending on who you ask), Artist, Entrepreneur (depending on who you ask), Asian American, Brown, POC, BIPOC, Iranian American, Persian, White (looking at you census), Black (looking at you facebook), Optimist, Cynic, Mindful, Spiritual, Agnostic, and most recently: An Atheist. Who prays.
In the arms race for the categorization of Arya Shahi, there’s just too many contenders. And I know I’m not the only person feeling this way. Anyone who’s experienced any degree of inner turmoil has come to understand something about identity: there are two kinds. The identity that is expected of you, and the identity you choose for yourself. The latter often being a reaction to the former. But more on that later.
Like many other non-believers, you can still find me praying in a very specific place (on an airplane) at a very specific time (before take-off and landing). That magical moment before I (a human being with no wings, or even a parachute) enter the air aboard a 130,000 pound metal bird to partake in the miracle of human flight. I can think of no act taken more regularly that breaks my mind so easily. Sure, science gave us medicine, miracle whip, cell phones, and the internet - but I get those. Flying through the air at 600mph at 35,000ft and diving back down to the earth unscathed just doesn’t feel like it should be possible. And I know, I know, flying is safe, the science is sound, and “if you’re so scared of flying you should totally just take a flying lesson!” But it’s still… different. No one needs miracle whip lessons to ease their fear of partaking in the miracle of whip. So when the time comes: I buckle my seatbelt. I close my eyes. And I hope I don’t die. Every time.
I do more than hope. I pray. I promise to be better. To use my time on earth for good. To call my parents more. My prayers are an offering of humility and humanity. An offering of my whole self to…. something. God? No. Because I don’t believe anyone is listening.
Now to explain why I’m an atheist. But first, let me make clear: I think there’s a lot of good in religion. Good ideas. Good people. I’m not trying to convert you, and I expect the same of my friends and family who are believers. I follow the golden rule, shared by all religions: treat others as you wish to be treated. It’s one of the best tenets of the pious. But I don’t believe in the foundational narrative of religion. There is no willful intelligent creator. It’s simply an old theory, a great story, that was invented to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. But this “god of the gaps” gets smaller each passing century. We understand more about ourselves, the world around us, and how we got here each year. The deeply-religious adopt these new scientific discoveries into their worldview, claiming their creator intended them all along. But new dinosaurs are discovered, more miracles are disproven, and big questions are answered, demonstrably, with rigorous and repeatable research.
And yet, the Unknown remains at large. I wrestle with it. Everyone does. But when I’m looking for big answers, the leap to “God did it” is more fantastical, more dangerous, than the other option: “we don’t know yet”. It’s okay not to know. The implication of “we don’t know yet” is that we will someday. The implication of “God did it” is convoluted - and necessitates alternate planes of existence populated by beings who personify subjective standards of good and evil. Places and beings that beg the question…. well then where did they all come from? If God can think, who made God? Does God have parents? Which parent does God love more? When God was a kid, did he feel the palpable irony at the chinese restaurant packed with jews on christmas eve eating dinner with his baha’i mother and muslim father? Because I sure did.
When it comes to creating religions, or writing origin stories, we can’t stop won’t stop. The simulation theory is a contemporary retelling of an old classic that scratches the same itch. The notion that we’re all living in a computer program is the intelligent design reboot. We just haven’t indoctrinated millions of children into believing it yet.
And I get it. I empathize. We are inherently small in the vast chaos of the universe. Many people are afraid of that smallness, of potential meaninglessness. It is hard to accept “it was all random” and easy to understand “it was all meant to be”. But there is no proof. And once you accept “it was random”, it becomes a deeply powerful motivator. To be good. To be enamoured with our short time here. To take in the view. To be inspired by other people, all in the same boat with you and full of wonder. A wonder so brilliant it becomes creativity. A creativity so powerful that it creates gods in our own image, not the other way around.
Human beings build systems. We recognize patterns. We weave them together. Some of these systems are simple, but others are awe-inspiringly complex. We don’t often bother to learn how those complex systems work, instead we take them for granted. But the realization of how something works is life-changing. The discovery of the mechanisms that allow those systems to function can change your perception of the world, and therefore, your reality. For instance, if I did take the time to learn about aeronautical engineering and the history of human flight, chances are high that over time, through repeated exposure, my fear of flying would diminish. We are used to re-examining and observing invisible forces in the world of science and math. But rarely do we extend that kind of critical thinking and investigation into our emotional lives, into our sacred thinking. If we did, we might be able to demystify the holy.
Allow me just one pandemic anecdote: I am a music person. I’m in awe of musicians. I love them so much that I pretend to be one professionally. Over the course of my life, I’ve owned dozens of musical instruments and put in the least amount of effort required to play them in exchange for money and even praise. I learned how to play these instruments as quickly as I could. From books. From YouTube. From private instructors. But I was only interested in learning the parts that moved me and skipped over the parts that didn’t (the technique). If I didn’t need it to play a specific song I was working on, then I didn’t need it at all. I learned and worked this way because music was mystical. Great musicians could create music that made me feel transcendent emotion. Beyond joy. Beyond anger. Beyond sadness. I thought of musicians not as masters of a craft but as vessels for a divine. And then coronavirus hit and I found myself in Tucson, Arizona, thousands of miles away from my bandmates, with thousands of hours to waste, and a spare piano in the living room. For about an hour each day, I study music theory. Out of sheer boredom and the privilege of time, I am getting to know the scales, chords, and concepts I skipped over when I was running full speed ahead towards the “divine”. I can now tell you why a suspended chord begs to be resolved, or why a composer may not want to play the Eb until the perfect moment in the song to establish the key of Bb. I am beginning to understand how the holy is made. And yet, my appreciation for it hasn’t diminished. I don’t think of music as any less worthy of my attention or love. If anything, in understanding complex musical systems, I am more at peace with myself.
If this atheist who prays knows one thing for certain it’s this: we must learn how to hold two truths at once. Our natural inclination is to create opposition between two incongruous things. As I mentioned earlier, the identity we create for ourselves is a reaction to the identity expected of us. But more specifically, it’s often a rebuttal of that earlier identity, not an acceptance or an evolution of it. We want to see, hear, feel, and live in a world of binaries. Perhaps it’s an evolution of our ancestral survival instincts - the framework of the ultimate binary - life or death. We crave “on” or “off”. “Yes” or “no”. “This” or “that”. But reality is not built on absolutes. It’s built upon our cultural and biological perception of the world around us. And to function, to care, to love, to exist in that world is to hope. Faith is an extension of that hope. Religion is an extension of that faith. No single religion, of the thousands we’ve concocted, is true - but they are all real. Religion is as real as joy or anger, because it serves as an emotional connection, a bridge, to the unknown.
The god narrative flourishes for the same reason fake news or conspiracy theories flourish: relentless demand for the oversimplification of the complex. We want, so badly, to know “why” instead of “how”. But what if the “how” is the “why”? What if our observations, hypotheses, trials, tribulations, and conclusions reveal new versions of ourselves in the future? What if we progress towards understanding until we eventually become perfect, like the god we wish lived in the sky? Is that what we’re so afraid of? Blasphemy?
And so I close my eyes and pray in the moments before my potential death. I reflect on my life. I never managed to look into the eyes of god, but I did look into the eyes of men, women, children, friends, lovers, liars, buddhists, christians, atheists, jews, baha’is, hindus, and muslims. I stared into their eyes, longer than was comfortable, until I could see a faint reflection of myself. I make an offering, not to god, but to that which connects us all. I offer myself to the unknown and to the billions of souls flying through it with me. I pray that I have helped them understand some small mystery in their existence as much as they have helped me understand the great mystery of my own.
Illustrations by Jessie Mahon