“Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
- Bertrand Russell in “Why I am Not a Christian”
Anyone who spends even a short amount of time looking into the history of philosophical thought will quickly realize how much philosophy revolves around the concept of the Good Life. What is it? How can a human find it? Is there a way to formalize a prescription for learning how to live a good life so that all humans can potentially attain it? These are some of the main questions that have propelled philosophers over millennia. While we have not found one system that will fit everyone, there are many ideas put forward by multiple philosophers and religious icons that will ring true with different groups of people based on their personal tastes.
While I agree in some ways with a variety of philosophers on the topic, in particular the sweetheart above, in my own experience, I have found that the Good Life is a concept best described by what it is not rather than what it is. Some days I need to enjoy nature, others I need pointless play, and others hard work on art projects. Trying to use just one of these as a definition of the Good Life would exclude the others, which would be unacceptable. What I never need, however, is whatever causes me to feel anxiety, malice, hatred, a desire to control others, or greed. More than anything, I do not want to feel like I am a helpless, powerless critter that requires rescuing. I desire freedom and self-sufficiency, and to help people find these for themselves, too. This is the number one reason I am not a Christian and why I believe that Christianity is one of those things that can be placed into the box that holds all the other things that the Good Life is not. To further explain the reasons behind my distaste for Christianity, allow me to retell a short story from my past.
Seven years ago, at my sister-in-law’s wedding, I had a short interaction with some family members. While sitting with my wife’s cousins, who are devout Christians that are painfully aware of my disbelief, one of them decided, no doubt propelled by a few bottles of liquid courage, to start questioning me about my atheism. It was all the usual, predictable discourse that happens when I step into these conversations: so how do you explain creation? Where do morals come from? To which I respond… I can’t, and people make them up. I love how flat these responses land on believers; they expect a raging atheist with citations and receive nothing more than a clueless idiot. Honestly, when confronted by believers, throwing out “I dunno” is all I really do anymore. The conversation then naturally fizzles out, and we can move on to more interesting subjects, human stuff about adventures and kids and hobbies, things we can both understand and relate to.
On this occasion, though, things went a little bit differently. I got a NEW QUESTION. The question: but Bryan… do you feel saved? Egad! Do I feel saved? I had no idea, and I am sure they relished how I wore it on my dumbfounded face. My response must have been terrible, although I do not remember what it was. Inside my brain, things were going nuts, and my first reaction was to think from what? But of course, I knew exactly what I was supposed to feel saved from. Satan. Hell. Eternal punishment that can only be avoided by promising Jesus Christ that I would have faith that his words were the truth no matter how immoral or downright idiotic they were. Like a time machine, this question transported me back to when I believed in such things, and I relived the terror that tortured poor ten-year-old Bryan when grown adults told him to repent or die. It had been so long since I thought about this shit seriously, since I decided I didn’t need saving. So long that I had started the path to recovery from the child abuse incurred from a Christian upbringing and started to understand what the Good Life was. New Bryan was caught off guard, and old Bryan was awakened and felt whatever the opposite of nostalgia is, recognizing the initial new question for what it was: just another attempt to scare me into submission.
Christianity teaches us that life is just a bad movie to get through and that we have no control over whether it will be our dad or a serial killer picking us up outside the theater when it’s over. Actually, we do have a teeny tiny little slice of control: choosing to fawn over dad, assure him over and over that he is the only thing that matters to us, doing every dumb thing he tells us to do, never questioning a word from him or his creepy group of friends. Dad controls all the rest, including the killer, who just so happens to be his estranged friend that oddly still takes orders from him. Dad does not mind sending this monster to the theater to snatch us up if we falter in our endless groveling. This is the message of the Bible, the Good Word: either love dad or his buddy will kill you. Dad is our savior because if we are obedient little children, he will choose not to destroy us.
To be honest, I do feel saved. Now that I have thought about it, I feel saved from dad. He robbed me of my agency, made me believe that I was born disgusting into an evil world, and only by his grace can I be redeemed into something worthy of escaping his eternal punishment. Free of him, I am free to live for today and seek the Good Life in this body, the only one I can be sure I will ever have. I believe Simone de Beauvoir was correct when she said the kinds of freedoms we should seek are those that increase overall freedom to its maximum for all humans, and Christianity is the antithesis of this. A good Christian is a shackled mind charged with running around convincing others cage up their own minds, too. Fuck that shit.
Like I said earlier, I cannot define the Good Life because I think it is different for everyone, even myself from day to day. What I can say, however, is that it surely is not being a Christian, and that is why, as my boy Bertrand, I am not one, either.