God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (46 page)

Religious Daoists are often distinguished from philosophical Daoists by their quest for physical immortality. But both the
Daodejing
and the
Zhuangzi
speak of immortals. The first chapter of the
Zhuangzi
tells of mountain-dwelling immortals overflowing with qi, which endows them not only with long life but also with extraordinary powers. One such holy man, as gentle as a virgin, lives on a faraway mountain, possesses the power of healing, eschews the five grains of settled agricultural communities, and drives flying dragons. The
Zhuangzi
’s next chapter tells of an immortal who cannot be burned by fire or chilled by ice, is unfrightened by the most frightful thunder and lightning, and “moves with the clouds, soars above the sun and the moon and wanders beyond the four seas.”
⁴⁷

Of course, Daoism changes over time. All religions do. It takes on Confucian and Buddhist elements, making peace with Confucian ideals such as filial piety, human-heartedness, and propriety, and adapting Buddhist meditation techniques for its own purposes. All these transformations, however, can be understood as developments inside a religious tradition unafraid of change. In the end, there is far more continuity than discontinuity between earlier and later Daoism. Throughout its long history, from the
Daodejing
to
The Tao of Pooh
, Daoism has seen lifelessness as its problem and flourishing as its goal.

Change and Disappearance

In my home on Cape Cod there is a small piece of paper taped to the refrigerator with the word “Change.” I usually read this sign in the imperative voice—as a command to make life anew. But that isn’t very
wu wei
of me—to take aim at this change and to expend all sorts of energy to make it happen. A more Daoist interpretation would read “Change” as an observation. We live as if things are unchanging—our jobs, our families, our loves, our bodies. But in fact all these things are changing every day.

One of the most famous stories in the
Zhuangzi
is also one of the most vexing. It is set just after the death of Zhuangzi’s wife. When a friend comes by to console him, he finds Zhuangzi beating a tub and singing with joy. Jewish law explicitly prohibits the making of music for thirty days after the death of a spouse, but Zhuangzi’s singing and playing is also an affront to Confucian propriety, and to our own. We don’t mourn much in the modern West. The things we cannot control are shrinking every day, but death remains one of them. So we don’t want to linger over it. Still, for most of us, the few hours that Zhuangzi gave over to grief seem a trifle. When his friend criticized him, Zhuangzi replied coolly that change is unavoidable and death nothing to fear. As the four seasons progress from spring to summer to fall to winter, transformation comes to all things, he said. Why should any of us be exempt from this natural process? So do not be repelled from death or attracted to life, but treat both with equanimity and indifference.
⁴⁸
And do not be afraid to respond to sickness and death and fear itself with laughter and music and play.

For some practitioners, Daoism is about grasping after the brass ring of physical immortality. But at the heart of this tradition is nothing more magical than a life well lived. If we are confused about why such a goal is religious, that is because we are confused about religion, which, as China’s traditions teach us, does not cease to be religious when it refuses to promise a changeless afterlife. After Laozi and Zhuangzi, Daoism doubtless drinks deep of the gods and goddesses, scriptures and sects, priests and prayers we recognize as the stuff of organized religion. In fact, it dives into the deep end. But throughout its long evolution it remains committed first and foremost to vitality—to human flourishing.

For Confucius, to be human is to be social. For Daoists, to be human is to be natural. According to many Confucians, being human is not a birthright but a hard-won accomplishment, and it is accomplished by the labors of society. The Confucian thinker Xunzi (Mencius’s nemesis) regularly resorted to metaphors from the trades—hammering, steaming, and bending—to describe this arduous process of becoming something other than what we once were. Daoists, by contrast, claim that we are born human and are hammered out of our humanity through education. To return to our true nature, we need only to return to the natural rhythms of the Dao, accepting without resistance the flux and flow of everyday life—summer to fall to winter to spring, morning to evening, mourning to birth.

Every year on Labor Day on Cape Cod visitors pull their boats out of the water, pack up their things, and drive away (often in sweatshirts). I have seen this happen almost every year since I was in kindergarten, but it still has the power to upend me. I go to the ocean. I stay until almost everyone has left, chatting with the locals, pretending it is just another sunset. Before I make for home, I hear a childlike voice inside me wishing I could jump through some magical hoop to the middle of June, skipping over the nostalgia of fall and the slush of winter to another Cape Cod summer. But there is another voice, younger and older at the same time, that also speaks, reminding me that things change, that “the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao,” that summer here would not be summer if it did not follow on the bone-chilling bluster of spring.

One of the grand motifs of Daoist stories is disappearance. An immortal known as the Lady of Great Mystery can point at temples and even entire cities and make them disappear. At the end of the biography celebrating her life—a Daoist analog to the hagiographies of Catholic saints—she is said to have ascended, Christlike, to the heavens in broad daylight, never to be seen again.
⁴⁹
Laozi goes by land rather than air, but he, too, wanders off. After depositing his wisdom with the border guard, he enters into the undiscovered country, and, his biographer tells us, “No one knows what became of him.”
⁵⁰

Daoism can be distilled into stories of the human problem and its solution—stories of how lifelessness threatens but flourishing triumphs. Its heart can be heard beating in exemplars known as sages and immortals who have mastered techniques to nourish life and “roam in company with the Dao.”
⁵¹
But more than any other of the great religions, Daoism possesses the power to vanish before our eyes, to get up and wander west, drift high into the mountains, and disappear into the clouds.

Chapter Nine
A Brief Coda on Atheism

The Way of Reason

Atheism is not a great religion. It has always been for elites rather than ordinary folk. And until the twentieth century, its influence on world history was as nonexistent as Woody Allen’s god. Even today, the impact of atheism outside of Europe is inconsequential. A recent Gallup poll found that 9 percent of adults in Western Europe (where the currency does
not
trust in God) described themselves as “convinced atheists.” That figure fell to 4 percent in Eastern and Central Europe, 3 percent in Latin America, 2 percent in the Middle East, and 1 percent in North America and Africa.
¹
Most Americans say they would not vote for an atheist for president.
²

Nonetheless, atheism stands in a venerable tradition reaching back to ancient Greece, where Diagoras was kicked out of Athens for impiety, and ancient India, where Buddhists, Jains, and some Hindus also denied a personal god. Some of the greatest minds in the modern world (Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre) were atheists. So were some of modernity’s most brutal dictators (Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic).

A few years ago I wrote that, in staunchly unsecular America, atheists had “gone the way of the freak show.”
³
I was wrong. For much of the last decade, books on atheism have crowded U.S. best-seller lists. And in his 2009 inaugural address President Barack Obama called the United States a “nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.”
⁴
In both Europe and the United States today there is a vibrant conversation about the virtues and vices of Godtalk. So while atheism is not a great religion, it deserves some attention here.

After all, atheism is a religion of sorts, or can be. Many atheists are quite religious, holding their views about God with the conviction of zealots and evangelizing with verve. Atheists take aim at organized religion, miracles, and groupthink. They defend reason over revelation, logic over faith, and scientific experimentation over magical thinking. Echoing Confucius and Laozi, they focus on life before death. As the term implies, however,
atheism
is first and foremost about denying the God proposition. Theoretically, atheists deny the existence of all deities, but as a practical matter they can deny only the gods they know. Freud rejected the Jewish and Christian conceptions of God swirling around him in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Most of today’s “New Atheists” know little about the gods and goddesses of Hinduism, for example, so when they take aim at the idol of “God,” it is the deities of the Western monotheisms they are hunting.

Atheists argue that the human problem cannot be solved by religion, because religion itself is the problem. Religious belief is man-made and murderous—irrational, superstitious, and hazardous to our health. The solution is to flush this poison out of our system—to follow the courageous examples of heroic unbelievers from Diagoras to Freud to the patron saints of the New Atheism: American writer Sam Harris, American philosopher Daniel Dennett, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, British journalist Christopher Hitchens, and French philosopher Michel Onfray. And where will this cleansing lead? To a postreligious utopia. Without the foolishness of faith, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Angry Atheists

Of course, not all atheists are created equal. Some describe themselves as secularists, humanists, naturalists, freethinkers, skeptics, or rationalists. Others do not. Because of the stigma attached to the term
atheist
, some have suggested alternatives such as “bright.” An online group calling itself The Brights’ Net claims close to fifty thousand members in 185 different countries, including Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, comedy duo Penn and Teller, and New Atheists Dennett and Dawkins.
⁵

Some distinguish between strong atheists (who actively deny God) and weak atheists (who simply do not affirm God), but the distinction between angry and friendly atheism is more useful. New Atheists exemplify the angry type. Their atheism is aggressive and evangelistic—on the attack and courting converts. Even the titles of their books (
The God Delusion
,
The End of Faith
) and chapters (“Jesus at Hiroshima,” “Down with Foreskins!”) are provocations.
⁶
These militants see the contest between religion and reason as a zero-sum game, but their favorite metaphors come from war rather than sports, and their rhetoric takes no prisoners. According to Dawkins, “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”
⁷
According to Harris, theology is “ignorance with wings.”
⁸
According to Hitchens, organized religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
⁹
At least in Europe, these New Atheists are not above hitting below the belt. Michel Onfray, the popular French philosopher and
enfant terrible
whose
Atheist Manifesto
(2007) has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Europe, attacks circumcision as barbaric and, in perhaps the unkindest cut (at least for a Frenchman), reports that the apostle Paul was impotent and “unable to lead a sex life worthy of the name.”
¹⁰

Earlier skeptics such as Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken took aim at fundamentalists and revivalists. And Hitchens, who thrills to the chase of “foam-flecked hell-and-damnation preachers,” was on the air only hours after the death of televangelist Jerry Falwell, remarking that “if you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.”
¹¹
But the New Atheist complaint is more comprehensive—against the sins and wickedness of Western monotheism, which Hitchens describes as “a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay,” and, more broadly, against religion in general, which, Hitchens adds, derives in East as well as West “from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species.”
¹²

This is an old lament, itself a plagiarism of Freud (who got it from Marx, who got it from Ludwig Feuerbach, among others), updated largely by the New Atheists’ trademark indignation and rhetorical excess. In decades past, Western intellectuals honored a gentleman’s agreement of sorts to keep their faith, or lack thereof, largely to themselves. Three things blew that agreement up. First, the U.S. Religious Right began in the late 1970s to put God to partisan political purposes, prompting atheists with different political views to go public with their criticisms of Godthink. Second, Muslims began to pour into Europe, edging toward 10 percent of the population in France and topping 5 percent in the Netherlands. Finally, Quran-quoting terrorists hijacked four jets and steered themselves and thousands of others to their deaths on September 11, 2001.