The Walking Un-theist

One thing that strikes me, and did even when I was a Christian, is just how little god happens. How seldom does the supernatural sit upon our shoulder? He is a distracted god if you sit and listen to the vast majority  of conversations which happen in the course of daily happenstance. Part of this is the banality of the any-moments which we have a habit of stringing together. Is the divine, the creator of all things, the beginning and the end of totality, really there when I'm brushing my teeth? And did that cavity happen despite Jesus, or because of him? You know, it's no wonder my wisdom-teeth were such trouble, they weren't faith-teeth. (I'll leave the "faith has no teeth" arguments for you to make or dispute.)

But you don't have to be a voyeur or a dentist to take notes on the secular tilt to actual popular society. Just turn on the radio. Take thirty minutes to tally the number of sins or sinful things you hear wailed across your favorite FM station. How many Honda Civics full of seventeen year old girls are barreling down the highway at this very moment "singing" right along? And how many guardian angels are there too?

In short, we operate as if there were presently no lord-savior-ghost in an overwhelming number of instances. During these times, the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, the Jain, the Buddhist, the Hindu, and the Sikh alike are not atheist, but neither are they theist. During these moments of mundane, we are all un-theist. And for the religious, whose god is ever present, this must be accounted for. But it is not.

And that is what makes it so maddening when and why god does get the credit.

They are the extreme cases, not the regular cases, for which god gets the worm. The times people are emotional and that they will remember later. No one worth talking to thanks god that they got to the bottom of the cup while the coffee was still warm.

There's an old lesson you probably remember from your high school psychology class about dog torture. You put a dog in a cage, or maybe someone else does it, that bit doesn't matter much. Then, every so often, you play a little bit of terrible music. Also, you course some electricity through the floor of the cage. The dog, yeah? She'll yelp and hop around, she'll dance until the combination of pain and exhaustion is simply too much and she collapses. Eventually when she hears the music, she'll just lay down and take it. There is, after all, nothing she can do. Then you divide the cage in two. One half electrified, the other half shock-free. And when you play the music, Spot will lay prone until the terrible music dies. There is, after all, nothing she thinks she can do. This is called learned helplessness. She has apparently become numb even to the electricity which was the initial cause of her distress.

This is why, during tumult or joy, we evoke religion. We feel either that there is nothing we can do, or that there is nothing we have done, to deserve the high or low which is happening. We simply lay down and take it, knowing that the status quo will return.

But is that any way to navigate your sole existence? Is it really the banal which we wish to debit to reality while we credit the meat of the worldly experience to something otherworldly?

Get up, walk around, enjoy life. The terrible music is dead.


ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.