'The Starry Heaven above Me, and the Moral Law within Me.'

('Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.') - Kant

I have to say, I love atheists. Or at least I love the bright ones. Because, look, they are maintaining a consistent position: either a thing is provable solely by reason, in which case I will believe it, or is not fully accessible to rationality, and then I won't. And if I'm anything (which at my weight is not always certain) I, too, am some kind of Enlightenment-style humanist in many, many ways. Maybe it took me a long time to admit it, but I'm out and proud now. The only catch in my case being that I don't believe humans are the end of it, nor that everything that does or could exist is necessarily comprehensible to or articulable by human reason. Our reason could have limits, just as our sense of smell does relative to a dog's, or a bear's. And, certainly, relative to anything having unlimited powers of every sort.

But I understand the position. And the last point would be an absurd speculation from a rationalist point of view, since what would my reason know about the existence of such anythings? I also think that there are many breeds of atheists, particularly of the Enlightenment variety, who agree on many basic premises about the inhering dignity of man with those who arrive at that position due to a belief about the divine source of that dignity. In either case the 'Man is born free' position holds, and each appends from his perspective the implied-moral-imperative second clause without which the beginning is nothing but a quaint and inert metaphysical claim.

However, the group that does drive me nuts, and has since I was in high school, is the 'spiritual but not religious' crowd, the mass migration of which to Big Sur, the Napa Valley, and beach huts in Costa Rica would leave the greater Seattle area bereft of 70% of its tax base. The rationalist atheists have it hard, and they know it, and they take their responsibility seriously, because they realize it's up to them to figure things out. If one cannot rely on any Authority beyond one's own logic to give guidance, the responsibility is great and the burden a heavy one.

By contrast, the 'spiritual but not religious' people often accept their 'authority' from a multitude of sources: it doesn't have to be right, as a religious person might say; it doesn't have to add up right, as a rationalist might; it just has to feel right, the standards for which are as varied as the number of soi-disant gurus and self-help books in the world. What to me is more chilling to me than the unpleasant aesthetics of that reality is that this 'spirituality' can be as devoid of ethics as the user wishes.

An atheist indeed can be a maniacal Machiavellian egoist, to be sure, but I'm not talking about them, and I have encountered few in my personal experience. I think at the same time that far too many shade-grown-coffee-drinking hemp-clad 'yogis' and would-be bhikkhunis end up, in their ever-fluid quest for self-development or self-enrichment, becoming terrifically self-involved egoists themselves. If, admittedly, extremely bendy ones.

It seems to me that at base the one belief that unites most of these 'spiritual' individuals is this: there is a Power, some sort of divine something, and I owe Him/Her/It/They/Us some form of recognition, but it is up to me to discern what shape this recognition might take in my case. All too rarely does this Divine Power impart an ethical code, because ethical codes are the province of religions, and the 'spiritual but not religious' eschew religion, and religious authority, as being inherently oppressive. But while 'feeling good' is a reasonable criterion for adjudging the after-effects of a yoga class or colon cleanse, it is nonetheless insufficient proof of the moral rightness or wrongness of a given act. It is in no way parallel to the fearless and rigourous self-searching that both rational believers and rational atheists must undertake in order to live an ethical life.

Enlightenment thinkers adjured us to use our own minds and pursue freedom, rather than blindly ceding our will and our powers of reason in deference to the dictates of monarchies or the Church. However, were I forced to cede all my powers of thought, I would rather do so to the likes of thinky ethical atheists like Diderot, Condorcet, Hume, Mille, de Beauvoir, Zizek, Clarence Darrow, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, James Connolly, Harriet Martineau, and James Rachels than to Oprah, The Secret, 'quantum mysticists,' or anyone aiming a burning hank of sage up at me from the Down-Dog asana.

Happy St. Calvin's Day!

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the US, and along with The Harvest, the fruits of This Great Land, squashes of all sorts and can-shaped cranberry puree, the changing of the seasons, colonialism, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, the Noble Savage and the White Man's Burden, we also pay homage to the undying legacy of John Calvin. He gave us hard work and Blackberrys and fax machines, to be sure, and quite possibly timeshares and cruiseboat holidays, as well, but the full measure of his influence cannot be appreciated without taking into account the Puritans' sumptuary strictures and their enduring significance.

'Original sin, therefore, appears to be an hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls "works of the flesh."' - J.C.

I do not mean to imply that I think the whole Reformation was a bad idea initially, or sprang from bad impulses. I would not like to have lived in Burgundy, for example, during a certain period, if I did not happen to be recognized as exactly and precisely orthodox by the Benedictines. I would have preferred not to live in Spain, either, from about 1500 to 1800, regardless of my affiliations or lack thereof. And I am grateful not to have been in the position of attempting to lead a devout life in some of the less-than-devout monasteries that reform and renewal put to right. However, if the end result would have been that no one, ever, centuries later, when I wouldn't even know, except in Heaven, where I could no longer feel pain, would have had to wear polyester masquerading as 'gabardine,' or drink 'white Zinfandel,' or stuff themselves into hideous little rooms on boats the size of cities with thousands of other holiday-makers, only to spend their days gorging on cafeteria food, playing shuffleboard, swimming in chlorinated pools in the midst of the Aegean, and debarking in growling hordes to buy up gilded replicas of Attic treasures and machine-made lace, I would gladly have submitted to whatever tonsure, penitence -- or cloistered aristocratic licentiousness -- were the case in my region.

'You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.' -J.C.

But because I didn't, we live in a society that continues to view pleasure as dangerous and the senses as Satan's inbuilt handmaidens. We oscillate between wordless orgiastic feedings of Grande Meals at the Big Hombre and the next day's punishing asceticism. Neither tastes like anything, but one causes self-loathing while the other promises redemption -- and flatter abs. We eat salmon-colored tomatoes in February and think nothing of it; we pump 'cheese' out of an aerosol; we have diabetes and hemorrhoids, cancer of the colon and hypertension, and our only consolation is At least we didn't enjoy ourselves getting to this point...

'Though Satan instills his poison, and fans the flames of our corrupt desires within us, we are yet not carried by any external force to the commission of sin, but our own flesh entices us, and we willingly yield to its allurements.' -J.C.

A handily reductivist version of Calvinism is that Adam screwed it up for all of us, and we're never going to get back to anything close to a prelapsarian state, in spirit or conditions or behavior, but it is our duty nonetheless to try to - even if we're some of the ones God has already decided He's not that keen on letting back into Heaven - with every waking breath, in each act and thought of our lives, and thus anything that distracts us from this is proof of our fallenness, our 'total depravity' (a phrase which came after Calvin himself but is not an unrepresentative distillation of his point of view), our hideous natures which draw us away from, rather than toward, the Good.

'Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.' -J.C.

This is an exceedingly long leap from the Roman Catholic position of 'don't get so drunk that your judgment will be clouded and you risk making bad choices and ending up in an opium den in Chinatown.' In Calvinism, we've already tied off our arm, flicked the needle, and had sex with the dealer. We are meretricious, deceitful, murderous, lazy, avaricious, gluttonous crackwhores from the start who would sooner kill you than wish you a good day. No wonder, then, that we can't stand the idea of enjoying a good meal in pleasant surroundings: one bite of the medium-rare filet with a delicate shallot beurre blanc and we have paved the way for lechery, idolatry, pederasty, income tax fraud, bestiality, and unbridled killing sprees. Enjoy anything too heartily, and it's only a matter of time before the stakes have to be raised, before the beurre blanc just won't do, it will have to be pounds of some ponderous Norman cream sauce, poured all over the steak and dripping down your chin, and the med-rare will mutate into saignant and before you know it you will be starring in a Bosch painting, eating babies, buggering lobsters, and never combing your hair.

So it arises that we take pains not to have too good a time. When that doesn't work, we endeavor to convince ourselves we are not really enjoying things but doing what we must, such as rampant overspending cloaked as necessary Christmas shopping or renovating yet again what we just discovered to be a hugely outdated living room. Or, we deny our urges so habitually, and in such illogical ways, that they perforce irrupt disguised - that they might for once be satisfied - and we rather than buy one pair of fancy shoes, or get a bit giddy on two glasses of port, or quietly watch the setting sun from the shore of a lake, instead order sixteen shots of whatever, stuff down some onion rings slathered in synthetic 'mayonnaise,' and try to convince the drunk girl next to us to go back to the apartment for anonymous, detached, barely conscious casual sex.

'So indulgent is man towards himself, that, while doing evil, he always endeavours as much as he can to suppress the idea of sin.' - J.C.

And that isn't what the Catholics warned us about, either. It's not the alcohol's fault. The alcohol is there in order that the rest can take place, in order deliberately to renounce judgment sufficiently that we can be as mindless of sin as of either genuine pleasure or redemption, and thus get on with our half-hearted quest for the bad food, the unsatisfying company, the superficial conversation, and the mindless, soulless, fumbling sex. We're no longer worrying about God, or Calvin, or Burgundian excesses. We don't even know where or what Burgundy is, for that matter, since we don't drink nice wines, or read books that aren't assigned, or travel to places where they don't speak American. And we no longer believe we're damned, nor care; we're chained to the ramified legacy of Calvin, without any recollection of how we got here or what the original argument was. We just know we're not supposed to enjoy ourselves. We should be multitasking on our Blackberrys while chasing the four-minute mile and listening to management seminars on our iPods, not idly reading the TLS on a Saturday morning and sipping mimosas in deck chairs amidst birdsong and evergreens.

'Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols.' -J.C.

So, when the dam breaks and the need for genuine pleasure mutates yet again into a virulent need to consume, we are stuck. It's too late to decide to keep fresh flowers in the house. Gone is our chance to enjoy the walking tour of the Piedmont, or to start wearing clothing that doesn't punish all the senses. And no longer will poetry or color or silky sheets or taking up ikebana or cheesemaking sate our deranged, repressed need for something, anything, that can stimulate a sense of even the most distant, third-order simulacrum of the commodity called 'enjoyment.'

But we've become by that point the crackwhore Calvin warned us about. Now it can no longer be about nuance or joy. We have ground ourselves down to nearly insensate lumps from alternating between compulsive and overarching gravitas surrounding work/'success' and puerile outbursts of mindless grasping that we can no longer just be. We have annihilated our receptivity so thoroughly that our whole outlook reduces not merely things but people, as well, to instruments. I see you for what you can give me, just like the obscenely large truck or the Patek Philippe or the ten numbing, dumbing vodka-and-Red-Bulls. But don't worry; as soon as I've eaten you and the four-pound McNasty and the 'craftsman style' high-end bathroom renovation, I'll spend two hours on the electronic bicycle and commit myself to at least three more memos a week and do a colon cleanse and take a Men's Retreat and swear off booze and find my inner child again and give him the kick in the teeth he so roundly deserves.

'I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.' -J.C.