Yesterday’s Yule Blog featured an essay about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical, and even spiritual meaning as we encounter the world. Life, we feel, amounts to more than eating, buying cool products, and scratching our various itches. Whether or not we believe in God, we want to do something real with our lives. We have one itch that mere scratching won’t fix, and that is the itch to understand what life is all about and to live meaningfully by the measures that really count.
So much for what we have in common. On this sixth day of the Yule Blog, approaching the midpoint of the season, I want to blog (respectfully) about how theists and atheists are different. While both groups think life means something, we understand that meaning in different ways.
Virtually all human beings encounter something in life that seems to transcend ordinary experience. This is true whether or not we believe in one God, many gods or no god at all. Almost all human beings have “peak experiences” from time to time. There are moments, relationships, or experiences that point beyond the business of life toward its meaning. Painting a picture, talking with a friend or a loved one, holding the hand of a small child, volunteering in a homeless shelter, watching the surf roll up the beach as the sun rises on the horizon: At certain moments in our lives, these very ordinary experiences connect us with something that somehow feels more real than the superficial and trivial concerns that usually engage us.