Spreading the Light

by Jason Dookeran

In the Holy Bible, amidst the passages attributed to one Isaiah it is stated, "The people who walk in darkness will see a great light." However, it takes a lot more than simple light to become enlightened. In this day and age, that which had been the light has now become the bringer of darkness, the pillars of ignorance.

I was born in the small Caribbean island of Trinidad, half of the twin-island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. This tiny country boasts amazing racial and ideological differences across its islands. The one glaring thing that stands out is that not many people, even though they may think it, come out and state that they have doubts about their religion. The average Trinidadians who do not have a particular religious leaning refers to themselves as a 'Nowherian', a word specifically created by the Trinbagonian public as a means to describe someone who belongs to a religion in name only, but does not practice or believe the basic tenets of the religion. It is not uncommon to hear someone stating "Well, I'ze ah Catholic inno, but I doh go church and thing..."

It is upon this backdrop that I, in the waning months of 2010, realized that I was an atheist. The admission was based on critical analysis of what I knew, what I thought and what evidence had been presented to me. It is not a decision to take lightly and it is not one that will improve the overall comfort of my social situation, but it is something that I feel I need to do. I'm tired of pretending to be something I am not.

I was born in a rural setting, many miles from the nearest city. The quaintness of my heritage is preserved today in the village that my parents live, a truly bucolic refuge in the hustle and bustle of modern life. My early life, spent as a child in this rural village, was only sparsely punctuated by allusions to faith and belief in an Almighty. Indeed, the only time one would hear prostration to a deity from a neighbor would usually come in the form "Oh God, ah think mih rice bu'n!"

In the first eleven or so years of my life, my only brushes with religion were the odd wedding/funeral and the yearly Hindu prayers my Grandmother/next door neighbor would perform. After the first eleven years of my life though, my mother decided that I needed religion, for one reason or another, and so we went to church.

Presbyterians aren't noted for being massive proselytizers and that suited me fine. The Presbyterian Church is probably one of the more liberal arms of the Christian movement, and as such doesn't put a whole lot of stock in converting people. The informal and open way in which the Presbyterian Church deals with issues makes it ideal for someone who wants to be a Christian, but doesn't want as much of the rituals and rites associated therein. It is also very accepting of science and sees the bible as a figurative tool (mostly) for instruction. From any atheist’s standpoint, it would seem that it's the least threatening branch of the Christian tree, and that may be so if people would follow the doctrine of acceptance, but over time I came to realize that this "doctrine of acceptance" is quite fine in theory but does not carry over to practice. As inviting as this branch was, it wasn’t without its thorns.

Having been internalized into the church (baptized and confirmed), I started attending church regularly, becoming one with the sheep and following unquestioningly. In fact, at one point in time I was seriously considering becoming a minister in the Presbyterian Church. It was in critically examining the church in my preparation for this decision, that I discovered many unsavory things about the Christian religion. These things, coupled with two major issues, caused me to rethink my position.

I was able to gauge and question Christians of "my" denomination freely, since I was accepted as one of them. I gained insight into their thinking and realized that quite a bit of them do not actually believe the tenets of the religion but have some ulterior motive for attending, whether it was using the Presbyterian board to land a job, or because they want to get married in the church. The unsettling thing is that some of them believe and subscribe to the archaic outlines of the Old Testament (selectively of course; the chapters and verses that pertain to their own transgressions are notoriously absent from their interpretation of the scripture) and believe those who don’t believe the same as them to be misguided damned.

The second thing, the one that forced me to reconsider my want to be part of this (or any) religious body, was the indoctrination of youth. On every fifth Sunday, the Presbyterian Church allows the youth of their congregation to deliver a sermon. On a particular fifth Sunday of the year, the entire country is urged by the Presbyterian Board of Youth Affairs to deliver a sermon based on a theme. Outlines are distributed to separate churches and a sermon is done up and delivered on the proposed day. On National Youth Sunday, 2010, the threads that bound me to this institution were irreparably broken.

The sermon outline contained a collection of bullet points that writers were asked to expound upon. One of them, I noticed, called for the dissection of "the persecution of Christian youth." After slowly reading through this section a few times, and finding it to be both misleading and propagandist in nature, I started to critically analyze all the things that were told to me. It was a moment of revelation and one that I look back on as the start of my atheism.

I decided to apply critical thought to the majority of the things I took for granted as outlined by my church doctrine. More often than not, the application of doubt and critical questioning caused the previously accepted facades to fall apart. I was excited! Here was something I should show people; here was something I could present, with requisite evidence, to show something tangible! It could cause a revolution; an uprising. It could make a difference to so many who are blinded. Here, then, was a “great light.” I immediately set about to educate my peers on my newfound epiphanies. That was when I encountered the ugly side of the believer.

Indoctrination is a powerful force. It can make one disregard evidence opposed to one’s belief completely, making one hang on desperately to an ungrounded fable contrary to, and at times in spite of, incontrovertible evidence against it. I brought my basic arguments to bear on the logical fallacies contained within the body of knowledge that my peers regarded as “holy.” I was accused of being a blasphemer. One by one they stopped talking to me or asking me questions because I “think too much.” Only in a religious institution would thought be considered evil and a vice.

Slowly, they drifted from me and I drifted from them. Their inability to understand or simple ignorance of the facts presented made me regard them differently. I decided that since I was finding myself at odds with the church, that I would forge my own path, one where I would discover what the world had to offer by exploring tangible objects and not putting my faith in something I could neither experience nor prove.

Thus began the growth of my skepticism and my move from being simply agnostic (belief in a God but with no belief in organized religion) to atheist. Helped by videos from Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, I learned about this new movement and how much of my own ideas were in line with the ideas and thought proposed by these great men. I became a heretic, and I have never in my life felt so free.

Now, with the passing of each day, I meet and interact with more people who share my point of view. Even friends I had considered to be dyed-in-the wool believers are now just as skeptical as me. The wave of reason is spreading, slowly overwhelming the tide of ignorance. Indeed, one can only hope that soon, those lost in the darkness of ignorance shall see the light of reason.

Embracing Ignorance and Asking Questions: Raising our Collective IQ

by David Ince

It's all about asking questions. That's what being an atheist, skeptic, or freethinker is all about. It's something that people of faith, as much as they protest to the contrary, seem to have missing from their armoury.

Yes, theists are generally good at stating their positions, telling you what they believe and what you need to do, but they almost never get into interrogatories. This lack of questioning is unfortunate, not only for the believer who loses out on a chance to understand more about the atheist perspective,  but also for the atheist who misses the chance to hone his/ her argument and improve upon it. Iron sharpens iron is what they say, but that only happens when there are questions providing the friction.

When I look back at my education in the Caribbean, I see suppression of an inquiring culture rather than promotion of it. This stems not just from a religious background that says something is true because “I say so,” but from a lack of confidence in our people, an underlying fear of being seen as unintelligent just because you don't know the answer. I know this was at play when I was at school. A teacher in Maths, History, or Science would stand before us and expound on a subject. At the end of the class would be the inevitable, “Everybody understands? Anyone have any questions?”  

Nine times out of ten every hand would stay down and we would nod and indicate we followed everything fully. I guess to some extent we weren't lying. We understood the words, the teacher was speaking English, we understood English. But as I have come to know now, understanding something is far more than just comprehending words. Still, in our minds at that time, words were all that mattered, most times we just sat and wrote out the exact phrases that emanated from the teacher's lips. We could, if called upon, stand up and repeat what Mr. Brown said and that was good enough.

Putting your hand up just was not an option. No, that would be a sign of weakness. It would be perceived that you were a bit of a “slow” child. Twenty-nine children nodding away confidently and you are the only backward one that doesn't get it? If you wanted to not be taunted for being stupid the thing to do was to keep quiet, don't open your mouth and show your ignorance, that's how we were trained in the Caribbean and to a large extent that's how many of us have remained in adulthood.

I have asked myself many times, how to change that mindset. How do we reverse what we learnt in school and convince people that it is the smart kid not the idiot that is the one who asks the questions? The answer to me seems to be education. I can say for my part, the further I have gone in my education, the less concerned I have become of displaying ignorance. It has often been said that the more you know the more you realise you don't know. The more knowledge you have the more comfortable you are with your lack of knowledge. Comfortable not from the perspective that you are happy to stay in that state forever, but comfortable to admit that you just don't know the answer to some things. You are willing to defer to an expert when you find yourself out of your depth in an area, taking your ignorance not as a badge of honour, but as a fuel to drive you towards greater knowledge on highways that were completely free of traffic before.

They say that ignorance is bliss, but I find ignorance exciting, a potential for enlightenment and discovery, and there are few things more thrilling than that. I think the embracing of ignorance needs to be a key part of what we promote in the secular movement  It is something I am enjoying doing myself on the  podcast 'Freethinking Island' which I am co-hosting weekly. It is easy when you put a podcast out to look at it as an instrument to get your message out, get your voice out there to the world. It is great to be able to add your voice out there, but I am quickly realising that the true value is in listening to what others have to say. These last two weeks we've had Seon Lewis and Jonathan Bellot, both of whom took us on their journey from faith meanwhile teaching us so much in the areas where they have their expertise. Here the beauty of the shows is not in how much you can say but in how much you can ask, what more can you find out about the person on the other side of the microphone or computer screen. 

However, what we in the skeptic community find when we take our questioning  habits back to those in belief is an attitude a bit like back in those school days.  Sometimes they think we are deliberately being cheeky, like the class clown, who asks the biology teacher if she was alive with the australopithecines.  Other times they may believe that we are just trying to catch them out with a “gotcha” question. What I find though, is that more often than not they think we are just a little bit behind. Slow learners in the subject of Spirituality. We have to be kept in detention, write “lines” or go to their extra classes until we get it right.  When we consistently say we don't understand them they are flabbergasted, because for them the concept is simple: God sent his son Jesus to die for our sins so that believing in him we can be saved. 

What's so difficult to understand about that? They are right, it is easy to understand, at least the words. We can repeat them just as easily as they can, but we need the follow up. Do the words make sense? Is there logic there? Does it mesh with what we observe or understand in other areas of the universe which we experience? If only our Christian friends could come to understand that we really do follow the words and that's why we just can't understand why they follow the words. 

I don't know about other atheists, but often when I speak to theists it is to just clarify what they are thinking, what they believe and how they see the world. In finding this out, it allows me to learn more about them and I can appreciate why they may have certain attitudes even if I don't endorse their views. What happens often is that they get stuck even in trying to clarify their own positions. What do they mean by words like God, spirit, faith, transcendence, immaterial, omnipotence, sanctification, transubstantiation? Often they can't tell you, because they have never asked these questions of themselves. They are like the nodding students just repeating the words of the teacher. Parroting words that have that veneer of intellectualism, but no intelligible meaning. Why do they find themselves in this position? It's down to their embarrassment with ignorance. They hear these concepts spoken about by the eloquent orators in their midst. They don't understand, but they are ashamed. Ashamed to say that it all sounds like gobbledygook to them. Their lack of self-belief makes them think that the confusion is on their side, that if they had a little more education, the speaker's words would all make sense.  They don't want to let anyone else around them know that they are confused so they listen and nod knowingly, hoping that their apparent comprehension of these highfalutin concepts will win the admiration of those sitting around. 

Many people in the faith community are well aware of the ignorance phobia in their ranks and they milk it for all it is worth. This is how you end up with people like Deepak Chopra, William Lane Craig, and others in the “baffle them with bullshit” brigade. These peddlers know full well that their audiences have a number of people of average education but who want to be perceived by their peers as erudite scholars. Such members of the audience are prime candidates for lapping up all on the pseudo-intellectual menu. They dance in delight when they get to hear a talk that includes realms of paradigms of infinite regresses on quantum levels of degenerating orbiting electromagnetic layers of amplifying magnitudes. Now they can bring out this vocabulary on demand to make themselves sound impressive. Sad to say, but phrases like that often work like a charm on Caribbean people. In our islands, big words are often the measure of brilliance. He who uses the most rises to the top of the pile in the minds of the masses. Once you have a reputation to go along with the verbiage, you are set. The more the talk is out there unchallenged, the more  people in the community will pick  it up and use the ideas as if they are their own, then their lesser informed friends will join in the smiling and nodding, hoping to show that they too are sufficiently informed to understand the babble. Oil is scarce in the Caribbean, but every day more and more of these “nodding donkeys” pop up. 

It's a hard road, but we have to encourage people to be honest about their ignorance. If you don't understand, say you don't understand. Admitting you don't know may make you feel small for the moment, but you will leave as a larger person because your knowledge is greater. I recognise that this is easier said than done. If you have a doctorate, you can be pretty sure that being shown to be ignorant about one obscure fact or concept is not going to make people think you are an idiot. You know you will have more than enough opportunity to come back later and show your superior understanding in the area where you have your expertise. However, it's a different thing when you are among people and you know your level of education is low in comparison, when you know that failure to understand something simple could make you be perceived as a simpleton. That's why I say that education is the key to curing ignorance-phobia. The greater the percentage of our populations that have a sound education, the less likely that persons will feel intimidated about displaying or demonstrating what they don't know.  

Yes, in this new era of critical thinking in the Caribbean, we need to stand up and be confident enough to say we don't know. Ignorance followed by questions, that's the key to critical thinking. We don't know, but we'll try to find out. If we don't have pride in admitting ignorance, people will continue to try to hide it and there is no better place to hide it than under the rock of religion—the place where “I don't know” is somehow covered over by the idea that a God whose mind we can never know, knows everything. 

Letting Go of God

by Kwame Weekes

Trust in Yahweh and do what is good,

make your home in the land and live in peace;

make Yahweh your only joy

and he will give you what your heart desires. Psalm 37:3

I am, perhaps, the weakest of all of my friends. Six years of my life was spent completely devoted to Jesus Christ. Like any love, I wanted to know everything there was to know about Jesus. I spent time with him and took him almost everywhere with me; almost because there were times I needed to take the crucifix off from around my neck to lessen the anticipated guilt of something I was about to do, similar to a man who takes off his wedding ring before he invites the woman at the bar back to his apartment when he's out on business. And because my love was real, every time I fell short of my commitment, I was sure to fall on my knees begging for mercy. Seven times seventy times I would, and still the love persisted. People have different reasons for doing what they do, but for me, if my memory is reliable and my honesty is true, my love was resting on a promise; a promise of love returned in abundance, of happiness, of purpose and passion, of meaning. My friends are still in love waiting on this promise, but I, in my weakness, have let go.

As I mature in my non-belief, I am beginning to see that there is very little difference - if any at all - among human beings. The same dynamics that are present in a relationship with a human lover are present in a relationship with a god. If you are not this person, you surely know someone who is madly in love with another human being. Their love is so bright it makes them blind to their own worth and the fact that their lover is blind to it as well. They would take the insults, the beating, the nights of loneliness and all the other niceties that come with unhealthy relationships while you look on in pity, disgust, or absolute horror. Tyler Perry is one of my least favourite directors of all time, but I like that he always makes room for this type of character in his work. This is probably why so many people like his movies - it gives us a "Good Friday bobolie" to beat on, ridicule and offer advice to. "How she schupid so! She takin all da licks. Girl, leave he ass and go by the next man eh!" How wise we become when we stand outside looking in. 

People in relationships like this tend to downplay the negatives and emphasise the positives, however few and far between. It's like the Stockholm syndrome where you think your kidnapper is a praiseworthy person because he offered you a slice of bread and some water when you were hungry, even though you had to eat it with your hands tied with ropes. In our darkest times we hold on to any glimmer of light because there is nothing else to do. I cannot laugh at persons like this. I weep for them. They are holding on to a hope that doesn't exist and I weep for them.

Many of my old friends are believers and many of them have experienced the darkest of times. Even though we don't speak anymore, my love for them sometimes pushes me, the non-believer, to my knees, begging the god that I don't believe in to be merciful to those that love him. He never listens. Still their love persists and I look on - like you look on in a Tyler Perry movie - and I say, "Hoss, why you wasting your time with this god thing?" Tomorrow, tomorrow, it would get better tomorrow. Tomorrow is always coming. Sometimes tomorrow arrives, but only lasts for a day. Then the darkness comes returns. Is there ever a right time to let go of a god?

I cannot answer this question for anyone but myself. For me, the right time was November of 2011. I could no longer live with the belief that if I made Yahweh my only joy he would give me my heart's desires, especially since my heart was not that wanting. My requests were simple - joy, peace, meaning, purpose. There were days when these did come and I made sure my praises on those days were loud enough for my atheist friends to hear. "Yuh see! My God is great! I could never have done so well in exams if it weren't for him." Yes, I did do “well” in exams but some of my atheist friends received scholarships while I didn’t. If it wasn’t me being happy about good grades it was me happy about meeting a new person who shared the same unpopular interests as me. For everything I was happy about, I could find a number of non-believers who enjoyed the same to greater degrees. It was like I was overwhelmingly happy about the bread and water I was eating with bounded hands thinking it was better than those who were eating golden crusted bread, with melted butter and cheese, washing it down with hot Milo. 

What is different between the relationship with God and the relationship with another human being, however, is inherent in the natures of the two objects. God is supposed to be eternal and all-powerful while human beings are temporal and weak. For this reason, it is incredibly easier for a person to let go of a human relationship than it is to let go of a divine one. God's promises go into the after-life, while human promises must be fulfilled in this lifetime. After a while, a person may cut their losses and recognise that the promises their deadbeat husband were making are never going to be fulfilled. A woman knows that after a certain age, the promise of having children is null because it is biologically impossible. But with God, anything is possible, and we hold on to the hope that He would work a miracle just for us, if not in this lifetime, in the next. We are so desperate for a miracle that perfectly ordinary things like passing a difficult examination are aggrandised beyond what they really are. And when the statistically improbable happens to someone else - a 56 year old woman has a perfectly healthy baby - we adopt that story and believe it would happen for us as well. We’re only hurting ourselves.

As condescending as this may sound, I wish some of my old friends would let go of God. What I have written thus far assumes the existence of a god with whom people are able to have relationships. The relationship becomes much harder for me to watch considering this god may not exist beyond the imagination. Suppose I am wrong and he does exist. Aren't you worth more than how you are being treated? To me, holding on to the hope that joy cometh in the morning is beautiful only up to a point. When the promise-giver holds the promise before you like a carrot on a stick and extends the reward’s fruition to beyond the grave, I cannot find love or recognition of your worth in that gesture. It’s as if you’re willingly putting yourself out there to be mocked.

Perhaps I am wrong and my giving up was too soon; I should have asked for strength and the intercession of Mother Teresa. I don't think so, though. I think I just found my worth and had no room for a love that tests. You may consider me weak, but I consider the decision to let go of God the greatest show of strength I have ever displayed.   

Just Who Is This God You Speak of?

Just Who Is This God You Speak of?

by Jonathan Bellot

            It is easy to forget that “God” is a proper name. For most theists and some deists, God, after all, is supposedly in some sense personal, if not a person outright; it’s only convenient he, she, or it have a name one can refer to. But while it may seem convenient for this thing, this deity, to have a name, it’s ultimately more problematic than convenient. A name, after all, should refer to someone or something one is in some way aware of, acquainted with. To use a name that does not clearly refer to someone or something is a bit odd. In a talk entitled “What’s Next for Atheism?” A. C. Grayling put the problem like this: if we replace God’s name with something more common, like “Fred,” the oddity of our claims becomes pretty apparent. If I say that Fred went to the 7-11 on Friday, and, once pressed, must admit that I do not know much about this Fred—what he looks like or sounds like, how old he is, where he lives, even if he is truly a “he”—you would be right to ask me how I can say that “Fred” went to the 7-11, since “Fred” has no clear meaning in this context. No Fred could be identified by me or anyone else on a security camera, either, since no one has the faintest idea what Fred looks like, assuming Fred looks like anything.

            Or, as Grayling put it: “Who made the universe? Fred. I have a deep personal relationship…with Fred.” By humanizing God, by making this indistinct person seem more intimate by nothing more than the change of a name, you might suddenly realize how empty the space seems beneath the word “God,” in the sense that it’s not clear who or what should go there. If I were to say I have an intimate relationship with Melissa, but have no idea what she looks or sounds like, no sensory details at all, indeed don’t even know she’s a “she”—well, you’d be right to look at me with raised eyebrows and start stepping back.

            The same, you may be about to say, goes for God. While it’s true that some speakers will provide specific definitions and traits of “God,” it’s also true that many people use the name to refer to whatever “supreme” being they have in mind, regardless of whether or not that being’s characteristics may accord with someone else’s. Thus, a Christian, a Muslim, and a deist who do not know each other’s respective beliefs can all say “I believe in God” and think they are speaking about the same being, though each one of them may have a being with different properties in mind. It’s not unlike if we imagine that there are two people chatting in a café, and each has a friend named Brian; without asking for further identification, each assumes that the “Brian” the other person is talking about is the same Brian, when, in fact, each is talking about a different person who simply happens to have the same name. This can easily lead to misunderstandings. One need only turn to various American conservatives’ attempts to claim that America is a Christian nation because the founders (such as, say, Jefferson and Paine) believed in “God” to see how easy it is to make mistakes, if not simply deceive the simple-minded. Jefferson and Paine, after all, were deists; Paine, in particular, took pain to emphasize the fact that he was not a Christian by ridiculing Christianity in an infamous pamphlet of 1807 (in its final form), The Age of Reason. Yet he spoke of believing in God, and misunderstanding—or manipulating—such passages might lead one to believe he was talking about the same “God” fellow as the founders who actually were Christians. The same, of course, is true for Einstein and Spinoza—and Spinoza famously equated God with “Nature,” thus revealing a singularly different being from the God of the Abrahamic faiths.

            Clearly, then, it matters what person—or thing—we mean when we say “God.”

            But it’s interesting to note that this seeming emptiness behind the word “God” doesn’t only extend to potential ambiguity; it extends even into the more complex definitions of God one may run across. The Reformed Epistemologists, like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, for instance, have made—though they did not invent the definition—a certain description of God infamous: God, we are told, is spaceless, timeless, eternal, immaterial, changeless, enormously powerful (if not omnipotent), omnibenevolent, and metaphysically necessary (uncaused). On the surface, this sounds great; God has finally been pinned down. But on closer examination, the matter is hardly clear—or perhaps it’s all too transparent. Taken literally, these definitions inform us that God takes up no space, consists of no matter (appropriate, really, given that he takes up no space), and exists outside of time. One could stop there. God, if we take this literally, is theoretically indistinguishable from nothingness—or, at least, frighteningly close. Mind you, like Parmenides, I don’t quite know what nothingness is, not having ever experienced anything but something; as Wittgenstein said in a 1929 Lecture of Ethics, “it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.” But God here is as close as I can get.

            Of course, there is another way to take these words, which is to invoke the possibly apocryphal medieval exercise of counting how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. (Such exercises did exist, but it’s unclear whether or not this specific one did or was created later as a caricature of the exercises in general.) It is possible to think, intuitively, of something taking up space without taking up space (and that was the answer to the pins question—angels take up no space, not being material, so an infinity of them could fit on the head of a pin). A mind, Craig likes to assert, is not material and does not take up space as material things do. And, as for time, Craig asserts—though more shakily—God might have created the universe at the exact same moment he desired to do so, since the desire cannot have preceded the creation of the universe, or God would have been acting in time—and time, according to the Big Bang model, cannot meaningfully exist at the moment of the Big Bang (and thus, there isn’t really a “before” the Big Bang, since relativity means that time loses all meaning when the universe is bunched up altogether at once in the point of the Big Bang, the singularity). Mind you, all neuroscience currently points to the mind being a product of the brain and not independent of it, as the dualists would assert (and Craig is not unsympathetic to dualism). Moreover, while we can say that things can take up space “without” taking up space, it’s not actually clear that this is either possible or even a meaningful statement. What is actually beneath those words? What does it mean to take up no space or to be “beyond” space—or, worse, time? (On the assumption that time even is even real, that is, more than just a convenient illusion, which I’m unsure of, somewhat alongside Julian Barbour and J. M. E. McTaggart.) At this point, someone might retreat into saying we can’t understand these concepts, just as a negative theologian—someone defining God by what he isn’t—might say that God can exist without existing. And I don’t deny that it’s possible that we just can’t understand these things but that they may be possible. I don’t believe in a deity, but I’m well-aware of the fact that I do not know everything, and there may be much more out there to learn. Hell, I can’t even disprove solipsism—and you—some irony for kicks—can’t, either. Perhaps God can exist and not-exist at the same time, not unlike Wittgenstein’s parody of Freud’s notion of the unconscious: “Mr. Nobody,” Wittgenstein called it. 
            Or, as Samuel Beckett asked in the addenda at the end of his novel Watt,
                 who may tell the tale
                 of the old man?

                 weigh absence in a scale?
                 mete want with a span?
                 the sum assess
                 of the world's woes?
                 nothingness
                 in words enclose?

            And mystery, indescribability, can be beautiful, in a deep way, as Einstein and Gabriel Marcel knew so well. Perhaps there are names we cannot speak because we will never have the words. 
     But at the same time, we should be careful. If we say something doesn’t take up space, maybe it doesn’t—and maybe that’s all it means, and there’s nothing there. As Julia Kristeva writes in The Feminine and the Sacred, those Christian mystics who went very far in negating God’s existence while affirming it may simply have been avoiding the fact that they were saying there was no God. Kristeva uses the example of Angela of Foligno, who described the divine as “an ‘abyss,’ ‘a thing that has no name.’” For Kristeva, this “thing without a name may betray…a suggestion of disbelief…[t]he latencies of a mystic atheism.” In so negative a theology, God may well vanish if one presses hard enough. Perhaps we cannot escape from this disappearance by using words to cover them up, to cover up the terrifying emptiness and ambiguity behind the very name of “God.”

            But the thing is, I love these discussions. I want to be challenged, to have my world and my beliefs spun on their axis by a new argument or new evidence. I want to hear and have these discussions in the islands—and, believe me, there are people from the Caribbean who are having them. But the average person there (and not only there, of course) does not choose to examine who “God” is or if God is truly Mr. Nobody. We revel in a simple, childish Christianity and, in some cases, Islam. We do not elevate the discussion; we assume that God is as obviously what we think he is as it is obvious that we breathe—and thus to assume God may not exist or may be other than we think may well be tantamount to being a fool or mentally ill (both of which skeptics are routinely called by fanatics, should the topic of skepticism even come up). We need something more. We need to be questioners, to be proud of ourselves for stepping away from simple answers and asking questions.

The world we find behind those questions may not always be pretty or comforting; it may well be bleak and depressing. Or it may be glorious and marvelous. Or depressing. But we will have found it ourselves. And that is the journey—the never-ending journey, like Jose Saramago’s tale about a man searching for an unknown island—we in the Caribbean should be happy to be on. Instead, we tend to attack others for asking too many questions.

Let us make our voices and questions heard—now and not forever after, but for a good long time.