Perspective looms fairly important in our lives. It allows us to empathise, to sympathise, to comprehend, to draw conclusions – it’s not the be all and end all of knowledge acquisition of course. But it is an important factor. We even have sayings for it, from the slightly esoteric, “walk a mile in his shoes”, to the reasonably literal “look at it from her point of view”.
Occasionally though, some people have what I’d call perspective blind spots. It could be for instance that they were exposed to something so traumatic that they refuse to even acknowledge that there is another perspective. Wars are a classic example; some veterans of wars will develop an implacable dislike (perhaps even hatred) for the group of people they were fighting against, regardless of what peace has been achieved.
As an atheist, one of the perspective blind-spots I periodically come up against is that some religious or spiritual people believe I have a hole in my life.
The problem of course with that conclusion is that it’s from their perspective. As such, it’s a gibberish proposition from the perspective of the atheist. I’m not saying that in a way which condemns – again, I’m trying to teach some perspective here. It’s like someone coming up to you on the street and declaiming:
It’s a shame you’ll live your whole life without widshonking a humstark.
What’s a humstark? And what precisely is involved with widshonking? Unless a person has the perspective of what a humstark is or widshonking entails, and agrees with the utterer of the statement, the statement, regardless of its intent, is meaningless.
Thus, it’s the same when someone of spiritual or religious belief expresses concern about a ‘hole’ in the life of an atheist; they perceive:
When in actual fact, the life of the atheist isn’t like that at all, it’s:
In short, there is no hole because to have the hole requires the belief system that creates the hole; since the atheist doesn’t have the belief system in question, they can’t have the hole.
Now, there’s one final point to make here: it’s not uncommon in this situation for the person who talked about a ‘hole’ to then try to turn this perspective argument around – “Why don’t you see things from my perspective? Why don’t you accept {Jesus|Yahweh|Allah|Healing Chakras|Crystal Lattice Energy|etc} into your life, just for a while? It could change you.”
This is all well and good, but I’d encourage you to find anyone who defines him or herself as an atheist who has never been exposed to religion or spiritual beliefs. You can’t – you won’t.
No atheist goes through life without some level of exposure to religion or spirituality. We already have had an exposure to your perspective, you would say. I became an atheist at age 8, for instance. Now, a religious person can’t tell me that 8 is too young to decide on atheism when modern religion is full of fervent exclamations of child-prodigies who “discover the lord” young – when religious indoctrination barely weeks after birth through baptism, for instance, is commonly entrenched in a lot of societies. Pick a town where an atheist could have lived his or her whole life without ever walking past a church, a spiritual centre, a religious bookshop. Yes, I’m lumping both religion and spirituality together there, but to be perfectly honest, to the dyed in the wool atheist, they’re just both belief systems on the same big circle.
I even had my crisis of unfaith when I was a teen. Realising I was gay I decided to ‘cure’ it by prayer. Two years of self hatred later, I ironically found freedom again from religion via Bishop John Shelby Spong’s book, “Living in Sin? A bishop rethinks human sexuality“. Spirituality? I was as equally exposed to astrology during childhood have met wiccans, have met pagans, have met Muslims and Buddhists and all number of people who profess to or demonstrate an alternate faith system – both spiritual and religious.
So, I can’t be accused of not knowing about or trying the other side.
Can the same be said of the person who tells me I have a hole in my life? If you’re a religious or spiritual person who has previously expressed such concerns, I’d strongly encourage you to stop seeing a hole where none exists. Instead, be prepared to accept that the other person does not share your belief system.
For them, there is no humstark to widshonk.
