Freud said “Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination”. This echoes Tolstoy: “One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love”. While I don’t define myself by my work, and see it as definitely secondary to my roles within my family (the love part, I guess), it is important – not just for my patients, but for me. So the questions are: can I find meaning in my work? and if not, why not?

I work in the public sector, which is wildly under-resourced. There are – as anywhere – issues I have with the way the service is structured, and care is delivered. There are many things I see that need to change that despite my best efforts I cannot affect. This all combines to make it very stressful and unpleasant at times: a bit negative as far as meaning and purpose go. As for my blogging, which perhaps has been an attempt to find more meaning in terms of my work life, the psychiatry side of it is probably mostly pretty negative: I tend to write about the things that get me fired up, which are often the things that my College or profession do (or have imposed upon us by society and politicians) that are wrong and even stupid. As a consequence, I think my psychiatry blog posts overall are on the negative side.

You know. Just a squidge….

It struck me this morning that this is perhaps not entirely healthy. Shutting up about those things on my blog is not the answer, because they’re important. I have no answer for or influence over the problems at work, but can’t shut up about them either, as I think it would be unprofessional of me to do so (and – though I hate to think in this way – if something goes wrong, and I called attention to it early on, it can’t be seen as my fault …*).

So can I have meaning – positive meaning – in my work life? Yes. On an individual basis. I have to be very clear about the difference between on one hand the overall poor systems, my issues with some aspects of the service, and all the rest of it, and on the other, the individual people I see. The patients who allow me into their lives, in the hope that I can help them. The patients to whom I give my time (the service itself be damned; it’s my time, my empathy, my knowledge and skills). The people I try to help to develop some hope, and find their way back to themselves (yet another patient recently said something very poignant to me around this: “I don’t like being around me”).

This morning I just spent an hour with a patient who is severely depressed – this relapse coming on over a few months, after some years of incomplete remission (treated elsewhere, I might say). We spoke in detail about their present state, previous treatment, early life, marital relationship, and about what I recommended and could offer. Now, I won’t pretend this person left the consultation infused with the joys of life, but I think they had some more hope and felt someone cared, and for myself (which is after all what this post is about) I felt professionally satisfied and virtuous.

Banging my head against the wider aspects of the service is frustrating not only practically, not only professionally, but also in terms of my own meaning and purpose (the work side of it, at any rate). It’s hard to feel one’s working life has much purpose when you cannot effect necessary change, or get things done as you think they should be. Focusing on the individual patient interactions changes it entirely. There I can effect change. There, at least for the time I am seeing them, I can provide them with the best care I am able. There I can in fact feel I am behaving excellently, making a difference, and find some professional meaning and purpose.

In finding – or realising – that, I think I see what Freud meant: “Both require imagination”. One cannot just float along and be found by purpose. A thoughtful approach is necessary in order to move beyond simply doing, towards meaning.

*I will add here that the problems I’m alluding to are not unique to the service in which I work now, and I certainly don’t mean to cast aspersions specifically in my employer’s direction. (There. Now my regular scheduled moaning can resume.)

In this post I will argue that religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for real spiritual well-being, that rationality and “materialism” can do at least as good a job (and possibly get in the way somewhat less), and that therefore religion has nothing left to offer.

Spirituality

The universe is clearly a material thing (with apologies to various airy-fairy philosophers; for my purpose, I can see, hear, touch, taste and smell the world, so it exists ) governed by material laws of nature. Scientific enquiry over many years has made incredible strides in understanding this material world, but there’s a lot we don’t yet know.

And a lot of people who don’t even know (or even actively deny) what is known.

We come then to the notion of spirituality: the idea or feeling that “there is more in Heaven and Earth…”. The feeling that we are more than simply cause and effect. It touches on notions of free will, aesthetics, love, wonder, creativity and so on, and lands, I think, squarely on the concepts of meaning and purpose.

Religious bigots like George Pell condemn atheists as coarse, uncaring, lacking purpose, and fearing the future. (Interesting here is Sigmund Freud’s statement that religion will never die as people are too fearful of death.) [if I remember to, I'll come back and edit this with the actual quote when I find it]

Unsurprisingly I refudiate this. First I will discuss why I think religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for a full spiritual life, and then turn to looking at the way that rationality can in fact be so.

Soulless Religion

Given that religion’s (stated) raison d’être is spiritual life, where in the hells do I get off on saying it doesn’t address spirituality? Because its vision is so stultifyingly narrow – that moreso than the demonstrable fact it’s, well, wrong.

Religion tells you the meaning of your existence. It tells you how to behave, and even how to think. It reduces all the wonder in the world to a plaything of a godling’s construction (heh – my iPhone wanted to change godling to gosling ).

They teach fear: of unbelievers, of evil, the devil, god himself – even of the world, it seems to me. At least Christianity, if not other religions as well, diminishes the world by giving us complete dominion over it. It tells us there is nothing (except god) that is greater than us. Whence real spirituality when the world is beneath us, and all that us above us is god, and all the works of our lives are purely to glorify god? It seems to me this diminishes the real value of the universe around us, and of everything we think, feel, experience, and do.

To me that is completely lacking in soul, or spiritual virtue.

Materialist Spirituality

Clearly we are not simply coldly rational robots. Not only are we not all that good at being rational, we find pleasure and fulfilment in things that we don’t think about in a rational fashion. I choose that wording deliberately: I don’t think these things are irrational, simply because we don’t behave rationally around them. Love, for instance: few of us choose our mate rationally, but the existence of the feelings that lead to this pair-bonding is perfectly rationally explicable. Likewise having children – moreso in fact. They’re expensive, aggravating, stop you sleeping for evermore, messy, destructive …. But awwwwwwwwwwww what about one of those? We don’t choose to have children on rational grounds, but the urge to procreate, again, is clearly able to be understood rationally; if that urge weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here. The more an organism procreates, the more its genetic material continues, the more successful it is in evolutionary terms. Likewise, pairbonding would have conferred evolutionary advantage, so love can be understood as something that makes rational sense, even though we don’t engage in a rational process.

I accept that not everything we do is determined by conscious, logical, rational thought. However, that doesn’t mean it is irrational; these things can be understood rationally. It’s similar in a way to my notion of ethical behaviour: we don’t in the course of everyday life debate philosophically about every course of action; we simply act in accordance with our character. However, the nature of our ethical character and consequent decisions can be understood philosophically – and that understanding can help us to develop further as ethical beings.

Similarly, while we don’t necessarily engage in rational debate about everything we do, rational thought and investigation can help us – individually and as a species – to grow. To understand and engage with the universe, and especially this Earth, better.

It can help us feel connected.

What could be more wonderful, beautiful, and yes: even spiritual and mystical, than the (true) concept that we are star-stuff? That we are made from elements forged in stars and blasted out by supernovae, come together to be us. That when we die these elements will become part of other things, animals, even people. The fact that this is demonstrably true makes it even more beautiful, to my mind.

Sure, you or I won’t be around to see what happens after we die, but that simply makes the world, and our time on it, that much more beautiful and precious. it’s like freesias, cherry blossom, and jacarandas: they flower so beautifully, and so very briefly. Somehow the fact it’s so brief adds to the beauty.

Conclusion

Do I need to state it? Anyone reading my blog knows what I think anyway. this universe in which we find ourselves is incredibly beautiful, strange, and terrible. Understanding it rationally, far from diminishing that spiritual sense, can enhance it. Reducing it to the whim of a petty jealous narcissistic deity robs it of something very deep and important.

I have meaning; I have purpose; I have love. I have joy, beauty and wonder. All I lack is God.

And I do not miss Him.

That lack of biblical literacy was made quite plain to me in reading and thinking this week on the Christian myth of the Resurrection (Christopher Hitchens mentions it in God is Not Great – which book is most definitely great). All I knew or thought before was along the lines of: “Jesus really pissed off the Romans, so they crucified him, but then the bible says he rose from the dead so he must be the son of god. The end.” I had never read or thought about the deeper meanings or moral implications.

I didn’t realise that this myth was tied in with the bizarre and offensive notion that we are all, through no fault of our own, born stained by “Original Sin”; that god sent his son, who was really himself, to earth, in order that he be brutally tortured and murdered (sacrificed, though he of course didn’t really die, making it not much of a sacrifice), in order that we be granted absolution for our sins: he would take from us our responsibility for our misdeeds – and the supposed transgression of Adam, who surely was simply following his god-given nature. And bloody hell: we’re all born in sin because the first man yearned after knowledge? To my mind Christianity hit the [FAIL] button right there.

In any case, it’s worth quoting Hitchens’ summary paragraph:

“I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life.”

Hitchens rightly asks how moral such a scenario can be. It is nothing but scapegoating, with Jesus as the goat, and us all as the “fear-ridden peasants of antiquity”. As he points out, a person can perhaps arrange to take the blame and even punishment for another’s misdeeds, but not the responsibility. My deeds are to the credit or debit of no-one’s moral ledger but my own. They can never be taken by another – whether human or godling.

For anyone, or any organisation, to offer to do so is simply immoral. Our deeds are our own, and to believe that a human sacrifice – that incidentally wasn’t a human, nor a sacrifice – millennia ago, in which we had no part, could possibly be seen to alter that is to me quite a revolting concept.

I do not hide from any of my “sins” (“sin” itself being I think a morally useless concept), nor seek to expiate them by thanking god for an ancient murder. Nor do I abase myself before my supposed creator praising or thanking him for the good that I do. I accept both. They are part of who I am and who I become. They are not things to be bought and sold by the blood of man or god.

Fuckers (my apologies for the language, but I’m not sorry; this is the right situation in which to use a swear)

If parents want their children to attend Special Religious Education, they will still be able to. No change to SRE has been proposed. The change is that currently idle kids (and, I guess, kids whose parents agreed to SRE only in preference to idleness) will be occupied learning how to think about ethical problems.

How is that a bad thing??!?!!

Ok, that’s one thing, but let me take it slightly further: those opposed to these ethics classes are simply trying to take away choice and control over their kid’s upbringing, from any parent who doesn’t make the same choices they do. It does not affect their own children, but they want to dictate how the rest of us raise our children. That level of control by the State is appalling.

Chris Gardinder has written an excellent article in Punch about the intolerance of the churches on this issue.

- And I’m getting so sick of the hypocritical whingeing about SRE kids “missing out”: if they’ll miss out by attending SRE instead of ethics classes then SRE has no value (other than indoctrination) and should be ditched; if SRE does have value in moral instruction then SRE kids won’t miss out.

So shut the hell up, and stop trying to take away my choices as a parent.

People seem to have always sought meaning, in various ways. One way has been – and is – through religion. Needless to say, I don’t believe that’s the only, the best, or even a good way of finding meaning and purpose, but millions upon millions appear to.

I thought what I might do today is present summaries of a couple of different notions of how we came to be and what that says about our purpose, and the meaning of our lives. In the interest of not being a dick, I shall present them without comment (save for the inevitable difference in tone that will no doubt creep into each summary).

First:

In the beginning there was a magic all-powerful and all-knowing dude who created the entire universe – including you and me – from nothing. Despite being unimaginably powerful and removed from us by a gulf more vast than separates us from single-celled organisms, this being for some reason needs and demands your worship and love, and if he doesn’t get it, will cast you into an eternity of dreadful torment when you die. The purpose of your life then is explicitly to worship and glorify this being; everything you do should be in his name and for his glory.

Second:

You and I are star-stuff made flesh. In Carl Sagan’s words: “… a way for the universe to look at itself”. We are the results of billions of years of chance, combining elements forged in stars and supernovae, come together briefly to make you, me, everyone we love (and everyone we waste time hating). We are here in this configuration for about 0.00058% of the time the universe has existed. So far. Then the star-stuff that makes us will return to the universe to form part of someone or something else. Our very transience is what leads to our purpose: to make it count. The meaning of our lives is no more nor less than what we make it during our fraction of a cosmic second on this earth.