For an Atheist, I Have a Lot of Spiritual Crises

I'm not a very good atheist. Ha.

No, actually, I'm a great atheist. A lot of people assume that atheism excludes any belief in the possibility of god, but that's not atheism, that irrationalism. We don't really know such things, not even you believers out there who "know" there's a god - now, I'm not trying to offend you, I'm only stating the obvious: you don't know there's a god, you feel there's a god, and that is perfectly legitimate and even, I would say, vital. Denying such things when you feel they're real and just and true would also be irrational. You would not make a very good atheist.

Atheism is about accepting the unknown for the remarkable reality that it is. Even if I can't define it.

In my kitchen I have a ceiling fan with two long, dangly pulls, one for the fan and one for the light. I have a habit, every time I walk by them, to flick one and send it spinning around the other, wrapping it tighter and tighter until the ends meet and the whole process reverses. This morning I watched them spin and unspin and spin again, twirling around and untwirling, ever slower and ever less violent, until they were finally still.

I knew as I watched that this whole process could be defined mathematically; defined by virtue of physics and taking in to consideration weight and length and shape and air pressure and so on. Such a simple, normally unremarkable thing. Completely complicated.

Nothing in this world happens without a reason. Situations unfold according to the natural laws they've been given, and I don't just mean twirling dangly-bobs, I mean you and me, our meeting and our interactions and what we say and why we say it. Why we feel what we do; why we do what we do: it all unfolds naturally and gracefully. It really couldn't have happened otherwise.

There is a rhyme and reason to this universe, I mean. I know this. I don't have to guess; I don't have to pretend; I don't have to have faith or even just hope.

I know.