A Still, Small Voice That Whispers

I was reading the Dawkster's antitheistic opus recently, and one thing that jumped out at me was a section on a female atheist comedian. Dawkins quotes - with approval - her talking of how she used to be a Christian but found the mental problems piling up and up, until one day a voice broke into her mind saying "there's no God." It kept saying this insistently and she started to listen, and the voice invited her to (so to speak) put on "atheist spectacles" and see the world through them and see if it made sense. She did, and the rest was history.

Now you'd think - and this was my first reaction - that a Christian, with sufficient engagement with her faith to feel oppressed by its problems and felt contradictions (I've felt it at times), would upon hearing a voice in her head saying "there is no God" become somewhat wary. I mean, if the voice were correct, how come she had voices in her head in the first place? Contrarily, if the voice were wrong, there's an easy explanation - the Christian scheme includes an Enemy of Souls who has neither our well-being nor our enlightenment at heart. Would not reason suggest a certain suspicion of inner voices? ("I don't trust my inner voices/Inner voices come and go," as Cohen almost sang.)

But I've come across the same "voice" myself in the past; and calling it a "voice" is somewhat metaphorical (it's certainly not audible, although its urgings sometimes take the form of concrete words). It has a little of its own character; I talk of "urgings," but it's certainly not an urge on the level of hunger; more like the inner voice that tells one, at times of misery, "you're a useless piece of shit", and then watches as you try to beef up your self-esteem, then waits till something punctures your self-esteem, then says "told you so!" (I had a run-in with this voice some years back and am still averse to the idea of self-esteem and self-affirmation as a result - they're worse than useless sometimes.) Maybe it's a fractured part of the subconscious; maybe the Inner Atheist and the Inner Despiser are lobbyists for tendencies in the mind towards certain conclusions. Maybe they're both emissaries of external forces who do not mean me well. I don't know.

My own Inner Atheist managed to convince me for about 20 or 30 minutes a few years back, at a moment when God and duty and the moral structure of life and, well, everything seemed very burdensome and choking. (I think it was my own fault, as I have found by experience that sin clouds the mind in such ways, particularly as regards the things of God, and from what I remember I had set myself up for a scrambled intellect by polluting my soul in some way.) (I had also been shocked into a brief moment of atheism by a stupendously boring church service, some years previously. That, however, lasted merely a moment.) So I gave in and put on the atheist glasses for a while, and the world looked qualitatively different - not more or less beautiful, but beautiful in a different way: bright, itself, fresh, no hidden meaning, just there. (The kind of sensibility one sometimes gets from Warren Ellis comics.) But I still had loyalty to the old way of looking at things, and had spent too long in the grooves of theistic thought not to at least ask questions, so I began to query the Inner Atheist about his ability to explain things - the existence of the world, miracles, etc. (Naturally I had to do the thinking myself; he could only point to things I'd thought of or directions to think in.) Possibly my inner atheist was a defective model, because when convincing answers were not available off-hand (and who has the answers all the time?) he couldn't take it at all - he got very quickly frustrated and was reduced to saying, "Shut up! Shut up! Don't ask such stupid questions! Look! Beautiful world! Nice trees!" At which point I said "enough of this, at least I got to ask difficult questions as a theist," and returned to God to make my apologies.

(Similar interrogatory tactics worked well on my Inner Despiser. "OK, fine, I'm a useless piece of shit. What are the practical ramifications of this?" And from there it was almost a rout - suicide was out, as a matter of loyalty to God; it was also clear that God can use the most useless tools for His purposes, so I could not rule out my life ever being of any benefit to anyone again; so I submitted my useless and shitty self to the service of God, and decided just to keep myself in quarantine and do as little damage to anyone as possible and just get on with life, for such was the approach that reason seemed to recommend. From there on it was improvement all the way.)

(If my Inner Despiser and Inner Atheist had tag-teamed me, I were in sore straits...)