Countdown to Halloween: Lovecraft and the Parody of Religion

H.P. Lovecraft was a lifelong resident and antiquarian from Providence, Rhode Island, who supported himself by writing the most vivid star-flung nightmare fantasies of the early 20th century. His shadow over the field of horror entertainment since his death in 1937 is unparalleled and unmistakable. To say something is Lovecraftian is to intimate its awesome alien strangeness, as in, "The early scenes of Ridley Scott's Alien are truly Lovecraftian."

In Lovecraft's tales, gone were the dank castles of Count Dracula, the Gothic laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, the cross and the silver bullet to destroy the beast, the pure of heart and the Lord's Prayer. He wrote for the new scientific age of Darwin, Einstein, and Freud, when our fears were no longer blasphemous monsters of superstitious Old World folklore, but of the vastness of the universe and humanity’s lowly place within it; terrors not of the soul, but of the mind.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927

Lovecraft's infamous Great Old Ones are not, as some have insisted, simply evil alien creatures, as Arkham House founder August Derleth posited and promulgated in his own stories; no, they represent the inability of humans to comprehend anything outside their own earth-bound experience. From deep space and other dimensions, these beings are not the saucer-eyed, woman-hungry Martians of science fiction; these entities are vast, incorporeal, protean, inconceivable. Degenerate cults worship them as gods, and Lovecraft at once parodies and mocks notions of religion, spirituality, and transcendent knowledge.

An atheist who, as he said, "hated and despised religion," Lovecraft saw no real qualitative difference between, say, "Shub Nigurath, the Goat with a Thousand Young" or "Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth," and "Transubstantion of the Eucharist" or "There is no God but God." The dread Necronomicon is their bible; the acolyte's cry of "Iä! Iä!" is Cthulhu speak for "Hallelujah!"

"They worshiped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."

"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927

The final lines of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (used so well in Stuart Gordon's film Dagon) can be seen as a nightmarish twist on the Lord's Prayer: "And in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever." Compare: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen."

"Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it."

"The Shadow out of Time," 1935

Third time 'round: assumptions about atheists

Atheists can’t prove there is no god
Of course not; negatives are not proven. But the existence of any kind of creator deity is ruled out more and more, made less and less probable, as evidence accrues for natural processes such as evolution, plate tectonics and the big bang. These scientific theories do not disprove the existence of a deity; they are an explanation that does not require one. Yawn-inducing stoner conundrums like "Well, what came before the big bang?" and "If man came from monkeys why are there still monkeys?" are not the atheist's problem; one can easily consult a science book for these answers. Whether one still believes in a god after that—Well, that's the real trick, isn’t it?

Atheists are arrogant
Again, this has no bearing on the existence of a god. But I find it more than a little ironic that theists who believe the entire universe and everything in it was created solely for the outcome of their own existence to then accuse an atheist of being arrogant. Now, this can be true; nobody likes a smartmouth, as I’m sure your mother told you. Sometimes atheists or even believers of another faith can unfairly malign some theists or offer glib criticisms of faith; atheists hold no monopoly on good manners. But anyone who’s actually seen/heard Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins—two critics of faith who are often branded as “arrogant”—take religious beliefs to task knows they are the very picture of civility and polite debate. It just seems that theists just don’t like a flat-out rejection of their beliefs delivered in calm, reasoned, and rational terms.

Atheism leads to nihilism
Again, if atheism leads to nihilism, so be it; atheism is a position about reality, not a prescription on how to live. Personally, I think theists are the nihilists: for them, without a deity, nothing means anything. They cannot imagine how to make sense of a cosmos without some sort of supernatural agent at work. Beyond their god is the great yawning abyss. Take away that god, and they shudder to think... In defiance of that oblivion we should find our common humanity,whether theist or atheist. But if theists can’t figure out that genocide or rape or lying are wrong on their own and need a trans-temporal everywhere-and-nowhere eternal invisible entity (and yet strangely confined to a Middle Eastern locale roughly the size of, what, New Jersey?) to tell them so, well, that says more about their moral compass than the atheist’s.

Assumptions about atheists debunked redux

Atheists say there is no god
As rhetorical shorthand, yes. Technically, atheists don’t like to say “There is no god” because then we are making a positive claim about reality. Some theists like to quote the bible, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no god.’” I like to follow it up with “And the wise man says it to the world.” I didn’t come up with that, but I think it’s clever in a bumper sticker sort of way. The point is, we believe none of what theists say about god or religion. We definitely think each and every religion is absolutely wrong about reality and about human nature and life and the earth and the universe and how it all came to be, and that if there is a deity, it is absolutely nothing like what any religion has ever claimed it was.

Atheists want to take god/religion out of public life
This one is actually true to an extent. Atheists and secularists reject the encroachment upon civic life by religion, outside the church and the home. Say all you want about god(s) in your home or place of worship, but schools, government buildings, the military and such, those are off-limits for theistic beliefs (if propounded by figures of authority). Atheists are secularists and feel civic life must be neutral on religion, neither for nor against--as of course do many theists. One can be both a religious believer and a secularist. That's called being an American.

Atheists have assumptions
No, atheists have conclusions. Some theists accuse atheists of assuming something called “naturalistic materialism” is true, and basing our beliefs on that. “Naturalistic materialism” or “methodological naturalism” is how science goes about figuring out stuff works. It has no need of the “supernatural” to conduct its experiments; indeed assuming there is a supernatural world would gum up the workings of the scientific method that gives us stuff which everybody, including creationists, likes, such as vaccines and airplanes and heart transplants and insulin shots. It is an attempt to understand the natural world. The atheist sees that there is simply no evidence in that natural world that reveals any type of deity, and has come to the conclusion one, or many, or an infinite amount, do not exist.

Atheists have killed more people than the religious
Certainly totalitarian regimes have killed millions in the 20^th century, more than the Inquisition, say. But if Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor had had access to machine guns, gas ovens and the like, you can bet he’d have been using them. Leaders drunk on power and believing themselves invincible can be found throughout history, secular and religious alike. But even besides that, even if atheists killed more people than anyone ever, that would not be one bit of evidence for or against the existence of a god. Atheism isn't necessarily about what's good for society; it's simply a lack of belief in theism.

Some assumptions about atheism... debunked

As a regular reader of atheist blogs and articles, I've come across my share of objections to atheism by theists. These are a few of the most common arguments, with my short rebuttals.

Atheism is a faith/religion
The only time theists like to engage in irony is when they want to damn atheists for having faith. Never mind theists think faith is, like, the best thing ever! It’s funny and bad when atheists have it. No, I get it: they want us to get grumpy when they turn the tables on us. We proclaim we have no faith but then the sneaky theist declares, “But you have the most faith of all!” It misunderstands the meaning of the word faith, which is believing in things for which there is no evidence. Atheists lack faith, lack belief. It’s tiresome and obvious and a weak rhetorical trick.

Atheism has priests/orthodoxy
You know, Darwin, Sagan, Dawkins, Shelley, Rand, Hume, Russell, etc. To varying degrees these people have influenced atheist thought but they in no way define atheism. No one need feel ashamed by disagreeing or arguing with any of these folks. We are not told from birth that we must heed their every word.

Atheists’ morals are personal preference/opinion
Someone whose morals are “personal preference” or “opinion” and do not stem from cooperation and empathy already has a name, and it’s not “atheist.” It's sociopath. Atheists get their morality the same place everyone else does: from deep within our mammalian, and before that, reptilian, brains. We are learning more and more about the origins of morality in which field? That’s right: neuroscience. Not theology. I guess a theist could argue that those “hard-wired” moral impulses are planted there by a god, but that just pushes the question back: where did this god get its morals?

Atheists think humans/reality “merely” atoms and chemicals
We are still atoms and chemicals even if there is a god. Notice the weasel word “merely” (other theist weasel words are “just,” “only,” “but”). Reducing everything to atoms and chemicals means, from what I gather, that there is no intrinsic worth to anything. I fail to see how this follows. Indeed, there could be a god and we could still be worth nothing. One must accept many, many tenets of faith—such as a god created us with a purpose in mind, that we somehow know this because god told us somehow, that we can trust this god when it says it is good, that this purpose is worthwhile—before one can declare that without god, there is no meaning, there are only chemicals and atoms. Well, guess what? There are only chemicals and atoms. Not merely, but wonderfully.

Don't worry, I've got more to come.

The faithiest faith of all? No faith!

What is someone like me supposed to do with Mitt Romney’s speech on Thursday night? I couldn't care less about his Mormonism, which is often criticized as a cult. As far as I'm concerned, cult + hundreds of years = religion. Mormonism's tenets are just as inscrutably ridiculous as any other faith's. I'm more concerned about how he decries the “religion of secularism." If he is preaching religious tolerance, then why should he single out this particular one? This is disingenuousness of the first degree: to call “secularism” a religion is to mock it. So now he’s mocking a religion? Or is he trying to hoist the “secularists” (as if one couldn’t be devout and secular at once) by their own petard, by taking an ironic swipe at their beliefs, which they think are without faith? And how can a philosophy of government—that it should hold no faith above any other, and should be neutral and indeed, incurious in matters of religion—be called “religious”? Is neutrality about religion a religion now? Religion is about the sacred and the divine and the spiritual, of something above and beyond the material world, and a human relationship with that world. So I guess a worldview that doesn’t take those things into account is, then… uh, religious? Fucking hell. This way to the rabbit hole, right?
It’s the old canard of “Atheism is a religion too!” that gets bandied about all too regularly. “It takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe in God!” This is even the title of a recent book of popular Christian apologetics. So, what, then by that logic, an atheist is a better person? Or, wait, no, it’s one of the few times these folks engage in irony. They understand atheists don’t want to be pegged as having faith, but ah-ha! They have the most faith of all! This rhetorical device is to get the secularists and the atheists and the agnostics to be seen as just another religious worldview which the government can’t promote, and thus, the folks who use this trope can sneak in their religious worldview. Right? “If the government doesn’t actively say there’s a god, then they’re saying there’s no god, and saying there’s no god is atheism, and atheism is a religion, and the government is promoting it!” "Your faith of no faith is the faithiest faith of all!" "Because you need faith to not have any faith at all." And, of course, bald is a hair color. Pretty sneaky, sis.

Or something like that. A few choice quotes:

“Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” I don't even know what to say to this. Anyone? Tell it to the Taliban.

“It's important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions.” Guess where those moral convictions came from? A group of bipedal primates that roamed the African savanna ages before anyone ever heard of this “god” you keep speaking of.

“But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God.” Sure believers can acknowledge their god. But you cannot make me bow to it, nor make me obey it, nor prevent me from questioning it. You cannot use your religious liberty to deny me my non-religious liberty. Not even when your religion demands it. Sorry.

“We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word.” So, Mitt, ready to cut up the New Testament like Thomas Jefferson did? Or write a screed against all religions, like Thomas Paine did? Hmm. Deist much, Romney? Didn’t think so.

“Infinitely worse is the other extreme, the creed of conversion by conquest: violent jihad, murder as martyrdom, killing Christians, Jews, and Muslims with equal indifference.” Irony alert! No mention of Christians, Jews, or Muslims killing “pagans” and “infidels.” Religious folks are always victims. Except when they’re not victims, then they’re victims. Are you beginning to see how it works?

Poor victims, forced to accuse girl of being a witch.

“And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.” Notice that God did not found the nation His own damn self. Apparently, He can fire up the Big Bang, but founding a mere country on this glorified hunk of rock we call earth, that’s a little above His pay grade. Just goes to show: anything God can do for people, people can simply do for themselves.

Sweet. Jesus. Fucking. Christ. Romney, you have proven to be a master of rhetorical skill, by giving a self-refuting speech filled with half-truths and diversionary tactics. There wasn’t even a snowball’s chance in hell of me voting for you anyway, but Christ Almighty, you got it down. You nailed it. See you in Hell.

Superstition -free!

The Raleigh News and Observer printed my letter! Honestly, this was on my to-do list last year. Done and done. Except, of course, not done; indeed, only the beginning.

Letter to the Raleigh News & Observer

My letter to the News & Observer after reading this article by LA Times journalist William Lobdell.

"In his article 'Faith Found, and Lost,' journalist William Lobdell is being overly generous to those faithful who willfully deny reality. Faith is no gift, and for many people, losing faith is no dark night of the soul. If anything, the awakening of reason is more what Carl Sagan termed a candle in the dark. Mr. Lobdell should be thankful he can now see through the darkness of religion, faith, and spirituality, and concentrate on the positive aspects of living a life free of superstition, credulity and delusion. One need not defer to the supernatural for meaning or celebration. The fact that we are alive due to natural processes and not jealous, vengeful, petty deities (whose monstrous spokespeople prey on the innocent and the infirm) is truly the only 'miracle' worth celebrating."

So, if it gets printed, how soon before the burning crosses turn up on my lawn? Or, wait, that's the KKK--what do folks do to atheists? Throw burning copies of Origin of Species through your window?