Mixed Feelings: Will Atheists Hate Ehrenreich's Memoir?

This morning, I happened across an odd sight, several of what I will call the asshole type of blog atheists mocking another atheist who I would not describe that way, Barbara Ehrenreich.   It seems that in her early 70s, Ehrenreich has written a book about her life and experience, a memoir.

"It seems very self-involved," she says by phone from her home in Arlington, Va. "I have anxiety about it." That anxiety is heightened at the moment because her new book, "Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything" (Twelve: 240 pp., $26), is as personal a piece of writing as she has ever done, built around a journal from her teenage years that traces both a spiritual quest and a youthful mystical experience, each having to do with "an impression of intention" — the sense that there is some underlying shape or meaning to the universe.

I haven't read the book and probably won't, but if that description is accurate,  Ehrenreich has cunningly pushed a lot of hot buttons, writing a book that is likely to catch fire in the near apostasy of one of the more prominent atheists with more credibility than most of the big names and little minds who regularly get asked on Fresh Air to peddle bilge.   Ehrenreich is a skilled and experienced journalist who has had best sellers and she is cagey enough to know the sales potential of doing that.   She's no one's fool on that count.

Of course she has not given up her atheism but she, as a PhD scientist as well as an ideological and, at times, obnoxious atheist, certainly realizes anything that smacks of teleology, of purposefulness in the universe will piss off a lot of atheists just as her frontier bar room savant style atheism will piss off the pious.   AND DON'T FORGET THAT EYE CATCHING TITLE.

"[W]hat do you do with something like this — an experience so anomalous, so disconnected from the normal life you share with other people," Ehrenreich asks in the foreword to the book, "that you can't even figure out how to talk about it?" Such a conundrum drives "Living With a Wild God," which is part personal history and part spiritual inquiry.

That is hardly the only thing that earned her the tongue lashing from those atheist assholes.  She is clearly out to provoke them as much as she has religious people in the past:

And yet, she says simply of the revelation or epiphany she underwent as a high school student, "I couldn't put it out of my life." In the book, she explains in more detail: "[T]he world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with 'the All,' as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it."
If such an account seems more than a little amorphous — how can it not? — that's one of the difficulties Ehrenreich faced in "Living With a Wild God." "How do you write about something you can't communicate?" she asks, voice rising as if to echo the impossibility of the task. "I felt both uplifted and shattered. A few months later, I concluded it had been a bout of mental illness. It was the only rational explanation. But I kept asking questions in the journal: 'How do I get back to that level of awareness?' Reality seemed so mundane and deadly afterward."

A famous atheist pushing woo, no?  And transcendent experience?  Worrying that her experience was a sign of mental illness?  I would note, that is a price for being that style of atheist when you have an experience that doesn't go along with the ideological program, religious folks would have an easier time rolling with it.

The frequently encountered atheist canard that religious people merely believe what they were taught to believe by their religious parents is never applied by atheists to the atheism of  birthright atheists.  That Ehrenreich is one has been something she has crowed about for decades.

Part of the disconnect, Ehrenreich suggests, involved her atheism, which remains a proud piece of her heritage. "I was born to atheism," she writes, "and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people: We did not believe, and what this meant, when I started on my path of metaphysical questioning, was that there were no ready answers at hand."

I would expect that one of the signs of a free thinking teenage and adult is the questioning of your parents and grandparents conventions and beliefs but atheists don't seem to do that as often as religious people seem to.

While I greatly admired several of Ehrenreich's books, especially her most well know, Nickled and Dimed (which, ironically, I would guess is largely read by people in church book groups, these days)  my feelings about her and her writing are mixed.  I admire her journalism, I don't find her especially honest outside of it. And I think she can be entirely blind to the faults of her atheist ideology, she greatly admired the entirely unadmirable Madelyn Murray O'Hair, mistaking that abusive, vicious, money grubbing, degenerate, capitalist huckster for some kind of leftist worthy of admiration.   I think perhaps that is something that was reinforced by the myopic understanding of science that scientists often have.

Such a distinction is important, for "Living With a Wild God" is not a book of faith. Educated as a scientist, trained as a reporter, Ehrenreich does not believe in what she cannot see. As such, she turns to philosophy, chemistry and physics; she traces the influence of her home life, which was dysfunctional (both parents were alcoholics) but encouraged asking questions and thinking for oneself.

In order to believe in large parts of chemistry, physics, biology, philosophy, you have to believe in what you can't see, no one has seen gravity, no one understands it, no one has seen a molecular bond.  Not to mention the invisibility of much of philosophy.   If that's your claim, that you only believe what you can see,  if that's what you practice, you can't believe much of science that is obviously true.  But materialists are really no better at looking, hard, at what it is they claim and what it is they believe.  And they refuse to acknowledge how much of what they hold is really the result of their conformity to their ideology and its coercive restrictions. I am pretty sure Ehrenreich knows those are there and I have every faith that Ehrenreich,  the journalist, would seem to deny that atheism is thoroughly dogmatic while she is making use of the dogmatism that the blog boys angrily accusing her of violating,  accusing her of believing in "woo",  of breaking the thought code and ban on expressing such ideas, breaking them in order to generate a hot topic, best seller.   Have I said that she's no fool when it comes to selling a book?