Dear Bleaders,

Hecht here. I’m new in these parts so will start with a few introductory introductions. To wit, I call anyone reading any blog I write my “bleader” for the obvious wordscrunch and also because I like reminding us that we are mortal. Also while often “breeder” means nesting heterosexual, blood is something many artists symbolically gush on the blank canvas of existence. So that’s you. I’m Jennifer. Jennifer Michael Hecht.

I used to blog a lot, over on the Best American Poetry site, and on my own weird little blog, “Dear Fonzie” so named because I admire both Arthur Schopenhauer and Arthur Fonzarelli and of the two of them I thought I could count on the Fonz to be a better listener. It’s hard to blog after the first thrill has worn off, so you really have to think about these things. What, I wondered, might set me in the mood for the world enough to chatter at her, and what I came to was the leathered arms of a bygone age, the curling scent of pomade, a little motorcycle love. I wrote odd things on that blog; posted curious photographs; indulged my predilection for funky diction. Then I decided to act my rum’s proof, not my shoe size, and start a serious blog which I called what I’ve long been calling my brand of radicalism: Poetic Atheism. But I only posted a few times before a penchant for not-posting overtook me and I took up with an orange ukulele. Youtube is teaching me how to play it. Up, down, chuck, up, down, chuck.

So what nut would guess, on the basis of this monument to entropy that is my blogging history, that I should sign on when asked to blog here, on the frontier, in the Secular Outpost? None. But I figured I’d say Yes now and think later on the principle that autumn demands action.

Then I read this memoir-essay by Jennifer Fulwiler on her trip from true teapot-mocking catholic-minded atheist to actual big-C Catholic believer and I wanted to say a few words and thought to myself: well now, self, why not sit yourself down and try to stay down till you’ve written something? And then, praise the baby jesus, I did. The trouble is, can I keep going? The temptation is to wander off to the kitchen or go play with the kids. But lookit, I have a full cup of coffee, no little sheep are bleating maa, so stay the hell with it. Right.

Here’s how JF opens her piece:

So yeah. I know, there’s a lot to say back to this, and who has the time, right? But the universe is nearly 14 billion years old and most people around here live to around eighty years. I’m just saying. But to get back to her.

She then marries a man who believes in God, an American Protestant, has a baby, and goes into a dark depression, specifically because she now has to cope with the *eventual* death of this beautiful child, as well as her own; then one morning she is looking at the baby and feels something a little transcendent, a little blip of an intimation of joy, and she follows it all the way to risk-my-life-to-avoid-contraception Catholicism.

I guess I read this essay in the first place because I have a ton of Facebonk friends who are atheists, because when you write a couple of books on atheism, atheists friend you on Facebonk, and so some of them posted links to this; which is why also you’ll see if you look that there are a ton of comments by atheists.

First thing I wanted to say was how a lot of the commenters said really fine sophisticated nuanced things in response. There were some Catholic defenders of the essay, with whom I shared some sympathy at times, but who seemed to be much more drawn to respond to the nasty comments than to the many subtle and considered responses (who had the benefit of being representatives of what seems to everyone to be the common sense truth, that thing about nature and atoms and no God).

Next I just wanted to say that unlike what might be called more materialist-minded atheists, I give a great deal of attention to questions like the ones JF raises above.

I believe the following formulation can be powerful help in sorting the problem: The feeling of meaning is sufficient to the definition of meaning.

I also do not believe that people have to make their own meaning. Meaning is a fierce presence. It comes from the fact of each other; it is human. You wouldn’t try to understand the meaning of a mole rat by holding one blind furry beast to the light, because they live in packs and are as organized as ants or the PTA. This is true even if you have never joined anything like the PTA. You are an ant. You are one of us. As I’ve said elsewhere, you do violent harm to the community if you kill yourself, there are tons of stats to prove it. I don’t want to stray to far from my topic here, but I believe that this insight constitutes a moral injunction, which is to say I have come up with a secular argument against suicide.

A hundred years ago Durkheim said the feeling we get in religious crowds, that we say is God, is in fact a powerful something outside ourselves, but it is the community, not something supernatural, that gives us these real experiences of the natural transcendent.

In all my books, but perhaps especially Doubt: A History, and The Happiness Myth, I talk about the blip of transcendent joy to which we humans ar

e occasionally privy, and how we might follow it without losing too much common sense.

The thin tendrils of the joyous tone that sometimes rumbles through the body is real. In common speech we speak of depression and don’t imagine demons, but we don’t talk about sudden, unbidden moments of transcendence that come perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. Poets do, though, without leaping to God, sometimes explicitly saying that they themselves felt like a divine being, and without inferring anything from it about some hidden other world that has furniture and mothers and special hats for all the big boys. I kid. But seriously? Let’s listen to Yeats for a sec: