Why Believe in God — Part 2

 

They called, they call her still, a philosopher. 

“Alone”

by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been 

As others were—I have not seen 

As others saw—I could not bring 

My passions from a common spring— 

From the same source I have not taken 

My sorrow—I could not awaken 

My heart to joy at the same tone— 

And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— 

Then—in my childhood—in the dawn 

Of a most stormy life—was drawn 

From ev’ry depth of good and ill 

The mystery which binds me still— 

From the torrent, or the fountain— 

From the red cliff of the mountain— 

From the sun that ’round me roll’d 

In its autumn tint of gold— 

From the lightning in the sky 

As it pass’d me flying by— 

From the thunder, and the storm— 

And the cloud that took the form 

(When the rest of Heaven was blue) 

Of a demon in my view—

It was Poe who was the philosopher. A genuine mystic. Rand was just a bright but dreary didact. Most importantly, she was an atheist, hammered into unbelief by the Soviet system she grew up in.

She was never a philosopher. She never accepted the consequences of her unbelief.

She preached egoism, selfishness. Brilliant as she was, she never understood that if there is no God, there is no reason to be moral in any sense we would recognize.

I had go-rounds with two young men, thousands of words worth each, who were so smart they were atheists. One professed to know exactly when a fetus was a baby, some four months in. TA DA.

 

He took my scorn as a proof of my dementia.

He laughed at me. He condescended to me. He wrote often about Dawkins’s Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it were an accurate summation of Christianity. He didn’t realize he had made himself God, which is the inevitable consequence of atheism. You are God now. Because you’re the smartest one.

I outgrew Rand before I reached twenty. I knew I wasn’t God. It took me longer to realize that Edgar Allan Poe was far and away the greatest American writer of all time. He was both a mystic and a scientist, to which I could relate, and he gave rise quite directly to — how to say it, Modern Poetry — as great French poets saw in Poe a new life of words that led to what became the Symbolist movement, gorgeousness on top of gorgeousness. The greatest of French poets, Mallarmé, translated all of Poe’s poems, quite beautifully. Greatness. But Poe, almost as a sideline, also invented the genres of horror, science fiction, and mystery novels. There would never have been a Sherlock Holmes without Auguste Dupin before him.

Where everything has gone wrong. Even conservatives have become atheists, or at least apologetic about their religious faith. Thing is, if you’re an atheist, there’s nothing it’s really wrong to do. 

END OF PART 2