A quick anecdote. Don’t worry, I won’t try to pluralise it and call it “data”.
I don’t really have many early memories. I suppose there are vague impressions of schools I must have been at sometime before I was 7 that still linger in my head, but nothing very concrete, or particularly memorable. But a memory of what might have been my earliest foray into philosophy popped up and prodded me in the brain again recently.
I’ve no idea how young I was, but certainly young. Possibly I was going to Sunday School at that point, and was starting to get my head around the notion of religion. My dad had some kind of book, which set out to answer a handful of simple questions about religion, possibly about the Church of England specifically. It was short, but hit all the basics. Sort of like a precursor to the Alpha Course literature, maybe.
One of the later chapters was titled “What made God?”, and this was the bit I was actually interested in. I remember thinking (at, let’s say, age 5) that this was the thing that most needed to be sorted out, before the whole God business could stop being a rather annoying enigma. I mean, what was this almighty being doing there? Where’d he come from? How had this state of affairs come to be? Surely that was the important bit.
It didn’t have a very good answer. It just sort of waffled a bit and concluded that we don’t really know. I was not happy.
You know, in the re-telling, this sounds rather strange. “What made God?” is a very curious way for a religiously proselytising book to phrase the question. It makes it sound like they’re treating God as if he were some kind of natural phenomenon, an effect whose cause can be determined, perhaps in accordance with some set of universal laws. Which I suppose is how I was imagining the answer would go.
It’s a common theist claim that the Universe’s very existence needs explanation, and that God is the only satisfactory answer. It’s a common atheist rebuttal that this just shifts the problem back a step, and only complicates things further, because now you have another, grander entity whose provenance needs accounting for. The usual theist re-rebuttal involves an attempted explanation of why God is a special case who doesn’t need to have been deliberately created. I don’t recall ever, since that first book, encountering a theistic argument which acknowledges that God’s inception itself is a valid and as yet unanswerable conundrum. They always prefer imagining some sort of loophole.
Which makes me wonder just how distortedly I’m misremembering the whole thing.
I still haven’t found an actual answer to the question. It’s not quite the same question I’d be asking these days, but in practical terms there’s not much difference. It grates less now, though. I remember being quite annoyed at the time. This was the kind of thing people should know, after all.
So, there’s that. I’m hoping to become wordier in future weeks, because I’m going to have a go at The Artist’s Way, a book and course on nurturing creativity. I was inspired to join in with this by Mur Lafferty (who, by the way, is awesome), and was only made slightly wary by her warnings about its spiritual approach. There is an explanation in the preface of the book about what the author does and doesn’t mean by “God”, and how we can choose to interpret the idea of a creative force any way we like, which I imagine I’ll be fine with… but by page 1 of the book proper she’s using phrases like “spiritual chiropractic” which unavoidably make me wince a little. Still, I plough on. Writing more words is never bad.
I keep meaning to end some of my posts with an audience question, to engage people a bit more in whatever I’m rambling about, but too often I forget. So, questions for discussion:
1.) Do you have any childhood memories of early, primitive philosophical thoughts? Did anything about the whole God business not sit right with you from a very early age? Were you dissecting grown-ups’ theological claims before you could tie your own shoes, and do you find that they haven’t come up with anything better in the years since then?
2.) Do you have any techniques that work for you to make creativity happen, in whatever direction you prefer to create things? Have you tried The Artist’s Way, or anything like it?
Age 5? What a late bloomer you were.
At age 4 I asked the same question “who or what made God?” (at Kids Club at the Hope Valley Uniting Church, South Australia) and I was told never to ask that question.
Hence I became an atheist.
It’s a common anecdote I believe, and probably a reason I look at adults who haven’t yet worked out the difference between objective and subjective truth with a mixture of contempt and pity. Not even smarter than a kindergartener.
I’ve been an athiest as long as I can remember, and my earliest memories are from when I was around three years old. I was more or less expelled from a Catholic-run primary school for questioning the Virgin Birth, asking if anyone bothered to check that Jesus was *actually* dead on the cross and eventually asking ‘but how did God actually get here?’
My parents were told that the school ‘no longer has the resources to teach such an intelligent child’, and I was promptly shipped off to public school where religion might as well not have existed for all the kids cared about it.
My parents gave up arguing religion with me a long time ago when they realised it’s easier to just wait until I leave home.
In terms of creativity, I just let it happen. It’s harder to stop myself from wandering off into imagination-land than it is to get started.
However, I tend to get ideas piling up and getting in the way of each other. The easiest way to deal with it is to just get them down on paper and out of your head, no matter how stupid they seem.
Keep some dry-erase markers in the shower and a notepad and pen in the toilet and next to your bed as well. It’s frustrating to get a good idea in the shower and then lose it before you can write it down. Some of the best ideas come when you’re on the verge of sleep, or just as you wake up, but they tend to disappear pretty fast so you have to jot them down quickly.
Wandering off to imagination-land is usually straight-forward enough, but it’s organising it into more than an idle cluster of daydreams and ideas that I guess is where most people tend to get stuck. Getting things down on paper is always good – I think the Morning Pages are intended to help get over any block you might have against scribbling down anything, no matter how primitive or disordered or inartistic, like you say, just getting it all out of your head and into the world where you can do something with it. It’s bizarre how difficult that can be to stick to.
I’m not sure I was ever a believer, though my Mum was and we kids went to Sunday school until I was around ten and we moved to a place with no church.
I recall specifically at age 11 asking “the question”. MY teacher was prone to invoking religion and was explaining how a blackboard duster (remember those?) didn’t just happen because wood and felt got together by accident.
“Someone had to create it”, he explained. “Things don’t just exist, they are made. That’s how we know God made the Earth and everything on it. It can’t just exist.”
“Who made God?”, I naturally asked.
“Oh, he just always existed”.
My doubts were cemented at that point by someone trying to instill belief into us.
The idea of being dissatisfied with the lack of this particular answer from a very early age seems a pretty common thing – I guess my main difference from a lot of atheist origin stories is that I didn’t get put off the whole idea for many more years. It seemed a bit iffy, perhaps, but mostly it just bugged me that I’d apparently reached the end of the road for where “Why?” could take me. They might not know their stuff as well as I’d hoped, but I didn’t conclude that all this religion stuff was clearly nonsense as a result.
I have the kind of opposite experience with God. From my early childhood I always sensed a divine presence sort of permeating myself and everything around me, and it was often adults’ explanations of God that got in the way of my acceptance/understanding of him/her/it/whatever.
We don’t have answers that are ever going to make sense. As I’ve said before, we proclaim the mystery of faith, not the facts of certitude. I don’t care if that makes me stupid in the eyes of someone else; I’ve come too far from being told that I am nothing by someone else to ever accept it from someone again, and I’m not hurting anyone by believing what I believe. So there. :-P
But I’m never going to tell you (or anyone else) to stop asking questions. Please do. We’re in this together, regardless of what we believe, and I know that community and respect for our desire for understanding are the ways in which our lives are enriched, and for Christians, the way we experience God outside of our perfectly constructed theological boxes.
I can remember giving dad several random thigns one christmas, i’m not sure which, between 94-96 though i imagine, where i wrote down my main philosophy at the time that people died, went up to heaven, hanged around for a bit, perhaps got bored, and felt like coming back down again, i have no idea if i mentioned god in it at all, i might have done, but i get the feeling i didn’t,
i don’t think the whole burn in hell thing never got to me, i think i was too hippy even then that people should have pain for years/ions depending on what they do here, although i believed in spirits/souls then,
i’ve had a look at the artists way, but not done anything with it properly, i can remember flicking through and laughing when it gave things that were often associated with artists such as lazy, drug addict, alcoholic, stupid etc, as from being on dA i know that it’s more likely to be the opposite if anything,
as to creativity, always have pen and paper with you (+ in my case camera if its somewhere other than uni) i think the artists way also says just typing whatever it is comes to mind, just writing all thoughts, straight down, no stops, forgetting all punctuation and the like. I tend to find that one quite useful, as you can get the pangs of idea that way, sometimes anyway,
When I was young, my parents (who were not particularly religious) sent me to Sunday bible classes on the notion that that was the “normal” thing to do. I think that they just wanted me out of their hair for a bit.
Anyway, I don’t really remember much of what I learned at those classes (I am not very knowledgeable of the Bible at all), but I do remember that 2 things bothered me:
1) Why are we reading bits and pieces from each chapter instead of reading a whole chapter through? Why are we jumping from a paragraph in this chapter, to another paragraph in an earlier chapter?
2) Wait, what does Jesus have to do with Easter? He was crucified then and came back to life? How does that relate to the Easter Bunny? Did Jesus come back as the Bunny? That would make sense. (I was being serious.)
There’s no real time I can point to when I became an atheist, but I did develop a negative view of the Christian God early in grade school (and refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because of the “under God” part, although I still stood). I held a vague belief in a higher being, or at least a view that included the balance of karma or whatnot, for a long time. It has only been in recent years that I have thought through some of the philosophical problems of religion.
As for creativity, I can only say that mine comes in spurts and usually in relation to working toward goals that I happen to get really interested in. Even then, if I don’t write my ideas down and keep working with them, my creativity fizzles out and I feel no longer motivated to attain my goal/result. So, my main strategy is to constantly work at something in order to keep my creativity from petering out (which it, unfortunately, did. Many, many times :-P ).
I was in Catholic schools from K-12, but for the academics, not the religious aspects. I never paid much attention, but after a few days in kindergarten I came home and asked my father about god, and mentioned that at school they said god was my father, so I was confused: did I have two fathers? My father responded by telling me that if god paid the rent or school tuition or grocery bill, or if god told me bed time stories or brushed my hair or went to school plays, then I was free to call him father. But until such a time, there was one father in the house, and it was a human :)
This made comete sense to me, although the nuns were shocked at my new line of questioning.
I also had a big issue with the whole animals not having souls. It made no sense that some of god’s creatures went to heaven and some didn’t. It seemed like a shoddy way to treat his creations: “I’ll make you and let you be used as food, but you don’t go to heaven.” I could almost, in my five year old mind, hear a “neaner neaner neaner”.
The final straw was in first grade, when I was sixish. The visiting priest mentioned free will and why we are all sinners, and then, a few sentences later said that god knew everything. My little hand shot into the air, and I asked how we could have free will if god already knew what we were going to do.
Yes, I was captain of my debate team in HS, and I was just as difficult in my layer years, albeit with more forethought and intention, at this point I was genuinely confused.
Creativity: if I’m stuck with one thing I go do something else. I find semi-mindless but useful activities really help: doing dishes by hand is level o e, but knitting or sewing is a process of creation, and that can jump-start ideas. Talking to others is also good for me. But what always works, without fail, is the stomach-wringing panic of last-minute work! I do adore a firm deadline! Somehow I can bang out whatever I need when I’m up against one, while without one I always find something else to do.
Even knitting, getting things ready for Xmas forces my hand(s) into fast action, despite the months of knowing all this has to be done!
Two excellent questions. Worth at least a couple of pages each, probably.
None of these – as a young child I was completely brainwashed. I was raised in a religious family and for me the whole matter was a fait accompli. You went to church, you believed in God. And, quite honestly, I liked church quite a lot – there were many nice people, there was music, I liked the wonderful Edmund Blacket-designed building that we attended. My mother was a very gentle, lovely religious woman who taught me and my siblings music and, fatally for my belief in supernatural beings, encouraged us to think for ourselves. So when I was a teenager the whole thing started to feel rather fishy to me – we were taught that the church was built on the rock of Peter’s faith and yet that rock started taking on a semblance of sand if you examined it too much. It struck me at around the age of fifteen that most of the people in the church were afraid of looking too carefully at some of the basic tenets of faith and I started to wonder why. Then the thing that crystallized it for me was that I started reading about Ancient Egypt. Here was a civilization that had had religion for much longer than Christianity was around, and we considered it profoundly in error. Why? It seemed to me that with no empirical yardstick for measuring faith (because you couldn’t have such a thing by definition) then the Ancient Egyptian’s beliefs were as valid as, or possibly even more valid, than Christianity. It was a kind of anti-epiphany, in effect. From that point it was easy to see how the whole thing worked – once you give all religions equal validity (as you must) you start to see the similarities in the kinds of assumptions they must all make. I stopped believing in God. Even so, it was a hard decision to call myself an out-and-out atheist for many years. I clung to the ‘agnostic’ label until, finally, probably in my thirties, I came to the conclusion that God was a lot like Santa Claus and I was really only in it for the presents.
So. Atheist. And proud of it. The hardest choice of all to make, because it offers no comfort. But why do we believe we are due comfort?
I sat with my late wife as she died six years ago yesterday, and if I ever needed proof there was no sense, no God, no meaning – there it was. A bright, beautiful, happy, joyful light snuffed out by cold implacable, cruel, painful cancer. If God did that, S/He is cynically evil, and no friend of mine.
To put some credentials up front: I am a film composer and sound designer by profession and I also write and create digital image work. I’m have been moderately successful in all three fields. I work on big mainstream films (I designed the Dreamworks remake of ‘The Ring’ and Jane Campion’s ‘In the Cut’), as well as small Australian productions. I’ve had several exhibitions of my artwork and it has featured on a number of books, including ‘Ascendancies’ by Bruce Sterling. I make my living working creatively.
I am skeptical of books that promise the kinds of things that ‘The Artist’s Way’ do. I’ve only scanned the site you linked to, but it has the same kind of worrying language that ‘self-help’ and ‘inspirational’ books/sites use. I bridle at the use of the word ‘spiritual’ when it comes to creativity, and even the term ‘higher creativity’, whatever that means (how does anyone rank creativity for Pete’s sake?)
While I think there are things you can do to help facilitate a creative method, personally I think it comes down to one thing – lots of hard work. I don’t think there is necessarily any ‘spiritual’ aspect to creativity, although I concede that creativity doesn’t exclude that possibility. But mostly, it’s not about getting in touch with the muse, as much as it is just working your arse off. Ask any artist worth their salt – that’s what they’ll tell you.
My estimation is that if you have something to say, an enquiring mind, and are willing to put in time to conquer the technical requirements, then no artistic or creative pursuit is beyond your scope.
My main enemy is laziness and distraction. That’s why I’ll never be a great artist. But no book is going to tell you those secrets – you don’t make money that way.
My personal recommendation on how to get your creative juices flowing is to find stuff written by people whose creative genius you admire and take a lot of notes. Not stuff about ‘how they got creative’ but just about how they view the world, how they interact with others, about their passions and their motivations. And then take some long walks and think. And then look at their work some more.
Mostly, that.
Wow, this whole “asking people for their opinions on stuff” really seems to work. I’ll have to try it more often.
I’m not at all sure that atheism offers no comfort, as such. You just might have to look in less obvious places to find it. It doesn’t offer some kind of cosmic plan suggesting that it’s all going to be alright because some grand authority figure is taking care of everything… but then, the idea that there is no grand authority figure looking on and doing nothing while the people you love die might be rather comforting in itself, given the evil and sadistic implications of the alternative.
I suppose it’s less easy to be comforted without some of religion’s obvious answers… but this is how the world is, so I guess we’ll just have to work with that.
I agree with you about being wary of self-help lingo, but so far the Artist’s Way is looking like it’s based mostly in practicality. One of the fundamental themes is the Morning Pages – you just write three pages longhand, ideally first thing, of literally anything, even if it’s just “I have no idea what to write about” over and over again – and this just seems to be a helpful idea without any necessary spiritual element to it. If “writer’s block” even exists, the only way to get over it is to write through it, and the Morning Pages is an exercise in silencing your inner critic and just letting words happen. Which for me is kind of a big deal. I’m also lazy and get distracted, sure, but so often I struggle to get words out even when I’m feeling energised and focused. It’s always going to take a lot of hard work to create anything substantial, but there are ways of making the hard work a bit less tortuous.
This might be a bit all over the place, but I’m getting some practice in just letting the words happen and not editing myself while I type, because if I try and do both at once then nothing ever makes it past my internal filter because I convince myself it sounds crap. And I’m sure that fear is justified only, like, 80% of the time. 85% tops.
•Comfort: I don’t think it’s such bad thing to let go of the illusion of comfort anyway. In my life it has turned my gaze toward the great friendships I have, the beauty of the here & now, the awesome spectacle of the universe and the magnificent (if totally implacable) machinery of life. As I’ve said in some of my blog writings, being a rationalist and an atheist has made my life more textured and colourful than it ever was before. There is something banal about thinking God fashioned everything (like nothing more than a Cosmic Toymaker), but something profound in the realisation that it fashioned itself.
•Creativity: May I suggest that you read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ if you haven’t. It’s one of the best guides that I’ve read to just getting stuff done. He talks about the ‘internal filter’ problem and has useful suggestions (the main one of which as you say is just to write through it – his suggestion for writing novels is to write your novel all the way through, four or five straight hours of writing every day, and then re-write it before showing it to anyone else. For me, this is almost impossible – I simply can’t put things to paper (or computer) without making them feel elegant (or at least as elegant as I’m able). Plainly, though, if you want to be a novelist this is something you must conquer. And it certainly doesn’t affect your potential if you are clunky, inelegant, verbose, grammatically incompetent and lame – just look at Dan Brown.
If you’re interested in writing for the screen, I also found William Goldman’s writing inspiring – ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’ is magnificent.
And may I say from my observation of Cubik’s Rube that your writing is very good. Comparable with the very best in the blogosphere anyway, for what that’s worth. And your ideas are good, and you have humour. I wouldn’t come back otherwise. So your problem is one of yardage, not quality or skill. And that’s just plain ol’ hard yakka, as we say down here.
I love On Writing. It’s one of my favorite books.
I remember having a religion class in Primary school where we were told about someone in the Old Testament worshipping (I think) Baal, who was “a false God”.
At this point it hadn’t yet occured to me to question the entire God concept (God as the creator of the Universe and the accompanying logical problems with that idea neve really came up), but I remember very clearly wondering how they knew the Christian God was real and this one wasn’t. Why couldn’t Baal be the real God, or one of many? I think it was the first time it hit home just how much of religion was resting on people’s assumptions.
I also remember being at Mass and becoming intensely aware that there was absolutely no evidence for anything I was being told, particularly the idea that an afterlife exists. It felt like the whole system of belief has suddenly disintegrated. I pushed it out of my mind, but the feeling returned often when I was at Mass, which is somewhat ironic I guess.
As for creativity, I draw and there’s nothing I can really do to foster it. Sometimes I can draw pages and pages in a singly day, sometimes I can barely hold a pencil. Practising every day helps, but I’ve come to accept that the creative impulse isn’t something I can control.
I haven’t read any of The Artist’s Way beyond the description on the back, but frankly it seemed like a load of bullshit.