Existential Angst

This post is about the anxiety of existence. An acquaintance of mine at a message board I go to asked the following questions (reproduced, as is):

Do you think satire was correct that knowledge of ones own freedom brings despair?
I ask because from his perspective (atheist existentilism) we define ourselves by what limitations we put on ourselves in the face of absolute freedom. when you deconverted did it feel as if you lost a part of yourself because you lost some of the self imposed limitations that serving God requires?

I responded there, but I thought that a more complete answer would make a good post here.

The paragraph above is a mix of issues, questions, and assumptions each of which I intend to address. The first is how did I feel when I deconverted. Didn't I feel a loss? The second is: Shouldn't I have felt a loss? That is, was Sartre correct? (Sartre is what the correspondent meant by “satire”.) Another question: Is there such a thing as “absolute freedom”. And lastly, how do we or should we define ourselves.

Note: I am not an existentialist, so far as I know, and as such I do not intend to speak for that philosophical position.

How did I feel when I deconverted? Relieved. Loss and incompleteness simply weren't among the panoply of feelings I had. In the years leading up to my deconversion, most of my waking moments were consumed with reconciling my beliefs with my perceptions of reality. I had developed quite an extensive theology where I tried to reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of God, the transcendence of God without an attendant arbitrariness, the immanence of God with the personalness of God, etc. Every day was a struggle to pull in a new piece of the puzzle without losing something gained earlier.

Once I realized that I didn't actually believe any of it—that I had neither inductive nor deductive reasons to believe any of the original propositions or my reformulated ones—the the struggle vanished. (Now, I vacillate between finding something else to do and playing with Theology simply because I enjoy it. I must say it is easier to go with inertia.)

This feeling I've experienced I'd say is akin to freedom. But it is different than the sense of the original question. My freedom is a freedom from struggle and other things. It is a freedom from not a freedom to. In that sense, this freedom from cannot bring anxiety. However, the freedom to choose to do something can be overwhelming in the face of too many options. Anyone who has raised children has had an opportunity to see this in a somewhat safe environment. My wife would ask my daughter what she wanted as a snack before bedtime. She'd ask, "Do you want eggs, Cheerios, Cap'n Crunch, toast, apple sauce ..." and the list would go on. My daughter (I'm thinking of when she was about 4) simply could not handle the array of choices. If you said, "Your choices are: Cheerios or Apple sauce or nothing", she'd make a choice almost immediately. Too much freedom creates a deadlock in the brain.

If then there were such a thing as absolute freedom, one can imagine that it would bring a certain sort of paralysis. The question is what would one mean by absolute freedom. It is difficult to know what anyone might mean by that. In debates on the question of Free Will, some will assert that there is no Free Will if we cannot fly unaided simply by willing to do so. I find such requirements unhelpful. I think that if absolute freedom entails the freedom to do impossible things, then it is a useless term in the pursuit of knowledge. All one can do with that requirement is to say, “OK, I agree that that doesn't exist. Can we now discuss something practical?”

Rather than worry about what “absolute freedom” might mean, let me focus on our limitations. By doing so, I think we can agree that we are not unlimited and that those limitations give us sufficient freedom to act—assuming we acknowledge those limitations. In other words, for a philosophical thinker there need not be paralysis.

I contend that my disbelief brought with it a more secure sense of who I am--and the constraints that go with it. I am free to be who I am. I am free to know who I am. But I am not free to be who I am not. For example, I cannot (should not) be an entrepreneur—I simply lack the imagination. I could work for one. I can make things happen. But I can't imagine a product or service that someone needs that doesn't yet exist. To be able to understand who I am is to define who I am. To define is to limit. If I am 6 feet tall, then I am not 7 feet tall. If I am male, I am not female. If I am an atheist, I do not believe in God. If I am human, I cannot fly unaided. What defines me, limits me. Understanding those limitations enables me to act as I can without attempting to act as I cannot.

This I hold is both healthy and in contrast to theism in general and Christianity in particular. In giving up Christianity, I gave up despair of the idea that I had to be something other than what I am—to be "like Jesus". I gave up feeling guilty about not being perfect. The idea of personal perfection in Christianity entails "dying to self", the renunciation of what you truly are. Repentance entails that one thinks one can get rid of flaws simply by pushing them aside.

I am a lazy person. I cannot simply deny this and have the laziness vanish. I must own it. I must acknowledge that I can be active and motivated only when I act in the face of what I am—lazy. I must ask myself, am I not doing X simply because I am giving in to my nature or do I really have a good reason—and does it matter in this case? As a theist, I'd find myself saying "I must not be lazy. Therefore I should X simply to show that I am not lazy; that my sanctification is well under way."

Christianity, for me, was the ultimate slavery of deluding myself and denying myself and a failure to truly grow. There is an inherent dishonesty in it. I lie to myself that I am not the way I am and can be other by saying to a god that I'm sorry. If I truly repent, then sin will leave me—because it isn't really me anyway.

The freedom to be who you are and accept it is achievable for both the atheist and the theist. However, Christianity entails a desire to be other than what you are—a sadness that you are not other than you are; that you are utterly worthless; that you are worthy only of eternal punishment. A theist is free only to the extent he or she denies these premises.

Leaving faith did not cause despair for me. It didn't create an array of options too vast to cope with. Rather it provided a framework for living more realistic than any I had before.

I am free and unparalyzed.