The Gods and Angels of Atheism

Having steeped myself in the writings and worldviews of the first century CE for much of the last week, an odd fragment that stuck in my head, one that came from the peculiarity of dipping my consciousness into a radically polytheistic pre-modern context.

Ancient Rome was a great heaping smorgasbord of gods and godlings, of peculiar beliefs from far off lands and odd mystery cults whose initiation rituals made joining the Masons look like applying for a library card.  It's worldview was a riot of magical beings and angelic influences, of spirits of the wood and stone and sky.  The world was rich with mystery.

Because my brain is peculiarly wired, I found myself taking that and playing it off of the secular assumptions of twentieth-century atheism about the nature of our cosmos.  There is no God, and there are no gods, and there are no spiritual beings, atheism asserts, with the certainty of empirical knowledge.

And yet, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson were to sit down with Cicero to describe what is known and expected about the nature of things, I wonder how that ancient would hear what he had to say.  Particularly when it comes to the heavens, and the gods.

Because in the heavens, most likely, there are living beings strange to us.  The cosmos is simply too vast to deny this as a probability.  Some may be simpler creatures, barely recognizable as life.  But some may have powers and capacities so beyond our own as to invoke Clarke's Third Law.  In fact, given the scope and scale of our time and space, the existence of such beings is not just possible, but likely.

This is why folks like Stephen Hawking would like us to maybe stop announcing our presence quite so loudly.  Who knows what beings lurk in the endless fastness?

Explaining what science knows and believes about existence to Cicero would just get a nod of agreement.  Oh, sure, he'd be a bit stunned at the size of things, but human beings adapt quickly.  I'm not sure the scientific view of the nature of existence would be quite as different from his worldview as one might like to think.  Beings more advanced than we?  Creatures inhabiting the heavens, with powers so beyond our own as to be indistinguishable from magic? 

Well, of course, the ancients would have thought.  You're describing the gods.

Funny, how little we humans have changed.

A Secular Pantheon

This last week, the family trundled off to our nearest sprawling Mega Mall for a viewing of the latest and greatest wham-bang early summer blockbuster:  The Avengers.   It was, well, it was what it was.  The kids loved it, of course.   But I while I enjoyed it a great deal, I was aware of its purpose.   It was there to entertain.   Period.

And entertain it did.  It was remarkably well crafted, a testament to the strength of Joss Whedon's direction and screenwriting.  Whedon knows how to create authentically resonant interpersonal exchanges, how to subtly interweave an ensemble cast to spin out a sense of the genuine tension between human beings.  Or superhuman beings, for that matter.   Couple that with a highly competent and well-cast group of interesting characters and a big wahonkus budget, and you've got a shoo-in.

Here you have a film that's mostly explosions followed by fighting followed by more explosions.  Here you have a film where an astonishingly primitive alien "army" appears, one that looks like it wouldn't have posed a challenge to the New York National Guard had they actually ever freakin' showed up.   Yeah, I know, there was that one Humvee, but really?

Yet thanks to Whedon and the cast, it managed not to feel stupid.

Afterwards, though, I found myself musing on how little of the film stuck with me.  It was just fluff, sweet and tasty as cotton candy, or perhaps cotton candy creatively sprinkled through with sour patch morsels and poprocks.  Mmmmm.   Visually interesting, sure.  Enjoyable?  Absolutely.   But ultimately?  Nothing of substance.

We can read substance in, of course, making this some sort of metaphor for teamwork and difference and how we need to learn to be together if we're ever going to defeat totally incompetent alien armies, but whatever "there" was "there" solely served the purpose of being the spoonful of interpersonal authenticity that made the 45 bucks we spent on tickets go down smoothly.

In reflecting on the film further, though, I did find one interesting thread.  This was a story of the Gods, twenty-first century style.  Each of the characters was an archetype of sorts, in much the same way that the gods of the ancient pantheons were archetypes.  You have the Divine Embodiment of Dynamic Capitalism.  You have the God of Honorable Patriotism.  You have the God of Anger.  You have...um...the actual God of Thunder.   That one always carries over across cultures, as does the God of Chaos and Mischief.

Oh, and Scarlett Johannsen, who may well be her very own archetype.  Or perhaps that's the Goddess of Empow'rd Mercenary WymmnHood.

Wait.  I'm missing one.  Um.  Hmmm.  Oh yeah.  There was that guy with a bow, too.  Perhaps the God of the Hunt, or the God of Accuracy in All Things Including Typing?

In a post polytheistic culture, that yearning to tell stories in which the archetypal powers that frame our existence take on form is still present.  We know they're not real, but that doesn't matter.  We still want to hear the stories.  Once upon a time, we'd gather around the hearth and hear those tales spun by a raconteur, wild stories of battles and intrigue and love and revenge in the heavens as the wind and rain blew fierce outside.

Now, we just see it on the big screen, with bellies full of double butter popcorn, our seats rumbling with the thumping of subwoofer thunder.