A stumbling manifesto of sorts

Skin hunger: that’s  a phrase for me, something that encompasses so much of what I am thinking and feeling and dreaming about at the moment. The hunger for touch, for human contact, for the physical experience of the world. Even now, as an adult, I am so much the little boy lost in his head, instead of living embodied in the world.

A weird name, though, for a blog that has, at its core, this fact: I am godless. And yet not really that weird at all.

Let me explain, if I can.

I have no god-belief. My atheism is really that simple. I am not an atheist as a result of some long, intellectual journey — though there has been one, and hopefully will be one for my whole life. Rationally, I hold that the belief in God makes little or no sense; that it does not accord with what we know of the universe; that the specific religions of the world are clearly wrong, and in often ugly, dangerous ways. But that doesn’t really matter, because even if intellectually I thought the God hypothesis had some merit, I come to this: I simply do not believe. I put it once, in my earlier attempt at an atheist blog, Atheist A-Go-Go, that I don’t hear the voice in my head, don’t feel the presence. I. Just. Don’t. Feel. It. I know there are people who do, who feel this God thing, and I don’t get it. It’s alien territory to me. My brain just doesn’t work that way.

So don’t expect much in the way of a defense of atheism. To me, it would be like defending my dislike of Cilantro. I just don’t like cilantro, and nothing you can say is going to change that.

Rather, what I want to explore is this — the consequences of not believing. The social consequences, the intellectual consequences, and, above all, the personal consequences. Which brings us to skin hunger, and the little boy lost in his head, and the man who still flinches at human touch and struggles to  embrace physical experience. My worldview is that of modern atheism and humanism, embracing the scientific method of skeptical inqury, materialism, naturalism. This body sitting at this computer is me. It is not a flesh puppet being controlled by some ghost in the machine, the “real” me encased in a temporary bubble of atoms. The bubble  is me. The physical is what is. The mind is part of the physical.

Yet I’m at war with the physical, with my body. Which is funny, really, except for when it’s just plain sad.

I’m more than a little tired of it. I’m tired of this life, tired of the way I’m dealing with it. I want to radically reconfigure it, embrace a new way. I want to break out of the bonds placed on me by the Cartesian duality of our culture, out of the bonds that I have forged myself, out of the bonds forged by my experience. I want to face the wonderful, glorious consequence of the godless universe: that we are here, part of the whole;  completely, gloriously physical. I want to feed the skin hunger, because the hunger says that I am here, now, a temporary conglomeration of atoms experiencing the Cosmos.

So I will explore the consequences of my godlessness, and attempt to integrate the lessons into my life, and hopefully, as Ray Bradbury delightfully put it, step on the landmine that is me and explode all over the place. Explode like a supernova that in its destructiveness brings creation. I hope you will join me and share your wisdom and thoughts.

A few notes on Gregory in Cyberspace: feel free to hook up with me on Facebook or Myspace. You can also find me on Atheist Nexus. You can also follow me on Twitter. I also have a Livejournal, pouk’s pinfold.