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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sasha Sagan
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November 24 - November 29, 2020
People once believed with all their hearts that the sun went around the Earth. But believing didn’t make it so. There are certainly things we believe right now that will someday be revealed to be hilariously or abhorrently ignorant. Our understanding changes with new information. Or at least it ought to.
Growing up in our home, there was no conflict between science and spirituality. My parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence, and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent—quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.
For me the biggest drawback to being secular is the lack of a shared culture. I can live without an afterlife, I can live without a god. But not without celebrations, not without community, not without ritual.
Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology.
As I see it, here we are on this rock that orbits a star, in a quiet part of a spiral galaxy somewhere in the great, wide vastness of space and time. On our rock these events, changes, and patterns have an enormous impact on us Earthlings. They are important to us. We have spent a lot of time trying to decode them, to manage our expectations, to predict what’s coming, to grow, to thrive, to survive. No matter when or where on Earth we live, we humans tend to schedule our most important events around the same times. Sure, Christmas and Hanukkah often fall around the same week. But so does the
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Religion, at its best, facilitates empathy, gratitude, and awe. Science, at its best, reveals true grandeur beyond our wildest dreams. My hope is that I can merge these into some new thing that will serve my daughter, my family, and you, dear reader, as we navigate—and celebrate—the mysterious beauty and terror of being alive in our universe.
Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. There is so much change in this universe. So many entrances and exits, and ways to mark them, each one astonishing in its own way. Even if we don’t see birth or life as a miracle in the theological sense, it’s still breathtakingly worthy of celebration.
To say “I don’t believe” in something doesn’t mean that I am certain it doesn’t exist. Just that I have seen no proof that it does, so I am withholding belief. That’s how I think about a lot of elements of religion, like God or an afterlife. And it’s the same way my dad thought about aliens. As he once said, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Even with our species flourishing, the chances of any one of us being born are still remote. Think of all the slight variations in human migration patterns, for example, that could have kept your great-great-grandparents from ever crossing paths. If you have any European ancestry, someone in your lineage had to survive the black death in the fourteenth century, which killed more than half the people on the continent. If you have any Native American heritage, somehow your forebears managed to pass their genes on to you, despite the fact that only 10 or 20 percent survived the microbes and
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The ideas that “everything happens for a reason” or that certain things are “meant to be” are often offered as reassurances. But, to me, they are not as astounding or awe-inspiring as the idea that, in all this chaos, somehow you are you.
Religion isn’t about believing things. . . . It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness. —KAREN ARMSTRONG
The stories of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark were not censored in our house. They were taught. I cherished my wooden toy ark with two of every animal and displayed it prominently. The only difference was that these pillars of civilization were presented as important, influential literature—not history. (My mother would say things like “There is evidence that there was a great flood, but the fossil record contradicts the idea that two of every animal survived and repopulated the planet.”)
It’s the silliness that brings down one’s defenses, that creates the bond, that makes it special, that makes you feel vulnerable.
Religions have a habit of squatting on things which did not originally belong to them. —ALAIN DE BOTTON, Religion for Atheists
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. —CICERO
Why does the provability of something rob us of the thrill of it? Even the coffee Jon brings me every morning feels like sorcery. Something grows in the earth. It’s harvested, roasted, ground, and percolated. I drink it and, like Alice, I am changed. It wakes me up. It gives me strength and speed; superpowers, really.
Once, early in my fascination with death, I came to my parents with a question: “Maruja says when you die you go to heaven and there are angels playing harps and you’re with God. And you guys say it’s like you’re asleep forever with no dreams. Who is right?” My parents, without missing a beat, said in unison, “Nobody knows!” And they didn’t just say it. They announced it like good news, joyful, enthusiastic, beaming. This exchange was revelatory for me. Not because it gave me any clarity on the mystery of death, but because it gave me a window into the nature of life. It taught me that there
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For many, reading passages from their holy text offers daily enlightenment and answers to the endless questions that run through our minds. For us, it was the encyclopedia, atlases, and dictionaries. And like finding a new verse in a sacred book, or reading an old one with fresh eyes, this enriched me emotionally, not just intellectually. Every day I gained a deeper sense of the workings of the world and the universe. Every day I got a little closer to a sense of understanding.
You sometimes hear people say, “Children are born scientists.” This is true in that when we are little we are full of questions and wonder, but there are some significant differences. If little children were really born scientists, they would be better at employing the scientific method.
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. —ALEXANDER POPE
As my dad once said, “If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” I believe our cruelty toward one another, not sex or love of knowledge, is our original sin.
There is nothing more central to science than error correction. Scientists are not infallible. Quite the opposite. The greatest minds in history have often been wrong about lots of stuff. But the defining difference between science and religion is that you’re a better scientist if you take the ideas of the people who came before you, the people whose shoulders you stand on, the people who taught you everything you know—your teachers, your heroes, your mentors—and disprove them. Then you’ve done your job. Doing the same does not make you a better pastor, rabbi, cleric, or monk; upholding
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But that’s the thing about death—it makes you appreciate life. It’s almost impossible to appreciate something without facing its absence. Just as we cannot improve ourselves if we cannot acknowledge where we’ve floundered, and atone.
That is what we’re really celebrating at every quinceañera and bar mitzvah, every Roman Catholic confirmation, every cotillion, every debutante ball, every sweet sixteen. This is about biology, sexual maturity, and the survival of the species. These parties are the community’s wish that their DNA will live on after they are dead.
The ultraviolet radiation we get from the sun releases endorphins in our brains. It’s a real chemical reaction, a scientific connection between our bodies and our closest star. How beautiful is that? How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?
We owe the sun our lives. If worship is, at least in part, about gratitude, about bowing down to the source of our blessings and bounties, then our bright, hot neighbor fits the bill perfectly. And for this reason, a vast array of human belief systems have featured a sun god.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
The war on nuance in our politics and culture tries to oversimplify complicated issues: If you criticize the injustices in your country you must hate the troops! or How can you support that candidate when she’s obviously not perfect? Our fear of complexity, our inability to, as my dad put it, “tolerate ambiguity,” is so often one of our biggest failings.
Questioning something, exploring it, examining it, thinking of ways it might change for the better is a way of loving something.
To the Zoroastrians, Alexander the Great was a devil who executed their priests. In Istanbul there are images honoring Atatürk everywhere, while in Armenia he is a mass murderer. Christopher Columbus has a national holiday in his honor, but for Native Americans he is the source of untold horrors and annihilation.
Somehow we humans got the idea that the best moment to really meditate on an event—a birth, a marriage, a death, a battle, a coronation, an inauguration, anything good, terrible, romantic, auspicious, historic, or otherwise memorable—is when the Earth is back in the same position it was when the thing happened. This is astronomy at work. On anniversaries and birthdays, we are in the same place in relationship to the sun.
Considering all the events and moments that make up a life how could there not be at least some that felt like serendipity? Even if all coincidences are completely unplanned, simply the by-products of statistics—like the proverbial monkey that types Hamlet—that doesn’t have to make them any less exciting. It’s beautiful that our brains have evolved to recognize patterns. It’s one of our greatest strengths. It’s what allows me to communicate ideas to you with these squiggly little symbols you’re looking at right now. It’s what allows us to understand concepts like mathematics and physics, it’s
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The urge to see a pattern is strong, even biological, but I also find pleasure in the idea of a world of total accidents. If these coincidences are orchestrated by some supernatural force larger than the human brain, well, then they were inevitable. But if it’s truly random, if it’s the one-in-a-million shot that lands, that is, to me, more special.
There is a direct correlation between science and survival. Medicine is a branch of science. Access to it keeps us alive in situations when we would have otherwise died. Infant mortality is still heartbreakingly high where war or poverty makes medical care scarce. But even the most powerful medieval queen could not have saved a baby in desperate need of antibiotics, an incubator, or emergency surgery in a clean, well-lit operating room. Whatever else may have played a part in our survival, there is no question that Helena and I are the beneficiaries of the scientific method. It’s this
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She smiled warmly. “Your father will be up there watching over you on your special day.” This kind of sentiment makes things more awkward for me. I don’t want to pretend I believe in an afterlife, but I don’t want to be rude or start a philosophical debate.
All our best rituals are a kind of performance about what we need or want most. Sometimes they are so on the nose they barely qualify as art—for example, a kiss at the end of a ceremony to signify the sealing of the union.
Symbolism around marriage is so tightly woven into our lives we don’t even realize it’s there. You both put a metal circle on your fourth finger because of an ancient erroneous belief that there was a special vein in only that finger that led to the heart. And then, when people out in the world see you have this metal circle, they know not to try to have sex with you. In the abstract it sounds bizarre, but it’s a small, elegant way of saying, I have found my true love.
I sat in the grass in front of his headstone and wept. And talked to him. I do this whenever I go there. Not because I think he, or my nearby grandparents, can hear me. I don’t. It’s not for them. It’s for me. It’s a reminder that even though they’re not here anymore, they were once and I still love them.
Instead, most belief systems argue that sex is acceptable when it’s for procreation, not recreation. Would that not be equivalent to only eating for nutrition? Empty calories might be frowned upon if you’re trying to keep trim, but they are rarely considered a sin.
to my astonishment, that there is no scientific proof of a correlation between the phases of the moon and the human female menstrual cycle, even though they are both around twenty-eight days long.
It’s one of the hardest parts of being secular: you have to work to congregate.
Halloween has another element, too. It’s a break from the rules of society. Day in and day out we abide by so many detailed customs and expectations. What we wear, what we say, what we do are dictated, at least in part, by social norms. But on Halloween, we can become another secret self in front of everyone with no consequences. It’s a big loophole, really. Imagine showing up at a bar dressed as a vampire on some random evening in March. But we need the escape. And it must be a very deep need, because throughout history societies have created little valves to release the pressure they create.
What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be . . .
Secular Jew that I am, I would have never dreamed that one of the most profoundly stirring spiritual messages I would ever encounter would be found in a Catholic crypt in Rome. But that was due to my own narrow-mindedness. Each of us, no matter our beliefs or lack thereof, is wrestling with the deep knowledge that whatever comes next, this, what we are experiencing at this moment, will end with total finality. Whether we find nothingness or somethingness, it will be new and different from existence as we know it. For even if you believe in, say, reincarnation, life at another time in another
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Middle-class Americans have access to more food and more varieties of food today than the most powerful rulers of just a few centuries ago. I doubt many would trade a trip to a local grocery store for the menu of a medieval king.
Many religious traditions strongly emphasize charity. This is arguably the very best thing about religion: a kind of social pressure to help others. But there is a secular argument for charitable works as well. If there’s no rhyme or reason to why you grew up with three square meals a day, if there is not a great safety net of justice in the universe, we humans must create one for one another.
People love the feeling of Christmas—the mood, the decor, the music—even if they have no connection with the belief system behind it. We all crave a little good cheer when the nights are long. I once heard a Satanist being interviewed on the news about his desire to have a Satanic symbol in his local town square next to the Nativity scene. The reporter asked him if he celebrates Christmas. He said, “I do, actually. I personally just view it as a time to be with my family.” Even Satanists love Christmas.
I will never tell Helena that a big jolly man is coming down the chimney to eat cookies and leave her gifts. I won’t tell her that her grandpa Carl is watching over her. Or that there is a man who created everything and lives in the sky. But I will also never stop her from choosing her own path. I don’t know who she will be or what she will believe. But it will be up to her. Authority—a parent or a church or a government—cannot enforce belief. Or lack thereof. She will have to be true to herself. Because “the only sin would be to pretend.”
Secular though we are, we read the mourner’s kaddish, the Jewish funeral prayer, at my dad’s grave when we buried him, and twenty years later when we buried Grandpa Harry, just feet away. We did it because we don’t yet have something else to read that both represents our values and lends the gravity of tradition. Maybe by the time I go I can leave my loved ones some list of passages that might better reflect my beliefs.
We pretend these rituals are for our dead, but they are for the living, for us.
