Post-Atheism: A Mechanist's Journey from Christian Materialism to Material Spirituality

by Matt Berry

Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God's integrity instead of one's own. There is a behavioral mechanism which has the Homo sapiens hating precisely that reality which constitutes existence. The otherwise successful wiring of our logical impulses in all distant affairs is made to short-circuit down that thinnest filament of Things-Me. With doctrine such as Proof by Miracle, the short-circuited mind has thus far used the word "spirit" to deny our own mechanical reality. Nonetheless, the exposure of their error does not constitute the possession of our truth. Consider that we "moderns" too have appropriated the word, "materialism" by a short-circuit of our own. The objective handyman imagines he has restored conductivity, when he has only rendered the filament of Things-me too thin for sight, and so takes "spirituality" as an illusion. He will tinker with every machine but his own. It is for him as if there were no such thing as a subjective struggle for science. "Subjectivity" and "Objectivity" are but two manmade labels stuck upon two extremes of a spectrum which is itself an entirely subjective creation. In this sense, it would be more correct to claim an evolving human orientation than a fixed material reality. Have we forgotten that the very existence of "peer review" admits to the behavioral vulnerability of the human subject? When we rely on that groping white cane which we call "the objective method," we also confess to an unavoidably subjective struggle. Truth does not begin with an answer on behalf of which all questions must constantly rearrange themselves. The search for Truth begins with fearless questions.

148 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2001

About the author

Our minds are circumscribed by our immediate reality but we stop short at the thought of it.

(I wrote this in the '90's. I'm flattered that it has spread across the internet as if from Ovid, ... it lives on as a parasite, fat and happy to feed off of such a rich host.)