Elijah

A serendipitous encounter led me to making a new friend, who thought I was Christian because my name is Elijah. 

Our conversation had cruised through all sorts of topics and eventually turned to the fact that it was Palm Sunday. I confessed to her that I didn’t know much about Palm Sunday. I understood that it marked the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, and that the “palm” bit came from the crowd’s celebratory waving of palm branches, but beyond that was entirely ignorant. 

Talking more about the tradition, she said, “I bet you know more than me,” and asked whether my family celebrated the occasion. This perplexed me. After a bit of dancing around each others’ confusion, she revealed that she had assumed my parents wouldn’t be naming me a biblical name if they weren’t Christian. 

Ah. 

A perfectly understandable assumption, of course. I wasn’t offended in the least, although my instinctive reaction to her mistake did surprise me. I felt nervous. As if my not-being Christian was going to somehow shatter the sense of connectedness we’d felt as new acquaintances. As if I was quite suddenly about to become more alien; less interesting; hollow. I’ve felt this way before.

As a philosopher with specific interest in philosophy of the mind, my research has recently circled around religion, spirituality, meditation, mindfulness, creativity, and psychedelics. The trans-disciplinary web which connects these various areas together has fascinated me for a long time, but only relatively recently have I considered the questions of my own identity with respect to these ideas. 

In recent years I’ve carefully revisited my position on religion, re-examining my initial neutrality–well, to be quite honest, my hostility–toward religious belief and faith at large. I tried to wear the labels of atheist and agnostic, but found both to be unsuitable. Many philosophers before me have shared my frustration. “Atheist” is too rigid; it exudes the same absolute certainty of which most of them ironically criticize religion. “Agnostic” is no better, for it implies that the person finds the likelihood of God existing and not existing to be equal. I’ve been compelled by more nuanced positions like Bertrand Russell’s Teapot, which compares the likelihood of God’s existence to the chance that there exists a china teapot orbiting the sun–the idea being that we can’t rule it out, but it’s very, very unlikely. However, “Teapot-Agnostic” doesn’t feel right, either. “Spiritual” comes close, but carries divine baggage. 

What breaks my heart is that occasionally, when people discover that I’m not religious, there is an assumption that I must not hold any strong beliefs. I wonder if this is a product of the language surrounding secularism. Atheists tend to describe themselves in negative terms (the very word comes from the Greek átheos, meaning “godless”) and agnostics tend to do no better; they’re quickly put on the defensive, or at best in a position to panic and mutter, “No comment”.

But there exists another option. I was reminded today in another conversation of how surveys in Singapore (where I was born and raised) would often ask your religious affiliation, and offer “free thinker” as an option. Upon poking through the history and literature around free-thought, you arrive at the term Humanism.

My intellectual idol, Stephen Fry, is a champion of this philosophy. He aligns it not only with a distrust of orthodoxy, conformity, preachiness and dogma, but with an array of positive beliefs in the enlightenment, science, art, the primacy of the heart, and human dignity. There is no chasm here in which meaning or a life of purpose might be lost. To the contrary, humanists are convinced that a full, ethical, and achieved life of friendship and fulfilment is possible. Fry describes this as “the eternal adventure of trying to discover moral truth in the world.” This perspective simply avoids appeals to authority, revelation and the supernatural. 

As an artist (a filmmaker) and philosopher, the search for meaning is truly all that I could possibly be concerned with. I care deeply about art, history, literature, the hypnotizing wonders of the natural world, and the beautiful patterns which intertwine these things. I’m curious about what it might mean to lead a good life, and I’ve so far tried to follow my instinct that it involves a commitment to open-mindedness, to a balance between personal liberty and social responsibility, and to protecting spaces where disagreement and discussion can thrive. I hope to orient my choices and decisions in life around love, compassion, acceptance, and the seeking-out of new experiences. I believe that the ability to create is the greatest power human beings have. It is, as put by Steven Sondheim in his most beautiful lyric in Sunday in the Park with George, the feeling of:

“Finishing a hat… Starting on a hat… Finishing a hat... Look, I made a hat... Where there never was a hat.”

I’m happy that my parents chose the name Eli because they liked the sound of it, and even that they thought Elijah seemed like the right “full name” (although the extra syllable has been reserved only for paperwork or the occasional scolding).

I’m proudly a humanist, but quite happy to be mistaken as something else. I may not otherwise have had cause to dive down this particular rabbit-hole.