The Double Refuge 🦋 Butterflies Landing
Sitting on Fences
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While theism and atheism are relatively clear, agnosticism lies between the two and is trickier to get at. The notion of a double refugee is yet murkier. It’s as new a term as agnostic was when Huxley coined it in 1869. People are justified in asking of both agnostics and double refugees: Can’t they just make up their minds? Aren’t they merely sitting on the fence? Aren’t they just stuck in a default uncertainty that makes them afraid to commit? Doesn’t a person have to either believe or not believe?
I’d answer these questions with an emphatic No.
Well, No, and Yes. But mainly No. By which I mean Yes they sit on the fence, and Yes they embrace a default uncertainty. But No, they aren’t this way because they aren’t capable of making up their minds. They have made up their minds, for the moment at least: doubt is the default position. And the moment is the sum of what’s come before, and will change at a moment’s notice. Open agnostics and open theists believe that to stop doubting is to ignore the fact that certainty doesn’t exist. One might think it odd that theists are put in the same (double) category as open theists. Yet it isn’t so strange when one thinks about it in terms of lived experience. Double refugees feel a moving of spirit, but what is this spirit? They see the beauty of the universe and they feel the love of others, but how exactly is God working here? Their doubt is simply an admission that they sense the operation of spirit, but they can’t say how God is working in relation to this spirit. They may sense the Holy Spirit but they don’t really have the faintest clue about how It works, where It started, or where It ends.
Finally, No, sitting on the fence doesn’t come from a fear of commitment. What is there to fear in commitment? Rather, it comes from the fact that there are at least two options — materialism or spirituality, atheism or theism, existentialism or essentialism — neither of which appears to cancel out the other, at least not from an open agnostic or an open religious point of view. How much of matter is there in front of our eyes, and how much of spirit? Who really knows?
The material world is solidly in front of our faces, beneath our noses, bumping into our shins. The spiritual world on the other hand is nowhere and yet everywhere — at least according to most of humanity. No amount of physical proof can make it vanish because it inhabits the emptiness of space. It exists in the ‘formless form’ of a dimension beyond space and time. Excluding one of these two options (physical or metaphysical), on the strength or allure of the other, isn’t as much a logical imperative as it is a practical or ideological choice. Double refugees simply don’t make this choice. They choose instead what they see as the obvious default: uncertainty.
Instead of deciding on either reason or religion, double refugees accept reason and remain open to all forms of religion. They argue that time on the fence gives a clear view, and allows for evaluation and experimentation. Open theists spend time on the fence yet spend more time in the realms of theism. They stress, yet refuse to turn into doctrine, what they don’t see, which is uncertain in its nature and impossible to measure or define. As a result, open theists are also in a constant process of evaluation and experimentation. It’s just that this process isn’t an aggravated one; it isn’t torture going from one to the next. Rather, it’s a release of the tension between the two.
Open theism is a refuge from the emptiness of positivism, and open agnosticism is a refuge from the rigidity of dogma. Zhuangzi writes about the pivot of the Dao, which allows us to shift from one point of view to another. In this case, the double refuge is a well-oiled pivot, which allows us to smoothly go from what many see as the crippling duality of spirit and matter, or as a chasm so deep that it’s necessary to push off from one side and leap to the next.
Not making up their minds allows double refugees to take a good look at the fence on which they sit. They examine how the divide is constructed, how it snakes this way and that, how it connects to other fences, where the gaps are, and where it leads.
Double refugees often wonder if the fence itself is a metaphorical fallacy, its logic at once decisive and divisive. Or perhaps that’s just a limit placed on the possibilities of fences. Perhaps the fence can run down an embankment, twist sideways, and stick out into a river. Perhaps the refugee sits on a dock instead. The dock lifts up into the air. It turns into a walking bridge and reaches the other side. The refugee stops half-way, to watch the river below. He hovers above it at a single point in space. He watches as the river turns into a symbol of ever-changing possibilities.
Or the refugee runs along the horizontal fence like a river runs to the sea. It’s here that the reality of constant change flows into the symbolic notion of the infinite sea. The sea isn’t in fact infinite, yet one might say that it’s a more powerful symbol than space because it’s more tangible. Unlike endless outer space, the sea is right there, and one could swim into it. And swimming in it, as any sailor knows, is a dangerous business. Little wonder it’s seen as the greatest symbol of Nature’s power. It can dissolve your identity and batter your bones like little slats of wood.
Double refugees know that we don’t know what lies beyond our world of sea, land, and air. They see the ocean as a stand-in metaphor, knowing that we have deep sea divers who can tell us what is down there, deep in the dark depths. The more challenging they imagine the ocean journey to be, the more they understand how challenging our situation in the universe is. We can use the word challenging, yet it is also terrifying, awesome, and not for the faint of heart. No one, however wise, really knows what’s out there. We may find giant sea beasts at the bottom of the ocean, yet these aren’t likely to change our view of the universe. However frightening such sea-beasts might be, they aren’t as frightening as the beasts one can imagine in the depths of outer space.
Written in 1931, Lovecraft’s At the Hills of Madness gets at the awe and terror of such a cosmic possibility. The ancient forces and beasts he conjures are blood curdling. Such dark scenarios are perhaps to be expected historically, since they are (even more than Poe’s stories) logical extensions of late 19th century Naturalism, in which the universe is a cold and calculating beast. Here’s another reason why open theism is a refuge: not only is it a refuge from dark forces that haunt our dreams (the most uncontrollable realm of our sub-conscious id); it’s also a counter to dark cosmic visions. If there are monsters and inter-dimensional forces in the depths of outer space, there’s also God, angels, and other positive forces in the same depths. If humans ever make it beyond their own nuclear bombs and into the 22nd century, this theological refuge may become even more helpful.
In writing about the double refuge I hope to dispel the notion that doubters merely sit on the fence. They do sit on the fence, watching what’s going on in the wheat field on one side and in the barnyard on the other. Yet they also walk along the fence, from farm to city, tip-toeing over the barbed wire of a warehouse gate, and kicking the sturdy boards of a gated community. They grab an apple in a sacred grove, jump down onto the pavement, sit in a café, and open their laptop. They live in the world of doubt, and cross into the world of belief. They aren’t just trying on new clothes; they’re entering into a new way of seeing and being. The open agnostic enters momentarily; the open theist sets up a base camp.
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