On being an atheist diagnosed with MS

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/may/03/atheist-diagnosed-ms-peter-thompson

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It was pretty well exactly at this time last year, in the middle of writing the sixth of my columns on Marx for Comment is free that I had to take a quick break and go and get the results of an MRI scan from the doctor. Thinking it would just show that the prolapsed disc that I had to have removed 20 years ago was giving me some problems, I was actually left floundering when the doctor read the report, handed it over to me and explained that in fact I had multiple sclerosis. All of those weird symptoms that I had put down to stress, overwork, RSI, the prolapsed disc and all sorts of other things suddenly fell into place. But at the same time everything else fell out of place. Having read more times than I care to remember the cliches about people being poleaxed or speechless it was now my turn to stay silent.

I sat in the car outside and cried. I mean, I had always known that I was going to die, but now I knew I was going to die, and there is a real difference between those two things. Two short words from the doctor turned the theory into reality and I went through several of the stages of grief within the space of about 10 minutes: shock, disbelief, anger, despair, resolve. But like the MS (so far) I seem to have had a rather mild version of grief. If people have been discussing recently whether a true Christian can get depressed then I think for me the same question applies to a true atheist. After all, what is there to get depressed about? Rather than ask "why me?" the real question is, well, why not me? Death has to be put into its philosophical context and for me that starts with Heidegger's Sum Moribundus (being towards death): I die therefore I am. The only certainty in life is death. Sod taxes, they can be avoided, death can't.

Also, there is no anger because I do not have any sense of having been selected for this. Life is a series of contingent events thrown at us and out of which we have to make a convincing narrative for ourselves as individuals and collectively. This narrative is what I call a "metaphysics of contingency" and it is at the root not just of religious thinking, but also of all the ways in which we try to create meaning within a meaningless and non-directed existence. Religion, culture, politics, theology, philosophy in all its wonderful forms is, when it comes down to it, nothing more than a rage against death. As Nietzsche points out, we are nothing but clever animals who think they have invented knowledge. One day, billions of years hence, the sun will expand and "the clever animals will have to die". When I occasionally visit a religious service, what always strikes me is the vehemence of the rage against this recognition of entropy and death, the hope in the light of salvation.

For an atheist and a happy and optimistic nihilist like me, who doesn't mind that there is no point to any of this, that it just is, something like this just lines up in the queue with all of the other contingent events that confront us. For me it is the absence of salvation that is our great hope, because it is the absence that creates the salvation and makes me realise that it is down to us to find it, just as it is the very non-existence of God that forces us to invent him. Maybe Ernst Bloch and Jürgen Moltmann were right when they said that only an atheist can be a good Christian and only a Christian can be a good atheist.

One year on there is hope – that most tenacious and essential of all emotions – in that I have not had any relapses, am not having any treatment and have improved my lifestyle, which actually makes me feel much better than I have done for many years. It is thought that within 10 to 15 years science will have found a stem cell cure for multiple sclerosis and, of course I hang on to that hope too. Science is not my god, but it may well be my salvation. And I have gone back to expecting to live for ever, which I will of course, even if that is only another few decades.

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