The following is a letter composed to my younger self as I was ten or so years ago, in my late twenties. I was at that time, and had been for a while, a militant atheist and a wastrel squandering my potential. This letter’s aggressive tone should be considered in light of it being written to myself at a younger age, not necessarily to be directed at an entire demographic. -MJW

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My dear young man,

You say that despite your spirited defense of your philosophy on life, you are by no means a poster child for secular humanism. I know what you mean by this, and in a sense it is true: your life is not an attractive one that others might wish to emulate. But in another sense, I find the declaration to be false and would regard you as the living and breathing logical outcome of your ideas. But I’ll leave this aside for the moment and treat with your assertion that you are not a good example of how one should live as an atheist. You have in your mind as the paragon of life and thought, Christopher Hitchens, of blessed memory. He was always living fast, always traveling, always writing, always in front of a camera, moving with grace between fabulous social events and the life of the mind. He was brilliant and glamorous. He also drank and smoked incessantly, which cut his life short at 62. (These hobbies you and I still both indulge in – perhaps some cessation is in order?) Given this, and given what you know of his character on and off the screen and page, how cantankerous, nasty, and arrogant he was, can we really say he was a man at peace with himself? But never mind that – that involves making a window into his soul. He could be described as living a happy and fulfilled life, but he was blessed with fame, wealth, and indomitable energy and industry. You have none of these things. You even lack nearly all the gumption and zest that your atheist peers practice to make lives for themselves. You have only the unflinching zeal of your opinions and life is passing you by. This is harsh of me to say, but can you really dispute me?

You say also that despite the absence of ultimate meaning or cosmic purpose, human beings can still find or create meaning in contexts limited to the good of our species, our society, our individual selves. This may be the case for those who actively pursue such, but who can say how they maintain their resolve in the face of unavoidable extinction or the myriad pain that racks them in countless ways? What meaning do they find in their suffering, loss, failure, disappointment, and boredom? Given the awareness of their inevitable death and utter non-remembrance by posterity, how do they uphold their joy in love, family, parenthood, friendship, art, political involvement, learning, discovery, nature, and career when all of these will be taken from them in death or often before their demise, chucked into the grave for which they themselves are bound?

I don’t quite know the answer to this question and, again, I can’t make windows into other people’s souls. But at a guess, I would imagine that most atheists keep two sets of books. One contains their stiff-upper-lip resignation in gazing into the void, while the other contains all the hopes, joys, aspirations, and loves which are magically sealed and preserved for some kind of mysterious ultimacy; that perhaps, deep down, there is some cosmic meaning after all – at least when it’s convenient to have such. This, of course, would be inconsistency. Or perhaps many just refuse to think about it at all. I couldn’t say, I can only guess.

But I don’t need to guess with you, my lad. You stare into the abyss with determination and claim great courage in doing so. But that millionth bong rip you just took gives the lie to any pretended fortitude on your part. Your life is one of constant, crushing despair, vacant of even the slightest spasm of attempting to live life to the fullest or to create meaning in the world. You sleep twelve hours a day, you spend almost all your waking hours drunk or high or in striving to possess the means for these activities. You want to be a writer – you even call yourself one – but you don’t write or work the soil of lived experience which makes literature grow and blossom. You hardly read but dare to call yourself a man of letters. You chase after meaningless sex (whose only reward is being able to boast of your tally of partners) and masturbate incessantly when deprived of someone to lust with. You are unhygienic, slovenly, bitter, opinionated, selfish, arrogant, resentful, and weak. I want to focus on that last adjective. You dream but make no effort, you indulge without constraint, you flee sacrifice and pain as if from a predator, and wallow in self-pity when they’re unavoidable. You shirk all responsibility, you take on no travail, you will not better yourself.

But at least it can be said that you live your life consistent with your beliefs, as I mentioned above. If the cosmos is so un-ordered as you believe it to be, if it is as parched of meaning as a desert is of water, why shouldn’t you live your days in smothering desolation punctuated only by the cheap pursuits of the cheapest sensuality, the which never bring you any real satisfaction? The horror of the reality that you profess is beyond, far beyond your ability to endure, so you conceal it from your awareness through pleasures of the flesh, but never being able to fully outrun it, you dwell in despair.

And so you should: “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?” These words of Søren Kierkegaard put it as bluntly as it can be put and no evasions in response to it are acceptable. Let us not waste time with protests about how offensive such a challenge put to you is. It doesn’t matter what value or importance you assign to something or what greater cause you attach yourself to; the universe moved with vertiginous meaninglessness long before what you cherish came into being, and that same universe will spin and howl without purpose long after your darlings crumble into dust. Appealing to human beings to create their own meaning in a world bereft of it is diminishing the answering of the Big Questions to a matter of personal preference; your invented meaning has no more basis or validity than anyone else’s and even when you can agree with others about meaning, are you not, by your own standards, suffering from a consensual delusion? If there is no purpose to the world or to human life, playing pretend about it will not allow us to have our cake and eat it, too. You might as well pick your nose and give each booger a name, hoping they’ll develop personalities as you flick them into the trash and wish them well on their journey. Either the universe has purpose and human life has meaning, or they do not. You cannot split the difference.

And because everything you value has none to speak of, you are perpetually despondent as you can make no foundation for your values, nothing to press down on as you attempt to raise yourself out of depression and shallow hedonism to make something of yourself during your time on earth. Nor are you capable in the slightest of withstanding or making sense of suffering, which is the only guarantee in life. No, pain decidedly demonstrates the flimsiness of your philosophy as well as of your character; at the first sting you shrink into the cave of narcotic stupor and sleep the day away. Pain for you is the enemy, and not an enemy to be faced and combatted, but one to flee from in cowardice. It isn’t just that you cannot suffer nobly; you cannot even suffer at all. You float in an intergalactic void, your only companion being a sack of weed.

Despite my disagreement and despite what I see as their inconsistency, when it comes to atheists who do make room somehow for meaning in a meaningless world, I can admire their heroism and I can applaud their moral merit and accomplishment. Perhaps consistency in one’s beliefs is not as important as what the practice of said beliefs leads to. When an atheist is succeeding in life, or volunteering at a soup kitchen, or giving generously to their friends, or faithfully loving their partner of ten years, it might be best not to dig too deeply into their ideology but only to approve of the fruit that their lives bear. But Michael, my lad, your worldview is all too consistent, and you languish in the misery that is your due. I do not think it will be much consolation to you, this intellectual honesty. There are some remedies to your plight, one in particular that I would recommend. But your outlook on life is not exactly friendly to the Galilean carpenter, nor the heavy cross He offers us to bear. Perhaps in time you may change your mind; indeed, I’m hopeful for it. Until then, I am tremendously sorrowful for your lot in life, and as always remain

Your solicitous elder,

-Michael