The greatest challenge in life is to be realistic.” – Sigmund Freud
A recent survey by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 71% of the 36,000 Americans interviewed are “absolutely certain” that there is a God. Before you say that Nietzsche’s parable that “God is dead” is as exaggerated as the once premature rumors of Mark Twain’s death, please recall that for Friedrich the issue was not outward belief but whether God is the definitive ground of personal, social, and political life. Here you may rebut there are some who wish to turn our polity, founded by Deistic Freemasons, into a theocracy. This is true, but the “Moral Majority” never lived up to either half of its name. By and large, Americans relegate Godly concerns to the privacy of personal choice.
It should come as little surprise that so many of us may rely on the received wisdom of our forebears – as part of our identity – to mendaciously shelve the ultimate chicken and egg paradox by calling ourselves believers while this belief has little actual bearing on how we live. After all, more than having to give up weekends for socialism, religions would really cramp the lifestyle of those who lived them. How can we understand something so elemental and simultaneously perplexing as existence itself? Why is there something, anything, everything – rather than nothing? Why is there even an “I” who is now asking a question? Martin Heidegger, the infamous Nazi philosopher, had one thing right: the question of Being is tough and there is much reason to elide it. Is it even a proper question at all?
Thomas Henry Huxley, the father of Aldous and Julian, coined the term “agnostic” in contradistinction to those of us who believe that we can know God directly. By agnostic, Huxley meant that he believed that the question of God could not be answered. What, then, are we, the reflective-minded, to do? What happens to our moral vocabulary? Once Humpty Dumpty, the big egg from which our universe was hatched, our fons et origo, is no longer on the wall and has no longer fallen and can’t be found in our cupboards or skillets, how do we get through breakfast? Why bother? Why bother doing or caring about anything since everyone you’ve ever met and all that they have done will be forgotten and has no bearing on the cold, empty, eternal vastness that engulfs us? What does it mean to be alive, in this reality, this universe, in the situations we find ourselves in day after day until we pass away?
A short time ago I reached out to God. As a participant in ancient practices, I did not eat or drink or wash for 26 hours. I spent 11 of those hours in a prayer hall tucked away in an old tenement apartmentf, meditating, reciting, singing, and contemplating my life and what I know of the cosmos. There seemed to be an intimacy in the air itself. Some of that air had been in the family for generations. Once outside, I saw the trees sway. The temperate fall night caressed me. The streetlights shimmered. My experience wasn’t metaphysical in that I was flying or saw an angel. It was just a sense that life itself, and existence in general, contains a kind of tender magic, a subtle oneness. The profound and the obvious held hands. If this crazy world is possible, I thought, anything is.
Upon reflection, the pleasures of my mystical interlude seemed solipsistic, so I thought I’d assuage my nagging existentialist impulses by seeking answers in other ways. Some folks visit svengalis for answers, some search books and remote locations, and others simply believe what they’ve been taught. I thought I would visit someone who claims to have leaped across the chasm between doubt and knowledge. I visited Normal Bob Smith.
If you are now asking “Who is Normal Bob Smith?” then I thank you for raising question I can answer. He’s an illustrator and creator of atheistic home furnishings, like “Jesus Dress Up” refrigerator magnets, and he runs a wild, wild website. He also prints anti-religious pamphlets and takes them to the people of New York dressed like an archetypical medieval archangel dressed for the prom. Did I mention that he’s 6’3” of skinny badass? Bob went to the opening of The Passion of the Christ as the Devil carrying a family-sized jar of Vaseline. Last, Normal Bob Smith is one of seven Bob Smiths profiled in an amusing and affecting film entitled Bob Smith U.S.A. Here’s an excerpt.
COILHOUSE: What about you is “normal”?
NBS: I still think that I’m really fucking normal. If not, I think that people should be more like me to be normal, from examining themselves inward, to examining society at large. I think that I live a normal, boring life in a lot of ways, like not doing drugs, not drinking too often, getting to bed at a reasonable hour, having a girlfriend, doing my art. Sometimes my life seems abnormally normal. Maybe what I do – my site, dressing up as Satan, handing our “God is Fake” fliers – is to crush what is normal in myself. I grew up in Colorado in a suburban home by Christian parents.
