Hope in a Godless World
By: Recovering Religion
Tags: Atheism, Religion, Society, Christianity, Hope

Back in my pre-enlightenment days, those dark days of my Christian faith where I put celebrity preachers on wobbly pedestals, I listened religiously (ha ha, see what I did there?) to whoever was speaking at a popular Californian church. I think I took everything each speaker said as profound, sometimes even posting them on Facebook to stun my friends with their brilliance. Because Facebook is a ruthless reminder of your past, quotes that I apparently found mind-blowing pop up in my memories from time to time and as I re-read a lot of them now, with my head in my hands, I think, “that doesn’t even make sense!”

One such statement that I’m thankful I did NOT digitally record forever was a rant from one of the church’s pastors, declaring, “We’re taking our rainbow back! And we’re taking our crystals back!”

Now, if you’re not a former believer this probably won’t make any sense to you. And to be fair, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time, but I assumed if pastor so-and-so was voicing it, there must be a deeper truth to it than what my little brain was comprehending. Ok, so the basic idea is that the LGBTQ community has “stolen” “our” rainbow, and the new-age mystics have “stolen” “our” crystals, and it’s high time gosh-darn-it that we stop letting non-believers use our precious symbols for evil non-believer things.

But do Christians own rainbows and crystals? At the time, I no longer believed the Noah’s ark story was literally true, so the idea that God created the first rainbow as a promise to blah, blah, blah was no longer ingrained in my thinking. And crystals are natural formations created by the earth. So… who is doing the stealing and the taking back? How does this even work? I mean, I was such a progressive Christian that I saw right through this nonsense. Who can own a rainbow?

Fast forward five or six years and I’m sitting down to watch Recovering from Religion’s RfRx talk with Danielle LaSusa called “Hope in a Godless World.” All cozy and settled in for a talk that was sure to be about how we don’t need hope, that hope is for people who still believe that their imaginary friend is going to swoop out of the sky someday and fix everything. Hope is clearly a religious word that I don’t need anymore.

Then… WHAM! Danielle starts talking about hope and faith. What? I don’t like those words anymore! Ma’am, those are Christian words. But, as I’ve learned in the past, the urge to cut the video, end the conversation, or slam my laptop shut is my mental toddler throwing a temper tantrum because she doesn’t want to be challenged with something new. So, I listened. And I started scratching down notes, rewinding and listening again and trying so hard to grab onto every concept she was throwing out. I haven’t been so inspired in quite some time.

Danielle starts out by defining the difference between “hope” and “optimism.” “Hope” acknowledges the desperation of a situation, while “optimism” minimizes. “Optimism” says, “Oh, things aren’t so bad. Look at this story of a cop who saved a puppy!” “Hope” says, “Things are bad. Really bad. But I believe we can make changes in our social justice system.” One term spurs us to action, and the other ignores the creative work we can accomplish.

Drawing on both current affairs and past events, Danielle perfectly paints a portrait with hope as the focal point, the catalyst that pushes us to action when we can’t even see any evidence that things are improving.

Then she starts talking about faith, and I literally caught my breath. Faith is a dirty, dirty word, Ms. LaSusa. You can’t talk about faith to a bunch of people struggling to recover from their religious pasts! But… she did. And she did it so gently. All that wordage lodged in my brain about “faith is the evidence of things unseen” and “without faith it is impossible to please God” and “faith without works is dead” — and all the other times I had questions that other believers couldn’t answer, so their response was “well, you just have to have faith!” — came bubbling to the surface. I thought my therapy sessions were on Tuesday mornings.

I squirmed in my seat. So did Eric Wells, one of this discussion’s co-hosts. There was some nervous laughter, but we gritted our teeth and heard her out. Danielle suggested that without having faith in a better possible outcome (a belief without evidence) we won’t have hope that goes beyond the current evidence to find unseen solutions.

Mic. Drop.

This discussion goes deep, but Danielle touches on so many practical uses of these terms that it’s worth watching and re-watching. I was personally so invigorated that I had my small group watch this lecture so we could use a whole meeting to discuss it. It is one that you truly should not miss.

Danielle LaSusa has a Ph.D. in philosophy and a passion for helping people transform their lives. Check out her first RfRx talk entitled “Creating Meaning Without God” as well as her podcast “Think Hard.”