Dear GCN

There must be New Age believers who make more sense than Chris Griscom (author of Ecstasy Is a New Frequency: Teachings of the Life), but those I know are all too like her, at least in what they are willing to believe. In order to believe that the universe is just and kindly, people will tolerate any sort of silliness and confusion. The New Age believers I meet have come from some form of white American Protestantism and I – like Duncan Mitchel (see GCN, Nov. 6–12, 1988) – see Griscom and Shirley Maclaine's beliefs as a disguised form of Christianity: obsessed with individual salvation, unaware of history, justifying its own contradictions, appealing to mystery and faith, and lacking in community and social conscience.

Don't understand it? Have faith! Don't believe it? Have faith! Or as one young woman said to me when she found out I didn't believe in God, “But you ought to try,” as if belief were an athletic feat like running a fourminute mile.

I'm an atheist. I had an entirely secular upbringing, but with the emphasis on ethics and social action typical of the secular Jews of my parents' generation, in whom Messianic fervor had been transformed into a passionate determination to understand the world and an equally passionate commitment to changing it for the better. I'm also someone who's had many experiences of what I can only call mysticism during my teens and twenties: a feeling of unity with the natural world and even moments in which I “knew” (in ways I could never recall afterwards or describe) that space and time were – I use such language for lack of a better – illusions. This sort of experience turns up in the literary records of all sorts of religions and while the experience is remarkably the same in all accounts (or almost all) it is used by particular mystics to “prove” the truth of their own particular religious belief. In short, it has no necessary connection with the facts of that creed nor does it – in my experience – have any connection with morality of the ordinary kind.