Food for The Eagle by Adam Savage

Food for The Eagle

By Adam Savage

Delivered to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010

---

• I want to start by saying that, to me, any discourse from me about how one can live a moral existence without religion or the church would sound improperly defensive.
• That there's an opposite to be defended is absurd and based on a provably false premise.
• So let's dispense with that.
• (To be clear: I'm referring to the humanist axiom "Good without God," whereby "good" means morality.
• It's provably false that there exists no morality outside of religion, therefore the statement sounds defensive to me.)
• By what route does anyone come to believe what they believe?
• We all like to imagine that it's based on a set of logical facts, but it's often a much more circuitous route.
• For me it was pretty simple.
• I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion.
• My children continue this trend.

Here are a few things I've learned:

• Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening.
• I've paid attention.
• I've pictured what I want to happen in my life.
• I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them.
• I've looked hard at problems and thought hard about their solutions.
• See, I order my life by the same mechanism that I use to build things.
• I cannot proceed to move tools around in the real world until my brain has a clear picture in it of what I'm building.
• The same goes for my life.
• I've tried to pay attention.
• I've tried to picture the way I want things to be, and I've noticed that when I had a clear picture, things often turned out the way I wanted them to.
• I've concluded by this that someone is paying attention—I've concluded that it's me.
• I've noticed that if I'm paying attention to those around me, to myself, to my surroundings, then that is the very definition of empathy.
• I've noticed that when I pay attention, I'm less selfish, I'm happier—and that the inverse holds true as well.
• I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you.
• That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here.
• And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences.
• At least I have.
• (And in the empirical study I'm performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.)
• While nobody's going to take care of us, it's incumbent upon us to take care of those around us.
• That's community.
• The fiction of continuity and stability that your parents have painted for you is totally necessary for a growing child.
• When you realize that it's not the way the world works, it's a chilling moment.
• It's supremely lonely.
• So I understand the desire for someone to be in charge.
• (As a side note, I believe that the need for conspiracy theories is similar to the need for God.)
• We'd all like our good and evil to be like it is in the movies: specific and horrible, easy to defeat.
• But it's not.
• It's banal.
• There's a quote I love: "Evil is a little man afraid for his job."
• I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.
• No one is in charge.
• And, honestly, that's even cooler.
• The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one.
• One worth clinging to.
• But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence.
• It's not just an idea, it's reality.
• We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day.
• The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing.
• Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.
• The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable.
• Truly unfathomable.
• But it is logical.
• We don't know all the steps in that logic, but we're learning more about it every day.
• Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.
• As far as I can see, the three main intolerant religions in the world aren't helping in that mission.
• For all their talk of charity and knowledge, that they close their eyes to so much—
• to science, to birth control education, to abuses of power by some of their leaders, to evolution as provable and therefore factual (the list is staggering)—
• illustrates a wide scope of bigotry.
• Now, just to be clear. If you want to believe, or find solace in believing, that someone or something set these particular dominoes in motion—
• a cosmic finger tipping the balance and then leaving everything else to chance—
• I can't say anything to that.
• I don't know.
• Though a primary mover is the most complex and thus (given Occam's razor) the least likely of all possible solutions to the particular problem of how we got here, I can't prove it true or false, and there's nothing to really discuss about it.
• If Daniel Dennett is right—
• that there's a human genetic need for religion—
• then I'd like to imagine that my atheism is proof of evolutionary biology in action.
• There may be no purpose, but its always good to have a mission.
• And I know of one fine allegory for an excellent mission should you choose to charge yourself with one:
• Carlos Castaneda's series of books about his training with a Yaqui indian mystic named Don Juan.
• There's a lot of controversy about these books being represented as nonfiction.
• But if you dispense with that representation, and instead take their stories as allegories, they're quite lovely.
• At the end of The Eagle's Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there's no point to existence.
• That we're given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call The Eagle, named for it's cold, killer demeanor.
• And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.
• He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they're granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible.
• This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one's life.
• And that, to me, is a fine mission.