About book Living With A Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search For The Truth About Everything (2014)
What a wild ride and what an amazing woman! I loved Nickel and Dimed and wanted to read Fear of Falling but never got around to it. I never knew that Ehrenreich gave up a life of science exploration and philosophy to become the activist that she is. This memoir echoes many others of mild family dysfunction, but she takes off into a deeply revealing psychological journey documented in a journal from her teens and early adulthood. As a life-long, truth-seeking atheist, she is unsettled by experiences of dissociation that parallel many mystical/religious encounters with the "Other" that have been reported over centuries. The book is crammed with so many interesting bits of information from biology, chemistry, physics, math, philosophy, religion, anthropology, archeology, cosmology, that make me want to explore as voraciously as she has done. Having associated religious experience as a form of mental illness for most of her life, a perspective that I have shared, she nevertheless opens up to try to understand her own mystical experiences through as broad an interpretation as a human mind is capable of expressing in words, and the last chapter is fascinating. The title is (annoyingly) misleading: nowhere does this life-long atheist concede there may be a “God” in the sense that most people in current times would understand it. Clever marketing – yes. Honest representation of what is an otherwise authentic and heart-felt account of a very personal spiritual journey – no.It is a testament to Ehrenreich’s superb writing and intellectual reasoning abilities that this book kept me under its spell in spite of the fact that many of her musings about chemistry and physics were way above my comprehension.Questions I’m left with: Is the possibility of faith so difficult to acknowledge for highly intelligent, scientifically minded people because they are so used to being in control of their facts and superior in their understanding of the workings of the world that they fail to see the importance of other essential ingredients: humility and awe? Ironically, they share this sense of certainty with religious extremists and dogmatists of all stripes. (To be fair, Ehrenreich does not strike me as a dogmatic intellectual snob in the vein of Hitchens or Dawkins.)Does a humble peasant living a simple, honest life of faith have an easier access to “spiritual intelligence”?Is Faith, rather than an intellectual construct attainable by a mental “leap”, a reward that comes from trying to actively live it and seeing that it would actually “work” if only we could all overcome our laziness and selfish natures to live it consistently?Since even the brightest among us will always be ant-like in our understanding of the how, and especially, the why of the creation of the universe (a large pea-sized brain is still a pea-sized brain), why can’t we just stick to the one simple, universally acknowledged, task we were given – love your neighbour? Isn’t that one assignment hard enough for us to figure out in our limited life times? Can’t we just accept that other than that, we really know nothing, and never will, so there’s no point in arguing about it? Would love to see a conversation between Ehrenreich and a non-atheist intellectual equal, such as Chris Hedges.
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The last 1/4 or so was really good. But it wasn't really worth it to get there.
—katerinaki
