Give it a whirl: Berlin's Long Night of Religions, By Zoe Markillie

Earlier this year, the first Atheist Church was launched in London, with sermons on science by Professor Brian Cox, and Stevie Wonder hits replacing the usual hymns. The underlying principle was that a sense of community and unity in belief is something that need not be limited to the religious but rather should be shared by everyone, including atheists. In an ever-increasingly individualised world, so the theory goes, why not provide an opportunity for the unspiritual to gather every Sunday with like-minded people and discuss the big questions of life?

It’s not the first time that atheists have chosen to take something from religious practices, and I consider it for the most part a healthy attitude – or at least better than a Dawkinsesque ‘you’re all morons’ approach. And it’s a two-way process, with many religious groups becoming more and more open to outsiders. Which is how I ended up spending my Saturday night learning about the complex family tree of the Hindu gods, being hit in the face with the robes of a Whirling Dervish, and watching a Sikh put a book to bed.

As part of its cultural programme, Berlin organises a Long Night of Religions every year – all the places of worship around the city are open to visitors of any (or no) faith between 6pm and midnight, with many providing talks, demonstrations and music. Keen to learn about some of the less well-represented religions – like most Brits, my RE lessons consisted mostly of what Christians and Jews think about various issues – I didn’t bother with any of the churches or synagogues, and I had already visited a mosque during an open day last summer. So instead, the evening’s activities consisted of visits to a Hindu temple, a Sufi centre, a Buddhist temple and a Sikh gurdwara.

The warm welcome I received from all of these places seemed less of a sales ploy than I had expected; the people of the different faiths appeared to be genuinely pleased that I was interested in learning about their religion and not set on converting me. In particular, the Sikhs were openly willing to answer any questions, and insisted on serving us all food, despite the fact that we had guiltily snuck out of the prayer room before the end. And the Sufis not only did not require the female visitors to cover their heads, but also offered the same respectful welcome and ‘salaam alaikum’ to a group of girls who wandered in wearing strappy tops and hotpants.

As well as being educational in the expected sense, I also learned the first rule of watching Dervishes: don’t sit in the front row. But when not ducking out of the way of the spinning robes, I was struck by the elated expressions on their faces. Whatever incredible inner place they were in, I wanted to be there too. Sufism promotes joy and euphoria as a way of connecting with God, but could this be something that atheists can experience too?

As an oriental dancer, I have attended a few dance camps which involved a ritual called the ‘zar’. This is a middle-Eastern tradition which is a form of Dervish whirling for laymen; it is used for prayer, exorcisms, pain relief and general wellbeing. For us, it was a completely secular religious experience – entering a trancelike state of pure elation without the accompanying connection to a higher being.

I was extremely nervous before my first zar; I’ve always been too sceptical even for meditation, and this seemed to be a weirdly pagan, cult-like ritual. We were led into a dimly-lit space and told to move in whatever way felt right; we needn’t worry about safety as there were supervisors to make sure we didn’t hurt ourselves. Zar, unlike Dervish whirling, is not at all a performance; it is not a pretty sight, and the only people who may be present, other than the participants, are there purely for safety reasons.

As the repetitive Sufi drumming began, I felt ludicrous and self-conscious. I had no idea what to do. I sneaked a glance at the others from the corner of my eye and began to follow suit, turning slowly on the spot. At first, the hardest thing was to remember that this was NOT a performance; as I spun, I had to crush my dancer’s instinct to hold my arms in a beautiful pose and to spot in order to avoid dizziness. The dizziness was part of it. Memories of spinning on the school playground until I fell over, just for the fun of it, came flooding back and I began to enjoy myself.

Unlike Dervish whirling, zars are not limited to on-the-spot turning, and whenever I got tired, I would fall to my knees and fling my head and arms from side to side. The wild movements came naturally now, and I could neither see nor care if anyone was watching me. My limbs were loose and felt separate from my body; my hair was in my eyes and mouth but I didn’t feel it; I simply felt a compulsion to move to the heavy drum beats. I was in a trance without drugs or hypnosis, an entirely self-constructed trance.

Finally, the music came to an end and we all lay still on the floor. Once recovered, we were led one at a time from the room and to our beds. Confused and disorientated, I asked one of the supervisors how long I had been in there – it felt like about ten minutes. She smiled and told me I had just thrown myself around in a dark room for an hour.

The zar affects everyone in different ways. Most feel high, dizzy and very relaxed. For some, the feeling of elation is so intense that they laugh hysterically – as I shuffled to my bedroom, I could hear their cackles echoing down the corridor, and a few dancers are well-known for needing at least 45 minutes to stop giggling after a zar. Others cry uncontrollably for no apparent reason. I know one woman who does the zar every year, and afterwards wails for half an hour with huge, racking sobs that seem to come from some deep unimaginable pain; she assures me she’s not crying about anything in particular, and that she finds it rather therapeutic.

Personally, I feel mostly drunk – carefree, uninhibited, but always aware of what I am doing, and with the feeling that I could stop at any time if I wished. I certainly feel relaxed and happy, but I can never quite reach the peaceful place of the Whirling Dervish. The euphoria rises, and I feel like there could be a connection – but there never is. Is this a problem in me, an inability to allow myself to connect to something greater, or simply that there is nothing to connect to at all? And does it matter in any case, if an atheist can have more or less a religious experience without God?

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Buddhists are bad enough, George. But now we’re all Quakers…

"Why should any man have power over any other man's faith, seeing Christ Himself is the author of it?" - George Fox

So, my other friend also has a theory. Basically we’re all Quakers 

Apparently one of the central doctrines of Quakerism is the ‘priesthood of all believers’, whereby the traditional clergy is disavowed and the direct experience of god is emphasised. While actually depending on when, where and which set of Quakers you are talking about, the denomination’s famed tolerance dissenting belief is sufficient that it can accommodate a non-theist component without too much trouble. My friend’s argument is that the belief in a more-or-less undefined ‘something’, resistance to doctrine, emphasis on ‘social gospel’, a sense of opposition to the established mainstream churches and a nuanced or even critical approach to the interpretation of biblical texts and history characterise not just Quakers. The idea is that there's also a large component of people who aren’t especially religious in the traditional sense but who nonetheless might describe themselves as ‘christian’. The British Humanist Association obviously think so too, considering their census campaign which urges that, “If you are not religious, for God’s sake say so”. I think there’s some mileage in their argument - that if people tick ‘Christian’ out of a sense of habit or familial loyalty, the census is compromised in terms of its ability to reflect social attitudes. Recent census figures, discussed in an earlier post, tend to back them up when one compares them with 2001 data. 

And that’s not even counting the Jedi Knights. 

I’ve emphasised before that the point of view of this blog is that the way individuals relate to and practise their beliefs is more interesting than debating the cultural, historical, philosophical or institutional baggage of the religions those individuals identify with. However, the differences among those forms of baggage and between them as well as the personal experience of religion is an interesting topic in itself. I was raised around a form of Tibetan Buddhism, and while it’s inaccurate to say I am Buddhist, or that I was raised as a Buddhist, it is the religion that I’ve had the most opportunity to observe up close in terms of its practice and its adherents here in the West. Thus, when discussing the history versus the ideas versus the perception of a religious institutions, the extremely good press that Buddhism has with people who are normally very critical when it comes to religious institutions comes is impossible to ignore. The journalist Micheal Parenti provides a helpfully referenced antidote to what he sees as the woefully under-informed idealisation of Tibetan Buddhism in particular and historical revisionism rampant in wide-eyed, western followers and fellow-travellers. The charge sheet includes a litany that will be familiar in the context of religion-bashing but not normally associated with Buddhism – terrorism,  religious violence and wars, shady dealings with the CIA and other naughty people, pogroms, institutionalised child abuse as well as  theologically-sanctioned feudalism, indentured servitude, theft, torture, rape and a notable lack of compassion for the common serf. Gladly, Parenti acknowledges the dangers associated with a recent wish to downgrade the ‘goody’ status of Tibetans as a side-effect of the well-intentioned wish to compensate for the knee-jerk characterisation of China as a yellow peril ‘baddy’. Obviously, both peoples and the organisations associated with them are more complex – the point is that the devil is in the details and the niave idealisation or demonization of huge swathes of humanity does nobody justice. 

Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

-James 2:17 - The Bible, New King James Version

I can’t help but wonder what a similar reading of the history, institutions, personages and doctrines of atheism – insomuch as they might be considered representative of your common garden atheist – might look like? One the one hand you might have the Galilean martyr of truth, embattled with a blind and brutal church. On the other, you might have the short-sighted nuclear scientist or the suspect eugenicist. Or even just the controversy-courting soldier of the culture wars. Given that the arena I am most motivated to fly my atheist flag is politics, it probably isn’t surprising that I share the Bright Network’s concern that people should see that atheists can be positively engaged in ‘matters of civic importance’. To some extent, I agree with Richard Dawkins that it might send a powerful message for atheists in prominent and respected positions to ‘out’ themselves and show that we aren’t all so bad – even electable.

 

I suppose that the best end to this post is the starting point of this blog – individuals are more complex and interesting than any generalising lens could account for. It’s not the club you belong to, but how and who you are.  

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