Despite my formidable reading backlog, I went out of queue and grabbed Mikhail Bakunin’s God and State—Dieu et l’état. This book has been on my bookshelf since the ’90s—perhaps the 1890s. I’ve long lost interest in reading arguments that support atheism, but my interest was threefold: first, is the notion of state; second, is Bakunin’s position on anarchism; third, to peer directly into a work of Bakunin.

I’ve gotten about two-thirds through. It’s a relatively short book, which is why I decided to give it a go. I can sense some common ground with Weber and Locke. He goes on about the necessarily corrupting power of the state—of the State. He supports science, but is leery of scientists as administrators, feeling that administrations corrupt people and disengage critical thinking that is trumped by a sort of fealty—my word, not his. Not to discredit his integrity, but Dr Fauci comes to mind in this Age of the Pandemic. (In an admission of a Freudian slip, I spelt Dr Fauci as Dr Fausti in my first go-around. Know you know.)

His arguments seem pedestrian by now, but I am glad I am spending the time to put this one under my belt. There are some memorable quotes.

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.

— Mikhail Bakunin

I realised that I was an atheist in about fifth grade—at least this is my first memory. Attending elementary school in the United States, we are expected each morning to pledge allegiance to an American flag. I’ll spare the reader any commentary on Baudrillard. Aside from the nonsensical aspect of obsequiousness, there is a passage in the recital, ‘one nation under God‘. As tasteless is the pledge—and for children, no less; O! the humanity—, this God insertion breaks the proverbial camel’s back—it may have been a dromedary, but I digress.

I refused to utter these words, place my right hand over my ‘heart’ (read: left lung), or even stand, which I was still coerced into doing. I remember being grilled by my grade-five teacher and telling him (in fifth-grader parlance) that I thought the entire affair was quintessential bullshit and that there was obviously no God. He defended that of course there was. This is the world I was raised in.

A little more backstory: I was raised in a fairly affluent suburb south of Boston that was 70 per cent Roman Catholic Italians. My unnamed teacher was part of this cohort, as were my peers, some of whom were second-generation. A few were even first-generation. In any case, this was not a discussion. I was chastised for my position, and the teachers advocated peer pressure. Am I digressing again?

Until I read Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I was on the fence between agnosticism and atheism. In the end, I adopted his scale, leaving open the options that there is a 0.000000000000000000000000000001% chance that I might be mistaken in this belief, thereby being a weak-form flavour—and I may have omitted some zeros between the decimal and the one.

To end this stream of consciousness, where I diverge from Bakunin and most post-Enlightenment thinkers are with the archetypal notions of freedom and liberty. When I get to these passages, my eyes start to glaze over, and I need to grind through in the same manner as one might do in some video games, just to get to the end.

Anyone familiar with my thoughts might even guess that I’d interpret the quote I’ve chosen for this post to be nonsensical. Few humans are capable of reason beyond the most facile definition, and justice is another weasel word. I agree with his take on enslavement…