Why I am not a believer

[Primula Baggins]

You'd probably get different answers to that, vison, depending on which believer you asked (and when). We are not all the same, we don't all believe the same things, and we don't all have the same reasons for believing.

I know you know that; I'm just explaining why I felt compelled to post this.

[Lalaith]

I was just thinking along the same lines. vison's two threads are related but not necessarily similar. I don't recall anyone asking us believers in the other thread why we believe in God. (Or I may have missed it--entirely possible.)

[vison]

It's true, I didn't.

[narya]

non-belief of stuff is the default state of mind

I would say whatever one is raised with is the default. Belief can be inculcated from birth.

Default implies that you can fall back on it. I started out Catholic. Went to Catholic high school. Became a Secular Franciscan. Then, somewhere along the line, the bottom of my faith fell out, and it hasn't come back. I don't know why I no longer have any conviction of the existence of anything supernatural. I just don't have it anymore. It probably had to do with my depression, but you'd think it would come back after the depression lifted.

I certainly wish there was an afterlife, where I could be reunited with all of my dear family members who have died. I wish there was a benevolent and all powerful guy up there, personally interested in my welfare. I wish I could change things with prayer. But wishing and believing aren't the same thing.

[TheEllipticalDisillusion]

I certainly wish there was an afterlife, where I could be reunited with all of my dear family members who have died. I wish there was a benevolent and all powerful guy up there, personally interested in my welfare. I wish I could change things with prayer. But wishing and believing aren't the same thing.

I run into this a lot. I wish some of this stuff would happen because my inclination to self-preservation desires anything to continue this existence of mine, but I, too, recognize that these are merely wishes, and there's a lot of stuff that I sometimes wish for (generally, I wish because I know it won't happen).

[Pearly Di]

Sincerely stating what you believe may not be offensive as such while still being unintentionally hurtful. On another board a lovely poster once quite blithely said something like, "And the reason the Jews are cursed is..." I got a good chuckle out of it but others are more sensitive.

Holy cow.

Well, it shocks me that fellow Christians still believe that rubbish.

( I also fear that to explain the reasons of my atheism might offend some persons here, especially as I find intercultural communication sometimes difficult and difficult to judge what is offensive to whom and see that often persons see postings as offensive where I don't see anything. I fear this, because my disbelief in God also comes from a rejection of religion.)

My impression is that Vison started this thread so that non-believers could freely share why they don't believe. Therefore I am not anticipating that believers will flood this thread with reasons why they are offended by people who don't believe. So, I don't see why you should hold back from expressing your opinion. The other thread managed to stay civil, after all.

The only thing I will say is that I discern two main reasons for atheism (as opposed to agnosticism): a) the lack of evidence for a God, or a supernatural dimension, i.e. the belief that the material world is all there is, and b) the existence of suffering makes it difficult for people to believe in God. Not the only reasons, maybe, but two major ones.

The latter reason is something that believers struggle with too. That's all.

[Nin]

The only thing I will say is that I discern two main reasons for atheism (as opposed to agnosticism): a) the lack of evidence for a God, or a supernatural dimension, i.e. the belief that the material world is all there is, and b) the existence of suffering makes it difficult for people to believe in God. Not the only reasons, maybe, but two major ones.

The latter reason is something that believers struggle with too. That's all.

None of those two reasons explain my atheism.

I distinguish faith from science and there is no need for any prooves in order to believe. I believe for instance that in principle all humans are good, despite many proofs of the contrary.

I also see suffering as injustice, but to be omnipresent or omnipotent (as God would be) you don't have to be just - or even interested in humanity. Maybe the existence of suffering would make it difficult to believe in a loving, caring God, but that is already one step further than believing in any God at all.

I don't manage to believe. I was raised with a reasonable dose of christianity, baptised, confirmation and had my mystical moments as a teen-ager (I remember one day when listening to the Ninth symphony of Bethove, where one line says "Brothers above the stars must live a good father" and my youthful self - I must have been twelve - thought: oh, yes, it's true, it's so true) I got married in church - not as a strong believer, but conscient of the cultural heritage in my life, I want my children to know the Bible. But I can't believe. I may sometime envy believers for their security and their trust that there is something out there, that there is something after death. I may wish it was true.

It struck me when my elder was so terribly sick after his birth that I could not pray. When we burried my father, that I found no solace in any religious practice, on the contrary. It bewilders me. I reject organised religion as in my experience I see it as a creator of intolerance and prejudice, as a reason to condemn and to judge. Once more, this is only my opinion.

But although I have grown up with a minimum of christianity, it touches nothing within me, the ceremonies, the words, the prayers seem as foreign to me as would be the rituals of some ancient or far-away cult, let's say the Maya. It's to reassure the people who believe in it, senseless. (Still, only for me).

So, for me, there is no God. Maybe he does exist for the people who believe in him, I don't know. I would not know how to pray, it would be like calling a non-existent phone number -of course I can do that, but it is utterly senseless.

So, I wondered about the world and how for instance morality comes to people like me or why people commit evil and what is right and wrong and how to live with the idea that there is nothing than this life. And well, I found my view of the world which places the emphasis on humanity (I have talked about it in the other thread). And it fits me. I'm glad to have a view a the world which seems coherent for me and in which religion is not necessary. I'm glad because I dislike religion, too.

So in the end, I don't believe - because I don't. I can't. It seems senseless and useless to me and I'm better off without believing in God. My life, my morality and my spiritualy are complete without God.

[axordil]

Many of you know my background, religiously speaking: I was raised in a very conservative, fundamentalist family. The siblings I knew growing up followed that path, and most of their children as well. Until roughly my freshman year of college, I thought I did too.

What happened next was simple, obvious even: I succumbed to the temptations of the flesh. Not just the ones actually involving flesh (though those were certainly part of the equation) but the entanglements of the kingdoms of the world in general. I discovered I could find any number of things I liked doing late into the night on weekends, and so I stopped getting up for church regularly. For a while this upset my father (he had been a deacon, then an elder, and served many years as treasurer for the church) but then the congregation turned on itself over the issue of opening up a day care center to serve an increasingly African-American neighborhood, and he found it difficult to be angry with me for not going to a church he himself no longer felt a part of.

(For the record, he was on the side of the angels in that discussion. He lost some friends and gained my respect, when I eventually found out about it. He wasn't one to discuss church policy at home.)

At any rate, the thing that strikes me now about my actions then is how easily I simply stopped being religious in any real sense of the word. I came to the conclusion some time ago this was due to any lack of spiritual feeling on my part underlying the religiosity. I went through all the education, inculcation, and indoctrination my church had to offer, and came out not really missing it when I left. I didn't feel particularly guilty about it then, and now it's mostly a topic for, well, discussion like this. I look at my sisters, who went through the same process, and ended up so very differently; what am I to conclude except that they, and genuine believers in general, experience the world in a different way than I do?

My grandmother used to write little devotional poems. I remember when I read them, how I envied the simple certainty they represented. I remember wondering, even a few years ago, why it was I had no capacity for real faith, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I don't envy or wonder any more. It's just how I am, perhaps who I am. Life went from taught certainty to indifference to doubt to amused resignation. I can live with that.

[Lalaith]

Thank you both for sharing.

[River]

I'm trying to think of the best way to phrase this... There are some lines of evidence that some people's brains are more wired for faith than others. I think it might have to do with how well people cope with abstractions. Not everyone's the same in that regard. I myself am actually very naturally inclined towards abstractions and in theory don't have issue with taking things on faith. My propensity for taking flight is actually scary enough that I always make an effort to counter-balance whatever my head is doing with what my senses are actually taking in. So I'm actually running counter to my nature by not believing.

In fact, I don't exactly not believe. I call myself an agnostic apatheist. I'm not sure what's out there. However, I'm well convinced that if there is a supreme being out there, it is not of the interventionist kind and doesn't give two hoots and a holler about us. So, in my own opinion, all the efforts made to pray and be right with god(s?) and keep the faith are just pointless. No one and nothing is listening. I have other things I'd rather do with my time.

My other hang-up is organized religion itself. Nothing but trouble, that. It can be, it has been, a force for good things, but the reverse side is this: once you're dealing with matters of faith and matters of the soul, you're tapping into something both powerful and irrational. That can be used, as I said, for good. It can also be used to acquire power, and the bad behavior displayed by various religions in their quest to acquire and maintain power has filled books and gotten me into lots of trouble when I've pointed it out in the past. I don't want to participate in that. At all. In any form. Which bites because what the Quakers on this board have said fascinates me, as has what I've read about Bhuddism. But I can't get past that step, you know?

[vison]

Nin and River say much of what I would say.

[nerdanel]

I am a weak agnostic in a very comfortable sort of spiritual limbo. I am exactly where I want to be religiously, though it seems to make little sense to many others.

Again, most of you know my background, but: I was a very religious child. I was raised religiously as a Catholic by my parents, but my religious tendencies came from within, I think. My parents may have taken me to church on Sundays, but it was me who stayed up late into the night, reading the Bible by candlelight, praying, then writing in my journal about my religious feelings (this was at 5 or 6.) At seven, I realized that I wanted to be Jewish. I had no Jewish friends, and only one Jewish acquaintance - my violin teacher, who was not practicing. Fortunately, I took lessons from him at the local Orthodox synagogue, which enabled me to sneak into the sanctuary during my sister’s lessons so that I could pray to God to make me Jewish, though I advised God, “I don’t know if that’s something that you can even do.”

Since I assumed that Jews were born and not made, and I was a church-going believer in Jesus, I didn’t return to my desire to be Jewish for several years. I had my First Communion and First Reconciliation, played violin in church every week, learned to pray the rosary and spent some free time memorizing Bible verses. I’d estimate that more than 50 percent of my religious behavior was self-directed, though my parents took me to Mass, expected me to pray before meals and receive the Sacraments, and attend Sunday school. By 12, it had become untenable for me to consider remaining Catholic. My increasing feminist conscience could not accept an absence of women in the priesthood or the church’s stance on abortion and birth control; I viewed the notion of original sin as fundamentally misguided; and I disagreed with the concept of praying other than to God (i.e. to Mary or the saints, even as intercessors.)

I announced to my parents, with some dramatic flair, that I was embarking on a search for Truth, and did not expect to remain Catholic at its end. My father neither approved nor strongly objected; my mother encouraged me to read as much as I could about every religion possible before making my choice. I looked at liberal variants of Christianity, which would have addressed the women-in-the-priesthood issue, among others. But the truth is, I wanted to be Jewish - and the more I read about Judaism, the more strongly I felt drawn. What is striking to me in retrospect is that it simply did not occur to me to leave religion or the “Judeo-Christian tradition” altogether.

There remained the matter of my belief in Jesus as God and Messiah - fundamental to Christianity, anathema to Judaism. At this time, I toyed with the idea of “Jews for Jesus,” until I realized that they were really “Jewishly-born Christians for Jesus” rather than a distinct denomination or expression of Judaism. I estimate that I spent two years, from 12 to 14, wrestling with whether I “believed in” Jesus. At the end of that time, I drew conclusions that I have never felt the need to revisit:

Those personal conclusions are: Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, of Hillel's school of thought. He was progressive, and has sometimes been described as the first "reform Jew." A majority of his teachings, while insightful and useful, reflected Jewish religious views of that time, and did not reflect his unique insights. (A minority of his teachings are contrary to Judaism.) Jesus was human, not Divine. He was not the Jewish Messiah, as defined by traditional Judaism, and he did not usher in the Messianic Age or World to Come in which traditional Jews believe. Jesus was conceived naturally rather than immaculately, whether his father was Joseph or unknown. He was a political and religious martyr, but his death did not redeem the world or result in forgiveness of anyone's sins; indeed, the God in which I (then) believe(d) does not require such human sacrifice, and forgiveness of sins is a direct product of the human-Divine relationship, without Messianic intermediary. Jesus did not rise from the dead or ascend into heaven; there will be no second coming. Baptism is not necessary and has no bearing on the forgiveness of sins; it has little meaning at all when imposed on a child too young to understand (as it was on me.)

Reaching these conclusions changed my life. First, it cleared the way for me to engage with Judaism as a potential ger (convert). Second, in rejecting much of the Nicene Creed which had been my profession of faith - and which views I had dearly held earlier in my life - I realized that faith was just that, a voluntary belief in the unknowable. In decisively and finally rejecting teachings that had previously been central to my life, my faith in the concept of a knowable, absolute truth was lessened, though not yet shattered. It still did not occur to me to reject or question the existence of a god in the Judeo-Christian mold, except for the "God the Son" part of Christianity: my belief in what Jews call HaShem and shechinah and Catholics call "God the Father" and "Holy Spirit" remained intact.

For five years I engaged with Judaism as a teenager absolutely determined to convert. I persuaded my parents of my seriousness, until my father drove me to synagogue on Shabbat and my mother gave a local rabbi permission to instruct me. I learned to read Hebrew, to lead services, to observe Shabbat. I substituted one absolute truth for another, and embraced the new as eagerly as I had the old. The only reason that I did not convert in those years is that I wanted a conversion that would be universally recognized within the Jewish community, and I did not feel able to convert to Orthodoxy because of their views on the ritual role of women (which are far more problematic to me than the Catholics'.)

In law school, I questioned my sexuality at a time when a majority of voters in my country, often citing religion, chose to assault the civil rights of sexual minorities at the ballot box and otherwise. Their behavior was repugnant to me, and so was their understanding of their god, which I saw as false. This time, my faith in religion, and in a traditional understanding of a god, was pushed to the breaking point. I realized that religion so often controverted rationality, and because it required belief in the unknowable, it could be used and was (is) often used to justify all manner of persecution and atrocity. I became briefly atheist and vehemently anti-religion of all sorts. Ironically, very little of the behavior that I objected to was coming from Jews. In a sense, I allowed the behavior of (primarily right-wing) Christians to push me away from Judaism. But I viewed sexual minority status and religion as irreconcilable, and I found I had little use for the latter.

There is a synagogue in the center of San Francisco, in the Mission Dolores neighborhood, that - though I never attend anymore - I consider to be at the intersection of all my various identities. In that place, I learned to reconcile the religious traditions I had learned on the East Coast with the progressive values that I discovered on the West; I understood that it was possible to love women and be religious, and learned that I could still identify as queer while also loving men; and I understood that I could engage with Judaism's spiritual and ethical traditions while identifying as an agnostic. And though personal reasons led me to leave that synagogue, its lessons - its willingness to engage with the grays of the human experience rather than to insist on a religious, unnatural and unrealistic, black-and-white morality - have stayed with me.

And so, I have explained to people: I may be agnostic, but Judaism is what I have known for 11 of my 23 years, fully half (and the more sentient half, at that.) If I have an ethical or a spiritual question, of course I would consult the wisdom accumulated by generations of Jewish sages. I observe the Jewish holidays and the Jewish Shabbat and take immense symbolic meaning from them, while reserving judgment on whether the traditions that we follow are divinely ordained. Some have questioned whether I have a "commitment problem" because I have remained within the Jewish tradition for roughly a decade (there was some time away during that atheist phase) without converting. I have no commitment problem: I am committed to remaining within the Jewish tradition and to engaging critically with Jewish teachings for the rest of my life. And if there is persecution and violence faced by the Jewish people in my country during my lifetime, I will stand with them, formal conversion or not: in the timeless words of Ruth, "Your people shall be my people . . ." If I converted at this point (and there may come a point when that makes sense), that is exactly what I would be signifying: that Jewish values and traditions have and always will have primacy in my life, and I would take pride in standing before the world as a Jew, as one of the Jewish people. The only reason I have not converted is that I cannot wholeheartedly say the second half of Ruth's immortal phrase at this point: ". . . your God shall be my God." I simply do not know, cannot know, and probably will never know whether there is a divinity, and whether it is as Judaism characterizes it.

Why then engage with one religion at such length, and with great depth? Because I see religions as collections of human wisdom, as places where people congregate in their searches for Truth. And inexplicably, irresistibly, at an irrationally young age, even, I have been drawn to this particular tradition. I see such wisdom and beauty within the Jewish tradition. It has always challenged me to think and to question, has never insisted that I must take things "on faith," and in more than a decade, has never imposed the slightest pressure on me to "convert" or "believe" in order to be "saved" or "redeemed" from anything. It places emphasis on deeds rather than on faith in unknowable things, and yet it accommodates the reality that we as humans will fall short of our ideals (or Divine ideals) -- and will need to get up and keep trying again. It recognizes that there are many paths to Truth, on which it does not insist it has a monopoly. And in recognizing Noahidism while providing for full conversion to Judaism, it allows interested non-Jews to engage with its traditions at whatever level makes most sense in their lives.

So, Judaism is the spiritual tradition, the collection of human (and perhaps Divine, or Divinely-influenced - I take no stance on that, as a weak agnostic) wisdom with which I personally wish to engage. And there are many other traditions which will speak to other people; and then there are people whose spiritual or emotional needs require no formalized religion at all. I feel very comfortable with this. However, I feel great discomfort with religions that require their adherents to accept absolute truths based on faith, particularly those which believe they possess the only path to the Divine. At best, such religions can sometimes be a force for good; and often, they can lead to extremely poor conduct (to state it very mildly) on the part of many of their adherents. (Side note: extreme, ultra-Orthodox right-wing Judaism - even though it still does not believe it is the only path to the Divine - seems to precipitate this "poor conduct," particularly in Israel. So I am not only criticizing religions other than Judaism.) This reality leads me to distance myself from the concept of "faith," even as I satisfy my spiritual needs by engaging with one organized religion.

[TheEllipticalDisillusion]

At any rate, the thing that strikes me now about my actions then is how easily I simply stopped being religious in any real sense of the word. I came to the conclusion some time ago this was due to any lack of spiritual feeling on my part underlying the religiosity. I went through all the education, inculcation, and indoctrination my church had to offer, and came out not really missing it when I left. I didn't feel particularly guilty about it then, and now it's mostly a topic for, well, discussion like this.

I found it just as easy, too. I remember Dawkins(?) wrote a book on the "god gene" which (IIRC) was supposedly this gene that controlled your propensity to believe or have faith in imperceptible notions. I don't remember if the gene actually exists or not.

[vison]

Thanks for your post, nerdanel. As always, very interesting.

[yovargas]

I posted this way back in Jan 28, 2004 on TORC (back when I could compete with nel in word-count ). The ending-so-far to the story is different now. Maybe I'll tell some of it some day. Maybe not.

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My parents raised me in the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) church, a denomination which has some unusual views but is otherwise a fairly normal Protestant denomination. They tend to be rather legalistic (lots of rules, specially concerning what you're allowed to do on Sabbaths and also some dietary standards such as vegetarianism) but
normally, not anything too extreme. My parents were very serious about the faith and wanted me to get an SDA education so I went to small SDA schools for nearly all my youth. When I had graduated from my SDA school at 8th grade, my parents wanted to find an SDA high school for me to attend. In my area there were two options - a respectable, accredited, "normal" (by SDA standards) school called Forest Lake Academy; and a radical, extremist school named Rolling Hills Academy founded by an SDA evangelist who had left the official church and founded his own branch because he thought the official church was far too moderate. Forest Lake Academy cost nearly $5000 a year. Rolling Hills Academy was under $1000 a year. My parents were poor. I went to Rolling Hills Academy (RHA).

RHA was a place where everything was considered immoral or corrupting. TV was bad. Non-religious music was bad. Video games were bad (two kids got suspended when the principal found out the played Mortal Kombat at home). Modern dress styles were bad (girls had strict codes on how high their skirts could come up and jewelry was forbidden). Any expression of sexuality was bad (one couple got expelled for kissing on a field trip). Competitive sports were bad. Eating absolutely anything animal-based was bad. Everything was bad and the entire faculty was more or less nuts.

Interestingly enough, coming into this environment after being in a moderate school, behavior which was seen as completely normal and harmless at my previous school got me labeled something of a rebel at RHA. While being a rebel makes you have constant run-ins with authority, it seems to do wonders for your "coolness" factor. Though
the faculty largely couldn't stand me, I had more friends then I'd ever had or have ever had since. Going to school there was absurd and maddening on a constant basis, but with all my new-found friends I was actually having a lot of fun. Having been a fairly lonely child, I probably felt happier at the time then I'd ever been. And then, in 1994, near the end of my 1st semester of my sophomore year there, the principal told me that I could not come back for the 2nd semester - I was being expelled. The official reason? The principal had overheard me telling some friends about a Saturday Night Live skit I'd thought was funny. The principal thought the discussion was highly inappropriate and that I had become a negative influence on the people around me, so I had to leave in two weeks at the end of the semester. I was upset by this news, but not nearly as upset as I would become within the coming days.

I begun to pray to God. Now, I had prayed fairly regularly throughout most of my young life. Though as a young kid one doesn't necessarily feel the need for prayer, living the relatively carefree life of youth, I still felt it was important to try and "stay in contact" with God. And the hyper-strict, hyper-religious teachings of my school, obnoxious as they were, had been very successful at making me want to get closer to God. So I was praying to God, not necessarily frequently, but regularly. But the prayers were rarely more then the benign "Thank you for being so good and great, please forgive my sins, Amen" kind of prayer. But now, with the upcoming expulsion from my school, I had a bit of a crisis and so naturally I went to God with my problem.

I was praying a lot during these days (at least for me), probably two or three times a day. As the short days I had at RHA passed, I was increasingly upset by the feeling that I was going to be cut off from a lot of my friends. The more upset I became, the more I prayed. What was I praying for? Not for God to change the principal's mind, or even for God to help me keep all my good friends. I was praying to find out the simple answer to the simple question: is this God's will? Is me leaving this school part of God's plan for my life? Or does God disapprove of the principal's decision because RHA is where I should be? The more upset I became, the more I needed to know what God wanted. I was scared! For the first time that I could remember, due to the expulsion, I was going to have to go to a public school. The private SDA schools that I went to spoke of public schools as if they were filled with nothing but hooligans, drugs, and violence. I was terrified of where I was going, deeply saddened by the upcoming loss of my social group and I needed to know for my comfort and peace of mind - is this God's will?

So I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed. Nothing. A couple of days before my last day at RHA, I was getting ready to go to school for the morning. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, looked in the mirror, pondered my situation, and begun to cry. Not just cry, but sob, and desperately. In my overly-emotional, teenage head, I was desperate and I cried more intensely then I've ever cried in my entire life. And so, in deep pain, I once again began to pray to God and to pray harder then I'd ever done before. In my mind, I was screaming at God for an answer, for some comfort, for some enlightenment, for some SOMETHING. What I got was nothing. That morning, I cried and I prayed to the point that I felt emotionally numb, a numbness that would follow me for the next several years. By the time, I left that bathroom, I hated God.

The following years were emotionally terrible, and particularly the one semester I spent in public school was pure hell, easily the worst period of my life. I sank into a severe depression, became highly reclusive and antagonistic towards people, and often felt suicidal. Put simply, I had been raised to believe that God was everything, but I now hated God and therefore had nothing to live for. In some sense I think that I felt during this time that God had betrayed me the only time I'd ever needed him, but this was all felt rather then rationalized. In other words, I never said to myself "I hate God because he abandoned me" or anything, it was more of a gut, emotional reaction that was a part of the bigger emotionally jumbled mess my life was during this period. (To help things out even more <sarcasm>, very soon after this religious downfall I also begun to realize I was gay, which could have only further my emotional turmoil. Though in hindsight I contend that my issues with God were by far the bigger issue I had).

With this new-found hatred towards God, I begun to call myself an atheist. This was mostly an act of rebellion, not really any philosophical stance, since at the time I didn't really comprehend what atheism meant. At the time, it probably stood more for Not Christian, which is what I really was. After my semester in public school, my parents decided to send me to Forest Lake Academy (FLA - the "respectable" SDA school my parents hadn't been able to afford). FLA was vastly more moderate then RHA, but it still had religious courses and religion, God, and the Bible were common topics in the general school discussion. My attitude towards God at this point led me, in some ways, to try and find reasons to hate God. So in all the religious talk, I started to look for flaws in the religious armor. I would pick on and grab on to inconsistencies I saw in the Bible, fallacies I saw in our doctrine, illogical ideas I saw about God. Though still clouded by all my teenage angst, this is important to note because it began a rational examination of the facts. My conclusions weren't even remotely unbiased, but they were slowly becoming rational.

I think during this period, I somewhat subconsciously gathered a lot of evidence against religion. I was steeped in a religious environment and seeing things left and right which just didn't add up. But clearly even though I called myself an atheist I still believed in God - hell, I was still angry at him (though I had long since forgotten why)! Fortunately, the later part of my last year of high school had been fairly pleasant and I begun to slowly come out of my depression. I was now able to begin looking more clearly into what The Truth was.

There were three things that I encountered within a few weeks of each other in the summer of 1997 which had a significant impact on my beliefs and would kick-start the philosophical inquiry that continues to this day. Those three things were the movie Contact (which I highly recommend if you enjoy these religious discussions we have around here), a collection of essays on Darwinism, and probably most importantly a book called The History of God. The primary impact of the first two was primarily to simply open my mind to other possibilities. Up to this point, I think I had only genuinely considered two options: Christianity or Nothingness. And by Nothingness I don't even mean atheism which IS something or at least can be something, but a true lack of belief in anything in life (which was my attempted route earlier and led to my hatred of my own life). But these opened my mind to other options, other
possibilities that I now needed to explore.

But it was History of God that revolutionized my previous conceptions of God. If you're unfamiliar with the book, it attempts to give a very detailed historical account on the birth and growth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam starting around Abraham and moving all the way to the present. Reading the book's notion of human's perception of God - even within the same religion - changing and evolving throughout time to fit the current ideals of humanity, left me with what I felt was an inevitable conclusion, IF God existed, the true knowledge of who or what he is has long been lost during the many, many years of human change. With this new notion in hand, combined with the evidence against Christianity I had gather over the past few years, I was now able to legitimately call myself an agnostic. This was hugely important in my life because my new status as a real agnostic cast doubt on God's existence. Since I was able to rationally conclude that God might not be there, I could finally let go of the immense anger I had carried towards God for nearly three years. Removing this anger from my life was one of the most positive things to ever happen in my life.

After this it was merely a gradual decline in reasons to believe in God with a gradual increase in reasons not to. I met Wolfie [old TORC poster and a RL friend at the time] a few months after my revelations and we were both filled with all sorts of ideas at the time. We helped each other immensely by giving each other someone to bounce all of our wild notions off of and to clarify some of the philosophical mess that we had. I kept calling myself agnostic for a few years, but I think that was partially because I still had in my mind some notion of atheism being bad in some way. Atheism had always been discussed negatively around me so I think I might have been a bit reluctant because of it. But that stopped when I encountered the philospher Ayn Rand who for me completely annihilated the idea of agnosticism, and gave me the intellectual ability to call myself an atheist proudly and significantly. (Note: This does not mean that I am a follower of Rand, just that her ideas highly influenced me).

So now I confidently call myself an atheist. Philosophically, I am more comfortable now then I have ever been in my life. This is not to say I think I know everything I need to, but that I am confident about many of the conclusions I have come to regarding God and religion.

/Me - Jan 28, 2004

[vison]

This is much briefer and less involved than I wanted it to be. But it's going to have to do for now.


I don’t remember a time when I believed in any god. I was not brought up in a religious home, but I vividly recall one of my sisters becoming a Christian and the wary confusion her conversion caused in our family. Her religious phase was brief and she was forever embarassed by it, to the extent that if anyone ever mentioned it she’d “go ballistic”. I don’t know why she was so embarassed. She was a very different person than I am, poor Lindy, and now she is dead and I can’t ask her.

When I was about 11 or 12 my parents were asked to be godparents to the daughter of some old friends who had become Anglicans. They agreed, and had to undertake some instruction or other, and we all went to the christening. That was the end of that, as far as I recall, I don’t remember that their duties as godparents were ever mentioned again. A long time after, I asked my Dad about it. He answered that “We didn’t like to say no”. He said that if he had it to do over, he would have said, “No”. The friends who asked them to do it were people who “took up” things and then set them aside; my Dad felt that he and Mum had been “fooled” in some sense to take part.

Sorry to be so long-winded. But I’m getting where I want to go.

But you know, as life goes on, Christian ritual comes up here and there. My husband and I were married in a church - the United Church of Canada - primarily because of “convention” and, the other reason, it was a building big enough to hold our guests. We made our wedding vows and promises, and we have kept them for nearly 45 years, and the solemnity of the occasion is now quite appropriate if it wasn’t then. I didn’t swear to God, nor did my husband, I suppose we swore to each other if I had to explain what that was all about.

When my husband and I were new parents, friends of ours asked us to be godparents to their daughter. We said, “No”, and there was a coolness for many years after. We were secure in our honesty, saying we couldn’t possibly undertake a religious duty when we were not religious - it seemed pretty straightforward to me that to agree would be hypocritical. Those friends have not, as far as I know, darkened the door of any church since their daughter was christened , except for weddings and funerals - and I still wonder why they wanted their daughter christened at all. Custom, I suppose. But since being godparents requires some vows, some promises, I thought then and I think now that it’s a pretty serious matter and it would be wrong to pretend .

For most of my life it hasn’t been an issue, one way or the other. But when my daughter-in-law died there were very hard questions to answer. My little grandsons both asked why God had let their Mum die. Where they got the idea of God I don’t know, I suppose a neighbour said something. I had nothing to say about God, but explained that as far as we knew his Mum caught a disease and it made her die. But if we ask won’t God make her come alive again? Is Mummy in heaven? My best answer was that if there was a Heaven, his Mum was there.

None of that made me question my beliefs, but what it did do was make me wonder how on earth religious people get around explaining things like that to children.

I think people began to see a need for god or gods when they began to wonder about the world around them. When they first stood up on their legs and saw beyond the trees. There were gods everywhere. Those were the sorts of gods attached to a particular people in a particular place, I think. When it was necessary for a people to move in order to survive, they created portable gods, invisible gods - and all the more powerful for being out of sight. In the sky, most likely. I think it was around then that the Sky God killed the Earth Mother.

The other impetus to religion always seemed obvious to me in what I think is the natural desire/longing of humans to be “good” or to “live a good life” so in order to be “happy”. Surely a powerful god would require something from his adherents - the enormous gifts he provided must be given on the understanding that the recipients be properly grateful and obedient. It is easy for me to imagine the rise of a priesthood, of initiates who can explain the rules of the creator. Reward and punishment are a logical end to that.

But all that is beside the point, beside being a very short and ill-expressed version of my thoughts. Since I started this thread, it strikes me that I better post something in it!

In the other thread about “the nature of your deity”, I found that the responses from the “believers” were pretty much of a muchness. I don’t know if that similarity would be common in the population in general, but I suspect not. If it was common, there would be a much more peaceful world. What I didn’t see any of, and I was a tiny bit surprised, was the part of religion where the god judges your behavior. I didn’t see Hell anywhere, and Heaven seemed only a vague and pleasant rumour.

I think that morality consists mostly of the systems we have devised to allow us to live together. I have never believed that fear of Hell or hope of Heaven really matter - it isn’t fear of punishment that keeps me from breaking a law and it isn’t hope of reward either. Being good is its own reward, sufficient for me. I give my neighbour the same latitude.

I think the God that commanded Abraham to kill his son was a brute and a bully. I think the God of the Old Testament is what we once called an “Oriental despot”. I don’t accept the various versions of the divinity of Jesus; I don’t think Jesus existed at all.

That many of my friends, here and elsewhere, believe in God in one way or another I do understand. I also understand that many of you take comfort in that belief, and that it is a major part of your lives. It’s not a feeling or belief that I can share. I never have and probably never will see any reason to believe in God - and it is “reason” that is the key word there.

I have stood on top of a hill in the windy night and watched the stars wheel around the Earth. I have been suffused with a sense of wonder and joy - and was glad to be there. But it never translated into ‘gratitude’ or any idea that someone at some time must have made it - or that what I was feeling was “mystical” or “spiritual”. The aching delight in beauty is part of our human sentience - only we can experience it.

“I am a child of the Universe, just like the trees and the stars. I have a right to be here.”

[vison]

Thanks, yovargas. That was great.

[Túrin Turambar]

Some interesting posts in this thread.

The short answer is that I was raised in a non-religious household, never really developed any religious belief and have never seen or heard anything to persuade me to do so. My mother was into New Age spiritualism for a long while, and I suppose I was led to believe in things like Guardian Angels as a child, but I came to settle into atheism as a teenager.

I went to a local public primary (ie. elementary) school. We still had religious education, though – the Queensland Government is not bound by a formal separation of church and state, and volunteers from the local churches would come to tell us about how Jesus died for our sins and the like. It was all pretty basic, and none of them had any real theological training as far as I could tell. Most were well-meaning retired people. Parents of non-Christian children had the option of sending a note to have their children excluded. It was also Protestant rather than Catholic, a distinction which mattered less in the 1990s than it did in the 1960s but wasn’t irrelevant.

Then I won a scholarship to go to high school a small private school in a semi-rural setting. In Australian terms it was a ‘college’ (Canterbury College was its name, originally the College of the Good Shepherd), meaning a private school that offers education from preschool to grade 12 rather than just primary school (preschool to grade 7) or just high school (grades 8 to 12) like state schools do. It was Anglican, and affiliated with a network of similar independent Protestant schools. I had been baptized into the Anglican Church when I was about eight, and had godparents. It seemed like a natural thing at the time, although odd in retrospect as my parents are not Christians. Regardless, Canterbury accepted people of all faiths and denominations, and so off I went.

Religion at Canterbury, as it is in the Anglican Church in general, was very laid back. We had a large annual chapel service, a smaller annual one for the class, a weekly one, and often started assemblies and the like with a prayer. The Headmaster was an Anglican Minister, and a good man that I respected. The school emphasized religion for community rather than salvation – the English middle-class affection of viewing church as a social institution. I distinctly remember the Headmaster saying that it was OK to be gay, and rumours went around that the Chaplain didn’t actually believe in God. At any rate, I happily played along with it all. Still, my atheist position firmed during those five years, and if anything, the wishy-washy religion I was exposed to didn’t gel with my intellectual demands and I respected it less than fire-breathing fundamentalism. To this day, I am deeply suspicious of liberal and progressive churches and synagogues and ‘smorgasbord’ faith, which I tend to see as dishonest and hypocritical.

Towards the end of Grade 12 (the final year of secondary education in Queensland), I made the decision not to go and get communion at a service. A few others did likewise. It was the moment for me that I ‘came out’ as an atheist. I saw many kids who almost certainly had little knowledge or understanding of Christianity and who lived, to my mind, decidedly un-Christian lives line up before the altar, so it was also a point at which I sort of rejected conformist society as a whole.

Over time I subsequently grew into a ‘strong’ atheist who sees religion as an active evil in the world. I began to see ‘faith’ as nothing more than willful belief without evidence, and came to appreciate Voltaire’s famous quote: If you can make people believe in absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities. The line from believing in a supreme God who must be obeyed to 9/11 is, in my view, fairly short and easy to follow. I have no desire to be an atheist evangelist, though, and so I generally don’t air these sorts of opinions in public. On the whole, unless I see someone’s beliefs leading to some sort of tangible harm I’m happy to let them come to their own conclusions and accept that they could be right and I could be wrong. I agree that the evidence must come from those advancing the claim, and unless I get enough evidence for a religion to outweigh my rational objections to it I will disbelieve it.

[JewelSong]

I just wanted to say that I think this thread and the sister thread have been extremely interesting and thought-provoking. I'd like to thank vison for starting them and everyone else for being so forthcoming and respectful!

[yovargas]

I have no desire to be an atheist evangelist, though...

Ha! I've been privately using the term "evangelical atheist" for a while now to describe a certain sort of atheism which I often see and dislike and try to disassociate myself from (in hindsight, I was an "evangelical atheist" at the time of the writing of my post above).