Welcome, everyone, to the second annual Atheist Digest Series. Anyone who missed the previous series last summer can access all the diaries and post game here. This year’s series will feature many of the same diarists but will have several changes in format. First, our diaries will focus on more specific or more personal subjects instead of trying to cover very broad ideas. Second, our diarists will have more freedom in choosing both subject and posting date/time. Third, I will accept diary submissions for the series from anyone and include them in the series as long as they pass some minimum standards as decided by yours truly, the MC. Anyone interested in submitting (You don’t have to be an atheist, but it has to factor into you diary somehow) can email me and I’ll review your request.
I thought I would kick off the series with a diary that may be a year overdue. Seeing as how I have undertaken two diary series projects on the subject of atheism it might be appropriate for me to tell the story of my own path to atheism. As this is a diary and not an autobiography I’ll try to keep it focused and brief.
I was born and raised in Colorado, to Lutheran parents (my Mom was raised Lutheran, my Dad sort of went along and got into it after meeting my Mom). With few exceptions we went to church weekly from when I was born until I left for college. Even at a relatively young age, maybe nine or ten, I had nagging thoughts as I sat in services. Most of the time I was in church listening to readings or sermons I actually thought about what was being said. One gift and curse I have is that my brain is always processing something, and it’s very difficult to turn it off. This is one main reason why I enjoy arguments and rhetoric so much as it gives me an outlet for my mental machinations. Sitting in a pew I contemplated and took little wandering trips down epistemological back alleys. Some things didn’t add up for me. I’ve never been one to accept things at face value, which probably explains how I eventually came to be a progressive (that’s another story though). Some of the things I heard didn’t add up to me.
I had thoughts I couldn’t immediately dismiss. For instance: if everyone who believes and accepts JC as their personal savior will receive eternal life in heaven then why did I have to go to church? I mean, I believed, I accepted Jesus, I was a good person. What was the difference between someone like me that went to church, and one that didn’t? I began thinking it was silly to believe there was some imaginary, arbitrary line that separated eternal damnation from eternal salvation. To think that God had a scorecard of every little thought or deed of 5+ billion people and had some kind of formula to weigh trangresions against benevolent acts was absurd to me. What about all the people in other parts of the world that have never even heard of Jesus? What happens to them? I was told that anyone could be forgiven for any sin, so long as they were repentant and accepted JC as their savior. So people that broke every commandment could go to heaven if they just repented, but someone who doesn’t know what the commandments are and steals a five cent jolly rancher from the 7-11 will suffer in hell for eternity? Where was the line, and how could human beings ever be sure of what it was? It wasn’t enough for me to believe that I had only to do my best and make sure I wasn’t near ‘the line.’ The idea of ‘the line’ was pure cognitive dissonance. I forced it down, and beat it back into submission. It was a frontal assault on rationalism I could not maintain.
There is a reason college is such a transformative experience for so many people. Not only are we reaching an age where we begin to mentally and physically mature rapidly, but many of the paradigms of restraint and influence that lock us in as a teen under our parents’ roof are lifted all at once, resulting in the flight of an untied balloon.
At first I tried to keep things contained in my previous comfort zone. I joined to the Campus Crusade for Christ (scary name isn’t it), and kept sending troops to the front lines of my internal battle. I was determined to win the fight for Christ. The people I met were all so nice, the girls so attractive, and the activity so pleasing to my mother that I couldn’t see an earthly reason not to come down on the side of Christianity. Yet the battle continued. Many people can point to one singular event, one incident that definitively destroyed the ramparts of their similar internal struggle, leaving one side finally and permanently victorious. I had no such event. Over time the forces of reason and doubt eroded my carefully constructed palisades until one day the forces for religion inside me pulled back to the embassy and evacuated by helicopter.
Originally my atheism was what most would think of as agnosticism. (We went around and around and the definitions of agnosticism and atheism last year, so I’m going to leave that scab alone for now if I can). My rejection of religion was firmly on the grounds of "they claim to know the answers to questions no can really know, and perhaps for which we shouldn’t even seek answers." I just rejected the notion that anyone could have the authority to claim knowledge of the nature of our existence and a possible afterlife. I surmised that church and Christian groups existed to keep people’s fingers in their ears chanting "la la la la la." On a side note I lost my ‘conservativeness’ at about the same time and through a similar process. As soon as I was removed from the right wing noise machine, the sheer irrationality of conservatism started to show through.
I didn’t start self identifying as an ‘atheist’ until after a few years had passed. Some time had gone by without me giving much thought to religion or my own brand of non-belief, and then I stumbled into a puddle of philosophy and stirred up some interest in the subject. I attended a summer school program at Cambridge University and encountered a lecturer that scraped off the scattered ruins and shanty huts that occupied my personal philosophy and started me building a respectable campus of modern buildings.
Within minutes of the first session of the history of philosophy course he was teaching, Piers Bursill-Hall offended most of the room. The Cambridge mathematics lecturer pretty much started off telling all the theists that their beliefs were silly nonsense and if they were offended too much by that they should probably drop the course. I think it was the brashness, the unapologetic confidence he had that opened my eyes to the possibility that I wasn’t some isolated outcast but a member of a society where there were others like me. Now I felt I could explore my ideas on the subject of religion with my head held high. That may sound strange to those born and raised atheists, but to me it took that experience to finally throw off the theist frame and adopt an atheist one. Piers went on to talk about how he was relatively certain that the book of genesis was a not so clandestine rip off of Plato’s theory of forms, and that religious organizations (mostly the Catholic Church) held back scientific advancement for centuries.
I got home from England with a new mindset. I started off slowly, sporadically reading message board posts and websites, I read Dawkins’s "The God Delusion" and some of the criticism of it, and I read "God is Not Great" By Christopher Hitchens (am ambivalent read to be sure). I read "Atheist Universe" by David Mills and then I went back and read the Bible. I can’t say I ever read the Bible cover to cover back when I was a practicing Lutheran, and I definitely skipped over the more boring sections the second time around (‘so-and-so begat so-and-so’ isn’t exactly a page turner) but what used to be a sacred and mysterious text when I was younger became to me a collection of gruesome fairy tales. I’ll try to discuss more of this in a later diary, but lets just say that as a non-believer, reading the Bible is an eye opener. I recently read "A Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris and it was part of my motivation for serializing this diary series.
There is obviously a lot more to the last three decades or so of my life than this, but I thought it might provide a better foundation for discussion to give everyone a short history of my interaction with religion. I’m sure from some I’ll hear a lot of the same canards about being angry with God, or not ever knowing Jesus like they do, and I’m happy to have those discussions on an individual basis, so long as they don’t become tiresomely repetitive. I put myself out there because I like to discuss, I like to argue, I welcome the intellectual challenge, so don’t hold back people, let me have it. Let the games begin.
I’ll cover the schedule to date and then see you in the comments:
Next diaries by me, XNeeOhCon:
Fri. August 13th, About 9:30 AM PST – On Christian Claims to Moral Superiority
Mon. August 23rd, About 10:30 AM PST- Ben Stein is a Moran, The Infinite Probability Fallacy.
Wed. September 1st, About 5:30 PM PST – Conclusion diary
Later this week: 'Glossary' by Dr. Rieux
Stay tuned for diaries from other users including Brahman Colorado, Dr. Rieux, Rfall, Something the Dog Said, and Warren S. (Look for "Atheist Digest '10" in the Tags and Diary Title)