Becoming a reluctant atheist moved me politically toward the left.
I used to be quite religious. Well, I guess you could say I was spiritual, or ecumenical at the least. Raised Catholic, went to Catholic school by parents who were lukewarm in their Catholicism, but pushed it on my to make the devout grandparents happy. And they didn't have to push hard, I was quite happy with the ritualistic family feel of church. Chanting the doxology, the warmth of communion. High school retreats where teenagers would testify in a tearful fashion about their relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
And social justice. This was a big hook for me. I still work for a Catholic organization, not all of them take social justice seriously, but this one does. "Doing the Lord's work" by pursuing the aims of social justice is seductively attractive, and always made me feel like I was part of something bigger. I really, sincerely wanted to do as much as I could to do as God asked of me. I didn't believe in hell. I didn't think that God would actually punish atheists or people of other religions. I felt like God was a frustrated parent and we were all rebellious teenagers trying to figure it out - I prayed, on my knees, daily. Please help me to do Your will. The prayer of St Francis: Make me a channel of thy peace. I never thought about using God as some kind of magic lamp - praying for things for myself.
Until my daughter was born with brain lesions. Initially, she was born septic after premature rupture of membranes following 18 hours of labor. After an emergency C section, I got to hold her for a minute, fell deeply in love with her, and she was whisked away to the NICU for a week of IV antibiotics. Then the begging God prayers started. "Please save my little girl." Surely this was unnecessary. God was the perfect parent. He must KNOW that this needs to happen. And there must be a REASON behind it - part of His Plan.
And sure enough, that's what it seemed. Because of her early NICU interventions, the neonatologist incidentally discovered that she had glaucoma. That along with her port-wine stain made her suspect a rare condition called Sturge-Weber Syndrome. An MRI was recommended and performed later that week confirming the diagnosis. Vascular lesions, tumors, affecting her face, eye and brain. Forewarned, for me, was forearmed. I am a nurse. I lined up specialists, started carrying seizure rescue medications. These came in handy when she was two and started having seizures. I started having my first doubts about God. I had never prayed ASKING for things before, but I was asking for healing. I wanted my daughter to stop suffering. I was a parent of three children - one time my older daughter had darted into a busy street and I lacerated my arm on a nail reacting to pull her out of the way to keep her from being hit by a car. That is what a loving parent does. I was at the Kubler-Ross stage of Bargaining. Please God, I will give my own health - heal my daughter, prevent her suffering.
When she was hospitalized just before her third birthday with migraines that were difficult to distinguish from her seizures, I kept a 72 hour vigil beside her bed, barely slept, barely ate, and showered in the community hospital shower. I prayed and read up on all her medications, conditions, treatments. I was well beyond prepared for the brand new residents who were supervising her case - they ultimately discharged her after determining that she was having migraines and not seizures - but they did nothing to relieve her suffering. When I got home, I took some of my own prednisone, called her pediatrician to tell him what I was doing and verify the dose - he said, "OK give it a try". And she snapped out of her week-long funk almost immediately. Back to eating and talking and laughing. I did that. That made me so angry with God, I wanted to punch him in the nose.
I gave Him another chance though, and this was the beginning of the end. Maybe I was doing it wrong. Maybe I had preconceived notions about what God is or should be that were interfering with my relationship with him. I decided that in order to find out what God was really like, what he really wanted, I would need to have to investigate from scratch - no preconceived ideas, not even His existence could be taken for granted. I would look into this for all arguments and evaluate their rationality and probability like I would any other hypothesis. Disturbingly, the results for theism did not leave me with lots of hope. No one really had concrete answers (and it turns out that Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome project, who was so influential to me years earlier, was a fraud when it came to linking his faith to his research). Ultimately, while watching Fear and Faith by Derren Brown, I felt a wave of comprehension and betrayal wash over me - it left me feeling exactly the same way it did when I discovered that Santa Claus was a hoax when I was eight.
I looked harder into the existence of God, hoping that this fraud wasn't true. Surely, billions of people couldn't be this wrong. I wanted there to be a God. Not just any God. A loving, fatherly God who helps protect my family and is proud of me when I do Good. Sadly, this was not to be the case.
After the end of faith post-depressive phase, things picked up. Skepticism is quite useful. It is humbling. Everything you think you know is up for grabs. I have had facebook friends politely accuse me of arrogance because my writing style is too 'confident', but the truth is I am wrong, and I know I’m wrong. About lots of things. I can't tell which things exactly, but when I find them, I am happy and even grateful to change my views on them. I have found this does great things for the accuracy of my beliefs (as Matt Dillahunty often says "I want to believe as many true things as possible and disbelieve as many false things as possible"), and this is easier when I don't have my self-esteem so closely tied to long standing sacred beliefs.
A side effect of this - my political beliefs have considerably moved to the left. I am not sure of the explanation, but as Stephen Colbert has said: "Reality has a well-known Liberal bias". I don’t consider myself a “Liberal” — the political left in this country has its own set of problems and cognitive biases that it needs to overcome. But these problems are not intractable. The fact that most Liberals are already interested in “believing as many true things as possible and disbelieving as many false ones” gives them a huge head start. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.