or How I Learned To Stop Believing and Love Reality
I do not believe in any gods. I do not believe in Zeus or Athena or Pluto or Mercury. I do not believe in Odin or Shiva or Bahamut or Thor. I do not believe Allah or Yahweh or Bast or Krishna. I do not believe in a great world spirit or a supreme being. I do not believe in fairies or leprechauns. I do not believe in Samsara or Heaven or Purgatory. I strongly suspect that you also do not believe in most of the things that I do not believe in.
There is quite a lot that I do not believe in. Indeed, I very purposefully and deliberately do not believe in much (which is a post I plan on writing soon). Sometimes, when people find out just how much I don’t believe, it concerns them. They tend to mostly be concerned when they discover that I don’t believe the same things that they believe. In an effort to alleviate some of that concern, I’d like to spend a little time talking about how I stopped believing in so many things. Maybe when they realize that I’ve given such matters a great deal of thought, they’ll at least be content that I have a fairly good idea of what I’m doing and not doing and that no one has tricked me or deceived me.
Bear in mind that I’m not trying to proselytize or convert you to my faithlessness. The world’s a big place and there’s room for all kinds of different ideas and beliefs in it. If everyone were like me, I’d be incredibly bored. (This isn’t to say that I won’t take arms against people wanting to teach silliness in public school science classes or that I think it’s okay for people to murder women for the crime of being raped. My country’s first amendment sets very clear limits on the first and basic morality sets even clearer limits on the second. But as long as you don’t try to ruin things for the rest of us, you and I will get along fine; no matter what you believe.)
So, take this as a story of how and why I came to the place in my life where I currently find myself. It’s not an attempt to bring you here and if you don’t care about me or my story, you shouldn’t read it. For someone who’s not interested in the personality behind this story, it may come off as an argument for why you should be like me. I would hate for it to be taken that way.
Now, with my two paragraph disclaimer out of the way, let us begin. Are you sitting comfortably?
I was raised a Baptist-like Christian with a healthy dose of Pentecostal thrown in for flavor. From the third grade until I graduated high school, I attended an extremely conservative Baptist school. The Bible was the literal word of God. When reality conflicted with the Bible, reality was clearly in error (seriously: anything in the universe that conflicted with the Bible was put their by Satan to trick us or by God to test our faith. I am not making this up.). When the Bible conflicted with the Bible, you were obviously reading it wrong. And God loved everyone, but he wouldn’t hesitate to send someone to Hell for the crime of being born in the wrong country.
And I believed it. I believed it fully and completely. I was deathly concerned about the eventual end of my soul and everyone else’s. Some dear friends whose opinions I valued greatly at the time (and still do, actually) called me Super Christian. I went to church and Bible study and I prayed without ceasing. Super Christian, indeed. But, eventually I started to feel somewhat disconnected from God. Don’t get me wrong: I still believed in him. I was just convinced that he couldn’t possibly love me. And let me tell you: that thought is sufficient to send someone into a pretty big funk.
So I wandered around in a general malaise for a few years: convinced that the creator of the universe just didn’t like me. And then I met another dear friend who convinced me that not only did God still love me, but that I still had a chance to build a relationship with him. So I did. If I were Super Christian before, I don’t know what I was at this point. Ultra Christian, perhaps? Just about every moment of every day was spent praying or singing hymns or going to church or thinking about Jesus or reading the Bible. I read the Bible like I had never read it before. Which was probably the beginning of the end for Ultra Christian. The more that I really read the Bible, the more I realized the one fundamental truth contained in it: the Christian God is a douchebag.
He starts off by creating a couple of humans. Humans that he knows (via the benefit of omniscience) will do whatever he tells them not to do. And so he tells them not to eat fruit of a tree that he puts right next to them. So of course they do and they and all of their descendants are cursed to hell.
He then spends the next few thousand years committing the most heinous crimes against humanity that I can readily imagine. He orders the deaths of entire peoples. He gives his chosen people free reign to rape any woman they find along the way. He encourages any survivors to be made slaves. He turns poor Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for having the audacity to look at her home as she flees it (okay; a pillar of salt is creative. But still.). Some kids dared to make fun of a prophet so God sends bears to maul them to death. And the Old Testament just goes on and on with this stuff.
Needless to say, I started to become somewhat uncomfortable about worshiping this guy. Had I committed even one of the atrocities credited to the Christian god, I’d be (rightly) considered one of the more evil men alive. I imagine I’d be executed for war crimes. No one but the mentally unstable and pathologically evil would sing my praises. Yet, once you really learn about him, the idea of praising the Christian god seems like a sin in and of itself.
About this time, I started reading books by Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist who made a name for himself outside of academia by writing books and doing TV shows to popularize physics. Greene does a fantastic job of explaining things like relativity, quantum theory, and cosmology. And he doesn’t do it with an appeal to authority. He doesn’t say “Trust me: this is the way it is.” Instead, he talks about the experiments that have been done. He talks about what they did and what the results were. He talks about the doubts that other scientists had. He talked about what science has gotten wrong over the years. And he included pages and pages of citations so I could go look it all up myself. Not once did he ask me to take his word for it
From Greene, I learned three things that relate to the topic of this post: I learned that a creator for the universe is not necessary. Physics, as we understand it, is perfectly capable of creating a universe all on its own. I learned that we have a great deal of evidence that points to our current theories (the Big Bang and such) being in the right ball park. And I learned the joys of being wrong or saying “I don’t know”.
That last bit is something that has really influenced me. Not knowing something is an amazing opportunity to learn something. But you can’t stop at “I don’t know”. Too often, people of faith stop at “I don’t know. God must’ve done it.” And that’s so unsatisfying! “I don’t know” is a doorway into further exploration. It has to be “I don’t know. Let’s find out!” or you’re not learning anything.
There were some other things too. I had never been happy with the way my religion expected me to think of homosexuals: that they were doing some great big sin just by loving someone. I had basically just ignored that part of my religion for quite some time using an incredibly liberal dose of cognitive dissonance. When Katrina hit, the Christian assholes came out of the woodwork to say that it was just punishment for the sins of the area; I found it odd that only poor black people were considered sinful enough to be punished though. (There was also a great deal of love and help poured into the area from Christians. This just seems like strong evidence that good people will do good things, no matter what they do on Sunday morning.)
I started questioning my faith. By this point, I had a lot to question. I realized that the only reason I believed what I did was because my parents had taught me to. And just like that, I stopped being a Christian. (I think it’s fair to say that I’d stopped believing before that since belief isn’t really something you can turn off and on. It might be more fair to say “And just like that, I gave myself permission to stop being a Christian.”)
At first, I toyed with the idea of other beliefs, but nothing gelled for me. I wasn’t just “not a Christian”; I was “not a person of faith”. I’d become “a person of evidence” instead.
But please understand me: I might be wrong. There might be some great spirit or god or higher power or supreme being hiding out there. I can’t disprove it. And all it would take to convince me is a little bit of evidence. A burning bush or fire from the heavens would likely convince me. However, in absence of such evidence, I’ll not believe in god anymore than I believe in unicorns or honest politicians.
I didn’t reach this conclusions lightly. I’ve thought over all of the arguments like Pascal’s wager and the argument of incredulity. And I still read a lot: both from secular philosophers, scientists, and theists. I haven’t tuned out of the world of the faithful just because I’m no longer a part of it.
After all, I might learn something.