From Christian to Atheist: Part 6

In my last year of high school, I met Linda Glassman. Shy and quiet, I started talking with her in drama class one day, and haven’t stopped yet. I don’t remember when religion came up, but I was all about the supernatural at this point, and it wouldn’t have taken long. I just know that one day, we ended up on the subject and that’s when I discovered she didn’t believe in gods. I had never met anyone who didn’t believe in God. Didn’t even know they existed, and here I was getting sweet on someone who was raised in an atheist household.

From what I’ve seen over the years, I know that Linda and her siblings were never told they couldn’t believe in gods. If they asked questions, however, those questions were answered. When Linda and I started dating, I asked a lot of questions and made a lot of statements. I was going to convince her that UFOs, ESP, and other things that go bump in the night were real, and so we talked. And talked, and talked and talked.

Linda had two things going for her in this conversation. One was that she was not hesitant in asking questions and pointing out illogical issues and inconsistencies. Given the stuff I was pushing, she had ample opportunity to question away. Second was her secret weapon. Ned and Ginny, her father and mother, were always available to answer or ask questions that she brought to them or that might come up. And this went on for quite some time.

Linda and I kept dating through high school and married soon after she graduated. At the time we married, I still held belief in a god and afterlife, though not nearly as clear as it had once been, and not quite as central. Note that we married in a secular wedding. We specifically asked that there be no mention of gods in the service, and our music was all secular. And for two more years, thus it remained.

During all this time, I started reading books by atheists, Christians, bible scholars and skeptical writers, all the while trying to figure out what the truth was, or at least what was not the truth. The more I read, the more I realized that there was no evidence for the things I believed. I realized that when I read something, even things that I felt had solid arguments, I needed to weigh the evidence and the veracity of the writer. I couldn’t just accept what I read as the truth, because now, I knew that there were some really excellent reasons why I was wrong about a lot of the things I held onto.

When I became an atheist, I didn’t do so because it was trendy or cool, or because I wanted to do evil and unspeakable things, or because I was upset with gods/God. I was always willing to give gods the benefit of the doubt, and even today, I find that hard to put aside. About a year before Jessica was born (about 1977), I realized that I no longer believed in a deity. I demanded proof, and none was forthcoming. Faith wouldn’t hack it. I required proof for evolution, for medicine, for many other things, and gods would be so much bigger than any of those things, so they needed proof too. God had finally lost the battle, and I was an atheist.

Still, it was about five years before I also gave up on an afterlife. I didn’t want to “not exist”, and when I realized that, I knew it was not a good enough reason to ignore the science and keep this one last bit of faith.

I have to be always watchful of what evidence I accept, because I still have that believer lurking around inside my head.  He wants to latch onto anything that will allow him to make an argument for an afterlife, and I know this because, he doesn’t care at all about whether the argument supports a god or not. The only real concern is, can I believe in an afterlife? And before you ask, no, I will not accept a belief system that supports an afterlife, just in case there is a chance it’s real. Pascal’s Wager fails. Evidence wins out.

I have made my peace with the notion that one day, just like everyone else who has lived and who will come after me, I will die. I will cease to be. Period. This is actually more comforting that the idea that I will be singing hosannas to Jesus for eternity. Really think about it. What would you possibly find to do for eternity? Maybe a few hundred years; heck, I would even consider living a few thousand (with a new and healthy body), but I have to admit that even that would be a pushing it. What do you do for two thousand years? When I was born, I had only one certainty, one guarantee. One day I will die. Till then, I intend to enjoy the ride whenever I can. Ups and downs, it’s an E ticket ride.

From Christian to Atheist: Part 5

At the point that I was a senior at Royal High, I had effectively stopped being a Christian. I still believed in a god, and an afterlife, as well as a whole lot of other things, like ESP, ghosts, UFOs and chances are if it was even vaguely “mystical” I was a believer. I even gave the Bible a selective pass on some of the things in it if there were explanations that fit what I had come to see as within the psychic/mystical. Ezekiel’s visions were UFOs, Jesus could perform miracles…but so could many other “mythical” people of the time. If monks could fly, Jesus could walk on water. If there was Kool-aide to drink, I drank it.

Around this time the Jesus movement was really getting big on campuses all over the States. They had high jacked the coffee house/hippy vibe and created a kind of “cool” atmosphere for young Christians. Hell, they even took Beatles songs like Nowhere Man and tried to make that carry a Jesusy feeling.

Now it’s important to understand, before I go further, that I was done with Christianity. While I might have been near certifiable regarding all the other crap I bought into, I had realized the Old Testament was full of holes and The New Testament was nearly as easy to dismiss. That was not a ride I was going to buy a ticket for again. So naturally, at some point along the way I discovered that the person I thought of as my best friend had bought it “hook, line and sinker”, and somehow had not bothered to tell me about it. I was not a happy camper.

Talk about a catch-22. Jim couldn’t have honestly come out of this without looking bad no matter what he did. On the one hand, he’d kept the whole thing from me, and on the other hand, I wasn’t going to drink from that cup again. Period. Ever. A "Kobayashi Maru" situation with no cheat possible. As it turns out, there were several other members of the circle we ran around in that had been sucked into the abyss along with him. I think the effect could have been less bothersome (or hurtful) if I had been invited near the start of the thing and simply turned it down, but that didn’t happen, and truthfully, I don’t know that I would have responded any better.

I thought of Jim as my best friend, but I honestly don’t know that Jim felt the same way. I was certainly on the list of his friends, and maybe near the top, but perception is usually a one way street. I would often find myself being brought into things he was doing after they were already in motion. Again, I have to be careful here because what I saw as so, might have not been so. I was not a very good reader of social situations. 

But I felt betrayed, and it was the beginning of a string of events over the next few years that would ultimately cause me to close the door on that friendship. As I said, I don’t know that he stood a chance.

What all that did was make me uber aware of the things I saw in the Christian community that were false, and cautious about the overly “happy” nature of Christians in general. There was everything in that movement that clambered cult or brain washing to me. The idea that these kids (or any adults I saw involved in the Jesus movement) were any better off or different was silly. I went to school with them, and push come to shove, they hadn’t really changed all that much. They had just decided that now that they believed in Jesus, they were happier than everyone else, and while they could cheer about forgiveness, they were still the same in most other ways. I didn’t buy it, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I really was done with organized religion by this point, but I wasn’t done with belief, and I still had one more major influence that I haven’t talked about yet. This last influence was the one that would set me on a path toward atheism, because this is, I think, the first time the word came up in any conversation for me. Next time, I talk about Linda.

Being is Born of Not Being

I guess the best way to start a blog, is to explain the Blog title.

Being is born of not being is from the Tao Te Ching. It fits the way I look at the world.

• For all appearances, the universe came from "not being".
• One moment not universe, then the Big Bang, and poof. You have a universe.
• The world did not exist. Rock, gas, bits and pieces of the universe get together and you have a planet. Earth.
• Life was nowhere to be seen, and then the right elements, molecules, chemicals, find each other and it begins.
• Evolution begins, as it must, and 3 billion years later humans are thinking they're the best things since white bread.
• And some 50 odd years ago, a particularly quick sperm met an egg, and my journey began from not being, to being. A close thing too, I'm sure, as there were a lot of other sperms that would have ended my journey before it began had one of them gotten there first.

And as I will not be in a position to write after I go from being back to not being, I choose to say what I wish to say now.