How I Came to Be an Atheist

My religious background is rocky, though probably not uncommon for someone born and raised in the midwest. My father's family were Catholics, my mother's also, though their roots were in neighboring states. I am convinced now in retrospect that my father must have been an atheist of some sort, having excised religion from himself somewhere around college age. My mother broke with the Catholic church sometime around 1990 and became a born-again Christian--pentacost and all.

I was educated in a Catholic grade school and indoctrinated--more than just indoctrinated, positively brainwashed--in an Assemblies of God church. I remember thinking that not only did I actually believe it, but it was as real as the birdshit on your car. I believed the Holy Spirit was real, that people really did speak in tongues, and that the evil Scientists and liberals were the unknowing agents of Satan and were out to destroy God. It's rather embarassing in hindsight, but come on--I was thirteen.

A formative moment in my life, a love unrequited, was forged in part from assurances from God that he was speaking directly to me and willed it for my life. What I chose, I felt he had not only sanctioned but positively goaded me into. It played out horribly and brought me to such anger at God that it fomented a tremendous internal struggle that culminated in swearing vengeance on God. Ahab, thy heart hath in mine a brother.

Distant and isolated from family during college, I devoted myself to the pursuit of technology and science. It instigated a profound maturation that forced me to confront my anger. At some point I was able to admit to myself that I could neither blame God for my actions or for the pain that I felt--that, empirically, the only person I could truly prove had acted was myself, and rejecting the tantalizing belief that reality is simply a figment of my all-powerful imagination and that I could shape it as I like, I came to the humble acceptance that I could no longer claim victimhood in the matter, and that I must be able to accept my mistakes and the actions of others in that time, as real and unchangeable facts of history, and that the only reflectance that I should pay should be to learn.

In essence what I came to regard as the only acceptable explanation of the world is the pure statement of atheism--I exist, the universe exists, and the path that reality takes is governed by natural, unchangeable laws, influenced, but not controlled, by actors such as myself of finite will that exist in this universe. It is a tantalizingly simple statement that my upbringing, and I believe, the psychological needs of my human brain, required significant intellectual development to entertain. I found tremendous pressure, internal and external, not to believe it. It was a dark, cold, masochistic thing to consider--and I feared in my heart, irrationally, and automatically, that God frowned on me. As this pressure weighed on me, I felt a sinking, deepening dread, as if the stars would lose their brilliant twinkle and wink out one by one, leaving the night to darkness, and that orange glow of street lamps would drench the world in a monochrome blandness, and the wonder would melt away from life.

I felt such uncertainty to my core that I wondered whether God would damn my very soul for inviting that dangerous answer into consideration and entertaining it as seriously as I knew must inevitably follow. And fear--fear of the unknown, as primitive man huddled in the dark hearing the gutteral roars of voracious predators in the vast blackness, grown to monster proportions in the imagination of his expanding, but barbaric brain. I knew that same fear that gripped primal minds before there was fire. I was in the wilderness, I was without comfort, without light, and the world was mysterious, unknowable, and destructive.

From that journey I now know that I traversed a black abyss, a deep canyon separating the safe shores of faith in God, the creator, the originator, and the ultimate will, from the rocky and dangerous path of the universe as it exists, undistorted and untempered by love, impersonally stoic, and infinite in its crude justice. I knew that path would take courage, that it would offer me no solace to my soul, and would not reveal in me a religious or spirtual truth that was transcendent. It was an adolescent mind--I concluded--that demanded the universe make sense, that demanded simple but profound insight into the very mysterious nature of it all. It was some brand of narcissistic hubris to believe such things, to have that faith. For as I was coming to see that God is not the creator of man, but God the creation of man--I recognized the origin of God as the core forces of all that primitive man could not grasp about the natural world--wind, water, fire, life and death. Layered and barnacled with all the crusty plaque of millenia of philosophical discourse, our discourse and our conception of god has evolved as our society evolved. Billed as constantly unchanging, all-knowing and all powerful, His evolution throughout history bears the marks of constant redefinition, expansion, and continuing abstraction, exposing Him rather as man's fleeting fancy than the unchangeable and universal. Scholars no longer muse about miracles, nor do we much accept that they take place in our times, as they have eroded like all mysticism from human consciousness, as rightly they should. And the creator who was once the bastion of all that humanity could not understand, has been desperately fleeing from the development of science and the maturation of human consciousness. As theologians have retreated to more abstract ponderings on God's nature, their discourse on free will and God's justness is more and more divorced from the mythological history of the events of the Bible--God, once a bearded Santa Claus in the sky and the personal god of the Israelites, the bringer of rains, the mover of planets and the stars, has abdicated each of these roles as mankind has accepted more and more responsibility for knowing.

Responsibility--that's important to consider when musing about God, and the more I pondered my own role in this universe I could not claim myself an adult yet still defer responsibility for my own actions, and for my own ignorance upon some other person or entity. What else is faith but evasion of responsibility? How can a mature and self-aware consciousness intentionally cripple itself by immediately abdicating responsibility for its own knowledge, growth, and survival? Yet nevertheless that is in essence what faith is.

The contradictions of theology then come to the forefront. We are created with intelligence, but must cripple ourselves intentionally. We are created with a consciousness that under every circumstance appears to be free will, yet we must deny free will. We are created with original sin, yet we can neither achieve redemption through our own actions or our faith--but through God's grace alone. The will is bonded, and God becomes absolute--determinism rules all. But we are to conclude, through our own reasoning minds given us by God, that God's grace has been given unjustly, and that His choice to create billions of human souls which are doomed to suffering is sickly sadistic. The worst deceit of theology is therefore doublethink; we must cripple our minds to accept without judgment a jumble of contradictory things--we must hobble our intellect, restrict our reasoning powers, and dare not look critically at the message or the contradiction that is God's existence. In order to worship the creator, or to know the creator, we must destroy His gifts of intelligence--we must accept as morality original sin that is inescapable, and must destroy our very nature, insulting its creator, in order to praise Him? Worse, we are expected to transform our objections to such contradictions into an admission of idiocy, proof that we cannot know God. The vast well is thus swimming with God's poison. Alas, God is a charlatan.

This doublethink is totally absurd. It smacks of the strange pretzel of contradictory logic--and those theological masters, who humbly prostrate themselves before God, or immodestly slap you with their superior God-knowledge have bent themselves into odd contortions and convinced themselves that its comfortable. It shows how strange and demented the human mind is, how susceptible it is to accepting odd and quite twisted nonsense when it divorces itself from reality.

Nevertheless, the Christian theology, though its exorcism from my own mind being of primary importance, I began to see just how ideologically restrictive and psychologically twisted other belief systems are, too. There are both spiritual and non-spiritual religions, and it strikes me how similar the modern left's progressive belief system is utterly mystical; it substitutes a different model of justice, projects upon the world a code of ethics that emanates from that model, and tries to force reality into the mold. Reality is a stubborn thing, and 100 million corpses in the twentieth century has been a high price to pay to discredit such an ideology.

Yet it lives, and a post on that topic will have to wait.