the night i became an atheist [12/02/2006 00:32:01]

A few months ago, while riding my bike, I noticed a man sitting in a truck by a small park. The engine was on and the windows were rolled up, and he appeared to be sleeping, or at least very relaxed. I just rode past him, at first, but over the next few minutes I started worrying about the guy. You sit in a parked car with the engine running long enough and you wind up dead from carbon monoxide poisoning (edit: well, probably not). The way I understand it, it just makes you tired, and you don't even notice that you're about to die. After about five minutes, I was worried enough about him to ride all the way back and knock on his window. He was fine. He probably would have been fine anyway, and I felt silly talking to him, but I knew it would have been much, much worse to hear about him on the news that night.

I imagine that must be what Christians go through when they see a guy like me that doesn't believe in God or accept Christ as his personal savior. Surely I'm going to hell, or, at best, living an unfulfilled life compared to the one I could have with the Big Guy on my side. So it's only natural to want to help me. I get that.

The difference is that carbon monoxide is a real danger, and hell isn't. Walking under a ladder doesn't cause bad luck, the bogeyman isn't in the closet, and bad little boys and girls don't go to hell.

A couple days ago I posted a silly critique of intelligent design, and how a good software design for humans would have a centralized, general, timing system as opposed to all sorts of messy, emergent cycles. The idea of the post was that I think we'll someday be able to design organisms from scratch with our own DNA compilers, and that we could certainly come up with much improved designs for our own bodies. If the grad student of the future can whip up a better design than God, then maybe God isn't all that much brighter than us humans.

The whole post was sort of a massive tangent that sprang from the thought that I'd really like a little system to remind me to do things during the day, to help me reinforce new habits. I sat down to write about software, but instead I wound up writing about intelligent design.

Anyway, someone read the post and told me today, that after reading it, he was a little worried that I felt my creator didn't spend enough time on me. After all, he said, it's easy to question the motives of the Almighty because the product wasn't perfect, when it's possible perfection wasn't His goal. He suggested that maybe the thing I was looking for in that post was the Holy Spirit, adding, "I'm not ashamed to say that He lets me know when it is time to do things."

I don't usually talk about religion with people. There are several reasons: First, I don't like being preached to; second, I don't really enjoy debating; and third, I don't want to cause someone to begin doubting their own beliefs.

There's really not much more to say about the preaching bit. Sometimes, talking to a person with strong beliefs (religious or otherwise) is like talking to a bad salesman, and I respond to it the way I'd respond to a telemarketer - by doing whatever it takes to get them to shut up and leave me alone.

As for debate: well, I'm not much of a talker. I can analyze an argument and come up with a counterargument, but I tend to be a slow, rambling thinker (I know, I know: hard to believe!) and I'm not so great at coming up at responses to stupid arguments in the heat of the moment, nor do I have a list of firmly held beliefs that I'm ready to spout off at a moment's notice. I believe in evolution and global warming and that my mind is just an emergent effect of all the interlocking neurons in my brain. I believe that raising the minimum wage is a really bad move (unless you're a politician), and that while drugs are very bad for people, anti-drug laws are even worse. I believe these things, but I don't have any rigorous logic backing up those beliefs, and I know that I may well be wrong on many things. But I kind of feel it's pointless to get drawn into a big debate about these issues because... Well, debating is hard work for me, and there's no real benefit. Unless I'm committed to taking action on a belief, it really just doesn't matter whether I'm right or wrong. So why bother debating?

The third reason I don't talk about religion maybe isn't all that good a reason. I think that it's good to question your own beliefs. That's why I write these long, rambling, posts. In fact, having your beliefs challenged is one argument for debate, though I personally prefer a dialog to a diatribe. But I think this questioning stance (especially questioning the religion they grew up with) is something people should take up on their own terms.

Of course, I realize I'm not likely to talk many people out of their religion. People make decisions emotionally, and only then do they back those decisions up with logic. When a former atheist joins a religion, they do it because that religion fills some emotional need for them. Being an atheist in America often means being the outcast. It's hard to be different, and churches are full of really nice people and potential new friends. Superstition and boring rituals are a small price to pay for acceptance, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that there are plenty of people out there that belong to religions they secretly think are foolish, simply because they get acceptance out of it. Heck, there have been times when I felt particularly isolated and considered joining a church myself.

Even quitting the church was, for me, an emotional decision. I was always kind of an outsider. Sunday school was okay, and sometimes the sermons in church were interesting, but usually I was bored. The only thing I really liked was seeing all the pretty girls. But I have this thing about being told what to do. And as far as my mother was concerned, I didn't have a choice about going to church. She forced me to go, and so I came to resent it. But we were Catholic, and for Catholics, there is something far, far worse than church itself, and that, of course, is confession. Hey, getting things off your chest is one thing. Forgiveness, and being accepted despite your flaws are both wonderful things. But these are also things that you have to enter into willingly. Forcing someone to go to confession when they haven't even done anything wrong, is no different than rape: it takes something that could be really wonderful and rewarding and turns it into a horrible, traumatic experience.

So I came to hate religion. (I grew to hate the orthodontist for the same reason, and still have a small metal band holding my bottom front teeth together as well as three false teeth up top. All of that was supposed to be removed or replaced fifteen years ago, but I just stopped going. Mom said I'd thank her someday. Well, no, but at least I forgive her.)

Er. Yeah. So I came to hate my church, and because of that, I started to question the beliefs of the religion itself. It was a slow, painful process, and there was a lot of screaming and crying the day I finally told my mom I was an atheist. It was hard, but at least I didn't have to go to church anymore. (My dad was there too, but he doesn't go to church. I've always assumed Dad was a sort of non-practicing Baptist, but now that I think about it, I really have no idea what he believes. Maybe I'll ask him.)

My early rationalizations weren't very rigorous. I remember thinking a lot about the middle ages as a time of poverty and stagnation, which only began to change with the Crusades -- pointless, stupid wars, but as I understand it, they led to the introduction of new ideas and trade from the middle east, sowing the seeds for the Renaissance. Technological advancement isn't necessarily good, and a stable, unchanging society isn't necessarily bad - in fact, you could argue just the opposite on both counts. But I prefer smart people to dumb people and I like technology, and so the concept of the dark ages started to prop up the idea that the church was mostly just a way of keeping large, uneducated populations in line.

I couldn't really tell you how I went from Church Sucks to There is no God. I know evolution wasn't an issue: I had always understood Genesis to be a metaphor, and it's only been the past few years that I really became aware that so many idiots people refuse to believe it. For a long while I was really more of an agnostic than anything else - I just didn't know the word for it at the time.

I suppose if I had to pick a specific day that I closed the door on God, it would be September 5th, 1994. That was the night I tried to kill myself.

I had graduated from high school that year. I spent the first couple weeks of the summer writing a short fantasy novel, and then I took a long vacation to visit my cousin in Chicago. I didn't really know what to do with my life. I was sort of like those institutionalized prisoners in The Shawshank Redemption - for me, high school wasn't all that great, but it was the only system I knew how to cope with. I was almost certainly the best programmer in the school, but to me, that was just a hobby. I had no idea that my skills had any value. I was scared to get a job or go to college. The only thing I felt comfortable doing was writing. So, after I got back from Chicago, I talked my parents into letting me stay home for a year to write a novel.

And so, while all my friends were off at college or still caught up in high school, I was all by myself at home. I basically had two friends, both still in school, and a few people I knew over the local BBS scene. But mostly I was just alone, and I started having bouts of severe depression. I started thinking a lot about suicide. The novel I was writing even opened with a suicide: the narrator was an atheist who wakes up in an afterlife he never expected, and, eventually goes on to become a god himself. (I was so excited about having a first-person omniscient narrator.)

Basically, I came to see death as an escape. I wasn't scared of dying. I was so detached and withdrawn, that it just seemed like a sensible thing to do: well, life sucks. Let's see what death is like. I figured that either I wouldn't be around to regret the decision, or else I'd just be somewhere else. So on that night, after everyone was asleep, I swallowed twenty Tylenol gel caps, and that was that. I didn't even leave a note.

A few minutes later, my mother started screaming in her sleep.

Now if ever there were a case for God, that would be it. Maybe God came down from heaven and scared the crap out of my mom in her dream so that she could scare the crap out of me, so that I could turn around and scare the crap out of both my parents when I woke them up a few minutes later and told them they had to take me to the hospital. Maybe there are an infinite number of universes, and in some of them I'm not here to write this. Maybe if she hadn't screamed, something else would have kicked off my survival instincts. Who knows?

I could pick any one of those answers, and choose to believe it. I could decide it means that God has a special plan for me. That I'm the chosen one or something.

But the lesson I actually took from that night is that it doesn't matter what happens after we die. I know for certain that I'm here right now, and I know there's a very good chance that this is the only life I'm ever going to get.

I don't really care anymore if there's a God, or an afterlife, or either, or both. It just doesn't matter to me. I don't need a supreme being to tell me why I'm here on earth. I'm here because on that night, and in the days and weeks and months that followed, I chose to be here.

You know, what I thought I was going to say here was that once I got away from the church and had some time to cool off, I no longer have any problem with it. I was going to say that the only reason I couldn't join a Christian church and be a part of that kind of community today is it would be dishonest to pretend to believe the story, and that truth and reason are more important to me than being accepted by a community. I expected to say all that, and I didn't expect to write about that night at all.

If I'm honest with myself, the reason I could never join a church (except, perhaps, the Unitarian Universalists, many of whom are Atheists themselves) is that by lying like that - pretending to be all gaga over Jesus just to fit in - it means I can't be the one welcoming someone like my younger self into a community. See, the third reason not to talk about religion is not so much that I'll shatter some Christian's worldview - I know I'm not going to talk someone out of a belief they want to keep - but that I'll find myself talking to someone who's already doubting and feeling stuck in a world of religion, and then I wind up pushing them over the edge. All the evidence in the world doesn't matter to the angry parent who's convinced you're sending their children to hell.

I was thinking about this as an ethical problem. If I tip someone over the edge into atheism, then they're very likely to go through a lot of pain and alienation. And for what? Maybe for some people it's better to just shut up and accept the lies. I mean, if you take someone's religion away, and you'd better be there to support them, because there's a good chance their friends and family will fight like hell to pull them back in. After all, they love this person and think his or her eternal soul is at stake.

But the flipside of that is that I'm not there to support someone who has made the decision to abandon their faith. The reason I've spent all night sitting here writing this post - the reason I started writing about this forbidden topic of religion at all - is that I hope that maybe someone out there will realize they're not the only one who's ever gone through this sort of thing.

Comments welcome.