This is the third installment and conclusion of my growing-into-atheism series. In this segment, I want to discuss how I’ve reevaluated my views, and myself, in the past two years since becoming an atheist. On one hand, I haven’t completely discarded everything I was taught in a religious context, though I no longer hold those religious beliefs, and I’ll talk about those first. On the other hand, I’ve had to reconstruct how I view things like morality, mortality, and beliefs different from my own.
To start off, I’ll say what I’ve said in my videos before - I don’t view all things religious as bad, misguided, or foolish. I think in my previous two videos, I talked about how I knew many very nice people growing up in a Catholic parish and attending parochial schools. At the same time, I feel like when religious people say that they’re doing something genuinely nice because “it’s the Christian thing to do” or “it’s what Jesus would have done,” they’re deferring credit that they should take, with all due humility, for themselves.
So one thing that I take from my religious background is a compassion for others and a desire to do service work. As a kid I was told to be kind to others to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, and to share my talents generously with others as instructed in Matthew 5:15, but as a non-religious adult I freely choose to continue to be kind and serve others in whatever ways I am able to because I want to. I remember the difference that teachers, mentors, friends, and sometimes strangers, made in my life when they showed me kindness, went out of their way to help me, or made me recognize potential I didn’t see or believe resided in me, and I hope to help others in those ways. That’s the primary reason for choosing to go into a service profession, and why I want to eventually be able to teach.
Another aspect of my childhood religious upbringing that I find valuable as an atheist adult is the sense of community that many religious groups offer. I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (which by the way, I enjoyed, except for the abrupt ending, but not nearly as much as Snow Crash), and I’m reminded of the passage where, when Nell reads at the end of the primer that she “had supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone only by her own choice.” Many religions offer their adherents these “cities of light” – groups of people that reiterate to you that you’re right in your beliefs, and provide you social company and support – but while I think every person needs external support in some way, I don’t believe that by not belonging to a religious group, as the majority of Americans do, that I inevitably become a loner, a deviant, or a subversive. I just moved from the Bible Belt to what I’ve deemed the Bible Collar, where yet again every time I go out, I see a handful of various denominations of churches, and the occasional “April 1 – National Atheists’ Day” bumper sticker. I was walking in a shopping plaza this past weekend, and I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone – as soon as I walked in, I was greeted the sounds of an older lady strumming a guitar and singing church songs in a Mother-Abbess-voice to a group of senior citizens; meanwhile the mall’s stores, a motley sort of independent shops featuring a “Senior Odyssey,” a few restaurants, and a Bible education kiosk (which should have tipped me off, I guess) , were mostly closed (on a Sunday afternoon!). I digress; anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that as religious non-adherents, it’s true that we are in the minority in the United States, but it is our own choice whether to remain in a self-imposed solitude, or to speak out and engage ourselves in the outside world. Community is important, and there are plenty of secular communities we can – and should – get involved in.
So from my religious background, I gleaned the importance of community and the value of service and compassion for others. However, since ceasing to believe in the Christian god, I’ve had to reconstruct how I view the world in many ways.
Christianity – and many other major religions – gives its believers a sense of security. Here’s your reason for existence (God); here’s your book on life (the Bible); here’s your moral compass (Jesus); here’s your group of like-minded people who will reinforce these beliefs and comprise a nice little community for you (your church). And what do you get for buying stock and investing in this offer? A sense of comfort now – you know God and/or Jesus are watching out for you and your community, that your life has a distinct purpose, that you can have a personal relationship with the almighty and ask him for guidance, support, and maybe a miracle or two; if you praise him well enough for long enough, he just might come through for you; if he doesn’t, oh well, it wasn’t in his great-plan-for-all-eternity. And here’s the selling point – be a devout follower in this life, and you get to spend all of eternity with the almighty, and with your previously deceased loved ones. If you don’t, mmmm, I guess you’ll be in hot water, literally or metaphorically depending on your denomination. I used to wonder as a kid - how can a blissful reunion with all your loved ones in heaven be a feasible concept? My parents had parents who had parents for thousands and thousands of years – an unbroken chain of life – and if all those parents had other children who had children who had children, etc., wouldn’t heaven be unbelievably crowded with the billions of people who’ve lived, and those who have yet to live? Also, how could a person ever be happily reunited with all of the hundreds or thousands of people with whom they had ties if all of those people had ties with countless other people? Is heaven so infinitely large that you won’t get to see all your loved ones, or so tiny and cramped that each new soul is a new sardine being stuffed into a way-overcrowded tin?
See, this is exactly what I think is the fundamental problem of religion. This sense of security is tempting but false. I won’t reiterate all the reasons why I find religion to be scientifically, philosophically, and intellectually unsound, but the point is that people buy into religion thinking that it will have foolproof answers to all of life’s questions, put them on the good side of a magical king who has powerful influence over their lives, and ultimately save their souls, yet instead they end up losing something. When you let a book dictate your moral, social, or political stances and even shape your behavior, when you remain psychologically dependent on a voice you believe guides you and will protect you in this cold world, when you surround yourself with like-minded people who parrot your views and together view others who don’t believe like you do as poor, pitiful, or evil people that they need to be saved, recruited, or talked into believing like you do, under threat of violence in this life or damnation in the next – you lose your autonomy , your ability (and maybe your desire) to control over your own future, your ability to view the world with open eyes, learn from your experiences and grow mentally and emotionally as a human being.
So now, as an atheist, I’ve discarded this sense of security that religion handed me. Now I have to navigate my way through life on my own, seek out my own answers, and I have to accept that there are frequently questions that can’t be answered and things that are out of my (or anyone’s) control. I have to walk a tightrope knowing that there’s nothing below to catch me if I fall, but at least I’m not walking blindfolded with faith that there’s an invisible net below me. Life isn’t fair; bad things happen to good people; good things happen to bad people. The world isn’t black and white, but a billion shades of gray, and our behavior rarely, if ever, falls neatly into binary oppositions like ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Since becoming atheist, I’ve had to develop my own set of morals – some borrowed from my religious upbringing, some gained from my experiences viewing the world more openly. I’ve had to accept my own mortality – that my life is finite and that ‘I’ – the nervous system and senses that allow me to store information, formulate and process ideas, and interact with the world – will cease to exist at some point in the future. In doing so, I’ve had to let go of the concept of being reunited with loved ones – family, friends, and pets – who’ve died and will likely die ahead of me. That part hasn’t been easy. I do view death is a natural part of life, and while it’s not too hard to feel sorrow mixed with relief upon the death of an elderly friend or relative, or someone who’s been suffering for a long while from a painful disease, it’s a lot harder for me when someone dies who’s young, healthy, and has so much potential. About a year ago a classmate of mine who was always smiling, who was constantly surrounded by friends, and who always struck me as a genuinely nice person, committed suicide. I’ll never understand why. He and his family were Christian, and they kept the circumstances of his death very hush-hush; maybe out of shame or fear or desire for privacy. I don’t know. I know almost everyone gets depressed and stressed out from time to time, myself certainly included, but from a non-religious perspective, this life is all we’ve got. I don’t think there’s any peace to be found on the other side – just cessation of existence, annihilation of the self, and a hard dose of grief to everyone around you.
In summary, re-evaluating and re-envisioning the world from a non-religious perspective, coming from a religious background, is a challenging and still-ongoing task . I’ve made mistakes and grown from them; I’ve had views, values, and beliefs that have been reinforced, and some that have changed over time. It’s been hard sometimes because I haven’t had a support system to talk me through this – I’ve had to come to conclusions largely by myself, in my own time, isolated in my own thoughts. In this time I’ve discovered that the little voice in my head – the one that I used to think was a more knowledgeable, wiser entity guiding me to make the right choices – the one that probably many Christians believe is their God or their spiritual advisor speaking to them – that that voice is, and always has been, myself. I am accountable for my own actions, and I have to trust myself to be, both scary and empowering. It may seem sometimes that choosing this path-less-traveled through life is condemning oneself to a life of solitude amongst a world of people who don’t share this view, but I don’t view it this way.
That’s it for now; thank you for listening. I’d love to hear your feedback. Until next time…
Monday, August 31, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
From Agnosticism to Atheism
Hey everyone,
For those of you who didn’t see my previous video, “From Christianity to Agnosticism,” you might want to check that out if you’re curious about how I began to doubt my religious upbringing from the age about 11 to the age of 16 or 17. I had a lot of questions during those years, but comparatively few answers and very little independent life experience. Had you spoken with me about my reasoning then, I would probably have come off as fairly immature and unable to hold my own in a debate on faith, let alone construct a strong argument either for or against belief.
So in this video, I’ll discuss the thought processes and experiences that took me from agnosticism to atheism.
My previous video left off at the point where I first became comfortable with the idea of agnosticism, at around the age of 16 or 17, when I was still a student in a Catholic high school. In that school, I made some friends who had also come from Christian backgrounds but had come to identify themselves as agnostic. Our conversations weren’t deep, but mainly we just stuck together to criticize our school administrators who blatantly used religion at every chance they got, especially to fundraise. I had one religion teacher my senior year whom I routinely questioned about Catholicism, but I wasn’t impressed by the caliber of her answers. I still had to attend Sunday mass every week without fail, so rather than having to sit with my parents and being forced to sit, kneel, stand, and respond, I joined the choir, tuned out during mass, and got some service hours to boot.
Anyway, fast forward about a year to when I started college in a different state. I was living away from home for the first time and was no longer surrounded my weekly church, religious schooling during the weekdays, and an insulated community of people devout in only Catholicism. There were Christian clubs on campus, as well as Muslim club, a Hindu club, a Jewish club, and a secular students’ club, but I never really got involved with any of those. Most students at my college seemed pretty religiously apathetic, though their backgrounds and ethnicities were very diverse. Over the years, I became friends with some Catholics, other Christians, a few Hindus, a few Buddhists, a Muslim girl, and quite a few people who didn’t align themselves with any faith. I did not engage in religious debates – although I did have friendly, non-confrontational discussions with a few friends – mostly I was interested in learning about other peoples’ belief systems and cultures, since I had grown up with very little exposure to any culture besides my own.
Mainly I went to college with the goal of studying, and since science had been the most intriguing subject to me in my last few years of high school, I came to college and began coursework toward a biochemistry degree. I found the science curriculum at my school to be fascinating, thought-provoking, and also quite challenging. I also did biochemistry-related research all four years of undergrad. Through my upper level science courses and hands-on research experience, I developed a deeper understanding of how living organisms function, how they have evolved and continue to evolve, and the hows and whys behind what scientists and researchers study. I developed an appreciation for the use of science to better the world, whether it’s through the development of effective sanitation, waste disposable methods, and agricultural pesticides, many of them natural, that help keep pathogens out of the water and food supply, the use of industrial fermentation of a genetically altered strains of bacteria to cleanly and efficiently produce chemicals on a large scale, the study of natural antibiotic products from the Actinomyces genus that can be modified to counter growing cadres of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or the in-depth molecular studies on human disease that aim to find viable treatment options and potential cures. And yes, I even appreciate the science behind paternity tests shown on every “Who the baby daddy?”-themed episode of Maury and other trashy talk shows, even though the exposed baby daddies probably don’t.
Anyway, through further study, I became literate in the language of the peer-reviewed scientific journal, an excellent barometer for what the scientific community uses to present its working hypotheses and findings, all liable to be disproven should evidence to the contrary arise and pass through peer review and peer research. It was in peer-reviewed scientific journals that I learned the most about evolution, through phylogeny and comparative studies in journals like Nature, Science, Animal Behaviour, and TREE. Through studying physical, organic, and biochemistry, I began to see how the molecular properties of carbon, with its ability to form four bonds to complete its valence shell and become stable, with the presence of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, and some metals and minerals, could have, over billions of years, formed living things from non-living things (abiogenesis). Studying and reading journal articles on biochemistry and medicinal chemistry, as well as my research experience studying cancer, gave me an understanding of how molecular-scale processes from DNA replication to protein folding to intra- and inter-cellular transport, are so finely regulated and conserved across organisms, that the tiniest change - a single point mutation or codon shift, inborn or acquired over time, in certain regions of our 3.4 billion base pair genome – has the potential to lead to devastating diseases. All of this was quite significant in my path toward atheism, because while science cannot offer 100%-verified explanations of how life started on earth and how simple cells became more complex, science at least posits theories backed up by years of independently-acquired, repeatable, reputable findings that address these issues.
And for any religious people who are ready to start typing in your comment boxes now that science became my new religion or that science has brainwashed me, that’s not the case. While I do plan to have a career in science and medicine, and science has helped me develop a pragmatic way of looking at the world, science doesn’t rule over me, consume my thoughts, or control most everyday aspects of my life, like shopping at the mall or grocery store, socializing with friends and family, or driving around my neighborhood. I don’t worship science; I don’t regard science as having all the right answers to all of our burning questions; and I don’t instantly believe every scientific claim I hear on the news or in popular science articles unless said claims withstand academic rigor over time. I view science as a very useful tool for probing and understanding the natural world and bettering the quality of life of humans and other living beings, and that’s it.
So within a week of turning 20, I moved into an apartment by myself, where I had some time to reevaluate my worldview after the people I’d known for the past few years, the academic work I’d done, and my own personal growth, which is still ongoing. I spent hours on the internet every week researching religious beliefs, Christianity in particular, and information on non-belief, as well as watching debates between religious people and atheists on the topic of the existence of a god. I now saw the arguments for the existence of the Christian god as pretty weak, appealing to emotion, guilt, and fear rather than reason and intellectualism. Proponents of the creationist movement touted the same tired bits of data in support of their belief of a young earth, data that for obvious reasons would never be published in any reputable peer-reviewed geology or biology journal, and when I did correspond with a few creationists online, I found them extremely unwilling to even consider data besides their own. Intelligent design was just as loony, just as agenda-backed, and just as purposefully ignorant of scientific progress in the last 150 years as its daddy, creationism. And not to insult the intelligent Christians and other religious folks out there, but none of the people I saw actively evangelizing on Youtube and other venues could offer a convincing argument for the existence of their god, let alone provide any shred of convincing, testable evidence for the truth of any of their beliefs in the natural realm. All arguments I heard – Paschal’s wager, the first cause, etc. – seemed to prey on emotions like fear and guilt, and many catered toward ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Other less aggressive folks , such as my parents, stressed the importance of faith, ‘believing without seeing,’ and they seemed comfortable and confident in the religion they’d been born into or chosen, but in general I found that they lacked open-mindedness to genuinely consider others’ beliefs and put their own to the same scrutiny that they often would use to dismiss ideas besides their own.
On the other hand, I had also been listening to what atheists and agnostics had to say, both on Youtube and other sites, and while I was turned off by the folks who would swear multiple times in every sentence, attempt to flush various holy books down the toilet, and insult the characters and perceived intellectual capacities of religious folks, I was impressed by atheists who were able to clearly articulate their positions in a rational manner that made sense to me and didn’t hinge on blind faith and appeals to emotion. I found deconversion stories fascinating, and through listening to former believers, I began to realize how for some, their faith, their denomination’s interpretation of the bible, and the moralizing attitudes of their churches and families imposed psychological suffering on them, preventing these individuals from being who they were, pursuing their goals, and living and thinking without fear. So ultimately I came to the realization that though agnosticism was a decent intellectual position for a period in my life of neither believing in nor rejecting religion, specifically Christianity, I had now shifted to a position where I no longer had any reason to believe that any human cultures’ religious beliefs had intellectual or rational merit, and until such merit would be convincingly and rigorously demonstrated, my position was lack of belief in said claims. That occurred two years ago this month, so in a span of 3 to 4 years, I went from a stance of agnosticism to one of atheism. A lot has changed in the past 2 years as well – maybe I’ll go ahead and make this series a 3-parter and talk about my experiences and growth while maintaining an atheistic worldview.
That’s it for now; thanks for watching, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments.
For those of you who didn’t see my previous video, “From Christianity to Agnosticism,” you might want to check that out if you’re curious about how I began to doubt my religious upbringing from the age about 11 to the age of 16 or 17. I had a lot of questions during those years, but comparatively few answers and very little independent life experience. Had you spoken with me about my reasoning then, I would probably have come off as fairly immature and unable to hold my own in a debate on faith, let alone construct a strong argument either for or against belief.
So in this video, I’ll discuss the thought processes and experiences that took me from agnosticism to atheism.
My previous video left off at the point where I first became comfortable with the idea of agnosticism, at around the age of 16 or 17, when I was still a student in a Catholic high school. In that school, I made some friends who had also come from Christian backgrounds but had come to identify themselves as agnostic. Our conversations weren’t deep, but mainly we just stuck together to criticize our school administrators who blatantly used religion at every chance they got, especially to fundraise. I had one religion teacher my senior year whom I routinely questioned about Catholicism, but I wasn’t impressed by the caliber of her answers. I still had to attend Sunday mass every week without fail, so rather than having to sit with my parents and being forced to sit, kneel, stand, and respond, I joined the choir, tuned out during mass, and got some service hours to boot.
Anyway, fast forward about a year to when I started college in a different state. I was living away from home for the first time and was no longer surrounded my weekly church, religious schooling during the weekdays, and an insulated community of people devout in only Catholicism. There were Christian clubs on campus, as well as Muslim club, a Hindu club, a Jewish club, and a secular students’ club, but I never really got involved with any of those. Most students at my college seemed pretty religiously apathetic, though their backgrounds and ethnicities were very diverse. Over the years, I became friends with some Catholics, other Christians, a few Hindus, a few Buddhists, a Muslim girl, and quite a few people who didn’t align themselves with any faith. I did not engage in religious debates – although I did have friendly, non-confrontational discussions with a few friends – mostly I was interested in learning about other peoples’ belief systems and cultures, since I had grown up with very little exposure to any culture besides my own.
Mainly I went to college with the goal of studying, and since science had been the most intriguing subject to me in my last few years of high school, I came to college and began coursework toward a biochemistry degree. I found the science curriculum at my school to be fascinating, thought-provoking, and also quite challenging. I also did biochemistry-related research all four years of undergrad. Through my upper level science courses and hands-on research experience, I developed a deeper understanding of how living organisms function, how they have evolved and continue to evolve, and the hows and whys behind what scientists and researchers study. I developed an appreciation for the use of science to better the world, whether it’s through the development of effective sanitation, waste disposable methods, and agricultural pesticides, many of them natural, that help keep pathogens out of the water and food supply, the use of industrial fermentation of a genetically altered strains of bacteria to cleanly and efficiently produce chemicals on a large scale, the study of natural antibiotic products from the Actinomyces genus that can be modified to counter growing cadres of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or the in-depth molecular studies on human disease that aim to find viable treatment options and potential cures. And yes, I even appreciate the science behind paternity tests shown on every “Who the baby daddy?”-themed episode of Maury and other trashy talk shows, even though the exposed baby daddies probably don’t.
Anyway, through further study, I became literate in the language of the peer-reviewed scientific journal, an excellent barometer for what the scientific community uses to present its working hypotheses and findings, all liable to be disproven should evidence to the contrary arise and pass through peer review and peer research. It was in peer-reviewed scientific journals that I learned the most about evolution, through phylogeny and comparative studies in journals like Nature, Science, Animal Behaviour, and TREE. Through studying physical, organic, and biochemistry, I began to see how the molecular properties of carbon, with its ability to form four bonds to complete its valence shell and become stable, with the presence of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, and some metals and minerals, could have, over billions of years, formed living things from non-living things (abiogenesis). Studying and reading journal articles on biochemistry and medicinal chemistry, as well as my research experience studying cancer, gave me an understanding of how molecular-scale processes from DNA replication to protein folding to intra- and inter-cellular transport, are so finely regulated and conserved across organisms, that the tiniest change - a single point mutation or codon shift, inborn or acquired over time, in certain regions of our 3.4 billion base pair genome – has the potential to lead to devastating diseases. All of this was quite significant in my path toward atheism, because while science cannot offer 100%-verified explanations of how life started on earth and how simple cells became more complex, science at least posits theories backed up by years of independently-acquired, repeatable, reputable findings that address these issues.
And for any religious people who are ready to start typing in your comment boxes now that science became my new religion or that science has brainwashed me, that’s not the case. While I do plan to have a career in science and medicine, and science has helped me develop a pragmatic way of looking at the world, science doesn’t rule over me, consume my thoughts, or control most everyday aspects of my life, like shopping at the mall or grocery store, socializing with friends and family, or driving around my neighborhood. I don’t worship science; I don’t regard science as having all the right answers to all of our burning questions; and I don’t instantly believe every scientific claim I hear on the news or in popular science articles unless said claims withstand academic rigor over time. I view science as a very useful tool for probing and understanding the natural world and bettering the quality of life of humans and other living beings, and that’s it.
So within a week of turning 20, I moved into an apartment by myself, where I had some time to reevaluate my worldview after the people I’d known for the past few years, the academic work I’d done, and my own personal growth, which is still ongoing. I spent hours on the internet every week researching religious beliefs, Christianity in particular, and information on non-belief, as well as watching debates between religious people and atheists on the topic of the existence of a god. I now saw the arguments for the existence of the Christian god as pretty weak, appealing to emotion, guilt, and fear rather than reason and intellectualism. Proponents of the creationist movement touted the same tired bits of data in support of their belief of a young earth, data that for obvious reasons would never be published in any reputable peer-reviewed geology or biology journal, and when I did correspond with a few creationists online, I found them extremely unwilling to even consider data besides their own. Intelligent design was just as loony, just as agenda-backed, and just as purposefully ignorant of scientific progress in the last 150 years as its daddy, creationism. And not to insult the intelligent Christians and other religious folks out there, but none of the people I saw actively evangelizing on Youtube and other venues could offer a convincing argument for the existence of their god, let alone provide any shred of convincing, testable evidence for the truth of any of their beliefs in the natural realm. All arguments I heard – Paschal’s wager, the first cause, etc. – seemed to prey on emotions like fear and guilt, and many catered toward ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Other less aggressive folks , such as my parents, stressed the importance of faith, ‘believing without seeing,’ and they seemed comfortable and confident in the religion they’d been born into or chosen, but in general I found that they lacked open-mindedness to genuinely consider others’ beliefs and put their own to the same scrutiny that they often would use to dismiss ideas besides their own.
On the other hand, I had also been listening to what atheists and agnostics had to say, both on Youtube and other sites, and while I was turned off by the folks who would swear multiple times in every sentence, attempt to flush various holy books down the toilet, and insult the characters and perceived intellectual capacities of religious folks, I was impressed by atheists who were able to clearly articulate their positions in a rational manner that made sense to me and didn’t hinge on blind faith and appeals to emotion. I found deconversion stories fascinating, and through listening to former believers, I began to realize how for some, their faith, their denomination’s interpretation of the bible, and the moralizing attitudes of their churches and families imposed psychological suffering on them, preventing these individuals from being who they were, pursuing their goals, and living and thinking without fear. So ultimately I came to the realization that though agnosticism was a decent intellectual position for a period in my life of neither believing in nor rejecting religion, specifically Christianity, I had now shifted to a position where I no longer had any reason to believe that any human cultures’ religious beliefs had intellectual or rational merit, and until such merit would be convincingly and rigorously demonstrated, my position was lack of belief in said claims. That occurred two years ago this month, so in a span of 3 to 4 years, I went from a stance of agnosticism to one of atheism. A lot has changed in the past 2 years as well – maybe I’ll go ahead and make this series a 3-parter and talk about my experiences and growth while maintaining an atheistic worldview.
That’s it for now; thanks for watching, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments.
Friday, June 12, 2009
From Christianity to Agnosticism
Hey everyone,
I’ve already made one video about my process of going from Christianity to atheism through a period of being agnostic, but looking back on that video now, I realize that those years of going from heartfelt believer to agnostic were kind of brushed over; also, the slideshow format of those videos made it difficult to fully articulate my ideas. In this video, I’ll go into more detail on the thought processes, as I recall them, from that period of my life; maybe this will be of particular interest to folks who consider themselves somewhere between believers and agnostic s now, or folks who are religious and wonder how others who were raised in a faith can begin to reject it. Maybe those of you who now consider yourselves atheists can relate my process to yours in some ways as well.
I grew up in a large Midwestern city that was largely Catholic. Coming from a Catholic family, I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through twelfth grade (besides, the public schools in the area were notoriously crappy). As a young girl, up until the age of 10 or 11, I accepted the tenets of Catholicism without question. My only exposure to anyone of a different religion was one uncle, who in his 20s had rejected Catholicism and become a Jehovah ’s Witness, thanks to the persuasion of other Jehovah’s witnesses he met. Yes, he did go door-to-door proselytizing, and even we, his family, weren’t exempt from his attempts at converting. When I was six or seven, he gave me a Jehovah ’s Witness illustrated bible, which I remember featured a colorful picture of Jesus being put to death on a pole rather than a cross.
Anyway, around the age of 12 or 13, being a typical frequently-annoyed pre-teen who enjoyed sleeping in and doing things independently of her parents, I became a bit pissed off at having to go to mass every single Sunday, a rule that my parents enforced under penalty of taking away my beloved Sims game and internet privileges. Going to church meant waking up early and staying awake through a seemingly-endless cycle of ritualizing, sitting, standing, kneeling, and occasionally incense smelling, which is a scent to this day that I dislike. When I actually happened to listen to the pastors’ homilies, instead of tuning them out, they were generally feel-good sermons, catered to the large community of the parish, enough to keep them coming each week, contributing to the collection on a regular basis, and feeling like they were being good devout Catholics fulfilling their duties to God and the church. In fact, the parish community was actually a very nice, fairly accepting group of people who regularly held bake sales, craft fairs, and other get-togethers, and I realize how nice it is to belong to that sort of community – too bad active communities of atheists, agnostics, and secularists are few and far between, at least in the United States. Anyway, when I listened to the bible readings at mass, it was a different story. I kept hearing stories where patriarchy and female subjugation was endorsed, which bothered me, and as I grew older and learned more about what constituted reality and what constituted fiction, it became very difficult to suspend my disbelief when I heard stories of angels, Jesus rising from the dead, and God’s omnipotence and omnipresence and role as creator of everything. I really enjoyed reading Edith Hamilton’s books on Greek Mythology as well as the Egyptian mythology and the King Arthur legends of the Middle Ages, and so if those stories were supposed to be false, why did the Bible get a free pass? Why were the writings of a small group of ancient desert people the basis of worship for billions, while probably many other civilizations’ spiritual writings from that era roughly four to two thousand year ago long-forgotten or considered irrelevant to all but historians?
At the end of grade school, I received the sacrament of confirmation, marking my full initiation into the Catholic church, not that I had any choice in the matter. So, if I ever bump my head against a very hard rock and come to the conclusion that Catholicism is the one true path to salvation, I’ll be able to get married in a Catholic church without having to go through special education classes, that is, if my plan of eloping in a city hall somewhere wearing jeans and very little make-up falls through.
I also went to a Catholic high school that, as I’ve mentioned before, required us girls to wear hideous plaid skirts and itchy oversized sweaters - I guess Japanese anime and the porn industry have glamorized and sexified school girl outfits, but there was nothing remotely attractive or comfortable about our uniforms. In high school I matured a lot in my breadth and depth of knowledge about the natural world and the people in it. I took a class on world religions, which was ironically required in the school’s four-year religion curriculum, and that class gave us all opportunities to meet and interact with people of different faiths. It was definitely an eye-opener for me, and I wondered why Christianity maintained its insistence of being the only path to salvation while the majority of the world’s people, even today in a global society with ample exposure to different cultures, follow faiths besides Christianity. I also took three years of biology, two of chemistry, four of math, one of physics, two of philosophy, and four of history, which combined gave me insight into how the natural world operates and how knowledge and human civilizations have developed and grown. It was during these years, between studying, family time, and extracurriculars, that I took time to sit by myself and have long periods of self-reflection. I had been raised to believe that God was a loving father to humankind, and that everything was created with a purpose in mind, and that I could have a personal relationship and conversations with God, and that God was looking after me and my family members as we faced struggles, dealt with grief, and celebrated accomplishments, but each of these beliefs seemed entirely based on faith and not backed up by resounding evidence. If God placed a soul capable of persisting for eternity and a heart capable of great love in every human being across the world, why didn’t everyone in the world believe in God? Why couldn’t God move the hearts of everyone to have experiences or see the proof that convinced them of the truth of Christianity? Why didn’t the miracles of the bible or of pre-modern times happen in modern times, where they can be documented and verified as events that defy the laws of nature? Why were there so many sects of Christianity? Was there truth in the claims of other religions? Was only one religion the true one, and could it be one besides Christianity? Surely people of other faiths must have strong reasons for believing in what they believe too. Why were so many Christian pastors corrupt, if they claimed such a strong relationship with God? What made the Muslim extremists who were responsible for the terrorist acts of September 11, the year I was a freshman in high school, so convinced that their god wanted them to murder innocent fathers, mothers, grandparents, servicemen, and children? What twist of faith caused George Bush to then spend his tenure in office on fighting a holy war, costing thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars? How could the will of god allegedly revealed to humans be so different, even so conflicting, from one person to the next?
My thinking shifted over my high school years and was influenced by the books I read, movies I watched, and the philosophical ideas I explored, both in school, on the internet, and in my own thoughts. I wondered a lot about morality, the nature of reality, and the plausibility of the existence of any god. One site I found fascinating was the game section of Philosophersnet.com. In one game, you’re put in a Matrix-like scenario, where you can’t conclusively disprove that you’re actually a brain in a vat plugged into a computer that simulates the sensory experiences of your life; in another game, the parsimony of your concept of God is measured; in another, called Battleground God, the rational consistency of your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, is tested. For those of you who’ve never played Battleground God, I’d highly suggest it; even today when I go through the game from an atheistic perspective rather than an agnostic or Christian one, I finish having bitten a bullet, and maybe we can discuss that further if you’d like. I’m linking the game page right here.
Anyway, one day I was laying on my bed, thinking to myself, and I came to the realization that I could not conclusively disprove the existence of the God I was raised to believe in, but I also, using my reason, logic, and what is known about the natural world and the cosmos, couldn’t prove its existence either. In fact, it seemed highly improbable, if not impossible, that this God could exist, be the creator of the physical world but also not require a creator himself, could be all-knowing of the past, present, and future but still give people free will, knowing full-well which ones of them would reject him or choose a different faith and would hence be damned, and could be all-loving, all-present, and all-father to the billions of people that have been, that are, and that will be, dictating a purpose and role in life for each and every one of them. I had wondered before if other religious held merit or if the characteristics attributed to the Christian god were exaggerated or contrived, but that was the first day I thought to myself “What if there is no God?” It was that day that I stopped identifying myself as a Christian and decided to live open-mindedly and inquisitively, exploring all points of view, religious and otherwise, without prejudice or predilection, which was something that I could not do previously holding onto feelings of guilt about questioning Christianity. So in a period of about five or six years, I went from being an unquestioning believer to essentially realizing my agnosticism at around the age of 16 or 17.
This isn’t the end of the story by any means – a lot has happened in the past five or six years as I’ve gone from identifying as agnostic to identifying as a firm atheist. I’ve already talked about that period in my life in a few other videos, but if you all would like more of a detailed discussion of that transition, please comment and tell me. Thanks for watching, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.
I’ve already made one video about my process of going from Christianity to atheism through a period of being agnostic, but looking back on that video now, I realize that those years of going from heartfelt believer to agnostic were kind of brushed over; also, the slideshow format of those videos made it difficult to fully articulate my ideas. In this video, I’ll go into more detail on the thought processes, as I recall them, from that period of my life; maybe this will be of particular interest to folks who consider themselves somewhere between believers and agnostic s now, or folks who are religious and wonder how others who were raised in a faith can begin to reject it. Maybe those of you who now consider yourselves atheists can relate my process to yours in some ways as well.
I grew up in a large Midwestern city that was largely Catholic. Coming from a Catholic family, I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through twelfth grade (besides, the public schools in the area were notoriously crappy). As a young girl, up until the age of 10 or 11, I accepted the tenets of Catholicism without question. My only exposure to anyone of a different religion was one uncle, who in his 20s had rejected Catholicism and become a Jehovah ’s Witness, thanks to the persuasion of other Jehovah’s witnesses he met. Yes, he did go door-to-door proselytizing, and even we, his family, weren’t exempt from his attempts at converting. When I was six or seven, he gave me a Jehovah ’s Witness illustrated bible, which I remember featured a colorful picture of Jesus being put to death on a pole rather than a cross.
Anyway, around the age of 12 or 13, being a typical frequently-annoyed pre-teen who enjoyed sleeping in and doing things independently of her parents, I became a bit pissed off at having to go to mass every single Sunday, a rule that my parents enforced under penalty of taking away my beloved Sims game and internet privileges. Going to church meant waking up early and staying awake through a seemingly-endless cycle of ritualizing, sitting, standing, kneeling, and occasionally incense smelling, which is a scent to this day that I dislike. When I actually happened to listen to the pastors’ homilies, instead of tuning them out, they were generally feel-good sermons, catered to the large community of the parish, enough to keep them coming each week, contributing to the collection on a regular basis, and feeling like they were being good devout Catholics fulfilling their duties to God and the church. In fact, the parish community was actually a very nice, fairly accepting group of people who regularly held bake sales, craft fairs, and other get-togethers, and I realize how nice it is to belong to that sort of community – too bad active communities of atheists, agnostics, and secularists are few and far between, at least in the United States. Anyway, when I listened to the bible readings at mass, it was a different story. I kept hearing stories where patriarchy and female subjugation was endorsed, which bothered me, and as I grew older and learned more about what constituted reality and what constituted fiction, it became very difficult to suspend my disbelief when I heard stories of angels, Jesus rising from the dead, and God’s omnipotence and omnipresence and role as creator of everything. I really enjoyed reading Edith Hamilton’s books on Greek Mythology as well as the Egyptian mythology and the King Arthur legends of the Middle Ages, and so if those stories were supposed to be false, why did the Bible get a free pass? Why were the writings of a small group of ancient desert people the basis of worship for billions, while probably many other civilizations’ spiritual writings from that era roughly four to two thousand year ago long-forgotten or considered irrelevant to all but historians?
At the end of grade school, I received the sacrament of confirmation, marking my full initiation into the Catholic church, not that I had any choice in the matter. So, if I ever bump my head against a very hard rock and come to the conclusion that Catholicism is the one true path to salvation, I’ll be able to get married in a Catholic church without having to go through special education classes, that is, if my plan of eloping in a city hall somewhere wearing jeans and very little make-up falls through.
I also went to a Catholic high school that, as I’ve mentioned before, required us girls to wear hideous plaid skirts and itchy oversized sweaters - I guess Japanese anime and the porn industry have glamorized and sexified school girl outfits, but there was nothing remotely attractive or comfortable about our uniforms. In high school I matured a lot in my breadth and depth of knowledge about the natural world and the people in it. I took a class on world religions, which was ironically required in the school’s four-year religion curriculum, and that class gave us all opportunities to meet and interact with people of different faiths. It was definitely an eye-opener for me, and I wondered why Christianity maintained its insistence of being the only path to salvation while the majority of the world’s people, even today in a global society with ample exposure to different cultures, follow faiths besides Christianity. I also took three years of biology, two of chemistry, four of math, one of physics, two of philosophy, and four of history, which combined gave me insight into how the natural world operates and how knowledge and human civilizations have developed and grown. It was during these years, between studying, family time, and extracurriculars, that I took time to sit by myself and have long periods of self-reflection. I had been raised to believe that God was a loving father to humankind, and that everything was created with a purpose in mind, and that I could have a personal relationship and conversations with God, and that God was looking after me and my family members as we faced struggles, dealt with grief, and celebrated accomplishments, but each of these beliefs seemed entirely based on faith and not backed up by resounding evidence. If God placed a soul capable of persisting for eternity and a heart capable of great love in every human being across the world, why didn’t everyone in the world believe in God? Why couldn’t God move the hearts of everyone to have experiences or see the proof that convinced them of the truth of Christianity? Why didn’t the miracles of the bible or of pre-modern times happen in modern times, where they can be documented and verified as events that defy the laws of nature? Why were there so many sects of Christianity? Was there truth in the claims of other religions? Was only one religion the true one, and could it be one besides Christianity? Surely people of other faiths must have strong reasons for believing in what they believe too. Why were so many Christian pastors corrupt, if they claimed such a strong relationship with God? What made the Muslim extremists who were responsible for the terrorist acts of September 11, the year I was a freshman in high school, so convinced that their god wanted them to murder innocent fathers, mothers, grandparents, servicemen, and children? What twist of faith caused George Bush to then spend his tenure in office on fighting a holy war, costing thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars? How could the will of god allegedly revealed to humans be so different, even so conflicting, from one person to the next?
My thinking shifted over my high school years and was influenced by the books I read, movies I watched, and the philosophical ideas I explored, both in school, on the internet, and in my own thoughts. I wondered a lot about morality, the nature of reality, and the plausibility of the existence of any god. One site I found fascinating was the game section of Philosophersnet.com. In one game, you’re put in a Matrix-like scenario, where you can’t conclusively disprove that you’re actually a brain in a vat plugged into a computer that simulates the sensory experiences of your life; in another game, the parsimony of your concept of God is measured; in another, called Battleground God, the rational consistency of your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, is tested. For those of you who’ve never played Battleground God, I’d highly suggest it; even today when I go through the game from an atheistic perspective rather than an agnostic or Christian one, I finish having bitten a bullet, and maybe we can discuss that further if you’d like. I’m linking the game page right here.
Anyway, one day I was laying on my bed, thinking to myself, and I came to the realization that I could not conclusively disprove the existence of the God I was raised to believe in, but I also, using my reason, logic, and what is known about the natural world and the cosmos, couldn’t prove its existence either. In fact, it seemed highly improbable, if not impossible, that this God could exist, be the creator of the physical world but also not require a creator himself, could be all-knowing of the past, present, and future but still give people free will, knowing full-well which ones of them would reject him or choose a different faith and would hence be damned, and could be all-loving, all-present, and all-father to the billions of people that have been, that are, and that will be, dictating a purpose and role in life for each and every one of them. I had wondered before if other religious held merit or if the characteristics attributed to the Christian god were exaggerated or contrived, but that was the first day I thought to myself “What if there is no God?” It was that day that I stopped identifying myself as a Christian and decided to live open-mindedly and inquisitively, exploring all points of view, religious and otherwise, without prejudice or predilection, which was something that I could not do previously holding onto feelings of guilt about questioning Christianity. So in a period of about five or six years, I went from being an unquestioning believer to essentially realizing my agnosticism at around the age of 16 or 17.
This isn’t the end of the story by any means – a lot has happened in the past five or six years as I’ve gone from identifying as agnostic to identifying as a firm atheist. I’ve already talked about that period in my life in a few other videos, but if you all would like more of a detailed discussion of that transition, please comment and tell me. Thanks for watching, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Christianity and Self-Worth
When I was a student in my Catholic junior high, our religion teacher gave each of us a copy of a version of the New Testament that was written in fairly simple language, so as to be comprehensible to younger people. Preceding the text of the New Testament is a fairly long ‘Question and Answer’ segment addressed to young Catholics to let them know how Jesus and the Catholic Church feel about issues like the devil, the existence of heaven and hell, premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion, AIDS, drinking, and a plethora of other topics (but strangely, none tackled questions like “Are people who belong to religions besides Christianity all wrong and going to hell?” or “What if I don’t believe in God anymore?”) I could make a whole series of videos devoted to these ‘take-our-word-for-it’ answers, but at the moment, I want to focus on one thing in particular.
There is a series of questions devoted to self-esteem and depression. According to the book’s answer, to have self-esteem, a good Catholic boy or girl must internalize the following beliefs:
1. He or she is more important than all other non-human forms of life on earth, because only he or she will live forever with God, while all other life dies.
2. God loves little boys and girls so much that he created them in his image. Furthermore, Jesus died for everyone’s sins, and, next sentence, this is more important than designer clothes or fancy cars!
3. Purpose in life, and accepting oneself, comes through accepting God, and letting him work in one’s life. People who have healthy self-esteem attain it by respecting God and emulating the example of ‘all truly lasting respect,’ Jesus Christ.
4. Humility means thanking God for the gifts that one has been given. The little Catholic boy or girl should accept compliments graciously by deferring credit for his or her talent to God.
5. Pride comes from thinking that one can call the shots in his or her life, not God.
And this is one of the main reasons I feel that adherence to Christianity has the potential to be psychologically detrimental to the believer. If you want to believe in a creator-of-all who works in mysterious ways in everyone’s lives, whether reputable sources back you on that or not, that’s fine, but I’d argue that once your self-worth becomes intimately linked with belief in a god, you are so emotionally attached to your beliefs that:
1. You cannot or refuse to fathom the possibility of your belief system being false, because if it isn’t true, you’d feel that your life is meaningless, worthless, and empty without God.
2. You may live your life repenting or rejecting who you are, pleading for repentance of your urges and desires, sorry for your habits, even begging forgiveness for your ‘impure’ or ‘’un-Christian-like’ thoughts that don’t even lead to actions. Your self-esteem is so rooted in God’s plan for you that you yourself don’t have self-worth outside of what God says.
3. You may get defensive quickly when they talk to others who don’t share your beliefs, and especially those who lack belief in a higher power, because you may perceive it as a threat to your own self-worth. “Of course God exists. Of course he loves me. Of course my purpose is to serve him and maintain faith in him when others question him. The people who question god are terribly misguided or have been seduced by Satan; let me bring them back to the faith. Because you know, if they don’t believe like I do, God will send them to hell for eternity. I bet those atheists are devil-worshippers and terrible people. If all else fails, I’ll just shut my ears and ignore what they said about my beliefs. La la la la la….”
4. You may have difficulty dialoguing with, respecting, or even maintaining friendships with those who don’t share your beliefs. Consciously or unconsciously, your relationships with those individuals may be colored by thoughts of “He’s OK for a Hindu” or “She’s a lapsed Catholic, but I still think she’s a good person, and God surely does too,” or, “It’s not my place to judge Bob for having relationships with other men, but like God says, ‘hate the sin, love the sinner,’ so I’ll do the Christian thing and be nice with him, and then covertly drop religious pamphlets on his doorstep when he’s not looking.”
Christians, like I said before, if you believe in a creator god who’s omni-everything, I may not agree with you, but I do believe that you’re entitled to your beliefs. But this whole business of putting God at the center of your life, thinking that all you’ve worked for and achieved in your life is through the grace of god, and feeling like your life lacks purpose without God’s guidance is a lot like psychological slavery, like you’re a little puppy (or lamb, if you’d like) forever following its master begging for love and attention and acceptance, because you don’t think you can achieve those things by your own means. Some of you wear your chains regularly, usually around your necks, adorned with gold or silver crosses. Those chains are removable, but the psychological ones are not-so-erasable, and while they might give you great comfort and hope in your times of crisis, they can also cause you agony, hurt, resentment, depression, self-loathing, broken friendships, and lost relationships when you come in contact with those who don’t share your views, or if you yourself question your views. I’m sure many former Christians on Youtube can attest to the difficulties they’ve faced with their loved ones, and the psychological re-construction they’ve had to undergo, when they’ve stopped believing in the God of the bible. It’s a lot of emotional baggage to rid yourself of, because by rejecting a Christian worldview, you have to forge your own purpose in life without God carrying you on his back (Footsteps, anyone?) and reject notions of a happily-everlasting-afterlife with Jesus and your deceased family members and friends. The point is that regardless of your religious belief, everyone of us has to live in this world leaning on ourselves, and our loved ones if we’re lucky, and strive toward a happiness and healthy feeling of self-worth that’s attained by achieving our own goals by ourselves through our own talents and hard work. That’s something genuine that will endure through life’s challenges and changes.
There is a series of questions devoted to self-esteem and depression. According to the book’s answer, to have self-esteem, a good Catholic boy or girl must internalize the following beliefs:
1. He or she is more important than all other non-human forms of life on earth, because only he or she will live forever with God, while all other life dies.
2. God loves little boys and girls so much that he created them in his image. Furthermore, Jesus died for everyone’s sins, and, next sentence, this is more important than designer clothes or fancy cars!
3. Purpose in life, and accepting oneself, comes through accepting God, and letting him work in one’s life. People who have healthy self-esteem attain it by respecting God and emulating the example of ‘all truly lasting respect,’ Jesus Christ.
4. Humility means thanking God for the gifts that one has been given. The little Catholic boy or girl should accept compliments graciously by deferring credit for his or her talent to God.
5. Pride comes from thinking that one can call the shots in his or her life, not God.
And this is one of the main reasons I feel that adherence to Christianity has the potential to be psychologically detrimental to the believer. If you want to believe in a creator-of-all who works in mysterious ways in everyone’s lives, whether reputable sources back you on that or not, that’s fine, but I’d argue that once your self-worth becomes intimately linked with belief in a god, you are so emotionally attached to your beliefs that:
1. You cannot or refuse to fathom the possibility of your belief system being false, because if it isn’t true, you’d feel that your life is meaningless, worthless, and empty without God.
2. You may live your life repenting or rejecting who you are, pleading for repentance of your urges and desires, sorry for your habits, even begging forgiveness for your ‘impure’ or ‘’un-Christian-like’ thoughts that don’t even lead to actions. Your self-esteem is so rooted in God’s plan for you that you yourself don’t have self-worth outside of what God says.
3. You may get defensive quickly when they talk to others who don’t share your beliefs, and especially those who lack belief in a higher power, because you may perceive it as a threat to your own self-worth. “Of course God exists. Of course he loves me. Of course my purpose is to serve him and maintain faith in him when others question him. The people who question god are terribly misguided or have been seduced by Satan; let me bring them back to the faith. Because you know, if they don’t believe like I do, God will send them to hell for eternity. I bet those atheists are devil-worshippers and terrible people. If all else fails, I’ll just shut my ears and ignore what they said about my beliefs. La la la la la….”
4. You may have difficulty dialoguing with, respecting, or even maintaining friendships with those who don’t share your beliefs. Consciously or unconsciously, your relationships with those individuals may be colored by thoughts of “He’s OK for a Hindu” or “She’s a lapsed Catholic, but I still think she’s a good person, and God surely does too,” or, “It’s not my place to judge Bob for having relationships with other men, but like God says, ‘hate the sin, love the sinner,’ so I’ll do the Christian thing and be nice with him, and then covertly drop religious pamphlets on his doorstep when he’s not looking.”
Christians, like I said before, if you believe in a creator god who’s omni-everything, I may not agree with you, but I do believe that you’re entitled to your beliefs. But this whole business of putting God at the center of your life, thinking that all you’ve worked for and achieved in your life is through the grace of god, and feeling like your life lacks purpose without God’s guidance is a lot like psychological slavery, like you’re a little puppy (or lamb, if you’d like) forever following its master begging for love and attention and acceptance, because you don’t think you can achieve those things by your own means. Some of you wear your chains regularly, usually around your necks, adorned with gold or silver crosses. Those chains are removable, but the psychological ones are not-so-erasable, and while they might give you great comfort and hope in your times of crisis, they can also cause you agony, hurt, resentment, depression, self-loathing, broken friendships, and lost relationships when you come in contact with those who don’t share your views, or if you yourself question your views. I’m sure many former Christians on Youtube can attest to the difficulties they’ve faced with their loved ones, and the psychological re-construction they’ve had to undergo, when they’ve stopped believing in the God of the bible. It’s a lot of emotional baggage to rid yourself of, because by rejecting a Christian worldview, you have to forge your own purpose in life without God carrying you on his back (Footsteps, anyone?) and reject notions of a happily-everlasting-afterlife with Jesus and your deceased family members and friends. The point is that regardless of your religious belief, everyone of us has to live in this world leaning on ourselves, and our loved ones if we’re lucky, and strive toward a happiness and healthy feeling of self-worth that’s attained by achieving our own goals by ourselves through our own talents and hard work. That’s something genuine that will endure through life’s challenges and changes.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
"Foolish Atheist"
Hey guys, so this video is about an Internet message board post that I’m linking to right here. It’s from a Christian website called Rapture Ready, that indeed, broadcasts news of the impending rapture. I’ll save my commentary of that for a later date to go ahead and focus on the post at hand.
The post is entitled “You might be an atheist fundamentalist if…,” and it contains a very long list of statements. Many of these represent what I can only describe a grossly misinformed perception of atheism , some are laughable, some are just plain ignorant, and many are a conglomeration of all three. However, I do think that a few of them are valid critiques of some atheists.
I don’t have much time tonight, but I’ll go through a few from each of the aforementioned categories, starting with those that I think embody a misinformed perception of atheism.
# You complain when Christians appeal to their emotions when justifying their belief in God yet you feel justified on appealing to your emotions for lack of belief in God.
And
# You declare on a public forum that you are "furious at God for not existing."
My lack of belief in God isn’t for emotional reasons…I don’t know about you all, but I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that the majority of atheists do NOT cite anger, fear, a desire to rebel against authority, or any other emotion as their primary reason for rejecting the notion of a god or gods. However, as the first statement astutely points out, a large fraction of Christians hold onto their beliefs for emotional reasons, the most common probably being fear of some variety.
And here are some entries from that list that I found funny:
# Going with the definition of "without a belief in God", you insist that all people are born atheists, and that dogs, cats, rocks, and trees are as well. You make statements like, "My dog is an atheist. Ask him about his lack of belief."
The writer’s tone is very tongue-in-cheek, but it’s true! When’s the last time you asked a tree about its religious beliefs?
# You believe that extra drippy ice-cream is a logical proof against the existence of God, because an omniscient God would know how to stop the ice-cream from being extra drippy, an omnipotent God would have the ability to stop the ice-cream from being extra drippy, and by golly, an omnibenevolent God wouldn't want your ice-cream to be extra drippy.
Wow, what a great argument! I’m totally going to use it next time I debate a Christian! PWNED!
And here are some that I find just plain ignorant:
# You insist that science is completely partial to all ideas, is not dogmatic and researches all possibilities -- except creationism and/or intelligent design.
I think the word they were looking for was “impartial,” meaning unbiased, rather than “partial,” which means biased in favor of one thing over the others.
# You claim antibiotic-resistant bacteria is proof protozoa evolved into a person.
As someone who has worked with and made antibiotic resistant bacterial strains in the laboratory for several years, I respond to this statement with a resounding WTF??
Finally, I mentioned before that a few of the statements presented in this topic I consider to be valid critiques of some atheists. Here’s a few of those:
# You became an atheist when you were 10 years old, based on ideas of God that you learned in Sunday School. Your ideas about God haven't changed since.
And
# You're a spoiled fifteen year old boy who lives in the suburbs and you go into a chat room to declare that, "I know there is no God because no loving God would allow anyone to suffer as much as I...hold on. My cell phone's ringing."
And
# Although you've memorized a half a dozen proofs that He doesn't exist, you still think you're God's gift to the ignorant masses.
And
# You demand that Christians study advanced evolutionary biology before making claims about natural selection. You then claim that their theological ideas, which you have never examined before, are pure nonsense.
At the center of each of these statements is the idea that atheists may not hold ideas that are ‘under-cooked,’ or ‘not fully hatched.’ To any young atheist (or newly-deconverted atheist) watching this video, I am not trying to insult you or your experiences in any way, but as a young atheist myself, I recognize that as people mature and experience different things throughout their lives, the reasons for their beliefs, or lack thereof, will (hopefully) become more finely-tuned, more cogent, and on deeper and more sophisticated planes of thought. The day you declare yourself an atheist or agnostic should not be the end of your thinking process. If you were raised in a home with no religious belief, or you decided when you were 10 years old that you didn’t believe in God, that’s fine, but hopefully in between then and now, you’ve explored this subject more thoroughly, which means exploring the points of view of others. Don’t just dismiss every religion on grounds of ‘I don’t believe in god or gods, therefore, religions A-Z = pure superstitious bullshit.’ If you’re open-minded, you shouldn’t be afraid of reading sacred texts or apologist arguments for any given religion, or even visiting websites or online messageboards where people discuss their beliefs. You might find some bits of wisdom in Jesus’ sermons, in the teachings of Buddha, or in the texts of Hinduism. If nothing else, you can discuss your nonbelief with folks of those religions without sounding like you have absolutely no idea what they believe. If you go charging into any debate, religious or otherwise, without having a firm understanding of the logic behind your arguments and the logic behind your opponent’s arguments, you will indeed come across as ignorant, laughable, misinformed, and foolish. If the debate is on religion, you’ll probably sound as silly to the theists as some notorious religious callers do on the Atheist Experience, like that guy who wonders why we don’t die when the sun goes down, Eve who thinks we’re atheists because we want to sin, and the guy who thinks all atheists are from Russia and are communists. I bet somewhere there’s a Christian call-in TV show that takes calls from atheists and puts clips of those online so that we can all laugh at the ‘foolish atheist.’ Seriously, let’s keep growing and learning so as not feed the fire and contribute to the already skewed views that some religious people have of us.
That’s all for now – this will probably be my last video for a while. I’d love to hear your comments, especially if you’re a religious person. I didn’t get to cover many of the statements from that message board post, so feel free to start a discussion in the comments section or in a video response about any statements that you find interesting.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Fewer female atheists? And why do religious women defend their submissiveness?
Hey everyone, so this video will be a response to two interesting and somewhat-related questions I received from my last video. The first question comes from bhig3, who asked why I thought there seem to be less atheist women than men. The second question comes from newstogod, who wondered why women whose religions require them to be submissive (specifically Muslim women and Baptist women) defend their role. I’ve thought about each of these questions a bit, and what I’m stating here will only be my opinion and include a crapload of generalization, so feel free to chime in with yours.
So why do I think there seem to be less female atheists than male atheists? First of all, I’m not even sure that this is the case – although there are clearly more men being vocal about their atheism on the Internet than women, I think that might be attributed to the general trend of women visiting and participating on other Internet sites besides discussion forums , chat rooms, and video sites that discuss religion. Most women of my age, including myself, spend a lot of time on the internet checking email, checking their social networking sites, reading the news, perhaps checking out gossip websites and blogs, and perhaps shopping online. While it seems like a lot of women are not shy at all about revealing intimate details of their personal lives to complete strangers on the internet – there are whole messageboards devoted to fertility or ‘trying to conceive’ where women will post about their menstrual cycles in excrutiating detail – I feel like most women in general, and myself specifically, are shy about making their personal lives an open book for all to read online. I would tell my closest female friends things that I would never discuss on the internet, even under the guise of anonymity that the internet inherently brings to your average Joe or Jane. And I think for many women, their spirituality, or lack thereof, is internalized, not something they wear on their sleeve, hence they’d spend hours browsing articles on religion online in the privacy of their own rooms, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel the desire to proclaim their views from the rooftops, or on random online messageboards, unless they were raised to do so.
Secondly, I feel like in many countries, including the United States, or in any location where a person is raised in a devoutly religious family or community, being openly non-religious can be a stigma that can impact how that person is perceived or treated in his or her family, at the workplace, and in the community. This is just a generalized assumption on my part, but many atheist guys I run across on Youtube seem to be of the high-testoterone male type – they do what they want when they feel like doing it, and they don’t care who they offend in the process. I can’t speak for all women, but I feel like I consciously reject this type of behavior, to the point where I choose my words carefully to try to not offend others and would prefer, in some cases, to avoid confrontation, which means to stay silent. On the whole, I don’t think atheist women would or do face substantially different degrees of discrimination than atheist men, but perhaps in some cases men care less about being outspoken among their peers while women are more sensitive to this.
Moving on to the second question – why do I think women whose religions require them to be submissive defend their role? I’ll start my answer with a bit of personal experience. I was raised Catholic, but thankfully, traditional gender roles were not enforced at home when I was growing up. My mom was a stay-at-home mom by choice, though she had a college degree and a career with which she had supported herself for years prior to starting a family, and my dad was fairly open-minded and never discouraged me from setting high academic goals for myself. I was also an only child; maybe things would have been different had I had brothers. In any case, I would get dragged off to church every Sunday, and around Mother’s Day every year, there would be this reading, which invariably turned me off every time I happened to be paying attention when it was read:
(this is from the New Testament, Ephesians chapter 5)
22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband. (endquote)
And I understand now that if one were actually to read the Bible from cover to cover, rather than just focusing on the group of readings read at church or discussed in bible studies, one would could across many, many passages to this effect, especially when reading the ramblings of the old testament where women are routinely sold off like prize cows into matrimony.
And the sad thing is that many religious women actually take these words to heart and see themselves and their potential roles as defined, or rather limited, by their gender rather than their individual skills, abilities, wants, and desires as a human being. It seems like Michelle Duggar defines herself as her uterus, and I foresee one heck of a midlife crisis in her future once she goes through menopause and can’t add more babies to her current brood of eighteen children. And the even sadder thing is that she and her husband Jim Bob, or as we snarkers refer to him, Jim Boob, are pushing this same fate on their eight daughters, teaching them to do the family’s cooking, cleaning, and homemaking while leaving them woefully unequipped to ever work outside the home as anything other than a secretary or nanny. Essentially, these girls are being groomed to get married off young and start popping out babies every few years until they can’t have any more kids, or die trying. Even worse, thousands of kids raised in fundamental religions homes across the world are sheltered from the outside world with highly censored or no internet or TV access whatsoever such that they never get exposure to any belief system besides their own, or they get that exposure once they’ve ‘drunk the kool-aid’ and closed their minds to questioning their own belief system.
I know I personally have a visceral reaction to the thought of ‘submitting’ to a husband no matter what his demand might be. Sure, bondage and sex role play can be fun when consenting individuals who trust each other engage in it, but I can’t imagine living my whole life condemned to submit to my husband’s every whim because I happened to be born without a penis. I certainly didn’t reject religion on these grounds alone, but this certainly was one of the reasons that I began to critically examine the beliefs that I had been raised to accept without question. To be perfectly honest with you all, if tomorrow conclusive evidence was put forward that, say, the God of the Christian bible exists, or Allah of the Quran exists, such that to attain salvation and avoid damnation, I as a women would have to submit myself to males, abandon thoughts of having any career outside the home, and cover my body up with a burqa so that only my husband could see my body, I think I would be sick to my stomach.
But playing devil’s advocate here, isn’t it a fantasy of many women to be taken care of, to be largely sheltered from the harsh realities of the urban jungle and the drug- and violence-infested inner cities, to be treated like a princess by a bevy of potential suitors leading up to a lavish white wedding, to have beautiful babies and be able to raise them without having to go to work, to spend their days decorating their home and baking cookies, and to rely on a clean-cut, handsome husband for protection, monetary support, and to walk them down the aisle at church every Sunday? It’s not my fantasy, but I certainly don’t look down on women who choose this life for themselves, the key word here being choose. I pity any women who are so sheltered that any other path in life would seem foreign, who would feel forced to stifle their desire for a certain type of career, abandon the thought of pursuing any career outside the home at all, or perhaps deny their sexual orientation, because they’ve internalized and accepted their religious beliefs so completely that stepping out of their gender’s predefined role is unfathomable.
So essentially what I’ve implied is an idea that women who are raised to be submissive or conform to gender roles within a particular religion do so, and go as far as to passionately defend their roles, because they have been raised in a sheltered environment where their belief system was regarded as unquestionable and incomparable to other belief systems. I think this is just one potential explanation, and it certainly does not come close to fitting every case. It totally doesn’t work when considering women who convert to a religion later in life – Youtube and the internet are rife with testimonials of women who’ve converted to Islam, burqa and all, as well as women who’ve converted to Christianity, Judaism, and practically every other religion (or have rejected religion, like myself). Why would a woman who was not raised in a religious environment where submissive gender roles were pushed upon her decide to convert later in life to a religion in which she would be essentially inferior to men? Is it pressure from friends or a romantic partner? Is it the desire to engage in the fantasy I described earlier? Is it a search for herself that led her to be vulnerable enough to a group of religious folks who befriended her? Is it fear? Is it an emotional substitute for getting over a previous addiction or trauma? I don’t know, maybe there are good reasons that are grounded in logic and reason and backed up by hard evidence that would even convince skeptics like me, but I haven’t found any yet. Anyway, thanks for listening, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
So why do I think there seem to be less female atheists than male atheists? First of all, I’m not even sure that this is the case – although there are clearly more men being vocal about their atheism on the Internet than women, I think that might be attributed to the general trend of women visiting and participating on other Internet sites besides discussion forums , chat rooms, and video sites that discuss religion. Most women of my age, including myself, spend a lot of time on the internet checking email, checking their social networking sites, reading the news, perhaps checking out gossip websites and blogs, and perhaps shopping online. While it seems like a lot of women are not shy at all about revealing intimate details of their personal lives to complete strangers on the internet – there are whole messageboards devoted to fertility or ‘trying to conceive’ where women will post about their menstrual cycles in excrutiating detail – I feel like most women in general, and myself specifically, are shy about making their personal lives an open book for all to read online. I would tell my closest female friends things that I would never discuss on the internet, even under the guise of anonymity that the internet inherently brings to your average Joe or Jane. And I think for many women, their spirituality, or lack thereof, is internalized, not something they wear on their sleeve, hence they’d spend hours browsing articles on religion online in the privacy of their own rooms, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel the desire to proclaim their views from the rooftops, or on random online messageboards, unless they were raised to do so.
Secondly, I feel like in many countries, including the United States, or in any location where a person is raised in a devoutly religious family or community, being openly non-religious can be a stigma that can impact how that person is perceived or treated in his or her family, at the workplace, and in the community. This is just a generalized assumption on my part, but many atheist guys I run across on Youtube seem to be of the high-testoterone male type – they do what they want when they feel like doing it, and they don’t care who they offend in the process. I can’t speak for all women, but I feel like I consciously reject this type of behavior, to the point where I choose my words carefully to try to not offend others and would prefer, in some cases, to avoid confrontation, which means to stay silent. On the whole, I don’t think atheist women would or do face substantially different degrees of discrimination than atheist men, but perhaps in some cases men care less about being outspoken among their peers while women are more sensitive to this.
Moving on to the second question – why do I think women whose religions require them to be submissive defend their role? I’ll start my answer with a bit of personal experience. I was raised Catholic, but thankfully, traditional gender roles were not enforced at home when I was growing up. My mom was a stay-at-home mom by choice, though she had a college degree and a career with which she had supported herself for years prior to starting a family, and my dad was fairly open-minded and never discouraged me from setting high academic goals for myself. I was also an only child; maybe things would have been different had I had brothers. In any case, I would get dragged off to church every Sunday, and around Mother’s Day every year, there would be this reading, which invariably turned me off every time I happened to be paying attention when it was read:
(this is from the New Testament, Ephesians chapter 5)
22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband. (endquote)
And I understand now that if one were actually to read the Bible from cover to cover, rather than just focusing on the group of readings read at church or discussed in bible studies, one would could across many, many passages to this effect, especially when reading the ramblings of the old testament where women are routinely sold off like prize cows into matrimony.
And the sad thing is that many religious women actually take these words to heart and see themselves and their potential roles as defined, or rather limited, by their gender rather than their individual skills, abilities, wants, and desires as a human being. It seems like Michelle Duggar defines herself as her uterus, and I foresee one heck of a midlife crisis in her future once she goes through menopause and can’t add more babies to her current brood of eighteen children. And the even sadder thing is that she and her husband Jim Bob, or as we snarkers refer to him, Jim Boob, are pushing this same fate on their eight daughters, teaching them to do the family’s cooking, cleaning, and homemaking while leaving them woefully unequipped to ever work outside the home as anything other than a secretary or nanny. Essentially, these girls are being groomed to get married off young and start popping out babies every few years until they can’t have any more kids, or die trying. Even worse, thousands of kids raised in fundamental religions homes across the world are sheltered from the outside world with highly censored or no internet or TV access whatsoever such that they never get exposure to any belief system besides their own, or they get that exposure once they’ve ‘drunk the kool-aid’ and closed their minds to questioning their own belief system.
I know I personally have a visceral reaction to the thought of ‘submitting’ to a husband no matter what his demand might be. Sure, bondage and sex role play can be fun when consenting individuals who trust each other engage in it, but I can’t imagine living my whole life condemned to submit to my husband’s every whim because I happened to be born without a penis. I certainly didn’t reject religion on these grounds alone, but this certainly was one of the reasons that I began to critically examine the beliefs that I had been raised to accept without question. To be perfectly honest with you all, if tomorrow conclusive evidence was put forward that, say, the God of the Christian bible exists, or Allah of the Quran exists, such that to attain salvation and avoid damnation, I as a women would have to submit myself to males, abandon thoughts of having any career outside the home, and cover my body up with a burqa so that only my husband could see my body, I think I would be sick to my stomach.
But playing devil’s advocate here, isn’t it a fantasy of many women to be taken care of, to be largely sheltered from the harsh realities of the urban jungle and the drug- and violence-infested inner cities, to be treated like a princess by a bevy of potential suitors leading up to a lavish white wedding, to have beautiful babies and be able to raise them without having to go to work, to spend their days decorating their home and baking cookies, and to rely on a clean-cut, handsome husband for protection, monetary support, and to walk them down the aisle at church every Sunday? It’s not my fantasy, but I certainly don’t look down on women who choose this life for themselves, the key word here being choose. I pity any women who are so sheltered that any other path in life would seem foreign, who would feel forced to stifle their desire for a certain type of career, abandon the thought of pursuing any career outside the home at all, or perhaps deny their sexual orientation, because they’ve internalized and accepted their religious beliefs so completely that stepping out of their gender’s predefined role is unfathomable.
So essentially what I’ve implied is an idea that women who are raised to be submissive or conform to gender roles within a particular religion do so, and go as far as to passionately defend their roles, because they have been raised in a sheltered environment where their belief system was regarded as unquestionable and incomparable to other belief systems. I think this is just one potential explanation, and it certainly does not come close to fitting every case. It totally doesn’t work when considering women who convert to a religion later in life – Youtube and the internet are rife with testimonials of women who’ve converted to Islam, burqa and all, as well as women who’ve converted to Christianity, Judaism, and practically every other religion (or have rejected religion, like myself). Why would a woman who was not raised in a religious environment where submissive gender roles were pushed upon her decide to convert later in life to a religion in which she would be essentially inferior to men? Is it pressure from friends or a romantic partner? Is it the desire to engage in the fantasy I described earlier? Is it a search for herself that led her to be vulnerable enough to a group of religious folks who befriended her? Is it fear? Is it an emotional substitute for getting over a previous addiction or trauma? I don’t know, maybe there are good reasons that are grounded in logic and reason and backed up by hard evidence that would even convince skeptics like me, but I haven’t found any yet. Anyway, thanks for listening, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Why I Am Atheist
So why am I atheist? To put it succinctly, I am atheist because I do not find sufficient, verifiable, unbiased evidence to believe in a god or gods. I am a scientist by nature, but my atheism did not necessarily arise from learning about biology, or some arrogant, unexamined assumption that science has all the answers. No, my atheism arose from my choice, once I was old enough, to think critically and apply reason to the world around me.
As a kid, I was sheltered in a largely Christian community. I grew up in a loving home, went to a religious school from kindergarten onwards, and was taught that Christianity was the one true religion. I had of course heard of other religions through books I read or movies I watched, but I didn't know anyone in my immediate circle who wasn't vaguely Christian or a God-believing, Jesus-invoking spiritual. My sophomore year of religious high school, I took the required world religions course, and for the first time I visited a Hindu temple,
saw a Buddhist sand mandala being made, and was had the chance to explore the customs and beliefs of different religions. That, coupled with Sophie's World, the first book I read that had the audacity to question the existence of God, which I read the following summer, set me on the path to agnosticism. For a time I didn't think too much about the issue, content to believe that maybe there was some truth to all religions, and that everyone's beliefs could peacefully and parsimoniously coexist, or something like that.
So why am I an atheist now? Because I realize that the world's major religions can't be parsimonious - in fact, even the same general religion, or even one denomination of a general religion, teaches conflicting messages. You've got the Quiverfulls condemning birth control - the Duggar clan just welcomed J-baby #18 this month - the Catholics discouraging birth control but nobody giving a damn about it, and some Muslims, Jews, and Hindus being fine with most or all forms of birth control (see Wikipedia's article for a brief, yet I'm sure incomplete discussion). The same goes for issues like homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, violence or non-violence, and so forth. Yet many, if not all, religions smugly assert that their belief system, and only their belief system, is correct, and failure to comply, to live by strict social and gendered standards, and to donate an appropriate amount of money will result in eternal punishment, or rebirth into a life of toil and suffering, or something along those lines. Now religion, culture, and history are so closely intertwined that it seems like religion would be just the thing to control the populace, wouldn't it?
So given the notion that only one of the world's thousands and thousands of religions is entirely correct, which one do I choose? Which tattoo do I get - a giant cross, maybe some Kabbalah prayer, maybe an ankh in case the ancient Egyptians were really onto something? Sure, religions have holy books and prophets and supposed miracles, conveniently occurring at times and places where they can never be objectively verified, and of course they can never be attributed to coincidence or poor memory coupled with latent desire, or some other logical explanation. And sure, religions offer different prizes - so which sounds most appealing to me right now -
an eternal life with Jesus as my best buddy, enlightenment and no more reincarnations into suffering, toilsome life forms, 72 young, female virgins...oh wait, I'm straight. And also women...guess that's also an inferior, submissive role if I choose a Western religion. Or even better, which religion has the worst professed consequence for disbelief or a life that otherwise does not conform to receiving the happy afterlife?
This last argument is Pascal's Wager, but I'd assert that choosing any religion on this basis is a case of Althusserian misrecognition. It's like investing in a scam product because the advertisement you saw on some late-night infomercial sounded convincing at the time, except now you have a worthless product, and they have your money. It's like hearing a song on the radio that you could swear was written about your last relationship or break-up, and feeling so connected to the song, when the band doesn't even know who you are, and some dude wrote the song based on an event that never happened when he was half-drunk and eating a batch of pot brownies.
The reason that none of the world's thousands of religions, past, present, or future, are true is that they are not verifiable or consistent with what we can prove about the natural world. Most religions hinge on the idea of an afterlife, but there's no proof that humans or any other organisms on this planet have any semblance of an existence after they die. How wonderfully convenient - how can you disprove one baseless assertion built upon an equally baseless assertion? And believing it on basis of faith is a blatant failure of every human's amazing brain. How can you disprove the Christian god, or the Hindu gods, or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael? No, because there is no verifiable, objective proof of ANY god - because no kid raised in some jungle away from all humanity emerges one day believing the in the exact same god and teachings of a religion he or she was never exposed to (or hey, even an alien will do!) - the burden lies upon you to prove your god or gods' existence before you deride us for our nonbelief.
As someone with a background in science, literate in the language of peer-reviewed scientific journals, I recognize the creation stories of most religions as myths - yes, that's right, entirely fictional. And in fact, let's put Biblical creation in public school, in literature classes alongside Greek creation myths, American Indian creation myths, and all of the rest. These stories do have literary value, imagination, and reveal insight into the ancient cultures in which they arose. But keep Creationism, Intelligent design, and everything else that doesn't appear in peer-reviewed science journals OUT of the science curriculum.
Some religions are so bent on proving their existence through a specific theory, or an apologist reworking of a theory, on how life on this particular planet originated, or how this whole universe came into existence. Please, if any religious folks are watching this, understand that these two are separate entities! The former lies largely in the realm of biology, specifically the theory of evolution, which has in excess of 46,000 hits on nature.com's search page (in contrast to 227 for "intelligent design," which mostly seem like editorials and rebuttals, or different topics altogether), and the latter lies largely in the realm of physics. Sure, you can somehow warp your Bible's Genesis or your pertinent holy book to sort of apply to some explanation of human origins or the origins of the
universe, but now that society has progressed into the Age of Reason, not much outside of your holy books and your own personal convictions lends support to the idea that life on earth, or the universe, arose from a god of one specific religion, and not any of the other thousands.
You say everything needs a creator, that every watch has a maker, that every banana fits perfectly in a human's mouth or up their ass, but then where did your creator come from? The logical answer is that he, or less commonly, she, is a figment of the human imagination, of the desire to be singled out or chosen, to have a life of purpose, to be reunited with loved ones after death, to quell fears and inspire hope in times of suffering. It's a wonderful, comforting notion that's attractive to any human being in every culture - hence so many cultures have unique religions full of beautiful customs, lovely artwork, and imaginative stories. I'd encourage everyone to
celebrate their own cultural background and appreciate the beauty and other admirable aspects of other cultures. But it's important to recognize all of these religions as ultimately fictions or myths.
I stopped believing in the tenets of the religion in which I was raised about six years ago, and about a year and half ago, I recognized that I was in fact atheist with respect to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Wicca, Scientology, and every other professed religion in the world today. While I think that science, and the scientific method of forming hypotheses that can either be proven, or disproven and discarded, has come a long way in helping us understand the natural world, I do not necessarily think that science can definitively explain everything there is to know about our universe and everything in it. Thus, I am an agnostic atheist with respect to deism, or the notion that some non-natural phenomenon was involved in the start of the universe, though I find the idea highly doubtful.
Being an atheist for me is extremely liberating - I am not confined to live my life as inferior to anyone, I can be true to my own self, my own desires and my own mind. Since I do not believe in an eternal soul or a never-ending afterlife, I am free to live each day of my finite life with happiness, and I don't feel obligated to jump through a never-ending series of hoops that I may or may not personally agree with just to garner a positive afterlife, or avoid a negative one. And even without the promise of a heaven or the threat of a hell, I still feel the need to live a moral life, because I feel connected to every organism on this planet, of which we are all products, and I do not seek to cause undue harm to anyone or anything. I neither go around preaching promises of spiritual happiness nor condemning anyone who's different than me with threats of eternal suffering. If you agree with me, great; if not, fine, and I won't treat you any differently.
So, for all of these reasons, I'm atheist. And I've never been happier.
Alraera, 12.31.08
see my Youtube account to listen to me narrate this
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