Last year my brother asked me for my thoughts on God: given our shared, childhood Christian indoctrination, how and where did our paths diverge? I was intrigued by the project and promptly let it sit for four months. When I finally picked up my pen to attempt a reply, I drew from the many epiphanies that challenged my inherited world view.
I am apparently the black sheep of my family, who are uniformly Christian, though not monolithically so. I love my family, and my father has been devoted to Christianity since his conversion at age 18. It works for him, and I don't resent him his beliefs or lifestyle.
I have read authors like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who argue for the abolition of religion, however I find this too remote a possibility given man's ego. As a species we want to believe in a divine purpose for ourselves and our planet. We are seduced by this cosmic canopy above us and are loathe to acknowledge its vast vacancy.
Because of my conservative Christian upbringing, religion has always been a topic of great interest for me, so I continue to read a great deal about it. I recently happened on one blog with an essay contest for de-conversion stories, so I dusted of my letter to my brother, reworked it, and sent it in. I've posted it below and would appreciate it if you'd vote for me here once you've read it (click the stars to rate it).
I have not read all the other essays in this contest, and there may be others that are hostile toward other beliefs; naturally I can take only take responsibility for my own statements. Let me stress that I believe in tolerance for a variety of world views. Too often politics and religion are off-limits for discussion, yet these can be the most important, not to mention the most interesting, things to discuss. It's important to engage each other in the crucial issues of our time, such as the need to educate our children based on observable, testable scientific principles.
Finally, I believe it's important to speak up for a misunderstood minority in this country. Too often, atheists are dismissed as amoral or satanic, which is far from the mark. Richard Dawkins gets it right to quip that most people reject any number of gods from Zeus to Dionysus; I just take it one God further.
My Journey to Reason
The process of reconciling the world I know with the one I was taught has been painfully challenging. Like extracting an entrenched weed, several attempts passed while the root remained obstinate and unmoved. Ultimately, I have found a certainty quite unlike what I expected, yet the long journey was necessitated by the depth of indoctrination from my youth.
My father attended seminary and was a minister of music in our church. My mother divorced him before my brother and I turned five. (Apparently his proposal “I believe God would have me marry you,” was not as enduring a line as he hoped.) We stayed with our dad and attended Christian kindergarten and elementary schools, as well as weekly services Sunday mornings and evenings and Wednesday evenings. Every activity from morning to night was accompanied by prayer, whether mealtime, school time, or any other time.
The Rapture was a two-edged sword for me. I was taught to look forward to it, but I was uncertain of the protocol. I was afraid it would happen in the middle of the night while I was sleeping naked, and I would fly up to Heaven with no opportunity to throw on some PJs. Meanwhile, everyone else would be clothed and laughing and pointing at me, of course. For this reason, I was sure to always wear underwear to bed. The Rapture might be chilly, but at least it wouldn’t be naked.
God was an ever-present part of our lives, to the extent that I was convinced that I saw an angel at the foot of my bed when I was ten years old. We were simply maintaining a heightened state of openness for communications from the Almighty. I accepted what I was told, tried to be an obedient child, and I did not question the received beliefs of my father.Two Worlds
As a child of divorced parents, I was exposed to two different ways of life. Though not hedonistic by any means, life during the summer at my mom’s was more permissive than the school year with my dad. Instead of hearing praise tapes by Sandi Patti and Steve Green, there was at least popular music from Billy Joel and Barbra Streisand. The secular world was visible in glimpses, and we were allowed to explore it.
We were set up for some fundamental confusion: Honor thy Father and Mother was inherently contradictory. We could not honor one without necessarily confounding the other. Instinctively, we followed the house rules for wherever we found ourselves and learned to get along. When I was thirteen, I elected to live with my mom, and my brother stayed with my dad. My brother still is a Christian. I have become an atheist.
There have been a number of epiphanies in my life: experiences where, then as now, I recognized I was suddenly and quite unexpectedly seeing the world with new eyes. These moments propelled me most vigorously and violently to where I now stand.Boarding School
Time away from home is, in itself, a catalyst for growth. Through unfiltered exposure to unknown people, places, and perspectives, we take on new vocabularies that augment or replace our working set. If the new experience conforms to our present understanding, it can be easily assimilated. However, if it challenges our received wisdom, either it or our understanding must be cast aside.
I met in high school many kids who dressed, behaved, and thought differently from me. This was in greater degree than I had encountered to that point. One classmate, now a recording artist, was a gay cross-dressing singer-songwriter who performed spot-on Tori Amos songs and derivatives at monthly coffee houses. There one would also hear an Alaskan songwriter, now a successful folk-pop songstress, strumming her guitar and yodeling. These classmates and others were exceptional creatures, even then, personifying talents and lifestyles unknown to me.
I could have, certain of my Christian upbringing, with its utter exclusion of and contempt for the secular world and all its variety and color, shunned exposure to these wild elements. But I was a boy with a foot in two worlds. Divorced parents can split a child’s personality quite beyond the help of drugs or therapy. The child’s journey must ultimately determine his chosen identity, and as I made my way through high school, I remained open to situations that would provide new sensory stimuli and expand the menu from which I could select a future me.
One catalyst was my choir director, “Craig”. I had two hours of instruction a day from him and came to be included in a group of students that hung out with him, both on campus and at his nearby home.
I had the greatest respect for him in his abilities and knowledge, and his enthusiasm for music and for conducting was infectious and kindred to me. I heard one day a conversation from other students suggesting that he was gay. Gay was still, to me at that time, an abomination of a word. It suggested at once decadence, deviance, disgust, and doom. I couldn’t believe these characteristics could be applied to this man I had come to care for and admire.
“I heard something about you,” I surprised Craig one evening while alone at his house.
“What is that?”
“Something awful,” I dug deeper but was not quite ready to confront him with what I feared. Once spoken, I could not take it back. If confirmed, how would we both respond? Could our friendship continue?
He urged me on, knowing an inevitable moment had arrived, “What have you heard?”
“That … that you…,” I paused, then pushed on. “…are a homosexual.”
I felt silly almost at once. It was a word. What terrible actions was I accusing him of? There was a moment of silence in the air as my thoughts continued to race. Craig’s response was brave and wise, “Is that really so awful?”
A moment to choose: If Craig was gay, and if that was indeed awful, I could not continue to befriend him. Instead, since he was gay and since I cared about and respected him, I decided to better understand who he was, so I could fully appreciate him.
So, here I chipped away at a foundational belief, and my holy armor was thereby weakened. A tenet my father had sworn to me was no longer true from my experience. There was no great threat to me, mankind, or God Himself from my gay friend. What else would I discover was false? There were other experiences in those years: new loves, first sex, more sex, new music, new literature, new ideas, and new questions I had to answer for myself.Germany
One of the religious questions with which I had struggled most mightily was thrown into sharp relief during my exchange year in Germany just before the end of high school. Until then, to be sure, I had encountered international students, but mostly just students from the U.S. with varying backgrounds. In Germany, and particularly in the former East Germany, I encountered people with vastly different backgrounds, experiences, and fundamental beliefs than mine.
The magnificent cathedrals of Germany are not well attended today. Western Europe has become, by many accounts, a predominantly secular region. This is true not just by comparison to its Middle Eastern neighbors, but particularly in relation to the United States. I wondered if, then, these secular Europeans were doomed to an infernal infinity by mere chance of birth. Is this the promise of a just and merciful God, that only those born to a Christian family or those fortunate enough to be visited by a missionary have an opportunity to see the light and repent? Whereas an island-born native never visited by a Western man yet living a decent, murder-, adultery-, and idolatry-free life, should be headed to hell for the mere failure to proclaim an unknown prophet as his life’s greatest treasure?
It was with this incompletely formed notion that I found myself one August night alone in the middle of a soccer field. I had been in Germany three weeks and was soon to depart for the remainder of the year with a host family. I had been enjoying a heady romance with one of our local coordinators, a twenty-one-year-old architecture student named Catrin. Aside from her help dissecting some finer points of German grammar and customs, at only seventeen, her attentions had me feeling on top of the world.
On the cusp of an unwritten foreign adventure and flush with the exoticism of the country and all of its attractions, I stood basking in the warm night air, secluded by the surrounding trees and illuminated only by the lights of the houses on the nearby hill and the starry sky. As I gazed up at the heavens, I was struck that, above these terrestrial features and geopolitical boundaries, the stars visible to me were likewise viewable to friends and family in the States and to unknown billions, of all beliefs, throughout the rest of the world.
This ecstatic feeling of oneness with the world transcended all beliefs and dogmas; I needed and wanted a god less than ever. I can’t respect a deity so vain that he will turn away good people who haven’t sung his praises. Throughout the remainder of my year in Germany, I remained impressed by a people who were so intelligent and artistic and who seemed to have little use for America’s puritanical obsessions and restrictions.9-11
Though naturally impacted by the traumatic terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, I was even more affected by the America revealed in its wake. At first, I was alarmed by the anti-Muslim fever that remains a steady undercurrent to our public discourse. I was later struck by an inconvenient truth: the terrorists didn’t hate us for our freedom, they hated us because of our beliefs—our God. And we, in kind, waged war with much the same instinct: Bush even baldly declared our anti-terror mission a “crusade.”
I began to fear the numbing, dumbing effect of religion on our country and the disastrous consequences its right-wing electorate brought to the White House and, ultimately, the Supreme Court through the 2004 elections. Where I had once considered religion a harmless, personal issue, I now saw religion as a paralyzing cancer on our democracy. We cannot make scientific strides with stem cells due to misguided puritans; we are embroiled in a losing, likely decades-long, struggle in the Middle East for no better reason than our hot prejudices compounded by a knee-jerk protectionism of Israel; we are crippling our competitive abilities by confusing our children with pabulum about Creationism and Intelligent Design; and we confuse straightforward scientific matters like global warming with misinformation borne of corporate self-interests and faith-based pseudo-scientists that peg the world as mere thousands of years old. Religion is not harmless; its existence and promulgation are direct threats to a democratic republic governed by reason and experience and educated by science.Conclusion
I have come to realize that, in this world, what you see is what you get. As man has puzzled over the inexplicable happenings in the universe around him, he initially came up with the best explanations he could that made sense in the realm of his personal experiences. Rain falling from the sky resembles tears that fall from human eyes. Therefore, there must be some great being in the sky crying tears down on man. As more became known, some gods were replaced while others evolved. When the Pentateuch was transcribed, man had worked to make sense of a Great Flood and the destruction of great cities. What was the meaning behind this, surely it was not random?! So, the flood was sent to cleanse the earth; Sodom and Gomorrah were wicked and had to be likewise purged. These are arguably less primitive than predecessor legends but plainly this-is-why-it-is-so myths nonetheless.
It’s convenient to believe in an all-knowing, all-seeing, ever-present father figure in the sky who cares for you even if no one else does. As long as you please this imaginary figure according to a millennia-old text and your imaginary conversations with said deity, the rest of the world be damned; you’ll be all set for eternity, come what may in this life. It’s harder to accept that there is no meaning to our existence on this planet in the universe than to share with our neighbors and work together toward the betterment of our communities and our world. Hard to accept that when we die, that’s all there was to it. If you failed to make the most out of life, you get no further chances. An afterlife is much more enticing to some; but, considering its many predicted manifestations, it is also just as likely, if not more so, not to be available.
As I continue to define my philosophy, it will be based on the tenets of naturalism: science, reason, and experience. As I learn and grow, I know I will sometimes be wrong about things, but I will have a better chance of being right by being skeptical and thinking critically about the world around me, and I will keep working on my brother and hoping he will one day see the light of reason.
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