I was raised a Catholic, but never considered myself losing my faith, I just studierd the Bible and other religions and decided I could not believe in any of them. I am not anti religion, I look at religion as a medicine it is good for some not so good for others. One should use one’s own mind.
Monavis
I was raised Baptist. I went to a private Christian school from kindergarten until 6th grade. My family talked the talk, but didn’t walk the walk so much (for instance, in those days the family went to church very rarely, although my brother and I were sometimes sent to Sunday school.) I suppose I believed what I was taught, the same way I believed in Santa Claus. In other words, “This sounds really odd, but all the adults say it’s true, so I’ll go with it.” And I did try to go with it as much as I could, because the Hell part sounded really scary.
Of course, like everyone here, the older I got, the more I noticed. Lots of “Christians” I knew weren’t very nice or very happy, and God himself sounded like a right dickweed. Also, I had to admit to myself that no matter how I tried, I had never “felt the presence” or “heard the voice” or had any kind of uplifting experience. Surely, if God was all-knowing, he knew that I was faking. So, I decided to quit faking, and right away I began to feel happier and better. When I say “quit faking”, I mean that I admitted my doubts, to myself and to others. As time went on, those doubts piled up until I was eventually able to say, “There is no God.” Talk about a relief!
I call myself an agnostic, mostly because it’s hard to totally shake off the brainwashing I recieved as a kid, and I don’t want to close my mind on the subject just yet, but I lean heavily toward atheism and find great comfort there.
Thank you, Diogenes, for enlightenment on this point. Which makes (to me) my adolescent confusion all the more understandable.
Roddy
I was raised Catholic - church every sunday from an early age, catholic grade school, high school, etc. I was a firm believer as a child, then as I got older my beliefs started to evolve, although I would always shape them around the Catholic faith. While in Catholic high school (to their credit) we actually studied religion. We interpretted the bible for historical context, we learned about other religions, we studied philosophy (though from a Catholic standpoint, but it was still an introduction to logical reasoning as it related to ethics and morals) to better understand the Catholic faith. I would take this new-found information and intermingle it into my faith (muslims jews and christrians all worship the same god, etc).
I even went to a Catholic university (though not for that reason) which had the added benefit of forcing you to take a yearly religion class. Being the curious person that I am, I continued to take classes on different religions and religious perspectives (even an interesting one on feminism in religion). During and after college the beliefs evolved more, to viewing god as a life-force/part of nature and the religions where right to an extent, but they had just been led astray by the imperfect people leading them.
Then I had this girlfriend… She believed strictly in the bible, and I had never. I never believed in the historical bible, and in my research and efforts to convince her that the bible wasn’t meant to be used as she was using it, I found myself heavily questioning the very existence of Jesus, and as more time went on even the existance god. The more I studied the historical time periods and context under which x-ianity arose, the more I viewed it as a mythology, much as I viewed greek and roman mythology. It was this combined with the inherrant contradictions of a merciful god and our very existance and coming of existance as well as free will that I shed all doubts about my belief in any type of god. So you could say that a fundamentalist showed me the light.
Yes.
I was raised as a sort of generic Christian; not taught by any one group. I was quite fanatic about it, but couldn’t kick the habit of reading things besides the Bible. I just noticed too much of the illogic,error and evil of religion. Over time I decided that it was not only wrong, but evil even if it was right.
For me, it was learning as a grade-schooler that there were other, very different religions in different parts of the world. Wouldn’t an all-powerful God be able to arrange it so that the whole world partook of his “revelations” or prophets or savior or whatever?
What kind of deity would send a single savior to a single tribe at a single point in history, and then condemn people who don’t believe? Such a God would be a Devil, fit only for scorn, not worship.
Raised Catholic (do I sense a theme?) I never believed in Jesus-as-God, but I did believe in God and I thought the idea of Jesus as a superniceguy was neat. I despised going to Mass, hated talking about God, felt icky about all of it. I found it excruciatingly embarrassing if someone wanted to talk about religion around me. It made me uneasy just hearing God mentioned.
We went to Mass every Sunday. I hated it. Went to Sunday school during the school year. I hated it. Went to Bible school in the summer. I hated it. And then, like a psycho, I decided to go to a Catholic university, where I became even less convinced of Jesus, but felt comfortable with the general idea of God and discussion of theology in an academic setting. Met my husband the disabled atheist. Married outside of the church. We don’t want children and I realized that I would have an abortion if I became pregnant. Never went willingly to Mass. Felt uneasy when I thought of going. 9/11 happened. Struck by the idea of doing such a cruel thing in the name of religion. Lost the sense that there was anything to believe in, a kindly presence, and here I am.
Since my conversion, I’ve become a more tolerant person, and a more forgiving one. I no longer feel like I have some cosmic flyswatter waiting to back me up. I no longer feel my ideals are absolute. I have also become much less conservative, going through phases of libertarianism and anarchism to end up a mostly-liberal who is no longer so certain that I have all the answers and everyone who doesn’t succeed is a slacker. Disability, atheism, and George Bush have all changed my life.
I started off as a believer, but I was confused about some things and people either wouldn’t or couldn’t give me answers. I then did what strikes fear into the heart of all organized religions - I started reading and learning for myself.
I started when I was 13. By the time I was 15, I had learned it was all bullshit. By the time I was 17, I had found that not only was it bullshit, it was an out-and-out con game.
I dropped Catholicism and then later Christianity and it’s all due to the Straight Dope.
The first thing that made me think twice was a Cecil article about how we don’t really know when Jesus was born. Growing up, I had been told over and over again that December 25th Was Jesus’ Birthday. More dramatically were the “Keep the Christ in Christmas!” I did some digging and learned the history of “Christmas” to discover that the roots go back to the pagan Saturnalia event.
And I remember thinking… “Fuck! Why didn’t the church just come right out and say ‘We don’t really know… we picked this day to celebrate for several reasons.’” I felt lied to. Betrayed. And I remember thinking, “If they were misleading me with this little bit of trivial information, I wonder what else they’re snow jobbing me on?” It was the church that explained why it’s so important to be truthful because “once you lose your credibility, it’s almost impossible to regain.”
You can say that again.
So if the Catholic Church was a little dicey on the facts, maybe I should go to the source… the Bible. No matter what flavor of Christianity is your favorite, the basis for them all is the Bible, right? I was never encouraged to read the Bible myself, the church always told me which snippets were worth reading. And since even those were weirdly written and quite frankly quite boring, I wasn’t going to be putting down my Spider-Man comics in favor of a letter from Saint Paul to the Romans. But okay… this is the meaning of life we’re talking about, I’ll just suck it up and get to know the Good Book.
“Okayyyy… Bible… Bible… The King James Version? What do you mean… version? Oh… there’s several? Why is that? Some of them don’t have all the same books? Really? Who is mankind to say which books to exclude? These are the words of the Big Man Upstairs, I’ll take the Original™ please! Except I don’t understand Aramaic or Latin… Right. These words are translated from ancient languages. Hell, I’ve taken enough French and Spanish to know that even in modern languages that some things just don’t translate well. And the connotations of words can change over the course of a few decades… I wonder how much they can change over a couple millennia? Maybe a lot?”
And what about all those contradictions and inconsistencies?
And then came the incredibly impressive 5-Part Straight Dope Advisory Board “Who wrote the Bible?” articles in which I learned a number of things, including we have no evidence that the writers are really the people they say they are and that things are being written about many years - if not decades or centuries- after they occurred (what mortal man’s memory is that sharp and unerring?)
I’m not saying that there aren’t some great morality stories in there, but you expect me to take this as “Gospel”? I’m thinking maybe the people who wrote and compiled this thing intended it’s use as one thing, and it really took off and morphed into a whole new usage by some people in modern times.
What separates faiths we refer to as “religions” from superstitions we refer to as “mythology”? Popularity? Good (or agressive) PR? It’s not as though there is any more evidence for the existence of the “Holy Ghost” as there is for “Thor.”
At it’s best, I believe religion serves as a guide to aspire to something beyond our base, lizard-brain desires. At it’s most practical, it serves as a set of laws through some pretty dark ages where even the best laws of the land were still progressively shitty as you worked your way down the social ladder. At it’s worst, it is an instrument to gain violent dominion over other people and bend them to the will of “religious” leaders under the pretense of the will of God (see Spanish Inquisition, Osama Bin Laden. et al.).
I was also a True Believer, albeit in Hinduism. When I was 14, my biological mom showed up in my life and threw in my face that I had been adopted, that my adoptive mom “didn’t care about me”, that I was illegitimate. And then disappeared from my life.
Well, it didn’t instantly kill my belief but talk about seeds of doubt. Why on earth would the God I’d always loved and had faith in let such a thing happen? I began to search for the Truth.
First I read the Bible, the Old Testament, and was completely disgusted by the things the OP mentions, not to mention Lot and the Good Samaritan story.
Then I read the Quran, and was turned off by the repeated litany of “Unbelievers shall perish in hell”.
Then I threw myself back into my own religion, at least on the surface. Meanwhile I was going on websites and debating religion and learning about the world and learning more and more about my adoption, and my father, who cared about me so little that he threatened to throw me out on the streets to starve if my mother brought me anywhere near. And the society I was born in (India) that blamed me for my mother’s actions, and would never let me have anywhere near a normal life as long as I had that stigma hanging over me. Another reason to ask God “Why? I didn’t ask to be born.”
In the middle of all this a close and much loved family friend died. Another chip in the armor of faith.
My parents realized I was growing away from their religion. My mother then proceeded to cram it down my throat for the next few years. This was more like a sandblasting.
So you could say I guess I was agnostic for a long while. The atheism came all at once, in a day…I was thinking about something, and suddenly I had one of those flashes of inspiration and it came to me that not only did I not have any belief in a god, I didn’t need any belief. I could put all my studies and books away. I was content just the way I was, and didn’t need any sort of outside influence.
Where would my belief that there is some sort of divine power, but that all religions are human responses to the experience of the divine (and, therefore, no less fallible than anything else come up with by humans), fit in?
I honestly don’t know. Trying to remember the time I believed is like trying to remember the time I couldn’t read. I just fell out of it somewhere along the line, and was a total heathen by the time I had the presence of mind to even give the matter of faith much thought.
I come from a long line of Catholics, and my father made a rather by-the-numbers attempt to raise us in the faith, though he himself was not a believer, simply because he had been himself. (I don’t mention my mother much in the process as she died when I was quite young). I found it interesting to learn years after I grew up that while all my grandparents were nominally Catholic, only my paternal grandmother, child of impoverished immigrants from the North of Ireland, was truly spiritual and deeplly faithful. All my other grandparents were children of working-class Québecois, and went to church and confession because that’s what upstanding people were supposed to do, in their minds. I’m not sure if there’s a cultural factor there or not, just noting the difference.
Anyway, I did the church-every-Sunday, sunday school, and CCD thing, just like all the other kids raised in the Church. For reasons he can’t even remember, my Dad dragged his feet a little getting me enrolled in CCD, and so when I went I was a bit older than most of the other kids, but not much. My recollection of that time is pretty hazy, most likely because I simply glazed over during most of my pre-adult religious instruction. It simply bored me terribly, and I came to resent somewhat having to go to classes when I could be doing something more interesting, like playing whiffleball, building model airplanes, collecting rocks, or about 10,000 other things I found enjoyable.
I also found some of the instruction a little bizarre, though admittedly more entertaining when so. I remember one class on performing baptisms in emergency situations. The example was something like, “What if your non-Catholic friend is hit by a snow plow while you’re walking home from school, and you don’t think he’s going to survive?” Well, then, you pull him out of traffic (look both ways, etc.), melt the snow, perform the ritual, perhaps with your friend propped up on the bank next to the shoulder, etc. I remember my animated discussion of the morbid details over dinner, and my father’s rather stoic silence and blank expression as he nodded occasionally to indicate he was listening. I think it was a few weeks later, having had a string of classes where nothing quite so entertaining as vehicular manslaughter jazzed up the presentation, and I finally broke down and begged my dad to not make me go to these stupid classes anymore. I fully expected him, as was his habit with any chore, to give me the stern “No. End if discussion.” reply, but instead he asked me “Why don’t you want to go?”
My reply was my typical, immature rant about the boredom and inanity of it all, probably the basic assessment I would have given about anything I was expected to do “because I told you to”. I’d like to say I had thoughtful and intelligent reasons for objecting, but really it had mostly to do with getting more satisfaction from my time with Wolverine and Nightcrawler than with Jesus and Paul.
“Well, I think it’s important that you go, but if you don’t want to, then it’s up to you.”
Those words are etched in my brain because my Dad almost never knocked the ball back into my court like that. It so blew me away I was speechless, and my father suggested I let him know later whether I would go again or not. I’m sure I was supposed to learn some lesson from this, but whatever impression the discussion made on me must have worn off in a couple days, because when my Dad then asked me “You going to CCD tomorrow?”, I said, “Mmmm, no, I’m going to <friend’s> house, he invited me.” Dad paused, looked at me solemnly, and said, “OK.” And that was pretty much the beginning of the end of religion for me. Soon I’d find ways to be too busy to go to church every Sunday, attendance became more and more infrequent, and eventually my Dad just gave up.
Some time during my teens, maybe 11th grade, I was having a random conversation with some other kids about what they believed in, and after listening to all of them I realized for the first time I had absolutely no feeling of the presence of God whatsoever, never thought about it, never prayed, just plain wasn’t in on it. I was rather shocked by the response I got to speaking my thought aloud. While few of my friends were themselves churchgoers, they all professed belief, and my “I mean, really, the dude rose from the dead?” objection got a hushed, deadly serious “You mean you don’t believe in God??” response. The only reply I could think of was “Well, I dunno. Do you mean, you know, the universe or something, or do you mean, like, God?”
Yeah, I was a real scholar of theology. After halfbrainedly outing myself as an atheist freak, I worked on getting better ed-ju-macated in undergrad for purely intellectual reasons, and beyond that there’s not much to tell. I appear to be constitutionally incapable of spirituality, wonder if I’ve inherited this trait genetically to some degree, and expect the Catholic line of my family ends with my generation.
This is going to be the longest post I have ever made.
I grew up in a half-assed Catholic home. My parents went to mass sporadically; my brother and sister went when my parents forced them to attend. Somehow I managed to take religion very seriously in spite of this. During my 9 years at Blessed Sacrament school, my grades were consistently highest in Spelling and Religion classes. Despite being a “gifted” child I was kind of naïve in many respects, sheltered as I was. In those nine years, I had contact with exactly one black boy and one protestant girl. I honestly didn’t know much of anything about non-Catholic Christianity until high school. While I went to a public high school, I attended catechism classes in preparation for Confirmation. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I was one of the few students that took the classes seriously. I thought long and hard about my faith, and with careful consideration chose my Confirmation name as Michael, after the archangel that drove Satan from heaven in the Book of Revelation. I was determined to combat evil in God’s name. In most respects I was a normal teenager, but I also believed fully in the reality of spiritual warfare and knew that God had a special role for me in that war; I was going to fight on the spiritual battlefield against the demonic forces that seek to deceive humanity.
My freshman year at the Columbus College of Art and Design saw me briefly indulge in the newfound freedom that came from being away from home for the first time in my life; nothing particularly horrific, mostly a few parties, some drinking, that sort of thing. A few of my dorm mates were holding a weekly Bible study and once in a while they would go around asking people to attend,; I thought about it but didn’t immediately join; they were, after all, not Catholic and I still was unfamiliar with Protestant theology at the time.
One night late in the year, I think it was early December, I was praying late and felt that God was speaking to me: “Just because you grew up in a church, do you think that means that you’re saved?” was what I felt he was saying to me. In retrospect, that was in fact the very thing that the Bible study people had been asking people around campus throughout the year so far, but I sincerely felt that this time I was really hearing it from GOD. I wasn’t quite sure what to do; I called home the next day and asked my bewildered parents to send me a bible and my rosary and various prayer books that I had collected during my Catholic school years.
I started reading the Bible voraciously. After a few weeks, I decided to go to the Bible study. I quickly made many friends and became and enthusiastic Bible study attendee. I borrowed or bought many, many books on the subjects of apologetics, eschatology, theology, spiritual warfare, prayer, discipleship…anything and everything I could get my hands on, I read. I read the “standard” authors thoroughly: White, Spurgeon, Bonhoeffer, Colson, Schaeffer, Stott, Lewis, Edwards, Luther, Calvin, McDowell, Ross, Sproul, Lindsey, Carlson, Piper, Morris, Dembski, Berra, Behe, and many more. I absorbed their words like a sponge, and all the while continued to study the Bible intently. I quickly found a neighborhood church near Ohio State and studied the Bible three times a week including the dorm study; the pastor, a Korean missionary who started the church 15 years prior by preaching on OSU’s campus and teaching the people who came to him, personally taught me and a select few others, apparently grooming us for church leadership. My growth in knowledge was exceeded only by my drive to learn and experience more as a Christian. By the end of my freshman year, I was teaching the Bible study and providing counsel and direction for even the lifelong Christians that had initially tried to invite me to the study. For the next 8 and half years, I was either leading or co-leading a Bible study on the campus and also serving the church. I say these things not to brag but rather to emphasize how completely devoted I was and how thoroughly I dove into the Bible and theology and so forth. However lukewarm I might have been as a teenager, from the moment that I became “born again” I was fully vested in my Christian faith. I fought the Good Fight, and I took that fight to the internet, battling with such unsavory characters as the Mad Hatter and other reprobates. I can honestly say without exaggeration that I argued in favor of Christianity with greater clarity and forethought than most Christians.
There was another story developing all during this time, though. From a young age, I was fascinated with science. Astronomy, geology, biology, archaeology - I loved them all, but above them all I loved dinosaurs. By the time I was in kindergarten, my love of dinosaurs was so apparent that one of my classmates confronted me and asked me if dinosaurs were the only thing I ever talked about. That was one of my earliest surviving memories of school! When other kids claimed that they wanted to grow up to be firemen or police officers or race car drivers or whatever, I was telling my teachers that I wanted to be a paleontologist. I was, from almost day one, an Uber Dinosaur Geek. I learned to appreciate science and discovery, and used my developing artistic skills to depict dinosaurs (a pastime that would eventually develop into not only a true passion but a viable source of income). I must have driven some of my teachers nuts; one of the nuns at Blessed Sacrament reported to my mother that I had complained about the picture of Adam and Eve that was being used in religion class, because according to me, they should have looked more like cavemen than modern, clean-cut humans. My love of dinosaurs would wax and wane during my junior high and high school years, only to be rekindled during my senior year of high school with the discovery of Greg Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, a new book that showed dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Deinonychus as fast-moving, dynamic animals which were far more exciting and appealing than the old Godzilla-like depictions of dinosaurs that I grew up with. From that point on, my love of dinosaurs would be strong, and that love would eventually contribute to my initial objections to Christianity as I shall explain later on. Suffice to say for now that my sense of divine purpose was developing alongside my love of science and especially dinosaurs.
Throughout my college years, I put my faith ahead of most everything else. My friends were, almost without exception, Christians. I had Christian roommates. I read Christian books, I listened to Christian music, I evaluated any movies or TV shows with a discerning Christian eye.
I had arguments about Christian rock music versus classical music; Bert, my best friend in college and one of my Christian roommates felt that classical music was more ‘Christian’ because it was beautiful, whereas Christian rock often copied the aggressive sounds of secular music. I maintained that beauty alone does not make the music more Christian; after all, if the music does not direct one to Christ, it can become an idol in itself!
I had arguments with other Christians about the level of faith that should be exercised in everyday life. For example, should we trust God to wake us up in the morning, or should we use alarm clocks? (This was a real argument we had at one time - I am not making any of this up.) Are we ‘testing god’ if we don’t use alarm clocks, or are we making an act of faith?
At one point early in my Christian walk, Bert and I got really deep into spiritual warfare; we were reading books by Rebecca Brown, Bob Larsen, Mike Warnke and others about the reality of spiritual warfare and the sometimes spectacular accounts that they gave of the battles that they had witnessed between angels and demons. Rebecca Brown in particular claimed to have been called by God to wage war against Satan and his earthly forces and claimed to have seen and talked to angels, demons, vampires, werewolves, and the most insidious monsters of all, Catholics. At one point, inspired by these books, Bert and I decided to march around a local Scientology office seven times singing hymns (a la Joshua marching around Jericho). We were elated to see that the building was abandoned the following week, only to have our joy muted by the realization that the Scientology center had simply moved into a new, bigger building closer to downtown. Oh, well.
Somehow between our Sophomore and Junior years, Bert and I both came to the conclusion that our Christianity was based a little too much on sensationalism and a fascination with the supernatural. We wanted to search for a deeper and more meaningful Christianity, a more sober and measured walk with God. When we returned to college in the fall, we compared notes and decided to burn our old Rebecca Brown books. Our pastor was relieved, though he rarely seemed to be fazed by anything that we had been doing. He was just waiting patiently for us to outgrow that phase in our life. We started down a path of serious study and discipleship.
(Bert eventually married one of the Malaysian women at our church and moved to California to take up his new job with PDI/Dreamworks; he would go on to become one of the top computer animators there, working on movies like Antz and Shrek. He and his wife would also come to reject Christianity, coming to their conclusions separately at almost the same time that I was questioning my faith.)
I struggled somewhat during this time to figure out how dinosaurs played into all of this. It was clear from my reading that a large percentage of Christians believed that God had created everything as per the book of Genesis, and that evolution was in fact nothing more than an attempt by scientists to deny the truth of creation. Satan himself was directing their thoughts, or else they were simply misled by a system which arose from a prideful denial of God as creator. And yet discovery after discovery in paleontology seemed to bear out the evolutionary theories about the dinosaur/bird connection. I had to find some way to resolve this.
Most of the creationist authors I read seemed less than objective in their analysis, of course. I remember reading at least one creationist book which contained most of the Institute for Creation Research’s arguments, highlighter in hand, marking whole sections of the book which just didn’t seem to make sense to me. I started reading more authors with slightly different views like Hugh Ross who was presenting a creationist argument that seemed to rely less on a literal interpretation of Genesis. Of course, Ross still brought everything back to Genesis; he had to, because otherwise there was no reason for him to interpret data the way that he did. I still was not entirely satisfied with creationism, but I reasoned that it was a matter of faith, that I as a Christian was called to resist being seduced by philosophies and principles that depended on this world rather than on Christ. So I started to buy into the Creationist argument more and more. It was more comforting to do so, because it allowed me to trust that the Bible was inerrant in every respect. If the Bible was wrong in some way it would threaten the foundations of my faith, after all.
I really dove into apologetics at this point, because I didn’t want to feel like my faith was unreasonable. Authors like Josh McDowell and C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel seemed to satisfy this desire, and I readily adopted an aggressive stance in witnessing on the internet to anyone who would listen. Armed with volumes of apologetics and creationist literature, I engaged in message board battles that quite frankly make the battles here seem brief in comparison.
After college, I continued to be active in the campus Bible study, serving as a teacher and something of a big brother figure to younger Christians. I was writing Christian songs and essays and so forth; maybe I’ll post some of those songs here so you can all see something of my thought process at the time.
It was getting harder and harder to continue arguing for Creationism, though. If I was going to keep up with the current theories about dinosaurs, I had to acknowledge that more and more evidence was being uncovered that pointed to birds having a dinosaurian heritage. I tried for a while to adopt an view that God was using evolution as his mechanism for creation, but that didn’t solve the problem that Genesis apparently was not to be taken literally. And if Genesis was not to be taken literally, what about the rest of the Bible? If the creation stories are allegorical, what about the story of Noah’s Flood? Most Creationists claimed that The Flood was the mechanism by which fossils came to be; they claimed various means by which to explain the sorting of fossils in the geological record, including one which claimed that the levels at which animals are found correspond to their ability to find higher ground to avoid the rising flood waters. Of course, that didn’t really do much to explain why flowering plants are not found before the Cretaceous period, for example. I guess you could imagine all of the low-lying flowering plants being pulled up and carried to higher ground by dinosaurs, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some creationist might actually have postulated something like that, but the idea of Noah’s Flood accounting for fossils was looking worse and worse the more I looked into it.
It was also becoming harder to ignore the fact that many of my Christian friends were very judgmental and unreasoning in their adherence to certain prejudices and precepts. I tried to introduce the idea that God would probably be more pleased with a monogamous homosexual relationship than a loveless heterosexual marriage, but no one wanted to hear that.
All during my Christian walk, I and my Christian brothers agonized over sexuality. Of course sexual temptation was all around us, and in fact many of the Christian girls in our Bible study group were undeniably hot, so we had many a tearful confession of our lusting and the failure to remain masters of our domain, so to speak. Again, I eventually tried to introduce the idea that maybe God was less concerned with how often we jacked off and more concerned with how often we helped people who were in need. Nothing doing; it was important to help people in need, of course, but there was just no excuse for getting a hard-on, apparently.
Then something unexpected happened. I got a job offer in Minnesota of all places, and if I took it I would have to move away from the church community I loved so much and all of my Christian friends. It was a scary prospect, but the money was too good to pass up; it was a jump in pay of about $10K per year more than I was making in Ohio, with room to move up whereas in my old job I was pretty much at the top of my earning potential within the company. So in September of 2000 (September 11th, as a matter of fact…!) I moved to Rochester, MN to start work for the Mayo Clinic as an illustrator. This was an important move in many ways, including the fact that this was the first time in my life when I was going to be completely alone; no Christian roommates, my parents and family were too far away to reach with a casual car trip on the weekend, etc. As it turns out, I did already know some people there, because the Creative Director who hired me was also the same guy who had hired me for my first art job in Ohio, and he had also recruited a few other people who had worked at that company in Ohio, including another illustrator that I had graduated from CCAD with. So I wasn’t entirely alone, but I was without a Christian presence in my life for the first time in nearly a decade.
I didn’t seek out a church immediately; I had some reading to do, and I finally felt free to do it. I decided that it was time to read about evolution from a scientific approach instead of a religious approach, for starters. I started buying books from regular bookstores instead of Christian book stores. A number of books by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldrege were helpful, and especially the book Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth Miller. I was becoming satisfied that scientists had it right when it came to evolution, and so my next challenge was to find a way to reconcile this with my faith. Miller himself appears to be a theist, and at the end of his book he attempts to reconcile science with Christian belief, but whereas his arguments against Creationism were thorough and succeeded in my estimation in destroying not only the traditional forms of creationism but also so-called Intelligent Design theory, his reasoning broke down considerably when attempting to reconcile faith and reason.
I continued my search by reading books which attempted to find common ground between faith and reason; I found most of them unsatisfying. Most of them seemed to argue that faith and reason could not in fact be reconciled except to keep them in separate spheres; let faith dictate spiritual truth, let science dictate material truth, they seemed to say. Well, that answer may have been good enough for many, but to me it was unsatisfying because I knew that the historical reliability of the Bible was essential as a foundation for my Christian faith; if the Bible could not be trusted with getting things right, then it became just a record of a particular branch of humanity and their quest to understand their place in this world and the experiences and traditions they believed about God instead of divinely inspired words directly from God himself. I felt that most approaches to reconciling faith and reason tended to do violence to one or the other, and came to the conclusion that I needed to pick one and let that take precedence.
Part 2 coming up…
OK, part 2:
I knew that science had an admirable track record despite the creationists’ claim that science had been wrong many times in the past. The fact is, they were wrong many times in the past, but the very nature of science is self-correcting. Religious dogma, on the other hand, seeks to interpret or explain away or dismiss evidence that contradicts the preconceived conclusions that are held as sacred. I saw dramatic evidence of this in some Young Earth creationists’ attempts to explain how light from stars millions of light-years away could be reaching earth now if the universe was only about 6000 years old; the light was created already en route, they said, or it was in fact an illusion, the universe was created with the appearance of great age even though it was in fact only 6000 years old. Why would God do such a thing? Why, to test our faith, of course.
This kind of argument didn’t fly with me because I knew in Romans that Paul had said that all of nature was supposed to bear testimony to God, that His invisible attributes and divine nature could be seen reflected in all of creation. Why then were creationists always seeking to put God into gaps, if Paul was claiming that we only needed to look to nature itself to see evidence of God? Why did creationists continue to push God’s period or level of activity further and further back? If they acknowledged a greater age for the earth, and the legitimacy of the fossil record, they gave God the role of guiding evolution or even of simply setting the entire universe in motion and then keeping his hands off of things entirely. While such an approach seemed to allow for God to still have a role while acknowledging scientific truths, it not only tended to marginalize God’s role in creation but also eroded the importance of scripture in my opinion. Again, if Genesis was allegorical, what about the other stories? If Jesus was supposed to be the very image of the invisible God, if in fact he was the Word made flesh, and if Jesus taught using parables, maybe a great deal of the stories in the bible were in fact meant to be taken as parables, stories in which the spiritual truth was important and the historical or scientific accuracy was not that important. I had to know more.
I continued to look into things more deeply. I wanted to know why people believed in god to begin with, and how religious thought had developed over the course of human history. I began reading books about anthropology and church history to get wider perspective on the origins of religious thought and in particular Christian thought. I found many parallels between Christian thought and many other religious traditions throughout history. I found that if one were to divorce oneself from the notion that Christianity is definitely true and everything else by default is wrong, it becomes very hard to distinguish between the viability of Christian mythology and, say, Pagan mythology. This was kind of unsettling, but I had to keep looking deeper.
I wanted to get closer to finding out what made the religious mind tick; I continued to study Christian history and the development of theology, and also started studying books about psychology and neuropsychology. Books like V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain, Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Why God Won’t Go Away (by a couple of guys whose names I can’t remember off the top of my head) revealed how fragile human perceptions of reality can be and how easily we can fool ourselves. Religious experiences seem to have arisen as a byproduct of other evolutionary adaptations, and retained at least partly as a means of strengthening community bonds and even combating the negative effects of a depressing awareness of our own mortality. I still believe that spirituality is a very important part of human experience, but I was beginning to feel that there was little reason to hold onto a Christian faith that now seemed to have no more of a foundation than any other faith. I was getting ready to make the most frightening decision of my life.
I had spent my entire life believing in and praying to God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Even during my questioning and searching I dared not even think about the possibility that I could walk away from my faith. I had invested too much time, too much effort, too much heart. I had argued in philosophy classes at school, on message boards on the internet, even on the street when need be. I had toyed with the idea of entering seminary or going on a missionary trip after college, and at one point it seemed clear that I was going to end up in some kind of ministry role. I wasn’t about to turn away from Christianity on a whim.
I couldn’t deny that Christianity had, at least indirectly, given me some of the best friends and best times of my life. I can truly say that I had brothers and sisters in Christ. There was no doubt about my love for them and their love for me. I had spent many a night staying up with some brother that needed words of counsel or simply a partner in prayer, and oftentimes I was looked to for guidance by the younger Christians that I had befriended through the Bible study. How could I even think about walking away from them now, when so many of them had known me to be a steadfast brother, a friend and guide who had long since earned the nickname “the walking concordance?”
There was also my family’s reaction to consider. I was pretty sure that my brother was not a believer, but my parents had at least a general faith in the Catholic version of God, and my sister was starting to become pretty hardcore in her beliefs. I had made my devotion to God clear to everyone in my family over the years. I had argued with my father because he wanted to be sure that I wasn’t neglecting my studies for the sake of my religion, and I had let him know in no uncertain terms that if push came to shove, God was going to be priority number 1. Aside from the embarrassment of backing away from that bold faith, would they now think differently of me?
All of those issues were present in my mind, but ultimately I knew that I had to make up my own mind about things and follow the path that I felt was right. I continued to search, to think, to read.
I mentioned some of the books that I had read earlier. Of all of those book, the three that made the biggest difference in my decision to finally walk away from Christianity were these: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg & Eugene Daquili, and Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth Miller.
Finding Darwin’s God pretty much settled all of my lingering questions about evolution and creationism; prior to reading it, I was of the mind that “theistic evolution” or “intelligent design” might be plausible alternatives to naturalistic evolution. After reading it, there was no doubt in my mind that “theistic evolution” and “intelligent design” were not only implausible but if they were true then they did violence to my conception of God. I saw that such theories were really more like admissions from the religious holdouts that had realized the folly of Young Earth Creationism than anything else. They couldn’t argue persuasively for a literal interpretation of Genesis yielding a 6,000 year-old universe, so they were trying to find some gap in scientific knowledge to fit God in. As scientific knowledge advanced, they continued to retreat; at first God was involved in everything, then he was just making the ambiguous “kinds” and let them go from there, and then he was just pushing things subtly in one direction or another, making a key decision at certain points in history to ensure that humans would evolve and so forth. Some of them even conceded the battle over biological origins and instead turned to invoking the “Prime Mover” argument for the origin of the entire universe, essentially relegating God’s role to not just the unknown but what is in all likelihood the unknowable. Miller systematically destroyed almost all of the various Creationist arguments that I had ever read or believed in, and addressed many of the objections that Creationists like to level against evolutionary theory. He showed how any God that would be an active force in ongoing biological evolution must be sloppy, uncertain, and limited. Such a God on the one hand is supposedly brilliant enough to come up with the human eye but at the same time couldn’t find a way to design it without a blind spot. He supposedly was able to come up with a brilliant method of delivering nutrients throughout the body but he had numerous false starts in trying to come up with a final design for the elephant. Miller was mindful that his audience might include people like myself apparently, and he tried to reassure theists at the end of his book that evolution did not necessarily mean that theism was invalid. However at that point his arguments became far less convincing; he had to appeal to quantum uncertainty as the window of opportunity for God to act in the world; to me this wasn’t much different than the Creationists that retreat to the second before the very origin of the universe to find a place for God to be safe from science. Like that God, Miller’s hypothetical “quantum god” (as I started calling him) was trying to find a snug little place where he would be safe from all scrutiny and disproof.
Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief was written, as the title suggests, to explore the neurological and neuropsychological basis for religious experiences and beliefs. The authors examined what happens in the brain chemically and electrically during a variety of religious experiences, from the ecstasy of Catholics deep in fervent prayer to Tibetan Monks deep in meditation to the seemingly wild dancing of various tribal religions. They found that certain parts of the brain, certain processes, and certain effects were common across the range of religious experience. They hypothesized that quiescent and arousal states of the brain are manipulated by religious thought and ritual and desires to push and pull human perception a certain way; they drew parallels between certain kinds of temporal lobe epilepsy and certain kinds of profound religious experiences. They noted that during heightened states of religious ecstasy the brain’s ability to determine a sense of self versus non-self is confused as is the ability to anchor oneself in time and space is suspended. The person feels that they are ‘nothing’ or ‘empty’ while at the same time feeling ‘connected’ or ‘one’ with all things, or Nirvana, or God or whatever. While their brains are experiencing these odd feelings, the conscious mind is struggling to make sense of it, and that’s where specific religious imagery or interpretation seems to come in. Somewhat amusingly, they find that religious ecstasy seems to follow the same neural pathways as sexual excitement and orgasm. They postulated an evolutionary scenario that might have given rise to religious thought (although this part was far sketchier than the ‘hard science’ of observable data about religious experience) and generally demystified (ha!) much of religious experience in my opinion. They also gave examples of ways that brain damage or defect or stimulation can produce certain feelings or hallucinations, and how easily and completely the mind can be fooled.
Like Miller, the authors were quick to reassure the reader that science had not disproved the existence of God; as they correctly pointed out, simply finding a biological or mechanical agent of religious experience does not rule out the possibility of the reality of a transcendent God. One could say, for example, that God gave humans this mechanism for sensing the divine. True enough, I thought, but such an idea was in stark contrast to the measured and even-handed scientific approach that they had used until that point. This book also showed that human perception was malleable and the brain easily fooled. V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain and Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat would later reaffirm this; their accounts of people with brain injury, disease, or defect and the bizarre and total effect that was displayed in their patients who suffered them were astounding. From people who honestly thought that their own limbs were not their own to people who were mentally ‘stuck’ in a specific year in the past, to a man who saw persistent and vivid hallucinations of cartoon characters (but only in the lower half of his field of vision), it became clear that ‘reality’ as humans perceive it is just that; reality as humans perceive it. I wanted to have assurance that my faith in God was more substantial than a brain-damaged person’s faith in Bugs Bunny causing mischief under the table.
Of course, no one goes through life constantly in suspicion of everything that they perceive. To some extent, we all have to trust our senses and our minds, even though we may be fooled now and again. But I knew that feelings alone were not going to be enough for me in a search for the truth. Some of the books I had read about science and religion had suggested that science and religion could be separate but somehow equal partners in a healthy and full experience of life; I think this is probably true for many people, but as I noted, it seemed to be more like a copout to cater to two seemingly contradictory paradigms without fully committing to one or the other. I felt like the fundamentalists and Young Earth Creationists were recognizing this and choosing to side with Faith, and I could understand that better than trying to ride the fence and avoid committing to one or the other. I was soon to read the book that would finally push me off of that fence and squarely into the arena of science and reason.
That book was The Demon-Haunted World: Science as Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. This is a book that I honestly believe should be required reading in every high school, even if it does not dissuade people from religious thought (which is not really the goal of the book anyway) but because it teaches the value of and methods of critical thinking. Sagan really created a masterpiece in this book, I think. From “psychic” frauds to alien abductions to the inquisition and the witch hunts, Sagan exposes the roots of their folly and shows how much common ground these beliefs share. Critical thinking is essential to avoid being duped, he demonstrates time and time again, and he makes a pretty strong case for saying that religious faith of a Christian variety really has no more of a grounding in reality than belief in an invisible fire-breathing dragon in your garage (a really classic section of the book). After reading that book, I felt that I couldn’t justify continuing to believe in my particular fire-breathing dragon anymore. I could have chosen to, based on faith alone, but to me I had just as much reason to profess faith in Zeus or Odin, and I definitely knew I didn’t believe in them.
So, one scary night in Minnesota, I said a quick goodbye to God; I prayed, “God, if you’re really there, I’m sorry, but you’ve done too good of a job of making it look like you don’t really exist.”
That’s when the bitterness started to rise up…
To me, a loving God that is for some reason not powerful enough to help everyone is far more acceptable than the concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful God that not only chose to create a world of suffering but actively participates in causing that suffering. The alternative is a God that is all-powerful and all-knowing and still chose to make a world full of suffering and actively participates in causing suffering. According to the Bible, when God establishes the New Jerusalem he will do away with suffering and pain and loss and, apparently, even the desire or capacity to sin. He’s got that ability. He theoretically could have done that from the very beginning. Arguments that ‘true love requires true choice’ sound nice but the fact is that just as God (if the bible god is real) didn’t make humans (generally speaking) with the desire to eat their own eyeballs, he could have made humans with free will and the capacity to sin yet without the desire to sin.
Here’s something I find disgusting; when I look at the state of the world and I see suffering and pain and men raping children and humans torturing other humans and all manner of evil in the world, I can’t imagine trying to comfort them by reciting some damn poem like “Footprints” about how God really is there with them and all they need to do is have faith. It angers me to recall how some of my Christian friends would blame human sin for all suffering, knowing that babies are sometimes born with horrible, painful and sometimes fatal birth defects that are not the direct result of any human action, let alone anything that the baby has done.
I keep coming back to babies, as some of you may notice. The reasons for this: first, most people will agree that a baby hasn’t had the chance to do anything, right or wrong, to warrant any kind of punishment. Second, Jesus made it a point to praise children; let them come to me, he said. You must become like a little child to enter the kingdom, he said. Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, he said, would have been better off killing themselves because God’s gonna make them pay. Third, Paul writes in Romans that God decided to love Jaboc and hate Esau as they were in the womb, before either had a chance to do good or evil. God’s choice. His prerogative, right? He’s God, he made them, he can do with them what he wants. All fine and dandy, but that still leaves him as an ass hole. Who among you believes that it is right to judge a person while they’re still in the womb?
The sum total of everything that I’ve learned and experienced and thought over the past 5 years has led me to discard the Judeo-Christian biblegod concept. I’m not entirely closed to the idea of a loving god, but if there is one, he doesn’t sound or act like the biblegod.
**Cuckoorex, ** I am in awe of both your heart and mind, as well as your courage to share an experience that dwarfs what I think a lot of us went through, given just how far you travelled.
I always had empiricist leanings even from childhood but I suppressed these when it came to the family faith (methodist) because after all, it was the family faith.
Over time, some observations led me to realize I couldn’t stop pretending anymore. Probably most significant among them was when I noticed that most religions tend to predict nothing, and always seem to benefit some sort of earthly agenda. Plus, there was the realization that since my parents and grandparents weren’t any smarter than me, I shouldn’t view their insistence as proof of any sort.
Having reached that point, I just unceremoniously discarded religion like a glow-stick that had lost all its glow. However, I do feel something of a hole in my life. Through indoctrination or whatever, I find I have a need for a faith-like construct, some path to follow. Having learned that Buddhism is accomodating to atheism while encouraging moral behavior, I’m looking into that now.
I have nothing to comment on in your post, Cuckorex; I’m just glad somebody posted something longer than me. Makes me feel less geeky.
(But not UNgeeky.)
My thanks to everyone who has posted, with especial thanks to Cuckoorex for that moving, illuminating, post. I was never at ease with religion, so the change was pretty minor for me. Reading your post makes me realize, yet again, how many paths there are.
Impressive thread, and some amazing personal journeys! Thanks all for sharing.
My journey was not nearly so exciting.
I grew up among laid-back methodist parents living among an extended Calvinist family. I frequently heard from some neighbors and relatives that I and my folks were going to hell for not being ‘true christians’ from pretty early on. My folks told me: “don’t sweat it, you’ll be fine”. I trusted my folks a lot more than the extended family, fortunately. I took Sunday school relatively seriously, just like I did all my schooling.
That worked until about first grade, when I reasoned out that Santa didn’t exist. From there it was no great leap to consider Jesus a nice guy who preached “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice to each other” and got slammed by people who didn’t like that message. But both God and Son of God? I didn’t think so. I noticed that others didn’t respond well to that hypothesis, so I mostly kept it to myself.
By 5th grade I figured that the Bible was a book full of legends, bits of facts, some useful advice, and a whole lot of writings by folks with their own agenda. And that if there was a Supreme Being, it was beyond our comprehension and had nothing to do with God as portrayed in the Bible. Turns out my own parents were comfortable with that interpretation, so there was really no conflict, just the need to keep my mouth shut in front of relatives.
Mrs. Mercotan came from a similar lapsed Methodist background, and slowly came to similar conclusions. Together we eventually became Unitarian Universalists, where we fit in pretty well with those sorts of beliefs.
Cuckoorex, thanks for sharing that!