Religion:
How I Lost
It
but Found
Something Better
One
night I prayed to know the truth. The next
morning I discovered I was an atheist.
That is what I
lightheartedly tell folks when they ask about my
religious beliefs. Of course it was neither as
simple nor as sudden as that. My release from
religion was a gradual and mostly unintentional
process spanning a period of several years. But
it shouldn't take quite that long to read this, so if
you'll bear with me I'll tell you of my journey.
First, however, I should
clarify my motives. Most religious people seem
to assume that believers who become atheists do so in
an act of rage or revolt against religion, or perhaps
in rejection of conventional morality. I cannot
speak for all atheists, but in my own instance that
was not the case. As a youth I was unusually
conservative and respectful of authority. Any
questioning I did was with the expectation of having
my faith reaffirmed and enhanced by the
answers. While it is true that it was anger and
revulsion which initially motivated me to examine my
beliefs more critically, I nevertheless clung to my
religion for years, attempting to rationalize and
justify it, before finally finding myself forced to
abandon it as hopelessly incompatible with
reality. It was not until I had been rid of
religion for a time that I realized I was much better
off without it.
I should also note that
some details might be inaccurate or out of sequence
due to the imperfections of memory, but those
shortcomings should not interfere with the substance
and general veracity of the story.
I was born in Cincinnati
during World War II, and was reared in a
"respectable" mainstream Protestant
Christian household. I had the standard
indoctrination of Sunday School and Bible stories as
part of my early upbringing, and I accepted it
unquestioningly, if somewhat uncomprehendingly.
At the age of four
(following my family's move to another city) I had a
terrifying experience in a nasty little
concrete-block fire-and-brimstone church — lots
of jumping and shouting and screaming, activity I was
not at all accustomed to in grown-ups —
thoroughly alarming and upsetting to a sensitive
little tyke who had been raised on "Jesus Loves
Me." I was sobbing uncontrollably when Mom
finally "rescued" me and took me
home. Fortunately she decided that we should
look for a different church. Although this
episode in no way affected my young belief in God and
Jesus, it was my first decidedly negative experience
with religion.
In the main, my
religious upbringing was pretty laid back. Once
Mom had found us a suitably "civilized"
church, we settled into a routine of Sunday School
for an hour each week. But other than that our
life was quite secular, except for one or two
exciting and uplifting (to me) school Christmas
performances of excerpts from Handel's
"Messiah." Belief in God was expected
as normal and proper, but we didn't make a great fuss
over it as some are inclined to do. I was never
baptized. We didn't attend Christmas or Easter
church services, but treated these holidays mainly as
family reunion, feasting, gift-giving, and
fun-for-kiddies occasions (which was just fine with
me).
I don't remember
learning much in Sunday School, except that there
were people, such as Jews and atheists, who did not
share a "proper" Christian belief, and
hence were immoral and evil. And probably
traitorous, too, for those were the "McCarthy -
HUAC*" days. It therefore came as quite a
surprise to me later when, while I was in my mid
teens, Mom finally revealed to me the reason that Dad
never went to church with the rest of the
family: He didn't believe in God! Though
my own religious faith was unshaken by this
revelation, it was nevertheless a real
eye-opener. It awakened me to the fact that
people who did not believe in God and Jesus are not
necessarily evil, for Dad was one of the most
conscientiously (though quietly) principled and
ethical people I have ever known.
It was in elementary
school that I learned about dinosaurs, prehistory,
and the concept of humans as an animal species.
In junior high school I learned that the earth was
billions of years older than the human species.
And in high school I was introduced to biological
evolution. I was even cast in a minor role in a
school production of "Inherit the Wind,"
which introduced me to the term "agnostic"
in the form of the real-life lawyer Clarence Darrow, and brought me face to face with some of the
glaring dichotomies between science and
fundamentalist belief. It didn't shake my
mainstream faith, but it convinced me that some
religious beliefs were antiquated and stupid in light
of modern knowledge.
After high school, I was
still religious in my mainstream Christian way.
I had shed the biblical creation timetable in much
the same fashion as I had shed Santa Claus and the
Easter bunny years earlier. But I still held to
the belief that God was the creator of the universe
and life. Then came college. There I
learned of recent scientific experiments, which had
shown that complex organic molecules spontaneously
form under conditions believed to have existed
shortly after the formation of our planet.
Suddenly, there was no need in my universe for a
supernatural creator; evidently, nature could handle
such tasks entirely on its own. Still, there
were other reasons for belief in God, and I reshaped
my thinking to allow that a Higher Power had used
natural processes—including evolution—as
tools over billions of years, rather than a series of
miraculous "let there be" commands spanning
a mere week. Though some of the biblical
stories were goofy, I saw, God and his works were far
grander than I had ever supposed.
Then one Wednesday
evening, my best friend invited me to attend church
with him and his parents. Having nothing better
to do (I thought), I agreed to go. Flashback to
age four: "Fire and brimstone!"
"Evil is everywhere!" "We're
gonna fry if we don't get saved!" This
time, however, the experience didn't traumatize me,
for I had caught snatches of this horrid crap spewing
from radios for years, and was by this time fairly
inured to it. But it did set me thinking.
My friend's belief in
"fire and brimstone" Christianity and my
own belief in "love and peace" Christianity
were equally intense, yet fundamentally
incompatible. They could not both be the word
of the same God; they could not both be right.
And if one was wrong, I mused, perhaps both
were. To resolve the difficulty, I tried to
imagine what might happen if I were a visitor from
Mars to Earth, having no religious experience.
I wondered what unmistakable sign would guide me, as
a stranger to earthly religion, to the One True Faith
(whatever it might be) and away from all
others? The more I studied the matter, the more
it seemed that there was no such sign. Despite
the Christian bias of my own youth, I had to admit
that there was nothing compelling about Christianity
which did not have some equivalent in Judaism, Islam,
Hinduism, or for that matter in the old Norse,
Egyptian, or Greco-Roman religions.
During the next year or
two I drifted into a kind of Christian deism (for
want of a better term), in which I viewed scriptural
assertions with increasing skepticism, and Jesus as a
great teacher but otherwise a quite ordinary and
mortal human being. Yet even if it wasn't the
deity of a recognized religion, God was still
necessary, I felt, as the ultimate arbiter of good
and evil, the author of morality.
In the spring of 1965, I
enlisted in the intelligence branch of the
Army. Following training I was sent to Europe,
where I found myself, along with a number of other
non-fundy Christians, in the unaccustomed day-to-day
company of Jews, agnostics, and even a Buddhist or
two—on the whole a pretty decent and fun bunch
of people, I discovered. Even the amiable,
cigar-chomping post chaplain was an okay guy.
Considerate fellow that he was, he made it a point
not to preach to our religiously diverse group at the
compulsory monthly training sessions, but rather
dismissed us for that hour. But a few months
after I had arrived, his tour of duty was over, and
the chaplain who replaced him was something else.
The new chaplain, a
fundamentalist Episcopalian (a most curious bird)
from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who came to us by way of
some unspeakable hole in Vietnam, was perhaps the
strongest single influence on my adult religious
life. It was from his hard-nosed preaching,
especially to the many non-Christians in our unit who
were (according to him) eternally and horribly
damned, that I got a hard look at the side of
religion which I had only briefly glimpsed
before. Our good chaplain unrelentingly slashed
through the love-and-peace trappings of Christianity
and revealed the grotesque hatred, ignorance, fear,
and superstition which lurked at its core. I
can truly thank that man and his fervent belief for
giving me the final, hard shove I needed to confront
the ghastly, bloody, insane and deformed horror of
the Christian religion, and ultimately to discard it
altogether. Furthermore, I earnestly wish him
whatever eternal reward he deserves for that
kindness!
On the whole, though,
the disintegration of my religion was a surprisingly
positive experience. But there lingered one
troubling question: Without divine authority,
what support is there for morality? Pondering
this, I saw that morality in some form is
essential to the structure and prosperity of human
society. And if morality has a secular purpose,
I reasoned, there must also be a secular basis for
it. In the years following my departure from
the military, therefore, I pieced together a set of
ethical values based on the demonstrably beneficial
or harmful effects of various actions and
attitudes. I was especially delighted that the
product appeared far more self-consistent and
pertinent to the modern world than the petrified
Decalogue of biblical taboo to which I had earlier
subscribed. I had, it turned out, reinvented a
centuries-old idea which others called "humanism."
It was now rapidly
becoming clear to me that the universe behaves very
much as might be expected if God didn't exist, or at
least didn't care. Eventually it dawned upon me
that in the grand scheme of things there is, in fact,
no grand scheme—merely the indifferent and
impersonal consistency of nature. Even as an
explanation for things as yet unknown, a deity is
superfluous, for experience has shown that religion
never truly explains anything; it merely serves as a
fig-leaf cover for the shame of human
ignorance. God performs no observable function
and has no valid purpose. The question entered
my mind, "What is a god without purpose and for
which there is no evidence?"
"Non-existent," came the most plausible
answer. The blinders of dogma and the yoke of
dread were finally off. For me the universe now
shone in a wholesome new light, the comforting glow
of reality no longer distorted, either by the garish
artificial "glory" of myth and miracle, or
by the ghastly glare of hellfire. I was—I am—free!
=SAJ=
*HUAC: House
Un-American Activities Committee