My Road to Atheism - First in a Series
May 15th, 2008 | By Edward Beaman | Category: Culture, Society, & Religion
“There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric God.” - Bertrand Russell
Few if any people in the world today would put faith in the Gods presented in the epic poem The Iliad of ancient Greece. Most Christians and Muslims would treat such theistic claims as humorous folly akin to a child believing in the tooth fairy. The majority of Atheists would concur with the addendum that Abrahamic Monotheism is as equally daft.
The above notion was part of the reason I became an Atheist at the age of seventeen. My parents had provided a solid foundation of religious belief in the assumption that it would be a bedrock from which to either continue to build or reject when I was old enough to choose. Both my parents were agnostics but each held great interest in all the religions of the world, past and present. I was baptised Roman Catholic shortly after birth and would later go through my first Holy Confession and Communions, as well as attending an all boys Roman Catholic Prep School where prayers were said twice daily.
As a child, I strangely never questioned the existence of God and took for granted the religious teachings as truth. I did the same with Father Christmas who in many ways was more magical and endearing than Jesus Christ. It could be said that the terrible revelation about the non-existence of the bearded man in red shook the foundations of my religious core just a little too much, thereby weakening the essence of ‘belief’ for the aftershocks of later contemplation and study. If one highly regarded invisible charachter was fiction, then what about the rest?
I tend to see my switch to Atheism as a belated experience. One that should have happened earlier and probably would have if it had not been for certain circumstances in my life. The years from when I was ten years old to fifteen were not the happiest and without going in to detail, the safety blanket of belief in a highly benevolent diety was in many ways a life saver. Add to that the wonders of angels, spirits and saints, so prevelent in Catholic tradition. These dark years led to the temporary cancellation of theological pondering and indeed strengthened my Christianity. Prayer was natural, it was needed, it was also something that I believed would help me from day to day. Consciously, any shards of doubt were surpressed.
Then at the age of sixteen, my life changed dramatically for the better. Prayer still continued and religious symbols, churches and the pope’s speeches still held a particular signifiance but they gradually started to fade in importance as the months went by. With my parents being agnostics and respectfully not caring either way which route I chose, the importance of religion was slowly becoming a downward spiral to oblivion.
My father was a religious and philosophical scholar and my mother well versed in Christianity, theology and literature. Naturally that led to often nightly discussions on subjects from Sumerian Culture through to the Renaissance and on to the broad ranges of Ethics and the Analytic Tradition. All throughout my life, these discussions became background noise for whatever else I was involved in, such as waging war on the French with my miniture toy soldiers or later trying to watch the American sitcom Frasier. When particularily bored I actually followed what they were discussing especially when they started shouting and throwing things.
It can be taken for granted that my family home was filled to the brim with books on religion, philosophy, classical fiction, Greek and Latin translated texts, encyclopedias and history. As an only child, they often provided the only sanctuary from boredom and loneliness. This fact alone is a strong reason for my eventual rejection of religion and indeed, of God.
When I had studied the evolution of religious thought, from the very beginnings to the modern day, in all their various forms and guises, including how the Bible and Koran were put together, it became impossible to rationally accept the existence or possibility of a higher power. It didn’t become a case of saying “I don’t know”, it went further to an outright denial of God, which was an additional stage down the path from my parent’s perspective.
I rememember the day I symbolically said goodbye to God. It was in the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, in Barcelona, Spain. Sitting to the side of the nave, I gave thanks for the help my belief had given me during the dark years and offered up an internal monologue of my rejection and willingness to suffer any resulting consequences. It wasn’t so much a message to a supposed being, for I had gone past that stage, but more a self directed statement of intentions, a clean break, a finiality and the closing of a chapter. Over the months when I had allowed doubt to return to my conscious mind, it had rushed in like a broken dam and drowned all perceptions of God. The structure of the library I had created in my mind through study, listening to my parents discussions, television documentaries and quiet contemplation kept my mind from collapasing in utter confusion with the loss of God and even possibly saved me from returning to an earlier form of intellectual suppression.
Whilst I cannot prove there is no God, I likewise cannot disprove the existence of a pink teapot floating around the plantet Neptune. I can however, say it is highly unlikely and that I don’t personally believe there is a teapot floating around the eighth farthest plant from the sun. I am an atheist and will always be one, unless there is some day an obvious and irrefutable goblet of proof to the contrary.
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Edward Beaman is a neoconservative writer based in the UK. He currently writes for several blogs and is posting at NeoConstant on a regular basis.
This article is the first in a series of articles that deal with Atheism from a variety of authors. Mr. Beaman was good enough to kick us off on this most interesting journey….
I look forward to more in this series. As you know I am a Buddhist but I am also an Atheist and the two are quite compatible. In Buddhism there is no “God,” we are our own saviors. Buddha was and is not a “God” either. He was a teacher and an amazing teacher at that but he didn’t walk on water.
I tend to see my switch to Atheism as a belated experience. One that should have happened earlier and probably would have if it had not been for certain circumstances in my life.
I can relate to this. I grew up Mormon but always had a very inquisitive mind and new from earlier on that it wasn’t for me but I was too young and afraid to make that break until I came home from a Mormon mission to Africa where I was forced to make a choice. So upon returning home I left and began looking to other ideas.
An important point from James above…. While logically we can say that we reject the idea of God as an all powerful being, there is more life than we can see with our own eyes, and so, should keep an open mind, indeed be very aware of our own spiritual nature, for it should not be denied simply because there is no God.
Some view the universe as a physical projection of a moral construct, the focus of which is, of course, themselves. “It’s all about me.” It’s a singularly utilitarian form of narcissism in which concessions are grudgingly conceded to obvious human limitations and perfected selves imaged in the form of flawless gods with absolute moral standards to which the fallible must aspire.
When Kurt Vonnegut asked the seemingly seminal question, “What are people for?”, he bypassed the significant possibility: People aren’t for. However, Kurt’s ‘Great Commandment’ of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent which I paraphrase, “Take care of the People; let the Gods take care of Themselves” should be rendered in lapidary permanence outside every public building.
The thread’s query “Who is God?” might with equal validity be rendered “Whose God” since all religions were the constructs of other humans.
My suggestion: Eschew ill-fitting, off-the-rack hand-me-downs. You have equal access to a fancied spirit world and, thus, are entirely qualified to create your own fetching, custom-fitted, designer religion. Otherwise, Vonnegut’s contribution to the religion business is well worth considering.
All seriousness aside, “Faith” falls by the wayside because empiricism is recognized to be the cornerstone of perceptions, including the concept of faith in the first place. We tend to say “reason is a tool” “faith is a tool”, “hope is a tool”, etc… but the truth is, reason is the toolbox — without reason, we wouldn’t have a chance of contextually devising any of the others. Without reason, the word “faith” is a meaningless noise. Monkeys don’t sit around exploring and expounding on faith because they lack the reasoning to even assess the idea.
So faith falls to reason by definition, and that does not make existence any less wondrous than it already is. I don’t perceive I’ve “cut myself out of something” by not “believing”, I know that I have opened up the only path to something– and that is knowledge. If I accept god as the end-game answer, then I definitely no longer have any hope of understanding existence because a god is necessarily beyond the understanding of a human being. “God did it” is not any more than an answer than asking an illusionist how he made a person levitate and getting the answer, “By magic!”
The entire god question is a pretty important one I’d say. For me, it’s not something to just roll over and believe because if you truly dig deep into what allows you to believe, you will find there is no clear reason to believe as you do– the differing paradigms out there do not make a single case that rises above the others. In other words, there is no reason to believe Christianity over Islam over Buddhism over Judaism over Hinduism.
People chose what their theistic beliefs are for many reasons, but rarely do they apply very hard standards to those reasons. They tend to be cultural (i.e., you grew up in a social environment that preferred one belief over another), or anecdotal (you believe in certain events that for you define a specific belief, like a Hindu may have examples of “reincarnation” whereas a Catholic will “see visions of Mary”, etc.), or there is simply a resonance in the belief system you select. And of course, I’ll even include the possibility (but not probability) that one selects a belief because they actually do hear directly from the Supreme Being.
But none of them make the absolute case of authority — hence, I select the default position of atheism until such time as there is a clear defining reason to select one over the other.
But the struggle over the spiritual questions — in fact, pondering all great mysteries — is the real thing that sets us above the animals. Perhaps in the end, sentient life is the universe’s way of trying to understand itself. But I consider that a noble struggle, and don’t diminish it in any way. I applaud it and it makes me feel good about the human condition. And hell, what is more courageous than saying, “I want to know the truth?” (wherever it leads).
Thanks, ruggedtouch, for that very in-depth response to Mr. Beaman’s article. “Perhaps in the end, sentient life is the universe’s way of trying to understand itself.”
I like that notion.