Leaving the Fold: Part 4

Debating the existence of God

I enjoy debating with people. I love to have conversations with my friends where we disagree, sometimes vehemently. But one thing I don’t like to debate is the existence of God.

I have no problem giving the reaons I don’t believe in God; the problem of evil, the lack of any evidence for or against such a creature, the fact that description of God and Gods are pretty clearly just human traits taken to a superlative extreme, etc. I have no problem explaining to myself and other people why I don’t believe in God.

The issue is that debating is inherently a persuasive form of communication. I can try to convince someone that LGBT people shouldn’t be oppressed. I can argue that the homeschool system in America desperately needs to be overhauled. I can even argue that universal healthcare doesn’t actually threaten one’s freedom. And I could convince someone of all those arguments. But I will never, ever, convince someone that God doesn’t exist.

The primary reason I won’t ever convince someone is that most people don’t believe in God because they’ve thought through all the logic of whether a deity exists or not. Most people believe in God because that’s what they’ve been taught. Trying to argue logically against something people have been taught literally from the cradle rarely works (for another example, see how hard it is to eliminate racism). Even I myself wasn’t simply convinced by someone else that God didn’t exist – I had to get there myself by looking at the evidence for myself.

Secondly, belief in God is related strongly to people’s core identity about themselves. It’s not just something that can be moved around easily. For example, I naturally have blonde hair. But having blond hair isn’t necessarily a core part of my identity, and I have no problem dying my hair a variety of color; and in fact, I do dye my hair, and continue to do so. I’m also right-handed, and if I lost my right hand, adjusting to being left-handed would be painful and frustrating. Right-handedness is a core part of who I am. The analogy isn’t exact, but imagine what it would take to convince you via an argument that you should cut off your right hand.

Finally, the fact of the matter is that the evidence for there being a god, and the evidence for there not being a god, are both incredibly circumstantial. In some cases, atheists and theists are using the exact same evidence.

So in general, I don’t like to debate the existence of God. Everyone gets worked up, nothing is accomplished, and for the most part, I just don’t do it. I’d much rather have conversations about how we treat each other than about the possibility that some sort of God exists.

Leaving the Fold: Part 3

Moral Atheism

As a child and a teenager, I was taught that non-Christians were immoral by default, because morals could only come from the Bible itself, and if you didn’t believe the entire Bible, you had no basis for any sort of moral code. So the choices were being a Christian exactly like my family/church/school, or being a hedonist/nihilist.

This turned out to be really frustrating for me. I didn’t want to be immoral. I also didn’t want to be a nihilist. Both of those options seemed to be just terrible. And while I did know, according to the church, I was being immoral by accepting LGBT people, that didn’t feel like I was being immoral. Quite the opposite, in fact; it felt much more moral than rejecting them. So with a moral quandary and new-found atheism/agnosticism, I was feeling a bit adrift.

So what’s a budding atheist to do? Well, I went to school. I tried to take classes that might give me a different view on what constitutes morals, and why we do what we do. And eventually, I had (part of) an answer.

Christians will tell you that morals come God. Depending on their exact background, they’ll put it differently, though. Some might say morals are from the Bible. Some might say God puts morals in us directly. Regardless, the idea is that religion is responsible for morals.

First of all, if God puts morals directly into humans, then one would expect all religions to have the same morals, or at least mostly the same morals. But that’s not what you see. There is some overlap: most religions bar some sort of murder, and most religions bar incest. But otherwise, religions run the gamut: The community is the most important, no, the individual is the most important. Doing good is best, no, not doing evil is best. Even murder and incest aren’t completely the same: some religions call it totally A-ok to kill people as long as their not in your group. And incest taboos range from very flexible to completely inflexible. With such a wide range across world religions, clearly God hasn’t placed morals within us.

Secondly, what about morals coming from the Bible? This again fails, because of all the blatantly immoral things that are condoned and sanctioned not only implicitly by the author of the text, but in-text by God as well. For example, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son “as a test”. What a terrible, terrible test. God tells the Israelites on more than one occasion to murder every man, woman, child, and animal in a given nation-state; in other words, God commands genocide. Again, no reasonable argument can be made supporting genocide*.

What are we left with? Clearly God doesn’t place morals inside us, and just as clearly morals don’t come from the Bible. So where do they come from? That’s actually a pretty complex question, and really has two parts: The first part is where do morals come from in general, and the second is why do we have the morals that we do?

I can’t answer those questions with a huge degree of certainty. For that matter, I don’t think that anyone can answer it with real certainty. I can say, I have the morals I do because they seem be a pretty fair way to deal with other people.

 

My classes, as well as my interactions with people, have helped me to crystallize my morals into a fairly self-consistent framework. I’m not perfect, and I screw up and hurt people, but I do try. So what is the framework I’ve come to?

In general, my morals can be boiled down to two statements:

1. Try not to cause harm**.

2. Seek informed consent for anything you do to anyone else.

That’s it. Get consent, try not to hurt people. Those two things will get you a long way, and there’s no invisible man waiting to smite you if you trip up.

 

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*I am aware of the theological argument that the rules for God are different by virtue of him being God; I just don’t consider it a reasonable argument.

**Yes, yes, don’t try, just do. It’s try here because sometimes, there is no way to avoid hurting someone. Not only that, sometimes, it’s out of my control entirely. That’s why it’s not a blanket “do no harm, ever”.

 

Leaving the fold: Part 2

Confessions

One of the consequences of being taught that everyone in the world hates you is you start believing that everyone hates you (crazy,right?). Because that was my starting place for interactions with people, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would treat people as deserving of unending torture, which understandably turned them off from wanting to be around me. Then I would claim I was being persocuted because no one wanted to spend time with the bigoted Christian kid.

The group of people I believe I hurt the most were the LGBT people I came into contact with. I actually told people, to their faces, that they were going to be tortured forever because of who they loved. Even worse, I was self-righteous about it, and told myself I was being “loving”. Bullshit. I was being the very worst sort of bigot.

That’s not to say I didn’t hurt other people, too. I was an equal opportunity bigot. I even told other Christians they should be concerned about their salvation because they didn’t believe the same things as me.

When I realized I no longer believed in God, I slowly started to examine things I’d taken for granted. It was slow because I’d been steeped in patriarchy and Christianity for so long, I actually could not see some of the places I was being awful. It took an awful shock to actually be able to see my own blind spots.

When I started college at UCCS, I was employed by the Scribe, the school newspaper. At this point I was calling myself an agnostic leaning toward atheism. I was still super naive. I met the managing editor of the Scribe, a wonderful woman named Cat. In one of our first conversations, it came up in passing she had a female partner. I was floored. I had never even considered the possibility I might work for an LGBT person. It was a huge relief when I realized it didn’t have to be an issue for me any more! It was like a great weight had been taken off my shoulders – there was absolutely no reason why I had to be freaked out or nervous when dealing with someone who was in a same-sex relationship. In fact, it actually made my interactions with everyone easier when I didn’t always have to think about that.

I had a choice once I discovered how many blind spots I really had. I could either wallow in guilt, or I could do something about it. I decided that wallowing in guilt was counter-productive, so I started to try to make up for my previous awfulness. In a lot of ways, I believe I have; however, I don’t believe I’ll ever completely make up for being so awful to so many people.

Today, I’m an LGBT Ally, a feminist, and what the Right sneeringly calls a “Social Justice Warrior”. I can’t say I agree with all LGBT allies, or all feminists, or all SJWs. But I do make the effort to listen to viewpoints different than mine, and respect those decisions and stances others take. My atheism has made me a better person.

 

Leaving the fold:Part 1

“I’m an atheist.” Even now, after being an atheist for several years, those words are still difficult to say. Everything I was taught was that atheists were evil. Atheists hated God, hated Christians, and were knowingly following the devil. Satan was their God!

“I’m an atheist.” In a lot of ways, I was very, very lucky. I have friends who grew up in a similar circle as I did, and were subjected to horrific abuse. The only difference between me and them was my mother, who managed to avoid caving to the “beatings will continue until morale improves” crowd. And make no mistake, that school of thought was there, all around me. Books I was given at my private Christian school espoused the same teachings as the Gothards, Duggars, and Jeubs. I am convinced that people that I went to high school with were given regular beatings. I myself was spanked growing up, though I was lucky enough to come through it without being abused. I know others were not so lucky. I was steeped in patriarchy. I was even told by one person, after my stepfather died, “You’re the man of the house now, you have to take care of your mother.” I was 10. And everyone knows that 10-year-old boys pre-empt mothers when it comes to “ruling the house.”

And even though I was spanked, and at this point, I disagree with the entire philosophy behind spanking, I don’t feel I was abused. I was never isolated or put down. I was never beaten until I stopped crying. In short, I was very, very lucky, because I could have easily been another horror story from inside evangelical Christianity.

“I’m an atheist.” The first cracks in my Christianity started to appear when I was 16. I’d gotten my first job at the Wendy’s in Woodland Park, which was super exciting. Since I did not have a car, I got a ride into town with my stepfather, three hours before my shift started. Fortunately, there was a little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in the same shopping center as the Wendy’s, so I waited there to begin my shift.

My mind was blown from the people I met there. All my life, I had been told that non-Christians hated Christians, that they would shun me, that they would try to get me to turn to the devil. None of it was true – in fact, the people I met at the coffee shop treated me way better than I’d ever been treated by my Christian friends. I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, and for them to reveal they’d been lying the whole time, but they never did. And not one of them ever judged me for not being exactly like them. In contrast, I’d been judged by every Christian I’d ever met for one thing or another: liking sci-fi, liking fantasy, even being better at memorizing verses. These atheists, pagans, Buddhists and others never said any negative thing about or to me, even though they knew I believed they were going to hell and told them so. In other words, they payed my hatefulness with kindness. They acted more like Jesus than any of my other Christian friends.

“I’m an atheist.” After I moved out on my own, I stayed with the Christian faith. I even attended and graduated from a local Bible school (calling it a college would be vastly overstating).But the cracks were starting to deepen, and I desperately wanted my doubts to cease. So I papered over the cracks by doubling down on all the things I knew to be true: gay people were going to hell, everyone hated Christians, and I was a member of a persocuted minority. I turned into the very worst sort of Christian: I spewed hatefulness under the guise of “loving people.” I was miserable, and I hurt a lot of people.

“I am an atheist.” Despite the long build-up to becoming an atheist, there was not really one huge moment when I realized I was an atheist. I just eventually realized I hadn’t believe in God for quite a while. It was very anti-climactic. What wasn’t climactic was when I started to realize how much my religious upbringing had skewed my ethics and morals. Without “approved by God” and “Not approved by God” boxes, I had no idea how someone came up with a moral code. Of course, that was only because I’d been taught that those boxes were the only way to divide actions. Eventually I learned how to have an ethical framework and stick to it because it works, rather than because I’ll be struck down by a psychopath in the sky.

“I am an atheist.”

Part 2 —>

The privilege of Christianity

Let’s talk about privilege. I’m a pretty privileged person – I’m a cis-gendered, straight, white male. I’m a college student, and I’m married. Those all give me a pretty good amount of privilege – I don’t have to think about things that a lot of people have to deal with on a daily basis.
Privilege, though, is not an all-or-nothing idea – one can be privileged in some ways, but not-privileged in others. (Some people would say “oppressed” as the opposite of privileged, but I dislike that. It feels like appropriation to me.) The other thing about privilege is that it’s often invisible unless you are experiencing it.

All of that being said, there is one way in which I am not privileged. I am not a Christian. Even more specifically, I am an atheist. Privilege means that with that statement, many people reading this have some preconcieved notions about who I am. There’s a notion that I’m an immoral person. There’s a notion that I hate God. There’s a notion that I hate Christians. There’s a notion that I’m a snob. There’s a notion that I’m a materialist. There’s a notion that I must be a nihilist.

Clearly, this is an incomplete list. I’m not going to bother with replying to most of these in this post. But there is an aspect to being an atheist that often gets overlooked – the workplace. All you hear from the Christian Right is that Christians are being persocuted in the workplace, and most are just a breath away from being fired for being Christian. However, I have been able to sit in my desk, surrounded by my co-workers, who are having a conversation about theology. Not only that, I have co-workers who have been given, essentially, a pass on a “no cell phones” rule – because they were reading their Bible, and implied that they would make a fuss if this exception wasn’t approved.

I don’t have a problem with people being given accomodations for their religion. I do think it should be handled more like smoking – if a smoker wants to have a smoke, they have to do it while they are on there normally scheduled breaks – smokers don’t get extra breaks. In the same way, just because you’re reading the Bible on your phone instead of, say, playing Angry Birds, doesn’t mean you get a pass on the “no cell phones” rule – you have to read your phone Bible at the same time as I get to check my email on my phone – when I’m on my break.

But it goes even further than that. If I had my way, I would go to the people that matter, and complain. Hell, I would be fine with just telling that person that they are getting an undue privilege for no other reason than they are religious. But here’s the thing – those other co-workers I mentioned? I still have to work with these people. And if I do try and engage with them as an atheist (as I have tried in the past) I am almost shouted down. Seriously. And the people shouting me down are ostensibly my superiors. All of which adds up. I have been silenced, while the Christian majority gets favored.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not trying to say that I want to avoid contact with disagreements. I don’t – anyone who has met me knows that I love to debate and argue about any topic under the sun. But when it is one person being verbally attacked and harrassed for what they (don’t) believe, that crosses the line.

That’s what being an atheist means. That’s what marginalization means. That’s why privilege matters, and why it’s invisible.