I've tried to put this into words a couple or three times before, always talking about why I'm an Atheist, and never with any great deal of success. Partly that's because the socio-political aspects are so often stated by so many people (most of them much better writers than me, to boot) that it's hard to really say anything new, but also partly, I think, because I never became an atheist. Apart from a brief period in my early teens of wondering vaguely, and I have to say rather casually, whether there might be some form of deist 'first-cause' sort of god, I've been an atheist all my life. It's kinda hard to do a deconversion story without the deconversion! The question for me is, rather, how did I become an Atheist with a capital 'A'? You know, strident, shrill; a nasty horrible persecutor of Christians and all that jazz. The answer—or this attempt at it—is likely to be a bit rambling, I'm afraid.
Let's start with Santa. Seems reasonable for the time of year.
I can't actually recall believing in Santa. As far back as I remember, he seemed like a shared joke between my parents and I. Their pretence seemed knowingly transparent, and I went along with it as part of what I assumed was the joke. I've no idea if they realised that's the way I saw it, but it's how it looked from my perspective.
I also don't remember ever not being able to read, and as with most kids, 'reading,' to me, meant 'stories.' Fiction, and lots of it.
Thirdly, to round off what we might call my early scepticism, I also remember being exposed to Bible stories for the first time (in Caen primary school, Braunton, Devon, if you're interested). It's not that I ever, to my recollection, thought they were silly or illogical as stories. I just didn't think they were supposed to be real. I'd already come across the idea of fables, via Æsop (read to me by my mum I should imagine. I doubt I was advanced enough to be reading them for myself), and knew them to be basically fiction. Anyway, the Biblical tales were mostly presented as fables, and though it was explained to us that such tales had morals, the fiction side of things was much more weighted in my mind than moralising. They really didn'tdo much for me, though Jonah and the whale was diverting for a while, until the frankly boring whale inexplicably failed to converse with Jonah. Æsop would've made it much more interesting!
Anyway—before this turns into misty-eyed nostalgia—I quite simply thought of the Bible stories as just the same kind of in-joke between teachers and kids that Santa was between my parents and I. After all, miracles and magic and all that stuff, was stories! No one would actually believe them, surely. And to be frank, that's how it still seems to me, to this day. I really don't understand at a gut level (intellectually, yes: 'give me the child until he is seven,' and all that, but not at a gut level) how an even slightly educated adult can possibly see all that talk of invisible all-powerful beings, their angel attendants and so forth as anything but 'made-up stuff.' But then, I can't in all honesty claim to have seen through it myself, given that my earliest memories of it are of not even realising it was meant to be real. You could say I was too simplistically-minded to be gullible.
Sometime between then and the age of about nine, it must have occurred to me that some people actually believed the tales, because I can remember being quite shocked at my grandfather's hurt expression when I mentioned him surely not believing in 'God and all that.' Not that my grandparents were that religious, mind—they weren't regular churchgoers, even. What shocked me was that I had formed an assumption (I think it was a case of what writers often call 'the arrogance of youth') that only, erm… people of lesser intelligence, shall we say, would believe such things. And believer or not, Granddad was most certainly not of lesser intelligence. Ruminations on which fact, I suppose, were what led to my brief half-hearted flirtation with deism, a few years later. Fortunately, I also discovered other, much more interesting kinds of flirtation, and the semi-mystical bullshit really didn't seem to matter anymore.
Fast-forward past girls, beer, music, beer, books, beer and bikes, (I like beer, okay?) to about three years ago. Well, not quite straight past. I formed a few vague opinions, over those years, about religion in politics, the unfairness of tax-breaks for churches and so forth, but hadn't really connected them all together. And anyway, religion mostly seemed irrelevant to modern life. It was a dying institution that few people, I thought, really took seriously or paid much attention to. American readers may be looking goggle-eyed at that last sentence, but I can assure you that that's the way it actually appeared in this country for most of my life. And apart from as regards the middle-eastern theocracies and near-theocracies and the Catholic scandals, it still does, to most people—with the exception of right-wing tabloid scare-stories about brown people Muslims. Even if they notice the religion, it's seen as secondary to the politics, not—as seems to be becoming more and more common—as a major cause of the policies. That's changing, though, even if most folks haven't consciously noticed yet. Even many ostensibly anti-U.N. American right-wing religious lobbying bodies are going global, and the smaller but just as crazy fringe over here is following suit, and also copying the more aggressive style of their American cousins. But I seem to have jumped to reasons for, rather than the growth of, my Atheism…
Which, apart from those few gradually-formed half thought-out opinions, was actually quite sudden. A 'road to Damascus' moment I could say. (I've always thought casting Dorothy Lamour as Saul/Paul was the bravest decision in cinematic history.)
One night I was sat at the computer, googling trivia for a quiz I was writing. Faced with a lack of ideas and an empty Google search-box, I glanced around the room for inspiration, and my eyes fell upon an X-Files DVD. That'll do, I thought, and I searched for some info on David Duchovny. (I wonder what I'd be doing now if I'd googled Gillian Anderson…) Well it turns out a friend of his is an apostate from the church of Scientology, which led me to a video of an interview with the man in question (I don't remember his name) talking about his experiences with the church. I got interested (I've always felt a little irrationally ashamed that an author of 'my' genre should have started that abomination), and dug into Google a little deeper, which led to me reading blogs, news stories and comments boards that inevitably also dealt with other aspects of woo and the crazier edges of religion in general. Whereupon it dawned on me, over a few hours, just how much fundamentalist Christianity is taking hold of the U.S. political arena in particular, but also making inroads, as I said earlier, into many other supposedly post-Christian countries.
I find it hard to describe how all that felt. Talk about a paradigm shift! It was almost as if I'd stepped into some badly-written alternative-universe novel, where the Enlightenment never happened but they somehow still managed to build modern technology. Fourteenth century opinions spewed, often semi-literately, onto a twenty-first century internet message board. I have a hard enough time, as I said, truly understanding the beliefs of a mild religionist, in virgin births, gods, and so on. The thought that any more than a few uneducated inhabitants of the extreme fringes of society, let alone politicians on the national stage, could actually believe in a literal 6,000-year-old earth, or a talking snake (I've grown out of Æsop) or Noah's flood, or… well, you get the idea—it still knocks me for six. I know they do; for I've talked to people who eventually managed to escape into realism. Deep down, though, there's a part of me that whispers, when I read or hear the speech of Young Earth Creationists and the like, "They're lying. No one could be that crazy. I don't know why they are, but they have to be lying." It's 2012, for Pete's sake! We're supposed to be flying round in bloody air-cars and wearing awful tin-foil coveralls whilst listening to synthesised music with a naff 70s disco-rhythm, not constantly rehashing the trial of Giordano Bruno. But back to my Damascene revalation…
I spent the entirety of the following weekend glued to the computer, bookmarking more blogposts, videos and news-stories than I could possibly read in a lifetime, skimming this, reading that in full; and all in a kind of horrified fascination, along with thoughts of 'how could I have not known this?' And I'm still there. Still staring in shock and incredulity at what still appear to be medieval peasants trying to force medieval religious views into the modern political arena. The scary thing is that they're managing; and in a world of nuclear weapons, anthropogenic global warming, overpopulation and depleting resources, when I say 'scary,' I really do mean it's the stuff of nightmares.
I just wish I could wake up.
—Daz
Daz – the reason why you are an atheist is because the devil controls you. You have been taken captive by him at his will to do his will.
Daz
I know about the Father Christmas bit: I don’t recall ever taking his existence seriously. I used to see pre-wrapped presents on top of my parents’ wardrobes and elsewhere, that made it obvious that they had bought them.
For me, what made the whole religion thing impossible to believe was an early interest in Ancient Egypt. My mum bright a book about Abu Simbel home from the library one day, I looked through the pictures and was hooked. Over the next three years, I read everything in the children’s library about Ancient Egypt and went on to go through the adult library. By the time I was 11, I had read everything I could get my hands on.
During this time, we had RI (‘religious instruction’) at school, which consisted mostly of learning about the Patriarchs and drawing such edifying scenes as Abraham’s willingness to murder his only son. The thing is, Egypt used to get mentioned quite a lot in RI. We had Abraham journeying to Egypt, Moses being raised as an Egyptian prince and so on. And yet, in my reading around the subject of Ancient Egypt, none of these people ever seemed to be mentioned.
It occurred to me that there was a mis-match between what the Bible’s stories were claiming and what the evidence of the Egyptian monuments and texts showed us. In other words, the Bible stories were just that: fiction.
During my teens, I studied Roman history as part of learning Latin. I began to realise that the problems of the stories of the Old Testament were matched in the new: the authors of the gospels made claims that didn’t match what could be gleaned from ancient historians. I then decided I’d read the gospels in Greek (I didn’t do very well: Latin was enough of a struggle!). Then I moved on to the New English Bible version, which was so much easier. It rapidly became clear to me that the gospels are inconsistent, plagiarise each other where they do agree and do not past the reliability tests that we impose on ancient historians. In other words, they aren’t history.
That’s where my whole atheism came from: an understanding that the founding texts of the consensus religion of the place where I grew up were unreliable, clearly human productions and told lies. It was only a small step from there to the realisation that if the Church of England’s favourite holy book is nothing more than a collection of just-so stories with no grounding in historical reality, then so are those of other religions. I’d never had any problem with regarding the gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Roman as fictions devised by pre-scientific people to explain the world around them; by the time is was about 14, I realised that Christianity (and Judaism, Islam etc.) all stood on the same type of foundation.
So, for me, atheism is a natural consequence of historical thinking.
Keith
Bob, I have no idea why I feel this repeated urge to try to help you engage your fellow human beings, but I do. It’s like you’re a lost puppy I found in the gutter—I want to dry you off, feed you and teach you not to widdle on the carpet. A fruitless exercise, I’m sure, but armed with the stout rolled-up newspaper of Reason, I shall do my best.
Just the other day, Bob, you assured us all that you do indeed try to engage people. I hate to break this to you, but your idea of ‘engagement’ is sadly lacking. You’re not engaging, you’re expounding.
Here’s a hint that might help you: your frequent use of rubber-stamp assertions such as ‘the devil controls you,’ may convince the very occasional person in the street when you’re preaching. They aren’t, however, going to phase anyone who already has a strongly defined position and has seen them many many times before. All you’re doing is making yourself look inane. If that’s your intention, go right ahead and we’ll just ignore your comments, just as we do with on-page advertising or any other vaguely annoying but always present aspects of cyber-life.
If you actually want to have a discussion, you might want to drop the assertions of such-and-such Bible verse says this, or the devil makes us do that. You know we don’t put any stock in them, so you have to know that you’re not going to convince us by making assertions based on them. In short, try actually engaging. One assumes that you can actually speak, for a few sentences at least, without a Bible verse popping out…
Hello Keith, and thank you for the great contribution.
Have you read any of Bart D. Ehrman’s work? He’s pretty much made a career of showing how much of the NT is basically forged.
I have to say I’m impressed. I dropped out of Latin after a single year, having absolutely no facility with languages at all. As a consequence, I’m always somewhat in awe of people like yourself, who tackle more than one.
Strangely, I can hardly remember a thing about RE lessons, except that they were entirely given over to revision for other subjects, in the months before our CSE and O Level exams. We must have been taught something, but Gawd knows what.
It’s so interesting, the parallels/contrasts of your growing up there, and me growing up in the “Bible Belt” of America.
If there was a post-Christian America, it certainly wasn’t here. My grandmother believed so hard that she sat through service twice a week in the back row with the other “shamefuls” after being ex-communicated for divorcing an abusive husband.
When I mentioned some pre-teen doubt to my father (an actual genius!), I got a haranguing. I can still hear his venom filled voice, going on about serving evil. My sister, just as intelligent as I am, is a firm believer, my brother a deacon of his church for some time.
I’ve always been surrounded by those people who you couldn’t conceive even existed prior to the Damascus moment.
And for what it’s worth, I am sorry that our strange religious crazy has somehow gone global. It’s truly terrifying.
Well it’s reciprocal; we sent you the seedling-puritans in the first place…
I always knew there were a few extremists in the Bible Belt. I just never realised how many, or how much it had spread to other parts. Or quite how extreme, to be honest. The U.S. we see is virtually all filtered through Hollywood. I think maybe a lot of people, even the mildly religious, are going to be shocked when American politicians and their religious statements start making headline news as the elections get closer. Hope so; it might make ‘em think twice about Cameron’s ‘Christian country’ bullshit.
Is this a fleeting visit, or have you got the computer fixed?
The only book of Ehrman’s I’ve read is the one about the da Vinci Code (sorry, I can’t remember the title). But he does seem to be a generally well informed scholar.
Have you read Ellegard’s “Jesus 100 years before Christ”? I came across it in a second hand bookshop. He’s not a theologian but a (Finnish?) professor of English who has taken the various books of the New Testament as literary works and analysed them according to content, language, theological outlook and so on. He makes a very convincing case for a Jesus who may have been the Essene Teacher of Righteousness (or at least a close associate), who was executed in the early first century BC. The Jesus of the gospels is then a fictional character, made up in the early second century from clues in the writings of Ignatius; some of his datings of Christian writings are unusual (Revelation, for instance, he thinks is a mid first-century Jewish apocalyptic work with Christian additions), but he presents a strong case. Definitely worth reading (I’ve re-read it three times and still can’t remember enough to make a decent summary of his argument).
Something I do remember is that we had Religious Instruction before age 11, then it was Religious Education at Grammar School. RE involved a lot more that drawing pretty (or not so pretty) pictures of murderous patriarchs: we discussed other religions, morality, controversies such as abortion. Much more interesting: a kind of cross between a comparative religion class and an ethics and philosophy class.
Sorry about the late reply. Been a tad busy, what with one thing and another.
I’ve only read two of Ehrman’s; Forged, and Misquoting Jesus. My knowledge of the Bible is fairly limited, so I can’t speak too much to his accuracy, but he certainly builds his case well, and explains the reasoning.
A slightly different approach, if you can find a copy, is Isaac Asimov’s guide to the Bible. He concentrates on the bits that have at least some historicity, with sources external to the Judean stories. (He did a book on Shakespeare, too, that I’d love to get my hands on.) Some of it’s probably outdated by now, as archaeology has changed ideas, but he’s a good writer, and entertaining.
I haven’t read the Ellegard book, but it sounds fascinating, thanks.
Ah, a grammar-school boy! I did two years in one, before a house move took us to an area that had phased them out.
Hey Daz
The loss is yours if you don’t get saved, not mine.
[...] Daz Share this: Posted in Atheism, Testimonial « Gore Vidal…a great one gone You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. [...]