With Christmas falling on a Saturday this year, I’m thinking of doing a full week-long series of posts about Atheism, culminating with my annual snarky tongue-in-cheek humourous atheism-themed post on Christmas Day! 😉
It’s pretty obvious if you read this blog (or just look at some of the categories and keywords I use) that I’m an atheist. But I don’t think I’ve ever, in my nearly five years of daily blog posts, explained how I came to hold this position.
Like the vast majority of people in Canada, religion was something that was just there as an accepted part of my life growing up in the 1970’s.
My parents belonged to the United Church but weren’t active. I have a few memories of going to services occasionally when I was young and mostly looking forward to the Sunday School cause we got to colour pictures of Jesus and stuff like that. (We didn’t go very much – my parents aren’t particularly religious and I think mostly went because there was probably some peer pressure to do so in a small town when you have a young family. I’ve never really discussed this with them so that’s speculation on my part.)
At the time, the stories we heard and activities we did in Sunday School seemed a bit like the comic books I enjoyed reading – pretty cool but definitely not real. Even at that young age, I don’t think you have to consider very deeply to start having some questions.
I remember thinking things like “Well, if Adam and Eve were the first two people on earth and they had two boys – how did society go on from there?” But I was 5-6 years old – my parents, my relatives, many people I knew from around town including teachers and so on seemed to not worry about it so why should I? And why risk God knows what punishment (literally!) by raising this type of question?
The next big leap happened probably when I was maybe around 10 years old. My best friend, Shaun, was a bit more open in his questioning of authority (okay, a lot more!) and being required by his parents to go to Catholic Church for catechism every Thursday after school only made him worse.
Personally, I loved catechism because the Catholic Church was a block from my house which meant I got to walk home with a bunch of my friends once a week – often discussing many of these questions we had about the Bible and what we were hearing in our respective churches or from our families or whatever.
Shaun took it a step further. He used to throw those same types of questions at the poor volunteer church members leading the catechism who would try to answer him, get caught up in mis-statements, kick him out of the class, forgive him and let him back in on a regular basis. (He’s a pretty unique guy – a mutual friend (who happens to be a very well-read and thoughtful member of the Anglican church and I only mention that because I’ve had numerous “God v. No God” talks with her as well) got to know Shaun when we were in our 20’s and once said “Knowing Shaun must be like knowing some super-smart renaissance figure like Da Vinci or something.”
A bit of hyperbole but perhaps as much as anyone I’ve ever known, Shaun was somebody who just loved to dissect ideas, argue and question – a trait that obviously started very young with him.)
Anyhow, the big turning point in my belief (or lack thereof) came during a conversation with Shaun when were were around 10 or so. We were both big into Greek and Roman mythology, movies like Clash of Titans were popular, and I still remember him saying to me, “The Ancient Greeks worshiped Zeus, right? Well, eventually somebody climbed Mount Olympus and realised there was nothing there. So the Christians just moved the mountain higher and said it’s in the sky. But the astronauts proved that’s not true either. So they just keep moving it further and further or saying it’s invisible or whatever.”
Feels like pretty heady stuff or a young kid. But hearing that argument, expressed like that, something just clicked for me. (It would be most clearly captured in a quote I have on my Facebook profile to this day: “When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”)
I wasn’t an insta-atheist and actually, probably didn’t even realise there was a “does not believe” check box at that point in my life. I wasn’t going to church regularly but I do remember the prayer I used to say every night before I went to bed (admittedly in large part because I was scared of the dark as anything – which is sort of a fitting explanation for why religion exists in the first place when you think about it).
I’m not sure what triggered it (hopefully not mom and dad overhearing my nightly prayer) but sometime, probably around grade 8 or 9, my parents decided to start going back to church. I was pretty excited because my colouring skills had greatly improved since I was a kid!
But it turns out Sunday School had basically become a Bible Study group for older kids and after a couple weeks of flipping around a copy of the Bible trying to find the sections they were studying and then being frustrated with what I read when I found it, I told my parents I wasn’t going back.
As I got older, I came to think of myself as an agnostic. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a “God” or “Heaven”, at least in the traditional way that they are usually portrayed – white man with a beard living some place in the clouds with a bunch of angels blowing horns. Although it didn’t consume my life, I continued to read books, study and discuss the topic of religion.
Many science fiction works looked at the nature of God and religion and Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man” was particularly impactful in explaining (in a fictional tale) how some of the mythologies around Christ may have come about and ultimately, how impossible it is to know the truth of something that happened 2000 years ago – at least without some huge leaps of faith.
I guess the final turning point that changed me from thinking of myself as an agnostic to admitting to myself that I was an atheist and being willing to tell people this without hedging was just a few years ago when I was reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins.
Somewhere in the book, he made the argument that people who are 99% sure of something shouldn’t call themselves agnostics – for all intents and purposes, they’re atheists. He points out that he’s never actually seen gravity and never will. But he’s seen enough evidence that he knows it’s a fact. The same thing applies with all of the evidence that there isn’t a God as creator of the universe. He points out that, yes, you may still have doubts and not know the answers to every single question there is. But science will have given you a solid foundation for understanding what we do know PLUS the added benefit that part of the scientific method is admitting you don’t know something is to be celebrated, not feared. (I may be paraphrasing liberally but that was the gist of his argument.)
So, that’s a very Cliff’s Note version of how I became an atheist. I’m skipping over lots. For example, I freely admit that I’ve never read the Bible from cover-to-cover finding what I did try to read alternately boring and/or inscrutable and/or frightening
and/or frustrating).
But like many atheists who tend to have a natural curiosity about many things including not just Christianity but all religions, I’ve studied the Bible and its major stories enough (probably more than most Christians have) to know that much of it sounds like exactly what it is – mythology – just like my good friend Shaun pointed out to me over thirty years ago!
