 Preacher's Kid to Atheist
An interesting article I came across:
My Story: Preacher's Kid to Atheist
- by Diana Black
My mother went into labor during Sunday morning worship services and had to leave church to give birth to me. Perhaps it was an omen.
There was no one incident that changed my life. I was so deeply indoctrinated� literally from birth�that I spent my formative years in intense denial of my atheism. My awakening was a series of minor epiphanies that took years to sink in. This is my story.
I was born and raised in Nacogdoches, Texas, the daughter of a Church of Christ preacher. My social life, outside of my family, consisted of going to church and school. For much of my childhood, my father preached at one church while we simultaneously �supported� another, so we went to church, on average, five times a week. All told, I probably spent as much time on a pew by the time I was eighteen as I spent in public school.
I was baptized at the tender age of eight. It wasn�t because I desired heaven and feared hell, or because I was aware of the requirement lest I perish in my sins. No. It was because I already understood enough of the doctrine to know this was expected of me. At that point, all the church members became �Brother� this and �Sister� that. Cool. I was in the club.
The Church of Christ of which we were members was extremely conservative. All music was a capella, because we weren�t commanded to use musical instruments in worship. Everybody sang, since we were all commanded to �sing and make melody in your heart.� Women kept silence in the church, of course (except for singing, which for some reason is considered an exception to the rule). Nobody smoked or drank, since this defiled the temple of God (i.e., your body). Nobody cussed, either (we were even forbidden to say �Darn!� since �we all know what you mean�). Every aspect of our lives, to the tiniest detail, was determined based on what the bible said about it.
Everything was by The Book (so to speak). The only way to ensure your eternal salvation was to speak where the bible speaks and be silent where the bible is silent. I grew up explaining to my peers why I didn�t celebrate Xmas (because the bible is silent on it, and because it has pagan roots). Or Halloween (definitely pagan). Or Easter (we�re commanded to commemorate the resurrection of Xst every first day of the week�not one day a year; hence, there is nothing special about this day).
Because we didn�t celebrate Xmas, we didn�t go through the Santa Claus facade. My mother once told us about a cartoon she�d seen in which one little boy said to another, �I just found out Santa Claus isn�t real. Now I�m going to check into this Jesus Christ thing.�
I suspect she was patting herself on the back for never putting herself in the position of explaining to her offspring why Santa was fake but Jesus was real. But she unwittingly planted a seed.
When I was in the third or fourth grade, I went to school briefly with a boy who told me about the Big Bang. And he clearly believed this�this nonsense. I was appalled. And fascinated. I mean, everybody knew God created the world, right?
None of the bible made sense, but I accepted what I was told. I assumed, as most children do, that grownups knew better than me. Someday it would make sense. So I didn�t bother asking questions when I read that God had hardened Pharaoh's heart, although a part of me screamed, �Not fair! Not fair!� I never asked how the Israelites could possibly keep meandering off to worship other gods when they saw such incredible miracles from The One True God as a matter of course. And the one Old Testament blanket problem that really bugged me�Why did God command the Israelites to kill other nations entirely?� I never asked.
Surely, I thought, everybody else sees these (and other) problems, too. I thought I was the only one who wasn�t understanding, so I kept my mouth shut. I didn�t want to look dumb.
In the fourth or fifth grade, I had a religious discussion with a Catholic girl named Susan. The conversation spanned several days. Each night, we went home and asked our parents questions so we could continue our discussion the next day. I remember losing interest about the point it occurred to me that we were both simply repeating what our parents had told us, but neither of us really knew what we were talking about. I remember convincing myself that this condition would change by adulthood if I just studied harder.
I spent my childhood fascinated with the American Indians and reading everything about them I could find. I asked my mother one day if all the Indians who'd been in America before Christianity arrived had gone to hell. She looked distinctly uncomfortable then said something about how God would take that into account. The answer clearly wasn't satisfying to me, because I carried that question in the back of my mind for years.
One day, in the fifth grade, a cold snap hit and graced us with about a foot of snow on a Wednesday afternoon. The town had shut down almost entirely (East Texas, remember), and my parents had made the difficult decision to stay home from �worship.� (My family usually goes to �worship� instead of �church,� just as they usually refer to the bible as �the truth.� Never underestimate the power of words�it�s difficult to argue against such utter certainty.)
Anyhow, as my mother and I sat alone at the kitchen table watching the snow fall, she sighed deeply and said, �I feel so guilty for not going to church tonight, but we just can�t take the chance of driving in this weather.� I knew what was expected of me. I agreed with her, conscious the while that I was thrilled with the unexpected break.
Then I punished myself by feeling guilty for being excited that we couldn�t go to church that night.
My clearest ongoing memory of my childhood is this: I tried to believe, I thought everyone else believed because they said they did, and I felt intense guilt because I was unable to convince myself to just have faith.
I enlisted in the Air Force at eighteen. I didn�t really have a confirmed belief or lack of belief at the time�just a subconscious realization (if that�s possible) that I needed to get away from what I knew so I could decide what I thought, believed, liked, and wanted.
The first change I made was to stop going to church. I�d always been taught that obligatory worship was meaningless (although I�d never been given a choice), so I decided I�d go back only if I decided I wanted to worship God.
I hadn�t taken parental visits into account. When they came to see me at my first duty station, I took them to church. When my mother told me that she was shocked to learn that no one knew who I was, I decided it wasn�t worth it to continue the charade. The next time they came to visit, I admitted I didn�t go to church. Daddy (bless his buttons) told Mother to drop it and leave me alone.
For several years, I didn�t know what I believed, and I didn�t give it much thought. But the longer I spent without the constant indoctrination of my childhood, the more I began to see the rationalization and convenient interpretation of my family�s beliefs. Drinking was a sin, of course, but alcohol �for medicinal purposes� was somehow okay. (For the record, �relaxation� is not considered a �medicinal purpose,� unless you have a nasty cough.) Girls were to dress as girls, unless they�re doing something which requires male attire. �Female attire� involved a skirt, but if I was prevailed upon to mow the lawn, I was required to wear pants, although I don�t remember any scriptural clause which allowed for this exception.
As the years passed, my questions grew. How could they claim that the only reason a man could leave his wife was if she cheated? So a woman couldn�t leave a man who beat her? Or molested her children? Or even made her feel small and insignificant? (According to the �scriptures,� if you follow this issue to its logical conclusion, the only way a man and woman can have a �scriptural� divorce is if (a) one of them cheats or (b) one dies. So if you�re in a bad relationship and you want to scripturally be able to remarry, you must either (a) cheat on that person or (b) kill him/her.)
Then I met my first avowed atheist. He told me how his grandmother had paid him, as a child, to read the bible and he�d complied. Far from giving him faith, it had left him full of questions she couldn�t answer: Why did God save Lot from Sodom and Gomorrah only to be raped in his sleep by his daughters? Is this behavior that�s good in God�s eyes? And suchlike.
Then I met another atheist. And another. These people all had certain things in common: they were the most honest, forthright, kind, intelligent and genuine people I�d ever met. I didn�t assume all atheists were like this; rather, I was intrigued to find that atheists�any of them�could be so principled. This ran contrary to everything I�d ever been told about �he who hath said in his heart there is no God.� These people were not fools by any stretch of the imagination.
During this period, I called myself �agnostic.� This went on for years. (In my opinion, �agnostic� means �I don�t know, I don�t care, and I don't want to think about it.�) During this time, I moved from Colorado to Virginia, where I made friends with a well-educated Pakistani Muslim. I questioned him about his beliefs �more out of curiosity than anything else�and quickly came to the point where he had no answers. Instead, he simply said, �If you know too much about your religion, you lose your faith.�
Out of respect for him, I dropped the subject. But I�ve wondered for years how he could tell me in all seriousness that�essentially�the only way he could keep his faith was to maintain a certain amount of ignorance of it.
From Virginia, I moved to North Carolina, where I returned to school to finish my degree.
In the course of events, I took �The History of Western Civilization, Part I.� I learned what a powerful, omnipresent influence religion had been throughout history, from the beginnings of life in the Fertile Crescent through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Fascinating, really, how people always had gods for whatever they needed to believe at the time. If they fought a lot of wars, they had war-gods. Farmers had goddesses of fertility, of course. No one except the Egyptians had any formulated beliefs in an afterlife for the longest time, probably because the Egyptians were agriculturally rich and isolated from marauders for centuries. They had a good, easy life and plenty of time to sit around wondering how to make that easy life continue through eternity.
I also learned about the basic tenets of Zoroastrianism, and that their god had many of the same qualities and ideas�coincidentally, I�m sure�as Jesus. (Or was it the other way around?) And my history book mentioned that the Epic of Gilgamesh had a Garden of Eden and Flood Epic parallel. How�curious, no?
And I took psychology, from which I began to understand what motivated people to believe, how superstitions take root in uneducated minds, and how desperately people will defend basic concepts they�ve accepted as true yet have no proof of.
Although it may sound unrelated, I realized toward the end of my degree program while I was in Wilmington, that the martial arts explanations I�d received and passed on for many years were wrong. The books written by the Oriental masters for Westerners were misleading (intentionally or otherwise). I spoke with many �masters,� and realized that they didn�t have the answers, either.
You might say I lost my �faith� in martial arts first. Things began to come together when a friend of mind made the flippant comment: �Masters are the priesthood of the martial arts.�
He was trying to convince me to not give up on them altogether, I think. He figured priests and martial arts masters still have something to offer, but they admittedly dabble in mysteries of which they may only have spotty knowledge.
But I took it a different way. I�d accepted everything I�d been told about the martial arts�explanations for techniques, the purpose of kata, how to practice fighting�from the day I�d begun training. I�d asked questions, but the answers were circular and unsatisfying. But I�d continued to train, believing that someday, it would all make sense.
Hey�wait a minute�Hadn�t I had that same problem with religion?
About that time, I moved to Augusta, Georgia.
Once again, I was in The Land Of Churches. It was like a trip back through time to my childhood. Only now, I looked at it through eyes undimmed by indoctrination and preconceived ideas. What I saw was hundreds of churches in Augusta alone. Some of the buildings were so huge and elaborate that they could have fed the starving inhabitants of a third-world country for a year. There is easily enough pew space, all told, in Augusta to seat the actual population of the town five times over.
This being beside the point, somewhat. When I found myself back in �God�s Country,� my interest in the true origins of religion resurfaced. The catalyst was a slender book I'd picked up for fifty cents at a library sale while visiting Colorado. It was called The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read. It was a mish-mash of essays by various writers on different aspects of religion. "The 16 Crucified Saviors," I think, was the selling point. I read all sorts of things I'd never even heard of before, much of which turned out to be myth itself, but the book left me hungry for anything out there that was true that I'd been sheltered from.
So I went out on the �net and began to read (there being a shortage of such information in bookstores in that part of the country). I spent many days online from 5am to after 7pm. I read everything I could find from doubters. I�d never read the literature of doubters �til then.
I read �The Greatest Story Ever Sold,� a site much reviled by theists and looked askance by many atheists, and while I don�t agree with all her conclusions, I must agree that the similarities in ancient myths (including the Xst one) are striking. If even one-tenth of the parallels she draws are true, the case for Xst as a myth is still a strong one.
I read almost all of �Forgeries in Xnty� and �Is It God�s Word?� by Joseph Wheless, both of which are online in their entirety. The picture of how Xnty rose to power became clearer to me.
I read sites by Jewish rabbis, touting and defending their faith. I read some of the basic beliefs of Hindus, and Muslims, then went back to the writings of Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Paine and countless lesser known questioners. And I read sites by numerous Xn apologists, and was amazed at all the nonsense they touted that I�d spent my life trying to believe.
Then one morning, I woke up and realized for the first time, clearly and undeniably, that I simply didn�t believe. This was my greatest problem with the whole of religion from beginning to end: it must be taken on faith. I am incapable of believing anything without evidence. But�here�s the catch�if you actually had evidence, faith would not be possible.
It says so right there in black and white. Hebrews 11:1: �Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.� In other words, it�s something you want but have no reason to expect. No reason. Other than hope. That�s what that verse means.
Further, it hit me in that long moment of revelation that if there really is a god, then he knows that I don�t believe. So what�s the use trying to convince myself? God knows better, right? The bible doesn�t say, �For those who come to him must try to believe that he is�.� It says, �For those who come to him must believe that he is�.� And I don�t. Without evidence, I can�t. Faith, at least for me, is impossible. (And hypocrisy is a sin, so going around telling everyone that I believed when I really didn�t was just as bad. See the dilemma?)
My first reaction was an overwhelming sense of freedom. There really wasn�t somebody looking over my shoulder. There really wasn�t anyone keeping score. It was just me. I had to answer to me in the end.
Contrary to what Xns seem to believe, I didn�t rush right out and commit mass murder. Or armed robbery. I didn�t even go next door and sleep with my neighbor�s husband. No. I realized that I had the power to do whatever I wanted with my life. I�m not sure if this really tied in with the sudden absence of any superstition whatsoever, but I�ve never felt so free and powerful in my life as I did at that moment. (And I still feel it, so there must be some connection.)
But what a SCAM! Oooo. I was angry at that moment, from a lifetime of being force-fed superstitious bullshit. I was angry at having been taught to systematically shut down my logical facilities and to �just believe.� At being taught to look down on others because their beliefs were somehow inferior. At being taught to believe in demons. At being lied to about what science really had to say about evolution. At being threatened perpetually with HELLFIRE. At being afraid to even THINK a �sinful� thought, since Jesus knew my every whim.
And in that period, I found the oasis of the Secular Web. I read an article, went to post a feedback to it, and found myself somehow in the forums. I tried to lurk but hadn�t read more than an hour when I began to argue. I took issue with every single aspect of Xnty. Every single one. The anger was coming out, and it felt GOOD.
I�m sure the administrators and regulars saw me and thought, �Another hothead.� That was over a year ago, though, and I�ve long since become an accepted member of the community. (Respected? Possibly. By some. Reviled by others. C�est la vie.)
I often think, when I see newbies there spewing invective, �Another hothead.� But I understand. It�s cleansing.
Over the last year, I have done more in-depth reading, once the initial flames of anger died out. I�ve come to reject the very notion of �god� (or �gods�) by definition. That is, the characteristics which gods are commonly said to hold are mutually exclusive with reality as we know it. Coexistence of, say, omniscience and free will are logically impossible. For this reason, I don�t claim to �not believe in a god,� but I actually contend that a god (at least by present definitions) is not possible.
That�s it. So far.
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2002-10-08, 05:59
