Disillusionment was not my reason for embracing atheism. I realise that what I’ve written has focussed mostly on disappointments and feelings. I didn’t turn my back on Christianity for those reasons though. At least not wholly. And I didn’t embrace atheism because of a disillusionment with theism or the spiritual paths I’d explored while and after leaving Christianity.
The main impetus for my atheism was rationality. Simply, I thought about it. I’m not going to talk about it at length though. People have written enough articles and books on the rational justification for saying atheism is true. Some are very good. Some are dreadful. People have also written articles and books on the rational justification for saying theism is true. Again, they’re a mix of very good and dreadful.
My reasons are my own and don’t particularly matter. All that’s needed is to know that through rational consideration I embraced atheism. Spoiler alert – in terms of classical theism I remain an atheist. I do not believe in a powerful or all-powerful supernatural being who created the world and universe, who sustains it, and who from time to time intervenes in it so things happen against the physical laws within that world and universe. I do not believe in an afterlife either must as most cognitive neuroscientists don’t. That’s not a belief I’d die for though and I confess I’d be very pleased indeed to die physically and find that my Self still lived in some manner. Nor do I believe the view of deism that the supernatural creator made everything and then went away either to watch the universal story unfold or to do something else, perhaps finish knitting a scarf of infinite length. Held up to the ideas of theism, let alone particular versions of it, I am an atheist.
For a while I wasn’t merely atheist. I was anti-theist. It’s a natural thing to be when dealing with anger and grief of everything that’s happened as a theist believing in a God who I now see as a non-existent monster. Anger is understandable. Anger is often valid. It should never be an end point. Perpetual anger turns life to death, compassion to wounding. It becomes bitterness and at least as hurtful a prison as the worst that theism offers in fundamentalist communities.
I met many Christians on my way out of that faith, many who saw that there was far more to God and life than could be held in a creed or that was dreamed of by a Calvin or Charles Wesley or Charles Spurgeon or even by the people who may have known Jesus personally and the people who wrote the stories and letters that later became collected as the New Testament. If I hadn’t met and been challenged by these people I confess it’s likely I’d still be angry, still be throwing verbal punches, still completely closed off and defensive. I’d be in danger of growing into a bitter old woman, cackling with evil glee as she thinks of how deranged religious people are.
No more Christianity. No more religious life. No more seeking something beyond this one existence bound to our beautiful world. My meaning would be here. Now. One life lived as fully as mental and physical health and financial resources would allow. Mental health has meant limitations. Right now physical health means more limitations than I’d like and I’ll never be rich enough for extravagant and expensive dreams. Life though is life. What is most important is to be and in that being to learn to be fully human. In limitations there is still the possibility of the full potential of humanity. There is still wonder, excitement, beauty. There is the extraordinariness of the ordinary, of the sight last night of the almost full moon above me and the brightness of Jupiter just above it in the sky, or of the way the light changes as I look out of my window right now and watch the light change in the leaves and branches on this breezy morning, more revelatory if we allow it than any word or any finding of science.
The religious challenge me and ask what meaning life can have without God? My granddad would have responded by asking why they thought life had to have any objective meaning at all. He didn’t believe in that meaning yet lived more fully than most people. I’d ask why anyone needs more meaning than just living. Our purpose is to live and one day we’ll be gone. Individually gone. The full humanity gone too one day. If we overcome climate change our species will still die. If the current threatening noises by various governments to nuke other nations became not Armageddon but a global determination to disarm our species will still die. One day the sun will engulf our world and even if our species has journeyed to other stars the heat death of the universe is inevitable. Whatever we do, all will be lost. So either we theorise an afterlife and find meaning there or we despair or we find meaning here, now, in the present moment. The religious are right. That is a challenge. If it wasn’t, existentialists wouldn’t have spent so much time discussing it on the bank of the Seine and all the atheist philosophers would either not have bothered with philosophy or have written solely about how to live a meaningless life without deciding to quit its pointlessness early.
Yet the atheists have answers. Life is purpose in itself. Discovery, loving exuberantly, experiencing, dreaming, sharing, creating. That’s enough isn’t it? Knowing that we are billions of atoms each comprised of smaller particles and yet our solar system is one of billions in a galaxy that’s one of billions of galaxies. Isn’t that enough? Our very human sense of awe and transcendence watching waterfalls, rainbows, the varieties of life, chemical reactions, how tiny insects form communities, or even watching familiar trees on a breezy day. Isn’t that enough? To find excitement in our capacity for creativity as we hear poetry, read novels and cartoons, as we watch an almost limitless variety of drama and comedy. Isn’t that enough? To know laughter and tears, to experience loss and gain, to know peace and terror. To know love and to be drawn to compassion, inclusion, togetherness, justice, equity. Isn’t that enough? To be able to act in large and small ways for a better future for the generations to follow for as much time as generations can follow. To stroke a cat or throw a ball for a dog. Isn’t that enough?
Life is our purpose. There have been many times when my mental health has meant I’ve wanted an end to my life. At other times though I’ve wished life was longer. It feels sad to know that I am almost certainly more than halfway through my life. There are less years to come than have gone and I’ve spent most of those in sadness, self-hatred, and in a religious system of entrapment. I honestly wish not for immortality but for more life. Six hundred years would be good. There is so much I will not ever learn. So many things about which I am very curious and want to explore but which I will never have time to make part of my knowledge or experience. Life is very long and the days sometimes drag yet it’s also too short. I want more. That’s impossible though. My death is certain. I will be gone and I will experience just as I experienced before I was conceived. Nothingness. That’s not so bad. In the meantime there is life to live in a body that today feels exhausted and which is in pain and with a brain that sometimes rebels against peace, fights against keeping on living.
Atheism can satisfy. Can’t it? Secular humanism too. I explored these things and can tell you with some degree of certainty that these related paths may provide satisfaction, meaning enough, and purpose for many people. Some of the talks in the local humanist group, covering a wide range of subjects, have been excellent. Some the articles and talks from sceptic groups have been superb. I remain strongly humanist. I remain atheist. At least from one point of view.
Atheism didn’t satisfy.
It’s not because of the frustrations I have with some atheist groups, especially those online. There’s a lot to be frustrated with there. Many of those groups quickly turn to being just angry and derisory attacks on religions and religious people. Often the accusations don’t make sense or only apply to the extreme versions of those religions. I look at posts about Christianity and know that they don’t apply to any of the people I met on the way out of the faith. Some are entirely untrue. Some are plainly stupid. Some are straw-men larger than any scarecrows from any nightmare world. Such groups fall into meanness and sometimes seem to exist just to laugh at other people, to insult, to raise themselves up as the superior part of humanity.
They can become fundamentalists too. There are many fundamentalists in atheist groups. An example. Did Jesus exist? I don’t mean whether all the stories we read in the New Testament are true. I don’t believe they are and I share that belief with many Christians and with most of the best New Testament scholars, Christian and non-Christian. I mean whether the man Jesus existed. The fundamentalism I often see among the mythicists, those who claim there was never a man, is frightening. They are more fundamentalist than extreme Calvinists or that group of men who wrote all those tracts and volumes called “The Fundamentals” from where we get the word fundamentalist. I used to own those books.
I believe Jesus existed. He was born, preached, gathered followers, got into trouble with authorities, and was executed. The weight of scholarship gives that broad outline for the historical Jesus apart from a mythicist fringe which claims even his existence was an invention. I’m prepared to be wrong. I’ve been wrong about many things, many times, and I’ll be wrong many times again. That’s acceptable. An Anglican priest I met a few months ago was prepared to be wrong too. She wasn’t particularly worried about whether there was a historical Jesus because she found much deeper meaning in her understanding of the stories than a need for literalism. Fables may be completely false yet they may be completely truth too.
When the New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman was interviewed by Seth Andrews for “The Thinking Atheist” this year he was insulted many times in the ensuing discussion and accused over and over again of being a Christian apologist. That’s an accusation that can only come from a fundamentalist. Ehrman is not a Christian. He’s one of the people we’d have been told never to read unless we wanted our eternal souls to be endangered by lies.
I’ve heard many atheists too say words along the lines of “I read the Bible and that’s why I’m an atheist.” That’s no reason to be an atheist. Even if a person came to hate the Bible it’s not a reason. Reading and honestly studying the Bible may be an excellent reason to reject literalism or a belief that the Bible is, to use an abbreviation from the atheist minister Gretta Vosper, TAWOGFAT, The authoritative Word of God for all time. We can reject that view just as Vosper and millions of Christians, theist and non-theist, have rejected it but the contents of one ancient religious collection of documents could never be a rational reason for atheism because atheism is a statement about the entire universe not about the rightness or wrongness of some words written a couple of thousand years ago and not about anyone’s interpretations of those words not matter how unjustifiable those interpretations may turn out to be.
No. The sometimes stupidity, cruelness and hostility of atheist groups is not a reason to reject atheism any more than the sometimes stupidity, cruelness and hostility of theist groups is a reason to reject theism. True reasoning is a much richer place than the insecurities and lapses of humans. I say this as someone who has been part of the “sometimes stupidity, cruelness and hostility” on both sides. I’ve been part of the problem and inevitably I will be part of problems again because we all screw up even with intentions that are beyond perfections.
I am not a theist. So why didn’t atheism hold me as a foundation for living? Beyond it being a statement of a negative of course which is never likely to provide a foundation. Atheism without further positive statements isn’t going to be that helpful to anyone in the long term. Many atheists of course make such statements and I have found great beauty and wonder in the writing of some of them. The words of secular humanists have inspired and will continue to inspire me until I die, five hundred years sooner than I’d like!
It would have been so easy too. I wish it had been. Reject Christianity. Reject other spiritual paths presupposing a kind of supernatural. Be an atheist or secular humanist and just get on with my life. In freedom. With surprise. With an almost unbounded curiosity. Writing poetry. Reading science. Campaigning for the freedom and dignity and rights of others and for a building of compassion and charity and inclusive love in our world.
That could have been the end point. More, it could have been the beginning point for a life without self-hatred, without a fear of damnation, without being trapped by religion.
It wasn’t the end point. It was neither a dead end or a living beginning.
Bishop John Shelby Spong – a man I once nearly picketed for being an extreme deluded heretic leading people to Hell – wrote this:
“Theism is a human description of God that has died. I seek to walk beyond the carnage of that description into a new sense of God – a God met not outside of life but at the very heart of life.
My mind, my integrity, my intellectual questioning, and my God-experience all come together in this new image. My religious schizophrenia is at an end. Theism is dead, I joyfully proclaim, but God is real. When I stand in the presence of this God who inhabits the heart of life, I know why I define myself as a joyful, passionate, convinced believer in the reality of God.” (A New Christianity For A New World, p77)
Spong is a bit conservative for me but I’ve grown to appreciate him even at the points at which I disagree with him. That’s not a threat to me because at no point would he tell anyone they had to believe as he believed.
I am an atheist. I am also an agnostic. I am also a non-theist and non-theist is the word out of the three I’d now most often use for myself. There’s a lot more space in non-theism. Space to play, to explore and to find rich light even in the religious and spiritual places I so firmly rejected.
I’ve written four blog posts to get to this point. 8000 words I wasn’t expecting to write at all. Finally I come to the point at which I’d expected to begin, the journey from atheism to wherever the hell it is I’m going and within that journey there’s a question I ask myself and which I need to ask others. That though, is for a fifth post. Even that won’t be the end of the story. Except through death how can an inner story end when both the heart and the universe are almost without limits?
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