December meme: my atheism
Dec. 16th, 2013 05:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI missed a day, so I'm going to post about that day's topic today and defer today's topic until tomorrow.
shadowvalkyrie asked me to post about being an atheist who is interested in religion.
I didn't start calling myself an atheist until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, although for a long time before that I would have described myself as "not religious." My parents weren't religious, although we were culturally Christian in the sense of celebrating Christmas and Easter in a thoroughly secularized way. However, my mom started sending me to Sunday school when I was a school-age kid. I'm not sure why, but I think it had a lot to do with my mom realizing I had no friends and hoping I could find some there. Since religion wasn't the point, she sent me to the only church anywhere near our house (I grew up in a very very rural area), which was Baptist and, as I see in retrospect, super fundamentalist. I also went to Bible camp a few times; either it was free or I got a scholarship, because there's no way my parents could have afforded a sleepaway camp.
I didn't make friends, though at Bible camp I won all the prizes for memorizing Bible verses. I believed pretty fervently for a while, but by the time I was a teenager that was over. I stopped attending church for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it emerged that the pastor of the Baptist church had been horrifically abusing his wife and children.
I was indifferent verging on hostile to religion as a teenager apart from a brief Goddess-worshipping pagan phase (I blame Marion Zimmer Bradley for that), then went through a period in my twenties where I very much wanted to believe, but couldn't. I dated a Muslim man for a while and thought of converting to Islam (and I'll point out that my interest in the religion considerably outlasted the relationship that sparked it); then, later, I thought of becoming a Catholic. But I kept coming up against the obstacle that, however drawn I felt towards those religious faiths, in the end there was just too many things I couldn't accept, including the treatment of women and queer people.
From my perspective now, I can see that during those years I was shopping for an identity. It wasn't a real urge to faith, but a desire to belong, to be part of a group. It was my mother's strategy all over again--join a church and you'll have friends. Some, although not all, of the impulse to belong came from my trans*-ness, which I hadn't even started to accept. I felt that I didn't fit in to the category "woman" in the way that I thought I ought to, but I had no idea what to do with that and wasn't trying very hard to find out; it was less scary to tinker with less fundamental aspects of my identity.
So what finally made me an atheist? Part of it was actually reading the Bible as opposed to memorizing bits of it without understanding. One real breaking point for me was the story of Jacob and Esau. Their father, on his deathbed, wants to bless his favorite son Esau. But Jacob, at the urging of his mother, disguises himself as Esau and gets the blessing instead. I remember my horror that there was only one blessing to be given, and that God could be fooled, via human trickery, into giving it to the wrong guy. "This is not religion," was my reaction, "This is a trickster tale." The sketchier bits of the Bible, from the Sodom and Gomorrah story to Paul's epistles, made me think that I did not recognize, in the scriptures, the loving God I had been taught to believe in.
I also came up against the problem of evil, as many people do. For a while I found an accommodation in the idea of God the watchmaker, who set the universe in motion but isn't actively involved in its running. But it seemed a bit odd to worship and praise and love the watchmaker.
Eventually I couldn't even believe in God the watchmaker, because the more I read about the evolution of life on earth, and the better I understood how natural selection works, the clearer it became to me that there was no room in life's history for divine intervention. Natural selection is random and non-teleological; human beings are not an endpoint towards which life inevitably moved, but the product of millions of contingencies including genetic mutation, climate conditions, and an asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago. And natural selection is not only arbitrary, it is by human moral standards wasteful and cruel; it proceeds by death and extinction. God's loving hand is not guiding it. (Yes, I'm afraid I am a real-life example of the creationist claim that the theory of evolution makes people lose faith. Mine was pretty well lost already, but coming to understand evolution finished it off.)
But now we come to the second part of this post. I'm an atheist, but I'm still drawn in certain ways to religion, and specifically to Christianity. I think the basic story of Christianity, when shorn of dogma, is very beautiful: a god takes flesh, lives among people and teaches them, suffers a terrible death to redeem them, and returns to heaven to welcome all his children. It moves me tremendously. I just don't believe it's actually true. I'm similarly moved by the bit in the Qu'ran about how all the birds and animals and everything are constantly praising God just by following their natures. It's lovely and I could wish it were true.
My interest in Christianity was also encouraged by my education. I have a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature, and trust me, religion is all over the place in those texts, and also in the history. By the time I'd written my dissertation, I had opinions about things like Henry VIII's headship of the English church (unjustifiable) and the suppression of Catholic images in favor of Bible-reading (it estranged ordinary people, most of whom could not read, from both their faith and their communities). Also indulgences, which were not innately a bad thing. I still have a dabbler's interest in theology, although most of my knowledge is about 500 years out of date!
I don't think my position is necessarily a contradictory one. Atheism does not require hating or scorning religious faith, although the most well-known atheists--not to mention a lot of internet trolls--seem to think it does. I don't share religious people's faith, and I think it's in error in a sense (because I don't think there is any God out there to have faith in), but as a human endeavour, religion is interesting, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible and cruel, depending on what people do in its name.
P.S. Hopefully this doesn't need saying, but just as a precaution: please do not try to convert me. You are welcome to talk about your own experience of faith, but I have no interest in trying Buddhism, paganism, any liberal Christian denomination, etc. etc. Nor do I want to argue about my reasons for being an atheist. Trust me, I've thought about things like the problem of evil in a lot more detail than I've gone into here. I'm aware that for some people, none of the things that make me an atheist are a barrier to faith. But for me, they are.
shadowvalkyrie asked me to post about being an atheist who is interested in religion.I didn't start calling myself an atheist until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, although for a long time before that I would have described myself as "not religious." My parents weren't religious, although we were culturally Christian in the sense of celebrating Christmas and Easter in a thoroughly secularized way. However, my mom started sending me to Sunday school when I was a school-age kid. I'm not sure why, but I think it had a lot to do with my mom realizing I had no friends and hoping I could find some there. Since religion wasn't the point, she sent me to the only church anywhere near our house (I grew up in a very very rural area), which was Baptist and, as I see in retrospect, super fundamentalist. I also went to Bible camp a few times; either it was free or I got a scholarship, because there's no way my parents could have afforded a sleepaway camp.
I didn't make friends, though at Bible camp I won all the prizes for memorizing Bible verses. I believed pretty fervently for a while, but by the time I was a teenager that was over. I stopped attending church for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it emerged that the pastor of the Baptist church had been horrifically abusing his wife and children.
I was indifferent verging on hostile to religion as a teenager apart from a brief Goddess-worshipping pagan phase (I blame Marion Zimmer Bradley for that), then went through a period in my twenties where I very much wanted to believe, but couldn't. I dated a Muslim man for a while and thought of converting to Islam (and I'll point out that my interest in the religion considerably outlasted the relationship that sparked it); then, later, I thought of becoming a Catholic. But I kept coming up against the obstacle that, however drawn I felt towards those religious faiths, in the end there was just too many things I couldn't accept, including the treatment of women and queer people.
From my perspective now, I can see that during those years I was shopping for an identity. It wasn't a real urge to faith, but a desire to belong, to be part of a group. It was my mother's strategy all over again--join a church and you'll have friends. Some, although not all, of the impulse to belong came from my trans*-ness, which I hadn't even started to accept. I felt that I didn't fit in to the category "woman" in the way that I thought I ought to, but I had no idea what to do with that and wasn't trying very hard to find out; it was less scary to tinker with less fundamental aspects of my identity.
So what finally made me an atheist? Part of it was actually reading the Bible as opposed to memorizing bits of it without understanding. One real breaking point for me was the story of Jacob and Esau. Their father, on his deathbed, wants to bless his favorite son Esau. But Jacob, at the urging of his mother, disguises himself as Esau and gets the blessing instead. I remember my horror that there was only one blessing to be given, and that God could be fooled, via human trickery, into giving it to the wrong guy. "This is not religion," was my reaction, "This is a trickster tale." The sketchier bits of the Bible, from the Sodom and Gomorrah story to Paul's epistles, made me think that I did not recognize, in the scriptures, the loving God I had been taught to believe in.
I also came up against the problem of evil, as many people do. For a while I found an accommodation in the idea of God the watchmaker, who set the universe in motion but isn't actively involved in its running. But it seemed a bit odd to worship and praise and love the watchmaker.
Eventually I couldn't even believe in God the watchmaker, because the more I read about the evolution of life on earth, and the better I understood how natural selection works, the clearer it became to me that there was no room in life's history for divine intervention. Natural selection is random and non-teleological; human beings are not an endpoint towards which life inevitably moved, but the product of millions of contingencies including genetic mutation, climate conditions, and an asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago. And natural selection is not only arbitrary, it is by human moral standards wasteful and cruel; it proceeds by death and extinction. God's loving hand is not guiding it. (Yes, I'm afraid I am a real-life example of the creationist claim that the theory of evolution makes people lose faith. Mine was pretty well lost already, but coming to understand evolution finished it off.)
But now we come to the second part of this post. I'm an atheist, but I'm still drawn in certain ways to religion, and specifically to Christianity. I think the basic story of Christianity, when shorn of dogma, is very beautiful: a god takes flesh, lives among people and teaches them, suffers a terrible death to redeem them, and returns to heaven to welcome all his children. It moves me tremendously. I just don't believe it's actually true. I'm similarly moved by the bit in the Qu'ran about how all the birds and animals and everything are constantly praising God just by following their natures. It's lovely and I could wish it were true.
My interest in Christianity was also encouraged by my education. I have a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature, and trust me, religion is all over the place in those texts, and also in the history. By the time I'd written my dissertation, I had opinions about things like Henry VIII's headship of the English church (unjustifiable) and the suppression of Catholic images in favor of Bible-reading (it estranged ordinary people, most of whom could not read, from both their faith and their communities). Also indulgences, which were not innately a bad thing. I still have a dabbler's interest in theology, although most of my knowledge is about 500 years out of date!
I don't think my position is necessarily a contradictory one. Atheism does not require hating or scorning religious faith, although the most well-known atheists--not to mention a lot of internet trolls--seem to think it does. I don't share religious people's faith, and I think it's in error in a sense (because I don't think there is any God out there to have faith in), but as a human endeavour, religion is interesting, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible and cruel, depending on what people do in its name.
P.S. Hopefully this doesn't need saying, but just as a precaution: please do not try to convert me. You are welcome to talk about your own experience of faith, but I have no interest in trying Buddhism, paganism, any liberal Christian denomination, etc. etc. Nor do I want to argue about my reasons for being an atheist. Trust me, I've thought about things like the problem of evil in a lot more detail than I've gone into here. I'm aware that for some people, none of the things that make me an atheist are a barrier to faith. But for me, they are.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-17 12:58 pm (UTC)Yeah, I can see I skipped an explanatory step there. My thinking is that even God-the-watchmaker presumes a god who has an interest in human beings as sentient creatures who can, for example, believe in a god or gods. Human beings are imagined as the goal of evolution: god set the rules of the world in motion in order to create us, even if he doesn't intervene on the level of making sure the "good guys" win the war or the airplane doesn't crash. But evolution doesn't work towards a goal. The evolution of life of some kind appears to be very very likely, given that life evolved on our planet as soon as it was geologically possible to do so, but for about 3 billion years life on earth featured nothing more complex than algal mats. (I'm paraphrasing Steven Jay Gould here.) Then, suddenly about 500 million years ago, life got a lot more complex; about 150,0000 to 200,000 years ago, it got sentient. Modern humans are the product of so much time and so much contingency that it makes no sense, in my view, to presume the rules were set up to create us. And also the "rules" of natural selection are wasteful and imperfect: witness for example the fact that we're not actually very well designed to stand upright (that's why people have backaches and why childbirth is so much harder in humans than other mammals) because natural selection has modified a skeletal system that originally adapted to walk around on all fours. If we were the end goal of evolution, shouldn't we have evolved from creatures who were always bipedal and could have given us better spines?
It's not, for me, an absolute certainty that there is no god: how can one prove a negative? It's that there is no evidence that there is a god or gods, and the best explanation we have for what we know of how the universe works is that there isn't.
As for indulgences: Catholic theology of the time (I don't know about now) held that the expiation of sins was two-fold. First of all, you had to properly confess your sins, receive absolution, and intend not to do it again. At that point, your sins are forgiven in the sense that they won't keep you out of heaven. But you still have to pay a penalty, just like nowadays if you commit a serious crime, you still have to go to prison no matter how genuinely sorry you are. You can either pay on earth during your lifetime or after your death in purgatory, and paying in purgatory is much harder and takes longer. So smart people pay on earth, by self-sacrifices such as fasting, prayer, self-imposed discomfort or pain like hair shirts or flogging, etc. Giving money to the church is a form of self-sacrifice. The sale of indulgences just sort of formalized the practice. Indulgences weren't forgiveness of sin, they were remittance of a certain amount of time in purgatory in exchange for a certain amount of charitable giving to the church. They were perfectly consistent with orthodox theology. They were also rife with obvious potential for abuse, which is what happened.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-18 02:47 am (UTC)