So, what do you do when you run out of ideas temporarily? You cheat. Here’s a little (okay, it’s actually GINORMOUS) gem from about ten years or so ago. It’s about why I’m an atheist. If you think this might offend you, don’t read it. More importantly, if you think this might tempt you to argue with me about it, don’t read it. I’m posting this merely for people who are curious as to how one turns away from religion and the idea of a deity or deities. This is just one example of the many ways this can happen. Feel free to ask questions, so long as it’s in a spirit of genuine curiosity. I will not even entertain anything along the lines of, “Well, just look around you!!” or, “Where did everything come from, then?” Enjoy! Or don’t!
It would be fair to say that my initial “atheism” was almost purely a knee-jerk reaction to a bad experience with one specific sect. But once you have seen through one myth, it becomes easy to dismiss its variations. This is the story of how I weathered the storms of antitheism and nihilism to arrive at the comfort of simple atheism.
I grew up with no real religious indoctrination. Technically, my parents were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, i.e., Mormons. I say technically because, though they had both been baptized into the church as children, I never saw either of them go to church until I was in my teens. My maternal grandmother had a passing familiarity with and a vague belief in selected bits of American Indian religions. These made sense to me because they were all based on things I could see: The sun, trees, rocks, water, air, clouds, etc. Even so, I can’t honestly say that I believed them.
This is not to say that I wasn’t interested in religion/mythology; on the contrary, I read everything I could find on the subject. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why the Judeo-Christian tradition was a religion and the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, Norsemen, Romans, Celts, etc. were mythologies. I learned that later. Suffice to say the subject was endlessly fascinating to me.
Shortly after I turned sixteen, I was searching for something to believe in. Having grown up in the “Pretty, Great State” of Utah, it’s no surprise that I started studying the LDS faith. Once a week for ten weeks, a pair of Mormon missionaries (Sisters Ramos and Bond) came to my house to teach me the basics and to give me a free copy of The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. The sisters were very nice, praising my natural inquisitiveness. At one point, they actually told me that God must have wanted me to be a great leader in the church, because I was so thorough in my study. They took to calling me “The Investigator.” My younger sister and my mom took the lessons and attended church services with me.
After the ten weeks were over and I had developed a routine of prayer at least twice a day, scripture reading for at least an hour every morning, writing at least one page about what I was learning every night, and, of course, attending church every Sunday, I decided to be formally baptized as a Mormon.
My mom’s cousin, himself an elder in the church, performed the baptism. After the actual “full immersion” ritual, my little sister gave a brief speech on how cool she thought all this was. She was ten. We all sang “I Stand All Amazed,” my favorite hymn at the time. Finally, I “bore my testimony,” the Mormon equivalent of testifying. I went on and on about how absolutely sure I was that this church was true, that Jesus was the Messiah, that God loved me. As I did this, for the first time, I felt a sensation that I had been promised I would feel when the Holy Spirit was really and fully with me – I felt the classic “burning in the breast.” And what a feeling it was! At that moment, the words I was speaking seemed to be coming to me from a source outside myself, strengthening my belief in them. I was hooked, not to put too fine a point on it.
After the baptism, we had a short reception at the house. I got gifts, which I hadn’t expected. A friend of my mom’s gave me a leather-bound journal because, as she said, “When writing about your faith, you should have a special book to write in.” Another member of our ward (the Mormon equivalent of a parish or a congregation) gave me an extremely impressive black leather Bible, with my name stamped on the front in faux gold.
A lot of things that I used to enjoy went by the wayside in the name of my newfound faith: drinking caffeinated beverages, taking the lord’s name in vain, hanging around with certain of my friends, indulging in “impure thoughts,” etc. I was so staunch in my religion that, whenever I committed any sin, however small, I would say a short, apologetic, and very sincere prayer. I even tried fasting for a day once – the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.
Before long, I was ordained as a priest, something Mormon boys get to do at the tender age of fourteen. I didn’t even have to go to divinity school first or anything. With this ordinance I was granted the ability to bless sacrament (the Mormon equivalent of communion) for Sunday services. Sacrament consisted of tap water and torn up bits of Wonder bread. “Where’s the wine?” you might ask. Since alcohol is evil, Mormons have actually changed the communion prayer so it reads, “Take this water and drink of it, for it is my blood.” I wonder if they’ll eventually change the biblical wedding miracle story so that Jesus turned the water into water. . . .
Anyway, after a couple months of this, I had a lapse in faith for a while. I’m not really sure why, and I’ve never really thought about it very much. Maybe it was just my former lack of religious sensibilities reasserting itself, but more likely it was nothing more dramatic than a simple case of laziness. I missed my old habits, and I was mighty tired of getting up early on Sunday and spending upwards of three hours listening to boring old men pontificate.
I started drinking coffee again, and stopped apologizing to God for occasionally taking his name in vain. I stopped reading my scriptures and going to church. I started hanging around with my heathen friends again, unable to satisfactorily explain my absence to them. I went ahead and let those impure thoughts dance around in my brain, as they were wont to. This went on for a month or more, until I finally felt guilty for shirking my faith, and worried about the state and eventual fate of my eternal soul. I got my act together and went back to church. It wasn’t the same as it was, though – it was all I could do to make myself be good, whereas it had been so easy before. And that marvelous burning in the breast? Gone. I didn’t know where or why. I was also still asking a lot of questions. Too many, as it eventually turned out.
It was in this state that I went to see the bishop one Tuesday evening. I was to be interviewed to determine whether I was righteous enough to be issued a Temple Recommend. This is sort of like a license to do work in the temple, because simply being a Mormon isn’t good enough to be allowed inside. I was questioned on whether I had been observing the Word of Wisdom (a reference to a set of LDS scriptures proscribing things like drinking alcohol, smoking, ingesting caffeine, thinking impure thoughts, etc.), and without batting an eyelash, I said I had been. God failed to whisper in the bishop’s ear that I was lying. That sort of bothered me. He also asked if I had been paying my tithe. Again I lied. God didn’t call me on it, but in this case, God didn’t need to. The bishop could just as easily and quickly checked church records to see if I was lying. He didn’t do it. It was thus that an unclean spirit was allowed passage into a holy temple, to perform “baptisms for the dead.”
This is a very interesting ritual. I had already been baptized into the church, but a vastly huge number of souls didn’t get that opportunity before they died. The LDS church provides these hapless souls with a marvelous service: young men and women have themselves baptized, full immersion, over and over again, in the name of someone who is already dead. In this way, a lot of very unlikely people have been unwittingly baptized into Mormonism: all the popes and saints, Marilyn Monroe, Martin Luther, the monarchs of England – you get the picture. That night, thirty-five souls got to be baptized in spirit as my body was mercilessly dunked into a baptismal font thirty-five times. Throughout my near-drowning, the elder doing the baptizing rattled off names at breaktongue speed, sounding like a cross between a crazed auctioneer and a square dance caller. The entire experience was pretty frightening.
After my ordeal, I found myself in the locker room, freshly showered but not yet dressed, trying desperately to pray, to recapture the ol’ burning in the breast. Surely after performing such an amazingly important service and while standing within the walls of a temple, this should have been easy. It didn’t happen. My epiphany was almost over.
During the next few days, I reflected on all the questions I had been asking on the minutiae of LDS beliefs. Do we really believe that Jesus did all the actual physical labor of creating the universe, but in God’s name? Yes, and that’s why the Bible says God did it, even though it was really Jesus. Did the Mormonites really fight their way over the course of several generations from what is present day Central America to present day New England? Yup. Can you, by good acts after your death, progress from, say, the Terrestrial Kingdom to the Celestial? Nope. Black people used to be denied full involvement in the church, i.e., they couldn’t hold the priesthood, bless sacrament, attain the highest level of heaven, etc. When that changed, they could suddenly attain the Celestial Kingdom. What about their forebears who are stuck in the Terrestrial or Telestial Kingdom? Can these families not be rejoined in “heaven”? Uh. . . .
More important in my reflections than the questions asked was the answer given to questions they couldn’t answer, always with all the animation and conviction of an automaton: “That has not yet been revealed to us.” In particular, I reflected on something my Sunday school teacher had said to me a couple weeks earlier. After the pat answer, he added, “Maybe you shouldn’t ask so many questions.”
A trait that had won me praise from the missionaries was now getting me into trouble. Was I mystified? Hardly. I understood enough about human nature to realize people don’t like being asked questions that they can’t answer. But this was important stuff – how can I claim to believe in something that I can’t understand? The end was drawing near.
During my last two or three weeks of staunch Mormonhood, I had taken to wearing a crucifix, outside my shirt, over my tie, proudly proclaiming myself a Christian. On the Sunday after my dunkfest, after services but before priesthood meeting, my bishop took me aside and whispered, “We don’t wear those.”
I was a bit bemused, for I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about. “Wear what?”
“Crucifixes,” he whispered, in the same embarrassed tone usually reserved for asking a pharmacist where the laxatives are kept.
“Why not?” Again with the questions.
“We don’t like to glorify the death of our savior.”
Now I really was confused. “But wasn’t his crucifixion the single most important event of his life? The fact that he died for our sins?”
“Yes, but – ”
“I mean, this doesn’t glorify his death, it glorifies his sacrifice, right? It reminds me that he gave his life that I might live forever. How is that wrong?”
He then said something that I’ve heard dozens of times since, and it still makes no sense to me: “If he had been shot to death, would you wear a pistol around your neck?”
I thought for just a moment, then replied, “No-o-o . . . I’d probably wear a little statue of his bullet-riddled body. What’s your point?”
Apparently lacking one, he skipped my question and commanded, “Just take it off, or I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“No, you won’t,” I said, and walked out. And I never looked back.
Okay, that’s the romantic way to end the story of my time as a staunch Mormon, but strictly speaking, it isn’t true. I looked back plenty. I did a lot of looking sideways, too.
Over the next couple years, I looked everywhere for some meaning, something that would make life easier to understand. I had read a lot about religion and myth as a young boy, but out of simple curiosity. Now I was looking for something else that would give me that sense of belonging, that sense of completeness. I needed a set of pat answers to all my questions, a set that I could believe with my head as well as my heart, a set that would give me a fix of that ol’ burning in the breast.
None of the Western religions I looked into were able to give me what I needed. When I turned my newly critical eye on the Judeo-Christian tradition, I started finding holes. But worse by far than the holes were the rotten things God had done to his people, the most faithful of the true believers. Job’s story incensed me – who could believe in a god that would allow the soul of one of his most steadfast believers to be the prize in a bet with the most evil being in the universe?
Abraham and Isaac: what the hell was that? “Since you’ve been so amazingly good and loyal, here’s that son you’ve always wanted – oh, by the way, you have to kill him so that I’ll know you love me.” And when the man is poised to do the deed, ready to kill the one thing that he loves more than life itself because God wants him to, God shows up and says, “Okay, that’s enough – I was only kidding. Here, kill this lamb instead.” Again, I had to ask – who could be faithful and devoted to such a hateful being?
I began to feel I had been betrayed, lied to, and scammed. These things are the makings of antitheism. I was an antitheist for a couple years, railing against the evils of a being I claimed I didn’t believe existed. I took to calling myself an atheist at the end of my junior year of high school. I proudly told people this, their sensitive feelings be damned. I even went so far as to question people about their own beliefs, and to point out to them why they were wrong.
Along with this and completely contrary to what I claimed to believe was a lingering and furtive fear of being struck down by God. I remember reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. At one point, Yossarian refers to God as a hick, saying he can’t wait to get to heaven so he can get close enough to God to wring his scrawny neck. I remember thinking, I wish I had the balls to say that! I still had niggling doubts about the nonexistence of God, though I would never have admitted it.
To add to these doubts, I was unable to explain that burning in the breast to my satisfaction. That sensation had been real, so if God didn’t exist, what had caused it? After a time, I came to recognize the burning for what it had been: a chemical reaction in my body to the stimulus of convincing myself that something I wanted desperately to believe in was real. You can get the same thing from any number of completely unrelated stimuli: having a sudden and unexpected argument with a loved one; nearly falling while rock-climbing; narrowly avoiding a serious car accident; suddenly realizing that you’ve known the answer to a particularly difficult problem all along (this is one of my favorites); falling in love; etc.
I only knew one other person during this time of my life that claimed not to believe in God. It was easier for him, though – a case of simple disbelief, without all the betrayal baggage. John had never been a believer, had never belonged to any church in any real sense. I would rail about how the Bible contradicted itself at every turn; he simply didn’t know and didn’t care to know. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I envied him tremendously.
He and I were in the same English class our senior year, and because I was basically not capable of keeping my big mouth shut, it wasn’t long before the entire class knew we didn’t believe. This led our teacher to take a stab at covering existentialism. We read Sartre’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus’s The Stranger, and various other excerpts from existentialist writers. And again, at long last, the ol’ burning in the breast was back with a vengeance. Learning that not only was there a name for the way I felt and thought, but that some fairly well-respected thinkers had felt the same way, gave me such a feeling of validation that I rode the high for weeks. It also spelled the beginning of the end for my antitheism. I began to see how silly it was to constantly bitch about a non-existent entity. It was still a while before I could stop proselytizing, though.
I found Eastern religions fascinating and, far more important, logical. It made sense to me that we lived again and again. It seemed to explain so many weird things. Déjà vu? Just a case of having been in the same place or a similar situation in a past life. Friends that you were so close to that you felt like you’d known them all your life? People you’d known before, when both you and they had been different people. Instant dislike of a person you’ve never met? Easy – an enemy from a former existence. And even though I couldn’t quite bring myself to actually believe in reincarnation, I held on to a lingering hope that it was true anyway. That hope was dashed my freshman year of college in, of all places, an honors philosophy course on ethics.
The professor asked us a question. He wanted to know if we thought that our mind was more than the sum of our brain and its functions, or whether physiology was all there was to it. Having long since dismissed the idea of having a soul, I had to go with option two. He then asked us to consider, in the context of our answer to his first question, what happened when the physiological processes in our brain stopped, i.e., when we die. Taking all of this to its logical conclusion led me to have the opposite of the burning in the breast: the damping in the mind. Without previously realizing it, I had believed for quite some time that death really was “it.” I was outraged.
The professor asked us these questions to prepare us for a reading of Sartre’s short story “The Wall.” The story was supposed to serve as the prelude to a class discussion of capital punishment. For me, however, it was the catalyst for a lot of soul searching on the subject of what, exactly, I believed about death. This was my first exposure to nihilism, though I didn’t know the word for it then. All I knew was that I suddenly felt like nothing I was ever going to do would make any difference in the grand scheme of things. What matter was it if I lived or died? Nobody would ever have missed me had I never been born, and even having been here a while, not much would change if I were gone. Depressing stuff, to be sure. Suddenly all the black clothing I wore all the time to achieve that morose look seemed to fit better than it ever had.
I began to fixate on the death of my maternal grandmother the summer before. I had never really gotten over it. She had been one of the biggest influences on who I had become as a young adult. In short, she was just about my favorite person in the world.
I remembered the winter night my senior year of high school that Mom had come in and told me Grandma had lung cancer. As soon as she walked into my bedroom, I knew something was terribly wrong: Mom just absolutely never looked that way. Her skin was pale, her eyes were teary, her voice cracked and barely more than a whisper. “I’ve got some bad news, Tommy.”
No shit! I thought. “What is it?” I asked.
“Grandma went to the doctor today to have her back checked again, and they found cancer all over the place.”
My first thought, besides, This can’t be true, was of how she had come to find out her back was broken.
Every summer since I could remember, my mom’s extended family had a huge family reunion camping trip. Upwards of a hundred people would gather in the woods somewhere in Middle-of-Nowhere, Wyoming, keep a bonfire going for ten days or more, sing, hike, fish, swim, raft, and just generally have a ridiculously good time.
The past summer, Grandma, Grandpa, and Great-grandma were among the last dozen or so people to leave. Grandpa was driving the truck, Grandma had shotgun, and Great-grandma sat between. Grandpa misjudged a turn and ran the truck into a boulder at a paltry fifteen or twenty miles per hour. He and Grandma climbed out, but Great-grandma couldn’t do it. Grandma basically pulled her out with no help.
About a month later, her back started aching something awful, so she went to her doctor. While I’m sure I’ll never know what actually happened during this meeting, family legend has it this way, and if it ain’t true, it oughta be:
After a series of x-rays, the doctor asked Grandma, “Why is it that the doctor is always the last to know these things?” Grandma asked him what he meant, and he answered her with another question: “How long has your back been broken?” Needless to say, Grandma was stunned. “You are one tough cookie!” the doctor mused.
They surmised that when the truck hit the boulder, Grandma’s spine cracked just a tiny bit, and when she pulled Great-grandma from the truck, it broke. We were all in awe of just how tough Grandma was. There was a lot of talk of her being too damned tough to die.
That night, Mom explained to me that, after finding the cancer, the story was amended slightly to include the probable fact that Grandma must already have had cancer in the marrow of her spine. When her back broke, they figured that the cancer got out and began spreading itself merrily around. It had concentrated in her lungs, and they were giving her six months at the outside, Mom said. Having dropped her bomb, Mom said goodnight and left me to sit in stunned disbelief, unable to reconcile my image of Grandma as the toughest human being on earth with the fact of her impending death.
Over the next five months, Grandma slowly deteriorated. After her first round of chemotherapy, she decided that the little bit it might extend her life by wasn’t worth the misery it inflicted. I remember one night after Grandma had been given chemo plus about four tons of morphine. Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, and I were sitting around the dining room table at Grandma’s house. Grandma was shaking uncontrollably, though the room was comfortably warm, and kept talking to the empty chairs, referring to them by names of people who were long dead. That night, she insisted on calling me “Dad,” which was unnerving, to say the least. I tried, only once, to correct her – the heartbroken confusion on her face as she realized, for a brief moment, that I was her grandson was worse by far than being mistaken for someone who had been dead for quite a bit longer than I had been alive.
Most of her hair fell out, leaving a few wispy strands floating around her head in disarray. We took to calling her “Yoda”, for that’s whom she resembled more than anybody. Grandma took this ribbing in the spirit intended, because even though she was dying, she still had her sense of humor. I’m sure that it was she who gave me my ability to laugh at situations that are heartbreaking, ridiculous, maddening, infuriating, etc.
In the last couple weeks of her life, her pain was so bad that she was on a constant morphine drip. She didn’t stay in the hospital, though – she had a home healthcare nurse visit every day, because she wanted to stay at home where she was most comfortable. She was rarely conscious during this time, let alone coherent. She would occasionally have brief moments of clarity, and I remember one in particular that scared the hell out of me for some reason.
I was sitting in her living room, legs folded, hands on knees, dressed in white jeans, white slip-on shoes, and a white button down shirt. Some friends of mine were coming to pick me up to go to a party, and I was waiting by the window so they wouldn’t have to knock at the door and disturb Grandma.
Grandma woke up for a moment, looked around hazily, finally settling her gaze on me. “Tommy?” she asked, recognizing me for once for who I was.
“Yeah, Grandma?”
“Aren’t you a Buddhist?”
“No, not really.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, and promptly went back to sleep.
I’m not sure, to this day, why her saying that freaked me out like it did, but I quickly got up and went to wait for my friends outside on the porch.
The night Grandma died, Mom, Dad, and all Mom’s siblings and their spouses met at Grandma’s house to make the funeral arrangements. Several of us grandkids were there, but few of us were paying any attention to what the adults were doing. I was just waiting for a chance to interject with a request to be allowed to speak at the funeral. Although I was fully an atheist by then, I had a favorite passage from the Bible that I wanted to read:
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms. She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet. She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land. She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant. Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.
Proverbs, 31:10-31
While this is all very heavy-handed, I thought the general idea fit Grandma very well. In a nutshell, she was a very good woman who took care of her family and always had a kind of gentle grace about her, despite her gruff exterior.
For a long time after she died, I would still find myself thinking about her as if she were alive. I’d be driving around town, running errands or whatever, and I’d think to myself, I should go visit Grandma for a bit. Then I’d remember why I couldn’t, and often I’d have to pull over for a minute and cry. I’d have moments like these more often than was probably healthy. And now, just when I thought I was beginning to adjust to the idea that she wasn’t around anymore, I suddenly found myself having to reevaluate my thoughts on the very nature of death.
I wrote what started out to be another cheerful letter home to Mom and Dad a couple days after my anti-epiphany. It quickly degenerated into a rant against death itself. I’ve lost the copy I kept of it, but I’ll paraphrase my summation:
“Death is not a peaceful slumber that comes at the end of your life and takes you away from all your pain and suffering. It is unfair and unjust, and makes a mockery of all your attempts to make your life mean something. I’ll not go out so easily, though: they’ll have to drag me out, kicking and screaming all the way.”
As vitriolic and venomous as that letter ended up being, it was the first step on the way to working through these feelings that I had somehow been cheated out of yet another comforting belief. The more I thought about Grandma and how much I missed her, the more I realized that, though she was dead and I would never, ever see her again, she nevertheless lived on in me as long as I remembered her. So, although the world at large could take me or leave me, I was affecting the lives of all those around me by simply being. Death may be the end, but I can achieve a sort of immortality by making an impact on the people I care about.
“Leaving a belief in God does not make life meaningless; it merely makes God meaningless”
I can’t remember who said that, but I remember that reading it for the first time brought about the burning in the breast again. It seems like such an obvious point, but until having it laid out so plainly, it never occurred to me. Someone else said something to the effect of, “A feeling of meaninglessness is bound to follow as a reaction to rejecting two thousand years of ultimate meaning.” Once again, the existentialist philosophers came to my rescue in a moment of weakness.
I’m no longer proselytizing. I don’t make a big deal of my atheism. It’s a fact of my existence, like my curly hair or the “Thompson Squint” or my bluish eyes. I don’t deny it, ever, but I also don’t beat people over the head with it. I don’t disbelieve in the existence of deities; I have a positive belief that there are no deities. It’s a VERY minor distinction, but to me, a VERY important one. This puts it in the realm of faith, so I get to use the “proof denies faith” argument too. Take that, thumpers! Okay, calm down, just kidding. In the final analysis, for me, I so dislike being proselytized at that I simply can’t justify trying to talk anyone out of their beliefs. In the even finaler (and SHORTER!) analysis, I have a strict “you have your beliefs and I have mine, good for us” approach.
I will now don my emotional flak vest in preparation for comments.
