Why atheism?

As an introduction to my take on atheism, check out The emotional impact of my atheism. That post got some really good feedback – I’m really, really pleased with how it came out.

When I was raised, I was given something of a half-hearted Catholic upbringing. Apparently a few generations ago my family was considerably devout – my grandmother on my father’s side still routinely gives me a bit of a lighthearted guilt trip for not going to church on Christmas Eve. I’m yet to have the nerve to wish her a ‘merry solstice’, unfortunately. I love her dearly, and I just can’t bring myself to trouble her with my atheism.

Because essentially, my parent’s generation in my family are cultural Catholics. To them, it’s always been about a sense of community, a set of shared values, and comfort in the idea that those who have died before us still are. That’s pretty much where the line is. In fact, I was quite pious as a child, and my parents were seriously worried that I’d wind up joining the priesthood.

It’s a pity about the whole atheism thing, really; I would’ve made a kick-ass priest.

That said, I was very pious as a kid, up until about the age of 11 or 12. The whole God thing was just what I’d always been told, and I accepted the word of my parents as fact, as children tend to do. Besides, the public schools where I lived in Australia were crap and the bigwig private schools were too expensive. The Catholic Education schools were the acceptable compromise, so I just went with it.

It turns out that the Catholic Education system was actually the downfall of my piousness. We had required Religion Studies at my highschool. It didn’t count towards University entrance scores, so they were pretty laid back classes. The teachers had an easy period to plan for (no state mandated learning objectives) so the students were pretty much allowed to be inattentive for 45 minutes, provided they didn’t start too much of a ruckus.

Except for me. I was pious, remember? I actually paid attention in RE classes. Boy, did that ever bugger things up. To any theists out there reading this now, rest assured; it is not for want of understanding that I have rejected Christianity. To the contrary. To misquote Omar Khayyám:

The Bible! well, come put me to the test—
Lovely old book in hideous error drest—
    Believe me, I can quote the Bible too,
The unbeliever knows his Bible best.

— Omar Khayyám
(Bible was Koran in original context)

Over time, it just became clear to me how transparently man-made Christianity is. There’s a lot of elegant arguments around, both for and against the existence of God. But that’s all beside the point. Arguing about God is fun, but at the same time it feels so silly. It feels like I’m arguing with someone who thinks that Master Yoda was a real person. It astonishes me that people actually take the subject seriously. It’s just so damn silly.

Since then, I’ve had a good hard look at other religions, and every shred of evidence I’ve found in all of them has reinforced the position that God is a man-made myth.

I got really into Buddhism at one point – I still do 30 minute sessions of Zazen when I’m feeling disciplined enough to get my lazy butt on the cushion. But when I actually went to a Buddhist temple and discovered how blatantly commercial Buddhism could be made to be, I found that I couldn’t stomach the supernatural baggage that Buddhism brought with it. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path still work without the supernatural stuff, so the argument could be made that I’m actually an atheistic Buddhist… But something about that doesn’t sit right. Your typical Buddhist really believes – or at least, professes to believe – that reincarnation is real and that Bodhisattvas are real, existing, thinking, active entities that influence the real world in detectable ways. I just can’t bring myself to identify as one of that number. It just feels dishonest.

That said, I’ll always remember Sensei Amala Wrightson of the Auckland Zen Centre as the thieving woman who first stole attachment/affection away from me.

At the same time, I’ve also had a good hard look at Islam – but where my study of Buddhism was like studying a beautiful fable, studying Islam has had more to do with horrified, morbid fascination. Islamic theology is genuinely creepifying. I remember when I was a teenager I once caught a live fly and threw it into a white-tailed spider’s web. Watching the spider come out, wrap up, and feed on the fly had the same horrifying, I-can’t-look-away kind of feel that the study of Islamic theology gives me now. The reaction to Islam isn’t as intense as it was to the spider, but Islam cuts deeper. It frightens me on a whole other level when I realize that millions of people are following the doctrine of Islam and consider it to define the perfect moral life. The man who does evil and thinks it good terrifies me in a way that the man who does evil knowingly never could.

That said, six or seven years ago the religion of others never really bothered me. Sure, I was the clever one that worked out that Christianity was just a rather average fairy-tale (Buddhism and Islam were still distant features on the horizon at that point). But hey, it’s all fairly harmless and it gives people comfort, community and a shared value system – provided, of course, they don’t look at their religion too closely.

That was my attitude growing up. Needless to say, things have changed.

When the Dover school-board tried to inject creationism into science classes, I started to realize it wasn’t as harmless as I’d realized. And it’s only been getting worse. The rise of unreason in the developed world frightens me. For the moment, there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it. I discuss atheism and religion online to give myself practice. I want to be familiar with the arguments and I want to be alert and aware of the shifts in the Zeitgeist. I get the feeling that these are going to be necessary and useful skills in the future. After all, we have cdesign proponentsists in New Zealand now. I was a bit heartbroken over that. I like to think of us Kiwis as ‘the sane ones’ in the world stage, but groups like Focus on the Patriarchy (NZ) make it hard.

But that’s all beside the point, really. The main reason I like to discuss and argue about atheism is because I enjoy doing so. It gets the brain working, and I’m something of a sucker for getting my brain working. And occasionally I’ll get genuinely angry about the life-denying tendencies of certain religious teachings – especially when doctrines of breathtaking evil are given a rhetorical working-over and marketed to the ignorant as the pinnacle of moral wisdom.