The Lonely Atheist
I wasn’t always lonely. And I wasn’t always an atheist. Hard as it is to admit, I was a Christian for a good 10-15 years. In my defense, my mother remains a devout Christian and raised me in the church, so I never really stood a chance. From the moment that I was born, I was a Christian. I was given a Christian name and baptized at an early age. Regular attendance in Sunday school meant that I was practically brainwashed by the church throughout my adolescence and teen years. Church became a community for me. In fact, to this day, many of my friends are people I grew up with in church. For this reason, I was constantly surrounded by like-minded people who reinforced my wholehearted acceptance of the bible as the word of god. It would be a long time before I ever questioned my beliefs.
Early on, I noticed that not everybody approached church the same way. There was always a group of kids that you sensed did not want to be in the pews. You could tell by their disinterested expressions during sermons, their lackluster participation during praise, their withdrawn demeanor during group discussions. They were just here because their parents forced them to come. I wondered how they could not be overtaken by the joyous passion involved in being a servant of Christ. The bible warned against such lukewarm Christians and I ignored them. In retrospect, they were the smart ones. They saw through the façade of the cult that their parents had forced upon them. I on the other hand, walked, no ran down the narrow path into overzealous, religious lunacy.
Throughout middle school and well into high school, church dominated my life, and more significantly, my mind. I attended countless youth retreats, 3-4 days long escapes to religious retreat centers in the mountains. Isolated with fellow young Christians, we were subjected to more brainwashing and groupthink, long hours of praise, and sermons. I no longer just attended church on Sundays. We had youth nights on Saturdays. I even attended a book club on Wednesdays, where we discussed the theological analyses of Lewis, Sproul, Craig, Blomberg, and Piper. It wasn’t long before I began evangelizing to others. I recall these moments with much embarrassment. I was basically shoving my misguided beliefs down the throats of anyone that would listen. My mentality reflected an attitude of moral superiority, shrouded in the false humility that accompanied being a proud servant, and deluded into believing that it was all for god, by god, through god. I believed myself to be saved and that those who didn’t believe direly needed to hear the gospel. I thought I was saving souls. It never dawned on me that what I needed most was to be saved from myself.
The seeds of doubt were slowly planted in my mind during high school, where I had begun preparing for college early. This meant taking rigorous advanced classes in a variety of subjects, especially the sciences. It didn’t take long for me to realize that science and my religion were incompatible. Science was the pursuit of truth, observations supported by evidence. Religion was dogma, backwards thinking that didn’t rely on a strong rational foundation, but rather entirely dependent on faith. I struggled a lot during this period. I kept trying to rationalize reason in order to make it fit with my faith. It wasn’t working. It felt like Orwellian doublethink, trying to spin science in order to make it seem like my belief in god was justified as a logical choice. The fact of the matter was that the bible had absolutely zero truth value. God didn’t exist just because we believed it. And the earth wasn’t around 10,000 years old. Furthermore, my inability to reconcile science with god wasn’t my only struggle.
I realized that I actually despised religious morality. As a Christian, my sense of right and wrong had been based on what my pastor sermonized, or what the bible, an anthology of ancient, first century, cultist writings decreed. However, I no longer wanted my morals to come from the bible. I no longer felt that homosexuality was a sin. I had a friend in college, and when he came out, I knew he wasn’t a bad person for being gay. I didn’t agree with the bible that women should be subservient to men. This was the modern age, not ancient Israel. Additionally, I could find no moral justification for the actions that god condoned in the Old Testament: rape, genocide, slavery, mass murder, capital punishment, and ritual human sacrifice.
I just couldn’t buy the apologist excuse that god operates on the highest order of holiness and therefore his actions are somehow justified. And quite frankly, the “god works in mysterious ways,” answer didn’t convince me much in terms of the problem of pain and suffering in the world. Not to mention the fact that there is absolutely no support that any god exists, much less the Judeo-Christian Yahweh. Even if such a monster existed, I would do everything in my power to oppose him, much less worship him! With a newly acquired critical mindset, it felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I was reading the bible for the first time. Now, every time I closed the book, it wasn’t with a sense of reverence, but with absolute disgust. Needless to say, by the time I left college, I was no longer a Christian.
That’s when the loneliness sunk in. My worldview had dramatically flipped. I stopped attending church. I could no longer identify with fellow Christians. I no longer saw the people that I once considered my friends; outside of church they became acquaintances. I realized that church had been the basis of many of my relationships. All of my mentors had been reverends and pastors. I didn’t dislike them, in fact I found most of them to be sincerely caring, but I could no longer find any meaningful counsel in their theology. When people asked me why I no longer attended church, I didn’t know what to say. I knew why. But I didn’t want them to know why. Interestingly, I felt ashamed! I was no longer part of the Christian in-group. I knew my rejection of religion to be reasonable, but in the eyes of Christians, I was just another sinner doomed to eternal fire in Hell. I would know! I used to be one among the fold. At times, I lamented the fact that I had changed so much… And yet, despite this prolonged depression, I emerged from my internal conflict a better person.
Admittedly, leaving religion left a large hole in my life. Previously, it had been filled with sermons, prayer, the bible, and other church related activities that had given me a deluded sense of spirituality. But I could never go back; the change that I had undergone was irreversible. And suddenly, this freedom from religion, which had shackled my mind for quite some time, was like a breath of clean, crisp air. I no longer turned to the bible to receive moral guidance. I no longer aligned my views with the dogma of Christian conservatism. Instead, every judgment I made was based on what made sense to me. It was up to humans to evaluate what was right and wrong, basing our judgments upon reason, logic, and science; not some god that didn’t exist. And that is pretty much how I turned to atheism, and secular humanism, although these labels deserve some elaboration to dispel preconceived notions about what it means to be an atheist or a secular humanist. (Of course that topic is to be reserved for another post.) What seems more immediately pertinent is the state of atheism today.
It seems that in the past decade, religion has been slowly losing its tight grip on American life. A 2011 Gallup Poll reveals that 71% of respondents, meant to represent the U.S. aggregate, believe that religion is losing its influence on American life. Contrast this with results from 2001 when 55% believed that religion was increasing its influence in the U.S., and you can see that we really have come a long way. This record high consensus represents an overall trend of a decline in religion, but other polls reveal that any such decline is very slow and very small. Again from Gallup, polling results from 2011 reveal that 9 in 10 Americans respond “yes” when asked if they believe in god. Of course when other alternatives were offered to respondents, 80% believe in God, 12% believe in a “universal spirit” (whatever that means), and 6% are atheist. All this goes to show that in the U.S., things aren’t looking very good for freethinkers, especially when another tally reveals that 40% of Americans believe in strict creationism, the notion in which God created humans in our present form, within the last 10,000 years or so.
Results from the aforementioned polls are very alarming, and one could draw the conclusion that in a room full of 10 average, randomly selected Americans: 8 people will believe in god, 1 person will believe in a universal spirit, while 4 of the 8 god followers will believe that man was formed by god in our present form about 6,000 years ago, and that woman descended from man’s rib. Another 3-4 of the 8 god believers will believe that humans evolved from less advanced species, but God guided the process, thus directlycontradicting their own scripture. And somewhere in that last 10th person in the room is the atheist, a very lonely atheist indeed.
