Evangelical Atheism
by JBEZL
Aug. 06, 2008 12:34

Several hundred blog entries attest to the fact that I'm not overly preachy with regard to the things I don't believe in. Indeed, only a few of my posts even touch on atheism.

I prefer to spend way more time talking about the things I do believe in, such as individual liberty, capitalism and reason.

From time to time, it becomes necessary to straighten things out, to remind folks where I stand and to correct certain misconceptions. In other words, I'm prone to infrequent bouts of Evangelical Atheism.

Let's begin at the beginning.

I realized I'd been duped at about age 21. Until then, I was raised as a Baptist Christian although I've never been baptized.

I didn't quit believing because I was "angry with God" or because something "bad" happened to me in college. It also isn't a result of me needing a belief system that provided me with more license to behave badly. It wasn't due to an influence of unbelieving friends and peers. In fact, I have never met another atheist in person other than my wife. My friends in college were into "Gaia" or Buddhism or they were just backslidden Christians, Catholics, etc. But all of them were religionists to some degree and they all believed in the supernatural.

I have to admit now I don't have the faintest idea what the term supernatural even means. I'm not being cute. The word honestly makes no sense to me.

My atheism is a result primarily of reading books about philosophy and reason. It came from reading Ayn Rand's discussions of the Primacy of Existence vs. the Primacy of Consciousness. It came from lengthy periods of introspection during which I asked myself precisely what I knew and what I didn't know. I was determined at the outset to follow reason, a faculty I had always believed to be a God-given characteristic that made humans unique. The more I read, and the more I persevered with honest (and at times, scary) personal reflection, I came to the realization that I knew nothing of God, had never seen him or heard him, had no knowledge of life after death or heaven or hell.

In short, there was a jaw-dropping moment when I said to myself, "Oh, crap, I can't be a Christian anymore." You see, I didn't set out to disprove God. I set out to read books about individual liberty and reason and capitalism. I set out to ground my conservative political views in a philosophy of reason so that I could bolster my arguments and know they were tenable all the way to their roots. Imagine my surprise when I found that the roots of reason didn't leave room for supernaturalism.

There were some bargaining moments during which I toyed with the idea of remaining Christian, just like a mild Christian. I imagined being a Christian who doesn't speak ill of the church, who attends church from time to time, but who knows deep down that something isn't right.

I did a mental test drive of my life in a Pascal's Wager sort of paradigm, in which I'd remain a Christian because, hey, if I'm wrong there could be a big after-death bonus. Plus, I knew plenty of Christians who were plenty reasonable 86% of the time (Monday through Saturday). My father, for instance has always been an inspiring bastion of reason. And he's severely logical. Eighty-six percent of the time.

My honesty prevailed. And I knew I could not live with myself pretending not to know what I knew, even if I remained perfectly logical 86% of the time.

That began a painful 6-month period during which I knew I was atheist, but was terrified to tell my devout family (all of whom are pillars in the local church). Hiding the secret began to make me physically ill. I once went to the ER with severe ulcer-like stomach pains. Being honest with myself had been difficult enough. Being honest with my family proved nearly impossible. But when I broke the news, I immediately began feeling better. My family were not happy, but they were accepting in a way that made me think they assumed it was a phase. I couldn't blame them for thinking so.

Ten years later, it appears not to be a phase. I learn more and more about this life every day, and I have never encountered any serious reasons to rejoin the Christian ranks.

Relatives send me a fair amount of information about Christianity, emails, videos, etc. And lately I've noticed it's quite popular to come at the process of converting people to Christianity by way of physics. And while the broad questions of the physics of the universe are fascinating and at times mind-boggling, it's not the effective recruiting tool it aims to be. Not for me, at least.

These schemes usually start out mentioning some amazing fact about life in the universe: that the probability of life forming spontaneously is equal to the probability of a tornado whipping through a junk-yard and building a Boeing 747, or that if the Earth were barely closer to the sun, we'd boil, if it were barely further away, we'd freeze, or that there are some amazing facts about atoms that presuppose some "fine tuning" by an intelligent being, etc., etc.

I always find myself fascinated by the arguments insofar as the science they discuss is fascinating. In fact, the grand questions about the nature of the universe always catch my attention and I find myself rapt in the speaker's pitch.

I'm listening, saying to myself, what an amazing universe we live in. I'm engaged.

Soon enough, the conversation devolves. The believer, having quoted some interesting facts about the universe and having posited in the abstract that a "supernatural" intelligence is responsible, makes the embarrassing, ridiculous claim to all sorts of very specific information about this being. And further, he'll aim to convince you that he knows how to gain the being's favor through worship, and how surely to anger him by engaging in jealousy, pre-marital sex, selfishness, swearing and so forth.

I feel like a shy teenage girl fending off her too-forward boyfriend. It's all moving too fast for me. A minute ago we were talking about the laws of thermodynamics as they pertain to intelligent design and all of a sudden there's communion and only-begotten sons, old and new covenants, baptism, and a Trinity.

And the more specific it gets, the more blury and bizarre it all becomes. There's the God of Abraham, presiding over the earth but leaving "free will" intact, interfering among the affairs of men, but not so much as to determine their lives completely (otherwise it would be his fault that so-and-so went to hell). In short, there's a recluse God of love demanding blind faith, omnipotent but allowing horrible atrocities, delivering his Word in a not-well-agreed-upon cannon of books that are copies of copies compiled into an often contradictory tome that may or may not be literally interpreted. And the Word reveals we're fundamentally flawed, bound to blow it, but commanded not to blow it.

And the wages of sin is death.

There's a get-out-of-jail free card with several variations that become more specific and more complex.

And what started out so innocently as an invitation from a Christian to look upon the starry sky and dare to believe it all happened by chance has gotten very weird in a hurry.

I don't know how the Earth came to be, exactly. As my wife says, "I wasn't there." I do know that existence exists, that existence implies identity, that identity refers to an existent's nature, that man's nature is that of being the "rational animal," and that you must use reason in any attempt to refute reason.

I don't deny a God who looks me in the eyes and tells me he loves me. I abstain from a grown-up game of staving off the fear of death.

Edited Aug. 07, 2008 14:18