How I got to be an atheist
posted by Silvana
THERE'S STILL TIME TO DONATE SO SYBIL'S COFFEE-SOAKED LAPTOP CAN BE REPLACED!(Bitch really wasn't lying about Sybil doing all the behind-the-scenes stuff, btw).
Since we're talking religion around here lately, I thought I'd tell my peculiar little religion origin story. I grew up in a multicultural household, with two parents who were both of minority religions for their respective cultures. My mother was raised by a Baptist and a Mormon. Together, her parents decided not to impose religion on their children. Their policy was that their kids could decide when they grew up. Accordingly, at age 17, my mother was baptized into the Mormon church and, when she graduated from high school, went off to Brigham Young University to study English Literature.
My father grew up in a big Catholic family in the 40s and 50s in Cairo, where Christians make up only 10% of the population and Catholics a small portion of that 10%. The number of Catholics is so small that few of my father's siblings could find another Catholic to marry, as was strongly indicated by their faith, and most ended up building a hybrid Orthodox-Catholic home. My dad went to Jesuit grammar school, and his mother was a deeply religious woman who went to mass multiple times per week until the end of her life. My dad, on the other hand, for much of his adult life, was something of a lapsed Catholic—although his beliefs hew very closely to doctrine, he told me he found the exclusivity a turn-off. He would always tell me that he didn't accept the notion that any one religion was the only pathway to salvation, and even now on his Facebook page he lists "tolerance of all creeds" as his religion. I find it endearing. At least during the times when I'm not arguing with him about gay marriage or abortion.
When my parents got married, because my mother was much more into her religion than my father was into his, and they didn't want to go the "choose your own religion" route that my mother's parents had gone, they decided to raise their kids in the Mormon church. Every week, we would go to Mormon services, and on Easter and Christmas, we would go to Catholic mass. I also went to countless Catholic weddings, baptisms, and first communions to see my relatives forge on in their religious development. I wasn't quite raise in two religions—I definitely identified as Mormon—but I certainly got a lot of experience with Catholicism.
I was a deeply, deeply religious child. My dad likes to tell a story about how at age 4, I was accidentally left behind in a Paris metro station. When my family rushed back to get me, they found me siting on a bench, happily singing church songs. I explained that I was just doing what my Sunday school teacher told me, which was to sing about how you love Jesus instead of being scared. I remember another day when I was 6—I got lost in a wooded area near our house, and I stopped and prayed long and hard for God to help me find my way. When I soon found a house where I could ask to use the telephone to call my mother, I was convinced that God had heard my plea.
I believed, more than anything, that God loved me boundlessly, and in the power of prayer. I would pray for everything from help finding a lost shoe to help saving my mother from cancer. I prayed every night and morning, I prayed before meals with my family (long and involved), I prayed when I was bored or scared or happy. I tried to always remember to pray to thank God for good things that happened to me, and not just when I wanted something.
When my mother became very sick, I prayed that she would die so she wouldn't be in pain anymore. My best friend told me I was going to hell for doing this. But the thought of my mother dying, though it made me very sad, didn't seem catastrophic because I believed with certainty that we would be reunited in heaven. And I wanted her to hurry up and get with Jesus, where I figured she was probably longing to be after all she'd been through. When adults gave me the sit-down talk about how my mother was going to die, I told them that I knew and that I was ready because she was going to be so happy in heaven.
It sounds fucked up when I put it that way, but I really don't know how I would have coped with her death, as a child, if I hadn't had that intensely strong belief. She died three days before my 7th birthday. I continued to believe just as strong as before, and I think I became something of a little-kid inspiration to the adults around me. I spent hours of my free time singing and playing religious music, and I would give impromptu speeches about the strength of my belief. In the Mormon church, the first Sabbath of every month is "testimony meeting," which is basically an open mic for people to testify to their belief in God and the church. Most were pretty boilerplate: "I'd like to give my testimony, that I know this church is true, and that I believe the Book of Mormon is the word of God..." etc. I would go up there and give long, involved explanations of the strength of my belief and the depth of my faith, and make people cry (and annoy my siblings). At 8 or 9.
I don't know when my faith started to waver, but I think it was around seventh grade, when the tenor of everything changed from "you are a beautiful and sweet special child that God adores" to "if you let boys kiss you, you are a bad bad person and God is very disappointed with you and you must pretend your body doesn't exist." I wasn't cool with shame, man. And, as I've so recently discussed, I was messing around with boys, and I did not like what my religion was telling me about what I was doing. In some ways, the strength of my faith fucked me. I truly believed that God was omnipotent, watching over my every move. I truly believed that my mother was looking down on me from heaven. And I really did not like the thought of the two of them watching me getting felt up by Nick, the kid a grade above me who smoked cigarettes. Not that it stopped me--it just made me feel bad and guilty.
A couple years later, I discovered feminism, and I started to get really pissed off. The fact that only men could hold the priesthood, and got to do all the cool stuff like bless the sacrament, and heal people, and make decisions and go on missions to spread the gospel really irked me. And then I found out that Mormons didn't even allow black men to be ordained to the priesthood until 1978. I started to wonder—how could this God that I loved so much create a church that was this messed up?
My sophomore year of high school, a dear friend of mine confessed to me that he had realized he was gay. I knew my church's stance on homosexuality, and given my new knowledge about my friend, I simply could no longer be a part of their ritual. I started faking that I was going--I would leave the house at 9 on the sabbath, and wander around town, or go sit at a coffee shop, until church was supposed to be over and then walk home. Eventually, my dad got tired of trying to convince me to go. Although my mother'd been dead a long time, my dad had taken up the task of raising us in the Mormon church, even though it wasn't his church. He firmly believed in the idea that religion was a part of your identity, that you should be raised in one and stick with it. And so over the years, when I have told him time and again that I want nothing to do with the Mormon church, he tries to convince me to go back, or at the very least, to find another Christian (and he emphasizes, it should be Christian) denomination I like better.
But the truth is, in the ten years since I found out my friend was gay, I've slowly lost my belief altogether. Part of the reason the belief appealed to me so much as a child was that it was comforting. It was a way to deal with the death of my mother, and it was source of self-esteem—I basked in the thought of how much God must love me. But as I get older, I want less and less to believe that peace can be found in the hereafter, and that I am special in the eyes of God. Instead, my personal creed that there is no hereafter means that we have to try and alleviate suffering now, that life is meant to be enjoyed by ALL and we can not stand idly by in the face of oppression. We can not wait for some merciful or kind God to bring us happiness and joy after we die--we must create our own happiness here, and help build a world where people do not kill each other and our institutions do not keep people afraid.
We have tried for over a thousand years, as a species, teaching people that killing people and holding others below yourself, and being indifferent to the suffering of others was wrong because God said so. I think we can firmly conclude that that strategy was a dismal failure. Instead, the zeal created by religious conviction has led people to hurt others in the name of God.
Many people have a moral center that resides in their religious upbringing. This leads other (stupid) people to claim that atheists must have no morals. I always find this funny, because my moral code, my sense of justice, fairness, and love, is what led me to repudiate religion, and my belief in God, in the first place.
I don't want a moral code that is based on what God or Jesus thinks or wants or demands. I want a human moral code that is based on love and fairness--on not leaving anyone behind, nor accepting that some people are just going to suffer in poverty or illness or pain. And I think God is a distraction from all that--a distraction from the responsibility we all hold toward one another to make this life a life of joy.
Since we're talking religion around here lately, I thought I'd tell my peculiar little religion origin story. I grew up in a multicultural household, with two parents who were both of minority religions for their respective cultures. My mother was raised by a Baptist and a Mormon. Together, her parents decided not to impose religion on their children. Their policy was that their kids could decide when they grew up. Accordingly, at age 17, my mother was baptized into the Mormon church and, when she graduated from high school, went off to Brigham Young University to study English Literature. My father grew up in a big Catholic family in the 40s and 50s in Cairo, where Christians make up only 10% of the population and Catholics a small portion of that 10%. The number of Catholics is so small that few of my father's siblings could find another Catholic to marry, as was strongly indicated by their faith, and most ended up building a hybrid Orthodox-Catholic home. My dad went to Jesuit grammar school, and his mother was a deeply religious woman who went to mass multiple times per week until the end of her life. My dad, on the other hand, for much of his adult life, was something of a lapsed Catholic—although his beliefs hew very closely to doctrine, he told me he found the exclusivity a turn-off. He would always tell me that he didn't accept the notion that any one religion was the only pathway to salvation, and even now on his Facebook page he lists "tolerance of all creeds" as his religion. I find it endearing. At least during the times when I'm not arguing with him about gay marriage or abortion.
When my parents got married, because my mother was much more into her religion than my father was into his, and they didn't want to go the "choose your own religion" route that my mother's parents had gone, they decided to raise their kids in the Mormon church. Every week, we would go to Mormon services, and on Easter and Christmas, we would go to Catholic mass. I also went to countless Catholic weddings, baptisms, and first communions to see my relatives forge on in their religious development. I wasn't quite raise in two religions—I definitely identified as Mormon—but I certainly got a lot of experience with Catholicism.
I was a deeply, deeply religious child. My dad likes to tell a story about how at age 4, I was accidentally left behind in a Paris metro station. When my family rushed back to get me, they found me siting on a bench, happily singing church songs. I explained that I was just doing what my Sunday school teacher told me, which was to sing about how you love Jesus instead of being scared. I remember another day when I was 6—I got lost in a wooded area near our house, and I stopped and prayed long and hard for God to help me find my way. When I soon found a house where I could ask to use the telephone to call my mother, I was convinced that God had heard my plea.
I believed, more than anything, that God loved me boundlessly, and in the power of prayer. I would pray for everything from help finding a lost shoe to help saving my mother from cancer. I prayed every night and morning, I prayed before meals with my family (long and involved), I prayed when I was bored or scared or happy. I tried to always remember to pray to thank God for good things that happened to me, and not just when I wanted something.
When my mother became very sick, I prayed that she would die so she wouldn't be in pain anymore. My best friend told me I was going to hell for doing this. But the thought of my mother dying, though it made me very sad, didn't seem catastrophic because I believed with certainty that we would be reunited in heaven. And I wanted her to hurry up and get with Jesus, where I figured she was probably longing to be after all she'd been through. When adults gave me the sit-down talk about how my mother was going to die, I told them that I knew and that I was ready because she was going to be so happy in heaven.
It sounds fucked up when I put it that way, but I really don't know how I would have coped with her death, as a child, if I hadn't had that intensely strong belief. She died three days before my 7th birthday. I continued to believe just as strong as before, and I think I became something of a little-kid inspiration to the adults around me. I spent hours of my free time singing and playing religious music, and I would give impromptu speeches about the strength of my belief. In the Mormon church, the first Sabbath of every month is "testimony meeting," which is basically an open mic for people to testify to their belief in God and the church. Most were pretty boilerplate: "I'd like to give my testimony, that I know this church is true, and that I believe the Book of Mormon is the word of God..." etc. I would go up there and give long, involved explanations of the strength of my belief and the depth of my faith, and make people cry (and annoy my siblings). At 8 or 9.
I don't know when my faith started to waver, but I think it was around seventh grade, when the tenor of everything changed from "you are a beautiful and sweet special child that God adores" to "if you let boys kiss you, you are a bad bad person and God is very disappointed with you and you must pretend your body doesn't exist." I wasn't cool with shame, man. And, as I've so recently discussed, I was messing around with boys, and I did not like what my religion was telling me about what I was doing. In some ways, the strength of my faith fucked me. I truly believed that God was omnipotent, watching over my every move. I truly believed that my mother was looking down on me from heaven. And I really did not like the thought of the two of them watching me getting felt up by Nick, the kid a grade above me who smoked cigarettes. Not that it stopped me--it just made me feel bad and guilty.
A couple years later, I discovered feminism, and I started to get really pissed off. The fact that only men could hold the priesthood, and got to do all the cool stuff like bless the sacrament, and heal people, and make decisions and go on missions to spread the gospel really irked me. And then I found out that Mormons didn't even allow black men to be ordained to the priesthood until 1978. I started to wonder—how could this God that I loved so much create a church that was this messed up?
My sophomore year of high school, a dear friend of mine confessed to me that he had realized he was gay. I knew my church's stance on homosexuality, and given my new knowledge about my friend, I simply could no longer be a part of their ritual. I started faking that I was going--I would leave the house at 9 on the sabbath, and wander around town, or go sit at a coffee shop, until church was supposed to be over and then walk home. Eventually, my dad got tired of trying to convince me to go. Although my mother'd been dead a long time, my dad had taken up the task of raising us in the Mormon church, even though it wasn't his church. He firmly believed in the idea that religion was a part of your identity, that you should be raised in one and stick with it. And so over the years, when I have told him time and again that I want nothing to do with the Mormon church, he tries to convince me to go back, or at the very least, to find another Christian (and he emphasizes, it should be Christian) denomination I like better.
But the truth is, in the ten years since I found out my friend was gay, I've slowly lost my belief altogether. Part of the reason the belief appealed to me so much as a child was that it was comforting. It was a way to deal with the death of my mother, and it was source of self-esteem—I basked in the thought of how much God must love me. But as I get older, I want less and less to believe that peace can be found in the hereafter, and that I am special in the eyes of God. Instead, my personal creed that there is no hereafter means that we have to try and alleviate suffering now, that life is meant to be enjoyed by ALL and we can not stand idly by in the face of oppression. We can not wait for some merciful or kind God to bring us happiness and joy after we die--we must create our own happiness here, and help build a world where people do not kill each other and our institutions do not keep people afraid.
We have tried for over a thousand years, as a species, teaching people that killing people and holding others below yourself, and being indifferent to the suffering of others was wrong because God said so. I think we can firmly conclude that that strategy was a dismal failure. Instead, the zeal created by religious conviction has led people to hurt others in the name of God.
Many people have a moral center that resides in their religious upbringing. This leads other (stupid) people to claim that atheists must have no morals. I always find this funny, because my moral code, my sense of justice, fairness, and love, is what led me to repudiate religion, and my belief in God, in the first place.
I don't want a moral code that is based on what God or Jesus thinks or wants or demands. I want a human moral code that is based on love and fairness--on not leaving anyone behind, nor accepting that some people are just going to suffer in poverty or illness or pain. And I think God is a distraction from all that--a distraction from the responsibility we all hold toward one another to make this life a life of joy.
Labels: deep thoughts, faith, m. leblanc, religion
Posted at 10:01 AM
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