What kind of an atheist am I? Well, the skeptical kind, with a bit of bitter, angry residue at the bottom of the glass.
The skepticism came first, and is the strongest, most enduring element. I always question things, including what I’m taught in school, and what I see on the news. I always will. In my late teens I started questioning why an all-powerful deity would condemn people to eternal Hell just for failing to believe what some guy in a frock and some dead people in a book were telling me, especially when the stories I was being told were so, well, unbelievable, and when there were equally implausible stories being told in other places by other religions. Most people just grow up believing whatever their parents believe, and have no real reason to run off and embrace another faith just because that faith says you should. And if you don’t, you’ll burn in Hell for all eternity? Git out!
I simply could not bring myself to believe that a benevolent deity would so punish people. Certainly there are lots of other, more attractive deities to choose from, no?
Nor could I understand why I would be born with any sin, just because some long-dead woman in a Jewish creation myth offered an apple to some long-dead dude. WTF? And why should the execution of some ancient rabble-rouser in a far-off land, if he really existed, have any bearing whatsoever on my life? Why should we believe that this particular person’s claim to be a messiah or to be divine has any more legitimacy than any of the other countless such claims throughout history?
More importantly, I couldn’t accept that I was REQUIRED by my parents to buy into that, and was faced with a certain degree of ostracism in my society if I didn’t. (How many atheists do you see getting elected to office in the U.S., after all?) It left me speechless. As did the historical sins of the Church, such as war (the Crusades), torture (the Inquisition), murder, corruption, abuse of power, and recently, child abuse en masse, for which sins I think a few more messiahs will need to die in order to make it all even.
And then there were the other guys in frocks telling conflicting stories. How is a person to choose which to believe, and why would a god, having failed to show up in person or answer any of my prayers anyway, punish me for not believing this one or that one? Why would my parents’ faith automatically be the right one and other people’s parents be wrong, when neither story was remotely plausible anyway? And why would such a deity crave our belief, our worship, our saccharine adoration? An omnipotent being doesn’t need insignificant little me groveling at its feet. It didn’t make sense. Not at all. Nor did pleas to simply open my heart or believe blindly or stop questioning. No, God, if there is a creator God, gave me a brain and logic and healthy skepticism for a reason, and I’m not going to waste these gifts.
I also didn’t think that a deity worth worshipping or an organized religion worth following would have literature with such flagrant internal contradictions and objectionable content, nor would they treat women as inferior, as the Catholic Church does. (How many priests, bishops, cardinals and popes are female?) And what’s with all this guilt and sin crap? The message was far too negative to accept.
Then there is the problem of how religion was in fact being forced upon me by my parents; I wasn’t being given the choice of whether to believe or not, or whether to attend mass or not. That offended and angered me. I rebelled against it, and it caused a deep split in my family, and several decades of conflict have followed, because they can’t respect my own choice of what to believe. I observed how the societies I grew up in also force religion upon you, printing it on the supposedly secular nation’s money, and making the kids recite it in pledges of allegiance, banning liquor sales on their holy day in some areas, and so on. And I grew angrier. And look at how the Catholic church bans contraception, as Surly pointed out today elsewhere, so as to inflate its own ranks and ensure its own prosperity, at the expense of its followers, who will continue to suffer lower standards of living due to excessively large families, overcrowding, pollution and so on. And look how other religions and perversions thereof have fomented religious conflict and terrorism around the globe.
So now I’m a bitter, angry skeptic – one who tries to respect the fact that, for many, including all my family members and many of my friends, faith is an important part of their personal lives, and who understands that it can sometimes be a positive force for good, but one who is furious at the way far too many religious people try to shove their beliefs down everyone’s throats, and at the way America is so deeply prejudiced against rationality and skepticism. Look at the way science and evolution are treated, and the fact that politicians are forced to profess their faith or they won’t have any chance of getting elected. In a supposedly secular society, that’s plain wrong!
I might have continued to believe, had I grown up in another faith, another family, another country. But I doubt it, as I’m just too fundamentally skeptical. More likely, I would have still become a nonbeliever, but perhaps not such a hard atheist, and quite likely not such a bitter, angry one.
