Andrew Manderson
There you have it folks, I am officially an atheist.
It’s taken me a long time of bouncing between this and agnosticism.
The thing is, the proper term for what I believe does not exist. It’s
between the two. I am fully aware of the fallacy of being certain of
something I cannot possibly know - on a philosophical level it is very
weak to close my ears to all unknowns. It *does* take faith do be a
true atheist, and this does not chime with my ways of only accepting
things that have proof. However, for all intents and purposes, the
term best expresses my beliefs to the Everyman. I mean to convey that
I do not believe in any deity man has ever come up with or heard of,
and think that the possibility of any God can only be attributed to
man’s imagination, and is therefore not true.
Before anyone pounces on me, please understand that I could never
justify this way of thinking in one sitting. It’s doable, but a long
haul. This has not been a snap decision nor a lazy one.
That said, I have no idea what caused the creation of our universe, I
have no idea what caused the Big Bang. Nonetheless, I think that the
impossibility of disproving God, the reason why I’m told agnosticism
is the way to go, is the same as the impossibility of disproving the
Flying Spaghetti Monster, Russell’s Teapot. or Zeus for that matter.
Therefore I am now comfortable with my new religious standing.
Simply put: I’m an atheist to any God anybody is likely to be
referring to in any conversation I’ll be having within my lifetime.
I grew up a Catholic. I went to Church with my mother and sister
nearly every Sunday. I went to catechism, did my first communion and
was confirmed in grade 7. I was pretty comfortable believing what I
did. I remember sometimes crying at church, the good kind, from
feeling that sense of awe at the thought of a loving supreme God
taking care of me. I was terrified yet lovingly submissive to God at
the same time. I also remember, late in high school, being angry with
my sister who stopped going to mass with my mother and I. Around that
point, I found the Church itself pretty much useless, other than being
a medium for worshipers to gather. I found it to be a waste when we
could/should all just worship on our own, in our own personal
relationship with God. But it really hurt my mother to hear me say
that, so I’d still go with her.
Come our high school graduation, I carried the cross to the altar for
our special graduation mass. At this time I was asking myself things
like: “Is Satan really bad? If he’s bad, then why is he the one in
charge for punishing the bad people in Hell?” I’m sure any aspiring
theologian out there can answer questions like these, given the
complexity of scripture (and rightfully so), but suffice to say that I
was questioning some things, whether right or wrong.
Come university, I was really starting to rebel against the Church
itself, as an establishment. I was learning of the atrocities caused
by decisions at the Vatican (late to learn, I know), and found myself
to call bull on a lot of local priests. I was still a believer in God
though. I went off on a “personal relationship with Him” path. To me
this was the obvious choice, but I only had one argument: The love I
feel for others, the sadness I experience, life and consciousness, the
beauty and perfection of our existence, the fact that anything existed
in the first place, was reason enough to believe in God. For me that
was good enough. I respected people of all faiths, figuring that God
was benevolent enough to understand that we were born in different
cultures, in different traditions, and the He would see we still loved
Him, though we gave Him different names.
From here onward, I am fuzzy on dates. I’d say that the next thing
that happened to me was when I first took part in an
evolution/creation debate. I had never believed in creation. I just
figured God was responsible for the Big Bang, and that He put it it
differently in scripture so that the people of yesteryear would be
able to digest it (try telling someone who thinks the world is flat
about cosmic microwave background radiation, good luck). During these
evolution debates, I found that many atheists and religious people,
Christians in most cases, to be so one-sided in their arguments. A
typical discussion I’d overhear:
Atheist: We’ve evolved from monkeys.
Christian: No we haven’t! God created the world 6000 years ago!
Atheist: That’s ridiculous, you are obviously retarded. There’s
evidence to support my claim.
Christian: It’s so obvious! God is right in front of you and you
refuse to see Him! Besides, I know of some biologists who believe in
creation as stated in the Bible.
Atheist: You’re a total moron.
Christian: Your loss. At least I’m not going to burn in Hell.
Frankly, I was annoyed by this. These people I was overhearing were
giving both sides of the argument bad names. It was like watching
kids cover their ears and scream “LALALALALA!”. It was here that I
started noticing that the people around me, like my parents, friends
and peers were just passing along what they were told, and could very
well be wrong. I was calling bullshit on people close to me for the
first time of my life…
I stopped going to Church altogether by this time, to my mother’s
disappointment. I felt guilty, too. I think the next big part was
when I moved to Western Canada, which is basically the Canadian Bible
Belt, in the summer of 2006. I had no idea what I was in for, but it
all started when my housemate, Amie, shouted to my other housemate
Alana, who was somewhere else in the house: “Alana! Have you seen my
Bible?” All I could think of was “Your what!?” I was stunned to hear
her say this. I had never, never heard of anyone searching for their
Bible for casual use, let alone a girl *my age*. She saw this in my
stunned face, smiled at me and went off to…Bible Study!?
So began my introduction to a version of Christianity I never thought
really existed, practicing baptists who did not even believe in
evolution. I thought most church-goers nowadays were just like me.
Was I ever wrong. I remember having long conversations with my
friends there about religion, sex, marriage, society, evolution and
pretty much anything else. I found them to be so…old fashioned? I
had a hard time, at first, because I knew these people were not
stupid, most of them had completed graduate studies in engineering, or
other professional degrees. I started to feel like they believed in
Jesus in the same way I believed in Santa Claus, in the sense that
they know their conclusion (Jesus is their saviour), and then they’d
cherry-pick between anecdotes and what they would see as common sense
to support their conclusion.
When we spoke of more religious stuff, I found myself to really
disagree with them, or not understand their explanations. For
example, I ask about the “Free Will vs. God is omniscient” thing.
Their explanation sounded fair at first - it’s like being a parent
(God) and telling your kid (humans) to wear a helmet when he’s out on
his bicycle, but you know he won’t wear it. But then I’d go and ask
why God made Eve, because he would have known that she would eat the
apple long before There Was Light. Was this some kind of sick joke so
God could entertain himself? Then they’d just laugh off my ‘foolish’
statement and carry on. But this was important! I had just found
something that should shake their entire belief and they just laughed
at me! What about the millions more people who pray and still get
slaughtered in wars? I wanted answers!
This is when I started noticing social patterns, how we are products
of our environments, how our parents raise us, etc. Soon I would
think that most people believe in God because they were either 1)
Afraid of death/infinity 2) Surrounded by their religion while growing
up and never allowed their faith to be adequately challenged. I
noticed how people hated to stray from their biases, including myself.
I went to church with them once in a while and I spoke to the pastors
a couple of times. I remember one conversation I had with the pastor
in the church I went to in Edmonton. I briefly gave him my background
and told him how much I wanted to believe in God, but that my faith
was really being shook up. I was looking hard. Because I’ll admit to
you right now that my greatest fear is death; and if this was my
ticket to a happy eternal afterlife, I wanted in.
I asked about the circular reasoning in the Bible. His response was
that I needed faith. Well frig, that’s quite the leap. For me to
believe in something that easily, I may as well have faith that the
moon was made of cheese. Again, I’m sure a theologian would be
chiming in here at any moment explaining it all, only to be countered
by a militant atheist. I learned that no matter what side of the
argument, you’ll have experts who dedicated their lives to the study
their side (which is still cool).
But this whole staving off of my questions was getting to me.
Therefore, I was slowly trickling into agnosticism. I had much more,
pardon the term, faith, in the scientific method then the answers
presented to me up to then. I was pretty much screaming to the world:
“Will someone PLEASE prove to me that God is real? I really friggin’
want to believe in Him!”. So I did that for about a year. I started
to really question how people had come to believe whatever they did,
and noticed that nobody challenged what they were used to knowing.
Nobody asked “why?”, nobody questioned authority. But I still wasn’t
happy that I could not actually disprove God’s existence. I’d tel
myself that I could not know better, I didn’t live 2000 years ago and
I have not had the chance to see whether he walked on water or not.
This is when I met a girl I will call Deb. Wow, right in the middle
of my “questioning everything” phase, I met this wonderful, cheerful,
intelligent and beautiful girl who just so happened to be a Baptist,
who’s father is a pastor, no less! I fell head over heels for this
girl, and was very OK with her faith, knowing full well that there
would probably be no sex whatsoever. I didn’t care. It didn’t take
long, however, before her parents had a lunch meeting with her and I,
telling me about their concerns of their daughter dating a
non-Christian. I told them how I stood (searching for God/Open to His
existence but not yet convinced). They seemed to be okay with it. By
this time I was going to Church with Deb on a regular basis. I’d find
myself hearing some things the pastor would say, and fight off urges
to scream “thats not true!”. I didn’t want to be like the people I
saw arguing at university, so I’d make a conscious effort to put my
bias aside.
After a few months, I had decided that I disagreed with mostly
everything Deb believed in. This was *really* tough, because she
really loved God, yet we both really wanted to be together. I’ll be
honest, after hearing a guest speaker at her church shun gays and tout
creationism saying “…and you have these scientists…they say they
have a ‘Ph.D.’ Who cares?! A doctorate is worthless in God’s eyes!”
I remember looking to the side and watching Deb nod in agreement with
him. I think this was more of a reflex on her part, because I know
she is more of a theistic evolutionist than anything else. I would
recall when she’d tell me about her summer jobs at a Bible camp,
building an obstacle course for the kids, and calling the game
“Running away from persecution”. Well that just took the fucking
cake. This is when we (first) ended things.
She had been the single most influential person in my life when it
comes to making me want to believe in God. I loved her and wanted it
to work out between us. Predictably, our polarized groundings split
us up. Since then, we’ve modified our own opinions on matters of
faith. She’s become more open to the possibility of questioning
things, and I have come to accept that I should not judge people for
their beliefs, I try not to be angry at believers and I understand
that they just don’t understand the groundings of science. To this
day, she is still one of my best friends.
By then I had lost most hope for God’s existence, choosing to believe
that religious people are doing nothing less than upholding tradition,
doing what’s comfortable for themselves, and warping their world view
in order to accommodate God - instead of doing it the other way
around. I decided to extend this to all major religions. I was
officially an agnostic, citing that I didn’t know anything, but that
nobody else did either. For some reason, I still believed in the
strong possibility of a human-type figure, with love and compassion
possibly creating everything. I obviously hadn’t heard of Occam’s
Razor by then. I was convinced that consciousness and emotion was
little more than dopamine and various other molecules milling about in
my brain.
Then came a second summer in Lloydminster. My beliefs were pretty
much solidified then, but only then did I ponder the *statistical
probabilities* of God. This is when I discovered Russell’s Teapot,
and started to really read up on atheism. I think the toughest part
of all this was trying to maintain a level of open-mindedness while
becoming more and more certain of my beliefs. I had made up my mind,
yet remained open to any new facts that would change it.
Also, my interest in astronomy has impacted me a lot. I’m realizing
that I can’t even come close to being close to being able to imagine
the complexity of our universe…let alone our galaxy or even my teeny
tiny planet. Taking my cue from Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’, I’m
realizing how insignificant we are, and that daring to suppose
knowledge of how the entire universe was created is not only extremely
naïve, it’s just extremely ignorant. I think this is my greatest
argument for my belief in the improbability of anything that man has
come up with.
So here I am, now making the quantum leap to de facto atheism. I
really wish I could share all the conversations I’ve had, all the
good/bad things I’ve read (there are just as many dumb atheists as
smart ones). I wish I could enumerate all the questions that are
still inadequately answered. I think this is a fair introduction to
how I have to to where I now stand. Please understand that this is
but only a small part of why I think the way I do, and that it would
take me much, much longer to justify each of my opinions.
It’s been fun to try to recount what I’ve been through. Thank you for reading.
[ratings]
