BRiaN S. KeNDiG

Tens of thousands of years ago, humans didn't have any idea how the world around them worked, and this frightened them. They assumed that the things which happened to them were the result of intelligent forces rather than just blind luck. This made daily life easier to deal with, by giving people imaginary "good" and "evil" beings to praise or blame for their fates. (It's human nature to personify things. How many times have you complained at your car or your computer because it wasn't working like you wanted it to?)

Some people were viewed as having more influence over these mystic and unseen forces than others: if Unk dances in just this way, the rains come, which means that he is obviously pleasing the rain god. So Unk becomes a shaman, and he teaches other people his ways, and they taught other people, and the population chose shamans to become their leaders in mystical matters, and shamans became priests, and the role eventually became firmly cemented in society, because people found that it's much easier and cozier to believe that you can enjoy a good life by doing what you're told than it is to believe that the universe has no inherent sense of justice and mercy.

Complex religions developed. Some good came of them: they helped set up a workable system or morality and justice, they gave individuals and cultures a well-defined absolute scale of right and wrong to live by. Some bad came of them: wars were fought, people were tortured and died because of disputes over the interpretation of a few words.

And so it continues today, with majority percentages of the world's population observing various forms of organized religion, with some countries very strongly equating the religiousness of someone with their morality, and with other countries long-bloodied through strife between various religious factions. All this despite the fact that science continues to illuminate unknowns that had previously been thought to be solely the domain of a deity or deities, with no signs yet of running out of steam.

Unk would have been proud.

I am an atheist.

I'm not going to try to prove to you that God doesn't exist, because for every bit of evidence you can come up with supporting the existence of God, I'll bet I can come up with equally-valid evidence supporting Santa Claus, and we could talk in circles about it for weeks.

I'm also not going to try to tell you that what you believe is wrong. If you've had a personal experience which proves to you that God is active in your life, if you've had a personal revelation from God herself, then I have no interest in trying to change your mind. I have nothing but respect for people who have a reason to believe what they believe.

However, I can tell you why I'm not a True Believer (tm).

Why I stopped believing (or, The Magic Feather)

I used to be a very devout Christian. But there came a time in my life when it seemed that the whole world was against me, and I needed God more than anything. I prayed long and hard, I kept God in my mind and in my heart, I turned the other cheek and forgave my enemies for they knew not what they did, I opened myself to let God's will for me be done, and guess what happened?

Things got worse.

Worse yet, I began to feel that God was ignoring me. The more I turned the other cheek, the more my enemies would find me an easy target, and I had no sense that God was paying any attention to my prayers. I felt alone and forsaken, and unlike Jesus or Job, I didn't see any light at the end of my tunnel. I couldn't live like this, so one day (after praying for forgiveness) I took matters into my own hands and stood up for myself.

Things got better.

This astounded and puzzled me. Wasn't God supposed to reward the meek and punish the proud? But it worked, and it was the only way out of my dilemma, so I took it. I fought back. My enemies backed off. I won the much-needed respect of my peers. Maybe fighting for myself wasn't what Jesus would have wanted, but it was a heck of a lot better than giving up on myself.

I did a lot of soul-searching at this point. I still believed in God, but I began questioning exactly what that belief meant and what supported it in everyday life. I came up empty-handed -- everything I knew about God and about how he interacts with us, I had learned by being told by other people. I couldn't point to a single instance where God had ever taught me about himself, much less given me any reassurance that he was really out there.

I remember well one day on the steps of a Catholic chapel when I asked God to set me free, to let me experience the world on my own, to stop delivering me from evil and testing my faith. No responsible father shelters his children all their lives, right? It was time for me to experience what the world really was, to fend for myself, so I could see just how futile my own feeble strength was and how much I really did need God to watch over me, if that were indeed the case. I reached out to God one last time, bridging the gap halfway, ready to turn back if I sensed him reaching out to me in return.

Nothing happened.

And that was that.

I stopped going to church -- I still believed enough for a while that for me to go would have been hypocritical, if you can understand that. But otherwise, nothing changed. My life wasn't any more or less difficult now that I had taken complete responsibility for my own life. In fact, maybe it was a little bit better now that I started feeling good about my own successes rather than humbly "giving glory to God" as I had been taught -- after all, either my successes were entirely due to my own merits now, or else God was still behind me but he was being careful to look like he wasn't there, and I really didn't think the latter was the case. Meanwhile, I found that even the bad times weren't as hard to handle if I stopped thinking about them as trials from God designed to test my endurance.

As I learned to take responsibility for my own successes and failures and not attribute them to "God helped me" or "God is testing me", I became more confident of myself. I felt better about myself, and I was able to share my happiness with people around me, too.

I spent a lot of time thinking about my experiences and my journey away from God. I eventually came to realize that God to me had been like the Magic Feather that Dumbo the Elephant learned to fly with: it was something easy to believe in, and I believed that it was the sole source of all my abilities and that I was worthless without it, but it took a dire situation to make me break my dependence on it and realize that it wasn't God who was using me as a puppet to accomplish great things -- it's been me all along!

It's been a decade and a half since I stopped believing in God. I have never had any reason to have second thoughts.

Why I still don't believe (or, Digging For God)

A friend of mine didn't understand how I could be an atheist. "It's like I'm pointing to a big X on the ground and telling you there's a huge pot of gold buried there," he says, "but you keep coming up with excuses and you won't even try to dig!"

I extended the analogy by metaphorically pointing to the dozens of other deep holes I've dug where dozens of other people have told me I have a definite, 100% certain chance of finding gold if I were but to dig just a little bit deeper...

There comes a time when I've got to accept that either there really is no gold there or else I'm just not capable of finding it on my own. In either case, there is no sense for me to dig any more holes without a darned good reason.

So before you give me all of the incontrovertable proof that your God must undeniably exist, keep in mind that I've heard it all before about the Christian God, the Jewish God, the Earth Mother, Allah, and many others.

What would make me believe (or, The Hand of Brian)

Let's say a man catches me as I'm on the way to my car after work, and he says, "Hello, Brian. Remember how you injured your hand many years ago and it never fully healed quite right? Well, if you'll check now, I think you'll find that it's good as new. If I'm right about this, then I'm probably also right that you have a lot of questions for me."

You can bet I would clear off my evening schedule for this person and listen hard to anything he had to say.

Further reading

The Secular Web is a wonderful source of information that explains what it means to be an atheist. Many common questions are answered there in a gentle, helpful form. Unlike many religions which actively try to sell their beliefs, atheists rarely feel the need to "convert" people, so this site provides a lot of well-reasoned information in a simple and direct fashion without cutting on any specific belief systems.

I especially enjoy the Introduction to Atheism at that site. I strongly recommend that anyone who's unclear as to what atheism is and means should read this. It ends with a summary of some of the fundamental messgaes of atheism:

• There is more to moral behaviour than mindlessly following rules.
• Be especially sceptical of positive claims.
• If you want your life to have some sort of meaning, it's up to you to find it.
• Search for what is true, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
• Make the most of your life, as it's probably the only one you'll have.
• It's no good relying on some external power to change you; you must change yourself.
• Just because something's popular doesn't mean it's good.
• If you must assume something, assume something easy to test.
• Don't believe things just because you want them to be true.

and finally (and most importantly):

• All beliefs should be open to question.