My first day as an atheist meme

I saw this at Kafir Girl and thought it was in interesting set of questions, even if nobody has tagged me (sniff).

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

I was at university and had a long debate with a Philosphy student friend in which I attempted to defend my belief at the time in a theist view that there was a prime mover god-type figure somewhere, albeit one which took no interest in what happened on Earth or anywhere else, or offered anybody eternal life. He asked the astute question why I believed this, since I had renounced any form of written or personal revelation on which to base it. By the next morning I had recognised that the belief was based on emotion not reason and I abandoned it; when I told him, I remember that he was surprised and impressed that I should actually alter my beliefs as a result of such a process.


Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Strangely enough, it was my confirmation (age 14). I had been going to church with my family for years without feeling that it applied to me; the course of confirmation classes had raised a series of moral conundrums without satisfactorily solving them (chief among them the purpose of pain and who goes to Heaven or Hell). But I was holding out in the expectation that once confirmed I would experience what otehr believers obviously did: some sense that there was something there that listened, and spoke to them. And after a grand service officiated at by a bishop I had thought, well, here goes. Nope, still nothing. It seemed obvious to me then that the whole structure was created by people, without any necessary input from God.


How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

Never, not even at the level of wishing.


Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Not at the time, although I find attempts to justify the Massacre of the Innocents make me cross now.


Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

Yes. I took the view that at least ghosts have a long and varied tradition of people seeing them and writing about them, and I was at that time open-minded about the limits of consciousness, so I was happy to entertain the possibility of telepathy. The critical point from my point of view was that ghosts made no claim to scriptural authority: if they existed, they existed. It was some time later that I shifted to the view that people believe they see ghosts rather than people see ghosts.


Do you want to be wrong?

No. We ought to live this life as if it is all there is, doing the best we can. There is no framework for another life which can accommodate the principles of mercy, justice and partial revelation to the living which redounds any credit to God.

Life isn't fair- and whose fault is that?

Update, 2009: the Cancer Baby blog has now been taken down, and people searching for it often end up here. What follows is wrote I wrote at the time of her death, and was a reaction to what I felt was mistaken rhetoric adopted by her virtual well-wishers which implied that they hadn't understood her stance.

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I have written before about Cancer, baby who faced the dark prospects of infertility, cancer and death with wit and honesty. For several months now she had been ominously silent, and has now died. And the world is poorer for it: we need sensible people who can write.

I have no great belief in the power of wishful thinking or blind optimism, but a lot of people do. If you read the Comments to her more harrowing posts you will see that there were many readers out there praying to God for her to recover (she knew her odds were bad). I guess they just didn't pray hard enough, or weren't good enough, or she had been too evil in some way (and more evil than all the other evil people who somehow wander around prospering and flagrantly unsmitten making everyone else's life worse), or (and this is the most revolting option), she died because He wanted her to, reducing her to some minion that can be sacrificed in pursuit of some greater aim. I do not believe that any ends can justify such means. "If you're suffering, it's because God wants you to" isn't really very comforting.

When people explain why prayers are not answered, they usually say something like "If people were given everything they asked for they would never learn responsibility for themselves". Oddly, they assume that people would automatically ask for things that benefit them directly. I saw on one blog someone tell the story of a discussion in the run-up to Christmas when a four-year-old was asked what they wanted as a present: the reply "that all the children in the world have clothes and enough to eat" put something of a damper on the consumer binge in the ensuing theological contortions. I know you could argue that such requests are in the end selfish because they would make the praying person feel better, but that is surely stetching it: you might as well say that God shouldn't make sunsets beautiful because people enjoy them.

None of this is news, of course. But it is so easy to respond to tragedy with formulations that seek some greater meaning or deny the reality of loss ("they're still out there somewhere", "they're smiling in Heaven": they are DEAD, they are GONE).

No. Shit happens, and happens all the time. It just does, not "Because..." or even "In spite of...". All you can do is hope that it doesn't happen to you for as long as possible, and accept, with whatever grace you can muster, that it eventually will.

And if Cancer Baby's sad and cruel end has helped hundreds of people realise this then she she did not suffer in vain. So that's all right then. No, it's not. The undertaking business really picked up after all the stockbrokers committed suicide in the Wall Street Crash, but even the undertakers would rather it hadn't.

It is hard for those who are suffering, and even harder for those who care for them, to cope with the idea that the suffering serves no purpose, that is is just stuff, that a night of pain was just a night of pain; it didn't purify or clarify or sanctify, it was just a bad experience that one would be better off not having had. But just because it's hard, that doesn't mean it's wrong. This isn't just what I believe- she did too. I'll miss her.

Update

As you can see below, my comment on Cancer Baby's blog has been criticised as insensitive. It wasn't my intention to cause any additional anguish to her family and friends, but rather to remind the large number of blog readers without any direct involvement of Cancer Baby's doctrine that one should face reality as it is rather than more comfortable illusion, in which she explicitly (and courageously) renounced heroism and victimhood. Perhaps the only thing that we can salvage from the trials of life is the determination to learn from them; it is a good thing to re-examine our core beliefs from time to time and to think hard about what they imply.

Having said that, I also recognise that there is a time and place for such debates, and there should be a choice about how one reacts, and that this was an error. I tried shortly after posting it, and again just now, to delete or edit my comment, but it appears to be indelible. Post in haste, repent at leisure.

Theology 101

The Garden of Eden story is strange, isn't it. I assume you have a copy of Genesis 3 to hand:

v3 God says to Eve "You musn't eat the fruit of the tree of life or you will die"
v4 The serpent says "You won't die if you do"

v22 God says he must send Man out of Eden "lest he eat of the tree of life and live for ever"

So God was wrong in v3 and the serpent was right- eating the fruit does NOT kill you, it makes you live for ever.

They say that lies make a poor basis for a relationship.

Wisdom

Zen Buddhism may not be the best religion, but it certainly has the best jokes.

These are from Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones:
Ikkyu, the Zen master, was very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique. Ikkyu happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. when the master appeared, Ikkyu asked: 'Why do people have to die?'
'This is natural,' explained the older man. 'Everything has to die and has just so long to live.'
Ikkyu, producing the shattered cup, added: 'It was time for your cup to die.'


Tanzan and Ekido were travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
'Come on, girl,' said Tansan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. then he no longer could restrain himself. 'We monks don't go near females,' he told Tanzan, 'especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?'
'I left the girl there,' said Tanzan. 'Are you still carrying her?'

Holy writ, Batman!

I don't, in general, like fundamentalism, but one thing about it you have to admire is its clarity: if the Quran says "adulterers must be stoned to death" or "thieves should have a hand chopped off", then that is what you do. No nonsense about 'understanding the criminal's environment', and 'we're all guilty', and 'who are we to say...'

I've been looking at Christian theodicy (the explanation of evil and suffering in a world created by God), in the course of which I've come across a wide range of readings of some of the more problematic incidents in the New Testament. My poem Collateral damage deals with one of these, the Massacre of the Innocents by King Herod, as described by Matthew (2 xv-xx).

This is a tough one to reconcile with a benevolent and merciful deity (as the poem implies). I was very surprised to come across the range of commentaries by Christians, which included:

1. It never happened. Matthew was wrong. He made it up because he wanted to demonstrate that Jewish prophecies were fulfilled.
2. As 1, except that Matthew was taking the prophecy as a symbol of a new covenant, not at face value.
3. It did happen, but shows that God can save the worthy (few) from the evil actions of Man (Herod).
4. It did happen, but was just one of those things. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. (I didn't actually read this one but it seemed implied by various references to the deliberate dropping of the incident from the Nativity story by the modern Church).

But the prize for muddled thinking goes to this argument: "The Bible is true, every word of it. Because it says so in the Bible"