Beyond Belief

[mostlyharmless]

Hi all,

 

I already posted this story at ex-christian.net but not at this forum so I hope it's ok if I post it here too:

 

 

This is a long story as my total deconversion has been a gradual and see-sawing process. It also demonstrates how the pervasiveness of Christianity in Australian society led me to cling onto ideas I might have otherwise abandoned in childhood.

 

I have been lurking here for some weeks and have decided if I’m going to post messages, it’s only fair I give my deconversion, although I’m not 100% sure I qualify since I can probably show you how many times I went to church using my fingers. Nevertheless, there were times I considered myself Christian and it is only relatively recently that I have fully appreciated the effect Christian influences have had on my comprehension of the world.

 

Maybe there was a time when I was unaware of any religious ideas but at an early age I knew I wanted to find out about God and Jesus. I may have been preschool age but definitely no older than seven when I pleaded with God and Jesus to help me when my parents got cross with me and I felt misunderstood and that it was unfair. I used both names “God” and “Jesus” but I didn’t know whether they were the same entity or not. I just knew that Laura Ingles used these names in her prayers on the TV show “Little House on the Prairie” or something and it seemed like the thing to do in times of need. I wanted to know if I was praying the right way, because if I was using the wrong name, my prayers might not be heard. As a child, I instinctively felt humble to this “God” being, as I felt awed by anyone in a position to grant or deny wishes (such as teachers and parents and other people with power over me).

 

At about seven years of age, I drifted out to sea on an air mattress and couldn’t paddle back to shore and slipped under water and began taking in lung fulls of sea water, I prayed to God like I never had before, “Please, God, PLEASE HELP! I promise I’ll be good if I don’t die! PLEASE!!” Obviously, I was saved. Pulled out of the water by a man I never got to thank. I felt guilty days afterwards, knowing I would inevitably fail to keep my end of the bargain and wondering if I would go to hell for it. I had heard about hell in the school yard, that it was a place that you burned forever in fire as God’s punishment for when we were bad. When I first heard of it, I felt shocked. I knew I had already done naughty things. I didn’t want to believe it, and hoped that the kids who argued back were right; that not everyone who did bad things went to hell. Depressingly, no one argued that there wasn’t a hell. Until then, I’d always assumed God was someone who helped you. I didn’t know he placed conditions on this help. I tried not to think about it.

 

 

When I was in Primary School (Grade School) I had a pale, blonde friend, that I soon came to think of as my best friend, who was a regular church-goer and she often spoke of things she’d done in Sunday school. I felt I was missing an important part of my education, as other class-mates piped up that they went to Sunday school too but I didn’t place too much importance on this until probably Third Grade when we were given “Religious Instruction” or in my case “Religious Education”. You see, I was Catholic, so I and about three others were separated from the rest of the class. My friend was and still is Baptist. I don’t know what the rest of the class was, probably a big dollop of Anglican plus a smattering of other Christian denominations. One girl did not attend either class but went to the library to idle the hours with free time. Of course, it was our parents who decided which class we should attend (or not). So this was how I found out that I was Catholic, specifically, Roman Catholic. That’s when I started comparing notes with my friend. We always played together at school and regularly visited each other so I often used her as a source of religious information, since, although my parents believed in God and Jesus, we almost never went to church.

 

 

By this time, my older sister had already had her First Communion and had been Confirmed in the Roman Catholic church. She was Confirmed when she was in Fourth Grade, plus I attended my younger brother’s baptism (which was scandalously late in RC circles; he was four years old) so I had been exposed to a small amount of church attendance. I knew that whatever my sister did, I would usually follow the same path in one or two years. I didn’t understand much, though. I tried to understand what I could of sermons (very little, if anything!) and what each ceremony was about but Confirmation, especially, was over my head. When I asked when I would be Confirmed, my dad said it wasn’t necessary, one of us was enough and he told me to forget about it.

 

By my experience, most of my “Religious Education” was identical to the “Religious Instruction” my fellow class-mates learned. Even the exercise sheets and readings were identical a lot of the time. But sometimes it differed a bit. The majority of my Third Grade class did not learn the “Hail Mary” prayer. I was glad I had the option of praying to a motherly woman if I felt like it.

 

Sometimes my friend revealed her religion’s perception of my brand of Christianity. I liked to think we prayed to the same God so it didn’t matter, but that’s not the way her dad, who had been a pastor at her church, saw it.

 

My friend never seemed to question her parents’ notions of the world. However, my experience was often that my parents didn’t know everything and therefore could be wrong at times. (My parents were migrants and didn’t know English as well as I did, or Australian culture or history.) I relied on school as the source of reliable information. But for the first time at school we were getting two sources of information that weren’t necessarily the same.

 

When I asserted that we were both essentially Christian, so it didn’t matter, my friend hesitated to agree. For me, keeping the peace was more important than being right so it was disappointing that she didn’t have the same attitude. For the first time, I heard the argument that Catholics are not Christians.

 

I felt that all the nice fancy ceremony and stuff the RC had the RC the real deal, but at this stage, I had not heard the arguments against “trappings” (but that emerged too).

 

My friend said she that when she was old enough she would have to decide if she wants to be baptised and that it was wrong to baptise babies before they were old enough to decide. She referred to the “idolatry” of the Catholic church and was even able to explain to me what that meant. (She was an A student.) She said it was wrong to pray to Saints because they are human and humans are imperfect. Only Jesus was perfect.

 

We also differed in opinion on other matters. I thought that humans were animals and she disagreed, saying that people had souls. I said animals had souls. She disagreed. She said animals didn’t go to heaven. I said What kind of place is heaven then? I didn’t think it could be nice if there weren’t any bunny rabbits or guinea pigs allowed there.

 

When I was in Fourth Grade I began to go to classes at the local RC church on Tuesdays. “It’s like Sunday school, but on Tuesdays,” I told my friends. I called it “Tuesday School”. In fact they were classes for preparing children for their First Communion. In this class, there was a girl with long, brown hair, like mine, who was a bit of a rebel. She always had band-aids on her hands because of warts. Her name was Joanna. I don’t know why, but we ended up hanging out together a lot during the class. She got in trouble for a having a “bad attitude”. It might even have been her who taught me what atheism is (“Someone who doesn’t believe in God.”) She hated going to the classes.

 

I remember not enjoying Tuesday School as much as I had hoped, so I sympathised with Joanna. I had thought the class was finally going to bring me up to speed with my Baptist friend, but it didn’t. It wasn’t half as fun as my Baptist friend made Sunday School sound. Still, I was always a compliant student, so the thought of adopting an atheist stance myself did not occur to me and even shocked me a little. But not enough to stop me from talking to Joanna.

 

When my mum made me visit my blonde, Baptist friend (after parading me in front of my brother’s Godparents (BTW, mine and my sister’s are in Argentina or she would have paraded me around there as well) in my Communion dress after the ceremony (which looked like a little wedding dress) and I saw the exchange of looks on my friend’s and her parents’ faces, I felt humiliated. Gradually, I started to see Catholicism through her eyes.

 

The following year I started watching Carl Sagan on “Cosmos” and a show about groundbreaking technology called “Beyond 2000”. I became heavily interested in science, especially astronomy. I also read “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that included abstract ideas like infinity and poked some fun at the idea of God and religion.

 

I decided I didn’t want to compete with my friend anymore by comparing religions (she was and still is a very competitive person and was always a lot more cock-sure than me). For a while, I stopped believing in God.

 

It was also around this time that my friend started hanging out a lot with a new friend and I began to compete with this new friend for my Baptist friend’s time. I still thought of her as my best friend. I also developed a phobia of doing gymnastic-like activities which we were required to do for Sport at school. Depression set in.

 

The following year we had two more new friends in our circle and I didn’t feel so jealous or depressed.

 

However, when I started high school the year after that, everything started to go down hill after Year 7. I was teased mercilessly by teenage boys the girls who hung around them. I felt humiliation very keenly on an almost daily basis.

 

My parents couldn’t afford buying the school uniform (most schools have them in Australia) so my mum would go buy the closest generic version or used version she could find. She bought me a pair of outdated, unfashionable shoes (from an “opportunity” shop, i.e. charity used goods, thrift store) with chunky heels at a time when chunky heels were definitely “out”.

 

I started to get depressed again.

 

The worst of the boys always used to refer to “666” and Satan, listen to Metallica with his friends, and draw what I felt to be beastly, satanic faces. He even drew one on my pencil case with a permanent felt tip pen. I burned it in the incinerator, in the back yard (in those days burning rubbish was allowed by the local council).

 

Today, I’d be amused by the attention of the boys, but in those days I felt these guys were my enemies. There was also a young, Christian man preaching in an empty classroom at lunchtimes and students were invited to attend and ask questions. Often the sessions included games that were loosely tied to an analogy demonstrating a facet of Christianity. There were only a handful of attendees, and a large percentage of them were hecklers. I attended, first as a haven from the boys who picked on me, but gradually because I identified with the preacher and I liked the way he never lost his cool at the hecklers, I attended to learn more. He always had an answer and seemed confident and untroubled.

 

Also, in the first year of high school, Year 7, we had been given miniature copies of Gideon’s New Testament. It had an index with entries for times of trouble, such as “when defeated by an enemy”, “sadness”, “loss”, etc. So I started referring to it a lot and contemplating the paragraphs, without looking at the surrounding context. It seemed ok to me, and I started thinking of myself as a Christian. When my dad began drinking heavily and becoming violent, I prayed and read more fervently, but only those reassuring passages.

 

In 1988, when I was about fourteen years old, my family became Australian citizens. At the citizenship ceremony, my mum, dad and sister were each given a leather bound copy of the Good News Bible. The same bible that my Baptist friend read. I didn’t get one because I was under 15 years of age. My mum got home and said, “What do I want this bible for?” so I asked her if I could have it. “You want it?” she asked somewhat incredulously. “Yes,” I insisted. So she shrugged and gave it to me. Now I would finally have the Old Testament too! But I was disappointed that this bible didn’t have the kind of index that the Gideon’s had. I put the Good News on the shelf.

 

All the years the boys picked on me, I felt I was fighting a battle between good and evil (and I was on the side of good of course). But I had a very low self esteem in those years and a lot of the time I felt that I must be being punished by God for not pleasing him. Why else would he let those boys continue to pick on me? Whenever I referred to the entry in Gideon’s about the problem of “enemies”, it said I must learn to love my enemies. At first I resented it. But eventually, the message sank in. I decided to try my best to see something, anything, good in these teenage boys.

 

The day I realised that the worst of these boys couldn’t read and our sour English teacher humiliated him in front of the whole class by repeating, “Come on! Don’t be stupid! Read it! What does it say?!” in a scornful tone while he was stumped by the word “flour”, I felt truly sorry for him. I wanted to say, “It says ‘flour’, you bitch!” but I was afraid he’d resent it. He reminded me of my younger brother, who also wasn’t learning to read successfully and was being punished for it. When I started seeing the boy as a victim of society, I stopped hating him so much. Gradually, his friends drifted away from him, he dropped out of school and so did a lot of his former friends and school didn’t seem like such a battleground any more.

 

When I finished school, I was 17. I was severely depressed when attending my University course. I had to travel long distances to attend the campus and I felt culturally isolated from my peers. During the first year, I spoke to a guy in my course that reminded me of the boys who picked on me in high school. He was one of these Satan-fixated, heavy metal types. I was talking to him and saying how if you don’t believe in God, you may as well not believe in Satan either, since you can’t have one without the other (hoping that’d shut him up on his Satan fixation).

 

But the funny thing was, prior to this conversation, after reading about Satan in Gideon’s, I had decided this aspect of Christian reality was too unpleasant and that I wouldn’t believe in it. I felt that if I didn’t believe in Satan, I wouldn’t fear him and if I didn’t fear Satan, he couldn’t have power over me. After all, didn’t Gideon’s say it was God I should fear rather than my enemies? Anyway, it occurred to me, as I was reflected after talking to this guy, that maybe I was depressed because I had ignored parts of the bible and Satan’s existence, thereby displeasing God and maybe that’s why I was depressed. I decided to educate myself by reading the bible.

 

Well, I read the whole thing from cover to cover, and there were lots of bits I didn’t agree with, like Jesus saying a guy was possessed by demons for having an epileptic fit, a passage in the bible demanding the sacrifice of first-born male humans and animals, and countless other things. But a part of me still wanted to believe in the comforting passages.

 

Well, I did a lot of mental contortions. I tried to console myself that the bible can’t always be taken literally that it can be metaphorical or that it was written a long time ago and that people’s understanding of God had changed over the years. Perhaps even God had changed over the years. It gave me hope that, because Moses was able to change Gods mind, maybe God could change his mind on other things as well. I developed the problem of not always knowing when to take the bible literally and not understanding the metaphors. In the long term, I didn’t fully accept the God in the bible.

 

If people asked me what religion I was, I said, “I was born Catholic, but never really went to church,” and let them draw their own conclusions. Sometimes someone might say to me something like, “I prefer the ideas in Buddhism,” but I was ignorant about Buddhism or any other religion, and didn’t care enough to find out more (although I had read some Buddhist animal stories that my dad had borrowed for me to read from the local library).

 

When I was 19, going on 20, one guy that was not religious, and who also didn’t like Christians, asked me out a few times. When I let him know I wanted more, he avoided me until one day that he came to my house to tell me he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship. By this time I had already realised I’d made a mistake, so I wasn’t ready to face him. I felt so humiliated that I’d opened my heart to him and he had rejected me. I became furious at him! I decided to be friendly to any religious person but no way would I get involved with someone who was not religious, you just couldn’t trust them!

 

Shortly after, an agnostic man told me he would like a relationship with me. He was going through a rough time with his wife and had separated from her. I turned him down. I wasn’t comfortable with him being married and his wife was suffering from some kind of mental illness he didn’t want to deal with. I told him that I believed in people being married in sickness and in health. I also didn’t like that he was overweight, a smoker, and more than ten years senior to me. He became cold towards me after I turned him down and I just chalked him up as a non-religious person with questionable morals.

 

I by this time and had changed courses but was still studying an Applied Science. I came across a teacher who ridiculed the people responsible for putting Galileo under house arrest for saying the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the centre of the Universe. I still believed in God, though I knew I wasn’t exactly a Christian, and that teacher grated on me.

 

The series “The Power of Myth” with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, influenced me a lot. I started to see all myths as similar stories. I still had a habit of praying to God and saying the Lord’s Prayer (Our Father…) but I was coming to think of the God idea as something more abstract than the bible God. Nevertheless, I still thought of it as capital G God and I still asked it for help some days. I didn’t think God was male or female though. I felt these traits were irrelevant to God. I thought of the Universe as an embodiment of God and thought I was related to God the way a cell in my body was related to me.

 

Basically, I was making up my own belief system which I didn’t really discuss with anyone else, but just contemplated on a relatively frequent basis. My ideas would shift a little here and there depending on how I felt and what ideas I found compelling at the time of contemplation. I had that freedom to ‘play’ with my beliefs because they were private. This time in my life was an enjoyable time mainly because I was studying closer to home and relating well to my classmates.

 

When I entered the workforce some years later, I caved into depression again. The loss of freedom was almost unbearable. I preferred the freedom of being a student, even though I had lived in poverty as a student.

 

I sought out self-help literature and browsed, bought, and read New Age literature such as “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and “The Celestine Prophecy” and “Titania’s Oracle”. The idea of “soul” was very important to me; more important than the God concept. I thought of “soul” as the thing that makes me Me and as a part of me that was struggling to find it’s place in the world, and, hopefully, something that would continue to exist in some way, shape, or form after death.

 

I heard about “Seat of the Soul”, and was encouraged that an actual (alleged) physicist (Gary Zukav) had come up with some soul concepts, which I heard him speak about on Oprah. (I looooved Oprah. I still like her but I no longer see many of her guests as authorative.) I ate up all this stuff like ice cream, looking to find the “answer” to my problem of feeling lost and unfulfilled.

 

I began reading “Care of the Soul” and could not finish. I didn’t know what Thomas Moore was writing about, but it didn’t fit with my idea of the soul at all. He just seemed to waffle about nothing.

 

After a while I came to realise that the New Age stuff wasn’t helping. None of the writers of the New Age stuff were backed up with real evidence of results, just anecdotes. How many times had my lecturers said that our conclusions had to be backed up by reliable results? So I started looking for literature with statistical studies behind them. Boy was it hard to find ANYTHING.

 

New Age literature is total speculation. I don’t know of any that are based on anything reliably real. Old traditions maybe, but definitely nothing like science. Even the ones written by psychologists were things like “Fairy cards” assuring you “the fairies” are influencing your life in positive ways. Ditto “angels”. But without evidence, I couldn’t be sure they would have a positive psychological effect.

 

Then one day, I found “What You Can Change and What You Can’t” and “Learned Optimism” by Martin E.P. Seligman, a psychiatrist. The books presented facts backed up by the results of experiments. At last! However, “Learned Optimism” was to spark in me a foolhardy idea.

 

Seligman cautions at the end of his book that the techniques he describes are not to be used as a panacea, in other words, a cure-all. I soon forgot that caution. I started practicing optimism at every opportunity. One fact that really struck me was that optimistic people are less likely to see reality for what it is. If I remember correctly, this conclusion was based on an experiment where people were sometimes rewarded for a task but not on a reliable basis. The ones with optimistic styles of explaining what happened tended to think that they had been in control of the situation and that they’d done better than they actually had, whereas the ones with unoptimistic styles of explanation described what had actually happened. In other words, the optimists were kinda delusional.

 

The idea I had was that if I ignored reality, the way optimists tend to do, I would finally be happy. Obviously, I wasn’t going to apply this technique while driving in traffic but in less life or death situations, why not? So that’s what I did.

 

It wasn’t that different to the mental contortions I had made when trying to accept the bible’s words. I would just push bad things into the basement of my mind and lock the door. It seemed to work. I felt great for the first time since I could remember. I had heaps of energy, running and swimming on alternate days, getting up early and going to bed late. And I always had a smile on my face.

 

My workplace was a real pressure-cooker in those days, a lot of major changes going on, and our project had been approved with totally unrealistic goals and timelines. I had been a sensitive person but in this environment I was suppressing everything to keep the pain away. I was also taking on a role in which I had little experience but that had quite a high profile, including facilitating work groups and performing presentations. My optimistic experiments led me to be in a situation where I was working closely with someone from whom I’d suffered a personal rejection and I felt mortified by it. I felt so bad, I couldn’t ignore it or suppress it.

 

After that, I couldn’t concentrate on my work anymore. I started spacing out while people were speaking to me. I couldn’t understand a spreadsheet I’d designed myself. I became paranoid about the person I’d been rejected by and that other people would discover what a fool I’d made of myself.

 

I told my supervisor I couldn’t concentrate because I was worried about my dad’s recently diagnosed Parkinson’s disease. She urged me to seek counseling at the company’s expense. The counselor I saw taught me techniques on how I might best deal with the person I was mortified about but by this time I had become obsessed about him.

 

I also started to think the company was brainwashing us. I broke into uncontrollable tears and told the counselor I couldn’t go back there. Finally, I stopped attending work and took refuge at my parents’ place, where work didn’t know how to contact me. I switched my mobile phone off. On the way to my folk’s house, I sang loudly and defiantly in the car, all the while suspecting it was bugged. I pulled over at one stage, thinking I might have been followed.

 

My parents could see there was something wrong and put it down to workplace stress. Dad urged me not to go back. Still obsessed, I optimistically convinced myself I should go back and confront the guy I was obsessed about. I thought of nothing else. I wrote from dawn ‘til dusk rehearsing speeches in my mind until Dad became angry with frustration and insisted I stop. He told me not to contact work now but to wait. I kept rehearsing in my mind (but this time without writing) then secretly sent an email to the guy I was obsessed with. Dad and my brother saw it and expressed disapproval quite strongly.

 

I felt mortified again but this time 100 times worse because they read the contents of the email which were personal. Dad continued to urge me not to go back to work. I made up my mind to quit, typed up a polite letter notifying my employer that I wished to terminate employment, printed it out on my dad’s printer and sent it off by post.

 

Also at this time, work had called my home phone number. Someone had told one of the ladies I often had lunch or went for a run with to call my home phone number (I never gave it to her). She called my brother and sister at home and told them she was a friend trying to contact me (I thought of her more as an acquaintance) and my siblings gave her Mum and Dad’s number. I was really mad that my brother and sister had given away my location. After I spoke to this acquaintance, the counselor called. I reassured her that I was fine but told her I’d made up my mind that I wasn’t going back to my workplace.

 

It took another six months for me to mentally deteriorate to a level where my family decided to seek medical help and I was hospitalised and diagnosed with a mental illness.

 

After going on medication which got rid of my mental confusion, emotional roller-coaster rides, and inability to complete tasks such as cooking or packing for a trip, I realised I had to come to terms with reality as everyone else saw it or face more hospitalisation. I went home and thought, “What have I done to deserve this? Did God punish me? Did he decide I needed some kind of wake up call?” It occurred to me that I could indeed take this as a wake up call, especially on understanding mental illness (which I had been totally ignorant about; I was an “avoid medication as much as possible” people).

 

I also no longer believed it was ok to kid oneself just for the sake of hoping to get a happy buzz. Did I induce my own psychotic breakdown? I don’t know. Given my history of depression, I was probably sick for a long time.

 

The idea of being punished or rudely awakened by God made me feel angry and resentful, which made it oh so much easier to take a long hard look at my reasons for believing in God. I remembered the conclusion I’d come to when I was 17 that I felt happier when I believed in God. But now I knew those reasons weren’t sensible. The God idea held no more water than the New Age concepts I had dabbled with or my forced optimism.

 

I became angry with Christianity because of the association I made between it and my blonde, Baptist friend seemed to have a charmed life, remaining a normal weight and fitting into fashionable clothes, being musically and comically talented, having a very active social life, worshipped by her parents, receiving kudos from her boss, winning the positions she wanted in her career, marrying a man who showered gifts on her and with whom she was obviously happy, building a charming new house together in a lovely neighbourhood. I envied and resented her seemingly charmed life and that she was too busy with her church-related social life to see me.

 

It was 2002 by this time and my delusions had also been associated with September 11, 2001 (in ways that simply make no sense so I won’t go into it). I wanted a place to socialise but not with Christians. Since my happy University days I had been disdainful of organised, institutionalised religion so I sought out a more healthy philosophy and a place where non-Christians could socialise.

 

I looked at witchcraft, which was nice and uninstitutionalised but had to rule it out on the amount of belief it entails in the supernatural, what with all the magic. I did cast some spells though and one of them even worked; I cast a money spell and I got back some money my brother owed me (but not without some nagging on my part). After a while, I decided there was not enough reason to believe in magic. A lot of witchy beliefs sounded too fanciful to me and I feared I’d be at risk of hospitalisation again if I took it up seriously.

 

I thought of taking on a less fanciful form of paganism but on the drugs I was taking I didn’t get a buzz out of creative activities like dreaming up ways to celebrate seasonal changes, etc.

 

The next thing I liked the sound of, I found on the Internet. It was Scientific Pantheism. I compared it with other forms of pantheism which say that the Universe is God. I realised that I had been a pantheist at one time but I felt like I’d moved on since then. Scientific Pantheism sounded good but I didn’t like the way it claimed to be a religion, as it refused to acknowledge any gods. If it hadn’t claimed to be a religion, but simply a philosophy, I might have stuck with it longer. The basic requirement was that you had to feel awe and reverence for the Universe but I couldn’t feel awe or reverence on the drugs I was taking.

 

Then and stumbled across the Universist (not to be confused with UniverSAList) Faithless Forum. Here, even strong atheists were welcome to socialise with others who did not advocate revealed religions. Like Scientific Pantheism, it claimed to be a religion, but it accepted people who believe in god(s) so it made more sense to call itself a religion. Here I learned about the existence and nature of a lot of alternative beliefs and absences of belief. The ones that easily come to mind (apart from atheists) are Deists, Transcendentalists, agnostics, and Satanists but there were heaps of others too, often with subtle differences in philosophy. For the first time I was open enough to find out what most forms of Satanism are really about. And I thought witches were misunderstood! I made some effort to go on a journey of discovery, as Universism advocated.

 

I read an article in Britannica that described the difference between pantheism and panANtheism. Panantheists believe god is outside the Universe, which makes more logical sense if it is the creator of the Universe (according to the article).

 

I discovered that the Australian census classed the following as “Nature Religions”: animism, druidism, paganism, pantheism and Wicca/witchcraft. Unfortunately the Bureau of Statistics hasn’t published any figures for them on their Web site. I looked them all up in the dictionary to find out what they were then compared it with what information I could find on the Internet.

 

I agreed with a lot of the forum posters that it was important to look for evidence. Because of my illness, I wanted to stay well grounded in reality. I never went as far as officially becoming a Universist. It’s funny, because Universism advocates uncertainty and my reason for not becoming a Universist was that I just wasn’t 100% sure that I wanted to call myself one. If anyone asked, I said I wasn’t sure God exists but I was leaning towards the idea that gods don’t exist. I didn’t use any labels since different people had different ideas about what each label meant. I was encountering a lot of different ideas relating to god(s). I didn’t like the aggression of some of the atheists, especially the strong ones, but the more I witnessed their arguments, the more I noticed they advocated scientific evidence as a measure of reality.

 

I bought a book on evolution and another on the Big Bang and lamented that I no longer had my copy of “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking. In the book about the Big Bang I read about how experiments to prove the existence of “ether” failed and how it led scientists to conclude it doesn’t exist.

 

I also heard an argument about a boy not believing his parents that Santa doesn’t exist and citing to them all the evidence he has in favour of believing (So your saying there’s an international conspiracy to convince children that Santa exists that includes the major media corporations and their sponsors?) It really hit home how implausible the non-existence of Santa Claus can sound as well as how the majority of a population can be deceived in believing in a fantasy if it is supported well enough by popular culture.

 

I heard the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument. (Should I believe in invisible pink unicorns because there is no evidence that they exist?)

 

I saw the Flying Spaghetti Monster parody. (There is a correlation between the decrease in the number of pirates since 1800 and the increase in global temperature; evidence that the FSM is angry that more people aren’t wearing “full pirate regalia”.)

 

Gradually, it hit home. It’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that God, or any gods, do not exist. In fact, it’s the more reasonable conclusion. I realised I preferred to be an atheist. Maybe I could even call myself a strong atheist, who says, “God definitely doesn’t exist.”

 

Here’s a thought, if the bible God were able to affect outcomes in people’s lives, such as saving people from a falling plane, wouldn’t he have to be able to exert a force on the plane or the people or to slow down their fall or enact some other preventative action? And didn’t Isaac Newton prove that to exert a force you need acceleration and mass? And since the bible God is not corporeal, he has no mass, therefore he cannot exert a force, therefore he cannot save people from an accident!

 

How about God is energy? Like fire that heats up molecules and gets them moving around or “excited”, as the scientists say. Maybe that’s how God saves people from aeroplane accidents. Is energy detectable? Yes. Is God detectable? No, because a property of God is that he is not able to be proven and if God were detectable, he could be proven and if he could be proven, he would not require faith. So God is not energy.

 

But, I forget, science and the bible God are unmixy things.

 

In what other facet of life than religion is it ok to believe in something because it CANNOT be proven?

 

If only, in people’s minds, the word faith were more associated with blind acceptance than with hope and charity.

 

I stopped visiting the Faithless Forum because I found myself becoming scornful of religious people and I didn’t think that was constructive since a lot of people I know are religious and I have to get along with them. It got closed down recently, anyway.

 

Really, most religious people I know are lovely people, and in most ways, quite sensible. We don’t get many fundies in my part of the world (Melbourne). I think of religious people as kinda deluded or misled and I wish I could open their eyes.

 

The other day I was in class (yep, I’m studying again) and our teacher kept on referring to “your Christian name”. I gently chided her for not using the more politically correct “Given name”. As a defence, she replied that we live in a Christian society. I was astounded. Hadn’t the Prime Minister himself said that Australia is a secular country? I had to admit, most of Australia’s population is Christian, however our class is quite multicultural and Australia is meant to be a multicultural society.

 

The Muslim student in our class might not agree that she has a “Christian” name. The Asian students in our class might not agree that they have a “Christian” name. Some might be Buddhist or Hindu or who knows what else. I had a Vietnamese friend who was filling out a form once who was perplexed at what the “Christian name” box was for. “Given name” causes less confusion. I was never “Christened” (my parents don’t even know what that means) so why should I say I have a “Christian” name? My actual name is really Hebrew. I didn’t say all this to my teacher, because we had to get on with the lesson, but I sure would like to discuss it again later.

 

Just an hour ago I received an email from my employer urging me to pray for a baby in Cape Town who has a congenital condition and is about to have an operation. It says to pass the message on to other people. I thought there were laws against chain mail. Urgh!

 

 

Mostly

[Ouroboros]

Wow. That's long testimony, and I will read it a little later, I just wanted to welcome you Mostlyharmless. And about you "qualifying"... yes, you do qualify. (we have atheists that never been Christians as members here, and we have some Christians that are regular contributors too. So it's the whole spectrum.)

[kellyb]

Hi!

Interesting story. I can definitely relate to some parts of it.

I've had extreme depression totally turn my mental facilities to pudding before, too, and I've also tried the new age/celestine prophesy thing

and later concluded it was a big speculative load of crap.

 

Strange how everything comes into perspective once you really understand the concept of "superstitious nonsense", isn't it?

[Loren]

Welcome, mostlyharmless!

 

One of the things you'll find you have in common with a great many of our members here is the tremendous amount of theological work you've done in trying to make Christianity (and others) viable in your life in some practical, genuinely meaningful way which doesn't violate logic, ethics and so on.

 

One of the common threads our members have is that we took our religion seriously enough to be willing to do the work needed to resolve the problems we saw. And we saw the problems because we took it seriously enough to not lie to ourselves about it, and just put on a happy face as so many Christians do.

 

You'll fit right in here, and I hope you find your experience with us enriching.

 

Loren

[mostlyharmless]

Thanks for the welcomes, I appreciate it. :happy_old:

[mostlyharmless]

Hi, thanks for posting your testimony. You'd be suprised how many people independently come up with the idea that "god" is everything and we are in relation to "god" as a cell in our body is in relation to us.

 

When I first thought of that idea, independent of any other influences, I thought, idiotically, that it was some kind of profound new thought. But it isn't. I STILL see things in this way. This doesn't mean I see "god" as some supernatural being, but that I think it's reasonable to conclude, especially through quantum mechanics that everything at some very basic level is interconnected, that everything is in a sense, one big thing rather than a lot of separate things. That it's separate and one at one time. As my cells are individual things, but all part of my one body.

 

Anyway, not trying to get all philosophical on you, just that, that idea isn't necessarily noncompatible with Atheism or "new agey" It's simply a metaphorical construct for an observable reality.

 

I'm agreeable to the notion that everything in the universe is somehow connected but I still see myself as an atheist since I don't believe in god(s). I don't know much about quantum mechanics and what I've read about it, I can't say I fully understood. I think it applies to things that are extremely small, such as electrons in atoms. I agree we're all part of this big, damn universe. Our bodies are made up of atoms that probably used to be in stars, that's pretty amazing!

[Guest Emerson]

Wow, well its good that you got out. You didn't have an easy journey! btw, optimists aren't delusional. I think a lot of us optimists want to be positive but when reality hits, we deal with it. At least I do. There's nothign wrong with being positive, as long as you're realistic of things in the world. Best of wishes on your new life.

[mostlyharmless]

Thanks, Emerson.