It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I became an atheist. I was raised Catholic, in a devout family environment. My father is Irish by descent -- from the Catholic parts of the island, not the "occupied counties" -- and a Quebecer by birth. My mother is an immigrant from the Philippines. My family not only attended weekly mass and all days of obligation, but also a lay prayer group affiliated with a group called Charismatic Catholics, which is Catholic in theology but borrows liberally from Protestant Pentecostal denominations (including an emphasis on the real presence of the Holy Spirit, lively music, and speaking in glossolalia).[...]
Though all good theoretically came from God, I didn't feel particularly evil now that I was denying his existence. Why did I not cheat on tests, skip class or lie to my parents if there was no God to watch over me and threaten me with punishment? Why did I bother being a good person at all? Though I wrestled with these questions, I never behaved in an amoral way. I concluded that my moral compass was not given to me by God but by my parents. I came to believe that "right" and "wrong" were based around the suffering of other people, and that morality can be summed up very succinctly in the words of Hippocrates: "First, do no harm."
I came to appreciate how the universe operates on its own, without any outside interference, and came to see how humanity evolved through a slow, incremental process over hundreds of millions of years, from the simplest single-celled organism, to the dinosaur, to the ape who carves great cities out of the earth. And eventually, in the midst of all this, I came to the conclusion that while there was nothing directly contradicting the existence of God -- He could possibly be sitting in His divine director's chair watching this all happen-- there was nothing to confirm it, either. So why believe it at all? And so I became an atheist.
It was lonely, at first. Even terrifying. But eventually I realized it meant I was free.
It isn’t hard to understand how he would feel relief at leaving behind the demands of the Church or its clergy, but in what sense can it be a liberating experience to look in the mirror and see “an ape that carves cities out of the earth?”
14 comments:
Is that a genuine or a rhetorical question?
I can give you a genuine answer: because 'God knows what you're thinking' isn't a nice idea for some people; because history makes more sense; and because you can stop worrying about the afterlife.
But if you're the type that would actively worry about the afterlife, and if you decide that there is no afterlife, wouldn't you then worry about this life ?
After all, if this is all that there is, then it's pretty pointless. Many people just carry on out of habit and for life's pleasures, but they're the non-worrying sort of people.
— I concluded that my moral compass was not given to me by God but by my parents. —
That was the silliest part of the entire essay. It is an example of what we computer scientists call "swishing the dirt around". You have a problem, so you make a tweak that fixes it here but that turns out to create a similar problem there. Sometimes that's useful, sometimes it's not, but it should never be confused with actually solving the problem.
Worrying about the afterlive is definitely more trouble than worrying about this life, especially if you're from a religion that makes the afterlife a very dicey proposition, like Catholicism. The rules never made any sense to me, and they seemed to shift around depending on who you talked to. I knew that having a mortal sin on your record, even after penance, made Heaven a long shot. Once I thought that mortal sins were just for murder and major stuff like that. But my mother once told me that commiting a sin that you knew was a sin made it mortal, which pretty much mortified my adolescent worldview.
Vatican II Catholicism is much more laid back about the minor stuff like that, but the fear of fire and brimstone is much more the historical experience than today's Teletubbies-like dancing flowers in the sunshine Christianity that you get today. So being the worrying kind makes the religious experience much more problematic than the atheist experience. I'd say that the religious types who grew up carefree and optimistic either don't have the neural pathways for worry or don't really pay attention to what their religion says.
Peter, do you want the long version or the short version?
The best way that I can explain it is to think of your faith as a client that you're defending in a criminal trial. You feel in your gut that he's totally innocent and all of his alibis and statements to the police are sound. At some point during the trial, however, he changes part of his story, which now ties him to some of the evidence that the prosecution has presented, but he still professes his innocence. Now its possible that he really is innocent and was just lying about one part of his story to save himself some embarassment. Or maybe his whole story is a lie, and he is guilty.
As much as you want to continue to believe him, his whole story is in question. You won't decide right away, but you'll mull it over. Old doubts that you once dismissed will pop back into your memory. Your subconscious will be at work as well. It is wrong to think that beliefs are totally within your conscious control. You just can't force yourself to believe your client because it makes your life easier to do so. You may wake up one day and find out that your gut has decided that the guy is as guilty as Adam, and it changes your whole case.
My gut didn't decide that overnight, it took awhile. One of the most damaging things that the Church did to its membership was Vatican II. That was like the client changing its story. As difficult as it was to abide by the Church's teachings, I beleived it was the truth and was willing to go to the mat for it. But once the Church admitted to itself and the world that it was behind the times and had been wrong in the past, well then all those anguished trips to the confessional over everyday sins that really aren't that important to fret about( a priest told me that once) seemed like a chump's errand. It was a very disheartening and alienating time, I felt like one of those Japanese soldiers holding out in the Phillipines for 25 years only to find out that the Emperor surrendered a long time ago and now roots for American baseball players.
Does that help?
Peter:
Yes, but why does rejecting the psychological hold of ultramontane Catholicism lead to atheism?
It appears you are making this question far more specific than it really is, and thereby losing sight of the fundamental conundrum underlying it.
The conundrum is this: particular revelation.
Absent particular revelation, the whole concept of religion qua religion comprehensively collapses.
This points directly to what Duck says about Vatican II; once good works become a sufficient path to salvation, then the discussion is solely about what constitutes "good works"; fealty is, at least implicitly, beside the point. What's more, and this is the liberating part to which your rhetorical question refers, the concept of "good works" no longer groans under the burden of separating proper from faulty fealty, and punishing accordingly.
Further, once one has dropped the concept of particular revelation, the whole question of G-d's existence becomes, well, irrelevant: the conclusion that we can say nothing whatsoever about G-d renders the whole question no more pressing, or profitable, than pondering winged teapots.
Liberated of creedal conflict and doctrinal disputes, all of them vacuous, we can focus on what constitutes "good works", which are, after all, in their commission and consequences, completely material things. (AOG is completely correct in noting the author elided this point entirely.)
Which puts in stark relief just how infuriatingly wasteful battles over Mohammed's succession, or maintaining exclusive claim to "the one true Catholic and Apostolic Church" really are.
Judaism is ambivalent about an afterlife and, in any event, it plays no role in Jewish ritual.
Skipper: Who believes that works alone are sufficient for salvation?
Who believes that works alone are sufficient for salvation?
Mormons kinda do, in the sense that one's acts on Earth figure into what happens after carnal death, and it's also helpful but not necessary to accept Christ before that death.
So in Mormon theology, a paragon of Buddhist virtue might be better off after death than a deeply flawed Christian.
It does seem a general rule that when Catholics lose their faith, the results are more dramatic than with other Christians. The most obvious explanation would be the greater difficulty of 'drifting along' within Catholicism, ie. popping in for a bit of lip service at Christmas and otherwise not thinking much about it. Catholicism is an identity religion.
Oro:
The extent to which atheism equals nihilism, and to which losing faith is liberating or depressing, depends entirely on the individual - there's no universal rule.
However, if you are a person given to introspection and philosophical musings, losing or keeping faith is not the sort of thing you have any choice about anyway: you either do or you don't. You have a bit more choice about whether or not you subsequently admit it.
Peter, I don't actually have any horror stories about priests to relate. What terrorized was the the actual ultramontante mindset. (Funny how you learn of a new word in old age to describe something from your youth. Noone in my church experience ever used the word, and I'm sure that neither of my parents know what it means. It was just being Catholic).
The mindset meant that you learned to terrorize yourself. When I talked about anguished trips to the confessional, I wasn't exaggerating. Years later as an adult I read a biography of Martin Luther and how he agonized over his confessional. It was similar. If you really start to believe that you are going to Hell, it does a number on your psyche. Something has to give. For Luther it made him decide that he'll be saved another way, through Grace and not works. For me it made me realize that Catholic guilt was a heinous torture device designed by diabolical control freaks.
The Quebec Catholic experience was not the normal American Catholic immigrant experience. The French Church planned to use New France as a Counter-Reformation bastion, so its religious birth was in principle opposite to that of the English colonies of America. There dissidents were fleeing the established churches to worship freely. In New France the established church arrived ahead of time to ensure a heresy free social order modeled on the Ancien Regime.
There are few books that I know of that describe how backward and reactionary French Quebec under the Catholic church was. One is "The Nine Nations of North America" by Joel Garreau. A more vitriolic first hand account is "White Niggers of America" by Pierre Vallieres, who was a Marxist and terrorist, so read with a grain of salt. (Harry I'm sure you have the most complete collection of anti-Catholic literature in North America, so if you don't have this book it is a must read.)
I could go on, but the most toxic aspect of the ultramontante experience, beyond the debilitating guilt, was the pervasive fatalism of it all. Both books describe it. But even though I was a third generation immigrant to the US, I still felt it and picked it up. Moreso from my mom, my dad struggled with it more. That alone put me at odds with my national culture, because America is the least fatalistic nation that ever existed. You could say that my faith was corrupted by Americanism. If I had to name my faith, it would be Americanism.
Peter, you got me going, and I could go on, but I have things that I have to get done today, so I'll stop here.
To follow on to Brit's and Peter's points, I'd agree with Peter that Catholocism and Protestantism are identity religions. I think that the major divide between the two and why Catholics have had a harder time adjusting their identity to the modern world is that the modern world is Protestant. The Protestants won, and the Catholics have had to learn to be like them.
Here's a quote from Ted Haggard about the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism that I think sums up the divide, and why America and the future is Protestant:
Free-market economics is a “truth” Ted says he learned in his first job in professional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe. Globalization, he believes, is merely a vehicle for the spread of Christianity. He means Protestantism in particular; Catholics, he said, “constantly look back.” He went on: “And the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don't tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren't shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the influx of people from Mexico, they don't tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilizations.”
As much as I disagree with Haggard and other evangelicals on religion, their worldview is much more in line with my own than the Catholic worldview I left behind.
"He can run, but he can't hide."
Are we all of us here clear on the distinction between freedom and flight?
Peter:
...the main reason we can't find the same wavelength is that you persist in seeing religion as analogous to a scientific inquiry.
To which I can only say: huh?
The other route to to take a more thoughtful look at what people are actually doing when they worship together and why they feel impelled to do so.
Fine. However, I think taking that more thoughtful look requires carefully assessing the role particular revelation plays in religion, and the consequences of undermining, or removing, it.
My thesis is that when that concept disappears, whether reaching the conclusion that G-d didn't, well, actually specifically choose the Jews, nor geographically limited his wisdom to Allah or Jesus, then the entire basis for organized religion disappears.
Perhaps ultramontane Catholics feel this most, but I suspect many who confront this have a similar response. Whether the outcome is atheism, agnosticism, deism, or Unitarianism is really a choice between tweedledees and -dums.
Well, different strokes for different folks. I find the justifications of the lapsed Catholics plausible, but in my case it was a little different.
The church claimed unique status: one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Now, if you're gonna claim that, you'd better live up to it.
With the admittedly slightly sinful, the discovery of yet another infraction does not change the whole picture.
But if you claim divine sanction (and if god is good), the first transgression destroys the whole edifice.
Once you've stopped believing in a god or a religion, it is easy to stop believing in all of them. In fact, what I find hard to understand (logically, though I get the emotional driver) is how anyone could abandon one religion only to adopt another.
All cats look alike in the dark, and all religions look alike in the light, though few if any believers look at them when the sun's out.
I have the same problem with the Bible. Hard to believe it's the record of a good god, though it might be the record of a god.
++++
Actually, Duck, I have hardly any anticatholic books (though I have generally antireligious books). Catholic books are damning enough; outsiders have little to add.
I did review Garreau's book when it came out. I was dubious that the Quebec terrorism was really over. But I was wrong.
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