Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  J.A.G. spent his high school years in Colorado Springs, CO, one of the most religiously conservative sections of America. The more he understood science, particularly evolutionary biology, the more he was able to quiet his noisy mind. He began to view all life as the result of a natural process, free from deistic observance or intervention. Empowered by knowledge and assisted by mild antidepressants, J.A.G. has overcome his childhood fears.

  My mother was raised Catholic, but my family is Lutheran. She converted when she married my father. Therefore, I was raised in the Lutheran tradition. I was sent to religious schools until I was in eighth grade. I was extremely religious when I was young.

  There are several Lutheran denominations. The biggest one is ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and, overall, it’s quite liberal. It ordains women and is gay-friendly. Another branch of Lutheranism is Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, LCMS. The most conservative branch is called the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, or WELS. The WELS branch is very fundamentalist, very literalist. Women aren’t allowed to vote or hold positions of authority. At different times in my life, I’ve been a part of each of these denominations.

  From the age of 12 to 14, religion began to have a negative influence on me. I started to have panic attacks, which I think were related to my religious beliefs. The attacks manifested because of my fear of going to hell. I was afraid of even thinking weird or irreverent thoughts like “I’ll sell my soul to the devil!” because if I did, I thought that I would have committed a grievous offense against God. It’s like the trick where someone says, “Don’t think about an elephant,” and you automatically do.

  I often felt like I was going crazy, and it was very disturbing. An idea or thought would pop into my head, and I would think, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to hell.” I’m not sure that words can describe how it feels to believe that you are going to spend the rest of your human life knowing that in the future, no matter what you do, hell will be the outcome of your existence because of thought-crimes that you had committed years ago. It sucked the life out of me. There were nights when I wouldn’t sleep; it became a major mental preoccupation. I probably wasn’t eating as much as I should have, too, and it hurt my performance in school.

  If someone had asked me back then what I thought my odds were of going to hell, I would have estimated about 80%. I think back and realize that I was enduring a low-grade mental illness enhanced by religion. Interestingly, something that I’ve realized about this fundamentalist outlook is that seemingly everybody has that fear of hell. I’ve talked to a lot of other ex-fundamentalists who have admitted that to me.

  In high school, religion started to have less of a hold on me. I began to feel as though I didn’t fit in at my youth group. At the time, I was living in Colorado Springs, which is the headquarters of Focus on the Family. I remember in 2004, in history class, I was one of two people who said that they would have voted for John Kerry for President of the United States. I think of Colorado Springs as Bush’s America. It’s very, very WASPy, and I never felt like I made a connection with that community.

  It wasn’t until around the time that I went to college that I really started to question religion as an institution. I found a blog that made me realize that atheism isn’t a crazy, evil, awful thing. It had always been portrayed to me in that way. I also began to realize that I didn’t know much about biological science. I knew that I needed to further educate myself about the debate between evolution and creationism. I went to a lot of Christian apologetics websites to read more arguments in favor of Christianity. I also started reading PZ Myers’s evolution and atheism website, Pharyngula. After a lot of research, I concluded that evolution is a sensible explanation of how life on Earth came to exist. I know that many try to downplay the implications of the naturalistic worldview on religion and say that there are plenty of liberal, educated religious people who believe in evolutionary science, but that argument didn’t persuade me. I began, for the first time, to consider the possibility that God may not exist.

  I continued my search and bought a few books, like Atheist Universe by David Mills, which is written for fundamentalists. I read it and found it convincing. I remember sitting in my dorm room one Saturday morning thinking, “I’ll try for a minute believing that there isn’t a God and see what it’s like.” I did. It was a shocking moment. I realized, “Yes! This makes sense!”

  I left my church and didn’t tell my parents about the change that had occurred within me. I wasn’t sure how they would react, and I didn’t want them to have negative feelings toward me. More than anything, I didn’t want my parents to think that I was going to hell. I care about them and they care about me, so, for a while, I kept my true beliefs from them.

  Despite my attempts to conceal my atheism, I knew that it would have to be unveiled at some point. They found out in an interesting way. One day, I searched for myself on Google, and one of the results that came up was an obituary for someone with my name. I told my dad about that, and when he looked it up by searching for my name, he found my Atheist Nexus profile as one of the top results. My cover had been blown.

  A few weeks later, my parents talked to me about it, and I told them the truth. Thankfully, that conversation was very positive. My dad told me that if anyone ever harassed me about religion, I should let him know so that he could go after them. My mother didn’t cry; her biggest concern was that I wouldn’t be able to find a wife.

  I thought that my parents’ reaction would be one of sadness. I know for a fact that they genuinely believe in heaven, and I was worried that they would tell me that I was going to hell. They did say that they were not thrilled about this change in my life, but they also stressed that they supported me. In fact, they said that they were worried that I had thought that they wouldn’t be supportive, which is why I hadn’t told them for so long. They wanted to be good parents, and they were concerned that I felt a bit unwelcome in our family.

  My parents are fairly liberal and open-minded, which is likely why they reacted the way that they did. I visited them recently, and my dad was talking about how he had seen a gay couple walking down the street and how, at first, it made him feel a bit uncomfortable, but then he felt badly for feeling like that. He said that he should be more accepting. Fundamentally, there’s a lot of mutual care, mutual love, in my family, which, in the end, informed how we dealt with my atheism. Our bond was able to see us through.

  Despite his relative openness, my dad did say that he didn’t want me walking around our house wearing offensive t-shirts like one he had seen with a Christmas tree and the words “Merry Christ Myth” on it. I wouldn’t do that anyway. That’s not really who I am. I’m not ostentatious or extremely outspoken about my atheism. My main challenge as an atheist has been staying aware of the fact that we really are a minority, that there really are people out there who truly do hate us.

  My education in college continued to shape my thinking about the world. I became more educated about the process of evolution by natural selection. I continued to find it to be a very powerful, compelling theory. It seemed as though the primary job of religion — explaining the existence of life on Earth — had been done scientifically. Everything made more sense with this worldview.

  It interests me that large numbers of liberal religious institutions have conceded the facts of modern science. Because of their concessions, I think there’s a worry within the Christian milieu that liberal churches don’t have a strong, firm idea to which they can point to appeal to people. Maybe it was my rather fundamentalist upbringing that made me disinterested in the positions taken by these institutions, and perhaps I moved a little too hastily from fundamentalism to atheism, but I still don’t see the appeal of moderate religiosity. That worldview strikes me as a bit of a cop out.

  With everything that I have gone through during my religious journey, at this point in my life, I feel very sane. But with that sanity has come some difficult conclusions. Perhaps more than anything else
, the most difficult subject has been the way that I now view death. I had believed that even though my parents and friends would die someday, we’d all be together again. Not having that, especially at first, was very difficult. It felt like a raw deal. But I can’t dictate terms to the universe.

  I actually think that life is better the way that it truly is. I like how it is. I don’t think that I would want an afterlife. I have always been a bit creeped out by the idea of eternity, no matter if that would be in heaven or in hell. Because I now believe that my time on this planet is so limited, I need to treasure what I have now. There’s a sweetness to life that’s been added because I know that it’s not permanent, that eventually it will end.

  I’m a different person now. I feel that the idea that I’m on my own, that I need be responsible for my life, that I don’t have someone who’s going to come in and help me with magic, is in its own way an exciting notion. To me, it’s empowering.

  XI.

  ______________

  Eric Gold: Batman, Judaism, and God

  “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

  The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

  It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

  — Carl Sagan

  Childhood can be a confusing time. For a literal-minded child like Eric Gold (a pseudonym), the concept of God, as taught in his Jewish community, was rather vague. The Almighty, as best he could understand, was similar to a superhero, like Superman. When Eric would play with action figures as kid, both Batman and Moses were literally Godlike, possessing superhuman powers.

  Eric drifted from Judaism as time passed. Despite not going to synagogue in years, he’s viewed as no less Jewish by the Jewish community than anyone who fully dedicates himself or herself to the religion. He doesn’t like such unchosen affiliations, though, and asks people not to call him Jewish. First and foremost, he considers himself a human being.

  I was raised in a Jewish environment; most of the families in my neighborhood were of that religion. I lived on the Main Line, Lower Merion, right outside Philadelphia. My mother was not born Jewish. She converted when she married my dad because she wanted her children to be able to be accepted into the Jewish community if they wanted to be part of it. So I was circumcised. I had a bris. My parents did all of the things that would make my brother, sister, and me Jewish in the eyes of other Jewish people. Because of their dedication to the idea of me being Jewish, I could, for example, become a citizen of the state of Israel if I were so inclined. Had my mother’s conversion not been Kosher, I would not be able to do so.

  The religious Jews I knew growing up would go to temple and do Shomer Shabbat; during a 24-hour period from sunset on Friday night to sunset on Saturday night, they wouldn’t use electricity, make phone calls, watch TV, or drive cars. My family didn’t do that; we went to many different synagogues, but never really settled on which branch of Judaism we belonged to. Our family tradition was as follows: we had a ceremony each Friday night in our home where we said three short prayers and then ate an awesome dinner. My father always said “bon appétit” at the end of the prayers. I used to think that was a Jewish phrase.

  There are a couple major forms of Jewish practice. I use the word “practice” because Judaism as a religion is less about faith and more about methodology. Jews come in many different varieties. Generally speaking, they don’t expect miracles or visions of angels. For many, Judaism is a lifestyle: you eat kosher, and you wear your clothes in a certain way.

  I remember that religion influenced me from a very early age. As a kid, I was very interested in science, science fiction, the universe, the galaxy, and the solar system. I knew from a very young age that the Earth’s not flat, that it’s not the center of the universe, that it’s much older than the Torah says that it is. Perhaps because there is such an emphasis on intellectualism in that culture, in my Jewish education, I remember there being very little emphasis on anything in particular. I have heard some people say that the Jewish faith is about values and morality. I wasn’t instructed in that way. I was never asked to truly believe any of the Bible stories about miracles or other supernatural oddities — not by my parents, not by any rabbi. These stories were discussed like literature is discussed in school. The emphasis was not so much on faith as it was on critical thinking.

  This absence of clarity stretched to the very core of the religion. I had no idea what the temple’s understanding of God was supposed to be. What I got out of its teachings was that this guy God is fucking Superman. He has powers, and so does his friend, Moses. When I played with action figures, I would take out Batman, and in my imagination I would think, “He’s not Batman, he’s God!”

  When I first enrolled in school, I began to realize that most people aren’t Jewish. My parents told me that Jews are very rare, that they’re a very small percentage of the world’s population. I didn’t know this before I went to kindergarten or the first grade. I went to public school, and one of my really good friends, Donald Dermond, was a Christian and, from a young age, was very into that identity. I found out that all of my Christian friends believed in this guy called Santa Claus. It was mind-blowing to me that their parents would make up this figure, a person who seemed like a cartoon character. I simply could not imagine my parents doing that to me. I began to think, “If there are so many different religions, maybe none of them are true.”

  As I was growing up, there was a push from my family for me to adopt Jewish culture, not necessarily the Jewish religion. As a child, for me, temple was a place that my family visited a couple times a year. We heard goofy stories and saw people we didn’t really know. The synagogue had really cool architecture, though. It was big, had a lot of interesting rooms, and made for a great place to pretend that I was in a spaceship. While I did have a bar mitzvah, I did not exactly learn how to read Hebrew: I memorized a whole bunch of words, which I didn’t actually understand, and recited them, pretending to read, with a metallic pointer in my hand, from the Torah. Regardless, once I passed the bar mitzvah milestone, I was considered a man in Jewish culture. In fact, that was my last experience with the Jewish religion. I was 13. Over time, any religiosity that I had in my youth gradually faded away. My brother and sister, my mother and my father, all started to become more and more secular. I identified with agnosticism for a time and decided after reading a lot about science that I was an atheist.

  The most persuasive argument in favor of my atheism came from how evolution can explain how order can arise from chaos. As a teenager, I was philosophically inclined, and I wondered about the big questions of life. Becoming educated about the science behind biological evolution and cosmic evolution had a huge influence on me. I learned about the formation of galaxies and solar systems, stars, and planets. I am a skeptic, and I think that any empirical claim is testable and potentially falsifiable. When I look at the Bible, I see many empirical claims about how the universe works and most of them are false, along with many omissions about what we now consider to be basic scientific knowledge. The Bible doesn’t mention tectonic plates. It doesn’t mention volcanoes. It doesn’t mention Africa or Australia or North or South America or the South Pole. Its authors did not understand that disease is transmitted by germs and not by demons.
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  Despite the inaccuracies of the Jewish religion, the tradition of Judaism still interests me. In fact, one thing that people from the world’s other major religions don’t often understand is the relationship between Jewish culture and Jewish religion. Modern Jewish culture is shaped by the diaspora. Jews have been in diaspora for thousands of years. A structured state or homeland — like the state of Israel — is a recent phenomenon. There’s no central Jewish religious authority; the highest authority within the Jewish faith is generally the local rabbi or his mentor.

  I similarly don’t think that Christians or secular people from a Christian background or most other religions understand the way Judaism is viewed in the eyes of other Jews. To them, I’m no less a Jew even though I’m an atheist, never go to temple, have nothing whatsoever to do with the religion, and was a church-state separation activist for several years. Being Jewish is not simply about being religious. It’s an ethnic identity. It’s like a nation in much the same way as the Tibetans or the Lakota Sioux are a nation.

  While I recognize the inclusiveness of Jews to other Jews, I am not a fan of endogamy. Within more conservative Jewish culture, it’s almost unspoken that Jews will marry other Jews. Because of this clannish mentality, I ask people not to call me Jewish. I’m a human being. I’m a person. I don’t want labels. I don’t have the need for the cultural affiliation that a lot of atheistic and agnostic Jews have. In my life, I have been quite interested in combating racism by explaining human variation and by debunking the idea that, scientifically, there is any such thing as race.