Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  While I grew up in Philadelphia and never really feel as though I’ve been discriminated against because of my Jewish lineage, there have been times when I felt threatened by rhetoric. In Philadelphia, the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrews are both quite active and quite anti-Semitic. Although I have never been confronted by them personally, I have, with a degree of shock, watched them give their speeches outside city hall.

  People sometimes ask me about the way I view the world. I tell people that I have a naturalistic concern and an evolved morality. I care deeply about the quality and dignity of human life, a care that has actually been deepened by my atheism. Overall, I find my worldview to be liberating because I know that I’m not going to be judged. I know that I’m not going to be categorized after I die. I don’t have a faith with which I need to wrestle. I have an awareness of reality and because of that, there’s a whole layer of neurosis that I circumvent. Knowing my mortality makes me think that I need to make my time on this Earth count. I try to do very worthwhile work and contribute to my community both locally and globally. I think that’s the most you can ask of anyone.

  XII.

  ______________

  Lucy Gubbins: Becoming a Happy Atheist

  “This I believe: I believe there is no God. Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world, and everything in the world is plenty for me.

  It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family that I am raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the genetic lottery, and I get joy every day. Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good. It makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.”

  — Penn Jillette

  If a prize were awarded to the happiest atheist on the planet, Lucy Gubbins would be a frontrunner. Raised in Tennessee, Lucy had a childhood fascination with Japanese culture and all things religious. She drifted from Christianity to Wicca before advice from her brother began to lead her down a more secular life route. In college, she co-founded the Alliance of Happy Atheists (AHA!) at the University of Oregon. The group became one of the most widely-known organizations on campus within its first few years.

  When she was a child, she believed that the bliss that she felt while walking through beautiful forests could only be explained through the awesomeness of a higher power. She certainly hasn’t lost her appreciation for nature or her faith in people, even though she no longer believes that God exists. She hopes, more than anything, that her efforts in organizing have helped to provide a safe and meaningful secular community in which young atheists can participate and flourish.

  I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. When I was growing up, my mom was an Episcopalian and my dad was an atheist. My parents were both very open-minded. My mom would take my brother, sister, and me to our Episcopalian church every Sunday; we would go to Sunday school beforehand and then we would go to church services. The Episcopalian Church is very accepting of people. They have women ministers. It was a great church to grow up in.

  Religion was never really a conversation topic in my house. It wasn’t as though we weren’t supposed to talk about it; it’s just something that never came up. We would go to church on Sundays, and then we wouldn’t talk about religious topics for the rest of the day or for the rest of the week. My mom was quite devout, though. She would go to church on Sundays and then on Wednesdays as well for Bible study. Around the time that I was 10 years old, she started sending me to Bible study too. It was at that time that my religious questioning began.

  I went to a private middle school, but when I was entering high school, I asked my parents to let me go to a public school because I wanted that experience. They let me. In the two years that I went there, I realized that it was very, very conservative. We had abstinence-only sex education. There was a creationism club. I remember seeing posters of dinosaurs with a big “X” through them. There were Bible studies. The school participated in a National Day of Prayer; it was voluntary, but everybody would go outside and hold hands around the flagpole. There was a fast food restaurant, Chick-fil-A, that would give you a free chicken biscuit if you signed an abstinence “I’ll wait for marriage to have sex” card.

  Despite this conservative setting, I always remained quite curious about the world. I read a lot about Japan when I was a little kid and was completely obsessed with that country. My parents think that my interest came from the fact that I had a Japanese friend when I was growing up in preschool. I read about Japanese festivals and Japanese religions like Shintoism and Buddhism. I thought that these religions and ways of life were very beautiful and very respectful. They valued human life and good deeds above everything else.

  One day after church, I remember asking my mom, “Who gets into heaven? What about these people in Japan or in China who have never even heard of Jesus but who are very good people and do good deeds? What happens to them when they die if they don’t know about God or they don’t know about Jesus or even if they do, continue to be a Buddhist or Shinto?” She really didn’t have a good answer for me. That was the beginning of me asking myself questions about Biblical justice and having an issue with any religion that would not allow someone into heaven because they didn’t have the luck of being born in a Christian country.

  This questioning began at the same time that I started to go to Bible study every Wednesday. As I became more educated about Christianity, I started to have more questions. I became interested in other religions, specifically paganism and Wicca. I continued to ask, “If people of different religions do good things, why should only one pocket of them be accepted into heaven or have a good afterlife?” I was very attracted to paganism and Wicca because those religions teach that one could be a pagan and believe in any God or Goddess; it was all-accepting. I loved the idea that if you’re Wiccan, you believe that God is like a diamond, and He has many facets. He can have the face of Allah. He can be Jesus. He can be Mohammad or Shiva or Krishna or the Buddha, but in the end, God is one thing. To me, it seemed to make more sense that all of the people in the world are actually worshipping the same God. At the time, that idea was very attractive to me. I became more and more sure that Christianity wasn’t for me.

  I was open with my parents about my changing beliefs. When I started learning about Wicca, I found a book about it in the New Age section of a bookstore, and I asked my dad to buy it for me. He said, “Of course I’ll buy this for you. I want you to know as much as you can about everything.” The book I got is called Teen Witch, by author Silver RavenWolf. It’s amazing thinking back that my dad let me buy the book. It talks about what it’s like to be a witch, what it’s like to be a Wiccan, to be pagan. As you can tell, Wicca has some Harry Potter elements to it.

  I started talking to my parents more about Wicca and paganism. When my dad told my mom that I was getting interested in it, she freaked out. I don’t know if she was uncomfortable with me not being a Christian or me getting into a weird, New Age religion. She ramped up her efforts to make me go to church and Bible study, which I think was her way of coping with the fact that I didn’t want to do something that she found very important in her own life. The more that my mom acted this way, the more I became interested in Wicca. She didn’t want me to tell anybody about it. I continued to read. For about two years, I got more and more into it.

  My interest in Wicca caused some issues in my parents’ otherwise wonderful relationship. I remember once being in my house doing homework, and I heard sounds coming from the family room or in the kitchen downstairs. I crawled down the hallway and sat at the stairwell. I heard my parents having arguments, my mom asking, “How did you let her get this book? Why would you buy it for her? She’s going to be ridiculed! People are going to make fun of her!
Only crazy people believe in this stuff!“ My dad rebutted by saying, “I just want her to know everything that she can about religion. If she knows about it, she probably won’t be into it anymore.” Those fights made me realize that these subjects are serious, and that my interest in them can have an impact on other people. My parents’ religious differences must have been a source of disagreement in their lives. When I was growing up, I never realized that my dad was an atheist. He would drive us to church, but he would never come in. I always wondered why. He would come to church for Christmas or Easter service, but he would always stay in the pews when we went up for communion.

  Interestingly, a few years ago, my dad became born-again Christian. I really don’t know anything about why he converted, and I wish I did. He’s a Christian now, and he goes to church with my mom. He’s not an intense evangelical; I really wish that he had been more open about his beliefs when I was growing up because all I wanted when I was young was talk to somebody about religion, and I felt like I couldn’t.

  My dad is a recovering alcoholic. It’s not something that I experienced firsthand because by the time my siblings and I were born, he was in recovery. But around the time that I was 16, he started going back to Alcoholics Anonymous for the community. Part of the 12-step A.A. rehab program includes submitting to a higher power. I think it was a rather natural progression for him, becoming more religious as he went back to those meetings. Regardless, he’s very happy now. He reads the Bible, and his favorite book is Ecclesiastes.

  Back to my story. I’m very thankful to have had people in my life who have encouraged me to become a critical thinker. When I was young, I was pretty gullible and would believe whatever people told me. At one point, when I was a teenager, my brother said to me, “Lucy, I love you, I respect what you believe in, I will always support you, but I want you to think about your Wiccan beliefs. Just because something makes you feel good doesn’t necessarily make it true.” That was hard for me to hear because I really loved Wicca. It made me feel very good, thinking that everybody who does good deeds and believes in whatever God that they want to believe in will get into heaven. My brother pointed out that just because I believe in something doesn’t really mean that my inclusionary beliefs about religion actually match up with the teachings or the content of the Koran or the Bible. It’s funny how what one person says can impact you so dramatically. It was at that moment that I started to think, “Maybe I’m not really being intellectually honest about this. Maybe I need to think about this in a more logical way.” That was the beginning of the end of my religious faith.

  After going from Christianity to Wicca, from Wicca back to nebulous agnosticism, I didn’t really believe in anything. Every step of that was very hard for me. I had really believed in God with all of my heart. I’m looking at a tear-stained diary entry that I wrote in 2001. I was 12 years old. It just says, “I’m so alone. I’m so heavy-hearted. I don’t know who to turn to.” Losing my religion was absolutely heartbreaking.

  Growing up, I felt like I could talk to God. I felt like I could feel the presence of a divine being wherever I went. I would walk outside, the sun would be shining, and the light would stream through the leaves. I would think, “Only God could have made this. Only God. He put me on this Earth to enjoy this life.” When I started to think about the fact that maybe there isn’t someone looking out for me, that maybe I was just born of my parents, that maybe there’s no heaven, and that maybe I’m going to die like everyone else some day, it was very hard to accept.

  I had no one to talk to about these new ideas. When I was a little kid, I remember being taught who atheists were. I remember thinking, “I don’t care what I end up being. I might be a Christian, I might be a Wiccan, but I will never ever be an atheist because how can an atheist ever be happy in this life? How can anyone be happy without believing that there’s a God?” I didn’t have any Godless role models, and I was terrified. It would have been much easier if I had known that it’s okay to be an atheist, that it’s normal, and that atheists can be happy. Because I didn’t, I pushed the idea that perhaps God doesn’t exist out of my mind.

  I went through a very, very long journey. I continued searching and looking for answers. Before my senior year of high school, I lived in Japan for a year. My second host family lived at a Buddhist temple. They practiced Mahayana, Japanese Buddhism. I learned that in some forms of Buddhism, the practitioners do indeed believe in many different Gods. Some believe in a heaven and a hell, a terrible, torturous hell. I saw pictures of a version of Buddhist hell in the temple in which I lived. People were being boiled alive and getting pitchforks stabbed into them, their intestines being ripped out. It was really intense, maybe more intense than the Christian hell that I was familiar with. After that, I realized that the one religious philosophy that I had believed was peaceful and pure, Buddhism, could still be tainted with ideas of a horrendous afterlife, sin, and retribution.

  The next year, my senior year of high school, I came back to Tennessee, and I went to school in Nashville. My parents had moved there right before I went as an exchange student to Japan. That year, I took an AP Environmental Studies class. The teacher of that class changed my life.

  One day I came into class, and I looked behind me. On the back of the room there was a gigantic map of the world, about five feet long, attached to the wall upside down. I asked my teacher, “Mr. Roberts, why is this map like that? Do you want me to fix it? Did somebody come in here?” He said, “What makes you think that it’s upside down? The way we perceive the world is due to the fact that we live in North America, and we have designed our maps to show north as north and south as south. But there’s really no objective reason to think that. It’s not like the universe has an up and a down and a north and a south.” His goal, more than anything else, was to teach critical thinking. I was taught, for the first time, that what I believe should be backed up by evidence. I started to once again wonder, “What beliefs do I have that I continue to fail to look at with a critical eye?”

  I began mentally preparing myself, understanding that it was quite possible that one day I would not believe in God. I was slowly and subconsciously making that transition. After I graduated from high school, I took a gap year. I really wanted to improve my Japanese before I started college. Even though I had previously lived in Japan, my Japanese was really rusty. I also wanted to work on a farm. I knew about a program called WWOF, Willing Workers on Organic Farms. I decided to participate in that program. Once I did, I quickly learned that it was extremely challenging. When I had gone to Japan when I was 16, everything was so new and comfortable. I had to go to school every day, but I wasn’t doing manual labor. I came to this farm and began working 11 hours a day. I was expected to get up at 6:00 in the morning and help with breakfast. I wouldn’t be done with work until 10:00 at night.

  Before I went there, I had imagined that I’d work about three or four hours a day. I thought it’d be really hot, and I’d be riding a bike around the Japanese countryside, going to temples, having fun. I brought Thoreau’s Walden to read. I thought that I’d have a relaxing adventure. That was not to be. The work was demanding, it was really cold outside, and I was miserable. During the first two weeks, I wanted to go home. I stuck with it, though. Then, suddenly, something changed. I began to love the work that I was doing, and I began to feel very strong, both mentally and emotionally. About that same time, my then-boyfriend sent me a copy of The God Delusion. He knew that I was thinking about atheism. I started reading it and began to see how being an atheist can actually be a source of strength. I read 30 pages, shut it, and thought, “This is it! I’m an atheist. This is who I am now.” I’ve been an atheist ever since.

  I realized that I had no evidence to believe in God. I loved the stories of the Bible. I loved reading about religion. I loved the stories of Buddhism, the stories from the Koran. But I had no reason to believe that there truly is a God somewhere out there. I began to have no problem creating my own purpose in life,
relying on myself and my family to get through hardship. I started to realize that I didn’t need a God for what I wanted from life.

  Since I first admitted that I’m an atheist, I’ve never doubted that belief, not in any way, shape, or form. When I was a Christian, I was constantly doubting my Christianity. When I was a pagan, I was constantly doubting my paganism. I was always wondering, “Is this really right? Do I really believe these things?” In thinking about what it was like to become an atheist, I’m reminded of the song “I Can See Clearly Now, The Rain Has Gone” by Johnny Nash. I’m completely happy and secure in my beliefs.

  Armed with this new worldview, I was extremely excited to hit the ground running when I started at my university. I wanted to make as much of an impact as I possibly could, take advantage of as many opportunities as I could, and finally be the person who I wanted to be. The summer before I started my freshmen year, I took a leadership class. It lasted for two days, with a couple of seminars. In the book we received for that class, it detailed what to do if you wanted to start an organization on campus. Before I met anyone from the University of Oregon, I had written the mission statement and worked on the bylaws of the group that I wanted to form. I started working to create an atheist club, The Alliance of Happy Atheists, or AHA! for short. I started proactively connecting with people for the first time. The group became extremely successful. By the first week of spring term, we had our very first meeting, and over 100 people showed up.

  When people first become atheists, they often have a lot of anger toward religion, especially if their introduction to atheism comes from reading, for example, The God Delusion. That was certainly true for me. When I first became an atheist, my then-boyfriend and I were newly Godless. We listened to the secular podcasts Point of Inquiry and Freethought Radio every day. We would talk to each other about how much we hated religion. I got that out of my system rather quickly; I realized that that isn’t really the person who I am. I love religious people. I get religion. I understand why people want to be religious. In thinking about the group that I wanted to start, I knew that I personally didn’t care if a single person on my campus left religion. I simply wanted there to be a community for atheists. There didn’t seem to be a lack of atheists who bashed religion in the world, and there wasn’t a lack of books in the world telling people why there is no God. But there did seem to be a lack of community for nonreligious people.