by Dan Riley
After trying out a staple of the American diet, I began to immerse myself in American culture. When I first entered the United States, I had no idea how religious it was or that most of its people were Christians. After spending two years at Syracuse University in upstate New York, I came to Oklahoma for my Ph.D. in the beginning of 2007. Almost immediately, I began to sense the air of religiosity that surrounds everything there. One time, during my first semester at OU, I was in the food court minding my own business, eating lunch. I was approached by a group of students who began to read me passages from the Bible. I politely asked them to leave me alone. Not long after that, a minister approached me while I was eating because he was also trying to get me to follow Christianity. Confused, I wondered, “Why is this happening?” I did some research and learned that not only is Oklahoma one of the most religious states in America, many people who live there do not believe in evolution. India is made up of religious people, too, but there’s no cultural controversy over scientific facts. Prior to living in the United States, I had no idea that there are people who truly believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old. It was quite surprising to me that such a significant fraction of the citizens of the world’s most powerful country hold such beliefs.
During my second semester at the University of Oklahoma, I met a classmate who had started a freethought group called CFI On Campus. After he graduated, I decided to take over. I tried to foster that community. It helped to know that not necessarily everybody around me was religious. I found that there were other people who viewed the world more like me.
I dedicated a lot of time to the group, mostly because I felt that something needed to be done about the religiosity of the campus. There were many organizations at my school that had explicitly religious purposes, and all of them were dedicated to one cause: spreading Christianity. I thought, “Why can’t there be just one organization that’s on the opposite side of the fence?” I also thought that it was important to provide a forum for other atheists and skeptics to open up their hearts.
I received a lot of satisfaction from working on the group, and my experience with it has only reinforced my perspective on life. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve dealt with the death of some friends and family. Of course, these experiences are sad. I go through the same emotions that other people do. I’ve listened to my relatives openly discuss their belief that they’re going to meet those who have died again in heaven. I let them believe what they want to. Mortality and death are facts of life, facts that I accept no matter how difficult it may be to do so. Even if I lose somebody whom I love, I know that I’ll make it through those times.
I also know that religion is here to stay. For me, as long as the majority of the world’s people are not consumed by it, I don’t mind it existing. I do, however, think that religion gets more respect than it deserves. If religion is, for example, truly the reason for a certain tragedy, then it should be openly blamed as the root cause. It should not be exonerated simply to avoid upsetting religious people. I want people to be free to speak in this way, without fear of backlash. If this environment exists, then I think that the influence of religion over society will continue to decrease.
XXII.
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Jon Nelson: Skepticism in the Heartland
“We are as Gods and have to get good at it.”
— Stewart Brand
The Left Behind series has influenced and entertained countless young people throughout America and the world. It is not difficult to understand why Jon Nelson, who grew up in Kansas as a shy, nervous, protection-seeking child, gravitated toward such literature. In his own life, he was yearning to find his own powerful, ever-present deity. As he aged — and after he read The God Delusion — both Jon’s desire for and his belief in such a God began to wane.
Like many children in isolated religious environments, during his youth, he was never exposed to the possibility of a secular worldview. His journey begins as one filled with anxiety. It concludes with a feeling of liberation that changed his life, one that increased his faith, not in Christ, but in people.
I was born to a factory worker and a farmer. I’ve lived in the same house in Kansas my entire life, baptized a couple weeks after entering the world. I grew up in the Christian faith, and my dad would take me to church every Sunday. I was raised as an Evangelical Lutheran and was a devoted believer.
Literature has always had a significant impact on me. Through seventh and eighth grade, I absolutely loved the Left Behind series. Those books were written by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, and they’re about a post-apocalyptic world. The plot follows an airline pilot at the Rapture, when many Christians believe that God will take his own to the kingdom of heaven, leaving all of their clothes and material possessions behind. It’s about one man’s journey as he goes through Armageddon in a modern interpretation of the Book of Revelations. To me, the books were incredibly suspenseful. They portrayed God as a badass action hero, like G.I. God, describing the sort of God that I hoped I would have in my own life someday. I wasn’t popular growing up, so the idea of an intercessory and personal God who would be there to stand up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself was really appealing.
My self-esteem was, I think, linked to some psychological issues that affected me in my youth and made me susceptible to religious ideas. In my freshman year of high school, I was diagnosed with depression and general anxiety disorder. I got on some medication. When I did, it seemed like something switched on for me. I suddenly no longer really wanted God in my life. My reason, which had been dulled for so long, came into its own, and, for the first time, I began to ask important questions about both the world and religion.
When I was growing up, I didn’t know that there was an alternative to religion. I’m sure that might be a shocking fact to people who grew up in big cities, but secular options simply were not available in the environment I was raised in. As my curiosity blossomed, I began searching for answers. The summer before my senior year of high school, I read The God Delusion, which had a huge impact on me. As I was reading it, it was as though rusty chains began falling off of my mind. I felt empowered, like I was finally free to think for myself, free to evolve out of my own cognitive dissonance. It changed my life and sealed the deal. I realized that I’m an atheist.
When the people around me began to learn about my atheism, many thought that I was going through a phase. Nobody ever threatened me, but I was mildly ostracized. In the Midwest, religion is considered to be a fairly personal topic, not something that comes up in polite conversation. By and large, when others found out about my beliefs, there was an unspoken agreement to disagree, and I never experienced too much backlash.
My family also found out. I have a grandmother who’s quite religious. Her rationale for belief in God comes from the sheer beauty of the world. She’s not a scientist. She doesn’t read about natural selection, and I’ve never tried to challenge her beliefs. At one point, though, she flat-out asked me, “Jon, you’re not an atheist, are you?” I felt that I needed to be truthful. I said, “I am.”
Religious is ubiquitous in Kansas. There was a girl I grew up with who was raised in the church, and her family members are as Christian as people can possibly be. I don’t think she has ever considered a worldview that wasn’t from a Biblical perspective. She was taught that everything good that happened in her life was a blessing from God and that everything bad that occurred was a test from God. She often said that she was going to rely on God to get her through difficult situations because what happens in life is part of His plan, that He’s going to make her a better person because of what happens. Over time, I began to increasingly see that type of thinking as a frightening act of submission.
She and her family taught me the ability of superstitious thinking to take over people’s rational thought processes. I once made a joke to her sister, who’s a Fulbright Scholar, about people actually believing that the Earth is 4,000 years old. She turned to me and said
, “I believe it is!” She justified her belief by saying that she thinks that there are some discrepancies with scientific radio isotope dating. I didn’t try to challenge her because I was in utter shock that she’s a creationist. That flabbergasted me. She and her sister are very smart young women, but they’re absolutely blinded by their faith.
When I was finally done with high school, I was hell-bent on going somewhere liberal for college. I wanted to get out of small-town America. I decided to go to Boston University. When I arrived, I found a thriving atheist sub-community, the Boston Atheists. I also found a faculty member at BU who said that he’d be willing to sponsor the atheist and secular humanist group that I was trying to start. Over time, I learned that most people in the New England area are apatheist, rather than atheist or theist. They don’t really care either way. Coming from Kansas, indifference to the subject of religion really surprised me.
For me, whenever I see other groups that are persecuted by those on the religious right, be they atheist, gay, or any other minority, having grown up in Kansas, it becomes a personal issue for me. Most people in Boston and big cities have never seen the sort of fervor with which people can use religion to discriminate against others. In my experience, the closest people who live in metropolitan areas ever come to seeing religious fundamentalism is when they read articles about the seemingly-crazy Westboro Baptist Church. Learning about their demonstrations, they seem to think that they’re a bizarre group of people, a few wackos. But it’s not an uncommon belief in large segments of rural America that God hates fags. A huge number of people actually think that way.
Even with all of the problems in the world, I have faith in people no matter where they come from, and I think we can significantly change the world for the better. I recognize that atheism by itself does not offer a philosophy of values. My secular humanism, rather than my atheism, guides my moral reasoning. That philosophy emphasizes the here and now of human existence. The Catholic Church, in contrast, is one of the richest organizations in the world. It flies the pope around the world in luxury, while it should be wholly dedicated to distributing food to the impoverished, working to alleviate and end suffering. Many religions say one thing and do another. So many of their adherents appear to have wool pulled over their eyes.
My own evolution has had a profound impact on the way that I see the world and how I think we should be spending our time and resources while we’re here. I look at many poor, religious countries, and I see people who are starving to death. Their God isn’t providing. I don’t know what the rest of humanity is waiting for. There’s so much suffering in the world, and yet, so many people’s attempt to alleviate that fact is to pray to end the pain. We need action. We need philanthropy. We need people to feed the homeless. We are all people regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation, and some of us are simply born in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should take responsibility for helping our fellow human beings. It’s time to wake up.
XXIII.
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Jimmy Pianka: Outgrowing Greek Orthodoxy
“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
— Delos Banning McKown
For much of his life, Jimmy Pianka stayed with Greek Orthodoxy. Raised in Lancaster, PA, he went to church camp through age 18 and admired his religion’s emphasis on artistic beauty. His slow break from his faith began as his curiosity grew. He wondered how he could believe in and love both God and Jesus even though he felt like he did not know them.
Jimmy feels lucky that his sister paved the way for his departure from religion: she had angrily left the Church years before he did because of Greek Orthodoxy’s position on gay rights. When he admitted his atheism, his parents seemed concerned not that he had lost his belief in the divine but rather that he would be unable to raise a successful family of his own. His father openly wondered how he would be able to raise moral children outside of the Church. While losing his belief in God has brought its own difficulties, Jimmy feels grateful that his life is free from superstition and a fear of hell.
I was raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. From childhood, I was brought up very intensely in Greek Orthodoxy. I went to church camp for 10 years in a row, beginning at age eight. I was a part of a really tight community, which stems in large part from its history: Greek communities often immigrated together, and the Greeks from my town came to the United States from the same island. I have gone back there many times and have met a lot of the people who still live there. Not surprisingly, because Greek immigration histories like the one from my town are so common, there is a strong cultural current that runs through Greek parishes in America. Greeks use the church as their primary cultural glue.
My experience in Greek Orthodoxy was emotionally developmental for me in that I very seriously believed in the faith as I was growing up. It was both a huge part of my moral structure and my behavioral compass; it guided a lot of my thinking. I always enjoyed my religion from an aesthetic sense. The visual style is gorgeous, mystical, and very old, and it helped characterize a lot of my artistic sensibilities. The divine liturgy that’s done every Sunday is a 2,000-year-old, untouched ritual.
Greek Orthodoxy is an Abrahamic faith that’s based on a single, theistic creator. Anyone who is superficially familiar with Christianity would feel right at home in an Orthodox community. It does, however, have more of an open-minded perspective on the definition of hell than many other Christian religions. Hell, as defined by the Orthodox perspective, is often viewed as a distancing from God rather than literal fire and brimstone, with heaven being interpreted as infinite proximity to God.
The idea of loving reverence pervaded all of the Greek Orthodox sermons that I remember from my childhood. At camp, we would detach from our normal lives and spend a lot of time in blissful awe of the divine. We would often talk about miracles.
There was a famous event that took place 15 years before I first came to camp when an icon of the Virgin Mary allegedly started crying salty tears that smelled like roses or lavender or rosemary. People were dabbing Q-tips and cotton balls on them and transferring the tears to other icons. Then, people claimed, the other icons would also begin to cry. It became a pretty big story. When local community skeptics heard about it, though, they asked if they could come and check it all out. The bishop said, “No, faith should be enough.” No formal inquiry was ever allowed.
Over time, I began to be exposed to some of the bigotry of Greek Orthodoxy. I remember one time, after 9/11, my church community was under a pavilion listening to His Eminence Father Maximos. He was the regional bishop of the diocese. At the time, I didn’t know much about Islam, American politics, or the twin towers. The bishop said, “Islam is a Satanic faith, and it promotes genuine hatred.” He viewed Islam as not just an incorrect faith but also as an evil faith in some vague sense. He preached that it was literally of the devil.
It was around that time that I started to think a little more critically about religion. I remember being told, “You should feel love for God.” I found myself increasingly irritated by the fact that I felt as though I did not know God. I tried to feel something, I wanted to feel connected to a deity, but it just wasn’t working.
As I was having trouble making this spiritual connection, I was also having difficulty taking the people within my religion seriously. I’ve always had a very committed mind, and I could never understand how, if someone truly, truly believes in something, they could not give their entire life to it. Had I stayed a believer, I would likely be a priest. It didn’t seem as though the supposedly religious people around me possessed true conviction.
As I began to develop doubts, I was pretty open about my skepticism. The religious right had its rise to power during my high school years, and that furthered my distaste for religion. Its values did not align with those of my heart. I started thinking about Greek Orthodoxy more thoroughly, and the story of my own faith began to fall apart.
I continued to search. I�
�d always leaned toward Eastern religious ideas, even as a kid. I remember once, at church camp, I confessed that I felt drawn to Buddhism. I was told that while Buddhism is a noble religion of compassion and love for all other beings, it’s selfish in that it turns one’s gaze inward and focuses on the self, rather than turning attention outward to God. According to my church leader, I should be aiming my spiritual inquiry and development externally to the divine.
My interest in Eastern religions continued as I got older. I studied abroad in India and Nepal on a Tibetan and Himalayan Studies program in college. What I experienced there was fascinating and had a profound influence on me. I was taught that while Christianity has a history of rejecting heretics, Buddhism has a history of debate time that’s built into its monastic schedule. Monks are required, rather than encouraged, to question their dogma and step through it. In many ways, Buddhism has a tradition of freethinking.
I gave Buddhist contemplative practices a serious try when I was in Asia. I found meditation to be really hard, especially for someone like me, with a really active mind. The first thing that I realized when I began meditating was how cluttered my thought process is. I found that the intellectual caliber and value of my average thought is similar to the quality of artwork on cereal boxes. Our minds are thinking about nothing all day, like puppies that are constantly wandering away from the newspaper they’re trying to pee on. We put the puppy on the newspaper, maybe it pees for a little bit, but then it wanders off. Meditation attempts to train people to take the puppy and calmly put it back on the newspaper.
I found meditation illuminating. It spoke to my interest in neuroscience and the brain. My education has persuaded me that Western rational thought generally tries to talk about the mind in a very objective, third-person perspective, as if it’s an object on a table that can be dissected. I think this approach lacks introspection. We are conscious all the time, yet Westerners are rarely encouraged to look at the content of their own mental lives. Meditation helps to make people more intimately aware of the reality of their consciousness. While I’m not attracted to dogma or a belief in the supernatural, I think contemplative practice can be beneficial for many in our culture.