When I
was still quite young, again about five, we lost a few cats to local
traffic. I held no belief, even at that
time, that death was anything other than final.
This lack of belief wasn’t restricted to cats since I had the same sense
of finality when my grandfather died a year or so later.
(This is
not to say that there hasn’t been some wishful thinking on my part from time to
time. I recall that when I was a
teenager, I did want to have paranormal powers, such as telekinesis and the
ability to teleport at will. However,
this was on a par with wanting to have my own fire lizard [see Dragonriders
of Pern] or my own light sabre. I knew it wasn’t possible, but I thought it
would have been so cool if it were. To
be honest, I’d still like to have a fire lizard.)
I was
not totally ignorant of Christianity, which is the religion generally held by
people who were into that sort of thing where I lived as a child. For a while, when I was perhaps seven or
eight, I even attended Sunday School (although I have absolutely no idea who
made that decision). My father did some
work at a tourist beach from when I was about seven until I was about nine, so
I spent whole summers – every single day – taking advantage of the only free
entertainment on offer, something known today as “Beach Mission”.
During
that time, I learnt the Bible stories inside out. I was the most knowledgeable atheist on the
beach, even winning Bibles during the quiz competitions. (I still keep the best
of those prizes together with the rest of my science fiction and fantasy books,
although it has the first page of Genesis ripped out which is a bit sad and,
I’d have thought, totally unnecessary – there are no nut-hatches in Genesis are
there?)
I do not
recall my state of belief ever coming up as a topic of conversation. The young beach crusaders seemed to be happy
enough that I was a keen and involved listener and they probably assumed that
since I was absorbing their lore, I was also absorbing their message. The issue of atheism simply never came up.
Not
terribly much later, von Däniken released a new book, which renewed interest in
his first book “Chariots of the Gods” and also in Velikovsky’s “Worlds in
Collision”. I didn’t read any of their
books, but I was aware of the contents in so much as both of them tried to
explain Biblical (and other) events in terms of aliens and/or non-standard
solar system cosmology. It was at this
time that I was struck for the first time by the thought that there are full-grown adults, who have not yet reached the point of senility who actually
believe what is written in the Bible and, not only that, some of them believe
it literally.
I need
to keep a theist (or apostate) reader in mind here and explain some things
which may seem obvious to other readers.
I was
aware of myth. I knew about Greek
mythology (and, to the extent that it was slightly modified, Roman mythology),
Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology (and the variant introduced to the British
Isles by Angles and Saxons), Irish mythology, a little Native American
mythology and some Australian Aboriginal and Maori mythology, plus I was
vaguely aware that there were African and Asian mythologies.
I also
knew a fair bit of Christian, Jewish and, to a lesser extent, Muslim mythology. I was aware that these monotheistic religions
were all quite similar to each other as well as being quite similar to some
earlier religions from the region. I was
possibly a little better informed than the average child who would more easily
fall prey to one form of indoctrination or another.
I
remember a particularly loud thunderstorm from when I was about eight and
recall knowing a story about how the ancients used to think about thunder in
terms of giants moving their furniture around (there was a lot of rumbling
thunder in this storm). I didn’t believe
that this was true: I just knew that I’d been told that people used to think
that. Note very carefully my use of
words here.
I did not believe
that “giants moving furniture caused the thunder” was true:
I just knew that I’d been
told
that people used to think that “giants moving furniture caused the thunder”.
There
are four separate and distinct concepts there.
·
I didn’t mention believing anything was true. All I had was an absence of belief.
·
I knew something (i.e. what I had been
told). This knowledge was based on some
evidence (i.e. the recollection of being told something).
·
I’d been told something, the fact that I am
told something doesn’t necessarily mean I believe or, in fact, that I know
it.
·
People used to think something. I’d been told, as far as I remember, that
people used to think, not believe, that gods or giants or something magical and
powerful controlled the weather, including storms.
It’s
possible to say that I “believed” that the thunder was due to lightning
activity, which might even be accurate since I did not fully understand the mechanism
by which lightning produces thunder, nor did I understand the mechanism by
which storm clouds generate lightning.
But I was most certainly not actively disbelieving that the thunder was
due to giant activity, or Thor’s hammer, or any one of dozens of possible
superstitious explanations.
If
asked, I am pretty certain that I would have reported a considered opinion that
none of the adults around me held superstitious beliefs about the
thunderstorm. I was quite used to the
idea that there were many myths available to explain various phenomena and I
was quite used to the idea that no-one really believed them (except possibly
young, more gullible children and anyone old enough to have become senile –
note that at eight, the term “old” had a lot more scope for me than it does now).
My
default position then, and to a certain extent now, was to assume that unless
there are indications to the contrary, a person probably won't be a believer in
myth and superstition. Yes, I realised
that old people were more likely to go to church, but with the constant
blathering on about things being great in heaven and the fact that death is
looming, this was hardly surprising to me.
(If you are ever going to indulge in Pascal’s wager, do it when you are
old and can blame it on senility. Not
that everyone will believe the senility claim, judging from the content of
various blogs that crow about Antony Flew’s conversion to deism – more on that
in another post.)
But when
people started talking up Velikovsky and Däniken, it became apparent to me that
even average people would seriously consider attempts to “scientifically” explain
myth. This was a bit of a shock. Science, in my experience, had always served
to replace
myth with workable theories and this was, certainly as far as I was and remain
concerned, the natural order of things.
It was
probably at around this point that I became a true atheist, as a reaction to
what I saw as a ludicrous situation in which people were taking selected myths
seriously. This is not to say that I was
not already, to all intents and purposes, an atheist. However, until this time, I
thought that pretty much everybody else was as well. You could say that I became a “harder”
atheist, or a “newer” atheist. If you
like, you could say I was “born again” as an atheist.
Something
else that might have been instrumental in my transition to a stronger stance
was my introduction to Baptists. They
may well have been around before, but when I moved to a new High School I met a
small group of Christians who were more overt, and more vocal, in their faith
than any I had met previously. Their
tendency to challenge others on their faith meant that I had my first
opportunity to publically identify as an atheist.
At the
same time, I was developing a teenage interest in philosophy, which means I
used to argue solipsism with people in order to annoy them. I would be able to keep up these arguments
for about as long as it took for them to punch me, which they would do in order
to prove that they did, as a matter of fact, exist rather than being a figment
of my imagination. As far as I can tell,
this is a standard rite of passage for a pubescent philosopher.
At some
point I either challenged the Baptists on why they believed what they did, or
they challenged me on why I didn’t, and a couple of years of heated debate
followed. I was probably a curious
animal to them, firstly because they were used to talking to people who had a
tepid, almost translucent, gossamer-like faith rather than people who had no
faith whatsoever and, secondly, because my knowledge of the bible was in many
cases superior to theirs despite my lack of belief in it. I found them curious too, because they
weren’t overly interested in learning more about what it was that they believed
and what it was they were trying to proselytise. They just seemed to move, as a group, from
esoteric passage to esoteric passage and none of them appeared interested in
understanding the whole of scripture in context. (Later I realised that these theological herd
migrations were the aftereffects of bible study sessions and sermons.)
At
university, I fell into a social group which included a number of (initially
tepid) Christians who were slowly ensnared in an evangelical campus group. This experience highlighted to me the
sect-like nature of these groups, with their pastor having a huge influence
over their behaviour – for good or ill.
Again, there were many heated debates, but this time with a group who
were increasingly interested in reading more and more of the scripture that
they held to be infallibly true. It was
at this time that I became aware of the mental gymnastics required to integrate
belief in the bible and an understanding of the real world – as an observer of
these Campus Christians as they were being forced down the path of what I
later came to know as apologetics.
I wasn’t
overly concerned by these Christians; they were relatively few in number and they
had little influence outside their own clique.
However, through having a privileged position among them (I was an accepted
atheist who even attended the occasional Friday sermon as a precursor to a
night out), I came to notice that more devout Christians can be intensely
hypocritical and intolerant. I was told
more than once that I was heading to hell, when I was not being told that I was
already there.
My
understanding of faith and belief, such as it is, crystallised around this
time. I was talking to Dee (not his real
name) about the nature of “grace”. He
explained to me that, in his conception of things, nothing he or anyone else
could do would result in him being among the saved. He would only be saved if his god so willed
it. The same, apparently, applied to me;
nothing I could ever do would affect the outcome. This was intriguing. Is it possible that Dee, the believer, was
not among the saved but I, the atheist, was?
Yes, Dee told me. The same
applied to people of other faiths.
However,
Dee was unshakeable in his faith that he was saved through the grace of god.
He
believed with utter conviction that he was saved. He believed with equal conviction that I was not
going to be, that Jews possibly could be saved due to a prior agreement with
the man upstairs and that Muslims, who were deceived by the devil, were all
going straight to hell – unless of course that god decided that he wanted us,
in which case god would do what was required for us to be converted,
irrespective of any ideas that we might have about it. So much for converting me!
I’m not
certain that this sort of unyielding, uncompromising faith is common to all
Christians, or even to all born-again Christians. What I can say is that while I have no
personal experience of this sort of mind-set from the inside, I suspect that it
is corresponds at some level with the way the majority of Christians think.
Atheism,
or at least my atheism, is not similar to this mind-set at all.
Over the
years I’ve ebbed and flowed on the atheism front. I’ve discussed things theological with theist
friends, been amazed that agnostic friends fanatically defend Christian culture
against "invading cultures" and argued hotly with people who knock on my door to
tell me that I am going to hell (no, not Mormon punks, I mean Jehovah’s
Witnesses). For the most part, so long
as they are not on my doorstep taking up time that I could be wasting in some
other way, being a theist is fine with me.
Sadly, theists have started to encroach on my life more over the past
few years, with attempts to change how schools are run, to influence what can
and can’t be taught at school, to define what is “good” in theistic terms and
to corrupt science with creationist nonsense.
Theists are particularly annoyingly when misusing logic.
So
that’s where I came from, and sort of where I am – standing up and pointing out
where people like William Lane Craig and his ilk are wrong.
I should
point out that I am totally aware that I don’t fully comprehend this whole
faith thing and my take on it may well be completely wrong. If anyone out there can go
some way towards explaining what faith actually means to a Christian, I’d be
very interested to hear about it. Don't bother recounting biblical stories. I've heard them.
