Atheism

For the better part of a decade I considered myself an agnostic. In the end, when you drill down deep enough nothing is truly proven without a shadow of a doubt. And I do mean nothing, our very percepti0n of the world around us is an abstraction of an abstraction as interpreted by our brains, so there are multiple points of possible misinformation just in what we see. But I'm not about to go all nihilist on you. To disbelieve everything is to not function at all. You have to stop somewhere and take your perceived reality as an accepted truth in order to live in it. So what stops you from taking that extra step and taking God an accepted truth? Nothing for most of the population, which is kinda sad. I suppose that if I look back a few sentences where I said "take your perceived reality as an accepted truth", because to many God is an integral part of reality as they see it. But these people are also letting the filter of religion color what their eyes see.

I have had a problem with organized religion since I took the path of the agnostic, so to speak, back in high school. For a long time I felt that ones belief were very personal, and as such must be found on ones own. Regardless of what organized religion you choose or how you view it, at some level someone is telling you what you should believe, which I found fundamentally wrong. No matter how much you may say you feel that the religion is your personal truth, someone somewhere down the line planted all those ideas in your head, you just chose to agree with them, or in the since of children brought up in a faith, not even that.

As much as I'd like to say it was ideas such as this that pushed me away from Christianity, it was really Christians like the recently departed Jerry Fallwell that initially pushed me out and set in me a certain level of hatred for the religion. And what really set me apart from it was a certain dislike for the Christian deity. The whole bit about the apple from the tree of knowledge really got me, where God punished humanity for, in a since, trying to learn. And eventually, as I moved also away from deism, I found a dislike for the very concept of god. How can something be at once all powerful, all knowing, perfect, and have a will? To be perfect and know all one would be able to do no wrong. One would always have to do the right thing, and as such one would have no choice, no will, in what to do, as it would always have to be the absolute perfect correct thing. If God is all powerful, all knowing, and perfect, he must always do the perfect right thing for any situation. If you were able to know what the perfect right thing was, you could easily predict all of God's actions - he would be little more than a robot. To have will is to have the ability to do wrong, to choose between right and wrong. You can be all powerful and not all knowing. That way you have the ability to do wrong innocently, but then you would no longer be perfect. If if you were all knowing and all powerful, but consciously chose wrong, well that far from perfect or innocent.

Still within me was a desire to believe. It's just 'what' that was the problem. At this point I called myself an agnostic, but was what you might call and agnostic theist. I had a tendency to believe. I always felt it was something, perhaps multiple things, not conscious in nature. Some kind of force or forces which flowed within and behind everything. I suppose kind of like the eastern idea of Chi, but not quite. But at the same time I was living my life without belief.

Really, when I go back and think about my life, all the way back as far as I can remember in my childhood, Christianity wasn't something that had a deep meaning to me. It's just something I was, no different from the color of my hair or my eyes. It was a part of me, but it didn't have any significant impact on my life. Going to church was something that we just did on Sundays before going to see Grandma. For a brief time in middle school I did actually pray, but that was out of fear more than anything else, after a friend told me that if I wasn't saved and prayed all the time I would go to hell. And once I was confirmed, my parents didn't make me go to church anymore, so I didn't. I had better ways to spend my Sundays. I had never really needed religion to function, so when I became agnostic, it really didn't change anything about who I was. So in a sense, I've been living most of my life without religion. And it was that, along with my desire to believe, oddly enough, which recently pushed me towards atheism.

Until recently I had always looked at religion a a social creation. Created way back at the dawn of time to explain the unexplainable and to convince people to do things they might otherwise not. Like follow a particular person, or destroy another tribe. It wasn't until recently that I saw that evolution might have a part in it as well. A couple of videos I saw online clued me into this. I t started with Richard Dawkins talk at TED on militant atheism (which I saw on videosift, and introduced me to TED), and then some other videos from TED conferences by Dan Dennet, Michael Shermer, Helen Fisher, Dan Gilbert and others. It made me see how the many things we hold sacred, such as religion, love and morals had a purpose in the evolution and survival of our species. That my brain is hardwired to believe, and my lingering desire to believe seemed to prove this for me.

NOw you may say this this revelation is not all that dissimilar from a religious conversion. I said that one should discover their own beliefs and not let someone else tell you what to believe. And here I am letting a few scientists do just that. And to some extent I guess that is correct. But at least science has within it the ability to update itself, to toss out the old and bring out the new. To correct itself when it finds discrepancies, and acknowledge when a complete explanation is lacking. Still this revelation was kind of freeing. The idea that so much of what I desire is built into my brain, in a way, frees me from having to acknowledge it. My built in desire to believe is unnecessary as I can, and have, lived without religion. The desire to find romantic love, get married, and reproduce is rather unnecessary as there and plenty of people on this planet already. (Not that I've given up as such, the that it's unnecessary somewhat quells the need to actively pursue this desire). I can look at what I desire, what I feel is wrong with my life as the influence of external social and cultural influences combined with hardwired internal desires. And that reaffirms the idea that there is no right way to live one's life.

These ideas helped me change my definition of atheist. Once upon a time I saw that to mean an active denial of the possibility of god. I can't prove that, and I think the denial of god is just as much belief as a belief in god. Today I call myself atheist as person who lives his life without god. As a lack of belief in god, not a belief that there is no god. Or, if you will, you could call me an atheist in that I am not a theist.