The One With Aldacron

I was raised as a Baptist. My father’s side of the family was never much for religion, but my mother’s side was, and is, very devout. I remember my mother dragging me to church every Sunday when I was young — Sunday School followed by a long, boring sermon. I used to chew sticks of the Wrigley’s Spearmint, or sometimes Juicy Fruit, that she always carried in her purse and would entertain myself by twisting and folding the wrappers into amusing shapes so that I wouldn’t fall asleep. It was an agonizing experience.

At some point in my early years I became infatuated with dinosaurs. I had several plastic dinosaur toys which all fought several epic battles in the prehistoric jungles of my room. In the third grade I was assigned a research project and chose dinosaurs as my topic. I don’t think I’ve ever been as enthusiastic about any research project since. So with my brain swimming in dinosaur trivia, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when I started questioning the conspicuous absence of the beasts, particularly my favorite, the triceratops, in the book of Genesis.

I had a very active mind as a kid (and still do, though now I consider it a detriment as I am so often intrigued by new things that I have trouble focusing on the old ones). I was constantly looking for answers to the questions flooding my head. I tore things apart to see how they worked, experimented with different items in the environment to see how they interacted, and forever acted out dramatic stories of thrill and adventure with my Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers and Star Wars figurines. But I was also burying my nose in books and learning as much as I could. Even at a young age, the things I was learning in school weren’t jiving with the things I was learning at church.

In school, I learned that dinosaurs lived long before man came around. In church, I learned that God created the earth, Adam, Eve, and all of the creatures in a week and not once did anyone mention anything about the triceratops or any other dinosaur. I knew the dinosaurs existed because I had seen the bones in museums. And then there was the question of timelines. At that age I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but it just seemed that if the earth in the Bible wasn’t nearly as old as the earth in my science and history books. With all of this confusion and uncertainty, I did the only thing I knew to do — I asked questions.

I wish I could say that I remember the answers to my questions, or even what all of the questions were, but I don’t. All I remember is that the answers left me with more questions. So my skepticism of Christianity began at an early age and arose from my fascination with dinosaurs. As time went by, my mother stopped going to church and, by extension, so did I. Though I did wind up going with my best friend to his church on Wednesday nights, and sometimes on Sunday nights, during my troubled teenage years. It wasn’t so much a religious event for me as it was a social event. The members of that church were less conservative than those I had been around before, and the youth group was excellent. But my skepticism never left me.

Over the years, my skepticism has evolved to encompass all religion. In more recent years, it transformed into disdain. The more I saw of ultra-conservative Christians, radical Islamists, and Jews obsessed with a land they claim because their ancestors lived there a few thousand years ago, the more I’ve grown to feel that religion is dirty. I had called myself agnostic for several years. I happily believed that some people need to believe in something to give their lives meaning, while others don’t, but I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the idea.

My philosophy of religion has always been that it serves four basic human needs:

1) Explanations - religions throughout history have sought to explain why we exist, how we exist, and what the future holds in store for us. Many ancient religions explained the mechanisms of nature as functions of the gods or their minions — Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, or Ra traversing the sky during the day and the underworld at night.

2) Inner Strength - in our darkest days, it can be difficult to find strength within. When life seems hopeless, it is comforting to believe that there is a superior being who is watching out for us. Praying to a deity in times of despair, believing that the deity is with you, is a way to focus your thoughts and find that inner strength. It’s like leaning on the shoulder of an imaginary friend.

3) Right and Wrong - most religions have the concept of a paradise for the good and an anti-paradise for the bad. Religion aims to take the burden of determining right from wrong away from us by spelling it out in a manual. It’s not a perfect system, as changing cultural and social mores can place the truly devout in some moral dilemmas, but for the religious it is a better system than having no written guidelines at all. You can be more confident saying that you are right because the Bible tells you so than saying that it’s your gut feeling.

4) Conquering the Fear of Death - most religions incorporate the concept of an afterlife, or rebirth in one form or another. It is painfully frightening for most people to believe that this is all there is, that once we die there is nothing else. We want to believe that death is not the end, that we continue to exist in another form. We also want to believe that any such existance will be a pleasant one. Believing that something else is out there helps us to focus on the here and now without worrying so much about the end.

That’s what my belief system evolved to, that religion is a device created by man to fill those four basic roles. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I’ve never studied theology. This is my own, independently derived, conclusion. I have no problem with this concept in general. My biggest issues with religion, and why I chose not to follow any one of them, is the behavior of those who claim to be “religious.”

I’m going to have to pick on Christianity, since it’s the one I’m most familiar with.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with Christianity is that there are so many branches. If Christianity is the one, true religion and God is the one, true god, then why can’t Christians agree on what Christianity really is? I can’t count the number of times I heard as a child that the Bible is “the word of God.” I guess God needs to take some classes on communication then, since no one can agree on what he is saying.

Another major complaint I have about Christianity is the selectivism Christians use when they quote the Bible to prove a point. Christians love to rant about the evil of homosexuality, but how many Christians today openly support the idea that women are to be submissive to their husbands? I haven’t heard any Christians agreeing with Paul’s assertion that, “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” If you are truly a devout Christian, why would you cherry pick the Bible? Shouldn’t you follow it verbatim? If you can choose to ignore certain parts of it that you don’t agree with, why can’t others?

A related issue is that many Christians can’t quote the bible to prove a point. How many times have you heard a Christian tell you that something is wrong, or is a sin, because the Bible declares it so? Next time someone tells you that, ask the person to quote the relevant passage(s). People love to parrot things they hear that they believe to be true, even when they have no idea of the veracity of the claim or of the exact source. This is especially so with the Bible. Many Christians can claim that the Bible says this or that — but that’s because they heard it in church. Maybe they read a few select passa
ges along with the preacher, but they can’t remember them and many can’t even decipher the King James version alone.

I can go on and on with my gripes about Christianity — inconsistencies in the Bible, translation glitches, different interpretations of certain passages, blatant hypocrisy — but that isn’t what I really want to write about today. Over the past few years, particularly since the war on terror began and since issues opposed by the Christian Right have come to bear in Congress (such as homosexual marriage and stem cell research), I’ve really moved farther away from my once liberal agnostic views. I’m now more inclined to see religion not as a boon for certain individuals, but as the bane of mankind.

Most modern religions encourage devout worship. That in and of itself is not a bad thing, but there is a line that can be crossed. Once on the other side, “devout” becomes “fanatical”. Fatanacism manifests itself in different ways, all of which are harmful to society. In the world of Islam, it takes shape in the form of holy warriors, suicide bombers and the Taliban. In the Christian world, it is seen as intolerance, bigotry, and restrictions on basic human rights. A fanatic has tunnel vision and is unable to accept any other view as being correct. A fanatic is always right and those who disagree are minions of evil. There is no logic or reason in the mind of a fanatic, only blind, intense faith.

I have always entertained the possiblity that one or more supreme beings exist, much as I have believed that the existence of extra-terrestrials is possible. But my tolerance of religion has quickly approached zero. Coincidentally, in the past week I have, quite by accident and on more than one occasion, stumbled across the works of vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. While I’m not ready to completely deny that a god could possibly exist, and therefore not ready to call myself an atheist, I do agree with many of their arguments against religion.

It really is silly, when you think about it, to blindly believe in a being you have never seen and have no real credible proof even exists. When I was a child, that was another conflict I had. I was expected to believe in God, but the monsters under my bed and in my closet weren’t real. That logic didn’t fly with me. If God was real, then there really was something in my closet and under my bed. I slept, terrified, facing the wall, with the blanket over my head, my hands and feet firmly placed within the borders of the mattress, until I was 8 or 9. I mean, really, you can’t have it both ways. It’s okay to believe in God, but not the boogeyman? And don’t get me started on the whole Santa Claus thing.

So in my 35 years of life, I’ve gone from skepticism, to disdain, to outright rejection of religion. And I am not the only one. Since I first heard of Dawkins last week, in an interview on some UK program I saw online, I’ve been curious about the atheist movement. There appear to be a great many more atheists in the US and Europe than I would have guessed and they are becoming more vocal. Dawkins likens it to the homosexual movement in the 70s, when people started coming “out of the closet.”

The twentieth century saw several cultural movements in America that began to reverse a long history of intolerance: Women’s Liberation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Gay Rights Movement — each of which still has battles to fight. It is possible that the first major cultural movement of the 21st century could be the Atheist Revolution. The war on terror, and the political environment in the US particularly, have begun to erode the confidence some had in religion. The environment is ripe for atheists to speak out and convince the fence-sitters and less devout that religion is bad for humanity. People like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are doing so and encouraging others to do so.

It’s difficult now for me to carry on a conversation with devout Christians, even those in my family. Our views are on opposite poles. I see the Christian view as narrow-minded and intolerant. I often become angry in such conversations, particularly when discussing issues I see as basic human rights and they see as mortal sins. I worry that if such views become accepted as the norm, America will transform into a sectarian state where the Bible is the law (of course, Bush’s expansion of executive power to dictatorial levels is a more immediate concern). We already have more references to God in our government than we should have. And it’s very hypocritical (a Christian trait) to denounce the sectarian government of the Taliban while lobbying the government at home to impose Christian values on society.

So if an atheist movement ever does take off, I’ll definitely be supporting it. A world without religion might actually be a better place to live. I’ll never see such a place in my lifetime, but it’s nice to imagine that some day, one of my ancestors might get to enjoy such a place.

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