Letting go of the myth of God is difficult in itself. Many of us grew up in the church. We grew up praying to God daily, confessing our sins, asking for guidance, and praying for strength. We kept a running monologue going on in our heads only we thought of it as more of a conversation, a conversation with a very quite and attentive listener who just let us ramble on without interrupting. Like a therapist who just sat back, encouraging us to talk and work out our problems for ourselves. But we always believed that there was someone listening. Realizing that there was no one on the other end of the prayer phone was hard enough for most of us, accepting that there was no grand puppetmaster controlling our lives, that the universe had no great plan for us, was painful for many of us. Accepting that we had to create our own meaning for our lives, that our successes and failures were our own, the product of our own decisions was terrifying but not nearly as terrifying as telling our family about our new epiphanies.
I didn't so much come out of the closet as I came out of the cage, roaring like a lion, determined to spill the blood of religion and rend the flesh from the bones of faith. I was a self-proclaimed militant atheist.
I had lost my faith two years before I had the proper words to express it. It was 1988, the year I graduated from high school that I became an atheist but I had no idea what that meant. I felt lost and forlorn and was desperately searching for some faith to replace my lost belief in the Christian God. I started hanging out with punk rockers on the streets of Philadelphia. They were all atheists as well so I assumed that they must have had some insight into what one did when they stopped believing in God. I was wrong of course. It wasn't until I left for college and met philosophy students who had been studying these questions that I began to get some understanding of what it meant to give up my faith, the world of wonder that opened up when you stopped believing and began to question.
Two philosophy students at Antioch College, Gustave Shultz and Chris Dimatto, were the first to introduce me to critical thinking and philosophical speculation. The next year I switched from a Creative Writing major to a Philosophy major and began to read the writings of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Rene' Descartes. I read everything I could get my hands on from Socrates and Plato to Herman Hesse and Buddha. It was then that I began to realize that I was not alone in my confusion. It was apparent that after more than two thousand years of inquiry no one had yet come up with the answers. The meaning of life remained a mystery and all the religions, philosophies, and ideologies that professed to the possession of some knowledge in regards to the meaning of life were all full of shit.
I was outraged by this realization. I was angry. How could they not know? How could no one in the history of man have answered these questions? All those libraries, all those books, all those professors with their PHDs and, worst of all, all of those priests, pastors, preachers, and spiritual leaders, none of them knew any more than I did. They were all clueless. How could this be? I looked at all those religious zealots with their faith and certainty and I wanted to wake them all up. I wanted to tell them all what I now knew. Because to me, they were all the problem. The reason no one had found the answers was because there were so few of us looking. Most people were content to remain ignorant. They were content to believe what was written in their so-called holy books even if it made no sense and conflicted with all the known facts of the universe. They had to be woken up and so I made it my mission. I called my mother almost every night and we argued about religion. I argued with everyone I could find. I was angry at the world's stupidity and I wanted to drag them all out into the sunshine of reason even if the sunlight burned their fragile skin and caused them to spontaneously combust like vampires.
It wasn't until I went home for Christmas that year, full of fight, that I realized what my new awareness had gained me. I could no longer relate to my own family. They were all tucked comfortably inside their illusions. I looked at my grandmother and all the comfort she took in her faith and I did not have the heart to tell her. I even eased up off my mother. A few years later, my mother called my sister and I and announced that she wanted to become a minister. To this day I often wonder if it was debating with me about religion that drove my mother back to the church. She had always believed but had never been very serious about Christianity. I wonder if my attempts to take God away from her entirely is what sent her screaming into the arms of her imaginary father. I hardly know her now. She knows exactly how I feel about her religion and her faith. We just don't discuss it anymore. I don't discuss it with any of my relatives. I leave them to their illusions. They don't preach to me and I don't preach to them.
So what's your story? How did you come out to your family about your lack of belief? What was the result? Share your tales with us and perhaps it will help others who are still lurking in the shadows to find their voices and declare their unbelief. Let's hear from you.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Atheism Sermon
This past weekend I participated in a religious discussion at Trinity church in Indianapolis, Indiana. I was to give a sermon on atheism followed by a sermon on Christianity by my good friend, author and pastor, Maurice Broaddus. Originally billed as a debate, after the head pastor withdrew it became more of a "This I believe". I was more than a little surprised by the overwhelmingly positive response. What follows is my entire unabridged speech.
Good afternoon, my friends. I’d like to first thank Maurice for inviting me here and thank you all for welcoming me. My name is Wrath James White and I am a humanist, an atheist. As Maurice’ll tell you, I am about as passionate in my disbelief as he is in his belief.
Let me begin by explaining what atheism is. Atheism, simply put, means not believing in any god or gods. There’s a quote made popular by Richard Dawkins: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” We are all atheists when it comes to believing in Zeus or Odin or RA. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
But, so what? I don’t believe. You do. Who cares? And if there was a way to keep these two viewpoints from coming into conflict with one another I wouldn’t care. But I believe in many things that are threatened by the church.
I believe in euthanasia. I believe that people should have the right to choose when and how they die. I believe they have the right to a dignified end. But because of the dominant religious beliefs in this country, if I became paralyzed with some crippling, agonizing illness that deteriorated my quality of life to the point that I no longer wanted to live, I do not have the legal right to end my life. That pisses me off a little. I believe in same-sex marriage. I believe that society benefits from people being in committed relationships. It serves a stabilizing function by encouraging people to settle down, get a job, raise children in a stable loving environment, buy a house, and pay taxes. But once again, because of the dominant religious beliefs in this country many loving couples are not able to enjoy the same rights as every other American. And that pisses me off. I believe in a woman’s right to choose. I don’t believe it benefits this society and, in fact, it does great harm to bring unwanted children into a world already straining beneath the weight of overpopulation, crime, and poverty. But the dominant religion in this country is constantly trying to curtail that right.
I believe that people should be judged by their abilities, their morality, and their actions rather than by their religious beliefs or lack thereof. But yet, in this country atheists are the minorities least likely to be elected to public office. And yeah, that pisses me off. When asked who you would like your son or daughter to marry, once again, an atheist is at the bottom of the list. Despite the fact that atheists are most likely to be college educated, least likely to go to prison, and least likely to get divorced. And finally, I believe in reason. I believe that the practice of believing without evidence is demonstrably dangerous and has historically led to abominable acts of intolerance and cruelty. As Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
I don’t think it‘s a coincidence that nearly all the racist organizations in this country are religious organizations. When you don’t need evidence for your beliefs you can believe anything and that tendency can be easily exploited by the corrupt and the unscrupulous.
Atheism is not a belief system. There are no dogmas attached to it. No mores. No rituals. There are no Ten Commandments of atheism. It is simply the absence of belief.
I’m sure you have been told and many of you perhaps believe that atheists hold science up like a religion. That we have faith in it the same way believers have faith in their religions, but there’s no such thing as scientific faith. Science is the study of evidence whereas faith is belief without evidence and often in spite of all evidence. They are the antithesis of each other. There are no scientific beliefs that are sacrosanct. If a scientist could disprove evolution or gravity or relativity he would be famous. He’d be almost guaranteed a Nobel Prize.
“… my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.”
That was Richard Dawkins who said that. He is about as close to a fundamentalist atheist as they come. And that is why there is no such thing as a fundamentalist atheist, because if there were scientific evidence that God existed there would be no atheists. I know exactly what it would take to convince me of God’s existence, verifiable evidence, facts.
I don’t have, and never had, the ability to suspend my disbelief and natural skepticism. Not even when I was a believer. I always questioned and doubted. That’s just who I am. I can’t believe just to satisfy anxieties about death or my place in the universe. I can’t believe simply because a particular belief system is popular. Truth isn’t decided by majority vote. I can’t be persuaded just because some priest or minister talks real pretty. I know they are just men like me. I talk pretty too. That doesn’t mean I’m not full of crap sometimes. I can’t just choose to believe because I don’t trust my own moral compass and fear that I wouldn’t be a good person without the threat of damnation and the promise of paradise. I cannot believe just to fit in, for that safe, comfortable, sense of community. I cannot believe just because everyone in my family, culture, or country believes and it has become a custom or a tradition. My mind just does not work that way. I am not terribly skilled at the art of self-deception.
I can only believe in any religion or ideology when I know it to be true, when it can be verified by empirical facts, by experiments that produce predictable results that can be duplicated. That’s the basic standard of proof we use for everything except our religious beliefs. If someone were selling me a TV set and they said “You can’t turn it on. You just have to have faith that it works. You can only turn it on after you’re dead.” I’d think they were crazy. And hopefully, so would you. But religion doesn’t allow you to turn it on and try it out before you buy it. You don’t know if religion works until you’re dead. Now, I’m just a kid from the ghetto so to me, that sounds like a con.
When I was growing up on the streets of Philadelphia, I
learned the hard way not to blindly trust in pretty words and beautiful fantasies spun by charismatic individuals no matter how desirable the fantasies were, no matter how well they fit my personal aesthetic, my personal vision of how things ought to be, no matter how much they flattered my ego or calmed my fears. I learned to question everything. I wasn’t fooled by the pimps, hustlers, conmen, and drug dealers because I questioned every lie that came out of their mouths and I demanded proof. I demanded evidence. I saw what a crack addict looked like and so I never fell for the lies of the crack dealer. I saw the drunks and winos. That’s why I never drank when I was young no matter how much peer pressure there was to get drunk and party. I never smoked cigarettes. I never smoked weed. No matter how many of “the cool kids” were doing it. I never got into crime. I saw the end results of the drug dealer’s life, the pimp’s life, the gangster’s life, and so I was never impressed with their temporary wealth and ghetto fame.
Likewise, I heard the preacher telling us that “Jesus Saves” and then I saw my friends and neighbors gunned down in the street by drug dealers. I saw them in welfare lines and unemployment lines. I saw them get sick with cancers and diseases and die in agony. I saw crack babies born into abusive homes. I saw the socio-economic oppression of my people, crushed beneath the weight of racism and poverty and it was hard to rectify that with anything the preacher was saying. I read in the bible, Mathew 7:8 , where Jesus said “For everyone who asketh receiveth; he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?” It floored me, because I had been asking for bread for as long as I could recall and had usually received stones and serpents. My own life proved the lie in this statement and it called everything else into question. As I looked around at my neighbors I saw that most of them had likewise learned to subsist on stones from heaven. The bible was obviously wrong. And so, like the lies of the pimps, drug dealers, gang bangers, and conmen, I learned not to trust it. Just as it had on the streets, being a skeptic kept me from being a fool and a victim.
Atheism, for me, is not a statement of any knowledge concerning the origins of the universe or of life. It is not saying, “I know for a fact that there is no God.” What it says is simply, “I don’t know if there is a God and neither do you. And because I don’t know I can’t believe.”
I didn’t become an atheist because I was mad at God. You can’t be mad at someone that doesn’t exist. I didn’t become an atheist because some tragedy befell me that made me turn my back on religion and deny the existence of God like some sort of grudge. If I was mad at God I wouldn’t deny his existence because if God doesn’t exist than he’s not responsible for anything. God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist. That would be like denying the existence of Hitler because I was pissed off at him over the Holocaust. It wouldn’t make sense. I’m not an atheist because I find Christian morality too hard to live up to and I want to just sin freely without repercussions. There are always repercussions for your actions in this life.
There’s no need for a heaven or a hell because we get them both right here, right now and it isn’t as simple as good befalling the good and bad befalling the bad. You can be the most loving and giving person and still make bad decisions that you ultimately suffer for. The morality I subscribed to, in my opinion, holds me to a much higher standard because it requires me to be more than simply good, it requires me to be smart. It doesn’t allow me to hate someone for no other reason than because some book says I should.
I became an atheist when I realized that the only reason I had ever believed was because that’s how I had been raised. I had been a Christian only because my family and everyone else I knew were Christians. That was it. That was my only reason. It had nothing to do with proof. If I had been raised by Hindus I would have been Hindu. If I had been raised by Muslims I would have been Muslim.
When I realized this I was embarrassed. To me, it was the most random, the most arbitrary, the most ridiculous reason I could think of to believe in anything. And that’s the way most people adopt their religious beliefs, it is simply handed down to them like a used sweater and we put it on before we are old enough to question it. Most people go their entire lives without ever questioning why they’re wearing it, if they need it, or whether they would be better off without it.
I didn’t have any proof that anything in the bible was true and once I read the bible, I realized that I didn’t believe half of the things in it and that neither did most of the people I knew. Yet somehow they still called themselves Christians. Most of the people I knew didn’t believe in Adam and Eve. They didn’t believe that Jonah lived inside a whale’s belly for days. They didn’t believe that Noah put two of every animal onto a boat for thirty days and thirty nights and that somehow every animal on earth lived within walking distance of Noah’s house, several million species of insects, thousands of birds and rodents that would have taken several lifetimes to collect. They didn’t believe that women should be silent and subservient. They didn’t believe in slavery. They didn’t believe that if someone worked on Sunday or cheated on their husband or didn’t obey their parents they should be stoned to death. They didn’t believe that it was a sin to eat crab or lobster or rabbit. Most of the Christians I knew had never even read the entire bible. They accepted this ideology and didn’t even know what the book really said. I became an atheist when I realized that I had no logical reason for being a Christian.
When I first began to question religion I assumed that I would find answers to my questions and that nothing would change. I assumed that the failing was in me and not in the bible. I thought that if anything, my belief would be stronger in the end. Instead, the more I read, the more I questioned, the more doubts I acquired and the harder it became to hold on to my beliefs. I found falsehoods. I found contradictions. I found immorality. I found that all the things I had believed made no sense and those things that I believed that did make sense were not even really in the bible or else were actively contradicted by other passages in the bible. That so much of what was written in its pages flew in the face of reason and morality. At that point, I would have had to deny all logic in order to believe and I just could not do that.
Isaac Asimov said, that when “Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived.” That’s why those who know the bible the best and follow it the most literally look crazy to most people. Even moderate and liberal Christians think fundamentalists are crazy. Because the passages that most sane and reasonable people completely ignore or choose to interpret symbolically or metaphorically, they believe. So we call them extremists and zealots when what they really are, are true believers. When the church was burning infidels at the stake and sending armed missionary soldiers abroad to slaughter or convert entire cultures, they were following the bible. Today’s fundamentalists don’t even follow the bible 100%. They can’t. If anyone was to follow every command in the bible 100% they would be a criminal and a murderer. They would be a thoroughly reprehensible human being—a racist, sexist, homophobic, wife beating, gay bashing, child abusing, slave trader. But the bible was written to be followed 100%. There’s nothing in there that says or even suggests that certain parts were to be ignored or taken lightly. When Jesus said, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling." He didn’t wink afterwards. He didn’t laugh. In Titus 2:9 when it says "Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect." Afterwards it doesn’t have a little note in parentheses that says “just kiddin’”. He meant that literally.
In order to keep Christian beliefs in line with modern morality you have to reinterpret passages that are relatively black and white or else disregard them entirely because so much of it runs contrary to commonsense morality. To be a good person and continue to believe you have to cherry-pick the good stuff and disregard all that slavery, homophobia, and misogynism stuff.
So, after reading the bible, I decided to reevaluate all of my beliefs. I abandoned everything I had believed for which there was no evidence and I started over, putting my beliefs back together piece by piece and only including the things I could logically support and defend.
I realized that the first step in achieving true knowledge was admitting my own ignorance. Not going in already committed to a conclusion and just looking for facts to justify the conclusions I had already reached. If I had begun asking questions when I was already one hundred percent emotionally committed to a conclusion those questions would have been worthless. So I let all these emotional convictions go and it was like a great weight had been lifted. The scales had fallen from my eyes and I could finally see the world as it was rather than how I had been conditioned to believe it was. My mind was now opened by wonder rather than closed by faith.
History has shown us again and again that the closed mind created by faith is fertile ground for hatred and prejudice, not to mention that it has often been an impediment to both moral and scientific progress. To quote Blaise Pascal, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” That alone would be enough for me to reject faith. This irrational illogical thought process, to me, contradicts the very definition of a human being, the rational animal. We were given these great big brains in order to allow us to answer questions and find true knowledge. Filling in the gaps between what we know and what we don't know with beliefs that we lend the same weight as knowledge ensures that true knowledge will have a hard time ever finding fertile ground upon which to grow.
The virtue of ignorance is that it allows for knowledge. The sin of faith is that it does not. If you believe before you know and are committed to that belief you will NEVER know. Your belief has taken the place of knowledge. Why would you search for truth if you believe in your heart that you have already found it? Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you from asking the questions and that alone is enough reason for me to reject it. You cannot fill a vessel that is already full and that is the problem with faith. That alone is reason enough to be an atheist. Not because I have anything against any one religion but because of the foundation of faith upon which all religions rest. That is why I am and will always be a skeptic.
The reality is that when it comes to creation and the existence or non-existence of a creator we just don't know. Anyone who says he does know is either deluded or disingenuous. We don't know. There is no shame in admitting that we don't know. There is no dishonor in admitting our obvious ignorance. The dishonor is in resigning ourselves to remaining ignorant. Not just belief without evidence but belief against all contradictory evidence. That type of willful ignorance is a sin against all the potential within human nature. An open mind that leads to the pursuit of knowledge is the very definition of what it means to be human and as such is the highest virtue.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, my friends. I’d like to first thank Maurice for inviting me here and thank you all for welcoming me. My name is Wrath James White and I am a humanist, an atheist. As Maurice’ll tell you, I am about as passionate in my disbelief as he is in his belief.
Let me begin by explaining what atheism is. Atheism, simply put, means not believing in any god or gods. There’s a quote made popular by Richard Dawkins: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” We are all atheists when it comes to believing in Zeus or Odin or RA. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
But, so what? I don’t believe. You do. Who cares? And if there was a way to keep these two viewpoints from coming into conflict with one another I wouldn’t care. But I believe in many things that are threatened by the church.
I believe in euthanasia. I believe that people should have the right to choose when and how they die. I believe they have the right to a dignified end. But because of the dominant religious beliefs in this country, if I became paralyzed with some crippling, agonizing illness that deteriorated my quality of life to the point that I no longer wanted to live, I do not have the legal right to end my life. That pisses me off a little. I believe in same-sex marriage. I believe that society benefits from people being in committed relationships. It serves a stabilizing function by encouraging people to settle down, get a job, raise children in a stable loving environment, buy a house, and pay taxes. But once again, because of the dominant religious beliefs in this country many loving couples are not able to enjoy the same rights as every other American. And that pisses me off. I believe in a woman’s right to choose. I don’t believe it benefits this society and, in fact, it does great harm to bring unwanted children into a world already straining beneath the weight of overpopulation, crime, and poverty. But the dominant religion in this country is constantly trying to curtail that right.
I believe that people should be judged by their abilities, their morality, and their actions rather than by their religious beliefs or lack thereof. But yet, in this country atheists are the minorities least likely to be elected to public office. And yeah, that pisses me off. When asked who you would like your son or daughter to marry, once again, an atheist is at the bottom of the list. Despite the fact that atheists are most likely to be college educated, least likely to go to prison, and least likely to get divorced. And finally, I believe in reason. I believe that the practice of believing without evidence is demonstrably dangerous and has historically led to abominable acts of intolerance and cruelty. As Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
I don’t think it‘s a coincidence that nearly all the racist organizations in this country are religious organizations. When you don’t need evidence for your beliefs you can believe anything and that tendency can be easily exploited by the corrupt and the unscrupulous.
Atheism is not a belief system. There are no dogmas attached to it. No mores. No rituals. There are no Ten Commandments of atheism. It is simply the absence of belief.
I’m sure you have been told and many of you perhaps believe that atheists hold science up like a religion. That we have faith in it the same way believers have faith in their religions, but there’s no such thing as scientific faith. Science is the study of evidence whereas faith is belief without evidence and often in spite of all evidence. They are the antithesis of each other. There are no scientific beliefs that are sacrosanct. If a scientist could disprove evolution or gravity or relativity he would be famous. He’d be almost guaranteed a Nobel Prize.
“… my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.”
That was Richard Dawkins who said that. He is about as close to a fundamentalist atheist as they come. And that is why there is no such thing as a fundamentalist atheist, because if there were scientific evidence that God existed there would be no atheists. I know exactly what it would take to convince me of God’s existence, verifiable evidence, facts.
I don’t have, and never had, the ability to suspend my disbelief and natural skepticism. Not even when I was a believer. I always questioned and doubted. That’s just who I am. I can’t believe just to satisfy anxieties about death or my place in the universe. I can’t believe simply because a particular belief system is popular. Truth isn’t decided by majority vote. I can’t be persuaded just because some priest or minister talks real pretty. I know they are just men like me. I talk pretty too. That doesn’t mean I’m not full of crap sometimes. I can’t just choose to believe because I don’t trust my own moral compass and fear that I wouldn’t be a good person without the threat of damnation and the promise of paradise. I cannot believe just to fit in, for that safe, comfortable, sense of community. I cannot believe just because everyone in my family, culture, or country believes and it has become a custom or a tradition. My mind just does not work that way. I am not terribly skilled at the art of self-deception.
I can only believe in any religion or ideology when I know it to be true, when it can be verified by empirical facts, by experiments that produce predictable results that can be duplicated. That’s the basic standard of proof we use for everything except our religious beliefs. If someone were selling me a TV set and they said “You can’t turn it on. You just have to have faith that it works. You can only turn it on after you’re dead.” I’d think they were crazy. And hopefully, so would you. But religion doesn’t allow you to turn it on and try it out before you buy it. You don’t know if religion works until you’re dead. Now, I’m just a kid from the ghetto so to me, that sounds like a con.
When I was growing up on the streets of Philadelphia, I
learned the hard way not to blindly trust in pretty words and beautiful fantasies spun by charismatic individuals no matter how desirable the fantasies were, no matter how well they fit my personal aesthetic, my personal vision of how things ought to be, no matter how much they flattered my ego or calmed my fears. I learned to question everything. I wasn’t fooled by the pimps, hustlers, conmen, and drug dealers because I questioned every lie that came out of their mouths and I demanded proof. I demanded evidence. I saw what a crack addict looked like and so I never fell for the lies of the crack dealer. I saw the drunks and winos. That’s why I never drank when I was young no matter how much peer pressure there was to get drunk and party. I never smoked cigarettes. I never smoked weed. No matter how many of “the cool kids” were doing it. I never got into crime. I saw the end results of the drug dealer’s life, the pimp’s life, the gangster’s life, and so I was never impressed with their temporary wealth and ghetto fame.
Likewise, I heard the preacher telling us that “Jesus Saves” and then I saw my friends and neighbors gunned down in the street by drug dealers. I saw them in welfare lines and unemployment lines. I saw them get sick with cancers and diseases and die in agony. I saw crack babies born into abusive homes. I saw the socio-economic oppression of my people, crushed beneath the weight of racism and poverty and it was hard to rectify that with anything the preacher was saying. I read in the bible, Mathew 7:8 , where Jesus said “For everyone who asketh receiveth; he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?” It floored me, because I had been asking for bread for as long as I could recall and had usually received stones and serpents. My own life proved the lie in this statement and it called everything else into question. As I looked around at my neighbors I saw that most of them had likewise learned to subsist on stones from heaven. The bible was obviously wrong. And so, like the lies of the pimps, drug dealers, gang bangers, and conmen, I learned not to trust it. Just as it had on the streets, being a skeptic kept me from being a fool and a victim.
Atheism, for me, is not a statement of any knowledge concerning the origins of the universe or of life. It is not saying, “I know for a fact that there is no God.” What it says is simply, “I don’t know if there is a God and neither do you. And because I don’t know I can’t believe.”
I didn’t become an atheist because I was mad at God. You can’t be mad at someone that doesn’t exist. I didn’t become an atheist because some tragedy befell me that made me turn my back on religion and deny the existence of God like some sort of grudge. If I was mad at God I wouldn’t deny his existence because if God doesn’t exist than he’s not responsible for anything. God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist. That would be like denying the existence of Hitler because I was pissed off at him over the Holocaust. It wouldn’t make sense. I’m not an atheist because I find Christian morality too hard to live up to and I want to just sin freely without repercussions. There are always repercussions for your actions in this life.
There’s no need for a heaven or a hell because we get them both right here, right now and it isn’t as simple as good befalling the good and bad befalling the bad. You can be the most loving and giving person and still make bad decisions that you ultimately suffer for. The morality I subscribed to, in my opinion, holds me to a much higher standard because it requires me to be more than simply good, it requires me to be smart. It doesn’t allow me to hate someone for no other reason than because some book says I should.
I became an atheist when I realized that the only reason I had ever believed was because that’s how I had been raised. I had been a Christian only because my family and everyone else I knew were Christians. That was it. That was my only reason. It had nothing to do with proof. If I had been raised by Hindus I would have been Hindu. If I had been raised by Muslims I would have been Muslim.
When I realized this I was embarrassed. To me, it was the most random, the most arbitrary, the most ridiculous reason I could think of to believe in anything. And that’s the way most people adopt their religious beliefs, it is simply handed down to them like a used sweater and we put it on before we are old enough to question it. Most people go their entire lives without ever questioning why they’re wearing it, if they need it, or whether they would be better off without it.
I didn’t have any proof that anything in the bible was true and once I read the bible, I realized that I didn’t believe half of the things in it and that neither did most of the people I knew. Yet somehow they still called themselves Christians. Most of the people I knew didn’t believe in Adam and Eve. They didn’t believe that Jonah lived inside a whale’s belly for days. They didn’t believe that Noah put two of every animal onto a boat for thirty days and thirty nights and that somehow every animal on earth lived within walking distance of Noah’s house, several million species of insects, thousands of birds and rodents that would have taken several lifetimes to collect. They didn’t believe that women should be silent and subservient. They didn’t believe in slavery. They didn’t believe that if someone worked on Sunday or cheated on their husband or didn’t obey their parents they should be stoned to death. They didn’t believe that it was a sin to eat crab or lobster or rabbit. Most of the Christians I knew had never even read the entire bible. They accepted this ideology and didn’t even know what the book really said. I became an atheist when I realized that I had no logical reason for being a Christian.
When I first began to question religion I assumed that I would find answers to my questions and that nothing would change. I assumed that the failing was in me and not in the bible. I thought that if anything, my belief would be stronger in the end. Instead, the more I read, the more I questioned, the more doubts I acquired and the harder it became to hold on to my beliefs. I found falsehoods. I found contradictions. I found immorality. I found that all the things I had believed made no sense and those things that I believed that did make sense were not even really in the bible or else were actively contradicted by other passages in the bible. That so much of what was written in its pages flew in the face of reason and morality. At that point, I would have had to deny all logic in order to believe and I just could not do that.
Isaac Asimov said, that when “Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived.” That’s why those who know the bible the best and follow it the most literally look crazy to most people. Even moderate and liberal Christians think fundamentalists are crazy. Because the passages that most sane and reasonable people completely ignore or choose to interpret symbolically or metaphorically, they believe. So we call them extremists and zealots when what they really are, are true believers. When the church was burning infidels at the stake and sending armed missionary soldiers abroad to slaughter or convert entire cultures, they were following the bible. Today’s fundamentalists don’t even follow the bible 100%. They can’t. If anyone was to follow every command in the bible 100% they would be a criminal and a murderer. They would be a thoroughly reprehensible human being—a racist, sexist, homophobic, wife beating, gay bashing, child abusing, slave trader. But the bible was written to be followed 100%. There’s nothing in there that says or even suggests that certain parts were to be ignored or taken lightly. When Jesus said, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling." He didn’t wink afterwards. He didn’t laugh. In Titus 2:9 when it says "Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect." Afterwards it doesn’t have a little note in parentheses that says “just kiddin’”. He meant that literally.
In order to keep Christian beliefs in line with modern morality you have to reinterpret passages that are relatively black and white or else disregard them entirely because so much of it runs contrary to commonsense morality. To be a good person and continue to believe you have to cherry-pick the good stuff and disregard all that slavery, homophobia, and misogynism stuff.
So, after reading the bible, I decided to reevaluate all of my beliefs. I abandoned everything I had believed for which there was no evidence and I started over, putting my beliefs back together piece by piece and only including the things I could logically support and defend.
I realized that the first step in achieving true knowledge was admitting my own ignorance. Not going in already committed to a conclusion and just looking for facts to justify the conclusions I had already reached. If I had begun asking questions when I was already one hundred percent emotionally committed to a conclusion those questions would have been worthless. So I let all these emotional convictions go and it was like a great weight had been lifted. The scales had fallen from my eyes and I could finally see the world as it was rather than how I had been conditioned to believe it was. My mind was now opened by wonder rather than closed by faith.
History has shown us again and again that the closed mind created by faith is fertile ground for hatred and prejudice, not to mention that it has often been an impediment to both moral and scientific progress. To quote Blaise Pascal, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” That alone would be enough for me to reject faith. This irrational illogical thought process, to me, contradicts the very definition of a human being, the rational animal. We were given these great big brains in order to allow us to answer questions and find true knowledge. Filling in the gaps between what we know and what we don't know with beliefs that we lend the same weight as knowledge ensures that true knowledge will have a hard time ever finding fertile ground upon which to grow.
The virtue of ignorance is that it allows for knowledge. The sin of faith is that it does not. If you believe before you know and are committed to that belief you will NEVER know. Your belief has taken the place of knowledge. Why would you search for truth if you believe in your heart that you have already found it? Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you from asking the questions and that alone is enough reason for me to reject it. You cannot fill a vessel that is already full and that is the problem with faith. That alone is reason enough to be an atheist. Not because I have anything against any one religion but because of the foundation of faith upon which all religions rest. That is why I am and will always be a skeptic.
The reality is that when it comes to creation and the existence or non-existence of a creator we just don't know. Anyone who says he does know is either deluded or disingenuous. We don't know. There is no shame in admitting that we don't know. There is no dishonor in admitting our obvious ignorance. The dishonor is in resigning ourselves to remaining ignorant. Not just belief without evidence but belief against all contradictory evidence. That type of willful ignorance is a sin against all the potential within human nature. An open mind that leads to the pursuit of knowledge is the very definition of what it means to be human and as such is the highest virtue.
Thank you.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Islam Is Not The Black Man's Religion
Ever since The Honorable Elijah Muhammed came to America, Islam has been linked to Blackness in America. Black Nationalists shed their Christian names and replaced it with an X until they could make the pilgrimage to Mecca to take Islamic names. Names like Abdul, Khareem, and Raashid became associated in our culture with large Black men with shoulder width Afros. The name of Allah in America, until 9/11, was linked more with The Nation of Islam than Middle Easterners or terrorism. It conjured up images of well-groomed Black men in suits and bow ties selling bean pies on the corner of Martin Luther King Blvd along with the latest edition of Final Call. But Islam is no more the Black man's religion than Christianity is.
Arab traders and travelers came to northern Africa sometime during the mid-seventh century A.D., only a few decades after the Prophet Muhammad moved with his followers from Mecca to Medina, and began to spread the Islamic religion along the eastern coast of Africa and to the western and central Sudan between the eighth and ninth centuries. Islam spread throughout Africa gradually bringing with it the art of writing, Arab architectural techniques, and the Arab language which eventually merged with the Bantu languages to form Swahili. Conversion into Islam by Black African chieftains was used to gain political support from Arab leaders and to establish trade relationships. Among the the common people it was used to avoid being sold into slavery.
Eight centuries before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade began, Arab slave traders invaded Africa in search of slaves and concubines. While the Trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted 300 years the Trans-Saharan slave trade lasted nearly 1400 years continuing into the Twentieth century. By the time of the Ottoman Empire, the majority of slaves in Islamic countries were obtained by raiding Africa. These raids of African countries were directly responsible for the rapid expansion of Islam across North Africa.
Slavery continued in Saudi Arabia until as late as 1962. While Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad were in America demonizing the White man for slavery, Islamics in Saudi Arabia still owned African slaves. Even today, African women are kidnapped as sex slaves to be sold into prostitution. As horrific as slavery was in Europe and the Americas the Islamic slave trade was as bad or worse. Mortality rates for slaves being transported across the Sahara desert to the Islamic empire have been estimated to be as high as ninety percent.
Eunuchs were especially prized for bodyguards and confidential servants and so fetched higher prices than other males, encouraging the castration of slaves at the borders of the Islamic Empire before being exported. This was done outside Islamic borders since Islamic law did not permit the mutilation of slaves. Women were used as concubines since Islamic law entitled Muslim men to use slaves for sexual pleasure. If they became pregnant their children were usually killed. Unlike slaves in the Americas, in Islamic countries slaves were not allowed to marry other slaves and raise families. Most of the male slaves were castrated and were either used as soldiers or as harem guards while the women were almost exclusively used as sex slaves and concubines unlike America where African slaves were mostly purchased for agricultural work and as domestics servants.
This is how Islam became an African religion. It was forced upon us by slave traders hunting for Black flesh for sexual exploitation, to swell the ranks of their armies, and for use as bodyguards to secure their harems of stolen African women. Just as Christianity was forced upon Africans at the end of a gun, Islam came on the point of a sword. Why then do so many Black people believe Islam to be the true religion of African people when it is not an indigenous religion but rather one adopted by African leaders in order to increase their profit and power and forced upon poor Africans by Arab raiders?
The proliferation of Islam in Africa, just like that of Christianity among Black Americans, is yet another example of the conquered adopting the religion of their conquerors. Just as with Christianity, had Africans not fallen prey to Arab slave traders, had Arabs never acquired a taste for Nubian slaves, far fewer of the millions of devout Muslims in Africa would be Muslims today.
The same absurdities and immorality inherent in the Christian bible are also present in The Koran. This comes as little surprise since Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all evolved from the same Abrahamic text. The same ridiculous creation myths exist in Islam as in Christianity and Judaism. The same reliance on faith over reason, dogma over empirical evidence. Sexism and homophobia are even greater under Islam. Islam, like Christianity, relies on fear and intimidation. "Love me or suffer eternal torment!" said God. It has the same insecure god-figure that requires constant praise and adoration from beings that are supposed to be like gnats in comparison to it in terms of intellect. Personally, I could give less than a fuck whether or not I was worshipped by gnats but then, I'm a pretty secure brotha. It has the same inexplicable dilemma of how an all-powerful, all-knowing, good and loving God could produce a creation so full of misery and suffering. The same problem of explaining why God intervened two thousand years ago to lead the Jews out of Egypt but allowed African Americans to suffer slavery and oppression for four hundred years in Europe and America and over a millennia in the Middle East. In terms of logic, morality, and overall efficacy, it is no better than Christianity.
Arab traders and travelers came to northern Africa sometime during the mid-seventh century A.D., only a few decades after the Prophet Muhammad moved with his followers from Mecca to Medina, and began to spread the Islamic religion along the eastern coast of Africa and to the western and central Sudan between the eighth and ninth centuries. Islam spread throughout Africa gradually bringing with it the art of writing, Arab architectural techniques, and the Arab language which eventually merged with the Bantu languages to form Swahili. Conversion into Islam by Black African chieftains was used to gain political support from Arab leaders and to establish trade relationships. Among the the common people it was used to avoid being sold into slavery.
Eight centuries before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade began, Arab slave traders invaded Africa in search of slaves and concubines. While the Trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted 300 years the Trans-Saharan slave trade lasted nearly 1400 years continuing into the Twentieth century. By the time of the Ottoman Empire, the majority of slaves in Islamic countries were obtained by raiding Africa. These raids of African countries were directly responsible for the rapid expansion of Islam across North Africa.
Slavery continued in Saudi Arabia until as late as 1962. While Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad were in America demonizing the White man for slavery, Islamics in Saudi Arabia still owned African slaves. Even today, African women are kidnapped as sex slaves to be sold into prostitution. As horrific as slavery was in Europe and the Americas the Islamic slave trade was as bad or worse. Mortality rates for slaves being transported across the Sahara desert to the Islamic empire have been estimated to be as high as ninety percent.
Eunuchs were especially prized for bodyguards and confidential servants and so fetched higher prices than other males, encouraging the castration of slaves at the borders of the Islamic Empire before being exported. This was done outside Islamic borders since Islamic law did not permit the mutilation of slaves. Women were used as concubines since Islamic law entitled Muslim men to use slaves for sexual pleasure. If they became pregnant their children were usually killed. Unlike slaves in the Americas, in Islamic countries slaves were not allowed to marry other slaves and raise families. Most of the male slaves were castrated and were either used as soldiers or as harem guards while the women were almost exclusively used as sex slaves and concubines unlike America where African slaves were mostly purchased for agricultural work and as domestics servants.
This is how Islam became an African religion. It was forced upon us by slave traders hunting for Black flesh for sexual exploitation, to swell the ranks of their armies, and for use as bodyguards to secure their harems of stolen African women. Just as Christianity was forced upon Africans at the end of a gun, Islam came on the point of a sword. Why then do so many Black people believe Islam to be the true religion of African people when it is not an indigenous religion but rather one adopted by African leaders in order to increase their profit and power and forced upon poor Africans by Arab raiders?
The proliferation of Islam in Africa, just like that of Christianity among Black Americans, is yet another example of the conquered adopting the religion of their conquerors. Just as with Christianity, had Africans not fallen prey to Arab slave traders, had Arabs never acquired a taste for Nubian slaves, far fewer of the millions of devout Muslims in Africa would be Muslims today.
The same absurdities and immorality inherent in the Christian bible are also present in The Koran. This comes as little surprise since Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all evolved from the same Abrahamic text. The same ridiculous creation myths exist in Islam as in Christianity and Judaism. The same reliance on faith over reason, dogma over empirical evidence. Sexism and homophobia are even greater under Islam. Islam, like Christianity, relies on fear and intimidation. "Love me or suffer eternal torment!" said God. It has the same insecure god-figure that requires constant praise and adoration from beings that are supposed to be like gnats in comparison to it in terms of intellect. Personally, I could give less than a fuck whether or not I was worshipped by gnats but then, I'm a pretty secure brotha. It has the same inexplicable dilemma of how an all-powerful, all-knowing, good and loving God could produce a creation so full of misery and suffering. The same problem of explaining why God intervened two thousand years ago to lead the Jews out of Egypt but allowed African Americans to suffer slavery and oppression for four hundred years in Europe and America and over a millennia in the Middle East. In terms of logic, morality, and overall efficacy, it is no better than Christianity.
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