I Didn’t Want to be an Atheist

I spent the first 65 years of my life professing to be a Christian.  That’s a long time.  I believed there was a god and that he sacrificed his only son so that we would be saved by grace and go to heaven.  I believed if I sinned I would go to hell.  I believed there was an after-life.  I believed my god was a personal god, someone I could talk with and turn to in good times and bad.  My Dad was a preacher so I never missed church, never missed Sunday school.  I read the Bible cover-to-cover in college.  I was active in my local church, served as a Trustee, and various other organizational committees.  I sang in the choir and sang in a small sextet that specialized in a cappella gospel type and contemporary Christian music.  Life was good.

My problems arose in March of 2015 when a mentally disturbed co-pilot gained control of a Germanwings airliner at 39,000 feet and sent that plane and all 150 people aboard straight down to crash in the French Alps.  It took almost 10 minutes for the plane to crash killing all aboard.  Ten minutes.  Everyone on board knew they were going to crash.  They saw the pilot, locked out of the cockpit, begging to re-enter.  They saw him take a fire ax to the door.  They knew they were going to die.  Men, women, children, infants, flight attendants, everyone.  I made an assumption.  That if a plane of 150 people knew they were going to die fervent prayers must have been unleashed to a variety of deities, but mostly to the god I worshipped as most of the passengers were European and most likely Christians.  I had to know why a god who could part the Red Sea, raise the dead, heal the sick, cast out demons, etc., could not alter the flight plan of a passenger jet.  Several things became obvious.  Either god wasn’t listening.  God had a plan that required the death of 150 random people including innocent children and infants.  God was unable to intervene.  Or there was no god.  If god was not listening then my entire belief structure shook.  How could he not hear those prayers?  If god had a plan that required all those people to die then what kind of god was this god?  How could he allow such a thing?  How can we make a single excuse for him that is anything other than negligent homicide for 150 people?  If god wanted to intervene and could not, how can we call this impotent deity a god?  Or, perhaps there is no god.

I was rattled.  Deeply upset.  It was very hard to consider any of those possibilities.  It would have been much easier to simply say this was god’s will and I did not have the right to question it.  God’s plan was beyond me, I just had to accept it.  I made excuses for a mean or impotent god, and suddenly I saw that is in fact what I had always done.  If it appeared that god was mean or impotent it must be my fault because I could not comprehend his plan.  But I knew that was bullshit.  If this was part of a plan I could not fathom what I could see was that this plan was cruel, it was murderous, and it was evil.  If I had god’s power I simply would have unlocked the cockpit door and allowed the pilot access so that the plane and all aboard were saved.  A simple trick for an omnipotent god.  A trick that would not even have revealed his intervention.  Am I a better person than the god I have been worshipping?  God took no action.  He waited in the wings while the wings crashed.

As I struggled I was loaned the book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”  I read it.  The bottom line was god set up a perfect universe governed by perfect laws and he was loath to intervene.  Really?  I make up the rules so I can’t change them?  That is not what the Bible says.  If that were true then the bush would have been consumed by fire, the Red Sea would not have parted, Mary would not get pregnant, and Jesus would still be dead.  The argument that god is subject to his own rules is an argument for the incompetency and limited power of god.

I read Lee Strobel’s books on the case for Christ and the case for faith.  There was no case for either.  The thesis was Strobel was an atheist and as journalist he sought proof of Christ.  But what he did was interview “experts” who knew “experts” who believed there was a Christ.  It was all hearsay evidence.  He wrote books that no newspaper would ever have published without some kind of corroboration.  Strobel is BS.

Then and only then did I turn to Richard Dawkins, to Christopher Hitchens, to Sam Harris, to Daniel Dennett, to Neil Degrasse Tyson, to Bill Nye, to Stephen Hawking, and to Carl Sagan.  My goodness.  The case for no god as put forward by these men was profound.  It was reasonable.  It was logical.  I did not want to agree with them.  I did not want to abandon my beliefs.  But I could find no flaw in their reasoning, in their evidence or in their assumptions.  Scales fell from my eyes and I ever so sadly had to admit that I had been wrong my entire life.

There is no life after death any more than there is life before birth.  We live, we die.  There is absolutely no evidence that we maintain some sort of post-death sentience.  There is no evidence of a heaven or a hell.  Those are Christian constructs and are not shared by all religions.  There is no evidence that Jesus really existed.  Other than two Roman historians who make reference to those who follow Jesus, there is no evidence outside his followers that there was such a person.  Amazing considering the detailed history of the Roman Empire as compiled by Roman scholars.  There is no evidence the Jews were ever slaves in Egypt.  There is no evidence of a mandatory census at the alleged time of Jesus birth.  There is no evidence of any of the miracles as they were all reported by followers who had an interest in perpetrating the myth.  If heaven is a real place and a perfect place then why oppose suicide?  If Mary really was impregnated by the Holy Spirit why aren’t we seeking God’s DNA? 

And on a broader scale, why after 200,000 years of human presence on this planet did the Christian god make himself known just 4,000 years ago?  Many other cultures already had gods.  Gods they believed in, gods they worshipped, gods that told them there were no other gods.  Why reveal himself to a poor, nomadic, illiterate people rather than to Egyptians or Chinese who had written language and communication systems?  He choose absolutely the least likely group on the planet to reveal universal truths, then marched them off to the only place in the Mid-East that does not have oil.  Some caring god.

And though there are a host of other non-sequiturs regarding god, the bottom line is if there is a god then those who believe such must offer evidence of his existence.  It is not the job of the non-believer to prove he does not exist, it is the job of the believers to prove he does.  They cannot do that.  It is all about belief, not knowledge.  If one says they believe that Santa Claus is real, then it is up to them to prove it, not up to the rest of the adults to disprove it.

And what of this Bible, this “holy” book?  It was not written by god.  It was written by humans.  Flawed humans.  Humans who edited and amended the content for years after the supposed Jesus died and supposedly was resurrected.  The Bible was not adopted in final form until a group of humans did that 400 years later.  Plenty of time to get their story straight, but they did not.  The Bible is full of contradictions and falsehoods.  Followers have a choice:  they can claim this book is holy and that every passage is true and must be believed and followed, or the book was written for another time and place and they can cherry pick the verses they choose to believe and choose to follow.  The problem with believing the Bible is a holy book is that it is just flat wrong in many cases, it calls for the stoning to death of adulterers, disrespectful children and those who participate in pre-marital sex, and it avoids the issues of slavery and the second class citizenship of women.  It is totally inaccurate regarding the evolution of our planet and life on our planet as well as our place in the universe.  God did not dictate this book.  Humans wrote it.  On the other hand, if they can choose to ignore all the fallacies of the Bible and cherry pick the verses they like what is to keep the rest of us from saying the gospels are simply mythology like stories of Zeus?  Either way, there is no way to consider this book holy.

I suddenly knew how the skeptics felt when Copernicus offered evidence that the earth orbited the sun and not vice versa; the earth was not the center of our solar system, the sun was.  It must have been totally disorienting to those who believed otherwise because they were led to believe so by the Bible.  Their response was to persecute Galileo for believing Copernicus.  (They did not persecute Copernicus because he died right after he published his theory of heliocentrism.  Galileo, on the other hand, was tried by the Inquisition, found to be guilty of heresy by the church and kept under house arrest for the rest of his life.  Interesting that the Bible makes it very clear that the sun orbits the earth.  It took 300 years for the church to admit its mistake with Galileo.)  Though some with intellectual integrity had to say to themselves that it is impossible to argue with the evidence that the earth orbits the sun and those people were willing to alter their beliefs based on new science.

Among many, one of the saddest results of discovering there is no god is the hostility I feel from those who still believe there is a god.  Of the 7+ billion people on the planet, 2.1 billion claim Christianity (a number that is shrinking), 1.3 billion claim to be Muslim (a number that is growing somewhat), and the third largest group is non-believers at 1.1 billion.  This last group is the fastest growing group on the planet.  There are multiple reasons for that.  Christians do not like to be challenged regarding their beliefs.  They are much more accustomed to proselytizing than to be proselytized.  They feel authorized to go to people who have a religion and tell them that the god they worship is not the real god and they should convert to Christianity.  Such arrogance is amazing.  When Christians experience rational arguments regarding their faith they can become irrational and threaten the non-believer with bullshit that is non-believed.  I am not going to hell.  There is no hell.  I am not going to heaven.  There is no heaven.  There is no life after life. When I die I will be dead, just like every other life form on the planet.  To believe otherwise may be hopeful, but it is silly.  To believe in an after-life allows a mythical supernatural being to control your free will with threats of eternal punishment or eternal reward, and allows for the concept of a being watching every move we make, every thought we have in a scenario that puts 1984 to shame.  This is all poppycock and balderdash.  It is up to the believer to prove the existence of a god, an after-life, a heaven and/or a hell.  They cannot do so.  We can measure the waves from the big bang.  We can demonstrate the efficacy of evolution.  We can see and measure billions and billions of stars, billions and billions of galaxies.  We can chart the depths of the sea.  And yet no one can offer coordinates for heaven and hell.  Simply because they do not exist.  If they did, we would have found them.

It would be wonderful if there was a benevolent god who watched over us, intervened in times of crisis, who did not threaten us with eternal punishment if we do not do what he wants, and who is willing to reveal himself and his plan.  But there is no such being.  Even the mystical being that is worshipped is not that benevolent, is not that loving, and in many cases is a grudge-holder and down-right cruel.  But, since he does not exist, I know the results credited to a god are based on science, on reason, and/or on either random events or inexplicable serendipity.  As a child I felt sad and betrayed when I came to understand that Santa was not real.  I feel the same way now about god.  I wish Santa was real.  I wish the tooth fairy was real.  I wish god was real.  I did not want to be an atheist, but I cannot ignore what I know to be true despite what I wish I could believe to be true.

If you worship a god whether it is Yahweh, Jehovah, father of Jesus, Zeus, Allah, Ra, or hundreds of other gods it is up to you to present the proof of their existence.  There is no such proof.  There is belief and belief alone.  Sadly the same is true of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but we do not seem to argue about those beings as much (which is really funny considering from a child’s point of view there is more evidence of the existence of Santa and the Tooth Fairy than there is of god.)

And yet, once everyone understands that the earth orbits the sun and that there is no god we will have no more religious wars, no more crusades, no more suicide bombings against infidels, no more persecution of people who are judged by Bronze Age values, no more slavery, no more women as second class citizens, no more fights over erecting the 10 commandments and prayer in school, etc.  The world will be a much better place without religion.  And in that I find hope.  More hope than I find looking at our current state of war, poverty, crime, hatred, fear, hunger, famine, disease in the context of some supernatural being overseeing everything.  If god has a plan and it is unfolding then believers are living in a hell ordained by a so-called loving god.  And that in and of itself is ludicrous.

I did not want to be an atheist.  But I am.