Yes, that would be a fair way to put it. There's a bit of a trinity here, if I may be cheeky, of things that led to my atheism, which I'll reiterate is not absolute. I'm with Dawkins on this one. If 1 is Billy Graham and 7 is total atheist, then I'm a 6.9, same as Dawkins, because you can never be ABSOLUTELY certain of anything, but in practice that's an atheist. Fair enough? Okay. Anyway, I'll go into the trinity of reasons I lost my faith and ultimately became an atheist so that you may understand better.
1. The Problem of Hell: I was associated with an evangelical group at my University called Logos. They're essentially a starter group trying to get officially recognized by Chi Alpha, whom they model themselves after. Anyway, the leadership was all Assemblies of God, both adult and student, and this huge AG church is where they all went. I was raised Methodist and was much closer their laid-back Anglican style, but I got into the evangelical perspective because they were more knowledgeable about scripture and I respected that. As such, I was going to an evangelical style Baptist church during this time. So everything goes soundly for a little over a year, from late fall of 2000 to mid fall of 2001. Then a roommate and good friend to this day got kicked out of Logos for converting to the Episcopal faith. He was told by all the leadership that was now hellbound because Catholics aren't real Christians and Episcopals are too close to Catholics, as are, he was informed Methodists, Anglicans, and some forms of Lutherans. Well, I left Logos out of solidarity at this time but it drove within me quite a question. Who IS going to hell and what does ANYONE going to hell mean for your average Christian? By the time I got done contemplating it, I had become a universalist. My theory was that Christ died for all our sins and accepting or rejecting that didn't change anything. Hell was real, but no one was going there. Solves everything. So I was able to go back to faith, albeit with not accepting the whole Bible as literal or even valid, with some belief in the validity in the gnostic scriptures thrown in for fun. I was not, by the end, any mainstream Christian's idea of a mainstream Christian. I was too insistent on things making sense and asking questions for that.
2. The Problem of Human Sexuality: Many atheists came to their lack of belief by seeing something so horrible that they could not possibly believe God would ever let it happen if he existed. Usually it's something they see in a war, or when one of their own children dies in some horrible way, or during particularly traumatic missionary work. For me, it took place on the business end of a woman. During my engagement, sexual difficulties were a problem and I took classes, read books, tried everything, and was engaged to a person intending on becoming a sex researcher one day. So I learned a lot. What I learned shattered me completely. About 20% of women are able to orgasm during sex from vaginal stimulation alone, you see. Most of them require clitoral stimulation, the loss of which will virtually ensure they don't enjoy sex, which explains the purpose of female genital mutilation pretty obviously. So this means that during traditional intercourse, if you're a guy, you're having WAY more fun than her. Her fun will come from manipulation with digits, oral manipulation, or some mechanical device. Maybe. Or maybe not. Also, you'll have to take her word for it because there's no reliable way to tell if you've succeeded or failed. If these sexual realities hadn't caused me so much misery during the engagement, I'd probably worry about them less, but as it stood sex was horribly unfair I could not imagine a benevolent God creating it. Men were doomed to forever live in doubt they'd performed admirably and women were doomed to keep their dissatisfaction secret lest they cause a likely unsolvable dispute to flare up and ruin the whole relationship. Sex was no longer a fun activity, but a game of manipulation and lies where no one could be trusted. This is something we're told is pure when part of a relationship between two people who love each other but I realized that it is a necessary evil and the most convincing evidence to me personally, though I wouldn't try and use it to convince anyone else, that God doesn't exist.
The Problem of Logic: This came about after my last attempt at religion. After leaving the church over a large personal betrayal, I started to look into atheism more strongly. Before I thought I was just too emotionally tied up with my personal tragedy to believe in God, but suddenly I had the whole idea of faith being a virtue being challenged for me. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Penn and Teller were truly excellent guides to the conclusion that a logical and skeptical mind was not compatible with faith or belief in supernatural anything. This part of my atheism is the best part to use in an argument because it's less personal and more logical. I've got my emotional reasons for my atheism, but I don't tend to mention them in an argument because I can't expect someone else to uphold my emotions as a valid argument if I'm denying them the same courtesy. That would be unfair.
-Frank
05 May 2008, 6:29 pm
