243. risibility

At 32.5 years old, I’m getting around to correcting a deficiency in my nerd cred.

Up until very recently, I had never played Dungeons & Dragons or any tabletop role playing games.

Part of this was that until my mid-twenties, I believed games like this were a real gateway to the occult and to demonic powers.

A Hellmouth, if you will.

Oh, yes—that went for shows and movies like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Bewitched, Ghostbusters, The Craft… even Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Simply watching a positive portrayal of witchcraft or the occult was an insidious threat to our Christian faith. We were like heavenly soldiers adrift behind enemy lines, like Frodo and Sam in Mordor. Unless we spent time every day reading the Bible and praying, and watched and read only Bible-based media, the constant inundation of worldly temptations would lead us astray into the grip of the Devil!

“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” – Colossians 3:2-3 (ESV)

I’m not even kidding. That’s what we believed.

I had a good friend in high school, Jennie Purino, who was really into RPGs. (And vampires.) At age 15, having been brought up to believe that all that stuff was literally evil, this was a real brain teaser. From how she described and talked about it, it didn’t seem particularly dangerous or threatening. And as far as I knew, she didn’t worship Satan. (I think her family was nominally Catholic.) It actually sounded like fun… which, to my then Christianity-saturated brain, sounded exactly how Satan would lure people in.

So over the past few years I’ve been getting caught up on things that were previously verboten for me. Everything from music to games, to television shows, graphic novels, movies, card games… and now role playing games. My housemates are long-time D&D players, so they’ve been trying for a while to get me into it. And while I no longer think it’s evil, I was a little resistant. My understanding of games like D&D was that they attracted nerdy math freaks who could keep track of all the rules involved in game play. I pictured tons of calculations, and memorizing arcane amounts of information about races, monsters, spells, weapons, combat, and so on.

To be honest, I have a huge chip on my shoulder about anything math or science-related. I struggled to learn even basic math, like algebra and geometry, and science was equally daunting. Chemistry was fun though. But that meant that I chose to focus on the humanities, especially on literature and music, and wrote science and math off as being for people who were logical, and “smart,” and who probably fell somewhere on the autism spectrum. (Irony.)

Julia Sweeney says in Letting Go of God:

I had this prejudice that doing well at science was somehow an admission that you didn’t have the complexity of mind or subtlety of character to take on the humanities. Science was for people who couldn’t handle ambiguity and needed black and white answers, people who couldn’t get in touch with their feelings and had nothing left to think about.

Then a few weeks ago, I was invited to play Pathfinder, a game system similar to Dungeons and Dragons (and, as I recently learned, is backwards-compatible with D&D 3.5), but set in a different universe and setting. My friend Ben is running this game, which is the first chapter in a much longer campaign called Rise of the Runelords. Earlier this year I played a card-based version of this game, so the setting and the world itself was fairly familiar to me, but this was the first time I’d be building a character and rolling for stats.

Look at me, using phrases like “rolling for stats.”

The past few weeks have been spent researching and building this character—in this case, a half-elf bard named Casevar. I wrote out a fairly lengthy detailed biography for him, and this was the basis for a lot of the skills, abilities, and classes I chose to assign. It was actually a lot like the experiences I’ve had building a character in theater—you can do almost anything, within the confines of the play and the world the playwright has set, but you have to be able to justify those choices.

For example, one of the skills was Linguistics, which allowed me to choose an additional language that Casevar knows. For this instance, I chose Gnomish. When Ben asked me how on earth Casevar would know that language, I could point back to his biography where one of his close childhood friends was a Gnome named Mikkkaer. (Told you. Detailed.) It works in the context of his history.

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What I’m learning is that the rules and the nuances of RPGs are almost secondary to what seems to be its more primary aim—collaborative storytelling. Mechanics are necessary, but are more the tools for storytelling than an end. It allows for people to experience a different reality through a collective imaginative effort, and maybe for a few hours to be someone else. It draws on narrative and mythic elements that have shaped human cultures and civilizations for thousands of years, and that still continue to speak to us today.

There are also an increasing number of studies suggesting that RPGs help in the development of critical thinking, creativity, and compassion, and can be useful in the treatment of conditions like bi-polar, depression, and even autism-spectrum disorder.

So I’m looking at this as an opportunity to not only broaden my horizons but to also step outside my comfort zone and try on different personalities and personas as I build and shape my own post-Christian identity. Perhaps in this way I can overcome some of the demons that have been keeping me locked up in my own head, and from moving ahead with my life.

Not to mention that it’s also fun.

237. emblem

Last week was the sixth of my first semester as a graduate library school student, and it feels like I’ve been running a marathon since February. Yes, it’s a trope to gripe about the busyness of academic life, how much reading there always is, and how there’s never enough time to complete project work.

However, for the first time in a long while, I’ve actually felt good. A friend commented recently that it’s been weeks since he’s seen me depressed.

“I haven’t had time!” I said, which is true. Between school and Sunday Assembly, I haven’t had the bandwidth to think about much of anything else.

Another part is that I actually enjoy what I’m doing right now. Both of my classes are delightful, even in their moments of tedium and pell-mell insanity. My cohort is made up of people who are passionate about what they want to do and can’t wait to be librarians themselves. For the first time, I’m on an actual path towards a career that I can see myself in (and loving) long term. Turns out, librarianship is an ideal fit for my seemingly disparate skills and interests.

The downside of all this busyness is that I haven’t had much time to write or blog, as evidenced by the gaps between this and my last post. It’s certainly not for lack of things to write about. I mentioned this a few days ago to my therapist, that this has been frustrating because I process most effectively through writing. My headspace is often a hurricane of thoughts and emotions, too chaotic and busy a place for reflection or making breakthroughs.

In some of our recent sessions, I’ve brought up the fact that right now I hate my body. I’ll write more about this next time, but it’s something I remember feeling from an early age. I’ve always disliked being naked or unclothed in public as a child, even with my family, and even in warm weather. The curious thing is that (particularly in the summer) my dad would go shirtless, as would most of the guys I was around. But even as a child, I already had a sense of Otherness about myself. And when one is acutely aware of that, they are also often hyper aware of the boundaries between themselves and other people.

Some of it was the intense and pervasive fear of being judged, or people noticing imperfections with my body. I was pretty scrawny growing up, and being a late bloomer when other boys were filling out didn’t help matters. I hated everything about my body, because it didn’t meet the exacting standards I assumed were expected of me.

This is something I’ve theorized is at the root of my sense of dissociation, both from myself and from other people, and why I tend to be more of a loner. I’ve written here about my tendency to keep other people at a safe distance from me. Of course, this is in keeping with my upbringing in a religious fundamentalist community, where we were encouraged to “search our souls” and confess any and all sin that might be lurking in our hearts. In hindsight, it’s not that different from Scientology, except that instead of disembodied parasitic Thetans, we believed in sin.

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A few months ago, I quoted Lawrence Heller: “When people experience trauma, they feel bad; children, in particular, think they are bad when they feel bad. Chronic bottom-up dysregulation and distress lead to negative identifications, beliefs, and judgments about ourselves.”

Virtually everything about fundamentalist Christianity teaches that, because of the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, all human beings are broken, flawed, and sinful. This is why we need the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, to metaphysically purify us of those sins. For most people in that community, this belief fills them with a sense of awe and gratefulness. However, for many of us, an unintended consequence of growing up with that worldview was that we came to believe that we are broken, flawed, disgusting, unlovable, undesirable, etc. Many Bible verses even reinforce this notion:

“For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.” (Galatians 5:17)

This was a real brain teaser when I realized that I’m gay, but even beyond that, the predominant feeling I was left with from my theological upbringing was that anything I felt or wanted was fundamentally wrong—which meant that I was wrong. So I retreated to an inner world of books and writing, and developing characters and personas that I knew were “acceptable,” keeping everyone away lest they figured out what a horrible person I was.

As a teenager, my mom would sometimes say to me, “If people knew how you really are, they wouldn’t like you.” (In context, I was a pretty angry teenager, which makes sense in hindsight considering that Christianity had made me a self-loathing closet case.)

The hardest thing the last couple of years has been learning to be with people as myself. Realizations along the way have helped bring the “real me” into sharper focus, like figuring out that librarianship best describes my orientation to the world. But shaking the sense that I need to run away from people or pretend to be who I think will be accepted is quite difficult.

So it’s always a shock whenever people genuinely seem to like me. Last week, I walked into class and everyone exclaimed, “David’s here!” My housemates Matt and Jason have truly become the family I always wanted. Ditto the people at my yoga studio, and at Sunday Assembly. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and an uncomfortable once because there’s still that voice in my head warning me that I could fuck up at any time and be cast out.

Not a terribly healthy/helpful voice.

But one fence at a time.

181. dilly

This afternoon a friend of mine posted an article from the Guardian about the top five regrets people have as they come to die. As an atheist who doesn’t believe in any kind of afterlife and that each of us only gets one shot at life, being intentional about avoiding regrets has been a major motif for me in the past few years. I don’t want to arrive at the inevitable end of my mortal coil with the taste of an unlived life in my mouth.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This is the principle reason why I finally came out gay almost five years ago, and as an atheist almost two and a half years ago. As a self-identified Christian, I wasn’t being honest with anyone (including myself) about the fact that I didn’t really believe in God, and that church was basically about socializing for me. And after coming to the realization that my sexual orientation wasn’t something that was ever likely to change, and that I didn’t even want it to change, I decided that living in fear of what my parents and community thought wasn’t worth wasting the opportunity to express who I truly am. Worse, it’s not worth the opportunity to experience life through the lens of marriage and intimate relationship, and to learn to love and be loved by another human being — in my case, another man.

I didn’t want to get to the end of my life with the knowledge that I’d missed the chance to find someone who I couldn’t live without.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

For me, this has less to do with working long hours and more to do with the nature of work that I do. For most of my working life I’ve taken the safer path and accepted jobs that paid the bills or didn’t provide much challenge. Even my degree I chose in college was something I knew wouldn’t carry much risk in terms of accomplishment. But ultimately, I’m most happy when creating, whether musically or with words. The best times in my life, when I felt most alive, were when I was working on a show, or writing an opera or novel, and so on. And life is too short to not be remarkable and do what brings you.

“It’s not so much do as you like as it is that you like what you do.”
– Dot, Sunday in the Park with George

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Heh, as anyone who reads this blog or follows my Facebook posts knows, this is not an area where I often hold back. Even my face frequently betrays what I’m thinking and feeling. I was a very outgoing and exuberant child, but there was a span of years during my childhood where I was shut-down and self-repressed. I’m not entirely sure why that happened. There were troubles with my parents, as many boys experience, but few photos from those years show me smiling. I’d become very self-critical, a trait that has survived well into adulthood, and remember being very dissatisfied with myself, particularly how I looked when smiling.

Thanks to one drama teacher in junior high, however, I rediscovered my ability to express myself, to smile and to laugh again. It wasn’t until after I came out as an atheist that I was really able to start expressing the pain and hurt that I experienced growing up. And once I’d given voice to the hurt, and truly grappled with the concept of the finality of existence, start expressing to people in my life how much they truly mean to me.

Words from the Bible that I grew up hearing and reading now take on a new, ironical meaning: “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Only that “me” ended up not being some religious figure.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

I’m trying to do better about this, but as an introvert with some hard-to-shake social anxiety and hermit tendencies, it’s a daily struggle. To that end, and thanks to the influence of a friend of mine, I’ve started maintaining a spreadsheet to track who I spend time with, and how often. It was partly in response to wanting to be more intentional about my social life, but also getting tired of saying, “It’s been a while!”

Quite a few friendships were burned in the process of coming out twice, some on my part and some on the part of others. You do learn who your true friends are when you show them your true self, and they can either live with that identity or reject you because you’re not who they wanted you to be. And it made me realize the importance of choosing your friends wisely, and spending time with truly good people whose company I covet and value.

One of the bedroom decorating tips in feng shui is to “choose images that you want to see happening in your life.” That’s how I’m approaching friendships now. Quality over quantity.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is probably the hardest one of all. As Aslan says in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew,

“… he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam’s son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good!”

Part of the impetus in starting therapy last September was to find a trained, impartial third-party observer to help me identify the ways I’ve tied myself in knots over the years. As Bob Wiley realized, “If I don’t untie myself, inside the emotional knots, I’m going to explode.”

Baby step: untie your knots. Life’s too damned short not to let yourself be happy.

167. decathect

“Perhaps I have been wrong to keep so much of my mind from you,” said Mr Norrell, knotting his fingers together. “I am almost certain I have been wrong. But I decided long ago that Great Britain’s best interests were served by absolute silence on these subjects and old habits are hard to break. But surely you see the task before us, Mr Strange? Yours and mine? Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England. We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

Happy 2013 everyone! Here’s hoping this year is better for everyone than the previous one.

Second, in the past couple of days I’ve had an odd but pleasant series of encounters with old friends I haven’t seen or heard from in a while.

Friday night while picking up a game piece from a local store at one of the malls near my house, I heard someone calling my name. I looked up and saw that it was Dawn, a woman I knew from my old church, the one I’d grown up in from age 10 until leaving it at about age 24. It had been almost six years since our last meeting. She and I were in the choir there for many years, and had done some acting together too. I even directed her daughter as the White Witch in my adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we performed one year.

We exchanged some of the usual pleasantries about the newest developments, and talked about mutual acquaintances we’d bumped into randomly while out and about, as we were doing then. Turns out she’d been following me somewhat on Facebook, so it wasn’t necessary to fill her in on the biggest developments — namely, that I’m gay and an atheist.

“You don’t exactly hide it!” she joked.

And it’s true. I explained, as I do for everyone, that I try to live my journey as publicly as possible to be an advocate for others who feel isolated or powerless. If anyone can benefit from my story and experience and not go through the same struggles, it’s worth it.

The other day, Leah, a friend of mine from London popped on Facebook and we ended up having a delightful conversation along the same lines. I met her at Northwestern College about ten years ago when she was spending a year studying abroad. Why there and not somewhere else? I don’t know, but whatever the reason I’m grateful for the friendship.

In the course of catching up she asked about my dad, and I said I hadn’t talked to him in about a year. I told her a bit about the split with my family, and the reasons, and the struggle that’s been. Though she’s a Christian, she was at a loss to understand how they could refuse to accept me. Hers is a god of love and acceptance rather than one of rules and strict regulations.

It’s funny, there are so many people from that period of my life who I haven’t talked about my sexuality or loss of faith with, either because we’ve drifted apart and lost contact, or because the occasion hasn’t arisen. I suppose, for whatever reason, there’s some hesitation to share who I am now with who I was then.

Just a few months ago, before I started going to therapy, I would’ve found the notion of either friend offering to pray for me offensive. Depending on how spiteful I felt at the moment, the offer might even be thrown back in their face. I don’t believe that there is any evidence that anyone is listening to their prayers, or that they have any tangible effect on the physical world. But the curious thing is that I’ve learned to look past the religious undertones and hear that they are thinking of me when they pray for my immortal soul. Dawn said whenever I popped up on Facebook that she would talk to God about me. How often do we really keep in mind the people we care about, take an interest in their welfare, and go out of our way to be a positive change for them?

The past week or so I’ve been listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Part of it is Simon Prebble’s captivating performance, but it’s such a good story. The other night while running some errands I was struck by the above-quoted passage.

“Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England,” says Mr Norrell. “We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

I realized that this has been my attitude towards God and religion since 2011. We must break people’s dependence on the supernatural. The first flash of my atheism showed itself on 9/11. In watching the towers fall, it suddenly seemed to me that no one was minding the store and that bad things happen solely because of people’s choices, not because some higher power willed anything. In the following years I began to rely more on evidence and reason for my beliefs than on the teachings of thousand-year old religions.

If evidence could be found for the existence of God, I’d gladly consider it. But the more we look at the universe, the more we see the workings of a wholly natural one, processes we’re just beginning to grasp. We don’t need a higher power, and for me that doesn’t lessen its beauty or importance. If anything, it makes every moment I’m alive that much more breathtaking for its transience and ephemeralness.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”

To live at all is miracle enough.

116. peroration

peroration, noun—1) A long speech characterized by lofty and often pompous language; 2) Rhetoric.  The concluding part of a speech or discourse, in which the speaker or writer recapitulates the principal points and urges them with greater earnestness and force.

A few weeks ago I decided to quit music—at least for a little while—and focus on writing. This is partly because music is so much work, with so little pay-off in the end, aside from the satisfaction of a job well done. You spend countless hours working out ideas, getting it down on paper (or on computer, in my case), formatting, writing parts, getting the harmonies and dissonances just right.

At the age of 11 I heard the Brandenburg Concerto No.1 at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis for the first time, and the hearing ignited something of a fire in my brain, and a passion for early music—and for Bach. There was something utterly enthralling in the interplay between the notes, the instruments and the musicians. I was terrible with mathematics, but this was immediately intelligible, and I set to work from that day studying any early music I could get my hands on—but most of all Bach. I began to write music of my own, copying my favorite composers.

Then midway through high school I discovered Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and the discovery that other harmonies existed besides tertian created something of a Cambrian explosion in my mind. I started devouring 20th Century music—Berg, Adams, Britten, Ligeti, Prokofiev, Argento, Reich, Babbitt (who I discovered in the course of a music listening contest through his piece Philomel and loved it despite everyone else hating it). In college I garnered a reputation for writing fascinating but largely unplayable music—at least as far as my classmates were concerned.

A third turning point came when I discovered John Tavener, rediscovered Arvo Pärt, and encountered Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. It was during the first semester of my junior year, and it moved me in ways that the 20th Century composers had not, but hearkened back to that first experience I had with Bach. The culmination of my “Tallis” period came with the first listening of Glass’ Einstein on the Beach. In the minimalists I heard the kind of simplicity that I’d been unconsciously longing for. Contemporary music had been driving me to keep moving, to keep innovating, to delve into deeper layers of complexity.

Once I began writing for my friends, I realized that writing music had to be about more than just exhibiting. I wanted to write music that they could perform, that I was proud of, but that spoke to people. So much of 20th Century music is just noise and experimenting. I wanted to do something bigger than that.

In many ways, my musical journey mirrored my spiritual journey. During high school I was becoming more involved in church and church life, and studying theology in an attempt to find god. Or whatever it was that I thought I was doing. In reality I was probably running from my increasingly present gay sexuality, burying myself in work so as not to deal with that whole complex of issues.

Around the time that I hit the “Tallis” period, I also started falling away from Evangelical Christianity and focusing more on finding orthodoxy and returning the original spirit of Christianity. I was becoming attracted to the ancient writings of the contemplatives—but something still wasn’t quite right.

Near the end of my college career, I was taking fewer theology courses and contemplating life outside of a conservative Christian college. Life wasn’t as simple as it has always been portrayed. Yes, life was a spiritual battle, but the closer I got to “real life,” the less certain I felt of what I had been taught all my life. The church I grew up in had a rigorous Christian education program, from birth through adult. But all that was seeming more abstract and less applicable. It was fine to have a belief—but what use was it? Even in the more “progressive” circles that I was finding myself in, it just seemed like a lot of talk, and a lot of mental gymnastics to deal with things like the nature of evil, the reality of suffering, and the seeming silence of god in the midst of all of it.

And paramount in all of this was the growing reality that I was gay, and was going to have to accept that fact sooner or later.

With music, it feels as though I’ve been spinning my wheels trying to get enough speed to jump over whatever hurdles seem to be between me and the audience. Or to just be heard. And even when people listen, they never seem quite sure what to make of it. It’s either too complicated, or not structured enough, or not coherent enough. And it’s just so much work.

Then I look at my most “successful” pieces to date—Annunciation, The Prayer of Saint Francis, the final movement of my trumpet sonata. All of these are relatively simple, with none of the hallmarks of striving that mark my more complicated pieces. What it seems to be is a stripping away of layers of pretense and getting down to saying what I truly mean. This was the case with my spiritual life, when I finally admitted that I didn’t truly believe in god. This was the case with my sexual life, when I finally admitted that I wasn’t straight.

The struggle came in clearing away what I wished that I was, and the expectations of what everyone else thought I should be (or what I thought they thought I should be), and trying to just be me, without all the frippery and the showcasing. I’m still not over it.

If I do write more music, it will be what I want to write. Not what I should write.

Anything you do,
Let it come from you.
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see.

112. codification

One of the great things about living in a city is the inordinate proximity and access to basically everything. There are a gadzillion restaurants to choose from and sample; opportunities to attend arts events; and stores of every size and niche to find whatever you happen to be looking for.

One of the downsides of living in the city is being surrounded by a gadzillion people, but still feeling completely alone. Even for those of us who have a ton of friends, we still run the risk of feeling rather isolated. I was talking with a friend about this yesterday; that we have friends who we rarely get a chance to see because we all have so much going on. We have jobs that take up most of our day; errands to run and things to do; then some of us have families and significant others to attend to; and seeing everyone becomes a scheduling nightmare, so we may go months (or years) between seeing certain people.

This is one of the good things about the church that I miss probably more than anything: the built-in, readily available social network. You can get together on Sunday morning for a couple of hours every week and see all of your friends in one place. You can even see them several times a week, at bible studies, choir/band practice, potluck dinners, etc. That sort of thing simply doesn’t exist in the atheist/skeptic community, and it does make me sad.

I’ve been feeling dissatisfied lately with that lack of community in my life. As much as I enjoy the company of my Christian friends (some of whom I’ve known for over ten years, and with whom I have had many wonderful experiences and memories), being with them now isn’t the same as it is being with nontheists. This is something they don’t tell you when you’re first deconverting from Christianity, that your world is about to go topsy-turvy; or if they do tell you, you can’t imagine how extensively everything gets re-written. It’s a bit like going to summer camp or Europe, having an incredibly life-changing experience, and then going home and not feeling like you belong anymore; or that you returned home only to find that your childhood home had been magicked away by a wicked fairy (sorry, I’m nearly done with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and am rather concerned about fairies). It’s what Frodo experiences coming back to the Shire after going to Mordor, when you long to be amongst those who have been on the same journey. As nice as some of my Christian friends are, they simply can’t understand how differently the world looks once you no longer believe in god.

A while ago a friend asked me why it mattered that I needed atheist friends. After all, I have friends who love and care about me. To me, this rather sounds like conservatives asking gays why they want gay marriage instead of civil unions. To those who already have a place of belonging, surrounded by people who (mostly) believe the same things that they do (i.e., believe in god, that this personal god is the “author of human life,” etc), it may sound like atheists are just whining. After all, we chose to leave the church—right? We chose to stop believing in god—right?

We are primates—pretty advanced primates, but primates nevertheless. Like our close cousins, we have a complex social structure based on our belonging to and our place within the tribe. With our larger brain size and capacity for higher intelligence comes self-awareness, and all of the perennial problems associated with it. Instead of sniffing each other’s butts, belonging is more like complex mathematical algorithms now, with a long matching checklist of beliefs, social class, media preferences and so on.

Being a nontheist is a unique experience in humankind today. A thousand years from now our descendants may look back with quaint curiosity at their primitive ancestors embroiled in stupid squabbles over religion and belief. Perhaps in a thousand years belief in gods will have died out, just as the Neanderthals died out 30,000 years ago or so. What must it have been like for the first tribe of homo sapiens to be living amongst their Neanderthal kin, alike but different? For the first time in recent geological human history, there are those amongst us who do not hold belief in gods or the supernatural. We are a small tribe living amongst those who still believe very strongly and very fervently.

But we are growing.

As Richard Dawkins writes in the preface to The God Delusion,

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.

It’s one of the reasons why this year I’m planning to get more “activist” about my atheism, and engage in more volunteering in order to start finding and building community.

But how to re-create the community that I enjoyed in the church as a Christian? Is it even possible? And what might it look like? Atheists don’t really believe anything. We have no codified tenets. Some of us had abusive church backgrounds, while some of us (like myself) knew wonderful people; and some of us grew up in secular homes where god was rarely (if ever) mentioned. All that unites us is our non-belief in gods and the supernatural, and our shared humanity.

A few years ago I lived with several friends in an apartment complex. Myself and two guy friends lived in one unit, while three of our girl friends lived next door. Ours became a central “gathering spot” for everyone. I wish our community as atheists and nontheists could look like that.

105. chime

This is a response to an opinion piece by Tom Arcano in the Greensboro News & Record that I just fired off to the editor of the paper.

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To the editor and to Mr. Arcano,

As a fan of all things Hitchens, I recently came across the op-ed tribute piece written about him in the News & Record, and as an atheist myself would like to respond. First, I too was devastated by the unexpected news of his death (though we were bracing ourselves for its inevitability, hopeful though that that day would be a long way off). He was a beacon and a role model for me and others in the rigorous pursuit of truth and the defeat of ignorance, fear and superstition in the world. Few champions of reason have walked the earth, and we were privileged to have had him.

Second, I do feel the need to address the statement posed in the headline of the article: “Hitchens as a role model for atheists today.” I will confess that in the hours after learning of his death, I found myself pondering the legacy that he left behind. Like many others, in the weeks that have followed I’ve watched countless YouTube videos and marveled in his ability to turn a phrase on the spot, or come back with a devastating coup de grâce to an opponent. I am also a huge fan of the works of Richard Dawkins (who helped crack open the door in my own journey of coming out as an atheist) and Sam Harris; but not as familiar with Daniel Dennett or Victor Stenger, the other two prominent “horsemen” of the New Atheism.

However, as I ponder these examples and the attitudes toward people of faith, I’m left wondering if the aggressive anti-religious stance of neo-atheism is a sustainable one. Nor is neo-atheism (or anti-theism) the only variant. There is agnosticism, skepticism, deism, agnostic atheism, agnostic Christianity, secular humanism, and even simply ambivalence to gods and religion. Personally I consider myself a post-theist, not so much rejecting god as considering him obsolete. Like the neo-atheists, I abhor religious fundamentalism and extremism wherever I encounter it. I’m concerned for children raised in such homes, who, like myself, are often inculcated before having a chance to choose what (or if) they believe. We should war against that, and against the exploitation of the poor and the undereducated, who are often unwitting targets of religious proselytization.

But the reality is that religion is not likely to disappear any time soon, and in its proper form I don’t think that it needs to. As Douglas Adams pointed out once in a speech, religion and the belief in god can serve its purpose. And it’s extremism and fundamentalism that has led to the problems in our world. So the question I am pondering is: Are we setting the right tone for discussion? We are just entering a global phase of civilization, with hundreds (even thousands) of beliefs and worldviews literally living next door to each other, sharing a garden wall. Some of these belief systems—such as the one I hail from—claim to be the One True Religion, with the corner market on Absolute Truth and the sole key to Life Everlasting. It was these that Hitchens reveled in going up against, picking holes in logic and pointing out inconsistencies and outright crimes.

However, is this the legacy that we ought to pick up? Yes, relentlessly pursue truth and evidence; and doggedly go after charlatans and oppressors. But just as non-theists tire of evangelicals relentlessly trying to save their souls, theists are just as put off by the caustic and often contemptuous tone of atheists. Take, for what you will, Dane Cook’s story about the man who huffily barks back, “I’m an atheist!” when Cook says, “god bless you” after the man sneezes. Or a more recent anecdote related to me by a friend who took a group caroling at an airport this year and had barely got through the first song when a store employee came over and asked them to “please stop with the religious music.”

Not that we have to hold hands and sing (insert your own feel-good campfire song here), but is it possible to discuss religion without having to poke holes in each other’s beliefs? The conversation seems to have devolved into ideological trench warfare, with an arms race of new and ever devastating ammunition to annihilate the opposition. Certainly there will be those who are converted by such tactics, but the majority will dig themselves deeper into what they already believe and only become more resentful of the other side. A worldview ought to be defined by what you stand for, rather than defining yourself by what you’re not.

I fear that what we are losing sight of is the distinctly human element in faith and belief. Why do people believe what they do? What benefit do they derive from it? Obliterate a person’s faith if you can—but what will you replace it with? Instead of thought warriors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, what we need are diplomats like Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord or Jimmy Carter to initiate negotiations and address the needs and fears on the part of both theists and non-theists in order to find ways that we can live together while retaining our ideological integrity, and collectively declaring extremism unacceptable.

For non-theists, atheism is about the freedom of a mind unfettered by belief in god or gods. But where Hitchens and the neo-atheists have been (and can be) belligerent, I should like to see us strive for a more generous approach where we are able to get to the root of and address serious questions while always affirming the humanity of those who believe differently than us. After all, we’ve only one planet and we have to live on it together.

103. sucre

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please;
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good;
We’ll do the best we know;
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.
— Richard Wilbur, Candide (based on Voltaire’s work of the same title)

The past few months I’ve had chats that begin like this, or include questions like these:

• “Can you be good without God?”
• “Without absolute truth, you can’t really believe in good and evil.”
• “Doesn’t that just mean that you define what’s ‘right’?”

The first thing that pops into my head when dealing with questions like these is—did I sound like that when talking to atheists back when I was a Christian? Not that I really ever recall talking to nontheists that much, but I’m sure that discussions like that were had. There were several times when we went out witnessing or having “spiritual conversations” with non-Christians, and I’m sure that something like that came up.

This brings up the issue of what I actually believe now as a non-theist – as a post-theist. In blog post 99, I expressed my frustration with the current flavor of atheism, which can best be described as neo-atheism: the sort of aggressive, in-your-face, denialist movement that has characterized atheism as more of a negative worldview than a positive one. It’s the kind that loudly denies the existence of any supernatural being under any circumstances, and seeks to destroy all belief in god or gods the whole world over. It’s also the kind the kind that has no qualms insulting the religious faithful by calling them weak, small-minded, superstitious, gullible, and… well, you get the picture. [Insert insult here.]

And, of course, the two high priests of atheism – the Anti-Popes, if you will – are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Or rather were, since Hitch is no longer with us. But their voices defined the movement in ways that few others have. Their vehement, shrill and oftentimes rude confrontations with monotheists (and fundamentalists specifically) and their call for all people to throw off the shackles of belief in favor of reason, science and intellect has been persuasive for many, and off-putting for others, including many atheists.

So some of us are left wondering: All right, now what? Rather than stand and define ourselves against a whole belief, what do we stand for?

Well, for starters, the first Humanist Manifesto, followed by the second manifesto (more fleshed out and developed than the first), is a good starting point. As the authors of the second manifesto wrote in their preamble, “Traditional moral codes and newer irrational cults both fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow. False ‘theologies of hope’ and messianic ideologies, substituting new dogmas for old, cannot cope with existing world realities. They separate rather than unite peoples.”

Religion, as I have come to realize (and let me be clear—I’m talking about the extremist and fundamentalist varieties that I’ve known, that I grew up with, and that most people associate with “religion”), is a distinctly anti-human enterprise. It puts human beings at the bottom of a hierarchy of importance, existing at and for the pleasure of a supernatural deity. It grants other human beings who supposedly hold the “Truth” permission to use and abuse others for their own benefit—or, for the truly devout, for the sake of “God.”

Why would I want an “absolute morality” like that—of a beneficent, celestial dictatorship? Hitch was fond of calling it a celestial North Korea in his talks, where “the real fun begins after you’re dead.” (“But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea,” he says in that video. “Does the bible or the Koran offer you that ability? No!”) Why would I want to pattern my life around such a system in terms of what I do and don’t do?

But that’s getting sidetracked slightly away from the original question: “Can you be good without God?”

The answer is: Yes. Millions of people do it every day. Is the only reason that you don’t rob, cheat, rape, lie and murder because of your fear of divine punishment? And is that the only reason for a theist to do good—because God’s watching? If so, that’s a pretty bankrupt morality, in the opinion of myself and other nontheists.

Morality seems to be a strictly human invention. While there is a rudimentary morality among some of the higher primates, the rest of nature seems to be a completely amoral place. It’s survival of the fittest. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote. Our human morality seems derived from our deepest, most tribal, and most primal being that values getting along and cooperating over total anarchy. As tool-wielders, and through trial and error, we’ve worked out a code of immutable “laws” for human survival:

• Don’t kill other humans.
• Don’t steal from other humans.
• Being selfish is bad.

It seems to come from our ability for empathy, which evolved from emotional connections that were necessary to form bonds with other members of our tribe. We learned to see things “from the other chimp’s perspective.” We realized that if we don’t like the other guy beating us up, he probably doesn’t like me beating him up either. And it’s that ability to see through another person’s eyes that gives us our “moral” code.

I see morality as being essentially a complex equation of sorts. Most of the calculating we do automatically, as one segment on “chimp morality” shows on an episode of WNYC’s RadioLab that was about morality. In fact, if you want to really know what I believe about morality, stop reading this and go and listen to that. Then come back and read.

It’s a sort of three-dimensional cost/benefit analysis, where various potential choices are compared side by side, and the possible outcomes are weighed against each other. The solution is usually the one that does the least amount of harm to everyone, and carries the most benefits for everyone involved. It starts with the individual, then moves outward to others in the immediate circle of influence, and then goes further and further out until we can look at the potential benefit/harm done to something as large as the planet.

Doesn’t that sound like a better alternative than blindly following what your 3,000 year-old Bronze Age holy book tells you to do? Such as if it tells you to stone your wife to death for adultery? Or cut the foreskin off a newborn baby boy? Or tells you that homosexuals are disgusting perverts who are going to hell and deserve the abuse they get?

My morality boils down to the line from the closing song of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (lyrics beautifully penned by Richard Wilbur, which is itself an adaptation of the last chapter of Candide’s novel): We’re neither pure nor wise nor good; we’ll do the best we know. Play nicely with others, treat them how you want to be treated, and leave the planet better than you came into it. What reason do I have for believing this? Absolutely none, aside from my own deeply-held convictions.

Supposing these ancient “moral codes” are merely humanity’s first attempts at describing what it means to be human? Explore and examine how we can live together in community? To try and put these deep and primal desires within us into words? We don’t really need a god to have handed those down to us.

Could I be a selfish bastard and try to get as much as I can from life while I can? Sure. But would it make me happy and contented? Would others benefit from my selfishness? No, they wouldn’t. (“What does that matter,” my theist friends will postulate, “if this is all there is?”) My humanity allows me to look at it through the eyes of my neighbors and decide what the best course of action is.

I don’t know if there is a God or not. I can’t disprove it any more than I can prove it. I take the last verse of “Make Our Garden Grow” to heart: Let dreamers dream what worlds they please; those Edens can’t be found. Ultimately, we don’t know, and speculating only makes things more complicated. It’s fun to think and argue about; but if there is a personal god out there, from the sort of universe it brought into being I think it probably considers belief in it—and all of the myriad of locks and fences we’ve built—pretty pointless.

Even ungrateful.

“Go outside!” it seems to be saying. “Get some sun—but in moderation! Enjoy nature! Enjoy yourself. Enjoy each other. Do good work.”

The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good;
We’ll do the best we know;
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.

100. singularity

This story begins with a boy, seven or eight years old, crouching outside on a mid-summer day under a clear blue sky. The boy is peering down into a puddle. It had been raining the day before and there were many such muddy puddles all around. He stares down into it, wondering, perhaps, if (like in The Magicians Nephew or Alice Through the Looking Glass) another world lies just beyond the reflection of the sky above; if that reflection is the mirror image of another universe, with another boy, who is also looking down into his puddle beneath his own clear blue sky.

He stares at it a while, and then it hits him like a bolt. He is looking into a puddle, at his own reflection, at a natural mirror. No such worlds lie beyond. This is all there is.

That, I suppose, is one of the formative moments of my cognitive development as a young person. Growing up on the outskirts of a farming town in rural Kansas, there weren’t many opportunities for… entertainment. So my two younger sisters and I had to create our own. We read books. We ran through fields. We acted out our favorite movies. We developed our imaginations.

Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family was perhaps not the ideal upbringing for a boy with an inquiring mind and insatiable curiosity. I was always the child in Sunday school asking questions, trying to figure out the story or the lesson, and aggravating the hell out of the adults with my persistence. In church during the sermon I would draw as the pastor talked, illustrating what he was saying in a way that made sense to me. In fact, one week one of my drawings was even published in the church bulletin as an example of how young people were “taking part in worship.”

I’ve been asked over the past several months why, after nearly twenty-five years (you can’t really count the first five, can you?), I suddenly became an atheist. My answer is always that there was no “suddenly” about it. Like the slow progress of evolution over billions of years, my own “coming out” as an atheist was a slow journey; with countless small changes and adaptations along the way, being gradually divested of what I wished were true, what everyone was constantly telling me was true, and accepting what is true.

At first I considered beginning with September 11th, 2001, driving in to college with my father and listening to the first reports of the attacks on the World Trade Center on National Public Radio; and then watching in chapel as the first and then the second tower fell, knowing that there were doomed people still inside them; or later that day watching the footage of people leaping from the top floors of the buildings rather than burn to death in the jet fuel inferno.

But that would be too easy.

Perhaps we should start in my living room when I was about eight years old, sitting in an orange arm chair and watching a Billy Graham crusade on television, and the reality of hellfire and damnation sinking in for the first time as he described the eternal suffering of those who died without having Jesus as their savior. There were tears that evening, and it frightened me so badly that I begged God to please spare me from that fate. I searched my soul for some sin that I might confess, sure that I’d done something to offend God at some point in my life.

A while later I ended up praying “the prayer” with my father, largely after my younger sister had done the same with my mom. I didn’t want to be left out, after all. And for a while things seemed good. I had Jesus now. I was “in.” But any changes I experienced didn’t last very long, and I found myself praying over and over again for that same feeling of newness that I’d experienced the first time.

It was never to last.

It wasn’t until my family moved to Minnesota and we found the church that I’d be at for the next fourteen years that my training as an evangelical really began. My fifth and sixth grade Sunday school teacher was an ardent Creationist, and at one point she even arranged for Ken Hamm to come and do a seminar. Those days were exciting.

My church also had several pastors who were great teachers and apologists. These men knew the Bible, and were able to communicate biblical truths in a way that was both relevant and instructive. There was no screaming, finger wagging or podium banging from the pulpit, and to this day I honestly believe that these men love God and love people. One of the pastors in particular deeply engaged my mind and my intellect, and challenged me to think.

And overall it was a positive experience. The people at my church formed a family of believers, both inside the church and out. They mirrored a kind of Christian love and acceptance that still produces warm feelings to this day. Some have experienced unspeakable shame, threats and all manner of psychological trauma at their churches growing up. Me, I recall the little old ladies in their red hats, and evenings in choir practice. (For a time we had a top-notch group, and not your regular warbly church choir—we were an auditioned and solid vocal ensemble.)

But on September 11th, 2001, I watched the towers fall and for the first time God seemed powerless and even uncaring. How could such a thing happen? How could God allow it? Didn’t God care about those people? And I had to assume then that there were many who “died without Jesus,” which meant that they were ushered from one hell directly into another. And it was the will of God.

I remember that morning that we had a speaker in chapel who changed his topic from whatever it was he would’ve been speaking about to Habakkuk, a prophet who I still admire and respect today. Habakkuk was writing on the eve of the arrival of the armies of Babylon, and questioning the wisdom of God in allowing injustice. “How long will I cry, and you will not hear? I cry out to you ‘Violence!’ and will you not save?” It was a particularly pertinent passage for that horrific morning. I don’t remember much of what he said, but the response did ring hollow in my mind. How could a good God allow that? Because we were Calvinists and fundamentalists, we had to assume that this was all part of God’s ineffable plan—but why?

That night, as I watched the image of the falling towers for probably the twentieth time, I said out loud, “There is no God.” And part of me waited for a lightning bolt to strike or an earthquake, but it was just me and the television.

It was then that I began to question my faith—not so much in response to the horror that I’d witnessed, not to mention the nightmares at the end of the 20th Century, of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia and even in the Darfur. Rather, it was the passivity of God, and the seeming resignedness of his followers—almost a shoulder-shrugging at the inhumanity going on around them. As a child there was a song we sang in my family: “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King. (That’s sung three times.) No more crying there, we are going to see the King…”

I remember watching the film “Quo Vadis,” a 1951 biblical costume epic with Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr and Peter Ustinov. In one scene condemned Christians wait to be sent into the Coliseum to be torn apart by wild animals. As they waited, they sang a hymn. And my mom began to sing that old hymn: “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.” But I remember thinking that it seemed such a waste to be killed over a belief, and pondering whether I could hold out under similar duress.

One night years later in my church’s youth group, shortly after the Columbine shootings our youth pastor proposed a similar scenario: A gunman threatening to kill us unless we renounced Christ. What would we do? My initial reaction was to go with the handful of Jesus deniers (after all, you could always ask forgiveness later), but I’m ashamed to admit that I ultimately caved to the pressure and the guilt towards being a dutiful Christian—but that same thought was nagging away at me. “It’s not worth it!”

For me, church was largely a social activity. It was about being with my family and my friends. God was an important part to be sure, but if I had to be honest he was more window dressing than a personal force for me, and theology was the language we spoke—and going to a Christian college for four years, I got pretty good at speaking it too. But as I felt I was growing more certain in my faith, so did the doubts that had steadily been growing in my mind since September 2001—was God even there? He never seemed to intervene.

In high school the husband of our children’s pastor died of brain cancer, and my family went to the viewing. Several years earlier one of the older boys lost part of his leg in a motorcycle accident. And as we stood there with friends, with the casket not far away, I wondered how she could still believe in God, when God allowed all that to happen, for her husband to suffer unimaginably before finally dying. They all believed he was in Heaven, with Jesus. They even went on how he’d been such a witness to the nurses, and to everyone he’d encountered. “That was Jesus in him,” they’d say.

I remember another incident from much earlier in my childhood, when one of the sons of our pastor in Kansas died in a car accident. I don’t remember the details, but the family’s car had hit a patch of ice or something, and the car had rolled, and only he had been killed. The rest of the family sustained injuries, some severe, but they lived. I was puzzled by everyone’s resignedness to this—how it was all part of God’s plan.

Some people have said, “It sounds like you just don’t like how God chooses to work.” And maybe that’s true. I don’t. But every time I’d watch the news or open a paper, someone was being murdered or robbed, and Heaven just seemed silent. And I started to wonder if it wasn’t that God was choosing to be silent, but that God wasn’t there.

On August 24, 2008, I came out as a gay man after over thirteen years of struggling with same-sex attraction and failing to overcome it. Imagine the pained confusion of a twelve-year-old boy, having read all of the books about adolescence, and knowing that I was supposed to be having thoughts about girls and instead having thoughts about… other guys. My friends were starting to talk about girls, having growth spurts, getting more masculine and… well… sexy. It wasn’t until the age of sixteen one autumn afternoon while raking the leaves outside, under a clear blue sky, that the thought finally occurred to me:

I’m gay.

It explained everything. But I couldn’t be gay—not and be a Christian! So I tried to be attracted to girls. I’d masturbate at night and try to force myself to think about being with a girl, and at first I’d try to trick myself into thinking about a guy and a girl, but the girl would always disappear and I’d get off with the image of being with a man sexually. And that led, of course, to more praying and begging for God to please take away those thoughts and feelings. But Heaven was ever silent, and I was left with the guilt.

So in 2008, when I finally came out, I made a sort of deal with God that I was going to figure this out. As Dan Savage said of the Catholic Church as a teenager, “That can’t be right. They must be wrong.” I started researching scripture in depth, stopping just short of studying biblical Greek and Hebrew myself—I was going to find out what the bible really said about homosexuality. And I found some really interesting information, but the more I looked and the deeper I dug, the less satisfied I was with the answers I was finding. And I started to become aware of this voice that had made itself heard that evening in front of the television that hadn’t gone away: “There is no God.”

Years previous to September 11th, I was sitting in the car listening to This American Life, and it happened to be the episode with Julia Sweeney where she tells an abbreviated version of Letting Go of God. In the dénouement of the show (which I’ve quoted on here more than once), she recounts the moment where she first begins to lose her weakening grip on the faith she’s desperately trying to hold on to:

One day I was Cometing out my bathtub, and I thought, “What if it’s true? What if humans are here because of pure, random chance? What if there is no guiding hand, no one watching?” I realized I had spent so much time thinking about what God meant that I hadn’t really spent any time thinking about what not-God meant.

A few days later, as I was walking across my backyard into my house, I realized that there was this teeny-weeny thought whispering inside my head. I’m not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. And it whispered, “There is no God.”

And I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. “There is no God. There is no God.”

And then I felt like I’d cheated on God somehow. And I went in the house, and I prayed. And I asked God to please help me have faith. But already it felt slightly silly and vacant, and I felt like I was just talking to myself.

And then, over the course of several weeks, God disappeared.

My teenage self heard this and felt both a mixture of self-satisfied pity, but also of fear. It seemed to me that Julia had just given up; that she hadn’t tried hard enough. Everyone has doubt, but you’re supposed to soldier on. After all, “the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:13). But there was also a part of me that was afraid she was right; and, looking back, knew that I was hearing that same voice too.

On the night of my birthday this year, after I’d just been dumped by Seth, the guy I’d been in the quasi, one-sided relationship with, it finally came crashing down. I’d been so excited about the church he was starting with my friends, and the thought of being in that church with them, and having a whole new community of friends—but mostly of being madly in love with him. And as I vented my rage at him, it was as if the glasses were suddenly taken away and for the first time I could plainly see that I hadn’t really believed any of it; that I hadn’t believed in God, in the theology I was so good at talking about, in Heaven or Hell, or any sort of divine purpose for my life or for anyone else’s life. It was a bit jarring to do it all at once, but I was finally being honest.

For years I’d had clashes with my parents over my “ungodly” behavior: The swearing, the drinking, the overtly self-centered behavior I’ve admittedly exhibited over the years. One night as my dad and I were driving up to Forest Lake to look at a car after my SUV had died, I admitted to him that I really wasn’t a Christian. I could “talk the talk,” but I hadn’t “given my heart to Jesus.” Not really. He said he knew.

This past summer I lived with my parents for a bit before finding a new place to live, and in one of the many discussions I had with them, my mom accused me of never really giving God a chance. “A chance for what?” I shot back. “God has never been real to me. Everyone else seemed to have these experiences with God, these personal encounters, but I’ve never once had any of that. Give God a chance at what?”

I’ve had religious experiences, to be sure, which were more emotional than spiritual. They were always connected to highly charged moments in my life, in periods of deep depression or brokenness, or to music. And there were a few times when I could almost sense the presence of God near me, when I was attempting to pray, but it was always fleeting, like seeing something out of the corner of your eye.

In the weeks following the debacle with Seth, I considered my decision to reject God. Was I leaving God, or leaving the Church? Was I just mad at Seth and this was my way of lashing out at him—or was there something more to it? As I thought and read and listened and discussed, the more I, like Julia, had to admit that there wasn’t enough evidence to continue to believe in God. Neuroscience is able to duplicate many of the experiences of transcendence that I had; and if I looked back over my entire life so far, God was always part of the window trappings, part of the paraphernalia of the Christian community I’d grown up in. And that wasn’t reason enough to continue. I could try to fake it, to go to church anyway, sing the songs, sit through the sermons (even though I didn’t believe any of it), and enjoy the company. But that’s not me.

I’ve had overall positive experiences in the church; and despite my family’s dysfunction (and the fact that all three of us kids are incredibly neurotic, can’t really trust anyone, never felt loved, and never feel like we’re good enough), a good home life too—but I never had a choice about what I believed or what I was taught, and we lived in an insular community where exposure to outside ideas was limited. It was God’s way, or Hell, and who wants eternal damnation (especially as an incredibly imaginative nine-year-old)? And I could’ve just as easily grown up in a home with bigoted non-Christian parents who didn’t want a gay son, but I grew up believing I was broken, disgusting and the worst sinner for being a homosexual or not trying hard enough to overcome it, and that God was going to send me to Hell if I didn’t literally straighten up.

Since coming out as an atheist, I’ve had much more peace of mind. I no longer fear Hell, or God. My thoughts are my own, and I’m free to think and believe whatever I want. And life without God isn’t as hopeless as we were always taught it was! It actually means more now than it did as a Christian. We live in an amazing universe, as a race of highly evolved primates who for whatever reason are able to think and reason and know and love and appreciate the beauty and wonder of our world. And the fact that this is the end result of billions of years of evolution makes it seem even more remarkable—and there’s still more evolving to come!

I don’t regret all of my life as a Christian. I made wonderful friends, and did some pretty cool things that were a part of that experience. And it’s made me who I am today. However, I’m left wondering who I’d be had I left religion sooner, or come out as gay sooner. But of course it doesn’t do any good wondering what might’ve been. That only leaves you crazy, bitter and stuck in the past. Things went the way they did, there’s no changing any of it, and here I am.

And all of those things have led me here, to realizing that who I am is who I always have been: the skeptical post-theist. I’ll always be the kid asking questions, aggravating the hell out of everybody else because I can’t just stop at the answer, and looking up from the puddle and at the clear blue sky and realizing that this is all there is and that there are no worlds on the other side—but also realizing that true wonder and magic are all around us.

And that that’s okay.

99. prometheus

I hate getting bad news. I hate it more when it’s about someone I have admired for years.

Yes, Virginia, Christopher Hitchens is dead.

It doesn’t come as a huge shock since we knew it would happen sooner or later, but it did come as an unpleasant surprise this evening to open my Twitter feed to see the bevy of #GodIsNotGreat hashtags and “Christopher Hitchens is dead!” posts. That put a damper on the rest of an otherwise pleasant evening.

Not surprisingly, major news outlets have published obits touting his career and many accomplishments (one of the best, in my opinion, has been The Guardian’s). No doubt they’ve had pieces ready to go since his diagnosis of terminal cancer. Also not surprisingly, many fundamentalist Christians have been expressing their glee at the passing of someone who they considered a mortal enemy. We’ll be hearing sentiments like, “Wherever he’s going, he’s there now!” And, “Boy, doesn’t he feel stupid!”

To be honest, I haven’t read much Hitchens’. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed for his column on Slate.com, and have enjoyed reading his views on everything from religion to politics to the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but have always felt a tad… overwhelmed by his intellect. I’ve fallen victim somewhat to the Systematic American Intellectual Laziness (S.A.I.L., for short) that plagues this land and its people, content with a few clever sound bites or quotes, or a summary in layman’s terms of what he’s saying instead of doing it myself.

Sorry, Hitch.

What is probably most unfortunate is that the thing he will probably be most remembered for is his polemics on religion when he had polemics on just about everything else. Right up until the end of his life (the last article of his published on Slate was dated Nov. 28, 2011), Hitchens was still using the scalpel of a mind that he had to go after Republican presidential candidates. It’s inspiring.

As I was driving home from Starbucks tonight, I was musing over this and some of what I’d read tonight, particularly the negative reactions from the religious community. Hitchens was proud of this, taking every opportunity to attack religion in scathingly brilliant diatribes and essays, gathering scores of enemies along the way.

When I first came out as an atheist, the only role models I had were the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two of the more prominent and vocal members of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. Their vehemence at organized religion fueled and sharpened my own hatred of the Church and of God, which I’m not sure was the healthiest thing at that point since there were a lot of issues I was dealing with by not dealing with them and taking up arms instead. To be sure, I’m as staunchly opposed to organized religion—and to Christianity in particular—as ever.

But as I thought about the work that Dawkins and Hitchens have done, the books they’ve written and the rancor they’ve stirred up, I found myself wondering if that’s the kind of world I want to live in—a world of ideological trench warfare, where atheists are constantly on the attack and saying nasty things about theists, and vice versa; and where there is no hope for conversation or dialogue in the midst of the flying vitriolic projectiles and snares.

For the first time in history, atheists and non-theists of all varieties are free to come out and be vocal about their views. Not too long ago it was unpopular, even dangerous, to not believe in God and say so in public. In the 1950s you could be labeled a Communist. In earlier periods it could get you jailed, tortured, interrogated, and even murdered. There are still places where that’s the case, in particular countries where radical and extremist Islam are the dominant religions. But in the Western world, people are largely free to be atheists, agnostics and skeptics. We may still face discrimination, prejudice and abuse from religious bigots (and I’m using the dictionary definition of “bigot” here, not just as a slur), but non-theism seems to be rapidly growing in popularity and acceptance.

What comes to mind is the gay rights movement and the attempts for gays and lesbians, and now bisexuals and transgendered persons, to gain acceptance in society. Homosexuals, like atheists, have always been around but have lived underground for fear of persecution for being who they are. (I’m certainly not equating homosexuality and atheism, though in my own experience you can’t force yourself to believe any more than you can change your sexual orientation.) In order to gain visibility and start the proverbial ball rolling, the founding members of the modern gay rights movement had to be loud, controversial, counter-cultural and polemic. As Harvey Milk said, “You must come out.” After all, people can’t understand what they don’t know about or never come into personal contact with.

In a similar way, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been the pioneers of neo-atheism in a world dominated by religion and religious factions. “We’re mad as hell as we won’t take it anymore!” Sundry flavors of Christianity dot the American landscape like radioactive Skittles; and we can’t stop hearing about ethnic violence in the Middle East between sects of Islam, between Sunnis and Shias, but also with the little-talked-about marginalization of the Zoroastrians (which still sounds to me like the name of some alien race on one of the Star Trek series).

Thanks to them and the flak that they’ve taken, countless atheists have had the courage to come out and identify as atheists and skeptics. Dawkins has stated that this was the purpose of his book The God Delusion; that while his wildest hope was that he might de-convert some of the “faithful,” his true intent was to help those who were privately non-believers find the confidence to no longer hide in the closet. His aim succeeded with me, for after hearing him interviewed on MPR I began my own quest for understanding that ultimately led to my letting go of God. But, looking back on my life, I was already there. All Dawkins did was open the door and show me at least one person who’d gone through it.

That said, just as most gays aren’t lisping drag queens or uber-butch lesbians, most of us aren’t as angry or acerbic as many of the prominent atheists. Or, at least I’m coming to realize that we shouldn’t be.

As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, flamboyant drag queens and butch dykes paved the way for gays like me to live out in the open—often with their own blood. But as important as those early days for the movement were, the gay community is experiencing somewhat of a convergence as we enter the mainstream. We’re doing away with sequins and feather boas (think the denizens of Queer as Folk) and getting down to the business of figuring out how to actually live our lives. (And, so long as a Republican isn’t elected President in 2012, one of these days we’ll be able to legally marry too.)

Neo-atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins paved the way for atheists to be out and proud, but I’m wondering if it’s time we set the vitriol aside and get down to the business of trying to figure out how to live together without killing each other. Sure, theists constitute a majority in the world today, and they tend to flex their ideological (and political) muscles a lot, and we need to fight that; but religion or belief in God isn’t going away for a long time—and neither are atheists. So do I want to alienate all of my friends who still believe in God by constantly attacking and belittling their beliefs (a là Dawkins)? Do I want to be the atheist in the Dane Cook sketch who takes offense when someone says, “God bless you”?

Is that really productive?

This is part one of a two-part entry that conveniently precedes my hundredth entry on this blog, wherein I want to flesh out how exactly I came to atheism and what I believe now. It’s as much an exercise for me as it is for others to read.

Here’s where I’ll leave this today: As much as I admired Christopher Hitchens, his intellect and his uncompromising articulation of his views, I don’t want to pick fights with every ecclesiastical windmill on the road. Nor do I want to waste another year of my life jabbing at the ghosts of my religious past.

It’s time to start moving beyond religion.

It’s time for post-theism.