Losing My Religion: Embracing Atheism in My Seventh Decade
“If I’d been compelled to label myself, from age 14 on, I would have chosen the name Agnostic. I knew that I could not trust either the gods of the Old or New Testaments (let alone the Hindus’ pantheon, Islam’s Allah or Buddha’s god-knows-what) to be the bedrock beneath my feet. But the jury was still out, for me. I wouldn’t rule out the existence of a Supreme Being, a Unifying Consciousness, a Prime Mover. I just lacked sufficient information.” Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Ruminant With A View
By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”―Christopher Hitchens, from The Portable Atheist
“The plain fact is religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people―by irrationalists―by those who would steer the ship of state, not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.”―Bill Maher, from “Religulous”
TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—12/3/2012—At the age of 14, following a stellar “academic” career in Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian church’s Communicants’ Class, I was granted an exclusive audience with the church fathers. I was their star pupil. I would be permitted to ask them anything I wished.
But, I found, to my great disappointment, that none of these Presbyterian scholars could answer the short, short list of questions I had compiled, questions burning a hole through my psyche even at that early age; first and foremost among them, “How could the God you have described to me allow such evil to occur in the world?”
At 15, I would enter college and learn—I was a precocious child, but my questions were only precocious for my years and station in life—that mine were the very same questions queasy theists had been asking themselves for aeons. And, for aeons, failing to answer to anyone’s real satisfaction.
Like Job, and so many others, I had asked the Church Fathers: “Why must the righteous suffer so?”
And they had quoted their Old Testament God back to me: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.”
What kind of answer is that, I thought even at the time. So that’s all you have to say in the face of such atrocities as the Warsaw Ghetto, Dachau and Buchenwald, just for starters? (I had some history under my belt, even at 14, having read Mein Kampf as an 11-year-old, but I had yet to study the immense, endlessly baroque canon of crimes committed actually in the name of organized religion: that curriculum still lay ahead of me.)
So, at 14, I “left the church,” though I could not yet abandon what I began to call The Ineffable. In my heart of hearts, I still held out hope that something beyond my ken, something that might be termed a (if not The) Supreme Intelligence, was at work in the universe; something largely unknowable, at least by my lights, but at work in our lives, just the same.
If I’d been compelled to label myself, from age 14 on, I would have chosen the name “Agnostic.” I knew that I could not trust either the gods of the Old or New Testaments (let alone the Hindus’ pantheon, Islam’s Allah or Buddha’s god-knows-what) to be the bedrock beneath my feet. But the jury was still out, for me. I wouldn’t rule out the existence of a Supreme Being, a Unifying Consciousness, a Prime Mover. I just lacked sufficient information.
It took me some half a century to shed that last shred of “faith,” but I have now shed it.
I now believe, with most of my being, that we sentient beings are alone in the cosmos. And, perhaps, we homo sapiens are alone in the universe in our being conscious of being alone.
At some point during the last year which, I admit, has brought with it life-cataclysms (of a sheerly personal variety, but also more universal challenges and defeats) for which I, and mankind at large, was ill-prepared by any of the consolations of our philosophy . . . I lost what small faith I had left in its entirety.
Very much like Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz,” I suddenly had my eyes opened for me, and the little wizard manning the fancy, scary whistles and bells in Emerald City was revealed to be . . . a little human con-man manning fancy, scary whistles and bells in Emerald City.
The church fathers, all the church fathers, have been revealed to be small-case emperors wearing no clothes.
The truth I had not wanted to own, to walk out in, at 14—due to received wisdom; due to having been brought up by believers; due to being steeped in the magical thinking we put on, in this country, with our tiny Oshkosh B’Gosh dungarees, then our Levi’s, then our Not Your Daughter’s Jeans, and the other shared coverings for our inescapable existential nakedness—I accepted, like my true mantle of maturity at 61.
Just as the Emerald City has no wizard capable of granting wishes, my world no longer has a God-of-last-resort to whom I can turn in times of woe.
I have become what I have been becoming, step by step, since age 14: an atheist.
During Hurricane Sandy, perhaps the single most terrifying day of my life, as my husband and I cowered beneath 200-foot trees, whipping their arms like giant squid in an underwater horror-scape lit by the blue and green flares of exploding transformers, I did not pray.
And I have always prayed. Even after voting with my feet and leaving first the Presbyterian Church and, then, all churches, all organized religions, still I prayed. From childhood on. The night of Sandy, having fallen away from any and all certainty of a consciousness larger than my own, I found “the line” had gone dead . . . along with every other power line in northern New Jersey.
God had not “caused” this super-storm. Homo sapiens, with great big greedy carbon footprints, had caused this storm, if any prime mover was to be indicted. And God, gods, would not come to our aid the night of the falling trees and rising tides, nor after: it was we, the people, who must come to one another’s aid, or not.
Oh yes, holding out some hope for the existence of The Ineffable had brought me some comfort over the years, but it seemed, after it left me, to be the comfort of an infant’s pacifier, a child’s lucky rabbit’s foot, a believer’s clutched mala or rosary or incantation.
When magical thinking lifts off from one’s consciousness, a vast, still certainty replaces it. One becomes, at last, the adult in one’s own room. One no longer awaits Godot, and one is free to assume responsibility for everything one can and should, without recourse to an invisible, ambiguous “sky deity,” and his so imperfect avatars.
One takes the steering wheel, alone, at last.
As a 16-year-old English major, back at the University of Georgia at Athens, I first read Archibald MacLeish, a so-called “minor” American poet who became one of my mentors. Later, a student of James Dickey at the University of South Carolina, I would meet MacLeish face to face, and speak with him about what his work had meant to me, specifically his poem, “The End of The World,” and his play based on the Book of Job, “J.B.”
The poem has to do with my greater subject here, our so-human willingness to hide our heads beneath various flimsy manmade constructs—religion, for one—in order to escape, for a time, existential dread. MacLeish’s circus-goers are stand-ins for mankind at large; the circus tent, which shuts out both the terrifying immensity of the night surrounding us, but also, the stars, I have always read as “religion” (though, of course, one is not meant to parse so meanly any poem).
“The End of the World”
By Archibald MacLeish
Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing―nothing at all.
In my seventh decade, like MacLeish, who was entering his eighth decade when I had the honor of meeting him, I have finally admitted that the dark night sky is our shared reality, as opposed to the bright and gaudy circus tent we erect to blot out the darkness.
But, remove that tent, I say, and one may finally see the stars, cold and impersonal though they may be. But, also, beautiful and, like us, here today, gone tomorrow.
As MacLeish writes, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
That is my lesson for the day.
The image used to illustrate this column: “Brain of The Sistine Chapel,” courtesy of tj.blackwell at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjblackwell/4679548147/
Further quotes on religion and atheism from Christopher Hitchens: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2011/12/the-20-best-christopher-hitchens-quotes/
Further quotes from his film, “Religulous,” by Bill Maher: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815241/quotes
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Publishing-Editor of “Weekly Hubris,” considers herself an Outsider Artist (of Ink). The most recent of her 15-odd books is The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable, now available in a third edition on Kindle. Thirty years an academic, she has also worked steadily as a founding-editor of journals, magazines, and newspapers in her two homelands, Greece, and America. Three other hats Boleman-Herring has at times worn are those of a Traditional Usui Reiki Master, an Iyengar-Style Yoga teacher, a HuffPost columnist and, as “Bebe Herring,” a jazz lyricist for the likes of Thelonious Monk, Kenny Dorham, and Bill Evans. (Her online Greek travel guide is still accessible at www.GreeceTraveler.com, and her memoir, Greek Unorthodox: Bande a Part & A Farewell To Ikaros, is available through www.GreeceInPrint.com.) Boleman-Herring makes her home with the Rev. Robin White; jazz trumpeter Dean Pratt (leader of the eponymous Dean Pratt Big Band); Calliope; and Scout . . . in her beloved Up-Country South Carolina, the state James Louis Petigru opined was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” (Author Photos by Robin White. Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)
19 Comments
John Maddock-Lyon
I’m sorry to point out Elizabeth that you are now in your 7th decade – horror of horrors – My mentors Ulrich Simon (Jewish German Atheist whose family died in Auschwitz and became an Anglican priest “A Theology of Auschwitz” was one of his books) Kitamori “The theology of the pain of God” and Akira Oda (Japanese Christan theologian who as an 8 year old boy was taken by his Army General father to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a week after the bombings by the Americans, and kepthis faith despite dying of leukaemia and in great pain). Like Abelard,I start from the pain of the universe and just happen to come to a different conclusion to you, as my brain now degenerates with Alzeimers Disease and my spinal arthritis and disintegration continue.
Skip
Interesting, but what do you say to the child whose parents drowned in Sandy’s wake?
I’m holding on to the Supreme Fiction for its humbling power. Imagine the pope without a god to worship. The Creator’s doing the best He can–don’t blame Him for “acts of god.”
eboleman-herring
Skip, forgive me, but I think you missed my point. I would never call Sandy an “act of God,” nor ever man an act of God. My point is that we are alone here. I say to the child whose parents die–any orphan, even myself–no God “did” this. I find your position baffling in every respect: emotionally, spiritually but, most of all, intellectually. Read the column again, please.
eboleman-herring
John, you’re one of my giants, but I do not share your faith, nor, alas, your greater skill in maths :-). You’ve known me for several of these 60+ decades, and we’ve been through some major tsunamis of woe, you and I, My Old Friend. But I have come to see our drownings, disintegrations and all other “natural” afflictions as impersonal. For Dachau, etc., manmade debacles, we are most culpable, and rise to the level of evil beings. There IS evil in the world, as man embodies it. But a deity in our world? I feel not.
Anita Sullivan
Thanks for this column, Elizabeth! For years after I stopped even thinking about the God question any more, I tried to figure out whether I could honestly call myself an “atheist”. Finally (recently) I’ve decided no, I am not an atheist because the term itself means something like “not-theist” or “not-believer-in-god,” and that is insulting, because it assumes that the Primary Question must be “Is there a God?” My position is that the question itself need not even occur. I think the first human religion was something like what anthropologists call “animism” — i.e., everything is in some way alive, but there’s no hierarchy.
David Campbell
Elizabeth, we do not share similar paths to your realization, but I applaud your arrival! I think you were essentially there at 14 — standing at the line, waiting to take that one tiny step across it. I never had any upbringing in magical thinking, though I was taught about it by my amazing teacher-father, so it is as inconceivable to me as atheism must be to some true believers. Some acquaintances still harbor some hope that I will “see the light” and accept the existence of God. But that would be impossible for me. I, too, would have far too many questions about the vast holes in the constructs of most religions’ narratives — the parts (the unanswerable questions) most of them gloss over with “faith.” The only faith I can accept or express is that of the understanding of the physical world that science — the task of constant questioning — can achieve. There are concepts in areas like theoretical physics, Big Bang Theories, and the like that I can’t quite wrap my head around. But I simply accept that much more capable intellects than mine CAN conceive of them and attempt to understand them and explain them to the rest of us — without any mysticality. These are not wizards behind curtains. And if these concepts and theories evolve and change as more information is available I am perfectly OK with that. I do not hang my intellectual and emotional security on any single supposedly immutable concept. I have no fears of the unknown, in this realm anyway.
David Campbell
A little addendum — the only thing I can imagine that could completely rock my understanding of the world and of humanity, is if everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, I have ever understood about about it was completely wrong and opposite to what I think it is: That down is up, that good is bad, that black is white, that water flows uphill, that food is poison, that poison is nourishment. That every notion of fairness and treating others by the Golden Rule brings despair and hopelessness instead of equality and feelings of self-worth. That dictators are right and Gandhi was wrong. That the Spanish Inquisition was right and telling the truth is wrong. I could go on and on. But I have much more faith in the possibility, if not the inevitability, of humans to overcome their fears and behave rationally, logically and in the best interests of us all, than in the possibility that we should give up our notions of rational thinking and leave it all in the hands of some invisible, omnipotent, unsubstantiated presence whose ability to mitigate evil and destruction has thus far proven quite shaky at best, and downright incompetent if he was to have to suffer through an annual performance review to get that tithing raise his followers keep asking for . . .
eboleman-herring
David, thank you for all the thoughtful posts above. A student of Latin–and I should have mentioned that in my piece–I always think of the prefix “a” as meaning “away from,” as opposed to “not entirely,” or even “not.” I am, thus, not inclined to posit the existence of Dei/Theii, or dei/theii. I “shy from” such a belief now, as I can find no legs to support it. On the other hand, I’ve read quantum physics (for Dummies, as it were) for the last decade, and am fascinated by what we now think we know that, very recently, we could not imagine. My mind is always open, if not credulous. As my good friend, David Christopher Loya, knows, I have had many brushes with The Numinous, and written about them (even here, at WeeklyHubris), but those brushes do not a portrait paint. I’m not at all comfortable with the all but certain knowledge that my consciousness will end with my last breath. And I cannot even tell you why–except that I’ve become accustomed to being conscious. It’s not ego, I assure you: the universe would be better off without this particular iteration of Eeyore, I feel, and the pain I suffer as a chronic depressive makes each day something of a trial. However, I’ve become accustomed to observing my segment of the multiverse and, though, in the face of Freud, I CAN imagine my own non-existence (under long, long anaesthesia for spinal fusion, I have already “been there, done that”) it’s still not an appealing prospect. I believe, though, given the evidence, I shall no longer be wailing into the dark after a god, or gods. THAT is over, it seems. There would, it appears, be other, more pressing concerns to pursue now. As the Greeks phrase it, “Tha fanei.” I hope.
Scott Whitfield
E, you are, once again, SPOT ON! It’s time the world sees religion for what it really is: a multi-billion-dollar-a-year BUSINESS. Hope you and Dean are well. Call if you need anything!
Love,
Us
Michael House
You are a very welcome and valued convert to the world of rationality and commonsense. Here are the cruel truths of this world:
1. Religion serves two purposes: social control, and a crutch for those who cannot face the reality that for many life is “nasty, brutish and short.”
2. You live, you die. If you are lucky, you live on in the memories of those who knew and loved you, or those who benefit from what you created while alive.
3. Religion has probably killed, harmed and destroyed more people than any other human-made phenomenon, and is still doing so.
4. Religion is a wonderful weapon for those who wish to control others, especially women.
Here endeth the lesson.
eboleman-herring
Thank you, Michael. It’s been a long and winding road for me, but living in America will, sooner or later, cure a thinking person of religion. Interestingly enough, despite what the edited “Share” numbers say above, this is my most-Shared column ever (on so-called Social Media). It went viral on Facebook. Of course, The Huffington Post, for which I also write, refused to publish it. Figures, eh? Welcome to the Land of Happy Talk. Cheers, e
David Campbell
Michael House — you have it exactly right, too! Those are exactly the main results of religion in the world. Unfortunately, I sometimes find myself getting sucked into reading blogs about religion v. atheism until I get too angry to read the insanity any longer, but I read a really wild comment once that has stuck with me. It seems the discussion had turned to whether religion or atheism was responsible for more deaths throughout history. And this religion apologist fellow had taken the time to count up and estimate the known deaths in history due to organized religion — biblical battles, the Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, modern religious wars, etc. He did an admirable job of it and somehow arrived at a figure in the low tens of millions! Amazing that he admitted to it. But to make his point that even after all of that murder in the name of God, he posited that just a couple of the world’s worst “known atheists,” Hitler and Stalin, for example, had been responsible for a slight edge in total death numbers (something around 30 million I think he said), thus proving that atheism was the worse offender in the Guinness World Record murder category. And therefore on the whole, Atheism was a worse world view because it obviously was responsible for more mayhem. How can we survive as a culture or even a species when we have growing ranks of people who think like this lost soul??? There is absolutely no arguing with them, even by simply pointing out the flaws in their logic . . . As my educator father used to say, and whose gauntlet I have taken up, [good] education seems to be key to so many of the world’s ills.
David Campbell
Oh, and Elizabeth, did Huffington say WHY they wouldn’t publish your commentary? No guts??
eboleman-herring
David, HuffPost DID, in fact, finally publish this column: and it was THEY who added the image, funnily enough. I badmouthed them before they posted it, alas, and then they really did right by the piece/me–including boxes, all my hyperlinks, etc., etc. I was very gratified. And you’re absolutely correct about the image, dern it. Thank you!
Rick Boling
Correct!
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Rick, in this case, I hate being “right.” I wish there WERE a creator, and that her logic, somehow, somewhere, were sound. But I really rather think…not. Love you, e
Rick Boling
I have often wished I had what my mother had: the peace that seems to come with an unrestricted belief in an all-seeing, omnipotent and benevolent God. But from very early in my life, I was disturbed by the contradictions and often downright silliness of religious writings, especially those in the Bible. I was also disturbed by many of the congregants at our church, whose primary purpose in attending seemed to be spreading gossip and/or making business deals. In fact, there was so little sincere “Christianity” involved in our “Christian” religion (Disciples of Christ), the hypocrisy eventually got to me, and I left the church as soon as my parents were divorced and Dad was no longer in control of my life (I was 13). After an angry, rebellious, self-imposed religious exile of some twenty years, I became curious about the phenomenon of “religion” and began studying and researching its history. Through this process, it eventually became clear to me that the human compulsion to look outside one’s self for answers to the great questions—the ones science had yet to explain—was based entirely on fear of the unknown, not on any rational or logical interpretation of reality. I did, however, find some philosophical and spiritual ideas intriguing, mainly those of the Eastern “religions.” I also found the allegorical mythology of some Native American tribes to be interesting, in that they simplified and conveyed many of the moral and ethical concepts western philosophers seem to go to great lengths to complicate.
Like you, it took me a few decades to completely abandon my “faith,” but I eventually made that leap. And now I must live without the comfort of “knowing” certain things absolutely, or having an infinite well into which I can throw all my “sins.” I do, however, think of myself as a spiritual person; the difference is that my spirituality now comes from a belief in natural, rather than supernatural phenomena, and I rely on my own internal compass for guidance, instead of some mysterious external force. Although this path leaves many of my questions unanswered, I have learned to derive joy from the spiritual and intellectual journey itself; a journey filled with fascinating discoveries derived from a continual search for knowledge and enlightenment (though I have to admit that I am still waiting to hear the sound of one hand clapping).
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
When what I term “generalized anthropomorphism” lifts off due to prolonged study and thought, and one no longer sees mankind as the measure of all things in this unimaginable-to-man-sized multi-verse, then all religions, all absolute belief systems become absurd. First, one grieves. Then, one realizes that mankind simply canNOT be taken all that seriously. Then, for many, one notices that one’s core ethical beliefs are utterly untouched by the departure of the magical thinking of childhood. Then, alas, one sees even more clearly the bickering of the sects, and the violence to which “believers” will resort, either intellectually or in the flesh, to insure that everyone goes on drinking their particular brand of Kool-Aid. I am happy “not to know” so very, very, very much, and I will no longer pretend I do.
Rick Boling
I hate to repeat myself, but you are Correct!