Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (15 page)

Why did it take me so long to figure out what now seems obvious?

The answers to these new questions can speed the process of shedding religious assumptions. Some of them can make a person a little dizzy. But new atheists commonly describe an intoxicating mix of freedom, maturity, and deep responsibility that results from asking such questions without worrying about what Jesus or the minister may think. (For more on the commonly described sense of freedom, flip to
Chapter 16
.)

Comparing religions

One of the most common “Aha!” moments for atheists is their first exposure to a religion that’s not the one in which they were raised — not a two-dimension snapshot of another religion, but the real deal. Meeting a fully developed system of thought with its own gods, its own stories, and its own claims — one that deeply contradicts their own religion and is held to be absolutely true by millions of people and absolutely false by everyone else — is an eye-opening moment. And many of those people come to the conclusion that both systems are simply ancient attempts to explain the world and comfort human fears before there were better ways of doing so.

I loved Greek and Roman mythology as a child; I knew every god and every myth by heart. In second grade, when it was time to do a project, everyone rolled their eyes as little Dale, dressed like Apollo, held up his helpful chart of the 12 gods of Olympus and their major fields
.
But the biggest lesson I got from those gods was that something could be earnestly believed by a whole civilization, and then discarded as obviously false by pretty much everyone a few generations later.

Then I had the related “Aha!” moment: If I’d been born in a different place, family, or time, I would have almost certainly been a faithfully observant believer in the religion of that place, family, or time. Many atheists cite that realization as yet another big step toward complete unbelief.

Reading the Bible

Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov calls the Bible “the most potent force for atheism ever conceived” — and many atheists agree. I read the book straight through at 14, and it was a big part of making an informed decision.

I’m more than willing to agree that the Bible has some really magnificent passages. I’ve never found a more eloquent tribute to love than the one in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. That’s why it was read at my wedding, and if you’re married, probably at yours, too. The 23rd Psalm is unsurpassed for its poetic expression of peace and acceptance in the face of death. And the Sermon on the Mount distills the best ethical principles of Christianity into what has been rightly called the moral essence of the faith.

But most people are only familiar with that carefully handpicked sampler of inspiring passages from the Bible. For each and every inspirational passage that finds its way into pulpits and needlepoint pillows, half a dozen immoral horrors stay pretty well hidden. When you decide to read the book on your own, without a filter, a very different picture emerges.

I won’t bore you with a long list of these atrocities. I can’t say it’s important to get away from filters and cherry picking, then just pick cherries from the other side of the tree. I will have to offer a few of them, just so you believe me about the sour fruit on the other side of that tree. But if you want to assess my claim that the Bible includes some very bad stuff, there’s no better way to do so than reading the Bible.

Wait wait, come back!
I’m not suggesting you read the whole thing. You certainly can if you want, but for now, just start with two books: Genesis and Matthew. Religious scholar Stephen Prothero estimates that 80 percent of the religious references you’ll hear in American culture — from political speeches to figures of speech to Christmas carols — get their start in one of those two books.

Genesis will take you three hours of reading, Matthew even less. And (here’s the small bowl of sour cherries I promised) before you reach your first bathroom break in the middle of Genesis, you’ll encounter the stories of two fathers and their children. Both fathers behave with astonishing cruelty toward their kids, and — here’s the thing — both are immediately praised and rewarded by God. Worse that that, God even
ordered
one of those cruel acts.

Now I don’t hold such stories against God, by the way. Even if he exists, I always picture him smacking his ineffable Forehead in disbelief at the way he’s portrayed. But I do hold it against the Bible and those who wrote it. And as I continued slogging through the Old Testament, that work of the human imagination has the poor Guy first instructing his people not to kill, then directly ordering them to kill neighboring peoples by the tens of thousands, including every child and infant.

“It says
what
?!”
asks God. (See, even
he
knows the book mostly from needlepoint pillows.)

In Matthew, I found the story of a mortal woman impregnated by a god just as fascinating and compelling as when I’d read it in the Greek myth of Danaë and Perseus. And for all the beauty and moral poetry in the rest of the Gospel, Matthew is where Jesus introduces the world to hell, speaking with some satisfaction about the eternal “wailing and gnashing of teeth” by those individuals who don’t follow his teachings.

I heard in Sunday school that the New Testament was intended to cancel out the Old. But read it yourself and see that Jesus puts that idea firmly to rest in Matthew 5:17–18: “Do not think I have come to abolish the Old Law. [That’s the Old Testament.] I come not to abolish but to fulfill it. And until Heaven and Earth pass away, not one jot or one tittle of the Old Law shall pass away.”

So all the commands to kill homosexuals, disobedient children, and nonbelievers, and to enslave and kill the people of neighboring countries — until Heaven and Earth pass away, it’s all still in force.

Okay, enough sour cherries. Perhaps you can see why reading the Bible (or the Qur’an, which fares no better, or whatever the home team’s scripture may be) is an important part of the process for many people who come to doubt, or completely reject, the religious claims around them.

Reading the Bible didn’t make me an atheist, but it took that book off the list of possible reasons to believe. It was an essential step, though by no means the final one.

Admitting the weakness of the arguments and evidence

After someone begins to doubt aloud, he quickly encounters the arguments for God’s existence, whether from a peer on the playground, a parent, or a Sunday school teacher.
If the person’s will to believe is stronger than his will to find out, the arguments will do their job, tucking the questioner back into his comfortable belief.

On the other hand, if the will to find out is stronger, the questioner is often surprised by the astonishing weakness of the arguments. I certainly was. I had been convinced that my doubts
had
to be wrong. It was impossible for so many billions of people to be mistaken! I had to have missed something big.

I wasn’t surprised that the playground arguments were weak —
The Bible is true because the Bible says so, you have to believe or you’ll go to hell,
and so on. But I thought that the more I probed and questioned, the more challenging the arguments would become. Instead, they didn’t rise too far above the playground level:
I feel it in my heart, it isn’t that kind of question,
and so on
.

The most common kind of evidence I heard was the “I feel it in my heart” variety — the direct experience of God. Though most people take this for granted now, this approach is actually a pretty recent one for talking about faith. Direct experience only replaced the formal arguments for God’s existence when those arguments started falling apart. (More on that in a few paragraphs.) Believers may speak of a feeling of transcendence, a near-death experience, a random act of kindness, or the sensed presence of God as a reason for believing. These feelings are beautiful and genuine, and I’ve had several of them myself — feelings of profound connection, of transcendence, and of overwhelming love and peace. I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same things. The question is whether they originate with a God or in the natural, human heart and mind.

If I heard from a very young age that every good feeling I have originated with God, then I’d see every good feeling as proof of God’s existence. And if I heard from a young age that faeries cause rain, I’d see every spring shower as proof of faeries. Confirmation bias was at work again, so the evidence of experience failed to convince me.

Finally I reached the highest level — the ministers and theologians — fully expecting more challenging answers. Instead, more than one minister gave me the weakest reply of all — I should abandon my doubts and take a “leap of faith.” When I spoke to theologians, I learned that many had quietly defined God right out of existence. One friend who is a Catholic theologian said the idea of “God” is really just “a response one gives to mystery,” the name people call that which is unknown or unknowable. Another theologian friend — yes, I have several — told me in writing that the idea of an individual soul surviving death is “an elementary-schoolish belief that is no longer widely held.”

Because modern theology was quietly putting “God” in quotation marks, I turned to the classics of theology to check out the arguments there. Most are variations on three ideas:

The ontological argument:
God is the greatest being conceivable. It’s greater to exist than not exist. Therefore God exists. This argument is kind of stunning in its silliness, don’t you think? It says God must exist because of the human definition of God. Yet people were so caught up in the will to believe that it held everyone’s attention for centuries.

The cosmological argument:
Everything that exists must have a cause. At the beginning of the “chain of causation” must be a First Cause, that was not itself caused; that’s God. This argument has some attraction, until you realize that it cancels itself out. Everything needs a cause, and God provides that cause. So what caused God? Simply contradict the opening statement by declaring he
doesn’t
need a cause, then pretend that something has been solved. Yet again, this strange argument holds human attention for many centuries.