Godless (12 page)
I’ll tell you, this is a great way to test your friendships. Imagine doing this yourself. If you are an atheist, try telling your friends that you have become a born-again preacher. If you are a lifelong Republican, announce that you have switched parties. How many of your “friends” would stay your friends? Some undoubtedly would, because your friendship is a true horizontal peer relationship of unconditional admiration and enjoyment of each other’s person. But some of them would not, because you (and they) would learn that the arrangement was contingent on something external to the relationship, such as belonging to the same club, faction, philosophy or religion. As soon as that external link disappears, so does the artificial bond that brings you together. That’s when the friendship loses its point. But this is good, because then you know who your friends are. If they were true friends, they would have gladly accommodated your freedom of choice even if it made them uncomfortable. You can’t lose something that was not there in the first place.
Few of the letters offered any defense of bible contradictions. No one presented any documentary evidences from the first century or offered a single rational argument for the existence of a god beyond the where-did-we-come-from garden variety. (I know there are stronger arguments, and I’ll deal with them later.) Most of the negative responses centered on things like humility, shame, attitude, prayer—in short, “spiritual” intimidation.
I never heard from Rev. Milton Barfoot, the pastor at Glengrove Assembly of God, but my brother, Darrell, told me he had spoken briefly with him about me, and all he could say was, “But isn’t Dan afraid of hell?” That’s it. Of all the things this learned, ordained minister could utter in response to honest intellectual searching, the first thing he thought of was hell. Oh, gosh, now I see it! I should stop questioning and just be afraid.
Dave Gustaveson’s challenge to “cry out to God” was nothing less than intellectual dishonesty. One of my friends asked me simply to “pretend that Jesus is real and he will make himself real to you.” Had either of them ever “cried out to Buddha” or “pretended that Allah is real” as an acid test of their existence? These people were asking me to lie to myself. They should have known better. They should have known that I had already “cried out to God,” that I had frequently prayed and “felt the spirit” within me. It is easy to produce or coax inner feelings, and it happens in all religions. They didn’t seem to realize that I was not seeking inner confirmation—I was seeking objective, external evidence. And isn’t “pretending Jesus is real” simply begging the question? Even if I had managed to fake it by pretending to pray to a being in whom I do not believe, would an omniscient god not know this? And why should I have had to ask in the first place? Why doesn’t God simply reveal himself to everyone? And even faking it, as they must have imagined I was doing (or could do), why did God not respond? Their challenge actually backfired: “Thanks. I tried it and it failed. There is no God.”
The almost universal tone of the letters and conversations was that I was the one with the problem. None acknowledged that my change of mind might be an indictment of Christianity itself. Some of them formerly had come to me for counseling, but now they no longer wanted to learn from me. (I don’t think they should have to.) They all assumed that the challenge then at hand was to get me back. Even the few who did ask to read my papers never commented on them, except superficially. Although I expected this, it was a strange feeling to be demoted from a respected authority to a problem child. I suppose if I had learned less, or stopped learning altogether, I would still have had the trappings of clerical credibility. But no thanks. Here is one emperor who did not want the clothes, or want to be emperor at all.
I don’t know if any of these people have since moderated their views, but I do know that none of them remained the same. You can’t avoid being affected when one of your colleagues challenges the very core of your beliefs. Although the long-term fallout from my friends and co-workers is hard to know, the effect on my family was much more dramatic.
My parents had moved to Arizona, and when they got my letter they were shocked. They had been proud of their son’s work as an ordained minister and evangelist, and of my reputation as a Christian songwriter. Not knowing anything about my gradual inner change, the announcement came as a total surprise. My sweet mother, a Sunday School teacher in Apache Junction, immediately hopped on a bus, traveling from Phoenix to my home in California, to see firsthand what had happened to her son. We had a long, emotional discussion into the early morning hours. I don’t remember much of what was said that night, but Mom later reminded me that we opened the bible and read some of the horrible stories about the petty and cruel God of scripture, and I had said, “Mom, you are a good person. Do you really want to teach this awfulness to children? The God of the bible is a monster. You are nicer than that!” She would never be the same, but it wasn’t until much later that I learned the long-term effects of that visit. At the time, I did not want to become a reverse evangelist to my own parents, so after that meeting I refrained from pressuring them to change their opinions. A family is a family, after all.
My mother tells me that after that meeting she was stunned by the dissonance. Backing off to get some perspective, she stopped going to church. In a
Wisconsin Magazine
article (July 28, 1991), journalist Bill Lueders quotes my mother, Pat Barker, as she recalled our late-night meeting: “The answers he gave me impressed my heart and mind. I had so much love for my son that I knew in some way he was right.”
Wisconsin Magazine
article (July 28, 1991), journalist Bill Lueders quotes my mother, Pat Barker, as she recalled our late-night meeting: “The answers he gave me impressed my heart and mind. I had so much love for my son that I knew in some way he was right.”
One morning as she was watering her desert garden, Mom saw a dead bird on the ground, and she thought, “How sad!” As she looked closer she saw that its flesh was being attacked by a mob of ants. How horrible! That pretty little songbird had come to a gruesome fate. Then she remembered all those years she had sung “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” praising God for his watchfulness: “I sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.” Here on the ground was evidence that God’s eye was not on the sparrow at all. If there were a God, his eye was at that moment on the ants and microbes feasting on the bird’s misfortune. But, then, everything in nature could be someone else’s breakfast, so the only “eye” is the impersonal eye of natural selection, which is a process of survival, not the result of cosmic parental care. On her own, she came to the same realization that I had come to on that cot in Mexicali—the realization that we are simply naturally evolved biological organisms in an amoral material environment, and that if there is any caring to be done, we are the ones to do it. All those years she was singing “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” it was actually
her
eye that was on me and my brothers. She was a wonderful mother.
her
eye that was on me and my brothers. She was a wonderful mother.
Within weeks Mom concluded that religion was “just a bunch of baloney,” as she told the reporter. She felt a “tremendously great disappointment in God.” She began to do some reading and thinking of her own, and eventually started calling herself an atheist. “I don’t have to hate anymore,” she said happily.
One fact that surprised my mother was that no one in her church ever seemed to care about her departure. She had been a member of the Assembly of God for years, had performed in the choir, had sung solos regularly in services, was faithfully teaching Sunday School and had participated in many other functions. The only incident out of the ordinary, after leaving the church, was an embarrassing moment when she was grabbed at the supermarket by an older woman who was shaking, speaking in tongues and praying to cast the Devil out of my mother. This only confirmed my mother’s newfound opinion that religion is “baloney.”
It took my dad a little longer. When he got my letter he ran down to the church altar and poured out his heart to God. He enlisted the assistance of church members to pray for me. The pastor laid hands on Dad, asking God for a special blessing during this trial of faith. At first Dad, the bible school alumnus, tried to argue with me in a friendly and fatherly way, and mailed me many pages of correspondence on the issues, which I answered promptly. Eventually he relented, due probably more to Mom and Darrell’s influence than to mine. He began to read the “other side,” and eventually came to respect the reasoning of freethinkers, philosophers and scientists.
The same
Wisconsin Magazine
article quotes my father, Norman, discussing how he dealt with his son’s change of views: “I tried to straighten him out. It worked the other way around.” After Dad stopped believing in God, he was amazed at how quickly his Christian friends turned on him. “I used to think it was a tough thing to be a Christian in this big, bad world. You want to see something interesting, try not being one.” He reports, “I’m much happier now. To be free from superstition and fear and guilt and the sin complex, to be able to think freely and objectively, is a tremendous relief.”
Wisconsin Magazine
article quotes my father, Norman, discussing how he dealt with his son’s change of views: “I tried to straighten him out. It worked the other way around.” After Dad stopped believing in God, he was amazed at how quickly his Christian friends turned on him. “I used to think it was a tough thing to be a Christian in this big, bad world. You want to see something interesting, try not being one.” He reports, “I’m much happier now. To be free from superstition and fear and guilt and the sin complex, to be able to think freely and objectively, is a tremendous relief.”
One of the immediate benefits to my dad was his reclamation of music. Back in the 1950s, when he and Mom became “born again,” Dad abandoned his musical career, threw away his collection of swing recordings, turned his back on his “sinful” life and played his trombone only in church. He had come to view popular, worldly music as a threat to spiritual health and godly morality. Dance bands encouraged a carnal lifestyle. When he finally gave up religion, he was free to come back home to his talent. But this didn’t happen in one clean break. Before completely leaving the church, Dad began to play his trombone in big bands in the Phoenix area, reconnecting with the delicious life he had abandoned almost 40 years earlier. He didn’t tell anyone at church because he knew they would disapprove: “Resist the temptations of the world!” One Fourth of July, when Dad was playing at a party, a TV crew showed up to cover the event. The next day the pastor’s wife called my dad to ask, “Norman, did I see you on TV last night?” Ha! The all-seeing eye of God!
Dad would not continue this double life for long. One evening, he drove to church, took his trombone case out of the car and walked toward the building. He could hear the praying, singing and preaching. When he got to the door it struck him that he did not belong in that alien world any more. Hoping that no one would notice, he quickly turned around, got back in the car and drove home, never to return. He traded “Onward, Christian Soldiers” for “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.”
I suppose it was implicit, but I never suggested to my parents that they should become atheists. They did their own thinking. They decided to investigate the issues for themselves. It is exciting to see what happened in their lives. I don’t think it is possible to pull someone out of religion if they don’t want to go.
My parents later admitted that they made some mistakes in raising their three boys in a fundamentalist household. My mother says that their motivation was to do “the right thing.” In spite of the religious overkill, I had a very enjoyable childhood. Sure, we were indoctrinated with an illegitimate and intolerant worldview, but my parents were decent, caring people in spite of their faith. They raised me with good principles. One thing they taught me by example is that you should never be ashamed to speak what you think is the truth. That lesson has stayed with me my entire life.
When Darrell got my letter he was shocked at first, but then he got excited. Darrell had been an almost-skeptic for many years, not knowing exactly what he believed but covering the bases. I had always thought he was a borderline Christian. His whole attitude to Christianity, he later told me, was, “Exactly how much sin can I commit and still get to heaven?” I did not convert my brother to atheism; in reality, his big toe was already across the line. Darrell said that when he heard his big brother—his ordained-minister, Christian-songwriter big brother—articulate criticisms of Christianity, it suddenly legitimized and crystallized all of those unspoken and unformed questions he had been carrying around for years. It made it okay to doubt. “If
Dan
can say it, then so can I!” When I gave him a book on humanism, he said, “That’s what I am! I never knew it until now, but I am a humanist.”
Dan
can say it, then so can I!” When I gave him a book on humanism, he said, “That’s what I am! I never knew it until now, but I am a humanist.”
For a while, though, Darrell was uncomfortable with the word “atheist.” He once asked to accompany me to a meeting of atheists in Los Angeles, then almost changed his mind before coming in. A year or two later Darrell became one of the chapter directors of that group, Atheists United. He went on to complain about violations of state/ church separation in Redlands and San Bernardino. He became a plaintiff in a successful lawsuit protesting county ownership and maintenance of a Christian theme park on public property. Darrell is a successful salesman and he has learned to put his considerable skills of persuasion to good use. My folks told me that Darrell was a solid support for them when they were going through their initial disillusionment with religion. It is helpful to have someone to talk to during times like this, and Darrell called them regularly to compare notes and cheer them up in their journey out of faith. Today, with more fervor and skill than he ever exhibited as a Christian, Darrell is a walking, driving advertisement for freedom of thought. (He often plays freethought music and initiates skeptical conversations with passengers on the airport shuttle van he owns.)
The change in my parents and in Darrell was tremendously heartening. I never would have predicted such an outcome. My parents had been fervent disciples of Jesus for years, and Darrell had been a street preacher with Christians in Action (CIA), a missionary/evangelism organization. (He confesses now that he joined that group mainly to wrangle an early discharge from the Marine Reserves on a “ministerial” basis—he did
not
want to fight in Viet Nam.) I should have known that in a family built around true love and acceptance, there is nothing to fear. The fact that these born-again, door-to-door preachers were open to change gives me hope. Some values are truly transcendent (in the natural sense), rising above religious walls. Human love, kindness and intelligence are better than belief, and superior to superstition.
not
want to fight in Viet Nam.) I should have known that in a family built around true love and acceptance, there is nothing to fear. The fact that these born-again, door-to-door preachers were open to change gives me hope. Some values are truly transcendent (in the natural sense), rising above religious walls. Human love, kindness and intelligence are better than belief, and superior to superstition.
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