Deconversion

(Disclaimer: This post describes in depth my experiences with religion and my thoughts on the matter. In addition, it is by far my most intensely personal blog post, containing many thoughts which I have never shared with another human being. Elly does not count.)

But seriously guys, I'm an atheist. If you hadn't figured that out by my previous blog post, then you can now rest assured that I do not believe in any God or gods. Also, in my previous post I made a brief mention of the difficulties I had while struggling to accept this about myself.  I want to use this post to expand on that further and speak a little about my history with theism and in some depth on what kind of emotions I went through while discovering my atheism. I also want to make it clear that this post isn't about explaining my rationale for "converting" to atheism, but instead describe how realizing my lack of faith impacted my life.

I think the term "deconversion" isn't entirely accurate, as it implies that at some time I was converted, or that I had faith. This isn't entirely true, because as far back as I can remember, my "faith" was more a matter of puppeting what I had been told by authorities rather than faith in the dictionary sense. The only time I can recall really praying for divine intervention was when I was very young, and I prayed for Santa Claus to bring me a SNES (True story, you can't make this kind of stuff up). Although it is impossible to recall with perfect clarity, I'd say that it's safe to say that my belief in the big SC and the big JC disappeared at about the same time, even if I didn't realize it as such.

Despite not actually believing in the stories I heard in church and at CCD, I would still parrot back lines from it, and thanks to my rather good memory, I was quite good at it. In addition, my natural personality greatly aided in presenting me as a quiet, pious young man.

CCD itself was always a complete bore. The only thing that made it remotely enjoyable was a growing friendship with TC. With the exception of TC, all of the other kids seemed to pay some lip service to the ideals expressed by the church and our instructors, but did not even attempt to live up to these ideals.

In addition, the instructors in CCD seemed, to find a way to put this politely, mentally slow (I think the same might be said of the students. I used to joke to TC that they would always have us 2 do the readings for masses because we were the only ones that could read). The answer to every other question seemed to be some variant of "Jesus loves me". So this weekly exercise in monotony offered me nothing in terms of mental stimulation, and without the belief in God to give it some sort of additional meaning, it became something I would dread more and more (No offense to TC, but somehow they didn't seem interested in letting us talk about RA the whole time)

So that's a basic summary of my religious life until coming to college. I think it would be cliche but I am unable to stop myself from noting that college is typically viewed as a coming of age thing where one finally becomes somewhat independent and finds out who one really is. I was no exception to this, my realization of my faith being but one example of a quite remarkable four year journey.

I think it is important to note here that when I speak of this time in college, I refer to it as "realizing my faith". I use this phrasing to make it clear that while I was in name a Catholic, my internal belief system in no way reflected a theistic point of view. Despite this belief system containing no God or gods, it wasn't until college that I truly realized it and accepted it, which is why I describe the event as I do.

So I go to college and I begin to live own my own (With TC, of course). There is something about changing your entire life that causes your brain to start to move in entirely different directions. TC once showed me a news article that recommended that you brush your teeth with your left hand every once in a while to keep your brain on its toes, and I'd say that it rings true in a way.

At some point I became aware of the Dover trial. For those of you not intimately familiar with Creationism propaganda, that is where a schoolboard tried to sneak repackaged Creationism into the science curriculum. I can't explain how shocking it was to me. Even then I had a well developed sense of science and not-science (and not so well developed sense of human nature), and it was completely shocking to me that there was still a minority of people that believed the earth was less than 10,000 years old. Even more shocking was that they had the audacity to ignore the majority science opinion to sneakily instate it in a science classroom. Even more shocking was that they had enough political power to make a serious attempt to do so.

Looking back, I am amazed that somehow going through CCD, I don't recall having ever encountered this propaganda. Being much more well informed now, I realize that young earth belief is disturbingly prevalent in American culture, especially midwestern culture (one of the increasing number of things that make me ashamed of my midwestern heritage). But somehow I never picked that up from CCD, so it was either never mentioned or I wasn't paying attention at the time.

Anyway, enough sidetracking. It was about this point that I began seriously reevaluating my belief system. I realized that I didn't actually believe in God. I mean, come on. I never prayed, I never read the bible except for scholarly reasons, I had no desire to go to church, except out of duty to my parents when I was home for the weekend. How could someone truly believe that there was only this one book that held all of the answers to getting into the good eternal afterlife, and never read it? I know that if I really believed that I'd be combing through it every night. The only reason why I identified myself as "Catholic" was twofold. A) I am a Catholic because I am a Catholic. Circular, but a great example of how crappy our thinking can be when we don't think about it. B) Out of duty to my parents.

So, after a ton of reflection, I was ready to self identify myself as an "atheist". I first came out of the closet to bennytee. It wasn't difficult, because he comes from a nontraditional religious background as well, so he could relate to that at least.

Sometime around then there was a public debate held "Evolution vs Intelligent Design". I didn't go, partially because there is a good reason why structured debate to a popular audience isn't how real science is argued. It is a crappy method to determining the truth of a matter. Just ask any good lawyer if the merits of a case alone are what determines who wins. But after this I saw that the AAS (Atheists and Agnostics Society) was holding a meeting to discuss it. I wanted to go to that at least, because, well, I had never met another atheist before, and I was curious.

The meeting was full of people, mostly guys, that sat around and used big words and described philosophical concepts that I had never heard of (Now, of course, I am much more knowledgeable). It was very intimidating, and I didn't contribute anything, just watched and listened. The people there seemed like normal people, and they brought up many of the ideas that I had been wrestling with (Is morality connected to religion? in addition to other sorts of things that I had discovered on my own). Although I wasn't able to add anything, I did get one important lesson from the meeting - atheism isn't bad, atheists aren't bad people.

I bring up the religion-morality connection quite often because it was at the forefront of my mind at the time. Throughout my life I had been instructed that religious belief was the source of human morality. That God has passed morality down to people and that it was independent of our human nature. I accepted this assertion without evidence as complete fact, and it took a couple of years before I was able to really convince myself otherwise. That is one struggle that taught me the great power of the assertions that our environment forces us to believe and the great power of our mind to keep us believing in these things that may or may not have a basis in reality.

So before I went to the AAS meeting, TC asked me where I was going and I told him I was going to this atheism meeting. I think it was a great shock to him and I don't think he really knew what to say. I think it was the next day at lunch sitting with TC and another person or two that he came out and asked "So, do you believe in God?". And I could finally say "No."