[Before I or you continue, I should specify both why I am writing this, and who it is for. Or maybe I should start with the reasons for which I am not writing it. I am not writing this to alter or discourage anyone's beliefs, whatever they may be, and I am not writing to offend those who hold their personal beliefs near and dear to them. I am not writing this for attention as a message to the world, or to my friends and family for solace or humility. I have waited over a year to write this, and I'm doing it for myself.]
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I was raised a Christian practically from birth. I was sent to a Christian school starting in kindergarten where praying, bible study, pledging allegiance to the Christian flag, and memorizing scripture were all part of the daily routine. I didn't question it; it made perfect sense. It was all that I knew and I knew it was all true. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior at around age 6 during an assembly at my school. I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew that if I said the magic words I wouldn't have to go to hell. So I said them. And I said them again when I was in junior high. And yet again in high school. I kept saying them because I kept expecting something to happen. But nothing ever did. I thought that maybe I was doing it wrong, so I kept trying. Eventually, I convinced myself that I felt different, that I felt God's presence in me, because that's what I was supposed to feel, and if I didn't feel it, then I must not have been saved, and I must still be going to hell. I told myself a lot of things to make myself feel better, and believed a lot of what was told to everyone to make everyone feel better. But as you get older you start asking questions. And with your elders being the wise people they are, you look to them for answers because, obviously, they would have to know more than you about what they are teaching you or they wouldn't be teaching it to you. So I started asking questions about Christianity.
Around age 11 or 12 I found out from my Catholic friend that he had a couple of more books in his Bible than I did in mine. This was unsettling to me because I knew that I was supposed to believe everything in the Bible, but if I didn't have the whole Bible, did that mean I wasn't believing all of it? Was my church saying that these other books weren't true? What if they were wrong? I was put off enough by this that I took the question to my youth pastor. I posed the idea to him, and eagerly awaited his explanation. He was in his 30s at least, and had gotten a masters in something or other related to religion and Christianity. He was smart. I knew if anyone had an answer for me, he would. So I was disappointed when I watched him hesitate, and develop the same look of puzzlement that I'm sure I had on my face when my Catholic friend first told me I didn't believe in the whole Bible. He said he didn't know. He said he would have to look into it and get back to me. He never did.
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Excuses are not something people generally use to add credibility to their claims. They use them as a defense or a way out of something they've done or they know is wrong. When the world was questioning Einstein about the seemingly nonsensical notions he was proposing in his General Theory of Relativity, he didn't give them excuses or ask them to take it on faith; he gave them ways for them to prove for themselves that what he was proposing was observable and repeatable. Now we know that gravity bends space-time. Applying this same method of fact seeking to Christianity however has always yielded me substantially different results, both from myself and others. When I found out that the Earth was not created in 6 days 5000 years ago, I told myself that it was because if God would have told the people of the time that the Earth was created over the course of almost 14 billion years, people would have said, "duah?". And I don't remember the last time that I asked a minister, "If every human descended from a single, related, man and woman, how then did they overcome the strong likelihood of genetic abnormalities?" and had him offer me a method by which I could bear a child with my sister or cousin without the risk of congenital birth defects.
When I would go to ask someone of faith why there are all of these contradictions, I wouldn't ever get logical, reasonable answers; I would get excuses that I was forced to swallow with yet more faith. Because nothing in that big book makes any sense anymore. Science, hell, even simple logic has stripped it down to its bare bones and all it is now are a whole lot of stories that I just have to believe are true - I have to have blind faith. There really aren't too many practical uses for believing something with absolutely no evidence. If I blindly and unwaveringly believed everything that was told to me simply because, then I would have to still believe that Santa Claus is real, that our president is actually going to "change" something before he's voted out next year, and that I really have 5,000,000 rupees waiting for me in a foreign bank account willed to me by some dude I've never heard of who just died and all I need to do to claim it is email them all of my personal identification information and bank account numbers. I'd have to be a fucking moron. Yet, for me to believe all of the magical, fantastic stories in the Bible puts me in a majority of perfectly reasonable, good willed, and all-around trusted people. I add emphasis to that last part because my entire life I have watched my parents devote their support and trust wholly and unquestionably to politicians and other prominent figures based solely on the individuals' self-proclaimed Christian faith. Yet upstanding citizens with great moral codes and a long track record of working to better the world around them with a blind eye to faith or skin or wealth were regarded as untrustworthy and a threat to our Christian ways of life simply because they were, *gasp*, ATHEIST, and even when I was still of strong faith myself this made me want to vomit. It made me feel physically ill because I knew that my parents were not the only people on the planet doing this. I couldn't understand it. It made no logical sense to me, especially when I saw those very same 'Christians' my parents supported doing detestable things that go against the very teachings of the person our entire religion was founded on. It was fucked up and it made me want to have no part of it.
I didn't immediately detach myself from my faith at the point, though. I continued to believe that the God of the Bible was real, and He was good, and he sent Jesus so I could have eternal life with Him in heaven, and all of the stuff I was seeing in the world was just a whole lot of people reading and doing it all wrong. I was trying to do it right though. I was trying to live by Jesus' teachings. I wasn't going to deny homosexuals the human rights they deserved, or ask for the heads of every anti-Christian Muslim in the middle east, or vote for people who I knew were only using Christianity as a guise for power and wealth. I convinced myself that the whole of Christianity collapsing in on itself was a sign of the end of times and not a sign that it couldn't stand up against logic anymore. I rode this wave out for quite a few more years, but it's hard to keep track of where you're going without any sense of direction from who you're following, and I couldn't find God anywhere.
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It's not news to anyone that knows me that video games are a very big deal in my life. And when I say, "life", I really mean it. The whole thing. Ever since my Dad brought home a Nintendo Entertainment System with Mario Bros, when I was barely old enough to remember things, I have played video games. A lot of them. Video games have without a doubt shaped the person I am today and put me where I am at in my life. If you don't believe me then you don't know how Adam and I met nor how I got the job I have nor how my band even came into existence. But that's a different story. I'm putting this in here because it was, in fact, a video game that started the chain of events that has lead to me writing this story, and I think that's wonderfully fitting.
At the tail end of January last year I started playing a game called "Mass Effect". I picked it up over Christmas on a whim during a GameStop used game sale because, despite never really hearing all that much about it otherwise, my friend held it in high regards and said I would really like it if I was even remotely into sci-fi. I like science fiction, so I bought it. Without really looking all that forward to it, but also without really having anything else interesting to play at the time, I decided to start it up one lazy, bitter cold Saturday afternoon. Even though there was a lot of character customization at my disposal when starting a new game, I blew through it with all of the defaults thinking that I would end up stacking the game on a pile of others never finished by day's-end. Much to my delight, however, I was immediately enthralled and found myself playing out to the early morning hours. It was a great game to be sure; good action, good mechanics, good voice acting, good graphics, all of that was great, but the thing that really grabbed me was the fiction, and really, that lack thereof in a lot of it. I quickly discovered that this game had an incredibly compelling story, not just because of how well it was written, but because it was based on real science. I could read and hear right from in the game all about how all of the different technology worked - from faster-than-light travel, to weapon mechanics, to artificial gravity - and it was all based on science that we know right now - things that we've known about the universe for decades, even.
Suddenly, the universe became this tangible thing to me. I realized that there was this huge wealth of knowledge that I had been completely oblivious to up until that moment. I couldn't wait to find out more. I started watching television programs, buying books, reading Wikipedia articles, anything that I could to learn all about where everything came from and how it all works. The knowledge was addicting. I was getting the answers to questions I thought that there was no point in asking because I thought that if it wasn't in the Bible, we would never know it. I wondered why I had never been taught any of this in school. I realized that it was no wonder that I had held onto my faith for so long, it was the only thing that anyone ever offered me. Faith was the only explanation I had for anything. And just like that it started falling away from me. I didn't need it anymore. I really never did. I can't even describe how refreshing and eye-opening it was. It was as if I had been living inside of a concrete bunker my entire life and stepped out and saw the sky for the first time. I could not possibly exaggerate this point. It was a feeling I had never had, ever, in my entire life as a Christian. And I am comparing this to faith because these are exactly the things I was supposed to be getting out of it and never did. I never got answers. I never felt enlightened. I never had an overwhelmingly emotional or spiritual experience. But I am now. I feel a connection to every other human being on this planet like I have never felt before. We are connected because we are special. I never felt special being created by a prideful, egotistical God who commanded me to worship Him. I feel special knowing that we are unique in our known universe and we are who we are today because of our own doing, not the doing of a deity. And the feeling of being able to focus on the betterment of the human race - my species, the only one we know like us - feels infinitely better than focusing on an invisible, voiceless being that we just hope will grant us eternal life for our obedience. I'm not even scared of dying anymore. I don't have to worry about whether I'm going to heaven or hell when I die, because I know that my consciousness will simply cease to be. Some may say that's worse, and for a while I thought it was. It scared me to think that when I die there is going to be nothing. But after a while I started realizing all of the things it meant for me now and how much better it made them. Loving someone; being someones friend; helping someone out; I'm not doing them for an all powerful God who could get whatever he wanted anyway, I'm doing them for the people I am doing them for. And that means so much more.
I kind of lost track of where I was going with this. My structure kind of fell apart in my train of thought, but I'm going to leave it because it's just an honest representation of a lot of the things that have been running through my mind for the past year. It has taken me that long to get to this point. It wasn't easy for me to say all of this stuff at first. Probably because I didn't really know what to believe for a while. It was a big shock to my system; I started questioning things I had believed steadfastly my whole life. Maybe there is a god and he/she/it's just not accurately represented in the Bible. The Bible itself being written and passed down by the hands of man, I suppose it's possible. But I've decided that I don't believe that either. There's no evidence to support it. It would be blind faith. Humanity has looked and looked and not found God anywhere. We have found galaxies and stars too numerous to count and too massive to comprehend - elementary particles too small to see and too fleeting to capture. None of them needed a God to exist. Of course, one could argue that we don't know everything or have all of the answers, and in that lies the necessity for a God. But really, to say that the end of our knowledge is the beginning of God is to give up on knowledge entirely. And if I resolve myself to that, then I may as well set my intellectual clock back a few thousand years while I'm at it. Because time, as well as humanity's insatiable desire for knowledge, has proven repeatedly that the supernatural is simply the natural yet to be understood. And nothing has ever made more sense to me than this. Because in this, everything can make sense.
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So why and what, exactly, am I celebrating for Easter this year? I guess it's that I've finally come to the point where I feel no hesitation, shame, uncertainty, or fear in this last little line I have been patiently waiting on myself to be able to say...
I am an atheist, and it feels absolutely fantastic.
Hoppy Easter
<3
Nathan
<3
Nathan
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