Let’s get this over with

I really need to get out more. Literally, as in “I have no social life and haven’t made any new friends recently.” Life’s a bitch when you find most people insufferable and yet aren’t satisfied with loneliness. My fear is that after spending so much time with my thoughts, I won’t have the humor and spontaneity that people generally desire in a friend. This question may have an obvious answer, but I have to ask anyway: what process allows people to become acquainted so easily in their youth? Am I too shy to strike up a conversation now? Too proud?

Money does buy happiness, but it’s ephemeral. That sounds like a pointless observation, but I’m coming to grips with the balance between living simply and entertaining myself. I need to take up some inexpensive hobbies. Or do some volunteer work.

I’ve moved from intense belief to doubt to agnosticism to atheism in the last four years, and despite my incessant whining it hasn’t affected my satisfaction with life all that much. I go through the same cycle of self-satisfaction and self-loathing now as I did then. To be candid, though, I do miss the effortlessness with which I was able to make friends in religious organizations. Perhaps I should find a secular equivalent. Book clubs?

2001 through 2003 were the flash of intensity before the bulb of belief burnt out for me. I spent time and energy on student ministry events to the detriment of my GPA, and at one point considered becoming a missionary. I even dated the singer in our praise band. Life was good until, when I was under consideration for student leadership within the ministry, the pastor found out I wasn’t down with spiritual gifts.

For the uninitiated (and I hope I get this right), spiritual gifts, as far as the Assemblies of God are concerned, are audiovisual signs that are incontrovertibly God-inspired. So, like, speaking in tongues. Babbling, basically. Easy to fake, right?

I had somehow stumbled on a centuries-old worldwide debate about the meaning of a few words in the bible. Lacking this gift of speaking in tongues, and being unwilling to pretend, I found the first crack in the edifice of my faith. Although I had been able to suspend disbelief concerning almost every other doctrine, this was just too ridiculous. And if a few verses (supposedly) written two millennia ago could inspire serious divisions among Christians, what guarantee did I have that a certain preacher or writer was dispensing the truth?

It didn’t help that I soon thereafter read The Da Vinci Code — although in literary terms not a very good book, it made some salient points. What if Christianity was devised more than divined? That many churches were so vehemently opposed to the ideas in this book worried me. Should an omniscient deity fear our investigation of the truth?

Matt (another church youth group veteran) and I had a lengthy discussion while at a theme park in the summer of 2003 that cemented my doubt. I was willing to accept an impersonal prime mover, but at that point I think we agreed that Christians were probably wrong about god. After reading Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on the subject, I felt confident in calling myself an agnostic (claiming neither faith nor belief in god). While it seems this would be a difficult decision, it actually came quite naturally. I knew that I didn’t need god, and felt that my previous fervor was misplaced. It wasn’t really god I was after, it was a peer group and music with easy chords.

“God and I are taking a break.”

The friends I’d made solely on the basis of a shared faith figured I’d come around eventually, so they didn’t make a big deal of my apostasy. Others feared I would lose my sense of right and wrong, which belies an incomplete understanding of the source of ethics and morality. I would guess that most people whose answers result in polls showing a high incidence of religious belief in America are Christians by convention. Well, I’m not Buddhist or Muslim, and my parents took me to church on Easter when I was a kid, so …

Many others who have thought deeply about the supernatural have come to similar conclusions (and obviously some very divergent ones). Most atheists are intelligent, logical and ethical citizens. But we dare not allow them to hold public offices!

I’ve found the dogmatism of the religious right (and their willingness to impose it on others) very irritating, but I wish to be careful not to be similarly close-minded. It would be extraordinarily tempting to assume that I’ve come to the final conclusion and may therefore cease thinking. It would also be dangerous. So whereas before I’d hoped to do something great in god’s plans, I now have what you might call a secular humanist bent to my plans. Thanks to Ayn Rand I feel empowered to seek my own happiness, but it doesn’t mean I’ll turn my back on humankind. If you have a mind you really ought to use it, for your sake as well as others’.

Ultimately, after reading Shermer and Dawkins, I feel comfortable calling myself an atheist. The distinction at first seems a narrow one, but it’s not: atheists call agnostics wimps for equivocating, and agnostics mumble in response about epistemology.

At some point I had intended to finish the memoirs (1, 2) I had started earlier — and I use the term memoir in a bit of an ironic jab at myself — so after a break of 2 years, I’m attempting to pass off the above as parts 3, 4, 5 & 6. It’s necessary for me to get these sorts of indulgent practices out of my system every so often, lest I dwell too heavily on the past and presume that it was better than the present. So now that I’m done with my nostalgia trip, I can again focus on what really matters. I’ll let you know when I figure out what that is.