Pivotal moments on the road from theist to atheist.

[Thinking Aloud]

I've described before the route I took from theism to atheism - it was long and tedious, and I won't subject you to it again - but I was just reminded of one of those moments of clarity I had that perhaps set me thinking the right way.

I just spotted a link on Facebook (Lozzer posted it) to some drivel by Cardinal Someone o'Someone about how a lack of belief leads to violence, and other nonsense of that ilk.

There was a time when I'd have instantly agreed with the pronunciations of a cardinal or bishop, or priest. They were the closest people to god, and therefore must be more right than anyone else. There are, of course, many people who still will agree, without thought, without fact-checking, without question, with the words spouted by men of god (and therein lies the problem).

Anyway, this reminded me of one Sunday at mass, when I was at university, when the priest was sermonising about the horrors of the world. He said, very emotively, "Never before in the history of humanity has there been so much suffering in the world." But rather than think, "Oh gosh, that's terrible," which is what I'd probably have done before, I just thought, "Um, no. Actually what you mean is: never before in the history of humanity have we been able to see so much suffering in the world by way of the media; in the past we just didn't know it was going on. And suffering has always been here, and it's probably proportionately been a lot worse in the past than it is now." And then the critical thought: "I'm sorry - but I think you're wrong."

Whoa! The priest was wrong. And obviously wrong at that. He's just a guy, talking. What else might he be wrong about?

---

Anyone else have any pivotal moments? Not necessarily 'moments of deconversion', just points where you began to think differently.

[Animavore]

The first pivotal moment was learning Chinese whisper in school. It led to the thinking that oral traditions were embellished and changed.

Another was going to "haunted houses" at night as a teen and watching the other lads give each other the willies. I realised that people haunted themselves. It didn't take much of a leap to conclude that this is what religious people do, that I myself had done as a young child, when they will a god into their minds. "Oh I can feel it. It's real." It seems no different to imagining a woman into your pillow on a cold, lonely night.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Never been a theist, but the Uni priest was talking out his ass. More people live in better conditions now than any time in our history. And if he'd like to put the current recession up against WWII I'll be happy to play that game with him.

[Hermit]

One pivotal moment took me from theism to deism. Another, less clearly defined moment, from deism to agnostic atheism.

Copy-paste excerpt from a couple of years ago:

• Somewhere around the mid 1960s (I would have been somewhere between twelve and 14 years old) a train driver failed to heed a speed limit sign. The train derailed killing a dozen or more passengers. The following Sunday's sermon consisted of the priest admonishing us not to regard our god as a cruel god. No! On the contrary, the accident must have been in fact a good thing because god allowed it to happen. It's just our limited, merely human mind that prevents us from understanding just why it was actually a good thing in the grander scheme. A couple of weeks later I read an article in a magazine explaining how this accident could have been prevented if a mechanical safety device had been installed at that particular section of the track, and if similar devices were installed in another 12 or so locations, this kind of disaster could never again happen in Germany. I came to the conclusion that the priest was full of shit. Accidents are caused or prevented by us humans. God doesn't give a fuck.
  
  I rejected any and every kind of institutional religion that advocated the existence of a personal god, but convinced that since everything must have a cause, there must be a first cause - or uncaused cause - that brought everything about. I became a deist. My new god was sort of a divine watchmaker. He set everything up and then let it tick away, big bang, universal laws, evolution, the works.
  
  In 1972, just as I was about to finish school, Gough Whitlam lead the Labor Party into government, and among other things he made it possible for people that lacked the financial resources but qualified on academic grounds to avail themselves to tertiary education. Possessed of an insatiable curiosity, but lacking any ambitions to prepare myself for a career of any sort I enrolled at Sydney University, taking Anthropology, Sociology, History and Philosophy in the first year. Philosophy turned out to be of most interest to me (closely followed by History), particularly the courses dealing with epistemology. David Hume was a bastard. He attacked everything I held dear regarding the classical view of science, but, try as I might, I could not find anything to counter his critique of naive inductivism. Not even Karl Popper, who came the closest in circumventing the problem, was ultimately of any use. I had no choice but to concede that while no matter how often correlations (such as, say, the rising of the sun and the appearance of daylight) can be demonstrated, proof of causality never follows. The assumption of causality is of course an essential component for our survival, both as individuals and as a species, but it can only ever remain an assumption. The best that can be said of us is that we are superior inductivist turkeys. Now my attitude concerning the divine watchmaker was that since the assumption of causality is pragmatically of vital importance for survival, but philosophically bereft of any justification, he has become an item of supreme irrelevance. More than that, his existence (among other objects of metaphysical nature) is beyond the remit of what we can even discuss with any prospect of usefulness. The watchmaker may or may not exist. We cannot know either way, and it does not fucking matter either way.

This thread seems thematically almost indistinguishable from that one.

[Tero]

I had confirmation class one summer in Finland. A year later my grandmother sent a newspaper clipping. The pasors two little kids were killed in tge crash of his little Fiat. God was testing him I guess.

[Thinking Aloud]

Yes, they are similar. There's nothing new in the universe...

(I was aiming at moments rather than entire stories for this thread, but go ahead an merge if it's too similar.)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I had confirmation class one summer in Finland. A year later my grandmother sent a newspaper clipping. The pasors two little kids were killed in tge crash of his little Fiat. God was testing him I guess.

Good Job, God!

[Rum]

A year and a half after my rather emotional and bullying conversion to being 'born again' as opposed to a take it or leave it CofE type my family went on home leave to Britain from HK. I attended the local Chapel in the Welsh mining town my dad's family was from and found it very different from the miracle spinning, tongues talking, heal 'em upping of the evangelicals that had got their mitts into me back in HK.

I went to the Chapel perhaps five or six times and realised that there was no god to be found there and that in fact the only reason I thought I was a committed Christian was because of peer pressure. It is called 'fellowship' of course. The process by which all doubts are driven out, all questions diverted and every logical contradiction ignored or frustrated.

By the end of that fifth week I knew I wasn't what the people back in HK wanted me to be.

For a lot of years - far too many - I sought some other way to access what I thought I was looking for, some sort of universal or higher truth or salvation but never did.

[Ian]

Anyway, this reminded me of one Sunday at mass, when I was at university, when the priest was sermonising about the horrors of the world. He said, very emotively, "Never before in the history of humanity has there been so much suffering in the world." But rather than think, "Oh gosh, that's terrible," which is what I'd probably have done before, I just thought, "Um, no. Actually what you mean is: never before in the history of humanity have we been able to see so much suffering in the world by way of the media; in the past we just didn't know it was going on. And suffering has always been here, and it's probably proportionately been a lot worse in the past than it is now." And then the critical thought: "I'm sorry - but I think you're wrong."

Whoa! The priest was wrong. And obviously wrong at that. He's just a guy, talking. What else might he be wrong about?

He was monumentally wrong. People who think we're living in a terrible time of violence and suffering ought to read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. It describes very, very convincingly how we're living in an extraordinarily peaceful time, the least violent in human history, and how we got from the past to here. And religion certainly hasn't been a helpful force in this civilizing process - quite the opposite in fact.

But of course people with an agenda which involves the state of human affairs is going to say otherwise. Nobody ever recruited anyone else to a cause by describing how things keep getting better.

[Ian]

As for me, the only real "moments" that come to mind were questions I would ask my Sunday School teachers, to which they gave me either no answers or else ones which didn't make sense and only produced more questions from me. I specifically remember once asking how anyone could have proof that Mary was a virgin. I think that question was especially touchy for them; asking about such a central tenet like that had to be quite awkward for them, not to mention that I was asking them to prove something which was both irrational and unproveable.

So was I ever a theist if I was already out-reasoning my Sunday School teachers when I was 10 or 11 yrs old? Maybe not.

[Coito ergo sum]

Pivotal moments:

1. I was about 5 years old and was picked up from some Sunday school thing, and I was very upset. Mom asked me what was wrong, and I told her I did not want to go back to that place. She asked why, and I told her that they were talking about if you were bad you could go to a hot place that burns. I said that I didn't think I could be good ALL the time, and I asked her if I would go there if I wasn't good ALL the time. Mom never took me back to that Sunday school.

2. I was in Sunday school at the age of 8 or so and I questioned the ability of an ark to hold all the animals and I asked where all the water went that could cover the world up to the highest mountain, which I had recently learned was Mt. Everest, about 5 miles above sea level. They said that God can do anything, so... and I was unsatisfied with that answer, but chalked it up to those folks not knowing what they were talking about.

3. I was in confirmation class and realized that the whole thing was a sham. There was no way to fail, even if you never did your readings and never learned any of the lessons. They paraded everyone up in front of the congregation as if something real was actually accomplished, when it wasn't.

4. From about that point on, I referred to the Bible as "bullshit" but I didn't give myself any real name. It just didn't come up much. I never went to church, and I think once in a while I thought agnostic was a good word, which I thought meant "doubter."

5. In my early 30s, I just said "fuck it. I don't believe in God, so I'm an atheist. Wherever the chips fall from there, they fall." Some folks always attach baggage to the word, but I just decided to weather the storm, and just be unapologetic. I am not in your face about it, but I won't back down either. I try to exude the attitude of "I'm an atheist. So what?" And, if someone says something about it, like, "how can you be an atheist?" I explain to them, usually, a shorthand reason, like, "well, it's complex, but to just give you one reason, I generally don't believe in things I'm not sure of. So, it's not that I'm saying I know for sure there's no god, I just don't know that there is. So, that makes me an atheist."

[Thumpalumpacus]

Moments:

The first time I saw Ramadan in Iran, with public self-flagellation
Experiencing the rioting over there, which raised the Problem of Evil in my head for the first time
Getting thrown out of choir at church for wearing a rock T-shirt

[klr]

I decided there was no more point going to church.

If nothing else, I've saved a lot of money that would have gone into the collection plate

[Tero]

Which rock t shirt?

[Thumpalumpacus]

KISS.