A Very Long Atheist Testimony

Foreword 19/11/15:

I wrote this post several years ago for a blog that I never really did anything with. It seems to be a good basis for describing my atheism, as it began at the time and as it largely still is. Hopefully it will be clear why I wrote this: you don't become a missionary on accident, and religion was a big part of my day-to-day life. And still is, in many ways, since there is no escaping from it- but I consider myself fortunate enough to not have fallen for it anymore. And I feel like an asshole for how condescending that sounds, but not quite enough like an asshole to not say it.

 The things I list as examples of Biblical contradictions, errors, inaccuracies, and forgeries are the subject of a book I'd like to write someday and I am collecting notes about them. If you'd like to see examples of these things, the study tool I used primarily and still consider to be best is "BibleWorks", a software package that contains the canonical transcripts (lol, srsly) of the available fragments that the 'official' bibles in existence today are translated from.  IIRC all of these documents, and many more apocryphal ones, are held by the Vatican, but BibleWorks is as good as you can get to going and seeing them without leaving the house.

Failing this, check out the marvelous BibViz web app. It's truly a masterpiece, and I hope to see a Quran, Hadith, Bagavad Gita, and even a Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and Hamlet version.

If enough people pester me, I'll go through and fix things. I don't think it's my best writing, but it seems coherent enough for now.

IN THE BEGINNING  

 Before I begin, I should clarify the terminology used below.

A "Testimony", in the language of particularly evangelical Christians, is the story of how you 'came to Christ', usually with a list of reasons and anecdotal evidence of why it was the right thing to do, or how it was inevitable.

This is my testimony as a gnostic atheist- at least in regards to Christianity (among others, but Christianity is the relevant one for now)- and this is the other term that people trip over. A 'gnostic' atheist is someone who knows there is no god, which can be compared with an 'agnostic' atheist who simply doesn't believe in any god. One knows it's fake, the other does not believe. To again clarify my position: I know that the Christian god is fake (gnostic atheism) but do not have the relevant knowledge to make these kinds of claims about, say, traditional Chinese religion, however, I do not believe there are Chinese gods (agnostic atheism).

 

I was born into a Christian home and had an interesting upbringing. My earliest memories that are in any way relevant to the discussion of religion are of dinosaurs, and it was a knowledge of the time scales involved (millions of years, not thousands) that made me able to pick up on some details in religion that didn’t make sense early on. The next relevant memories, however, are of my own attempt at conversion to Christianity as a child of perhaps 3 years old. The teacher asked if any of the kids in Sunday school wanted to “Ask Jesus into their hearts”, and I raised my hand, thinking it was what was expected of me. I, and one other child, were taken into a separate room, where we were read` John 3:16, and both of us- quite awkwardly, as I remember it- asked Jesus into our hearts, and from that point on, I called myself a Christian. In relatively short order, I had read through a children’s bible, and subsequently (but a few years later) a comic book version which was more in-depth. Both were informative, and the second especially has stayed in my mind.

 

My subsequent studies of the bible lacked academic rigor, but despite this, I did manage to read much of it at random, and to also read through it entirely several times in various translations, notably KJV and NIV (76 Translation), and also used the Amplified Bible- before having any linguistic knowledge at all- in order to facilitate greater understanding sometimes.

By the time I was perhaps 14, however, I had wandered away from the faith. Perhaps it was a lack of Christian friends, perhaps it was the idiotic insistence on believing things that I knew couldn’t be true- such as biblical creation- and perhaps it was some of the bigotry and bizarre fundamentalism I saw in the churches I attended with my family. I was well-versed enough to know better than to ascribe these attributes to God, but in any event, despite feeling guilty about it, I left the faith and began mucking about with what I thought of as Wicca, but which was actually just a mess of different things I downloaded online. Why Wicca? Because the wiccans I met were nice, genuine people, who weren’t just in on it for the benefit of their parents social standing, and they weren’t concerned with souls- and their attitude towards drugs was one of experimental interest rather than shame-faced aversion, an attitude that, while I found fascinating, did nothing to facilitate me getting high as a teenager.

 

And so that is how I remained for a period of about 2 years, before being introduced to George Carlin, and becoming an atheist- for the first time. I can remember the occasion well, I had downloaded a small clip of a standup routine, either to my own laptop or to my grandfather’s computer, and the clip was the now-famous “bullshit” segment. For those of you unfortunate enough to have not heard the quote, here it is:

 

When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

 

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

 

This byte resonated with me, and I had to admit- had to admit- that no matter what, religion was ridiculous and improbable. The emotional gut-reaction of realizing I was praying to what was, essentially, just an invisible guy in the sky.

 

Then Thailand happened (long story short- I got drunk, woke up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, my dad saw this as a cry for help, gave me the choice of going to Thailand to teach English or Mexico to study art. I chose Thailand). After a few weeks of being here, spending all my time with missionaries, who themselves spent all of their time studying the bible and planning ways to spread the gospel to remote corners of the world. At a getaway, a camp lasting several days up in the villages on the border between Thailand and the Karren state in Burma, I was convinced that what I was seeing was divine purpose. Recapturing the essence of that moment, even after so few years, is difficult, but I genuinely thought that there was something to the work these people were doing and attempting to do, and that this was an admirable thing that was made possible only by their faith.

 

And so I began studying the bible in earnest, seeking, for the first time, to both have faith and to know exactly what that faith was. I was introduced, at this time, to a program I still use to study the bible, called “Bibleworks”, which enabled me to not only compare translations, but to examine the original words in those translations and the way they had been translated in other places. For the first time, even considering my use of the amplified bible before this, I was able to see theological disputes with science laid bare, from a biblical perspective; the biblical story of creation in Genesis, for instance, makes no claim that god made the world in seven days; the actual word in Hebrew, “Yohm”, is translated in various places as ‘hour’, ‘day’, ‘month’, ‘season’, ‘year’, ‘period of years’, and notably in exodus, it is this word that refers to the 40 years in the desert (story of Moses leading Israelites out of Egypt). And so, with this knowledge and a very good impression of the character and demeanor of Jesus (I remember being particularly impressed with the verse of Matthew 15:14, and still consider it a valuable lesson), I resolved to attempt to believe on the basis that, if it was true, I would have the benefit of meeting at least one literary figure with whom I was enamored, and if it was not, it should still convince me to live a good life and at the end of it, I would never know the difference.

 

And so my faith remained for a time, growing slowly as I came to accept more things rather than critically question or reject them- a fact I was uneasy with, but accepted as a natural part of ‘spiritual growth’. My previous dint in atheism left a mark, and I tended to refer to God as “My invisible friend”, and I learned interesting things about church history, the interpretation of the scriptures and biblical doctrine. I truly believed- I must emphasize this, because the attitude among nearly all Christians is that, if you become apostate, it means something was wrong with you and you never were truly saved, but this is a false statement, because I truly believed, and knew I was saved, and was secure in that knowledge.

It is difficult for me to pin down where I stopped believing, because it happened slowly over a very long period of time. One of the things I found more and more unbearable was the idea that some people were created with the odds so incredibly stacked against them. If the objective (for God) was to make as many people go to heaven as possible, then this seemed wasteful; and so I became slowly convinced that portions of the bible were immoral, whether or not they were right or wrong. Despite this, I found comfort in the belief (I don’t think it is biblical, although it may be) that, first, God would not give anyone anything that they truly could not bear, and second, that all people had equally valid struggles which would consume the whole of their lives, and it was the overcoming of the barriers in one’s own life that was the necessary ingredient of success.

Then I began to read critical scientific books. The first of these, and perhaps the most important for this discussion, was “The Grand Design”, by Hawking and Mladanov. These books walked me through the physics of the creation of the universe, of dimensions so small that they would be smaller than themselves if measured, and of the beautiful and complex universe we live in, and how it may even be giving rise to entirely new universes. It was listening to this book via my MP3 player that led me to seek out more scientific books, because I felt my eyes opening. I do not remember clearly how I came upon the next books inevitably mentioned, but in fairly short order I had discovered that I had downloaded both “The God Delusion” as an audiobook, and “God is Not Great”, in one folder, perhaps in a moment of religious belligerence. I had already begun questioning my ideas of God a bit more as a result of The Grand Design, and I had to shrug them off- I simply didn’t know enough to reach any meaningful conclusions, and I was still secure in my beliefs (notably, God provides purpose, God takes care of people, God does not test anyone in a way they cannot bear, and what I considered the ace up my sleeve, that God was the basis for morality, and that this was the design he referred to in Genesis when he said “in his image”).

And so, with this paltry handful of arrows in my quiver, I ventured into the books by Dr. Dawkins and Mr. Hitchens. I was not sincerely moved by them at first, to be honest, and while I admired Dawkins’s honesty and the scientific exactness of his arguments, I was less impressed by the arguments made by Mr. Hitchens. Both, however, provided suitable starting points for the unavoidable conflict between Science and Christianity (and indeed, all religion), and so I set out from that point, determined to find the truth, confident that God was watching, secretly proud, and also that he was keeping score.

 

My faith did not last my next bible study. I began looking at, for example, the story of Noah’s Ark, and found it unbelievable. I compared the order of creation in Genesis to what is known about the evolution of life on earth, and was forced to conclude that at least two of the three accounts (for there are two in Genesis) must be incorrect, and that even if evolution via natural selection was incorrect, both discrepant accounts in Genesis could not be correct. For several hours, I pored over different sections of the Bible, alternately Googling things I thought might be relevant. By the end of it, I was disappointed with Jesus, thought that David (of David and Goliath fame) was an unabashedly ambitious bisexual warlord with a Machiavellian bent, I disbelieved all accounts of Moses, and I could not stand to look at the actions of Israel when it was acting under the orders of God.

 

It has been several months since then, and I still read the bible regularly, and even take the odd lesson from it- but the more I read, the less I am able to believe. My beliefs, first in actual doctrine and second in the purpose, morality, and overall goodness of god, have been damaged by the bible to the point where they will very likely never again be taken seriously. My morality, however, and my belief in the goodness of my fellow human beings, and my determination to make- rather than find, or be given- a purpose for myself has given my life new meaning. I have seen it suggested, in many places, that atheism is spiritual death, or that it is suicide of the soul, and I can’t take that idea seriously anymore. If I were not an atheist, I would not have realized that I have had a perfectly good soul my entire life- it's made of neurons.

THE END