I grew up in a 50-50 household: Mom was religious, Dad did
not seem to be (and, later, Step-Dad didn’t seem to be, or at the very least preferred
football to sermons.) Mom made me go to church from the time I was tiny until
she died (when I was 14). My best friend in junior high was the son of a preacher, so I often
went to the church that his dad ran. Even after my mom died, I
continued to go to church with some skateboarder friends that I had, until I was about 16 years old. I was somewhere between 16 and 18 when I realized that I no longer believed the stories.
As a kid, I was always a reader. I loved ghosts and bigfoot
and folktales and U.F.O.s and the possibility of psychic powers, so I read
about them. A LOT. I’ve always loved to read, since my first Dr. Seuss books
and my HOBBIT storybook that came with a record that chimed when you were
supposed to turn the page. My first R.I.F. book was WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
(and the fact that I can still remember, forty years later, what my first
R.I.F. book was should tell you how exciting it was for me to get a FREE BOOK!)
I’ve always read a lot, and after my mom died and I seriously threw myself into
my religious studies, I started reading everything I could about Christianity:
how it started, how it developed and changed over time, how the Bible was
compiled from older manuscripts, how the stories in the Bible were different
from (and often NOT different from) so called PAGAN religions, how much
politics influenced the development of religion, etc., etc., etc.... I devoured
books on world religions, psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, history,
and philosophy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have read between 50 and 100 books a year since I was 14 or 15 years old.
And through all this reading, and my personal writing and
thinking, and my experiences in both the religious world and the secular world,
I started to doubt the veracity of the Christian conception of the universe. The
doubt actually started pretty early, like around six or seven, and it would
grow bigger, then ebb back, throughout my childhood.
At about 16, the church that I went to at the time had a
guest speaker who performed a stage trick called “slaying in the spirit,” which
I later learned (in a cultural anthropology class about shamanistic rituals)
plays on “group think,” a fear of upsetting the room by not participating, and
the well known psychological phenomena of self-hypnosis. At the time, I still
believed that the “supernatural” was a real part of life, that people had
souls, that angels and demons were real, but despite my willingness to believe,
the guest speaker was unable to “slay” me. It just didn’t work. No Holy Spirit
flowed into me, no all consuming light caused me to lose control of my body, no
healing took place. It was just an old guy pushing my head backwards until I
lost balance and fell over. I seriously felt cheated.
In fact during his presentation, I got a bit bored, so I
started chatting with a friend, keeping half an ear on the guy in case he said
something interesting. He thought I wasn’t listening at all, though, and tried
to catch me and embarrass me. He stopped in the middle of his talk and asked, “Did
you hear what I just said?” And being a weird freak with an odd memory, I
repeated the last three sentences he’d said, word for word, then went on
talking to my friend. (I’ve always had a freaky good memory for sound. I’m shit
at remembering the passage of time, but SOUND, I’m solid.) The guy stood there
with his mouth open for a minute, then went on with his talk and left me alone
until the end of the night.
After the talk, the guy grabbed me before I left and told me
the LORD had spoken to his heart, and that I was meant to be a prophet. I’m not
shitting you. The guy actually told me that, and then he gave me a few chapter
to read in the Bible, which I read as soon as I got home. However, I didn’t
feel like a prophet, I felt let down. Everyone else at the event had
experienced this great mystery, and I didn’t feel anything at all. I started to
wonder how much you had to PLAY THE GAME, and let the stuff that isn’t working
slide in order to keep the belief alive. Maybe the game wasn’t for me.
A few weeks later, I was at the same church for Sunday
service, my last day being at a religious service EVER, and the preacher got up
in front of everyone there and said that God had told him that anyone who
smoked was under the control of the devil, that the devil wasn’t going to be
allowed in their church, and so if you wanted to be saved, if you wanted to
stay at that church, you had to quit smoking. I didn’t smoke, but I couldn’t
believe the EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL, the fear of damnation that this man was
attempting to use in order to control his “flock,” so I got up and got the FUCK
out of there and never went back.
Mind you, I wasn’t suddenly anti-religious, but I saw how
controlling and how manipulative the ideology could be, and no longer felt any
desire to be involved in the organized form. About this time, I ran into
Bertrand Russell’s book, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, and he recounted all his
moral objections to the Christian ideology (including some seriously unfair
treatment that he himself had received because of his outspoken atheism), but
his moral objections still didn’t convince me that there was nothing to the
GREAT MYSTERY. So what did convince me? Why did I give up the faith? How did I
go from TRUE BELIEVER to NON BELIEVER? It was a process of reasoning, gathering
information, and learning to put what I WANTED to be true behind what seemed
more PLAUSIBLE.
I read. I thought about it. I wrote essay after essay trying
to clarify my thoughts. I searched for answers to life’s biggest questions. I
took philosophy and religion and anthropology and logic classes. I talked to
people and got their views. And slowly, I stopped believing in magic. I stopped
believing in superstitions. I learned how critical thinking and reason produced
reliable, repeatable, useful results, while praying tended to have the same
success ratio as not praying.
Now, after three decades of study and research, I know more
than I did when I was a 16-year-old kid with some doubts. I know about how
translation works, now. I know the political motivations behind which “Books”
were kept in the canonical Bible and which were excluded. I understand how,
historically, psychological phenomena, like DREAMS, were not understood, and so
a person could have a “vision” and write about it, and at the time, people
thought they were really seeing a dead person or an angel or a djinn or a
demon.
I understand that people are AFRAID of what it would mean if
there wasn’t some all-powerful figure with a wonderful plan in charge of the
universe, that life would be, ultimately, meaningless---that HUMANS WOULDN’T
REALLY BE SPECIAL AT ALL, and that death would just be “GAME OVER.” These
things just don’t jive with what most people WANT TO BELIEVE. I get it.
But I also don’t see how the magic that religions suggest is
real could possibly be real. There is no evidence for it. (No modern miracles
ever survive scientific scrutiny, and if all it takes for someone to invalidate
a miracle is looking at it carefully, it’s not a miracle.) Critical reason,
using the evidence of your own eyes and ears, is enough to tell you that magic
isn’t real. It doesn’t happen. But more importantly than that, using scientific
techniques to TEST magic, test psychic powers, test for auras or spirits, you
get nothing. You have to look beyond what you WANT to believe. I would love to
believe that there are ghosts and monsters and magic, but I don’t. I love the
stories and the art and the folklore and the movies, but I know they are
products of human creativity, not reality. I believe that we live in a strange
world, that human brains are awash in weird chemicals that make them see things
and believe in things that aren’t there, but once you start to understand the
HOWS and WHYS of the world, then the ghosts and monsters start to fade, and it
becomes abundantly clear that the physical world is just what you see in front
of you, and any MEANING or PURPOSE that exists in the world isn’t instilled by
a divine, floating, non-human entity. It has to be put there by YOU.
Why am I not a Christian anymore? Because I understand now
that the Bible, the basis for all this BELIEF in all these supernatural
entities and occurrences, is just stories, newer than some, older than a lot of
them, but JUST STORIES that were made up by HUMANS to try to explain how the
world worked and how people should behave. The stories were based on the
knowledge that the writers had when they were writing, a pre-scientific
conception of the world. We have a better understanding of how the universe works
now than we did 2,000 years ago. (Technically, 1,800 years ago, because the earliest
New Testament manuscripts are actually dated to somewhere between 100 and 200
years AFTER the time in which stories that they are reporting on happened, even
though they are presented as if they are eye-witness accounts. They aren’t.
They are stories…)
Today’s stories are better, to me, than those old tales,
which seem pretty naïve, if you actually bother to read them (which I have…) I
am not a Christian because I don’t want to live in the world created by those
stories. I want to live in the ACTUAL world, however frightening that might be
or how meaningless that might make it. Plato advocated the “NOBLE LIE,” but I
think it’s time we start living with the NOBEL TRUTH instead.
---Richard F. Yates
