Why I’m an Atheist

I remember being a child in Sunday school and listening to the story of how God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. I didn’t know much about biology, but even as a child this seemed a tricky proposition. Right off the bat, Genesis 2:21 had raised some red flags for me. So I raised my hand.

My Sunday school teacher finished her story and then called on me. I asked why God needed a rib from Adam to create Eve, if He had created Adam alone with no such “starter” rib? Her response was swift – she said curtly, “To be a suitable helper for Adam.” I then asked why he didn’t make all the animals in that way, to which she replied with several rebuttals including the fact that man was not an animal, and ending with, “Why are you asking so many questions? Only those of little faith question the word of God.”

Genuinely, this had been an innocent question. I hadn’t challenged the entire religion of Christianity – not knowingly, anyway – in fact, I was still young enough to believe what adults told me almost implicitly. So this exchange curbed my enthusiasm to question my Sunday school teachers, as it was intended to do.

And since everyone I knew was religious (or if they weren’t, they kept their lack of faith quiet), I toed the religious line, if only barely. Which is to say that I spent many sleepless nights worrying over the fate of all the other kids born around the world into the “wrong” religion (not mine) – or into no religion at all – who I was taught were all surely doomed to hell unless some missionary got a hold of them and scared them into believing, too. It’s unfortunate that rating systems were never assigned to the religious stories taught to children, because those stories caused more nightmares for me than any horror movie ever did.

Another conclusion I tried to escape during those young and sleepless nights was the terrible fact that either this God that I was worshiping was impotent to prevent the catastrophes befalling people and animals all over the world every hour of every day – in which case prayer was completely ineffectual – or possibly worse, that He was able, but unwilling, to prevent them.

I heard people pray for things like a good parking space at the store or no rain on their party day, and people thanking God for their “blessings,” like a pay raise at work or that their team won a big championship. Watching prayers for sick children go unanswered made me angry, especially when other people claimed to be “blessed” with children of strong health. Was the insinuation that the parents of the sick kids were denied God’s blessings? Of course it was. But such miserable outcomes didn’t seem to correlate with the goodness or kindness of the people involved at all. There was no “karmic justice,” so to speak. If this God did exist, He was clearly a capricious God at best, and a downright sadistic God if you examined these prayer histories more closely.

And what was the purpose of prayer anyway, if God supposedly knows all of your wishes and desires? Are we to believe that He really wants us to beg him for things which He may or may not grant us, based on His mood? What kind of God knows what you want and still demands that you beg, and then still might not grant your prayer anyway, since prayer outcomes are totally independent of devotion? (Statistically, believers are no less susceptible to misfortune or illness. Google it!)

There are billions of people in the world, so logistically, how could God even spend time on even just the life-and-death prayers, when there is so much suffering in the world? Kind of makes your prayer for your favorite team to win the Superbowl seem not only appallingly narcissistic, but physically impossible. Are we supposed to believe that His vast prayer-answering is made possible by tunnels within the space-time continuum, like the wormholes we tell our kids about when they ask how Santa can possibly visit billions of homes in one night?

Thank you, Einstein, for the general theory of relativity which could even make wormholes theoretically possible. Regrettably, such real-life magic is noticeably absent in the Bible because the general theory of relativity hadn’t been discovered yet, much like the dinosaur bones resting quietly beneath the surface way back in the dark ages during the writing of most religious texts. These books were “written” by the God who supposedly Knows All, except maybe that there had been dinosaurs roaming this earth for many millions of years before humans evolved, or the very notion of evolutionary theory itself.

Are we also to believe that everyone suffering a terrible life needed to learn their lesson of suffering in order to achieve heavenly enlightenment (for lack of a better word), while others of us simply born during better years and to better families and in better corners of the world were just… better? Intrinsically? Pardon my judgment, but how incredibly arrogant is that conclusion? And yet, there is no other conclusion to be made.

Despite years of heady philosophical discussion in college where I believe I completely lost my faith just from my own mind turning these concerns over themselves, I was married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City – which today remains the largest Gothic Roman Catholic Church in the United States, built over 150 years ago. It was ostensibly erected by Archbishop John Hughes “for the glory of Almighty God [and] for the honor of the Blessed and Immaculate Virgin,” but was also hoped to be a display “of our increasing numbers, intelligence, and wealth as a religious community, and at all events, worthy as a public architectural monument, of the present and prospective crowns of this metropolis of the American continent.” In fairness to me, I did believe our marital union to be “an event worthy of such architectural monument,” as Archbishop Hughes intended – with or without our united belief in his specific God.

We did not have a Catholic mass during our wedding, of course, because my husband-to-be was not Catholic – a fact known to all during our extensive pre-cana instruction. If I look deep into my heart back then, I would have to confess that at that time I was no longer a believer, but the sheer number of believers in my life during that time encouraged my tacit allegiance to the pomp-and-circumstance of a church wedding. It was as if your marriage wasn’t “real” if it wasn’t recognized by a church, and I very much wanted my marriage to be respected as real.

Remember, when we married in 2003, George W. Bush was president, and even the widely-considered progressive president Barack Obama who followed him would go on to oppose gay marriage in his 2008 campaign in favor of the weaker “civil union,” claiming that “marriage is not a civil right.” That sounds like the middle ages just looking back fifteen years ago, but honestly, in many ways, it still feels like the middle ages to me now in 2018, where religion and its stranglehold are concerned.

We are still fighting to allow LGBTQ couples to enjoy the rights and benefits of marriage as straight couples have done for centuries (droves of whom divorced anyway), yet this legal right has been systematically denied them solely because of religion, because of bigoted words written down thousands of years ago. You will find some so-called “progressives” within the church – perhaps those who sense the faith of their congregations slowly ebbing away like the tide – scrambling now to twist the words of God as written in the Bible and other important texts of the so-called “great religions,” to “allow” gay marriage, and to “permit” women in higher ranks. But this is as nonsensical as making up an entirely new religion. The problem is in the texts, the problem IS the texts, the dogma required for the religion to work. Now that people increasingly understand the barbarism of punishing gays for who they love, they recoil from the bare bigotry of these texts, leaving clergy scrambling to “reinterpret” quotes as horrific as the quotes advocating slavery in the Bible. And there are many of those, too. (“Slaves, be subject to your masters with all reverence, not only to those who are good and equitable but also to those who are perverse.” – 1 Peter 2:18.)

Back in 2003, the most important people in my life included beloved family members and friends, and even colleagues at work who would walk around with the mark of ash on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday – including many of my fellow Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs). I remember one of them approaching me and asking, “You’re Christian, aren’t you? Here -” and she rubbed some ash on my forehead without waiting for my answer. We had always divided up the work schedules between the Christians – who volunteered to work the Jewish holidays for the Jewish prosecutors, and the Jewish ones, who volunteered to take Christmas week, etc. for the Christians. There was one Muslim ADA and another Hindu ADA – both of whom were forever trying to get out of their marriages being arranged by their parents – who would always be scrambling to get someone to work their holidays too. In theory this sounds beautiful: the melting pot of New York, but not so much for open atheists. I actually didn’t know any. The word “Atheist” had been so conflated with “devil worshipper” that it seemed vaguely demonic and reckless to me.

I was not prepared to accept that I was an atheist – it felt like you were somehow taking yourself out of the running as a human being. But I am an atheist, and it’s not scary. It feels logical. It feels humanist to me. I love people as much as I ever did, and continue to embrace my love of nature even more without the conflicting tenants of religious dogma.

We sent our children to a Christian preschool simply because it was cheaper than Montessori – tax-exemptions passed down to benefit the religious, and all of that. But even after my kids made it through those preschool years with hardly an awkward moment for me about my personal lack of faith, I noticed faith creeping into my life in other unwanted ways, and realized that it had been there all along.

Forget about the politics of trying to train our future scientists while fighting to teach the theory of evolution in public schools, or attempting to mine the life-saving promise that stem cell research holds; we couldn’t even tune in to the congressional confirmation hearings of now-Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh this year (2018!) without hearing a United States senator (John Kennedy of Louisiana) ask the candidate, “Do you believe in God?” This question was on the record, unabashed, and when asked, was intended to short-circuit previous scrutiny of the candidate’s morality, presumably bolstering the same if answered in the affirmative.

So what happens after death, then? People act as though giving up their religious beliefs – those fantastic stories – will actually change what happens to them. It doesn’t. As Neil Degrasse Tyson so eloquently states, we know exactly what happens to our bodies, and the matter comprising our bodies, when we die. Mere belief in alternative fantasy won’t make that fantasy true. And personally, I think the idea of our bodies returning to the earth to feed new life is beautiful. Life itself comes from death, and there is no denying that.

I’m often asked, “Where do you get your morals from, if not from religion?” The implication is that I am devoid of morality, and that I am robbing my children of morality in failing to indoctrinate them into a particular religion. Instead, I would submit that I am keeping my children from the fear of a God – an imaginary “Sky Daddy,” if you will – so that their acts of kindness are driven not by the self-serving motivation of a heavenly afterlife, but instead by sheer compassion.

Personally, I have been deeply affected by some of my favorite books on the topic of science and morality. Click the link below for a brief synopsis on the fascinating science of morality in this bite-sized TED talk by Sam Harris. It describes the actual science of morality:

And here, I can share an introductory list to which I will probably return and edit regularly, but which includes some of my favorite books on the philosophy of religion. Full disclosure: in my youth I searched high and low within multiple religions for the spirituality we all seek as curious human beings. The problem was that most religions are imbued with negative, nonsensical, or divisive content that didn’t ring true for me, personally, or make sense to me, logically. In many of these scientific writings, I have not found all of the answers, but have indeed found inspiration which has sparked much joy and wonder at all that surrounds us here on this Earth and beyond:

• the Bible, along with
• the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible
• Incognito by neuroscientist David Eagleman
• works by journalist + writer Christopher Hitchens
• works by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins
• works by cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett
• works by neuroscientist + philosopher Sam Harris, as well as all philosophical and scientific works recommended by him – this list of recommended books is absolutely huge and inspiring, and will take lots of work to get through. I had to go through and edit ones I’d already read and then add the rest I was interested in to my local library shelf, which I highly recommend. Edited down I had almost 100.

I have tons of podcasts and video recs as well, but the above will keep any inquiring minds busy for quite awhile if they’re looking for some good, philosophically-meaty content. Feel free to contact me with ideas and questions.

Thanks for looking and happy reading! I wish all my readers very Happy Holidays and particularly, a Happy Festivus 🙂 xoxo