My Journey to Atheism
Offline I was raised a relatively secular Jew. We went to a few different synagogues in my childhood, mostly conservative, but only on the High Holidays. As a child I had questions like, "If there's a God, why are there so many different religions?"
When I was three I asked my mom what happens when people die, and she said no one really knew. That scared me then, but looking back on it I think it was the best answer she could have given then. My mom is an atheist now who thinks the world would be infinitely better off without religion. My dad, my brother, and my sister have found their ways to atheism too.
I lived on the Main Line in Pennsylvania, right next to Philadelphia. When I was six years old almost every one I knew was Jewish. I though Halloween was a Jewish Holiday.
At a young age, before my immediate family had gone atheist, I suppose I was something of a Jewish Deist. My parents were in this vein too. We believed in a higher power, but we certainly didn't think it listened to us or that human beings could comprehend it in any way. We didn't believe in miracles. We were "culturally Jewish." I was Bar Mitzvahed, but that seemed empty and hollow to me. I certainly wasn't a "man" yet, and I didn't think I'd be treated any different now that I was thirteen.
At fourteen, a friend of mine introduced me to Paganism, specifically Wicca. I was something of an anarcho-primitivist at the time, and a naturalist religion made sense to me. Until I was seventeen, and everything I'd read about evolution finally took affect and I realized I just didn't believe in God, nor would I want to live in a world where a celestial dictator did exist.
I don't know why I don't identify as culturally Jewish now. I know many atheists who came our of the Jewish faith who do identifiy culturally as Jewish. Culturally I identify as American. My ethnicity: human. Maybe because it was always a relatively small part of my life. I remember hearing things like "Jews have always been like vinegar in water, never mixing, never assimilating." I had issues with those statements. It seemed wrong to me to elevate one particular ethnicity over all others. The Jewish Bible similarly identified the Jewish People as the Chosen People, and I was uncomfortable with this. No wonder the holocaust happened, I thought as a teenager.
A Pagan, I became an agnostic. I stopped wasting money and daggers and wands and altars and started reading about evolution, which I'd been exposed to first in 3rd Grade by a maverick elementary school teacher whose first name, ironically, was Faith. An agnostic, I wavered every day between deism and atheism, constantly wrestling with the question. Finally I came to an inescapable conclusion: there was no God. Supernatural phenomena did not exist, and I was a much happier, more well-adjusted, and more driven person than I had been as even a vague believer.
I remember my first semester at college: Dad called to tell me that the family hadn't even celebrated Hannukah that year. There were two other kids still at home, as I was the oldest.
I remember being proud for having broken the chains of mental slavery that my process of inquiry had weakened over eighteen years. I remember...
But I forget, why it took me eighteen years? Why would it take seventeen years?
BTW I'm 23 now.
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”
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The liberation of thinking rationally. Congratulations on making the transition. I'm intrigued how your family became atheist, how a group of people can come to realisation together is quite something.
A question that ive often thought about is when your confirmed into a religion like Christianity or Judaism and in later life become atheist, is that confirmation still relevant? As there is no reversing process. Im sure you have friends who are Jewish, do they still regard you as a Jew?
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true"
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
Thanks. I've been an atheist for 5 years. In the Jewish tradition, a Bar Mitzvah isn't exactly reversible, but Judaism is largely voluntary when you practice it in modernity without isolating yourself like the Orthodox. There are many atheists who still consider themselves "Culturally Jewish", I'm just not one of them.
As for the other question, it depends on the Jew. Most Reform and some Conservative (religiously, not politically) Jews accept atheism as a perfectly valid alternative to religion and will accept that non-belief does not require faith. The orthodox, many Conservatives, and especially the Hasids are more of a problem. It's said that Jews don't evangelize. Well, they do if you have a Jewish last name and don't practice. My dad got especially irritated at our Hasidic neighbor. Beyond the Hasids and the Orthodoz, most Jews don't take Torah literally and many of them accept evolution as a scientific theory and are able to reconcile (or compartmentalize) that with their faith.
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”
Every person during a life has a period, when he passes through all lessons of the past. For example, everyone learns again a basic hygienic habits, language, culture and elementary knowledge. This also applies to spiritual development. If someone has these lessons managed in past lives, then there is a certain revival in this life, but it's very shortened, it's just renewal of realization, that this is already outgrown. It may take some years, or a day, depends on how much of it was there and how aware you are.
So as a young person you may be religional, or inclined to whatever you did in your past lives, and this all repeated lessons will eventually end, before a new lessons of this life will be placed in front of you.
For example, my mother was spiritually active for about 20 years and all that time she intuitively used her experiences from past lives. She had to go through that again, to prepare that knowledge and to know where it ends. When she ran off this inherited knowledge, she started to learn something new. Now she isn't really interested in spiritual books, that many other people are. She can agree with them, but considers them as already mastered, containing things like she resolved 10 years ago, for example. This doesn't make their value any lesser for people who really need them, it's just a past lesson.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Does it really matter? If I pledge my eternal allegiance to the snarf-widget, and then later realize that such an entity doesn't exist what does it matter?
I was going through my filing cabinet the other day and found the certificate from when I was baptised. I got a chuckle out of what it said, then threw it away.
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
You got a certificate? I feel jipped. All they did was dunk my ass underwater and send me home.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
I was never baptised at all.
if it makes you feel better - you can have mine watcher.
What about pissing on a Bible then making up your own "Un-baptismal Certificate" with Print Shop?
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
Screw that. I'm writing the baptists.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci