Why I Don’t Believe
During my four-year stint at a Catholic high school, after 9 previous years of Catholic schooling, I finally developed enough of a personality that I was able to make and keep friends. And, given that my personality was yet (and remains) unrefined, those friends were rather encouraging of my bizarre ideas and creative ploys for attention.
Like most teenagers, I was trying to find myself, and like a percentage of those, I battled with the added confusion of religious doctrine not making any damn sense. So, dabbling in a newfound appetite for creating Webpages, I founded a quaint Geocities Webpage called Kristianity. For the sake of religious parody, I presented myself as the center of this so-called religion, made my own commandments, and tried to find my personal limits of blasphemy.
But I didn’t find them. I found instead that I was quite comfortable with poking fun at the doctrine I’d been raised with, and it wasn’t just me. I had like-minded followers, who thought the whole thing was amusing enough to count themselves among Kristianity’s members. I listed them on Kristianity’s Webpage in ranks akin to the Christian god’s angels. I wasn’t the only one who thought the model of our religion was silly.
At this point, I’d already concluded that the mythology I’d been fed since birth could not be reconciled with reality; now, I’d taken a silly but important step outside of it. For the first time, I started thinking about Christianity from the point of view of a non-believer. I realized that in order to make sense of it, I needed to bend the rules, as all denominations of Christianity do. They’re all seeking a compromise they can live with. And that’s just Christian denominations: what about the other religions?
Clearly, there were multiple philosophies, competing philosophies, trying to make sense of life, and clearly none of them had any evidence backing them up, only people liking what they had to offer. Therefore (I thought, in my self-absorbed teenage years), anything I could come up with would be just as valid. If they didn’t need evidence, neither did I. So I set about trying to create a belief system that was both pleasing and allowable within the realm of science–what I knew of it, anyway.
I included my brother in my ruminations, and he mostly agreed, at the time, that surely the soul was some form of energy, and surely it persisted after death in some form of consciousness (because that was comforting), but that an overarching deity need not be present (because that theory caused too many contradictions). I had finally settled on a loose belief system that placated both my fears and my need for things to make sense.
I managed to keep up this belief for some time, but not comfortably. All the while, a critical voice kept reminding me that I was just making all of it up, and that the probability of my hitting upon the truth, by chance and preference alone, was terribly, terribly small. Therefore, I was most assuredly wrong. Wishing something does not make it true. Believing something does not make it true. I was wrong. I was wrong because I was just making it up.
Blearily, I turned to consider established religion once again: after all, what was the alternative, if a personal belief system was not valid? But I realized that strength in numbers, strength in tradition, is no greater proof. If I couldn’t believe in my own philosophical creation because it was made up, then I couldn’t believe in anyone else’s system either. At some point, in the past, all religions started because someone had an idea and other people adopted it. Those ideas may be based on a factual event or natural law, but all the lore and myth surrounding it is just someone’s interpretation, and at one point in time, that interpretation was new, and it was novel, and it was make-believe.
So organized religion was no more valid than my own fake religion. I realized it was all wishful thinking. It would be nice if we had souls; there’s no evidence for that. It would be nice if something greater than ourselves cared about us; there’s no evidence for that. It would be nice if consciousness continued after death; there’s no evidence for that. I realized that I had to be suspicious of anything that I wanted to be true, because it is easy to believe what we want and never question it.
That left me with atheism. If every assertion as to the existence of God is mere speculation, then it is all empty. And I may not like what atheism leaves me with, but it fits the puzzle. It works. There are no contradictions to explain, no elaborate explanations required to circumvent an inconvenient but probable truth. And it’s not subjective. It doesn’t depend on your or my or some other guy’s interpretation of it. It just is. Atheism is the observation of what we can observe.
Everything else is wishful thinking. Everything else is your own creation. Give me a complicated mathematical formula and I can guess, off the top of my head, that the answer is 7. I like the number 7. But the answer is probably not 7.
The odds are against you if you’re just guessing.
Tags: atheism, life, previously on "Kristin", religion
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