Atheist

In all the individual prayer times in mass, once I was old enough to pay attention to what was going on, I only ever prayed for one thing.

"Please, God, help me to believe."

I would look at all these people around me, who obviously felt some sort of divine presence in their lives, people whose sincerity was obvious, people who knew there was some non-interacting but apparently caring and IMPORTANT consciousness floating around, and I couldn't feel it. I wondered and wondered, "what is wrong with me? I don't feel like that!"

I wish I'd had the vocabulary to express agnosticism and atheism as a tween. Knowing there are other people who can't convince themselves that a magical force that loves everyone but doesn't ever do anything but controls everything exists would have been very comforting.

I tried behaving as if I devoutly believed, to see if that would help me to. It didn't. I was afraid to act devout publicly, because I knew I was faking it. I didn't talk about my struggles with church and religion, because I just thought something was wrong with me. If all these other people are getting something valuable out of church, I should too.

In high school, I quit caring. I went through the motions of confirmation, because it was important to everyone around me, even though it was a massive waste of time. I didn't have any particular belief set then, I just pushed the issue away and focused on more important things. Like picking a college major, and a college, and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. The only time I really thought about it was at an elementary school reunion, where one of the classmates who had always been nice to me told me he felt God had called him to service. "How does he know that? Why is he so sure? Why have I never made it to probably?"

In college, I had a lot of more-or-less devout friends, so I started attending church again. Maybe this time it would work, and I would feel...whatever it is. I really liked the church there. The priests were fun, good speakers, and talked more about reality than divinity. Lots of sermons on tolerance, being good people, doing good things. I enjoyed the message, the music, and the people.

I still prayed at every mass for faith, because I still couldn't convince myself that any of the god stuff made any sense at all. Again, people all around me had no trouble believing that an invisible being that never did anything anyone could sense and only left one very random mish-mash of books written by men to say anything about itself knew and guided everyone all the time. Lovely, intellegent, fabulous people. So I figured that if everyone else could see that this bizarre concept made sense, and that creating an entire philosophy out of a self-contradicting compliation of documents was not only reasonable, but the best way, that it must just be me. Obviously, there's something wrong with me.

That's not a comfortable feeling to have, but EVERYONE I knew identified as a Christian believer of some sort. There were variations, of course, between the non-introspective roommate who was a believer because that's what she'd been taught and she never really thought about it, who attended church during the major holidays and the Aeroboy who attended two services every Sunday and truly believed that doing anything fun at all would send you straight to Hell.

And then there was me, unwilling to admit I couldn't believe because that indicated there was something terribly wrong with me, but unable to read the Bible any differently than the fairy tales and Greek myths I loved as a kid. Except the Bible was usually more tedious, more violent, less coherent, and didn't include the names of the women.

I was scared of the word "atheist" because all the people I knew considered it derogatory, indicative of moral failing, or at best, misguided and pitiable. I defined myself as an apathetic agnostic for awhile, because saying "I don't know, but I don't really care" is safer than saying "I don't understand how all of you can make any sense out of this."

I talked about it with MM once, asking her how she could deal with the biblical discrepancies, the lack of response from the universe, the non-appearance of God. Her reply, "That's part of the mystery" is the best answer I've ever gotten, and it simply doesn't work for me. Accepting that there's no reason to believe and believing anyway is not something I'm capable of.

I find the notion of eternal life absolutely terrifying, and can't understand why it's considered a reward. I want more time than I'm likely to get, but I don't want forever. The concept of infinity really freaked me out as a kid.

I shall be grateful for the rest of my life to one of the Aeroboys, for telling me he's an atheist and giving me the resources to find others. Suddenly, there was nothing wrong with me. I can't believe because believing in something that can't be detected in any way at all because some people wrote some stuff down a couple thousand years ago doesn't make sense.

There is nothing intrinsically valuable about faith. In no other area is it considered a good thing to believe everything anyone says without question. Whole classes are taught on evaluating the validity of web resources. You're supposed to actively disbelieve the stranger who says he has candy in his van. Food processors have to prove their factories are clean and their products are safe. I'm feeling compelled to provide examples to back up my statements on a personal blog that nobody reads.

I am an atheist because I can't choose to believe in something that doesn't make any sense or provide any actual, measurable, proof of its existence, and I am okay with that. I am much more comfortable with a god-free world, and an ethical system based on empathy instead of a deeply sexist, xenophobic, and authoritarian ancient book. I wish it had taken less than 24 years to learn I wasn't profoundly broken.