No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Curses! Tagged again!

I got tagged by Division by Zer0. Sigh... some people have no consideration for overworked geeks who have no time to blog!

Anyway, the theme is "the day I became an atheist." I will take the first two questions together:

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist? Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Looking back, I can't pinpoint any particular day or incident that tipped the scales for me. It was a long drawn-out process lasting several years, and I think I was an atheist for quite a while before I could actually admit it to myself let alone anyone else.

To give you some background, I grew up in a very pious Irish Catholic family. From my earliest years, my mother had her heart set on my becoming a priest because it was a tradition in her family that the oldest son became a priest. I guess it's a relic of sacrificing the firstborn to Baal or something. Anyway, my mother was always pressuring me to think about the priesthood, long before I had any idea what it was all about. (See my earlier post, Life after God, which also answers the question, How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?)

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Nope. Perhaps in reaction to the pressure described above, I started questioning my religious upbringing at an early age, seeing the absurdity of a lot of the bible stories and dogma, and noticing the hypocrisy of the priests and bishops who preached sacrifice and abstemiousness while living high on the hog. By my late teens I no longer considered myself a Catholic, but I felt I had to be "something" so I looked into other religions but soon found that those I looked at were just as full of it as Catholicism.

Here is a good one: Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

I went through a brief phase of having a fuzzy dualistic worldview in which some kind of spirit realm might make disembodied spirits and life after death possible. But then I started reading skeptical literature and found that there is no evidence to support anything other than a naturalistic viewpoint, and that all so-called manifestations of the supernatural can by explained by ignorance, self-delusion and wishful thinking. Furthermore, I became exposed to humanist philosophy and saw that the proper goal of mankind should be to work for justice and a better life in this world, and that giving up the hope of an afterlife is a necessary part of becoming a mature person.

Do you want to be wrong?

I'm sure there are many things I'm wrong about, like any other fallible human. But although my personal philosophy continues to evolve, I just don't see myself reverting to theism ever again. To me, atheism is not a destination but a starting point, a clearing away of ignorance and superstition so that you can build a worldview on a rational basis. Where you go from there is up to you - there are as many kinds of atheism as there are atheists.

As for me, I try to be a spiritual person in my own way, and I don't see atheism and spirituality as incompatible. Spirituality (as I define it) is simply about asking the questions that may never be answered, while religion is about imposing the answers that may never be questioned. I read several years ago - I wish I remembered the source - a quote from a Muslim mystic who said that you have to demolish every temple, tear down every minaret, and move beyond Islam (or whichever religious tradition you came from) to atheism - and only then are you ready to move on beyond both religion and atheism to true spirituality.

I'm now going to tag the following bloggers:

• Hank Fox
• Intergalactic Hussy
• Severian
• Celtic Chimp
• Ramon at Creative Century

Hope they will take up the challenge, because I'm always fascinated by other people's deconversion stories. Have fun!