Waking Up: An Introduction

Hi,

I'm Paul, and I have no idea why I'm doing this. Well, actually that's not true. I know why I'm doing it. I just don't know if I am going to do it. This will take a lot of energy, you see – a lot of motivation. Now where am I going to get that motivation?

People ask why atheists feel the need to talk about something they don't even believe in. I mean why the hell am I doing this? Well, there's something you gotta understand about atheists in America. You see, it's very frustrating to live our lives up to our eyeballs in people who base their entire lives on the fairy tales of illiterate bronze-age nomadic goat herders. Did I insult you? I'm truly sorry. I'm just being honest. Every single day, we feel like we are the only sane person in the asylum – the only sober person in a car full of drunks and nobody will even let us out, much less give us the keys.

Why do we talk about it so much? Some atheists will tell you they do it because they want to save the world from religious politicians who don't believe in global warming because the Bible already told them how the world is going to end. Well, that sounds like a nice practical reason to speak out against the overly credulous majority. But it's crap. Well, it's not crap. But it's also not the real reason. We do it because it is the only way to keep our sanity, the only way to escape the endless frustration of being surrounded by people who live their lives as if the Flintstones was an accurate portrayal of natural history.

A Little Background on Me

Well, this is supposed to be an introduction, after all. Lest you think that I don't love God because I've never properly been told the “good news”, I want you to know that I was thoroughly and completely indoctrinated in my youth. I went to Church, Sunday School, Baptist Youth Fellowship, Vacation Bible School every summer... I sang in the choir. Both of my parents were Deacons of the church. My Christian summer camp councilor wrote home to my mother and said, “You don't have to worry about Paul. He really knows his Bible.” My Mom was so proud.

But you know what? It didn't stick. I wanted it to stick. I prayed to God to help me believe. But I think I began to doubt around my early teen years, you know, the time when your bullshit detector suddenly starts to get big and hairy. I had been blessed with a great science and social studies teacher in middle school, and I used to sit in church, bored stiff, thinking about how ridiculous it all sounded in comparison. (Thank you Mr. Denniston!)

I don't know exactly when I became an atheist. It was a long slow process. But by the time I hit high school, I knew that there was no god. Once you realize it, it's like waking up from a weird dream. It suddenly becomes gob-smackingly obvious. You can never go back.

So what happens next?

Believers often ask how atheists can find any meaning in life. What's the point of living if you're just gonna die? They often ask why we don't just go around raping and killing people, since there's no god to judge us when we die. And atheists often laugh off these questions. But they shouldn't. In my journey from credulity to incredulity, these were questions I had to ask myself. After suddenly realizing there is no god, there is a crisis of sorts, that a new atheist has to go through. Religion formerly provided the answers to all of life's big questions, wrapped up in fancy paper and tied with a golden bow. As a fledgling atheist, I was surprised by these questions popping up in my own mind. And they're not easy questions to answer.

I can tell you, though, that I did eventually find a way to answer them – a way that is vastly more satisfying to me than the old answers ever were. I can't give you those answers in the scope of this blog post. But I can tell you that I am a far more ethical person now than I would have been if fear of hell was my only motivation. I can tell you that I am not even slightly afraid of death. Ok, the process of dying... that's a bit scarey. But actually being dead doesn't scare me a bit. And, oh, the amazing sense of freedom you get when you realize that you don't have to waste this life preparing for the next one.

Waking Up

Being a believer is like being caught in a tornado of errant thoughts and ideas. The beliefs that you have been taught, swirl around you like an impenetrable wall of dark wind. You can't see beyond that wall of confusion, so you don't even realize that you're in it. You don't realize that your world is so small. You may even be happy in that whirlwind of delusion. You may even wish to tell others the “good news” and bring them into the vortex with you... And as long as you stay in there, you'll never know how incredibly huge and magnificent this world is out here. A universe in every speck of dust, the incredible vastness of the cosmos, all exist out here, outside the prison of those thoughts.

So of course I am motivated. Of course I want to talk about this. I want to give you this “good news”. I want to help you to wake up from the dream and feel the wonder, the exhilaration of reality.

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

-Henry David Thoreau