Twenty~one years ago today I became an atheist. Ironically, I was praying. Walking back and forth in the yard behind the condominium in which my family lived, I offering silent supplications to God and attempting to evaluate my faith in him when (not for the first time) it occurred to me he may not exist. For some few moments I resisted contemplation of this nefarious notion, and that was the clincher. For whatever reason, I am not the sort of person that can suppress my own thoughts. If I feel like contemplating something, I'm going to allow myself the freedom to contemplate it. And all the training and conditioning and schooling and indoctrinating and inculcating of my childhood could not withstand or endure the impulse to ponder the possibility that there is no God. To the contrary, I resented what I perceived as a brainwashing environment condusive to bypassing rational thought. Had I been a better behaved sheep, I would instinctively have put my wandering mind on hold and placed my faith blindly and resolutely in God.
The Old Testament Abraham is honored for doing just that. Tradition says God told him to sacrifice the life of his beloved son, Isaac. And the venerated patriarch was going to do it. He had his son bound with rope and set upon an altar and was prepared to personally execute him with a knife when God announced that his faith was sufficiently proven and the sacrifice would be not be necessary after all.
Compared to Abraham, I have no faith at all. But (and here's a point I can only hope to make), I declare myself morally superior to him anyway. Of all the ridiculous stupid disgusting and pathetic things I've ever done, nothing comes close to weighing on my conscience as heavily as would the shame of knowing I had tried to kill my son just because God asked me to. That variety of faith is not something to be proud of.
And neither would I sacrifice the potential of my intellect. I would not constrict my own cognitive ability to evaluate the likelihood of God's existence. The very reflex of feeling guilty because I was entertaining forbidden thoughts motivated me to rebel that much more. There dawned on me an intoxicating hunger for thinking on my own and rejecting anything I was expected to swallow like a good little boy just because I was baptized under deluge upon deluge of religious stories and sermons and songs for as far back as I could remember.That was March 12th, 1988. I decided I'd rather go to hell for doubting God's existence than go to heaven and endorse a God that uses hell as a punishment against those who have doubts.
Today I believe God was created by man and not the other way around. And that this is the only life we have... very nearly the only world we have... Wherefore I sense a tremendous pressure to accomplish as much as possible in the short time allocated. Pressure to do more than I feel like doing... to do more than I'm very likely to do and I often berate myself for personal failures and relentless procrastinations. But I have this one consolation... that 21 years ago I made a decision to rely more upon the integrity of my own mind than upon the regurgitated presuppositional proselytizing of an ageless superstition. I might not ever write the book I dream of writing. And I may never find the right woman with whom to enjoy a romantic relationship... but I know my mind is free to think according to its inclinations and so shall it remain as long as it's able to think at all.
