Tell me about yourself.I’m sixty-one years old, an Air Force brat who grew up traveling around North America and Europe as a curious observer of the anomalies of human behavior and culture. I’m a social worker.
Did you always know you were an atheist? What was that process like?I don’t remember believing in Santa Claus as a kid, but realized I needed to keep that to myself because the other kids obviously believed in it and so, apparently, did their parents. At about the age of five I went to Sunday school and heard about angels. I spent a lot of time for a few days after that looking up at the clouds to see if I could catch an angel jumping from one cloud to another. I caught that the idea of God was expected.
Religion was associated with strange anthropological things as we traveled around. The kids who’d come back to school from church on a Wednesday morning with ash on their foreheads, and I caught it was because of some atonement for sin thing. The people in Spain who were going up the steps of the cathedral on their knees crying. The fact that there were two separate hearts of Saint Theresa of Wherever in two different churches we visited. My father finding a small round container only about 4 inches wide hidden inside an old harpsichord he bought in France. It supposedly contained a piece of bone from each of the saints, with a tiny piece of the cross in the middle. I knew it was all some kind of fantasy.
As I grew up I became passionate about human rights and other things. I read books about that fed my yearning for something beyond inane suburban expectations and religious vacuity. I started reading Eastern philosophy, which didn’t go along with the American dream, but those religions also had elements like the blue gods of the Hindu texts that made it clear it was all mythological at its base. There are some principles that work well for people that are threaded within some of the religious/”spiritual” teachings, but the helpful parts seem to have nothing to do with the supernatural elements.
When I was 20 I was in college but aimless, unsure how I was going to translate things into an actual career in the middle of the anthropological wasteland. I was intense and earnest, and as a military brat yearning for a place of sorts to land. I was having a lot of adventures exploring being more alive than what I saw as the cultural robots around me. I wasn’t looking for some supernatural answer so much as that there must be richer possibilities out there. I became intrigued with some Jesus freaks (this was the early 70s) because they were nice and seemingly in the realm of something “more.” I quit school and joined their commune initially as just another adventure.
I bought into the idea of God along the lines of those idealistic old movies in which Jesus appears among the oppressed peasants and provides brotherhood, giving to the poor, and all that. I ended up getting married pretty quickly and having kids, so ended up much longer than the year or so I had originally thought I’d be there.
I started observing the culture of the community I was living in through my anthropological eyes and noticing the same old mythology and magical thinking I had seen before. There was no earth-shaking epiphany, just a realization I didn’t really believe in the supernatural or the god stuff, and that was okay. I began to realize there had been reasons I had bought into it. Coming to my naturalism was one thing. Extricating myself from the whole cultural mess I was in took a long time.
Did you grow up in a religious family? How did they take the news that you think differently? My family was nominally Lutheran but not practicing, although when I was fourteen they had me go to classes to become confirmed in the Lutheran church. That was a cultural milestone of sorts that was expected. I don’t remember much about the classes except for a “debate” about where the soul was. Everyone else said it was in your heart, while I said if there was such a thing, it would have to be in your brain, since theoretically that’s the only piece of you that can’t be replaced and you remain yourself. Church-going with my family was very brief.
Everyone seems to assume you’re Christian unless you say otherwise. As long as you don’t declare unbelief, you’re okay on some level. I have a sister who has become rather fundamentalist, and my mother. Both seem concerned about the fate of my soul, as in “even if you don’t love God anymore, he loves you.”
How do you describe what you think about the meaning in world to others? What are your personal and social values? How have they developed? Naturalism is a word I prefer, because it implies two things: I don’t believe in the supernatural, and there is also room for awe, wonder, compassion, and acceptance that there is no need for things like suffering and death to have some grand answer. There’s no big “purpose” or “meaning”. We develop our own meaning. There is enough beauty, wonder, and experiences to be had without having some supernatural meaning.
What do you think about religion?I see religion and the idea of spirituality as arising from certain psychological tendencies and cultural proclivities. These include agenticity (our tendency to perceive invisible agents in our world) and patternicity (our tendency to see patterns where there are none). These served as survival tools millennia ago, since it’s better to mistake that rustle in the grass for a lion where there isn’t one than to assume the rustle is merely the wind and get eaten. Humans love narrative and have endless propensities for superstition and magical thinking. I include myself in that mix. Just this morning, I closed my sock drawer and a sock that was sticking out a little bit got pinched. I found myself feeling just a tiny bit bad, as though the sock had feelings.
Has anyone tried to convert you? How did that make you feel? How did you respond?My mother and sister have tried a bit to convert me, but I think they figure since I was once into Christianity, I’m probably good to go because I’ll “come to my senses” someday. I find the general assumptions of Christianity a bit annoying, but it’s often inappropriate to attempt to counter that. It reminds me of being a kid who didn’t believe in Santa Claus. You don’t want to say anything that would alarm the poor kids who believe in it.
I get bugged by certain things that are said so often that reflect an assumption there is a god. What bugs me is the assumption everyone around them accepts it . . . “I’m praying for you” every time someone has a problem. “Everything happens for a reason” is especially annoying . . . nobody thinks how fantastic that casual statement is . . . it would mean 1) some god has control over every single thing . . . even that you didn’t get that parking place where you wanted it . . . and 2) that being is doing a lousy job. And what can I say? You get these looks if you say things like “Well, thanks, but I don’t believe in that”.
If someone tries to convert me, I tell them what I think but refuse to engage in tiresome, useless conversation with someone who’s convinced they have a relationship with god.
How do people react to you when you tell them you are an atheist or skeptical about God? What do you think people should know about atheists?I get the feeling I’m looked at as lacking but the monotheists. For those who believe there’s not just belief involved, but an actual God, there has to be the assumption that I’m rejecting a real being. Talking about it to them is a bit useless, because there can’t be dialogue about something dogmatic. I find that frustrating. I get around my frustration with my understanding that the supernatural comes readily to the human mind, which can give me at my best a kind of benevolent fondness for the follies of our superstitions.
