One day in first grade, I got into an argument with a classmate about the origin of the human species.
“God made us,” she insisted.
“How do you know?” I asked, skeptical.
“The Bible says so.”
“Well the Bible’s wrong,” I shot back. “Humans came from monkeys. It’s called evolution.”
“No way,” she scoffed.
The next day, I hauled to school the ultimate scientific authority: My First Encyclopedia by Parragon Publishing.
“See?” I said, triumphantly displaying the page that explained the evolution of the homo line. “We came from monkeys.” (Fret not: I have learned since then that it is not in fact the monkey as we know it now that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved from.)
“You’re wrong,” she persisted. “We came from God.”
Another classmate chimed in then. “Humans came from monkeys,” he agreed amiably, “and God made monkeys.”
I went home that day in a huff, and expressed my dismay at my classmates’ obstinacy.
“How could they believe in something that they’ve never seen instead of an encyclopedia?” I complained.
“There’s no use arguing about these things with them,” my dad replied, shrugging. “They exist in an entirely different world of reasoning; you’ll never be able to convince them on this point.”
I don’t think I’ve ever engaged in a direct confrontation with anyone on the topic of religion since then — partly because most people I’ve known since do accept evolution; partly because I tend to feel like the aggressor for questioning someone’s faith; and partly because it doesn’t really matter. For the most part, in the U.S. as well as in France, I have found that a person’s religion, or lack thereof, has no bearing on his or her personality or intelligence or anything else that does matter.
Have you ever wondered how an atheist could sympathize with characters like Jane Eyre, who seem wholly motivated by “Christian goodness”? Perhaps not, but I, in reflecting on my own love of classic European literature which is inevitably steeped with a Christian tradition and status quo, have.
I have always been able to effortlessly immerse myself in fantasy worlds; if it is easy enough to be invested in a quest motivated by magic rings and dark lords, it is not much more difficult to do the same with what so many people believe to be reality.
I hope I do not offend by comparing religion to fantasy. For me, however, religion is a fantasy – God, or Allah or Yahweh and the myriad deities that fill the invisible realms of the universe are no more real to me than the Force or the Valar, except that an entire history and world of people have made the former real. In fact, it is easier to believe in the Force, because I can see evidence of it within the world of the movies; but no one has ever proven the existence of a god.
Do me the favor, then, if you are not atheist or agnostic, of stepping momentarily into my shoes – to view human actions, past and present, through eyes that are not watching god – and understand how beyond confounding and senseless so many of them are.
How many wars have been, are being, and will be fought because of religious differences? To be sure there are numerous other factors at play, but religion provides armies and populaces with an impetus and moral justification, in the Crusades centuries earlier as well as in religious wars now. Would such levels of devastation have occurred even without the presence of religion? It is certainly possible. But there is a feeling of infuriating absurdity to read, as an atheist, about people killing each other in the name of something or someone that has less historical basis than flying reindeer and Santa Claus.
I almost have to suspend myself in a fictional plane of reality to begin to comprehend that somewhere in the world, people are fighting each other because (at least ostensibly) of conflicting ideas of spirituality.
It’s like if I told you that a war was going on between people who supported the Jedi and people who supported the Sith. It’s even worse, in a way, than the scenario in Dr. Seuss’s "The Butter Battle Book" — at least bread and butter are real.
I know the good that religious piety can inspire: it engenders psalms of sublime beauty, kindness and goodwill, and melodic names like Theodore. It is possible that religion gives as much as it takes; I do not know if absolute peace could exist even without religion.
But if we must have war as well as peace, can we not have them on our own terms, driven by whatever flaws and virtues we possess onto ourselves? Must humankind always live in belief of someone greater than everyone and everything else?
If my parents had been religious, I doubt I would have had it in me to question their teachings and become atheist. As it stands, though, I have not the faintest wisp of religious belief; and yet I am inheriting a culture that still cannot prevent religious ideas from shaping political actions.
I do not know what, say, Christians might think of an atheist; whether we will all be pardoned eventually and come to see the light in Heaven, or if we will all be damned to Hell.
But this I maintain: What can any god give me that friends, family, books, ice cream and the pursuit of knowledge cannot?
Thus ends (for now) the open reflections of an atheist on religion. The goal was to inform, to share, and to communicate, not to offend. If I have made any factual errors, please do tell. Just don’t argue that we haven’t proven that God doesn’t exist. We also haven’t proven that the Force doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t exactly behoove anyone to go around assuming that it does.
