Atheistic Musings: Part 1

Even though I was raised fundamentalist, I've been an atheist since I was around 5 years old. I had some street preacher tell me as an undergrad, "Oh, you knew god when you were little. You just forgot." I laughed out loud, at first over the sheer ballsy-ness of the argument. I'm not wrong--you just forgot. How can you remember something that never happened? How do you prove a negative? It's the same argument Xians use all the time: prove He doesn't exist! You can't prove God doesn't exist anymore than you can prove pink unicorns that sprinkle the world with faery dust don't exist. But that doesn't mean that you then just shrug and become agnostic at best. Based on current evidence and the reasoning of your own brain, God, particularly the Xian God, is embarassingly easy to dismiss. But I laughed, too, because I remembered thinking to myself when I was about five or six: Being human is nice. Why doesn't God like us? That doesn't make sense. We're better off on our own, I guess.

I, of course, kept that to myself.

But even living in a fundamentalist cult, I just couldn't wrap (warp?) my brain around a god and conform to it. And I tried really, really hard. When I heard the story of Adam & Eve's expulsion from Paradise, I swear to the god that doesn't exist, I thought it was a heroic event. It was full of philosophical problems for me: why would god set temptation right in front of their eyes? Wouldn't that be like setting a loaded gun in your kid's playroom and then whipping it when it got (naturally) curious? Why would the tree of knowledge be forbidden? If god supposedly made us curious, wouldn't he know that the tree of knowledge would be the first thing we'd go after? With my personality, I'd take the knowledge fruit knowing damn well what was to come--it would be worth it to me. Live in ignorance and servitude for eternity or be able to decide things for yourself? Hell, I'm taking the whole tree! I'd uproot it and drag it right out of Eden. If god is all knowing, didn't he know this was going to happen? Weren't we set up to fail from the start? If we'd never heard a lie before, how would we know we were being lied to?

But besides the theological quicksand in the story, the whole idea was just so very exciting to me. A woman decides that she's fed up with being ignorant, and why shouldn't she be able to decide things for herself? She likes what happens afterwards, so she takes some back to her family because she loves him and wants him to have it too. He also likes it. Then they figure out the heavenly realm are a bunch of pervs who've been staring at their nakedness for a while, and with their newfound knowledge they make clothes for themselves, proving that one of the first forms of knowledge is fashion! Afterwards, those in charge get falsely pissed at the people (knowing they were going to screw up anyway and ruin their peep show) and throw them out of "paradise." So they leave, having to create something with their own hands through independence, creativity and cooperation.

Sounds great to me!

Milton's Paradise Lost describes the way I always thought about it as a kid:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Sure, it was a bit traumatic, but they got over it. And together, they went on their solitary way with all the world before them. What to choose first? The fact that they could now choose at all told me when I was a little girl that this was something like an heroic epic. I never thought it was a sad story.

I never went into nature and felt "humbled" by creation or a creator. I felt powerful and alive and happy to be concious. Of course, that set me up to be in love with Ayn Rand and Objectivism later, but that's beside the point. (When I first read her book Anthem's Most Important Line "I am the warrant and the sanction" I practically jumped up and down.) As such, I've never understood why many Xians feel that atheists have no morals because they have no Bible. The flipside of that, of course, is that Xians must have no morals if they have to rely on the Bible to warrant them. Would they all go around looting and killing and raping if they didn't have a book to tell them not to? That's the scarier thought. I've worked out the reasons why I do/don't do things. My reasons are more explainable and understandable than "God told me not to" or "He'll roast me for it."

"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point."
~ Richard Dawkins

-- Virgil