I like talking with people who have changed religions. Here is one of them. Previously: Kima Jones.
Can you tell me a little bit about your religious background growing up? Did your parents talk much about their own faith, or take you to any religious services? When do you first remember being aware of the concept of God, and what did you think of it?
My family is from the West Bengal state in India. My parents’ religious background, strictly speaking is Hinduism, but that does not quite do it justice or paint a comprehensive picture. Firstly, not only is Hinduism a diverse range of beliefs and practices, I want to stress that my family was a multifaith household with a background of Hinduism. Let me explain further. My maternal grandparents, and as such, were/are devotees of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who introduced a very interfaith approach to the idea of God even though he himself was an ordained priest at a Hindu temple of Kali. He practiced rituals and forms of prayer of different faith traditions without discrimination, and even abandoned Hindu iconography when especially immersed in some of these experiences. I think more than anything, his contribution to interfaith dialogue came at vulnerable time in India’s religious politics. The British Raj was gaining a stronghold in India, and Indians were experiencing major shifts and challenges to their religious identities like never before. What Ramakrishna did was establish the notion among Indians, and especially Bengalis of the time that all religious and spiritual paths lead to one God, and that whatever form of worship and religion one may inherit and practice is valid. The Ramakrishna order is still active in India and around the world, and they celebrate festivities from other religions, too, such as Christmas, Easter, Eid, Vesakh and many others.
My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, was an atheist widow, which people still find hard to believe. She lived till the age of 105 and never cared for God or religion.
So as a child I was taken to all kinds of services, not really as a spiritual or religious event but as cultural and social excursions. I guess I was in a geographically advantageous position growing up in India, as I got to visit many Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim sacred sites. I thought the sites themselves were cool, historically and culturally, but understood little about what each faith meant and why this God figure was necessary to warrant just having amazing architecture. I never got any formal religious education. I’d hear a story at school, or from a children’s book about the life of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, what have you, but the tangible differences in the specifics of the ideas of divinity never really occurred to me. I believed anyone who believed in God, regardless of their faith background, believed in the same God, and I just didn’t bother with specifics so much because I didn’t believe in God myself. My earliest memories of spirituality or religion is characterized by aggressive indifference to divinity and marked curiosity in the history and mythology behind religions. I treated them as fairy tales or high fantasy literature that simply took on special meaning for a group of people, so it was largely interesting to me ethnographically. I would not get any real religious education until I moved to Canada at the age of 12, and subsequently attended a Catholic high school.
(I would like to read a book about the life of your paternal grandmother, whenever someone has the time to write one, please and thank you.) I imagine moving to Canada and going to Catholic school for the first time just as you started puberty was a pretty low-key event that had little effect on how you viewed religion, culture, God, yourself, and other people, so we should just skip that, right? “Pretty much the same as before, Catholic school in Canada.”
I should mention that before I attended my Catholic high school, I went to a public middle school. In Canadian public schools, you don’t talk about religion if it’s not relevant to the curriculum, so while I knew my classmates were Lutherans, Mormons, Catholics, Muslims and belonged to all sorts of other groups, institutionally no one cared, and we were just kids, so it never really hit us either. I went to a Catholic high school because it offered the International Baccalaureate program and was close to my house, and as an aspiring polymath, that was pretty much what I was looking for in my high school experience.
Let’s just say, my preconceived notions of Catholicism were oh-so-wrong. My exposure to Catholicism prior to arriving in Canada was through chill nuns who hung out at convents in the Himalayas or taught at schools in India. I knew they were strict, but not beyond what I would expect from avowed ascetics. In Canadian Catholic school, interestingly, I seldom had any encounters with the clergy or anyone involved with monasticism. And man, lay Catholicism was…different.
My first encounter with how ignorant I was about the Catholic faith happened while I was in my Grade 9 orientation camp in Haliburton, Ontario. There were a dozen or so of us girls in this cabin, and we had a camp counsellor just a bit older than us. We sat around in a circle and talked about the “Catholic high school experience” and how it was different. We arrived at the topic of Christlike behaviour and works of charity, and eventually “how to help the people in Africa.” People had the usual discussion about sending clothes, food and money to charities. When it was my turn to speak, I just blurted out, “why don’t we just teach them about contraception and condoms?” with a dead serious face. Everyone gaped. For what it was worth, I was not trying to rock the boat, I genuinely believed it’s not the business of religion to dictate what people did with their bodies, so long as it wasn’t hurting anyone else or themselves. I knew the whole Christian preoccupation about chastity, but I certainly didn’t realize that a ban on contraception was part of the package. Silly me.
I mean, I didn’t exactly have sex ed in India, and my parents hadn’t broached the topic beyond a few vague remarks, but I lived in India, and not exactly under a rock, so I was aware of all the family planning/AIDS prevention public service announcements and initiatives. Plus, I had Encarta. I knew what’s up.
Anyway, I had religion classes for the first two years of high school. We talked about the Beatitudes, some Christian history, Catholic sacraments and mystagogy. All fine and dandy. I could appreciate Catholic spirituality and asceticism, ones that didn’t concern themselves with the “threats of rampant secularism” because it strived to transcend the everyday material world, but lay and evangelical Catholicism and I seemed to have some beef. What’s with the obsession with believing that you are the one true apostolic Church and everyone else had it wrong? Why was there this preoccupation with becoming a governing force in people’s lives beyond their moral and spiritual needs? To me, these forms of Catholicism were mostly preoccupied with establishing political order, far more so than any authentic concern about spiritual truth, even though they claimed otherwise. I had (polite) arguments with religion teachers about these things and the confusing notions in Catholic sexual morality. I thought the stories of early Christianity were fascinating. Apparently my fascination with asceticism had started early, and I thought the Desert Fathers and Mothers were the bees’ knees. After Christianity became a more organized religion, it seemed that I had checked out mentally. Not that I would at all qualify for being Christian in any way, I still didn’t believe in God, and the most I could do is describe myself as an agnostic. People in school knew I wasn’t Catholic, and some (both teachers and students) called me a pagan, which was truly bizarre. I worshipped no one, not even idols. Also, is that supposed to be an insult or something?
Around this time, I discovered Zen Buddhism. I loved reading koans because they were like little logic puzzles that aren’t meant to be solved, simply contemplated. I loved the imagery, the poetry, the mythology and the trippy plots of some of the Jatakas and the koans. If I was in search for spiritual truth, it seemed like this was the way to go. So I became a hobbyist Buddhist for a while, until that is, I realized “Buddhist” was indeed a very misleading term to describe me. I practiced certain aspects of Zen Buddhism, but it still couldn’t claim a large enough place in my worldview for it to become my religion. Sure, it didn’t care for God, but I could have that without Buddhism too. What was the point of calling myself anything?
I was eventually able to simply identify as an atheist. Little did I know that it comes with its own baggage, like the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris trifecta. That’s where the fun began. The New Atheists didn’t represent me, for a number of reasons, and it frustrates me to this day that they have a monopoly on what atheism is to the international public with the belief that bunch of 19th-century white aristocratic gentlemen had single-handedly invented atheism and passed it down to them. As if! Did they not read in Encarta/early Wikipedia that ancient Indian philosophers had entire systems of thought devoted to atheism and rejection of scripture, long before Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead”? This was only the beginning of my rift from mainstream atheism.
I’d love to talk more about that last part, because I went through a phase in my own young adulthood where I found New Atheist writing to be deeply compelling, and had a brief flirtation with Richard Dawkins (I blush to recall it). It’s not at all surprising that atheism often comes with significant cultural baggage, and it’s amazing how many of us don’t realize that atheism and agnosticism weren’t invented by male Westerners in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Can you tell me a little bit about what draws you to atheism? What does your atheist outlook look like? Are there any writers or thinkers in particular who have influenced that worldview?
I think I have always been an atheist. I currently identify as an agnostic atheist, because I find it necessary to qualify the fact that I don’t claim to have absolute knowledge on the existence or lack thereof of God. I’m an atheist because I simply don’t have faith in God.
I too, had a brief flirtation with Dawkins. I remember reading The God Delusion as a teenager thinking I had found my manifesto or something. It feels funny to think about that now. I think what I object to most about the brand of atheism that the likes of Dawkins promote is the idea that there’s a conflation of lack of faith with rationality. This is simply not true. Plenty of people are perfectly rational with faith, and many are very dangerously irrational without one. This is also a bit of a classist and elitist because it assumes less educated people cannot find lack of faith on their own, and that education and reason are necessary requirements to attain enlightenment by atheist terms.
Since my teenage years, my atheism has changed a lot. In high school, the atheist movement was somewhat exciting as I felt validated in my lack of faith, especially in my Catholic high school surroundings. It was quite enlivening, in a way that I imagine finding religion is for many people, but some of the assumptions simply didn’t sit well with me. I was not an atheist because of reason or because there is no proof of God’s existence to a 99.99% probability. I was not an atheist because I had proof of no God, or because I needed or wanted a proof of God in order to believe, but simply that the notion of God didn’t happen to be part of my spiritual faculties. The other day I saw Nicole Cliffe tweeting about how she found faith, and that it seems it either happens to you or it doesn’t, and that she is not interested in convincing others that God exists. This is similar to how I feel about my atheism. It’s just always just been there, I didn’t have to seek my lack of faith, it was a preexisting condition in my spirituality. I didn’t need proof. I didn’t need logic or reason or science. At a very basic instinctual level, I simply had no faith. Many atheists found atheism after having not-so-great experiences with religion. This was certainly not my case.
Despite my atheism, I’m one of the most spiritually greedy people I know. I define spirituality as the feeling of connection to all living things in our shared condition of being, living, thriving, suffering and ultimately dying. This is a feeling I consider sacred. I am spiritually greedy in that I do not want to have to pick and choose between any kind of faith tradition or practice where I can find opportunities to deepen this connection. My atheism allows me to be the captain of my own spiritual destiny and to find my individualized methods to get in touch with the sacred. This sacredness has nothing to do with God but everything to do with how we experience our lives and how an acknowledgement of the common thread of being in all of us can help us be more empathetic to each other. I know some religions see God as Being Itself, and I think that’s beautiful. In my case however, respect for our shared being does not require a divine figure.
The thinkers who have influenced my current philosophy are mostly religious folk who do believe in God. It’s also strange that the majority of these people happen to be ascetics, but maybe I’m a fan because I’m a graduate student and we lead similar lifestyles to them, except for the whole celibacy part. I’m a big fan of early Christian ascetics like the Desert Fathers and Mothers, because through there experience much of contemporary Christian spirituality was established. St. Benedict’s Rule is something I practice in my day to day life, with a good balance between contemplation and community. I am also very inspired by Zen literature because it urges us to experience the beauty of the present moment that I think is very therapeutic and life-affirming. I’m also getting into Sufism and its ideas about finding enlightenment within oneself. Rumi is not only a great poet but also an amazing student of the human condition and I think we can all learn from his verses, regardless of our religious or spiritual affiliations. I’m fascinated by the philosophy of Bauls of my native Bengal, who disregarded caste and religious boundaries in favour of celebrating the divine love that occurs among humans and finding divinity within earthly realms. Recently, perhaps a bit inspired by Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me, I have become interested in North American indigenous spirituality. I’m particularly interested in the idea of sacred clowning, which have similar counterparts in other cultures as jesters, tricksters and satirists. I find this especially compelling because much of religion seems to be a battle between dualities. Practices like sacred clowning subvert our logical expectations and reductionist dualistic thinking in favour of nuance, and I just love that.
I actually attend religious services sometimes. I’m a fan of Lent-related contemplation. I spent my last New Year’s Eve at an Anglican Convent as part of a retreat, and I am soon attending some formal Zen training sessions. I’m almost embarrassed by my interest in spirituality as an atheist, but I guess it’s my lot in life.
Oh, not at all! I think it makes enormous sense, because you’re clearly someone who thinks a great deal about faith and spirituality and meaning, and I don’t think that just because you’re an atheist means you shouldn’t or can’t participate in religious conversations and experiences. You can be fond of something that doesn’t belong to you, if that makes sense.
It sounds like your conversion was more of a gradual transition (like Crowley, the Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards) from mostly-culturally Hindu to an atheist with a healthy interest in weirdos who live in the desert, and that it’s been a mostly positive, affirming process for you. Was there ever a time were you felt conflicted about it? That you ran into difficulty with any members of your family over your spiritual beliefs?
It’s funny that you mention Crowley. My first name literally means “the first that was created” (feminine form) in Sanskrit. It’s not a mythological character, so I often align myself with Lilith a la Alphabet of Ben Sira.
I have been lucky enough that no one in my family has had any issues with my atheism. The times I have run into trouble is when I try to explain to well-meaning people that I don’t need God in my life, not even for spiritual well-being, thanks very much. I think most of the conflict I had was with myself and a certain culture within atheism that doesn’t really care for my interest in spirituality, or dare I say, even mysticism. When I go to religious services or places, I am able to explain to people that even though I don’t have a God, I’d be a fool to remove myself from a vital part of the human experience, that of transcendence through spirituality. Of course, religion or spirituality is not the only means by which we can do it. We can do it through art, music, literature or just being around people we love. I still think the world at large still has a somewhat distorted idea about atheism and the forms it comes in. Some of us have rich inner lives similar to devoutly religious people. There have been times when I have been so moved by religious art and music, that I really wanted there to be God, or if there is God, that I could find the faith to believe. This has also happened during times when I had particularly shitty times in my life, for example in the aftermath of deaths in the family. I remember that when my childhood dog died, I was heartbroken that I would never see her again. I really wished there was an afterlife where I could hang out with her for sure, but I don’t know if there is. I mean, sometimes, I hope that there is some way to have parts of your life accessible even when the time for them is past, and I struggle with this every day. An afterlife would be a simple solution, and I really want to believe in it. Maybe it exists as something we haven’t imagined as, maybe there are parallel universes we go to, who knows. Life and death are weird things, and I’m nowhere near at peace with the finality of it, but the elusive moments in which I feel really connected to everything, I know that I’m always with those who I loved and lost to death, sometimes with their memories, their belongings, but nothing is really lost. They continue to live within me, and shape who I am. For now, this is consolation enough.
Oh, how the BEST is that Lilith tradition? B O N K E R S, is what it is.
I would love to know what the Venn diagram of “atheists” and “people fascinated by mystic traditions” looks like. I don’t think atheism necessarily means hostility toward religion, and it seems like that’s something you believe too. There’s an enormous number of people in every religion (and within atheism, too), in my experience, who feel discomfort and wonder and confusion and pain at the mysteries of life and the realities of death. There are a great many more similarities between them than one might think – all believers are not blissfully certain of the rightness of their faiths, and all atheists are not completely uninterested in spirituality and completely convinced that they know everything about life and death.
That’s pretty much it. Thanks for letting me be a part of this!
Aadita Chaudhury is a graduate student and writer based in Toronto who has been known to moonlight as an engineer and a poet. She blogs about her adventures at The Thylacine Reports.
Tags: aadita chaudhury, i once asked richard dawkins for his autograph, interviews, religion
yaaay
This is a really beautiful discussion that matches a lot of what I feel about my own agnosticism and spirituality. I really, really loved reading this interview. Thank you so much for sharing your experience.
When someone you went to university with shows up on the Toast. Thanks for sharing your story!
I love this series. I too would be interested to see how many other atheists are interested in mysticism. I’ve always loved stories of the Hasidic masters, Buddhist monks living in caves, Christian ascetics, Sufis, etc.
I’ve always been fascinated by mysticism, even when I was in my angriest Newly Atheistic Teenager years. It’s rare that I hear of someone else who enjoys spirituality as a core part of human existence, but also doesn’t have faith in god, themselves. This was very encouraging to read.
This is a significant theme in the novels of Iris Murdoch and is discussed in the Abbess of Imber chapter of Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A. N. Wilson. (Much of the rest of that book is scurrilous and off topic, though, so I’d recommend reading it on Google Books or getting it out of the library rather than buying it.)
I understand that Murdoch was a Platonist, and conceptualised the Good as something external to humanity and that it is a yearning for this that draws people towards a non-existent God. However, this is discussed in her philosophical treatise Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, which I have not yet read and so I might be misrepresenting her position.
Loving this series. The talk of the afterlife really resonated with me. I grew up in a sort of New Age-y religion and am now somewhere between agnostic and “looking,” and it’s funny, but I find it really easy to think of a universe without a god and really hard to think of one without an afterlife.
Maybe that’s just human weakness talking, or maybe it’s because the god of my childhood religion was very hands-off, while afterlife experiences were emphasized. I’d be interested in how others approach the afterlife question. If you’re a nonbeliever, does it bother you?
A little, but not really? I mean, I’m of the belief that this shot is the only one I get, and after this, that’s it, so I try to do as best I can with what I’ve got. If I’m wrong and there happens to be something afterward, then I hope that my actions on this earth speak for themselves.
yeah, that there’s no afterlife (as I see it) does bother me so I don’t think about it much. Does make me want to be a better person, since this is the only chance I have, though how successful I am is definitely an open question.
Not at all — speculating about something that is innately unknowable seems to me to be an exercise in futility. I find the fact that when I die, my body will return to feed microbes, invertebrates, and plants much more meaningful than a hazy notion of a spiritual afterlife.
fuck microbes why should they get to profit off MY body??? what have MICROBES have ever done for me (a lot, probably)
Hey! #notallmicrobes
It doesn’t bother me, exactly, but it makes me sad. I wish that it were a thing that I could believe in, but I just don’t. But, like, I miss my mother and my childhood dog and various cats and grandparents and things very much, and I do feel like I would be comforted if I thought I would see them again. But I don’t.
Yeah, I have a hard time differentiating between whether I believe or just want to believe. Ha, I think I’d be psychologically well-suited to a religion of ancestor worship, maybe I should look into that.
When I accepted my atheism at 42 after being a lifelong Christian of one sort or another, this was a hard one for me. Weirdly, my dear believing mother dying made believing in the afterlife harder for me, although it’s hard for me to articulate why. At any rate, one book I really enjoyed while grappling with no afterlife was “Comforting Thoughts about Death That Have Nothing to Do With God” by Greta Christina. I also got a lot out of reading The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering when I was trying to understand why those beliefs were difficult for me to let go, even when I had no longer had a rational use for them.
yeah, the idea of the finality of death definitely scares me (usually at like 3 in the morning when I can’t sleep), but I’m also of the opinion that it’s true, so I guess I better get used to the idea.
I definitely would prefer it if I had some kind of conversion experience and angels or something appeared to me and said, “no, don’t worry, there’s a heaven and such, you’ll all be redeemed in love”, but until then…
I’m an atheist like Aadita–the idea of God simply does not enter into how I see and interpret the world. I never had much religious upbringing to begin with; my mother is a personally-spiritual-but-very-lapsed-Catholic, and my father is a not-spiritual-and-very-lapsed-Jew.
I do not believe in an afterlife (that is, it has never entered into how I view the world) and I do not find this distressing, but that might be because I am young and have not yet lost anyone close to me. For now, though, I do feel like this is the one chance we get, and I find it comforting to think that however much I may miss someone, there will come a point when I, too, am past caring.
I don’t know if y’all remember Mermaids at the End of the Universe, but there is a quote that I lean into whenever apathy gets threatening:
“When your life is small and finite, you see each and every finite thing. You see it all and it all means the world to you. I just lived 87 years of precise and vibrant moments and every one of them burned like a star.”
When I read that I don’t just not believe in an afterlife, I do not want to believe in an afterlife. But perhaps I am young and carefree also.
My partner and I were actually talking about this the other day, because after Oliver Sacks died, we were rehashing his views on the afterlife. Or, should I say, the lack of one. He talks a lot about how there’s no need for one, not if we’ve got this life here. And to me, that makes sense. Something I don’t like about a lot of religions is how the idea of an afterlife maybe makes you not so accountable for this life? Like, I’m not a big fan of the idea that you’re only being a good person because you think it’ll make eternity more enjoyable or because you think you need to pass some test. Being an atheist comes with its own set of struggles, but deciding whether or not to be a good person just because it’s the right thing to do is not one of them.
Have you ever read Waiting for the Galactic Bus, by Parke Godwin? I read it when I was about 15 and it blew my little mind. With that you get afterlives, but no gods – just aliens. I have no idea how it holds up, but I always liked the idea that human spirit/energy/whatever was strong enough to go on after, even if it didn’t know where it was going.
No, but I just Wikipedia’d the plot and it sounds like fun! I’ll have to check it out, but yeah, your last sentence sort of hits the nail on the head for me.
I think it probably does depend a great deal on how you were raised, and what your expectations were early on.
Personally, my parents and grandparents are/were always quite staunchly atheist, and I grew up without any religious experiences or religious education. Though we never really discussed it, I just took it for granted from the get-go that there was no God and no afterlife, and that death is just the end of things. It’s never bothered me at all, I suppose because I never expected anything else.
The main thing that’s affected my views on death has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, but rather working as a health law/ Medicare attorney for the last 10 years (and seeing a lot of very difficult, painful end-of-life scenarios). Also going through the declining health and deaths of close family members.
I think American society as a whole often has a very unhealthy view of death, where many people seem to want to prolong life at all costs- even when someone is obviously suffering and has a terrible quality of life. I’ve noticed that the religiously devout often seem to have a much harder time letting go and accepting death, and are much MORE likely to insist on continuing medical treatment. This seems quite paradoxical to me, if one believes in an afterlife. I can’t figure it out.
Like others have noted, it does bother me, and it makes me sad when I think about it too much. I really, really do love living, you know? So it’s bittersweet. But I take some small comfort in knowing that when the end comes, there won’t be anything left of me for it to bother.
For me personally, it doesn’t particularly, although I commented below about feeling sad not to be able to comfort my partner with thoughts of the afterlife when his grandfather died. I believe there’s nothing, and I’m okay with that. I actually find it quite comforting compared to the alternative – my dad was brought up as a Catholic, which did not go well (never believed in God, very difficult relationship with his parents, now extremely hostile to religion), and even many years out he is distressed by the thought of his loved ones going to Hell (because what if he’s wrong and it does exist?). Not having that fear is a big positive for me.
It doesn’t, not anymore, and here’s what I have come to: the universe is big, and energy is pretty amazing hopping around and doing its thing, and I think of it as being like water in that there’s always the same amount, essentially, it is just moves from one place and state to another continuously. (this is some Science coming from an artist, so, yanno, it’s possible I’ve got facts wrong) I think of our beings as having continuously existing energy, too, and moving after this life ends into another state – maybe reincarnation, maybe just absorbed back into the ether, maybe some other way of continuing forward. However woo this may be, it’s my jam.
I’m a former Christian who, after many years of struggle, realized that the idea of god is much bigger than any one book or idea, and that looking out at our natural world or contemplating the vast complexity of our inner lives is more spiritual than any set of doctrines. I love rituals and mysticism, too, like many others here it seems (hello friends!), but am not a believer in anything in particular, and my idea of god is a vague, cloudy thing, more like the mystery of evolution than anything else.
I found, of all things, the first law of thermodynamics pretty comforting. Energy is never lost, it just changes form. This is unequivocally what happens to us when we die. We may not be concious, but our energy is still around.
I’m an atheist and yeah, mortality sucks, and I totally understand believing and/or wanting to believe in an afterlife, but the fact that that concept is comforting does not, to me, make it any more convincing. Like, I would also like to believe that I will live to be 200 years old, but as far as I can tell, that’s extremely unlikely to happen. I don’t know for sure that it won’t, but I live my life on the assumption that it won’t. The afterlife, for me, is the same thing, just…longer. If I don’t believe I’ll live to be 200, I have no more reason to believe that I’ll effectively live forever after I die.
I am always grateful to read about other atheists who are just sort of reasonable and interested and interesting people. So thanks for this!
I became an atheist the way other people convert to Christianity – with this overwhelming sense of rightness and joy. When I found out about the idea of secular humanism it was like, yes. If I have to put a label on my feelings about the universe and humans and the focal point of our intersection – that’s what I always imagine other people mean when they say ‘God’ – this is it.
That’s why I can’t even with Dawkins and his ilk. They are fundamentalists. They are interesting sometimes but often absurd. Dawkins is the reason I tell people I am an atheist philosophically but not culturally.
People like Aadita – people who seem kind and interested in the world and culturally sensitive – are my favorite type of non-Dawkins atheists. I wish there were more folks sharing stories like this in the public discourse about religion. Thank you!
Dawkins and his ilk are the reason I say I’m a humanist rather than an atheist.
I tend to go with “lowercase a atheist” because I have seen so many people capitalize the letter A that just…don’t represent me or what I think or feel.
I sometimes go with “non-theistic,” if I sense I’m in a crowd that might interpret my atheism as anything ideological.
Oh man, I cringe to read about your teenage flirtations with Dawkins, because that was totally me. I thought I was so COOL and EDGY when I was actually just an insufferable 16-year-old who was insulting other people’s deeply-held beliefs. May all such grumpy teens reach a more nuanced understanding of religion and belief.
Looking forward to more from this series! Especially if you continue to name-drop the fictional angel who inspired my handle. 🙂
I cringe to read about your teenage flirtations with Dawkins
I had teenage flirtations with paganism (like with outfits and tools and All The Appropriation). Ugh. So embarrassing.
I was Wiccan for ten years (in retrospect, so much appropriation, aaaugh) and then became atheist from reading The God Delusion, and it was really exciting to me at the time (I had my copy signed, even) even though I was still active in a coven.
I’m definitely not a fan of Dawkins et al anymore, but it would be disingenuous to pretend he didn’t convert me to atheism.
“I think what I object to most about the brand of atheism that the likes of Dawkins promote is the idea that there’s a conflation of lack of faith with rationality.” This really resonated with me. I did not become rational when I lost my faith: I always was rational. I merely lost my belief in the premise of God, and altered my thinking accordingly. And to judge my parents and their church as irrational or not worth being listened to for their faith would deny the good they have done in the world, and I will not do it.
This post is one of those rare moments that come along sometimes, where someone else manages to so eloquently and concisely put into words something from your own experience that you’ve never been able to articulate. I also was raised in a fairly religious household, and found my way to atheism through genuine interest in religion and the shared human experience of seeking to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Thank you, Aadita, for your wonderful post, and as a Tasmanian girl living in Toronto the thylacine shoutout was like a big warm hug with words.
As an adult convert this series is just glorious. It can be a terrible burden (socially, culturally, etc.) to say “I have embraced a new way. On my own power, without asking for your permission” while also being tremendously freeing. The sense of rightness when one finds the way one is supposed to travel (guided by a higher power or not) is a comfort I pray for everyone.
And can I add that I adore how faith and religion and spirituality are handled here? I’m obviously new and it has been so wonderful to see measured and respectful discussions about this. I mean all the discussions are brilliant and thanks to you all I go through my day feeling brilliant and funny and accepted (and also not at all smart enough to even comment).
I love seeing another person whose atheism isn’t all wrapped up in scientific language. I like to think that my interpretation of the world is factually sound to the best of my abilities, but that’s really not the reason I’m not religious. It’s just… a gut feeling, I guess? A life of experiences that tell me that the world is not ruled by any meaningful or just system? The fact that I have can name a thousand nonreligious things that are more beautiful, profound, or inspiring to me than anything I’ve ever seen within 300 yards of a church?
I went through the Richard Dawkins phase as well (embittered Catholic school grads represent!) and I think it was healthy to be a little angry and strident for a while! But as time goes on, I just don’t need to feel the need to have a set-in-stone, Correct and Proven worldview. And besides, I think that the New Atheist ignorance of history, sociology, etc. is just as dangerous and anti-intellectual as the science denialism they critique.
*and in response to the last question, I am SUPER fascinated by mysticism, hope that helps with your diagram
the New Atheist ignorance of history, sociology, etc. is just as dangerous and anti-intellectual as the science denialism they critique
A THOUSAND TIMES YES!
Yeah, I feel like the New Atheists did do a kind of service, in the sense that they made room at the table for discussion in the US and England, where the only way you can get heard is by being a huge asshole about stuff, but now that that’s done, I am not really interested in letting these guys continue to be representatives of “atheism.”
That’s certainly true in many parts of the US, where atheists are equated with devil-worshippers who will eat your children.
I don’t know that they really needed much help in the UK, though– despite some legal weirdities (e.g., public funding for religious schools), only a very small percentage of the population is religious or attends religious services regularly. I would say that atheism (or at least keeping your personal views to yourself) is pretty much the accepted cultural norm, and the religiously devout are generally looked at with some suspicion.
But, yeah– as a lifelong atheist myself (and, I hope, a reasonable person who respects other people’s views), I would dearly like to shake a lot of those capital-A/ fedora-wearing Atheists and yell “YOU’RE NOT HELPING”.
Yeah, I guess the UK would have a different perspective on it, I think I just assumed it was the case since so many New Atheists are English — but I suppose that’s only true because Americans instinctively afford men with posh English accents intellectual credibility, that’s why here in the states we keep hearing about them.
It also makes them extra asshole-ish, in that they’re lecturing and being obnoxious to people at home who already basically agree with them…
Also, they probably don’t seem any more credible to you guys, everyone sounds some kind of British over there.
Atheism definitely feels like the accepted cultural norm to me (in the UK) – I’m generally surprised when I hear anyone actually professing any sort of belief, because it feels so unusual and separate from how I experience the world.
I, too, went through the Dawkins/Hitchens phase! I think, for me, it was a natural part of the process of unlearning the canned, quotable reasoning of my childhood evangelism: learn an opposing (but similarly memorable) logic, then break free of both.
A life of experiences that tell me that the world is not ruled by any meaningful or just system
I love this! I think about this often, when I am in the thinkin’ kind of mood. We all construct our religion out of what we see and experience – my life has been a series of experiences and observations that add up to a conclusion of Godlessness. However, that’s just me! And you! And some other Toasties here! Other people have seen other things and drawn different conclusions that are no less correct.
Yes, I think it’s okay to be angry for a while. My atheism more or less arose when I was a teenager and suddenly being dragged to this very conservative church every other Sunday. I was angry then because I needed to be.
But I don’t think it’s good for me to stay angry forever, especially now that I’m over a decade away from all that. The New Atheism stuff drives me up a wall too, especially the rationality stuff. I didn’t rationalize my way into being an atheist and I doubt that most people do. I clung to Carl Sagan and Contact when I was a teenager and his approach to atheism in that was a much better model for me.
Yes, when I tell people I’m an atheist they usually expect me to be some incredibly science-minded individual and honestly? I just don’t care that much about science. I’m glad we’re making advancements in it but I don’t follow it, don’t use it to back up my atheism, and I don’t have any interest in studying it (kudos to all the people who do though!). I just have the same gut feeling that there’s nothing out there.
(As for Mallory’s diagram- An Atheist who actively and passionately studies religions, particularly ones that veer towards magic and mysticism!)
ooh, I totally went through my teenage dirtbag atheist phase too. I think because I came from a pretty privileged background and being overwhelmed by Christian-is-the-default US culture let me be all “help, help, I’m being repressed!” The whole Dawkins-y “religion is illogical” thing didn’t sit too well with me, but my atheism was pretty wrapped up in righteous teenage woe-is-meeeee anger. Later, that turned into “hmm, being an atheist in the U.S. has annoyed me a lot, but that is very different from being oppressed for it.”
But yeah, I also remember the specific moment I figured out that I didn’t believe, and it was definitely not reasonable or logical and my mind was not on the Big Bang or evolution; I was quite earnestly and sincerely trying to pray for someone I knew who was sick and I realized no one was listening to me.
As for the venn diagram, I’m not fascinated by mysticism…unless it’s part of someone’s personal & eloquent story, so I’m definitely reading this series!
(two Monty Python quotes in my Toast comments in as many days, uh oh!)
Pursuant to that Venn Diagram, I also am an avowed atheist but also interested in, and kind of actually think of myself as a mystic (I sort of cobbled together a working religious philosophy of atheistic-zen-mystic-materialism that I don’t think really has a name, as far as I can tell) — I think a huge problem with the New Atheism is that it fetishizes rationality as more than a tool for understanding how the world works, but also has a tool for understanding a sort of value of being, which I think is a serious problem. For me, the appeal of the “mystic” approach to understanding the universe is the fact that I don’t really believe that the universe yields itself particularly well to reason.
I think a huge problem with the New Atheism is that it fetishizes rationality as more than a tool for understanding how the world works, but also has a tool for understanding a sort of value of being
Yes.
I really wanted to say more but I don’t think I can. It’s like rationality as a weapon that doesn’t allow for consideration of things like human emotions.
I think in a lot of cases it’s actually even worse than that, it’s basically the language of rationality as a rhetorical tool, completely disconnected from rationality as a formal process of inquiry.
OH you are my people.
I’m guessing that the Venn diagram between “atheists” and “interested in mystic traditions” has a substantial overlap — and I’m sort of on the edge? I’m not well versed in religious texts/traditions but I love reading about how people make sense of the world, and there’s a lot more ways to do that than just science.
Put me in your diagram of atheists who come from slightly hindu backgrounds who are fascinated by mysticism, yes please.
As a teenage atheist I was definitely hostile to religion. It took getting older and wiser to realize that what I am really hostile to is assholes. Particularly power-hungry assholes, who can be found in all sorts of settings, not just religious ones.
As a glass-half-full Protestant agnostic who grew up evangelical but also really misses church* this is literally MY FAVORITE series.
*Pretty sure this is a functional definition of “Episcopalian.”**
**No offense to devout Episcopalians! I just love gently ribbing you all. You guys and your cocktail hours and welcoming of the LGBTQ community are rad.
<3 We love the gentle ribbing! (and you’re always welcome at the coffee hours and cocktail hours and all of everything)
We can do it through art, music, literature or just being around people we love. I still think the world at large still has a somewhat distorted idea about atheism and the forms it comes in. Some of us have rich inner lives similar to devoutly religious people. There have been times when I have been so moved by religious art and music, that I really wanted there to be God, or if there is God, that I could find the faith to believe.
I get this completely. I feel very powerfully moved in any church or temple even though I do not share the beliefs of the others inside. And I have a deep and abiding yet inexplicable love for Gregorian chant and choruses singing in Latin*. I find religious art/iconography so very interesting, in all its manifestations.
*CBC used to play hours and hours of religious music on Christmas Eve and that was always my go-to while I fell asleep. I miss those days.
I really enjoy some of the ritualistic aspects of religion, even though I was raised in an atheist family and have never believed in God.
When I was living in the UK, I attended a number of services just for something to do (because I was broke), and because the settings were so lovely– e.g., the York Minster cathedral with the gorgeous stained glass windows. I quite enjoyed all the chanting and reading along, the architecture, the music, etc. Even though I didn’t believe in any of it on a deeper level, it was still an enjoyable and strangely satisfying experience.
I can’t phrase this in the way I really want to, but I almost think it’s about the communality. When I think about all of the people who came together to make whatever it is, *that* is part of the spirituality of it? It sounds a bit weak that way, but I feel like my spiritual sense is tied up in a) the huge beauty of nature and space and time and that we’re alive and conscious of it and b) the loveliness humans can create when they put their minds to something, whether singly or collectively.
I think you’ve phrased it very well–both of those things are a huge part of my spiritual sense, and I’m religious. A lot of the awe that I feel in old cathedrals is the idea that people really built something this spectacular, and that people have been coming together here on these stones for the same purpose for hundreds of years.
Has anyone else here read Ursula K LeGuin’s book Always Coming Home? It’s the text that filled me with the most spiritual energy as an agnostic raised by agnostic parents who also welcomed a healthy dose of nature spiritualism as part of their environmental politics. I also love that in LeGuin’s detailed imagining of a far-future society in Northern California, ritual clowning is one of the traditions that endures and thrives long past the collapse of our own civilization.
Aaaah, this was so great. And your comments on spirituality not necessarily being linked to a belief in God, and on the divinity of our shared being and humanity – yes, yes, yes! The most spiritual moments I have had are about the bigness of the world and the connection and communion I feel with something outside myself. These have come standing in the middle of ancient ruins and in choral singing and also standing in the middle of a triangle of sequoias. I can sing the Mozart Requiem and weep and not believe in God and still be moved, because – what glory! What an astonishing thing, to be connected to all the people in my chorus and the musicians and our listeners, and to the centuries of others who have sung it with us, to that one odd little man who poured poetry out of his fingertips, to the impulse in humans to lift their voices together. I appreciated hearing you talk about this, and doing so in such an eloquent way.
I really loved this. I really loved how you articulated finding atheism – it just was in you. That’s exactly how I feel about my beliefs (or, obviously, lack there of). I never had any belief to begin with, though I didn’t really feel the need to articulate it – or even really to think about it – until I was in a situation where I was being pushed to believe.
I wonder if perhaps that’s true of many atheists who seem to have been converted by bad experiences with religion. Maybe they always knew on some level that they didn’t believe but weren’t necessarily in a place where they needed to fully define themselves as atheists.
I loved this! My background is different in a lot of ways, but I very much identify with her feelings about atheism and mysticism. She sums it up beautifully!
I haven’t got the faith lobe in my brain either, but religion and spirituality and mysticism are all just so *interesting*, and the mythical/symbolic dimension of human life is as important to me as religion is to its adherents.
I wonder how much of my view has been influenced by growing up Greek-American, where you have Religion on the one hand and Mythology on the other and they are *not* the same thing.
Love this. Also YEAH ENCARTA!
This was great! i particularly liked “At a very basic instinctual level, I simply had no faith”, because that’s always been my experience, too – I just can’t imagine ever believing in any sort of god. I don’t want to invalidate other people’s beliefs; it just feels like an impossibility to me, like I could just as easily believe that up was down or black was white.
The comment about wanting to believe when bad stuff happens also rang true to me. When my partner’s grandfather died, it was the only time I’d desperately wanted to be religious, because I wished I could tell him that it was fine and that heaven existed. But I couldn’t without lying; however much I might want to, I find the idea too impossible. That was hard.
My people! I’ve been wavering towards Deism or agnosticism for years but I love the rituals and community of Catholicism so much even though I hate the moralizing and proselytizing and guilt (though I love Confession) and love learning about religions. I lived in Indonesia and found aspects of Islam so beautiful though I sometimes grew frustrated with local conservatism. The closest label I can come up with now is a religious agnostic.
It's the same in Australia. There's not really any stigma to being atheist since everyone assumes it's the default setting unless told otherwise and talking about your religion is really just Not Done. I do love Aadita's thoughtful brand of atheism though. She seems to have a spiritual connection with people and communities that I think a lot of very secular countries are lacking. People aren't thoughtful about it here. It's more "eh I think I was baptised as a baby, but I haven't set for in a church since then and would rather spend Sunday morning watching sport than listening to sermons".
I think this is such a valid point. If most religions that you're exposed to as a young person preach values that devalue and disenfranchise women then anger is totally justified if you have any sense of justice or desire for autonomy as a woman. Especially if your community and family all uphold those values.
I was raised in what passes for a Christian family in Australia which was basically going to a pretty liberal and accepting church when my mum remembered and stopping when we found better things to do. But she was also a huge feminist who supported me in everything so I never really HAD to get angry.
Okay I'm going to need to read this. Thanks for mentioning it!