The $64,000 question. I wish that I could be glib with the answer. Pithy and concise. It’s far too complicated to tuck it all in a nutshell. However, one thing I’ve noticed is the preposterous lengths to which some ‘Believers’ go to rationalize their ‘Faith’; pseudo-quantum mechanics, wave theory, universal consciousness, uncaused first cause, reductio ad absurdum, gob-smacking analogies between atoms and star systems leading to sentience, etc. The amount of ‘what-ifs’ and gibbered rationalizations of Biblical twaddle is astounding. It all boils down to: God is god because god is god.
Q.E.D.
Being an atheist seems so simple compared to the torturous mental gymnastics which the more cognizant ‘Believers’ must perform to justify their theism. It is astounding, as well, that the apologists’ fall-back position seems to be ignorance and the comfort they find in ignorance. ‘Believers’ find comfort in confirming that we are all ignorant; from which point they joyously assert that since we’re all lowly cretins when it comes to knowing the universe then we must then reconcile ourselves to being ignorant of the mind of god. God is god because god is god.
That thought aside, perhaps the one circumstance that allowed me to find an exit from ‘god-land’ was an economic one. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to the parochial high school for my sophomore year. Due to financial considerations (i.e. the high cost of tuition) I had to rub shoulders with protestants and other similarly cash-strapped Catholics. Consequently, there were no daily or weekly ‘convocations’, masses, novenas and prayers; no nuns or priests to reinforce the teachings of the Church.
There was no one single epiphany or event where the light came on and Eureka! I’m an atheist. I do recall at some point in the early ‘80s when I defined myself as agnostic. I didn’t know. What I did know for sure was that the Roman Catholic church was bonkers and wrong. I recall that our family had a volume of Greek and Roman myths which a favorite of mine and which I read with delight. The stories of Zeus/Jupiter, Persephone, et al. revealed that each culture had its stories and that these stories were somewhat interchangeable; the stories of Zeus were the same as the stories of Jupiter. A bit later, the myths of the Norse pantheon and the ancient Celtic myths of Cúchulainn and Finn McCool showed that stories about gods were varied and yet dealt with similar issues. Much was handled with brute force and an almost flippant disregard for humanity.
Importantly, those heathen tales were just as loony-toons as the Christian stories the nuns and priests presented me. Point of fact, nowhere in the world’s myths is there more gore and bloodshed, rape and murder, burning and death than in the myths of the Bible. The Norsemen, whom the Christians in Europe considered ravenous barbarians – and righty so – had myths of delicate beauty. At least the beheadings and disgorgements were separated by misty woods, far-off horizons and an after-world that was stirring and adventurous rather than chaste, prim, meditational and riddled with guilt and angst.
My father was the one who taught me critical thinking skills. He and I would engage in loud, late night discussion about politics, social issues, art and familial matters. Those sessions were informal seminars on rhetoric, philosophy and critical thinking. He was an autodidact who had left school at fifteen to join the Merchant Marines. He’d seen the world and served in the US Navy as radarman during the Second World War. He’d read a bit and challenged my thinking regularly. While discussions were vociferous and impassioned, they weren’t propelled by animosity. He respected my view - as I did his - if the position could be supported rationally.
Perhaps another exit from ‘god-land’ was my aversion to reading the Bible. Roman Catholics are instructed to NOT read the Bible at all; ‘leave it to the professionals, dear’. I was content with that; there were plenty of better written books to read. I found the narrative dreadful. The allegories obtuse. The prophesies vague. There was no history. Biblical tales were no more substantial than the tales of Valhalla or Olympus and less well-told.
The stories in the bible are so shopworn, of course, that they have a distinct patina of wear and over-use. Centuries of making Noah, Moses, Jesus, Paul icons rather than historic characters detract from the claim that the Bible is source for historic act.
Why didn’t ‘god’ make Stephen King or Asimov, or Tolkien to write the Bible? They’re all better story-tellers than the anonymous hacks that came up with the gibberish of Noah, the Garden, Joshua and the walls of Jericho.
The story of the fricking Ark – Come on. No one buys this nursery school nonsense, right? (‘It’s a metaphor …’is what we were told; a metaphor for what? The power of ‘god’ to do stupid genocidal acts for his personal amusement? For his own benighted glory? Or for revenge for something that he, himself in his omniscience set in motion – huh?)
Dead people walking around alive? Not zombies, mind you, but perfectly functioning human beings who thought they’d been asleep or something. The dead in Jerusalem walking at the hour of Jesus death; Lazarus rising from the grave. Over and over, so as to soften the blow for when the star of the show, man/god/son, G-suz has a particularly bad weekend before coming back to life as a full-blown god in his old human form – very ‘Amazing Tales’ – and then floated off into ‘heaven’ to sit with the ‘father’? Please…
The Epic of Gilgamesh makes fewer demands of the suspension of disbelief than the Bible mark 1 and mark 2.
And the narrative style is awful. Sure, that’s understandable given centuries of editors and revisionists, transcriptions, transcriptions of transcriptions of translations of transcriptions; cherry-picked and compiled in dozens of different editions. All repackaged, revamped and realigned to fit the post facto narrative that Christians had been developing for centuries before being nailed down in codices by this bishop or that ‘doctor of the church.
But the stories themselves are less than marvelous, generally speaking Familiarity breeds contempt, granted, but the Mabinogion and Tolkien’s legendarium made much better reading. Talking snakes did have a short-lived appeal but Disney defanged the image and, once more, the story sucked.
More metaphor? Perhaps; but nonsense nonetheless and without a scintilla of ‘reality’. In order to ‘Believe’, we’re must ignore the paradox, the dichotomies, the contradictions, the non sequiturs, the logical fallacies, the total absurdity of the Bible account ‘cuz it’s the word of ‘god’?
And the Iliad was the word of Homer. Hear how nonsensical that sounds?
But simply seeing a comparison between the guff of the Bible and the outrageousness of world mythologies was not a pressure point that split the boulder of belief. Seeing the similarities in the Gilgamesh/Noah stories was one thing. The repetitiveness of the death and resurrection myths of Osiris and Jesus informed me, but I was already a non-Believer. I didn’t experience a singular, epiphanal ‘a-Ha!’ moment.
The gory fear-scape presented by the Bible was both spell-binding and repulsive. To think ‘How could god be so cruel?’ is considered a ‘thought crime’ in and of itself. Far worse than touching yourself or having impure thoughts. Doubt was most strictly a no-no – taboo! The very worst affront against ‘god’ from which there is no forgiveness or redemption. Non-believers had a one-way express train trip to Hell and the Lake of Fire!
Taboo! As bad as cannibalism. That bad! All those …but Communion, taking and eating the body of Christ was the supreme sacrament. Eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Savior man/son/god was the very height of the god experience.
It don’t get no better than this – feel the god juice run through our soul! When the very human essence of Christ Jesus is placed on your tongue for you to choke down. Never let it be said that a good bit of irony and hypocrisy aren’t interwoven in tapestry of the Roman Catholic church.
But to actually ‘BELIEVE’ this twaddle?
Then, we have the Resurrection …
This is all more fully dealt with in the section of the Bible, itself.
Phrases like ‘god’s word’ to swear to the truth ‘so, help me god’. Oh-my-god as an exclamation and ‘god bless’ to a sneeze. Hell, yes! To hell with you. Hell's bells. It’s gospel – give me chapter and verse.
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