My Road to Unbelief Part IV

My Road to Unbelief

Part IV: Revulsion

The answer was no. Never. Absolutely not.

What's the point of prayer when millions of prayers every day during the Holocaust were met with deafening silence? What's the point of having a divine protector that does not protect you when you most need it? What's the point of a divine protector of humanity if he does not protect humanity when humanity most needs it? One would have to believe that the protector allows suffering of such magnitude to happen. To me, that is a far scarier prospect than having no protector at all.

And consider the scope. Only counting the Jews of this particular genocide, the number is about 6,000,000. While only seven digits, that is far more than a human brain can comprehend. It's far more than Hitler can comprehend. If you think he understood the magnitude of his crimes then you give him too much credit. I could hopefully wrap my head around the idea of six hundred lives. Maybe if I strained myself I could comprehend six thousand. But six million? Far greater than the human mind can handle.

There is, however, someone who could presumably understand the magnitude of the crime. God. And apparently it isn't enough. Crimes far, far greater than human comprehension, and it isn't enough for God to step in.

Perhaps it was part of some divine plan. But then I ask, why would I ever want to follow such a plan? This is the most psychotic version of "the ends justify the means." The version that absolutely nobody would ever follow if it was presented to them. If that's part of the plan, then there is no way I would ever support such a plan. Psychotic.

Perhaps God has intentions for me but not my family. But not for the little eight-year-old girl who was turned into a lampshade. This argument makes me nauseous with the sheer arrogance of it. It isn't normal arrogance, but cosmic arrogance. The idea that your divine worth is somehow greater than others. My own body rejects such a answer. The reason I lived to be nine-years-old and she didn't is because of nothing more than Luck. The other possibility is just sickening.

No. From that day forth my empathy was an ever-present shield against ever believing in such a God. No longer would I ever want God to exist. If God didn't exist, I would be relieved, happy, and thankful. Thank God there is no God.

However, I wasn't actually an Atheist yet. For the next few years I would waver back and forth between Deism and Atheism (although I did not know the word Deism). Theism was forever dead to me.

My Road to Unbelief Part III

My Road to Unbelief

Part III: A Thought Experiment

One of the traditions of Judaism is a memorial day known as Krystalnacht, or "The Night of Broken Glass." It marks the day of a specific event in Nazi Germany where all the Jewish shops were raided and glass littered the streets. It's essentially a day of remembrance about the Holocaust. Not exactly a pleasant thing. In schul (like sunday school), we would talk about the Holocaust on this day. It often raised serious philosophical and religious questions, as you can imagine.

I've never actually read Maus (it's about a man telling his son about the days of the Holocaust, told in comic form where Jews are mice and Nazis are cats), but I heard that one of the interesting parts of it is that the father is now an Atheist because of the Holocaust. I found out that many Jews lost faith in God after the Holocaust. Some remained faithful, while others did not.

It raised a question in my mind: "Which would I be?" After all, in many ways you could see how something as terrible as the Holocaust could go either way. It could reaffirm your faith. Or it could destroy it. And so I posed myself to that Thought Experiment. It may be scary, but it's an exercise in Empathy. I find it rather depressing that other people don't try this sort of thing, and I find it absolutely ridiculous that Christians never seem to talk about genocides and what it means in terms of their religion.

I tried to put myself in that situation. Separated from my sister and mother (only to have my mother be raped and gassed and my sister to thrown into an oven), to have my father be shot randomly for some disobedience. My family murdered. Their deaths not heroic but pathetic. And then for me to survive. If I somehow survived, would I still worship the God that I prayed to for years to end the suffering? Would I pray to the Lord that allowed my family to perish for some reason only Gods-know-what?

The answer I came to was forceful, painful, and resolute:

Never. 

My Road to Unbelief Part II

My Road to Unbelief

Part II: A Childhood of Questions

I was a highly curious child, interested in questioning everything everywhere. I had a childhood friend (let's call him Charlie) who was also extraordinarily curious. Charlie was Christian, and as a child the two of us talked about various philosophical concepts and how to resolve them. Not that we knew what philosophy was. I was not really concerned about ideas of 'evidence' or proof. I cared more about the big picture of it all.

The Meaning of Life

I remember trying to settle the question of "What is the meaning of life?" and coming up with several answers, all of which made very little sense. I remember feeling very smart when Charlie and I came up with the idea of 'nothing' but even that felt hollow and fake. After running it through in my head, it really felt like I didn't understand the question at all. What did I mean by 'Life has no meaning'? It certainly sounds profound, but I wasn't sure what I was saying. What did people actually mean by "What is the meaning of life?" It's a question you hear a lot. I also did not see how throwing God into the equation made the question any clearer.

Morality without God

With Charlie being a Christian and me being a Jew, it was of course going to happen that we were going to discuss things like this. As we were both very secular, we eventually came into the question "can you have morality without God?" I thought the obvious answer was yes. In fact, when he suggested that it might not be true, I balked. Clearly there were infinite (or at least a lot of) possibilities of morality, judging by how some Christians did bad things and some did good things and they all disagreed constantly and killed each other over it.

Why would lack of God lead to lack of morality? As a child, I felt it was jumping to conclusions. People ask "well then where does morality come from?" but that's not a fair question. How could one suggest that it was impossible for morality to exist without God without considering all the vast possibilities of moralities? Just because I don't know doesn't mean it doesn't exist, after all.

Heaven & Hell

Jews don't believe in Heaven and Hell. We have kind of a vague view of Heaven, but there's almost no emphasis on the afterlife. Christians, of course, talk about the afterlife all the damn time. So eventually I heard about this idea of good people going to heaven and bad people going to hell from Charlie. When I considered this as an outside observer, I found the whole idea to be incredibly childish. Yes, I was a child, and I found it childish.

How could real adults believe that people could be sorted into good people and bad people? Regardless of criterion (I never found out until later that the major criterion is believing in Jesus), I found that people just don't seem to work like that. We aren't bad and we aren't good. We just do good things and bad things. Sure, it makes sense for Gandhi and Hitler, but those are obviously extreme examples. And even if I didn't like some of the other kids in my class, I found it hard to believe that they would be sorted into hell. It just didn't work with my personal experience. I found this to be strong spot of pride that I was Jewish and not Christian. I never believed in such silly ideas.

Now, when I say that I found that childish, I mean that very literally. I found it to be a child's morality. Good people and Bad people, easily sortable by some sort of vague quantifiable analysis. Then there is Purgatory. To me, the very idea of Purgatory just reinforces how ridiculous it is to be sorting people like this at all. Adding a third 'medium' category doesn't solve the problem at all! It's so silly. I was convinced that belief in Heaven and Hell is something that people just grew out of. Surely no adults could possibly believe such silliness.

People may find this view arrogant or offensive. I don't know why. I'm just being honest. And I don't see how we could possibly have a real conversation about it unless we're going to be honest about it. Although, I will say that I was absolutely shocked to find out as a teenager that grown adults believed in Heaven and Hell as well.

As you can see, even from an early age, I found the major shields of faith to be on shaky ground. However, I certainly saw no reasons not to believe in God, either. That would come later.

My Road to Unbelief Part I

My Road to Unbelief

Part I: Introduction

Hi, I'm DoubleReed.  I stream starcraft, compose music, and work in cybersecurity.  I figure a blog would be a great way to put my thoughts to paper so that ideas are less in my head.  This blog will be a place for me to talk about random crap, because that's what blogs are for.

As a start, I figured I would talk about my road to becoming an atheist. However, all stories need a proper setting, so this will also serve to introduce myself.  I grew up in a rich, white suburb of America that has some of the best public schools in the country. It is highly liberal, and I was one of its many Ashkenazi Jews.

My Jewish congregation is Conservative (as opposed to Reform which is less religious and Orthodox which is more religious). So you could say it's the middle, but the fact is that really Conservative and Reform are not that different from one another.

I have one sister and one brother who are awesome. I have a wonderful mother and a wonderful father who is a Mathematics professor. Religion was never a significant part of our household, although of course we followed the traditions that were fun and family-oriented. We are a secular family, through and through. So I'm sorry to say that I will not have dramatic stories about my family, as they are all very accepting and apathetic about the ideas of religion.

So this is where I started: lucky, wealthy, and happy. This is the setting of my unbelief.