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.