That's me in the corner...

Born Again Christians have the "Witnessing" story, about how they came to Christ. That emotional moment when they feel that whisper of the holy spirit call them, and how that transformed them from what ever dark place they were in, into the child of Christ they are today. It's a big, dramatic thing.  There aren't Atheist Preachers at Revival tents, using emotional pleas to try and convert you (though a Hitchens Rant comes close). Rational inquiry isn't big and dramatic. There isn't some big EUREKA epiphany moment (typically).  It's a long, slow process of examining evidence, coming up with the best hypothesis, testing it, accepting it, rejecting it, improving on it.  It requires a lot of thinking, and a lot of work, and a lot of courage.  Never forget that  Christianity's greatest tool in converting non-believers, and keeping them converted is fear. Because Fear of death isn't enough quite scary enough, the fear of the meaninglessness of life, of the great nothing that comes with death (something i'm still terrified of, fwiw), isn't traumatic enough. No, instead Christianity fills you with an even greater fear, fear of eternal suffering. Of eternal punishment, never ending, if you aren't saved and don't stay saved.  These twin fears, Death Fear and Hell Fear, are incredibly traumatic for the believer, and difficult to get rid of, even after you've reasoned your way through it all. It's the fear of Death/Hell that keeps so many Christain's clinging to Pascal's Wager like a life preserver.

I think it was both easier for me, and harder for me to become an atheist than it was for most former Christians. I didn't really have strong  external indoctrination. My Dad was a Mason, and basically a Deist (Mason Deism which is a very interesting Theism, and was a nice giant step away from irrational religion towards the rational back in the 1700's. A subject for another Blog post, however). My mom is Baptist, but she didn't go to church much, didn't bring me to church much. She did Listen to Focus on the Family all the time, watched Billy Graham whenever he was on TV, and read books/pamphlets mailed out by both organization. I would say she has an intensely superstitious belief, but it's not one founded in church going. She deeply believes in hell however, and the need to be born again.


So because Mom didn't go to church much, I didn't go to church much.  One place I did go to, starting at a very young age, was church camp.  Church Camp is an incredibly insidious thing.  They take you away from all your friends at home, drive you out into the woods in the middle of no where, bunk you up with a bunch of strangers, most of whom to a greater or lesser degree are Christians. There was always at least one Head Pastor for the camp, and usually 1 or 2 assistant Pastors. Each cabin's has a Youth Councilor. When you were really young, the Councilors were typically High School Students who had gone to the camp when they were young. As you got older, the Councilors were almost all Students at local Baptist Colleges. They were there to recruit, I think paid by the Colleges. So,  what they would do is, exercise you all day, having you sing songs, and do sports until you're exhausted. Then, after a day of physical activity, when it's dark, they light a big bon fire, and have you sing, and sing, and sing, until you've hyperventilated. Then, in the darkness, after a day of exhausting workouts, and an hour (ish) of singing, people start getting up by the camp fire, and start witnessing to you. Telling you stories about how they came to christ, how someone they knew came to christ, or some other story, meant to move and or scare you.  Sometimes it would be a Pastor, sometimes one of the Councilors, and some times it would be one of you. People would start getting really emotional. Start crying. Tell emotional things about their past, stuff that had happened to them. How god helped them (or they wanted God to help them).  It was like when you get together with your friends, and tell ghost stories. You'd all start to get freaked out, "spooked" out, and start to feel the evil creatures.  Same thing, only you feel the spirit of god.  the whole Church Camp Experience was an incredibly efficient at eliciting a "religious experience"

So I was young, I hadn't really thought about Christianity Critically yet. I just assumed what adults told you, and your parents told you was true, but I didn't "Feel" it.  I didn't know any atheists, wasn't exposed to it. I'm surrounded by believers, at the apex of a situation crafted to elicit a religious experience, and predictably, it did elicit one in me. I felt "The presence of god" . I felt awash with love. I felt the need to confess my sins, and accept Christ as my Personal Lord and Savior. The whole 9 yards. Totally bought it, totally believed it, totally FELT it. It was very real to me,  hyper real. What it really was, was a flood of endorphin's washing into my brain, and I have had more "profound" drug experiences since then . However, at the time, it seemed very, very real.  So, the rest of camp, you're filled with Christ love, fellowshipping with other campers, and it was like a paradise. Then, you go back home, and I"m filled with the spirit of the Lord. I start buying up Xian music, and reading my student bible, and some theology books, and going gun ho. I prayed all the time, had a "personal" relationship with Christ. I still didn't go to church much, but  I formed my own theology, very much like the one Helen describes in the comments of my previous blog post. I wasn't concerned what churches did, because I didn't think churches were particularly good at understanding the type of love and Fellowship I thought Christ represented.  I had a very Hippy idea of what being a christian was, for lack of a better word. I had some punk christian friends, that I would go to bible study with sometimes, which seemed more authentic to me than Church did. I would go to camp every year, and it was wonderful. I always felt the spirit, Christ's love, when I was at camp. Very, very seldom if at all away from it, but i'd get recharged every year at camp. I never felt, for a moment, that these feelings and experiences I had weren't real.

It wasn't till college, when I really started thinking critically for the first time, that I started doubting. I didn't go to church, and I was too old for camp, so the religious experiences ceased. I read a lot of existential literature, read philosophy of many kinds, talked and debated with people of many faiths and of no faith.   Did drugs. I don't mean that glibly. I did mushrooms, acid and even ayahuasca with the specific goal of finding God. I had stopped feeling the spirit completely by that time, and my faith was crumbling, and I was desperate to kick start it. But All I found in those drug experiences, was that I had a lot of fun. There was nothing deeper and more meaningful about it them.  But still, the fear was there. Still the implication of not believing was there. The emptiness. I had fetishized how good believing felt, how good of a person I was when I was "walking with christ"  and I dreaded how bad losing my faith felt, and how awful the oblivion of death would be ( and worse still, Hell, if I was wrong).

But eventually, I had to stop deluding myself. Eventually I had to come to grips with the hard, cold fact that I didn't believe. I remember, I sought out one of my good friends from college, who was an Atheist ( he had been raised by a really crazy fundamentalist Pastor, like more conservative/weird than Southern Baptist. Like his dad had to hide from his congregation that he went to the movie theater, sort of thing.). He was the first one that I told that I was an Atheist. He said that he knew that I would eventually, because I wasn't stupid.  It was a relief, but it also felt shitty.  I had other things going on in my life, at the time, so I don't know how much of my Depression was linked with my Existential crisis, but I certainly link them in my mind today.

My life since then, has largely been my own personal quest to get my mind around the moral/psychological/societal/philosophical implications of there not being a God, of there not being an Objective source of Morality.  To find personal meaning in what I think is fundamentally a meaningless existence.  Someone linked me to a Woody Allen Interview yesterday, and I think he pretty much articulates exactly how I see the world. http://commonwealmagazine.org/woody.  It's really bleak outlook. Not a really good selling point, compared to say, eternal paradise or re-incarceration or a mystical transformation into a loving person.  It couldn't compete with religions in an open market, that's for sure. Really, the only thing that it has going for it, is I think it's true.  I'm not quite as bleak as him,I don't think life is essentially horrible, I find a great deal more pleasure in life than Allen does ( I'm a Born Again Hedonist, these days).  But I do think life is without objective meaning, and I just can no longer fool myself into thinking otherwise.  That's why I'm an Atheist, because I refuse to delude myself with subjective experience, and with fear.