January 2008 Archives

Today I got into a slightly confrontational argument with a small group of Christians in the cafeteria today at dinner. They were talking to one person who looked down and a bit beat by their words, and I heard the whispers of Hell and the words, "When you read the Bible don't read it with your mind. Open up to it."

I asked him why he left church (he indicated earlier that he used to go) and he said he just fell out of it. I confided in him that I myself have left church years ago and it was the best decision of my life. Through glares of a Christian woman I explained to him that ultimately it is his decision what path he takes and that he must take responsibility for his own actions and beliefs.

Then the woman turned her attention towards me and started berating me about my own beliefs. At first she didn't know I was an atheist but a Christian friend of mine introduced me to her and he couldn't bring himself to say, "he is an atheist."

So I said, "Yes, hi, I'm the prominent atheist on center." Which is the truth. I'm one of the most outspoken atheists at this Job Corps center. She seemed taken aback. She became visibly angry and berated me. A few gems were her telling me: 1.) That I should keep my beliefs to myself and 2.) That I have no hope because I don't believe in Heaven and Hell.

Is that how atheism is viewed? That I should shut up and wallow in misery? She seemed confused that I didn't feel I had no hope. I feel quite the opposite. How can this be? How can someone that believes in no gods feel any hope?

Never mind the hollowness in believing in a god simply to have hope. I'm sure thousands believed in Zeus, Ra, and countless other gods for hope. I don't see how the Christian God is any different in this aspect. Am I, an atheist, liable to feel hopeless due to my lack of belief?

The answer is a resounding no. I do not feel hopeless. Quite the contrary, in fact, and I think that confuses many people of faith. To them, hope is looking forward to dying so you can go to Heaven. I don't see how that is hopeful at all.

As a Bad Religion song states, "What good is something if you can't have it until you die?" I think this explains my view pretty well regarding faith-based hope and I think it serves well as a reminder of how empty such promises are.

My hope lies in humanity, in the expanding of knowledge. My hope lies in us continuing to learn and grow as time goes on as we have been doing. Times in the Dark Ages and before were barbaric, cruel, and immoral. We've advanced quite admirably; when was the last time you attended a witch burning or a gruesome gladiator battle to the death?

I find religious hope troubling. It takes the ball completely out of our hands and thrusts it into the hands of a malevolent deity bent up on control. The only hope for humans is to hope they end up in Heaven upon death? Perhaps I go to far to say this, but I can't imagine I am, isn't this demeaning to the life we have?

I tried explaining it. I don't think she could grasp what I was saying. She knew nothing more than that her faith in God and in Heaven were what drove her to live. She couldn't see my motives for living. I find something very sad about that and wonder how despair doesn't set in with such beliefs.

She seemed to think it was arrogant to think man handled his morals and hope himself. I find it empowering and the true key to happiness.

In any case, I hope I left the man they were targeting for conversion with some food for thought. I didn't pitch to him that atheism was the true path, nor did I even ask him if he believed in God or not. I simply told him to empower himself and to think for himself.

I also realized something. The greatest tool against religion is to ask, "why?"

Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been reduced to such a level that the average high school student could not surmise what his political stances were beyond that he fought for civil rights and encouraged non-violent action. The holiday given in his honor has been a disgrace to his vision and has been used as an excuse to pacify the continuing struggle that he often described.

While he was heralded as a great civil rights activist, his greater calling is often ignored. King's vision extended beyond simply dreaming of black and white kids holding hands in harmony, indeed, they went much deeper into what King viewed as the systemic cause of such social injustice.

That systemic cause he saw was greed, militarism, and the stranglehold of a materialistic society ignoring the impoverished and downtrodden. Poverty, to King, was not simply a problem for poor ghetto bound blacks, it was a societal problem that had to be attacked by every American.

King said, "we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society." To him, materialism fueled inexorable injustice and that true empowerment of the poor came when we started compassionately giving them opportunity to rise up.

We are not there yet.

The question hangs on to us: what would Dr. King fight for today? What causes would he take up? Though we can't ask him directly we can look at what he has said in the past to gain inspiration for the new wave of social injustice taking hold under our very noses.

One can look at the current debate surrounding universal health care. A Harvard study says in 2001 56% of all bankruptcy in the US is caused by surmounting medical costs due to illness and injury. Out of them, 72% had health insurance and were working.

There is something very wrong when half of bankruptcies are caused by health care costs. There is something very wrong when the rhetoric is, "We don't want to care for the slacking poor." There is something wrong when the richest nation in the entire world says it can't afford to give health care to every single one of its citizens.

In Michael Moore's film, Bowling for Columbine, he asks a pervasive question about what could possibly be different that causes the US to stand out from most other industrialized nations in terms of gun murder rates.

"Is it their culture?"

It would seem culture is ridiculously homogenized across the western nations as the free flow of information over the internet and mass media has brought everyone closer. So why is it the US stands out in this negative fashion?

A man shoots up Virginia Tech and another man shoots and kills churchgoers in Colorado. What exactly is going on?

While it may seem far fetched, the state of education and morality in the US may be what is partly to blame. The US is ridiculously religious when compared to other industrialized nations[1] and morals are something that many feel is given to us by religion and tradition. As a result education is not focused on rationalization of thoughts and feelings as this would be something that treads upon a parent's rights to instill their personal values onto children.

Furthermore, questions of morality in the education system are glossed over and students are fed what positions and actions are good or bad, without much thought to the actual reasons for this.

I was a Christian for seven years of my life. I would lie if I said that I hated those years or that those years were entirely wasted, even with hindsight. The fact is, I enjoyed them in my ignorance, and I learned a small part about compassion (though, it was entirely misdirected).

There are two camps of Christian thought regarding my salvation. One group says that since I had accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I am forever bound to him and thus I am still saved. This group usually loves to point out that there is no possible way I could truly know Jesus and be with him and then deny his existence.

To them, it would be akin to meeting your aunt for the first time, spending time with her, and then later on saying you never met her and you didn't think she was real. It would be a ludicrous thing to do.

The other group of Christians say that a Christian is able to do something called "backslide" in which they are either sinning again and in the clutches of Satan or no longer believing in the doctrines. To them, one can be sufficiently backslidden enough to no longer have the saving grace of Jesus.

To them, it would be akin to meeting your aunt for the first time, spending time with her, and then later on saying you never met her and didn't think she was real. The difference is, in this case, she rejects you and says that for as long as you reject her you can't go into her house.

Both camps love to point out that perhaps I wasn't a real enough Christian. I find this notion funny. It is a childish security blanket for them to think that I was never a real Christian who believed as they did. Not to mention it also belittles my experience and puts them on a pedestal of arrogance to assume they know what my personal beliefs were.

A Christian can be summed up as someone that accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Whatever actions they justify with religious dogma afterwards are actions of a Christian for Christian reasons, even if warped. This is the inherent danger in religion. The ability to be warped and changed to fit agendas has caused much harm in history and is the running gag of the Religious Wing of the United States at this very moment.

The question poised, however, is if a person is saved are they always saved? I retaliate, is a person saved to begin with? Is there any rational reason to think the soul was in danger of hellfire before supposedly being saved? Is there even a soul to save?

Once again Christians run from rationality and set assumptions to build upon. They are building structures out of grains of sand.

My personal stance? I was never saved. There was nothing to be saved from. I was sucked into a belief system and they leeched upon my need to feel validated and safe. I was used to spread this system for their own purposes.

Really, it is the Christians who need to be saved from their dogmatic delusions.

I've joined the Atheist Blogroll. It feels food to be part of a community. The blogroll currently has about 540 members on it. That's quite a lot.

I hope I can interact with some members and get some interesting discussions going.