This is a poem from my upcoming book:
How do you sleep?
Indigo rain cleansing my brain
after a restless night of “soul searching”.
Relief comes when you realize god isn’t real
and you’re released from your rusty chains.
An outlook of debilitating winter
melts and sizzles into freedom.
Like fresh linen under the morning sun —
I put my heart out on the line and won.
I’m the shy queen of my ruby paradise
which resides right here on earth.
I no longer yearn for a flimsy mystery in the clouds.
Breathe deep into the truth and sleep peacefully.
What was your “soul searching” like? How many religions/spiritual beliefs did you go through before concluding god isn’t real?
I went to church with friends for a short time when I was younger. I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t see what everybody else saw and everything seemed ridiculous. Then as a teen, I dabbled in Wicca. With a foundation in nature it made a teeny bit more sense than Christianity, but not much. I remember feeling a lot of confusion growing up. Then at 21, I declared I was an atheist and things were simple and clear.
So what’s your story? Did you try out other religions?
(If you’re curious, my poetry book is called, Free to Roam: Poems from a Heathen Mommy, and will be released 2/2/21. It is for sale on my publisher’s site freethoughthouse.com, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.)
I never had to do any soul-searching; I was brought up Catholic (in 1960s Spain), went to religious schools and so forth, and believed what I was told — but by the time I started growing pubic hair I didn’t have any remaining belief in goddishness.
When I was a young teenager, I thought there may well be something to parapsychology, but that didn’t last.
So it seems like we had a pretty similar trajectory, only mine was a bit shorter.
I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t see what everybody else saw and everything seemed ridiculous.
Exactly the same for me; well, that, and I could see the hypocrisy of self-declared believers. They did not practice what they preached.
(Just try slapping a Christian, and see if they actually turn the other cheek!)
I was raised in the Episcopal Church (kind of the USAan version of the Church of England), and I don’t remember ever worrying about whether God existed. I loved the ritual of the church service, and I loved (and still love) the music — I was in the children’s choir. And I still frequently describe things using the language and imagery I grew up with.
Somewhere in my teens, though, the ritual started to feel phoney. FWIW, this was also about the time that I stopped hoping that there would be anyone on Earth who would care about who I was or what I was going through, and I started to accept that if I was going to survive, it would be entirely through my own efforts. Any expressions of concern were, in my view, just lies, and only said to make them look good. I suspect that a lot of the attraction of religion was the idea that maybe there was somebody out there who would actually care what happened to me, and when I gave up that idea with respect to humans, the idea of hoping for that from a non-human source seemed like bitter mockery.
I don’t think I ever became an atheist in the sense of being convinced that God doesn’t exist, though for a time I called myself that just to shut people up if they asked what I believed. I now call myself an “apatheist” — I don’t really care whether there’s any sort of “god” out there. I figure, if she exists, she can take care of herself (being omnipotent and all 🙂 ) and certainly doesn’t need my help. To be honest, the insistence on “proving” that there is no God just bores me.
However, what I’ve kept from that religion (or how I took it, anyway) is the idea that simply by existing, we have an obligation to do good in the world and to not do harm. If anything, morality is more important to me that it seemed to be to the more outwardly religious people in the church I grew up in. After all, if you can’t hope for some omnipotent outside force to step in and make things better, then it’s all up to us. I don’t come to this website for the atheism, I come here because it seems like most of the bloggers here (and maybe most of the commenters) have the same “theology” that I have, which is that making the world a better place and treating people decently is very important (I sum it up as “don’t be a dick.”) There have been a few bloggers here in the past who seemed to believe in hate or selfishness or self-glorification, but they don’t seem to be here any more.
How many religions/spiritual beliefs did you go through before concluding god isn’t real?
None. I spent a lot of time, as a kid, being dragged past medieval art (which is largely religious) and concluded that there was no omniscient/omnipresent/omnipotent god that would countenance “refrigerator art” to such a degree.
I’ve always been amazed at the people who decide they don’t believe in christian god, and become buddhists – because, somehow replacing one big framework of bullshit with another makes sense? Once you’ve figured out it’s bullshit, it’s time to just move on.
You might find this video quite interesting. I did.
It’s by a film critic who I respect.
How I Left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to Pursue Filmmaking by Chris Stuckmann.