I would credit my atheism to an excellent education. I have had the opportunity to have been taught by many excellent teachers and professors who passed down to me the ability to think critically, ask questions, and to complete wide research to find answers. While I am not a scientist, my education provided me with a background in the scientific method, and a basic understanding about how the sciences can explain our natural world, and sometimes what others may call the “unexplainable.”
Because I was not as gifted in the sciences / mathematics areas, I chose study literature and writing. I found that through literature, there is a great deal of information and as that contributed to my atheism. I believe my first foray in to questioning the existence of god came about after reading Greek mythology in the 6th grade. After learning about all the myriad gods, goddesses, titans, nymphs, monsters, and super-powered heroes the Greeks once believed in, that they used to explain their world, I thought it might not be a stretch that in modern times, “god” was used by humans to explain our modern world. The Greeks once believed the titan Helios pulled the sun around the earth on the back of his flying chariot, when we now know that the Earth actually revolves around the sun.
My English teacher introduced our class to “Elmer Gantry” and “Inherit the Wind” in our freshman year of high school. I learned about the hypocrisy of believers, and how people can twist the Bible to fit their own needs and agendas. I found this was not only the case in modern times, and in reading Voltaire, I discovered that hypocrisy and religion have been travelling hand in hand for centuries. I discovered that promoting belief in a god or gods was also a route to power of those that promote dogma.
In college, I was introduced to Freud, and psychology. By reading further into the subject matter, I became aware of why people have a need or desire to believe in god, an afterlife, angels, or a higher power, why they have a need to feel some connection to the world around them. It can be difficult for the human brain to accept “not knowing,” and god and religion try to comfort those “discomforting” thoughts and feelings. I found that religion was there to soothe and coddle those who feel uncomfortable with life’s most difficult questions.
I am truly grateful for having been exposed to great teachers, who in turn exposed me to new ideas. Not telling me which may to go, but arming me with a variety of viewpoints to help me choose my own direction. I continue to use my educational experience to find new questions, and new answers, some that confirm thoughts, and others that help me to answers questions that others have.
Jonathan Judd
Yes, but how did you deal with the total disconnect between the two? After all, the “Oedipus complex” and “id” are as mythical as Helios.
I am so very pleased that the education you received went to such good use. It would be wonderful if a quality education led to every student developing the kind of critical thinking skills you appear to have acquired. Sadly it does not. I wish every student were exposed to the caliber of teachers to whom you give so much credit. Unfortunately they are not. A final note. I do hope that you have revisited these teachers and expressed your gratitude to them. They would undoubtedly greatly appreciate it.
Great, entry, Jonathan. As Robert Ingersoll said:
Just to let everyone here know, my book is FREE for Kindle today until Friday. Just givin’ the milk away this week. Or is it the cow? No, I’m the cow. Nonetheless, the eBook is free.
#1 KG says:
A friend who is a practicing psychiatrist tells me that Freud’s tripartite model of the mind (id, ego, and superego) remains the only such model that makes sense. This says nothing about Freud’s other ideas, of course.
Stay tuned for a revision in this point of view. I’ve just read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” in which a two-part model of the mind is presented, and it makes a LOT of sense. And I’ve ordered Amazon to send a copy of the Kahneman book to my shrink friend.
It may be that these two models are not in conflict; I can’t say. But be careful not to throw out the baby of the id with the bathwater of the Œdipus complex.
RFW@4,
Any model that reifies the multiple interacting processes going on in human mentation into some fixed number of “parts of the mind” is absurdly short of adequacy; and if Freud did get anything right, it was pure happenstance, as he wouldn’t have known a scientific approach if it bit him on the bum.
If you stayed in awe of Freudian ideas, you’ve just gone into another cult. If so it makes me doubt your critical thinking and basis in scientific method. Psychoanalysis it’s not a part of science or even comprehensive idea to explain human behavior. Psychoanalysis is a pulled-out-of-ass unable to falsify assumptions (read Eysenck’s and Crews’ books on p-analysis). Of course he highlighed some ideas (dominance of unconscious processes, importance of some events in childhood, defence mechanisms), but mostly he overrated the impact, provided any or mindshrinking explanations. Yes, his writings are good litereature, but they have little to do with reality.
Freud is nowadays totally unimportant to scientific psychology and only historically interesting. Like the humoural pathology in medicine. Psychology understood how unscientific it is but sociology has not, atleast not in continental Europe where it flourished in Germany and even more so France. So a lot of stuff was built on Freudianism like so called “critical” theory, social psychology (not identical to the scientific psychology subdivision of the same name) etc. and it is still taught widely so social sciences students get indoctrinated with that crap. Professors are usually completely unaware of unimportance of Freudianism in psychology and how unscientific it is. You could even study these things as majors in both undergraduate and graduate studies in these two countries (and probably in the small countries of same language). Fortunately, my university abolished it but it had to face fierce resistance of the student bodies, whose activists are often heavily into that stuff here. I hope it’s different at other places.
Basicly, Freudianism is dead in psychology but still not dead completely but undead because of living forth in some parts of social sciences.
Jonathan:
…..It can be difficult for the human brain to accept “not knowing”, and god and religion try to comfort those “discomforting” thoughts and feelings. I found that religion was there to soothe and coddle those who feel uncomfortable with life’s most difficult questions….
Until about my tenth year, I liked the stories in my ‘Bible for Children’ because they were handsomely written indeed, and illustrated. But the real description of angels, devils, sin, hell and eternal damnation in the OT, and the literally unbelievable events called resurrection, ascension and other miracles told in the NT, confirmed my suspicion that they are fairy tales. And I was (70 years later, I still am) amazed to see how all the grown-ups around me firmly believed they were real beings and happenings.
I don’t remember having had any “discomforting” thought about ‘not knowing’. To the contrary, I’ve always felt at ease with this uncertainty, felt happy to be free, to have the sky as a limit, not a provincial god. Not to mention the Christian God, who seems to talk, get angry, request sacrifices, promises rewards, whimsically determines whether a person will die the day he is born, or when he reaches the age of 116.
Thank you for this entry, regards.-
Thanks Jonathan. It seems you are an atheist because reason and evidence (or lack thereof alternatively) demands it. I am with you on that.
I sense having spent time here and similar places that most of us come to be atheists because of the same. Yet the theists often love to scream some version of “you are you JUST mad at god!” – the subtext being we are no more grounded or less emotional in our beliefs than they are in theirs.
While emotions have nothing to do with my conclusion that the supernatural is – well – nothing but childish fantasy, I find myself increasing emotional – annoyed/agitated – about organized religion and people’s intellectual dishonest and/or self-serving faith ploys.
I find myself noticing more and more the way religion is just a scam that is on balance harmful and/or wasteful. That angers me because let’s just say I think it is time we devoted those precious resources wasted at the holy font to real solutions. I find rational reason for my anger.
I also find myself biting my tongue more and more with people who just cannot NOT play the belief game. Good people,intelligent people, my dear friends, my dear family, who are committed to the notion of the supernatural. I cringe inside. And why shouldn’t I? I am not an intolerant person but why shouldn’t I cringe when people I otherwise respect and rely on essentially go into infantile “I believe in Santa Claus” mode.
I feel like you Jonathan, that I can rationalize their reluctance to give up the game. Warm fuzzies, social acceptance, etc. — I get it at some level. But it still makes me cringe.
But then I am cringing more and more about people’s stupid hero worship in general. A sign of my advancing years I guess.