Armor and Sword

This is an entry that has floated around in my mind for almost two months. What I'm about to discuss will likely upset and anger some of you. Honestly, I would find it especially surprising if I even have enough readers to cause those feelings. Regardless of that, however, I will share some feelings and experiences that will explain why I take the position I'm about to mention. This is a topic that I consciously avoided mentioning on my former Facebook page in years past. This time I'm not holding back.

I'm an atheist.

And I believe I have finally arrived at the point where I can no longer tolerate Christianity and religion in general. I mention Christianity specifically because it's the dominant religion in my country, which, of course would also make it the reason that I have experienced as much oppression in my life as I have. I recognize that there are many who have it far worse: trans-people, those who follow other religions, women, and generally the whole LGBTQ community, just to name a few. These people, often innocent, face defamation, discrimination, devaluation, and, yes, death. Just turn on the news or pick up a newspaper--it's everywhere and it happens every day.

And I also recognize that my identifying as an atheist on the Internet and then explaining why doesn't necessarily make me special. But that doesn't matter to me because this blog is my personal platform upon which I organize my feelings and thoughts through writing. I am writing for a very small group of people and myself, so this entry, like all the others I've written here, fulfills its purpose.

In the entry before the last one, I mentioned how I lost my friend (who was also an ex-girlfriend) Jane. Her rejection initiated the final stages of the erosion of my tolerance for Christianity. She finalized a process that had taken more than a decade to unfold. That part of my life was arduous and acutely frustrating. I'm sometimes amazed at how I still function normally today considering how much pain I endured through that time. Suffice to say that Jane wasn't the first and she certainly won't be the last person to show me the oppressive nature of Christianity.

Before I carry on, though, I want to make this clear:

I know that Christianity is but one of the world religions that visit oppression on the billions of humans living on this planet. Islam, Hinduism, and even Buddhism, for all its purported pacifism, are also major agents of oppression of the different types of people I referred to just a little while ago. Indeed, no one is really safe from the pain these institutions and ideologies cause daily.

The snakes and arrows a child is heir to
Are enough to leave a thousand cuts
We build our defenses, a place of safety
And leave the darker places unexplored

I focus on Christianity because what I'm sharing here is very personal. I have not yet faced discrimination from Muslims, Jews, or Scientologists, so they don't really figure into the story.

When I was very young, probably about six or seven years old, I had already many names of dinosaurs memorized. Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Deinonychus, Rhamphorynchus, Ankylosaurus, and more dominated my mental landscape, just as they had the world during the Mesozoic. So, of course, because I had devoured more than any six or seven-year-old's share of dinosaur books, I knew that the dinosaurs died off some sixty-five million years ago. I didn't know what sixty-five million really meant, but I knew it was a lot more than a thousand. It was a really big number. So whenever my Sunday school teachers would tell the story of Noah with their felt figures on the brightly-colored easels, I always somehow felt uncomfortable. I didn't feel right about the story of Noah the more I thought about how the dinosaurs didn't survive the flood. If the Christian god created dinosaurs, why wouldn't he have saved them along with the lions, mosquitoes, snakes (how ironic), and penguins? Of course, the humans in the story had committed crimes in the eyes of the Christian god, but I didn't think it was fair to punish the dinosaurs too. The dinosaurs had done no wrong. They're just animals. I had no concept of evolution or natural selection and would not for a few more years, but I just couldn't agree that their god decided not to spare the dinosaurs.

That was the first step. My mother had unknowingly sown the seeds of my atheism by getting me hooked on dinosaurs and outer space. When I was about nine years old and had already exhausted my school library's supply of dinosaur books, I turned my attention to the prehistoric mammals and then the origins of Earth. I distinctly remember reading a book illustrated with images of Earth as a bubbling ball of magma, shifting and changing for billions of years. I saw pictures of an enormous Moon hovering menacingly over roiling oceans. I can even remember feeling my stomach drop just thinking about how scary that must have been for the bacteria living in those seas. So with those images glowing in my mind's eye, I continued to slide further into doubt about Genesis. I actually went to church for years while not believing in creation anymore. I would pay lip service to it, of course, for my friends, youth leaders, and parents, but I knew deep down that it was just wrong. I began to wonder why, of all the planets in the Solar System and the rest of the universe, that god had put life on only one. It seemed silly to me.

Fast-forward to when I was thirteen years old. I had just discovered masturbation. And like many other kids around my age growing up similarly, I carried overwhelming guilt at having sexually stimulated myself. I still lived under the impression that god watched my thoughts and actions without missing anything. I always mentally looked over my shoulder and then felt more shame than I should have following orgasm. I felt like I was living in some kind of dystopic reality where my private time wasn't safe from prying eyes. I began to question why god would even bother with my trifling day-to-day misdemeanors. Like the dinosaurs, I wasn't hurting anyone. So that uneasiness grew into resentment. Not at myself or this newfound part of my sexuality, but at the voyeuristic god who surveilled my every move.

Not long after, I discovered evolution and realized a few key things that ultimately helped me leave Christianity. Primates all have five fingers on each hand and a large brain. Almost all animals possess bilateral symmetry. Birds look like theropod dinosaurs. Geological layers of ancient deposited rock and sediment showed the staggering age of the Earth. When I took this knowledge to my crumbling faith, my sense of religion promptly disintegrated. I had finally realized that I was an atheist at age fourteen. I also had some knowledge about AIDS and the horrible wars all around the world and wondered at a god who would just allow such disasters to pass. I was fed up with the idea that he was testing humanity. And one of my youth pastors was fed up with me and my insufferable questioning of religion. He stopped visiting my house after I had asked him too many blasphemous questions. The fact that he gave up on me showed me that Christianity had no rational, measurable answers to any of my questions. By that point, I had long overcome my fear of hell.

Faith is cold as ice
Why are little ones born only to suffer
For the want of immunity
Or a bowl of rice?

Well, who would hold a price
On the heads of the innocent children
If there's some immortal power
To control the dice?

And then, of course, after coming out to my friends and family, began the discrimination. The gross misunderstandings and shouting matches. I found myself having to play defense constantly against people I thought were my friends. Against my own family, which hurt me the worst. I love my family--please understand--but explaining and reiterating the most basic foundations of my nonbelief drained me more times than I can even remember. The mother of one of my closest friends would say, to my face, that "You'll come back to church someday soon, when you grow up. I used to be like you." That cut more deeply than the stock-standard "Yer goin' t'hell, boy" I usually received at school. I couldn't believe the arrogance, the presumptuousness. I even tried a few times to see if I could entertain deism or revisit Christianity, but each time, it just didn't hold. I had already seen the hypocrisy and then the objective truth that science had so painstakingly discovered. The arrogance of the Bible and its adherents was just unignorable to me.

Like a forest bows to winter
Beneath the deep white silence
I will quietly resist

Like a flower in the desert
That only blooms at night
I will quietly resist

Blind men in the market
Buying what we're sold
Believe in what we're told
Until our final breath
While our loving Watchmaker
Loves us all to death

My parents tried for years to cure me of my atheism by dragging me along to church. This is where the real oppression began, around when I was fifteen and sixteen years old. By now I knew about the Armor of God and that Christians were supposed to wear their faith as such--like armor. To me, though, it was armor that defended against the onslaught of science, logic, and facts. This was one of the first instances upon which I began to realize that Christians, especially those in America, had reforged their armor into swords with which they injured people like me with a thousand cuts.

Sometimes the fortress is too strong
Or the love is too weak
What should have been our armor
Becomes a sharp and angry sword

I would get dirty looks from people I knew from band. They would whisper amongst themselves and point at me furtively while I read atheist and devil worshiper on their poorly-hidden lips. Of course I had to realize my atheism right in the sweatiest section of the Bible Belt. A former friend I made in high school attempted relentlessly to convert me while we were in eleventh grade. He would invite me to video game nights at his church, Christian rock concerts, and give me CDs of his favorite Christian bands. I politely turned him down every time. A psychology teacher I had in twelfth grade asked me twice to come to FCA's morning meetings, trying to entice me with Chik-Fil-A chicken sandwiches and music--to which I also politely declined. After the second time, though, he took his sour-grapes attitude and pointed his sword of faith at me, warning me of my erroneous life choices. Christians kept chipping away at my tolerance for their religion, and somehow, I never lost my cool with any of them. Until Jane left me.

I don't need to belabor the details of one of the most devastating breakups of my life again, so I'm just going to mention that one huge issue between me and Jane lay in our philosophical/religious decisions. She never failed to entreat me to join her at her Sunday Masses. I was nineteen and had grown more principled in my atheism. I loved Jane dearly, but I refused to compromise my own convictions. She wouldn't budge either, and that opened a rift between us that could not be bridged no matter how many discussions we had. No matter how many tears we shed over each other. I could feel my heart ripping in two every time she said that she wished I believed in the truth of Jesus's resurrection like she did. And I wept for her blindness to facts and science.

We're one
But we're not the same
Well, we
Hurt each other
And we do it again

You say love is a temple
Love the higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

The moment when I finally blew up at a Christian after years of patiently enduring oppression came when I called Jane on a night when I was at work. I paced angrily through the store, my mind racing with thoughts that burned like shrieking tires. I broke down and called her and took my anger out on her. She pointed out our religious differences and I just lost it. I cursed god and told her she was brainwashed and hopeless. To this day, that is one of the most hurtful things I've ever told a human being. This is on the level of the text that I sent to Lalita with the purpose to emotionally eviscerate her almost two years ago. I can be particularly nasty when I'm feeling enough pain. Just thinking about it now, here, in the apartment I share with Lalita--a warm and inviting space--I feel the light rain and see the harsh lights reflecting off the slick surface of the parking lot behind the Domino's where I had my apocalyptic bout with Jane. Memory is powerful.

A little while later, I tried to see things Jane's way as far as religion. I tried desperately to get her back in any way I could. My mindset was so dire that I entertained converting for her as a compromise to win her back. That didn't even last the week.

I tried to believe
But you know it's no good
This is something that just can't be understood

No matter how hard I tried to stretch my hand out to her, she would always remain out of reach. And it was then that I finally learned that I couldn't date Christians if I wanted to be happy.

A year later I ran afoul of my former band friends by posting an atheist cartoon on Facebook. After a lengthy battle with their devout creationism, I felt even more drained. My Facebook friends censored my atheism while they paraded their religious posts back and forth across my feed. I had to sit down and shut up and suffer their nonchalant intolerance.

Fortunately, I had surrounded myself with more like-minded people like Lalita, Jake, and Julie. I joined the SSA group on campus at Dalton and the CFA in Chattanooga. Though I had a slightly stronger feeling of community, I still had to face my parents' faith. However, recently, my own mother has faced discrimination from her friends just for questioning her faith. Which is an especially difficult thing to do in your fifties. My mother's friends interrogated her, demanding her to answer to whether she was sufficiently godly, whether those with whom she socialized were Christlike enough. So she turned to me. My heart ached for her, so I couldn't just stand by. She asked me about evolution and contradictions in the Bible. I helped her look up its verses supporting slavery and murder of gay and lesbian people. My mom was horrified. But she still has difficulty letting go of her faith even now. She searched around the Internet for deaf people who had let go of their faith and she found one former deaf preacher who had. She devoured his videos, showed them to me, and had many discussions with me about her thoughts. I felt a great deal closer to my mom and moreover, felt safer talking about my nonfaith around her. After ten years, it was an immense relief.

I started watching Secular Talk, probably now my favorite channel on YouTube, shortly before I left for Colorado. Being able to converse with Lalita again reawakened my awareness of my growing intolerance for Christianity and religion in general, and Secular Talk focused those thoughts and feelings. The facts were overwhelmingly against just taking a more moderate stance.

When Jane turned her back on me for the last time, she solidified my position. I cannot brook the proud ignorance of Christians and will stand against them for the rest of my life in every place I go. I've had enough and now it's time to stand up for myself and for those who are too damaged to do so themselves. I'm not afraid anymore.

I believe in the beauty of a fifteen-billion-year-old universe. I find myself in awe of the sheer immensity of geological time and the slow blooming of the evolution of all species. I will stand for the rights of those who live, love, and think differently. I will stand up for myself.

I've got my own spirit level for balance
To tell if my choice is leaning up or down 
And all the shouting voices
Try to throw me off my course
Some by sermon
Some by force
Fools and thieves are dangerous
In the temple and marketplace 

You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill

I am the Heretic and you can call me faithless. But I believe in love.

And that's faith enough for me.