Confessions of a Lapsed Atheist

American Thinker ^ | 6/21/2009 | Jenn Q. Public

[SeekAndFind]

Do you believe in God? Really? And you're willing to admit it in public?

Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant Atheism of my youth.

Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God.

When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but was more or less a bit player who didn't have much to say.

After my grandfather died when I was seven, his Baptist minister lifted me up in his arms and told me, "It's all right, Grandpa's with God now." At that moment, I could feel my dress was hiked up in the back and all I could think about was pulling it back down. But later, I asked around and discovered that God was our Heavenly father, whatever that was supposed to mean.

I figured, who better to ask about my Heavenly father than my earthly father, but when I did he laughed.

He wasn't amused in a "kids say the darnedest things" kind of way. He was laughing derisively at the idea that my mother's family believed in God. And thus began my introduction to Atheism.

There are people who call themselves atheist who are simply nonbelievers, and then there are the big "A" Atheists for whom Atheism is almost a religion. This quasi-religious doctrine isn't neutral on the existence of other religions; rather, Atheism is a virulently anti-theistic creed characterized by sneering contempt for religion and a profoundly dogmatic bigotry toward people of faith.

Want to know how Atheists see the rest of us?

I grew up learning from my father that Atheism is rational, and therefore, religious belief is irrational; Atheism is defined by logic, religious faith by fantasy; and science is real while religion is make believe. Faith, I was taught, requires a willful stifling of reason.

The Torah, the Gospels, the Qur'an? All woefully inaccurate, laughably inconsistent fictions used to encourage belief in an illusion for the purpose of social control.

My curiosity in religion surfaced again in seventh grade when several of my friends were planning Bat Mitzvahs. Surely my friends weren't ignorant enough to actually believe in God, were they? The answer was no. For most of these Reform Jews, this celebration marked the official end to the tedium of Hebrew school. Most of their families were Ethical Culturists with a recreational interest in preserving their Jewish cultural identity. In other words, they too were Atheists.

By the time I reached high school, having had little contact with religion, I was convinced that people of faith were credulous and unenlightened. They gravitated toward soothing tales of God and afterlife to help them deal with their own mortality. At best, I considered belief in God an anachronism, a quaint vestige of days gone by, on par with superstitions about wicked thoughts causing birth defects.

At my extremely liberal college, I was exposed to even more militant Atheism. It was there that I learned the mere whiff of religiosity is worthy of denigration. Many of the people I met approached religion with something between disdain and loathing, and considered all religious belief a form of fanaticism. Christians in particular were characterized as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fundies (and that was in polite company.)

Fortunately my mother taught me enough manners that I kept my bias to myself.

In this new environment, my Atheism was more than evidence of good reasoning, it was a socially desirable badge of intellectual superiority. Make no mistake: Atheists think they're smarter than you. Atheism isn't simple skepticism. It is a certainty that believers are wrong, and by extension, intellectually inferior. Religion, especially Judeo-Christian religion, is nothing more than a crutch for dupes.

But Atheists aren't content to leave religion as a mere object of ridicule. They want it cleansed from public life. And enlightened as they are, they've come up with quite the pretense for justifying the righteousness of their bigotry: they are defending the vision of our Founding Fathers from a dominionist conspiracy to establish Christianity as the state religion.

You see, for liberal Atheists, the only thing worse than religion is the Religious Right, a term they use to encompass all Christian conservatives. And what better way to siphon fuel from the Religious Right than to convince Americans that the government is perpetually on the verge of becoming a theocracy?

And so, they accuse local governments of trampling the Constitution in the name of God and they find subliminal Christian iconography in political ads. They wring new meanings from Thomas Jefferson's notion of separation between church and state, and condemn our country's motto and the status of Christmas as a national holiday. But above all, Atheists stoke fear among religious and nonreligious alike that conservatives view government as a tool to force religion down your throat.

Pope-slandering buffoon Bill Maher, something of a patron saint among Atheists, has called religion "the ultimate hustle." Last fall, Maher's fellow liberal Chris Matthews, a self-described Catholic, roundly criticized Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for talking about prayer in a "secular environment" and complained that she made the Republican Party look more like a church tent than a big tent. In March, Matthews complained, "Why does everything sound like the '700 Club' with this Party now?" Such examples of anti-religious bias can be found every day on cable news, network television, and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

As my politics strayed right of center after college, I realized I wanted no part of that Maher/Matthews worldview based in elitism and the ridicule of others. I made the transition from Atheist to atheist to agnostic, and have since discovered why it is often said that religion is experiential.

There was a time when I would have preferred any manner of torture to admitting the possibility of a higher power. These days, I'm proud to say I lost my faith in the Atheist creed.

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Jenn Q. Public writes about news, politics, and the seedy underbelly of liberalism at JennQPublic.com.

[MarkBsnr]

***The concept of “endowed rights” needn’t mean to imply a “creator”.***

The concept of ‘endowed rights’ comes with the implied endower. If not God, who endows?

***The principle of reciprocity doesn’t need a god for it to function.***

Not by itself; it does need a moral basis for man engaging other men in trade in a fair and honest fashion.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Most of the so-called atheists are really nothing more than Christian Atheists... all they can do is give you some harrowing display of blasphemy against Jesus, but they will gladly bend over and spread their cheeks for Islam because they are too much the cowards to fight it... For them, Christians and Jews are easy targets.

Myself, I don’t care why the Islamics hate me, I just want them dead. I’m not interested in saving anybody.

So long as someone is willing to pay there will always be someone willing to collect...

The only issue for most is who holds the collection plate in their temples for the god of communism or the gods of religion.

Morality and all of its associated ideals are rooted entirely in a presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.

The argument of some higher purpose is religious fallacy. Whether this is done by atheists or by the godists, it is exactly the same.

[MarkBsnr]

***Arrogance is a hallmark of atheists.

I’m sure the believers never display their smug sense of superiority by claiming that they have been “saved”.***

The behaviour of humility is what the Saviour ordered. Christians are not to be smug about something that they cannot know - it is up to the Judge, not any little pocket deity.

[dan1123]

The now-atheist doesn't believe that there is some invisible figure giving him 'points' for trying to convert people over.

For whatever reason, many atheists try to de-convert Christians anyway. I see them on Christian message boards all the time. It puzzles me though, since I never bothered searching out Christians when I was an atheist (and yes, I strongly believed that there was no god).

[RipSawyer]

“Real believers, if they had the highest faith in a god-figure, would not waste a single minute living their ordinary lives- they would be out crossing oceans, to risk life and limb to spread what they believe is the truth. For that, I have a lot of respect for certain missionaries from various faiths, even if I don’t believe their message to be true.”
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I can agree with that. While I am not an atheist I simply don’t believe in the concept of eternal damnation and I cannot imagine why those who claim to believe it often keep living as though they don’t believe it at all. I think anyone who really believed the doctrine would instantly give up anything that would interfere with going to heaven. Nothing could possibly be worth risking an eternity in hell.

I have actually known some who said that they know they are going to hell but they just can’t change. I simply don’t believe that they believe what they are saying.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

***The concept of “endowed rights” needn’t mean to imply a “creator”.***

The concept of ‘endowed rights’ comes with the implied endower. If not God, who endows?

There is no morality without one singular source defining what it is.

Plato’s Euthyphro is a great illustration. Socrates advanced the argument to Euthyphro that, piety to the gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible. (Socrates exposed the pagan esoteric sophistry.)

Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols used by the Left as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the "avoidance of sin."

---

***The principle of reciprocity doesn’t need a god for it to function.***

Not by itself; it does need a moral basis for man engaging other men in trade in a fair and honest fashion.

The Hindu calls this Karma.

Lord Krishna instructed Arjuna to ignore wordly constructs such as human morals - they are self-deceptive delusions that keep us from becoming the Atman.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Which one is a picture of Jesus from Revelations?

Which one is Kalki?

[Tribune7]

That depends...are we talking about Christianity as it is practiced today, where Christians leave others of different faiths alone in peace? Or are we talking about the Christianity that was practiced in Europe between three and five hundred years ago, when people did unspeakable things to their fellow man over the 'crime' of heresy.

We are talking about what Jesus taught. If I were an atheist I'd really push for people to follow what Jesus taught.

They're the "Perez Hiltons" of atheism.

Except they are not judging beauty contests but courtrooms, and grading papers in universities.

And they are not making fools of themselves but exercising power in attempting to establish a value system. For instance, by claiming words don't really mean what they were meant to say.

The first step in understanding what I am getting at is not to believe in God but to recognize that truth is an absolute -- not something relative and situational -- and that there is a purpose to our existence.

The next step is to understand that there is a moral code i.e. good and evil that transcends the will of man and to which each man and woman must account.

After recognizing those principles, you will believe in God.

[Tribune7]

I should have added you to 228 too :-)

[MarkBsnr]

******The concept of “endowed rights” needn’t mean to imply a “creator”.***

The concept of ‘endowed rights’ comes with the implied endower. If not God, who endows?

There is no morality without one singular source defining what it is.

Morals are a deceptive replacement for the “avoidance of sin.”***

I’m not following your post as well I really should. Could you please restate? If something is endowed, then there is an endower. Who is that, if not God?

And if you would, are morals internal or external?

******The principle of reciprocity doesn’t need a god for it to function.***

Not by itself; it does need a moral basis for man engaging other men in trade in a fair and honest fashion.

The Hindu calls this Karma.***

Call it what you will; there is indeed a moral basis for fairness and honesty.

*** Lord Krishna instructed Arjuna to ignore wordly constructs such as human morals - they are self-deceptive delusions that keep us from becoming the Atman.***

Explain your use of the term Atman. Do you mean it to be the individual soul, or to be the Supreme Lord. If the first, it makes little sense - I am who I am - and if the second, then it also makes no sense unless you are fusing Hindu and Mormon theology.

[MarkBsnr]

***Which one is a picture of Jesus from Revelations?
Which one is Kalki? ***

What is the significance of two paintings side by side that resemble each other in certain ways - the horse, the sword and the direction of travel? What is your point?

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

“I am who I am.”

Exactly.

[MarkBsnr]

***“I am who I am.”

Exactly.***

Fine; can you explain your previous statement in which you state that morals prevent it.

[Cvengr]

While I am not an atheist I simply don’t believe in the concept of eternal damnation and I cannot imagine why those who claim to believe it often keep living as though they don’t believe it at all.

Consider the alternative.

Why should perfect righteousness and perfect justice endure evil in its presence for all eternity?<>p>A lot of people read into Scripture their own understanding, rather than bringing Scripture into their mind and spirit through faith in Christ and letting God make it understood in our spirit.

We all stand eternally damned from Adam's original sin in the Garden.

Christ redeemed that sin for all of mankind. Redemption, though is not forgiveness.

There is nothing that says God in Perfect Righteousness and Perfect Justice must endure evil in His presence for all eternity.

God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, so that those who believe in Him, who simply have faith alone in Christ alone, might be given everlasting life.

As soon as any human has just smigeon more faith than no faith whatsoever in Christ, God is free to justly, righteously, and by His grace forgive us of all our sin and give the believer a regenerated human spirit, an eternal life and He seals those whom He loves.

While it is true that nothing could be worth spending an eternity in the Lake of Fire, the nature of volition and the fallen carnal soul out of fellowship with Him, isn't seeing Him through faith in Christ, but through a scarred mind.

Where remission of sin occurs, there is no more sin offering, but a fearful expectation of His wrath. If the children of Moses who had so much less, were dealt with so severely, what expectation does the carnal soul have of true justice and righteousness when judging ourselves?

Nevertheless, through faith in Christ, all sin has been redeemed, and He is fully satisfied by the payment already made, allowing Him to justly forgive our sins when we face Him and confess those known and unknown sins to Him.

Too many people confuse fellowship with God with morality or religion. The basics of a relationship with perfect righteousness and perfect justice are much more simple, direct, and provided by God Himself, simply by our exercising faith alone in Him alone, in what He has already provided.

[metmom]

I like your tagline.

[metmom]

While I am not an atheist I simply don’t believe in the concept of eternal damnation and I cannot imagine why those who claim to believe it often keep living as though they don’t believe it at all. I think anyone who really believed the doctrine would instantly give up anything that would interfere with going to heaven. Nothing could possibly be worth risking an eternity in hell.

I do believe in eternal damnation, as a lot of people do, but in answer to your comment. I think that a lot of people who don't live like they believe in eternal damnation don't change is because they don't think it's going to do any good.

That's the position I was in many years ago. I knew I sinned and deserved to go to hell for it, but I figured that I had done too much and gone past the point of no return. That's because I was basing my salvation on good works.

Basing it on the forgiveness offered through Christ, gives you a clean slate and a chance to start over.

Now, nobody is perfectly capable of living a perfect life, forgiven or not. If someone is really flip about it, I'd question what they really believe.

We all start at different points when we come to Christ. I knew someone who was a sincere Christian, but was very rough around the edges. Many people in church questioned whether or not he was really a Christian. But if you looked at where he came from and how far he'd come, the difference was staggering. He'd made more progress than any 10 people I know; he just had a lot further to go.

That could be another factor in why some people don't seem to live like they believe in hell.

Just curious. Jesus talked more about hell than heaven. He taught that it is real. Why do you choose not to believe that?

[MyTwoCopperCoins]

Weren’t you pretending to be Hindu, and trying to get people to go to your little Hindu Wiki page, that turned out to be a Christian-bashing, pro-evo site?

Eh? Read up on my comment history, again. I've always maintained that I'm an Atheist, here. Moreover, I've even declared that I pit one religion against another to prove each one of them wrong.

[MyTwoCopperCoins]

I’ve posted something about it in comment #161:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2276740/posts?page=161#161

[MyTwoCopperCoins]

 

Like I said before, religions, being the inventions of the minds of men, is also a sort of popularity contest.


If any faith allows a spectrum of devotion to be a member of its flock, then this is the mos obvious sign that the religion is a man-made invention. If a person is truly devoted to his or her god whom he or she believes to be all-powerful, then this earthly life is nothing compared to the afterlife. If a person of faith places restrictions and limits on what he or she can do for his faith, in life, then it is indicative of his or her earthly ties being stronger than the spiritual ones. It's simple logic, abundantly evident.


See the Hindu version of the same limits:

 

 

 

 

Yet, hard
The travail is for whoso bend their minds	15
To reach th’ Unmanifest. That viewless path
Shall scarce be trod by man bearing his flesh!
But whereso any doeth all his deeds,
Renouncing self in Me, full of Me, fixed
To serve only the Highest, night and day	20
Musing on Me—him will I swiftly lift
Forth from life’s ocean of distress and death
Whose soul clings fast to Me. Cling thou to Me!
Clasp Me with heart and mind! so shalt thou dwell
Surely with Me on high. But if thy thought	25
Droops from such height; if thou be’st weak to set
Body and soul upon Me constantly,
Despair not! give Me lower service! seek
To read Me, worshipping with steadfast will;
And, if thou canst not worship steadfastly,	30
Work for Me, toil in works pleasing to Me!
For he that laboreth right for love of Me
Shall finally attain! But, if in this
Thy faint heart fails, bring Me thy failure! find
Refuge in Me! let fruits of labor go,	35
Renouncing all for Me, with lowliest heart,
So shalt thou come; for, though to know is more
Than diligence, yet worship better is
Than knowing, and renouncing better still
Near to renunciation—very near—	40
Dwelleth Eternal Peace!

[MyTwoCopperCoins]

See post 161.