I entered college a devout Christian and left it an atheist.

In the decade since graduation my atheism has become more profound but less vocal. Nothing that I have seen or heard or read has indicated to me that there is any sort of supernatural world, any spiritual realm, anything other than this physical world in which we live.

I have not turned my back on religion; religious belief continues to fascinate me, has shaped my life, but for myself, I do not believe.

As anyone, I am the sum of my prior experiences, the totality of all that I have heard, seen, read, and done. These experiences have — for better or worse — been filtered through the sieve of my mind until what remains is the essence of Who I Am.

But who am I?

I am a non-proselytizing atheist whose personal moral convictions are deeply rooted in both the Mormon and Mennonite faiths, those religions of my youth. My convictions are tempered by personal experience and by ideas from authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Plato, Ursula LeGuin, John Stuart Mills, Ayn Rand, Joseph Campbell, Milan Kundera, Daniel Quinn, Kathleen Norris, Wendell Berry, ad infinitum.

I believe that one’s ultimate responsibility is to oneself and to one’s own happiness insofar as this happiness does not infringe upon the happiness of others.

Though I’m a devout atheist, I try not to be an evangelical atheist. Spiritual evangelism is a curse, a blight upon this world. Spiritual evangelism is responsible for most of the Great Evil that humankind has committed: past, present, and future. If your belief system is sound, if your god is the One True God, then others will come to know it through your actions; you needn’t foist your god upon them. Evangelism is the telemarketing of spirituality. I deplore it.

I deplore it in atheists as I deplore it in the religious.

I’m willing to share my spiritual beliefs (as I’ve done the past three days), but I’m not about to force them upon anyone, to espouse them as true for all people. I do not believe the world would be a better place if everyone were atheist. (Well…)

Spirituality is an individual thing. What is right for me may not be right for you. What is right for you is almost assuredly not right for me.

Though I am an atheist, I continue to grow spiritually. (It is perfectly possible to be spiritual without a belief in any supernatural presence.) Reading is my doorway to enlightenment, as it always has been.

Many of the books I read take religion, or spirituality, as a central theme. Why is this? Do I feel some fundamental lack in my life? Do I pine for god, for salvation?

No.

The quest for spiritual fulfillment has been a central human experience for millennia. It is a primary theme in the book of each person’s life. Naturally this has lead to an enormous body of literature in which religious and spiritual themes are explored. How can one help but read from this pool of books? Why would one want to avoid doing so?

I just finished Moby Dick: here is a book that is deeply spiritual without being religious, a book with spiritual themes applicable to all people, no matter whether they are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, animist, or atheist.

I enjoy reading about characters or ideas with which I disagree. To do so is often enlightening, illuminating myself and others.

I’m evolving. I keep an open mind, consider new ideas. (I see many of my friends and family cling to some idea or other and never let go — they do not grow or change. This works for them, and that’s fantastic. It does not work for me.)

Some of my best friends are Christians. Indeed, it could not be otherwise in this country, a nation in which ninety percent of the population is Christian and ninety-nine percent believe in god. I am friends with these people not because they are Christians, but because of who they are. I don’t care what a person’s religious belief is so long as they do not attempt to impose their beliefs on me.

The people I most admire are those who have undertaken an intellectual and spiritual journey and have ultimately been able to make that Kierkegaardian leap of faith, and who reveal their faith through actions rather than words. Ken Kauffman and Michael Hampton are two that I admire; they are intelligent, learned, and devout. Paul Jolstead (who, incidentally, posted a comment to yesterday’s entry as I finished this one) is making this spirtiual journey, has traded his atheism for agnosticism for spiritualism and, perhaps, religion. His journey is thoughtful and deliberate, stopping at many points to explore ideas he finds along the way. I do not know what point he will reach, but I know it will not be an arbitrary choice, but a result of reading and thought. To an extent, Andrew Cronk is also making this journey.

I try to live a life that adheres to fundamental Christian values (especially Mennonite values), yet a life that does not require a belief in god, and a life that does not focus on the little things. It seems to me that spirituality and religion should not be about the details (“thou shalt not masturbate”, “thou shalt not drink strong drinks”, “thou shalt not eat pork”, etc.), but about the Big Picture instead.

It’s possible for an atheist to be more Christian than most Christians. This seems a worthy goal.

It’s no longer important to me that I be Right, that I find the One True Way. I don’t believe there is One True Way. It’s more important that I live a happy, fulfilled life and that my actions do not interfere with the happiness of those around me.

Yesterday’s entry has engendered several thoughtful responses to this subject. It’s as good a place as any to continue the conversation.

I entered Willamette University in the fall of 1987 intent on becoming a Christian missionary to South America, followed by a career as a pastor in the Mennonite Church. My course selections reflected these goals.

During my first semester, I joined Young Life, a Bible study group on campus, but found the group left me unfulfilled. Its members were petty and reclusive, the group insular. It reminded me more of the Mormon youth group I had fled than of the Mennonite youth group I had embraced. Young Life did nothing to improve my esteem of fellow Christians.

Willamette was a shock to me. Or, more precisely, the myriad opinions on campus were a shock to me. Canby High School provided me a good education, but an education in an environment in which opinion was essentially uniform. Opinion on Willamette’s campus was diverse. My freshman seminar, World Views, included people with decidedly different opinions than my own. In fact, World Views would be the most influential class I took at Willamette.

World Views focused on the literature of Victorian England and the sea change that occurred in that country during the nineteenth century. It featured readings from Bernard Shaw, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and more. These were great minds, pillars of genius. I was staggered by the intellectual heights to which these men and women aspired. I dutifully read the assignments, but rejected most of their ideas; they did not fit with my Christ-centric conception of the universe.

Still, they had a cumulative effect.

By the end of my first semester at Willamette, I was overwhelmed. In only three months I had been exposed to a broad range of ideas (feminist theory, utilitarianism, communism, evolutionary biology, etc.), ideas that had changed the course of Empire. What chance had my mind against such might? My belief system was being shaken at its very foundation.

In the final paper for World Views, I wrote: “What I say is what I feel and not what I know. I know little but I feel much. Perhaps you should not attack me with knowledge but with feelings.”

This statement is telling. It illustrates my state of mind.

For years I had been transported by a euphoric religious fervor. My beliefs made me feel good, but I had never accepted God on an intellectual level. In fact, I had staunchly refused to engage in intellectual debates regarding the existence of, or nature of, God. I kept the conversation on a strictly personal, emotional level. I felt God in my life — or so I believed — buy my mind was not ready to tackle the topic; I had not even made a Kantian “leap of faith” (nor do most Christians). Despite having read a fair number of Christian apologists, I had merely bought into a philosophy and a culture that made me feel good.

(Aside: Now that I am older (and wiser?), I have no qualms with a person who buys into a philosophy and a culture that makes that person feel good so long as this “buying in” does not interfere with my happiness. There are actually times that I wish I could buy into Chrisitanity — the community of spirit has its appeals.)

During the writing of the aforementioned final paper, I first began to doubt the validity of my own beliefs: “I worship. You worship differently. Who is right? Let’s play a game: I’ll flip a god, you call heads or tails.” It seemed to me that my belief in the God of Christianity was perhaps arbitrary, based more on geography, culture, and chance than on the truth of God’s existence.

By the end of the paper, it was clear to me that my faith was on the line: “Next semester I will take Study of Major Religious Texts. Let’s see how well my dwindling faith responds now! Let’s see some proof. I want fire from heaven. Question everything. I’m waiting.”

That’s what my first semester at Willamette taught me to do: question everything. (And this helps and hinders me to this day, fifteen years later.)

I ended the paper by describing my reaction to all that I’d learned during that semester at college: “I fall to my knees and I pray. To a God that I’m thinking of giving my two weeks notice. I don’t know if he hears.”

(Incidentally: this paper to which I keep referring was pivotal in my intellectual development, but it was surely non-standard. It was hand-written in four colors of ink, written as an internal dialogue (not a monologue) that never addressed the essay topic (which was something like: describe the roles that Mill, Marx, Darwin, and Dickens played in shaping nineteenth century intellectual development). I was too self-absorbed at this point, too consumed by my own personal transformation at the hands of these authors to completely tackle the Big Picture. Professor Loftus refused to give me a grade for the assignment.)

I started my first semester at Willamette devoted to God, ready to spend my life in his toil.

I started my second semester at Willamette questioning God, challenging him: “Prove to me that you exist.”

My focal point during that semester was Introduction to Major Religious Texts. The course was less an objective survey of major religions than it was a Christian analysis of them. Still, it was enough to push me into the corner with the agnostics.

We studied the book of Job, a book I found ludicrous. God, as portrayed in Job, is a capricious child, wagering with Satan over the faith of a righteous man. God torments Job sadistically, as if He were a boy with a magnifying class, burning the ants. Is this the God I worshipped?

We studied Gilgamesh as a “primitive” religious text, yet it seemed no more primitive than the Old Testament. We studied the Bhaagavad-Gita, but I wasn’t impressed with Krishna and the demands he placed on his worshippers. They were like the demands that Jehovah (or Yahweh, or Whoever) placed on His followers.

Every religion we studied was, in its own way, a method by which humans could cope with a seemingly meaningless existence on the Earth. (This seems obvious now, but was revelatory at the time.) I moved from the camp of the Christian Existentialists to the camp of the Existentialists.

I was not long for existentialism; the philosophy was too nihilistic for me. I did toil among the ranks of the agnostics for a time, though, and this caused my carefully planned life to crumble. My life goals were no longer valid; there aren’t many agnostic missionaries. I fumbled around for a semester or two before deciding that psychology offered my best choice for a career. (Look where that got me!)

My last three years at Willamette were a gradual progression from agnosticism to atheism. As I read more widely, as I became more frequently exposed to the principles of the scientific method (also here), essentially the more I learned, the weaker my faith became until all that was left was an understanding that not only is there no God, there are no supernatural phenomena at all. No angels, no ghosts, no spirits, no life force, nothing. There is life, and that, itself, is awesome.

Still, I longed for a purpose to this life that only religion had been able to provide me.

[… to be continued …]

When I was young, I bought wholesale into the religion of my parents, as all children do.

A child accepts all that he is taught without question. He is taught to love and obey his parents, and to trust their guidance. If his parents tell him, “It is so,” then it must be so.

Even the most fantastic stories in this way become truth to a young mind.

In my family, the truth was that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, and that he had discovered golden plates which revealed another testament of Jesus Christ. The truth was that Nephi and Omni and Moroni and the other prophets of the Book of Mormon were also prophets of God. The truth was that this life was but a temporal manifestation of a grand, extended spiritual existence, an existence that existed prior to physical birth, and an existence that would continue eternally after death.

The truth was also that we could not drink coffee or tea or cola; on Sundays, we did nothing but attend church (as a child, the few times that we ever went to the grocery store on the Sabbath left me feeling dirty, unclean); we had Family Home Evening on Monday nights; we never took the Lord’s Name in vain; we bore our testimonies on Fast Sunday; we attended primary, seminary, priesthood; we called adults Brother Watson and Sister Smith; we lived in an insular world.

The truth is: I was happy as a child in this church.

The truth is: I became an unhappy young adult in this church.

My parents were very open-minded with us children. I do not remember them explicitly encouraging us to read, to explore, to ask questions, but they certainly never discouraged us. My father, himself, asked many questions and was not afraid to challenge the status quo.

As a result, I nurtured a curious mind. I read. I devoured books. I mostly tried to avoid that which might pollute my thinking, but I read everything else that was available.

(I can remember resisting The Great Brain series for years because I knew it made fun of Mormons. I finally succumbed when Tamati (Tom) Hall and his brother, Alan, loaned me the books. They were good Mormons. How could The Great Brain books be bad if recommended by good Mormons?

Skip the next paragraph if you are easily offended.

Curiously, Tom and Alan were also responsible for introducing me to another very non-Mormon book: Mortal Gods. Leaving aside the title (very ironic in this case), this slim science fiction novel was corruptive because it was the first book I’d ever read that contained sexual content. The book, totally unremarkable in every other respect, was responsible for my first masturbatory experience at the age of nine or ten. This was a Big Deal. Even more so than other religions, Mormons frown upon masturbation, and go to great lengths to discourage it.

A Science Fiction Book club mailer was bound inside Mortal Gods. The books I received from joining the club inspired me to start writing my own science-fiction and fantasy stories. Fast forward twenty years to this weblog.

Finally, the Great Brain’s younger brother is called J.D. This is a large portion of the etymology of my name; The Great Brain books were popular in Canby when I was in fourth and fifth grades.

Looking back, that evening when Tom and Alan, in all ignorance, loaned me The Great Brain and Mortal Gods had a tremendous impact on my life. Who would have guessed?

(On a purely geeky note — the date this event occurred could probably be determined because I remember that a version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine was being shown on television. Let’s check the Internet Movie Database. Aha! 05 November 1978 — a Sunday evening, as I suspected. Why can I remember this but not remember to pick up milk on the way home from work?) )

I’ve never really known why my parents chose to leave the Mormon church. For myself, I may have stopped going if they had not. During junior high and my freshman year in high school, I began to have serious doubts about the church, not because of its theology so much as its all-too-human flaws. People were petty. They gossiped. They stole. They lied. I told myself that no church founded on God would have members that behaved this way.

(To be fair, this behavior can be found in congregations of any religion. At the time, though, it seemed, to me, to be localized to the ward of the church to which I belonged. I took it as a sign of corruption. My adolescent mind longed for purpose, for a righteous God, but could not find it in that spiritual environment.)

We left the Mormon church and turned to Zion Mennonite, the congregation in which my father was raised.

I was fortunate that my peers at Zion were friendly; they went out of their way to include me in their activities. This, in and of itself, seemed to me a radical change from the cliquish nature of the Mormon youth. I felt wanted. I belonged.

The brand of Christianity to which Zion Mennonite adhered in the mid-80s was a marvelous blend of strict Biblical theology and modern liberalism. To be sure, the Zion philosophy would have looked positively conservative to most liberals, but the members seemed generally open to new ideas, were willing to discuss possibilities so long as they were rooted in the teachings of Christ.

Mormonism had been inculcated upon me as a child, but I bought into the Anabaptist philosophy on my own, and with my entire being. These Mennonites were pacifists; they were not evangelical; they were thoughtful and caring; they stressed love: agape and philia; some members even asked questions and discussed religion on an intellectual level. Most of all, Zion felt like home in a way that the Mormon church never did. (In truth, it still feels like home.)

For three years I devoted myself to this brand of Christianity. It was liberating.

I was active in the congregation’s Mennonite Youth Fellowship (or MYF). (Today many of my closest companions are from that MYF circle of friends.) I read Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard and other Christian existentialists. I volunteered to lead Bible studies. (My favorite was a friendship-themed Bible study that featured The Velveteen Rabbit as a supplementary text.)

At this time, three disparate aspects of my life converged: my devotion to God, the Mormon emphasis on missionary work that I learned as a child, and the 1986 film The Mission, in which a Jesuit priest attempts to convert South American natives. At the end of high school, I decided that what I wanted most, what God had called me to do, was to become a missionary to those less fortunate than myself.

When I left for college, my intention was to train to become a missionary to South America.

But something happened on the way to that place.

[… to be continued …]

By Saturday afternoon it had become clear that my knee wasn’t going to be sufficiently recovered to allow me to play in today’s soccer game. I wasn’t about to let my body to give me no for an answer; I’d been looking forward to this game for seven weeks, had spent too much of the season injured.

I pulled a Brett Favre.

In the twelve hours before the game, I took ibuprofen and hydrocodone in an effort to alleviate the pain. It worked. To combat the drowsiness these two drugs produced, I consumed a large quantity of caffeine. It worked.

Before the game I warmed up tentatively. Though jumping was painful, I felt I could play the game and help the team. And I did. For fifteen minutes. Then my knee gave out and, through the barrier of drugs I had erected, came a stabbing pain.

My actions leading up this point were foolish, but to my credit I did the right thing and yielded to my body. Cheikh finished the game in the net and did a fine job. I limped around the sideline and cheered the team.

I find that I like goalkeeping now that I’ve had a taste of it. I’d like to play keeper for the FC Saints in the spring, if possible, but I cannot help the team if my body is not strong enough to resist injury. My goal this winter is to become more physically fit, not only continuing my weight loss, but also building strength in my legs.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to do something about this knee. The hydrocodone and ibuprofen have worn off and the knee is causing me a lot of pain.

I’m so stupid sometimes: I thought I was being clever by deceiving my body so that I could play, but I was only being an idiot.

I’m going to miss soccer. I’m also going to miss the post-game bridge games that Mac, Pam, Joel, and I have had the last several weeks.

Still, I’ll have more free time now.