Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  When I became an atheist, I started to talk to other people my age who had grown up in my church. Some of them told me that they had known that what we were being taught wasn’t true. Some people didn’t take the church’s messages with same level of seriousness that I had. In my childhood, TV was censored. I spent most of my time at church, and when I was there, I saw what I believed to be acts of the supernatural. My parents believed it. Their friends believed it. In my mind, that was the whole world. I think it’s basic human psychology to accept what your community tells you when you’re that young.

  One of the things that I realized the more I moved away from religion was that I had a huge reduction in anxiety and huge differences in my thoughts and my behavior. I began to realize that I didn’t have to be afraid of the dark. That sounds silly to say now, but my atheism took that fear away. Becoming educated took away the demons, the fear of the Rapture. Now, instead of getting into a hyper-vigilant state and saying, “Who is it?” when I hear a noise in the night, now I look for other causes and realize that it may just be the house settling.

  I think most of my personal problems that developed because of my church are now gone. It took a long time, close to 10 years. For me, actually meeting other atheists helped me a lot during my transition. What I found was that the more I was able to express certain ideas out loud, the more I realized that the world wasn’t going to fall apart because I had done so.

  Reading also helped. I read Plato and the classics. I also wanted to understand the history of the Christian religion. I read the Epic of Gilgamesh and started to piece together the historical roots of the Bible. I learned about psychology and realized that when my dad thought that he had fought a demon, he was probably experiencing a well-understood psychological episode. I began to realize that perhaps a whole congregation engaging in bizarre laughter isn’t quite as magical as it at first seemed to me.

  I was thinking about myself the other day, wondering, “What’s still left? What kind of damage do I still have from this?” I had a long haul, and I think perhaps the only thing that I still have is that I expect to work too hard for little compensation — the “turn the other cheek” idea, a willingness for masochistic sacrifice that I think the church instilled in me. Overall, though, I think it’s cool that I’ve been able to remove so many negative beliefs from my brain.

  I think that the atheist movement is highly important, even though now that I’ve come so far, I often feel as though I’ve lost touch with how negatively my religion affected me. I would like to see a lot more focus on critical thinking, including more self-criticism, within this new leaf of atheism. I think it’s really healthy for us to self-criticize as well as support each other and our ideas. I’ve been trying — and I hope that the idea catches on — to reach out to ex-Muslims. Many of them are scared to show up to an atheist meeting. I think others in the movement need to be aware that there are a lot of people who have had much scarier experiences than a lot of us have had. They really need support and people to talk to. That could potentially be important in dealing with some of the problems that we currently face with moderate Islam trying to censor free speech, while simultaneously addressing how intolerant more radical forms of Islam are.

  Overall, I’m really glad that we have a strong movement now and that there are a lot of conversations taking place, many of which should advance the human species. I see us helping as humanity begins to explain neuroscience and the biology of morality, something that I think is really important for both atheism and for science. It’s crucial for people to understand that a natural worldview can indeed comment on morality, that we really can have important scientific things to say about ethics and how we ought to live. There’s a lot more to be said, and it’s exciting that a lot of work is happening in that area.

  I hope that the atheist movement can contribute to influencing worldwide culture as well. One of the big intellectual problems that people have regarding a global conversations about morality derives from an idea that comes out of multiculturalism, the idea that everything’s relative, that one culture is relative to another culture, that what’s right for one culture is okay and what’s right in another culture is okay as well. I like the quote “It’s not relative because we’re all relatives.” We all fundamentally have the same neurobiology. That fact doesn’t make answering moral questions easy, and it doesn’t mean that humans will ever have a science of morality that will be able to address every conceivable moral question, but I think some things are fairly obvious. For example, most people understand that morality entails doing well for other people as well as for yourself, encouraging human flourishing. If that is true, then we know that empowering women, having women working, having women as an integral, participating force in culture is always better for a society’s overall happiness. If people want to change circumstances in a Third World country where there is a low quality of life, for example, they should educate and empower women. Pretending that that’s a relative statement when faced with so much evidence to the contrary is, I believe, fairly immoral. I don’t think that people will ever be able to say that there’s one best way for all societies and cultures to be organized, but that’s irrelevant as to whether or not we can answer some moral questions. We need to begin speaking about what’s best for a society from, at least in part, a neurobiological and evolutionary perspective.

  Life is far better for me now. I’m a much more powerful person than I was, as are my parents. They’re more liberated because my brother and I have pushed them to read and become more educated. For my mom, living with fear, guilt, and magical thinking was not good for her. I’ve been able to do a lot more with my life and my career than I would have if I had hung on to the religious ideas of my youth, although I do wish they hadn’t taken up so much of my life. It would have been better not to have had to go through all that, but since I did, I’m glad that I’ve come out on top. It’s nice not to be afraid all the time.

  VIII.

  ______________

  JT Eberhard: Evangelical Activism

  “I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  And I’d urge you to look at those of you who tell you at your age that you’re dead until you believe as they do. What a terrible thing to be telling to children: that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift, think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.”

  — Christopher Hitchens

  Shy youth from Arkansas don’t generally jumpstart their professional careers by attacking religion in the Bible Belt. But that’s just what JT Eberhard did, and he’s damn happy he did so. After a proselytizing high school teacher convinced him to commit himself to evangelical Christianity in his mid-teens, JT finally read the Bible. He was an atheist by the time he was finished. Shortly thereafter, he read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, which convinced him of the dangers of religion and that activism against its influence was necessary to create the kind of world in which he wanted to live.

  What began as joke — drawing Flying Spaghetti Monster emblems on the sidewalks of Missouri State University — has progressed into a purpose-driven life. He has helped organize multiple Skepticons, the largest annual secular convention in the Midwest, is a frequent religious debater, and has worked at the Secular Student Alliance as America’s only organizer of secular high school groups.

  I grew up in Arkansas in a secular household. My father’s an atheist. My mother, while I was growing up, was a very light deist. I became a Christian when a couple of my teachers proselytized to me in high school. It is understandable that I would have an interest in religion because
I was a socially awkward kid, and joining a religion was a quick way to make friends. My sophomore year in high school, I converted. My parents weren’t thrilled, but they never told me that. They have always nudged me to form my own path.

  I was invested in all the things that Christians tend to be invested in: going to church, trying to convert people. I was like most religious people, completely unaware of its theology. Bill Keller Ministries has confirmed that about 10% of Christians have actually read the Bible. Even though I was a practicing Christian, I had never read the Bible, yet I thought that it was the authoritative guide to faith. At one point, I attended a meeting of Promise Keepers, a huge, very anti-gay rights, “fundegelical” convention in Tennessee. I often pulled arguments off of the internet on subjects about which I had very little comprehension and regurgitated them to people. I certainly believed that I was right and that I had a personal relationship with God.

  Mostly, I was a guilt-ridden Christian, especially regarding sex. I tried to be pure and felt guilty when I couldn’t be. I was convinced that non-Christians were going to hell, so I always asked myself, “What can I do to save them?” I think that urge is what inspires a lot of Christian activism. The problem is that that notion tends to be able to twist good intentions in some very evil ways.

  Actually reading the Bible certainly changed my mind about religion and Christianity. I turned over the last page and thought, “I don’t believe any of this.” I very, very quickly went through all phases of religious de-conversion, from Christian to strong deist to weak deist to agnostic to atheist. At the time, I didn’t even know the terminology. In a matter of a couple of months I went through all of them. For a while, I was searching for another God. Quite quickly, though, I realized that other religions are all, fundamentally, bullshit.

  When I lost my faith, there were three emotions at work. I began to realize all of the harm that religion causes in the world, so the first emotion was anger that any force on Earth could produce so much badness. I also had anger at other people for letting religions slide, for not being more informed. That led to the second emotion that I felt, which was guilt over the things that I had done and said as a Christian. The third emotion was compassion for those who had been and were being harmed by religion. If religion never caused suffering, I wouldn’t care about it. For me, losing my religion was like taking off a wet, sweaty shirt. I wanted to get it away from me.

  I still had commitments to values and ideas, but I began to no longer have such an emotional attachment to them. If someone beat me in an argument, it didn’t matter to me because I became less emotionally attached to my beliefs. I became emotionally attached to the truth, so I enjoyed changing my opinion. When I found out that I had been wrong about religion, I was glad to have one more thing figured out.

  When I first became an atheist, I wasn’t particularly outspoken. It was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith that made me become a vocal atheist. The whole book was written in an accessible way. It was written for people like me to understand. There was one sentence in particular in that book that stuck with me, and I use it repeatedly because it convinced me that I needed to openly speak my mind. Paraphrased, it says, “We live in an age when someone can have both the resources and the intellect to construct a nuclear weapon and still think he’ll receive paradise for detonating it.” That hit me hard.

  After I read that book, I had an intense emotional reaction. I feel like I have a fairly strong sense of justice, and I realized that there was no greater threat to justice than religion. So, as a compassionate person, I wanted to do something about it.

  In college, I started to get involved in atheist activism. My friends and I started drawing Flying Spaghetti Monsters on our campus, and at one point we were stopped by a campus security guard who asked, “Are you part of a campus organization?” I lied and said, “Yeah, absolutely!” He asked, “Which one?” Because I have an appreciation for stupid humor, I said, “College Republicans.” He bought it. The group decided that if we were going to continue to be active on campus, we would need to create an organization so that we wouldn’t get in trouble. All we needed to create an organization were constitutional bylaws, five members, and approval from the student government. So we got five people, we filled out the paperwork, and our official group recognition passed student government by three votes. Over time, the group would grow exponentially.

  We were out to amuse ourselves, and because we were amusing ourselves, we amused others, too. People like laughing. At the beginning, we weren’t part of any national movement, so if we were impolitic, no one cared. We were only out for ourselves. When groups form in college, they tend to immediately affiliate with the SSA or CFI, organizations that have prescribed ways to run groups. But since we didn’t know about the national secular organizations, we were flying by the seat of our pants. What we did differently than most other groups is that we had a philosopher king setup, with one person who made all the decisions. It worked really, really well. There was no bickering amongst the officers. If something needed to get done, we just did it.

  One of my major goals in becoming an activist was to change people’s minds. I know what it feels like to be religious, but I also know that religious people can change. I was as closed off as anybody at the height of my religiosity, so I’m familiar with what happens in the brain of someone who is meeting atheistic arguments for the first time and doesn’t want to accept them. Some people try to close their brains. I’ve been in that position, and even though I tried to do so, I couldn’t. Once the worms got inside, there was nothing I could do, which is the way the mind works. We don’t choose our beliefs. Our beliefs are formed by the information that is in our brain. One can climb up to the top of a building and try to convince oneself by force of will that gravity doesn’t work, but you’ll never be able to do so. Our minds are reality-producing engines, so once ideas get into someone’s head that destroy their belief in God, even if they say, “No, no, no, I’m not listening,” the ideas are in there. There’s nothing they can do about it. I was the same way. Once they got in there, I was done. It was just a matter of time.

  In a way, this is why I believe atheists can be successful in the long run. I bump into a lot of atheists who express awe that we can make it look easy to beat all of the illogical arguments that religions and religious leaders make in debates. People think that theologians really do have good arguments, that it must take some towering intellect to beat them. I think most atheists also felt that way until they started watching other atheists win religious debates online. Atheists began to think, “That argument was easy. I never thought about that argument, but it’s so simple. These religious ideas are dumb, and I just never saw it.” Human beings have a herd mentality. If we see a bunch of people running away from something, we also run, even though we may not necessarily know why. People who act boldly and speak with confidence, like the world’s most revered religious leaders, assure people that there’s no chance that they’re wrong about their beliefs, and people tend to believe them.

  I personally think that the best way to change someone’s mind about religion is through confrontation, by telling people unashamedly and without apology that what they believe is wrong. I think this way for a couple reasons. The first is that when we appear strong, that influences people. We have every right to appear strong, which is what separates us from the religious. We have all of the evidence, all of the reason, all of the logic on our side. More people are beginning to understand that fact. As more young people come out of the closet, secular organizations like the SSA and CFI are providing warm environments for people to know that they’ll still be loved and supported. As more people are coming out, more people are realizing that not only do they know atheists, but that they like atheists, too. That has a powerful effect. It’s easy to say that atheists are the cause of all things evil when people are not faced with them. But when your child or your parents or your friend or your lover comes out and says, “I don’t believe in God,
” all of a sudden there’s a human face on that identity. That is happening right now.

  I’ve been incredibly interested in helping the secular movement continue to grow, and I was fortunate to be hired by the SSA after I graduated from college. It was quite interesting for me to hold my job organizing high school secular groups at this point in time. In my experience, many high schools do not want freethought or atheist student clubs and therefore try to stonewall them. Usually it’s juniors or seniors who are trying to start these clubs. The most popular tactic is that administrations will ignore the students, delay and drag their feet and wait for the student to either lose interest or graduate. If the students don’t lose interest or graduate, the administration will generally say that they require all clubs to have a willing faculty advisor. They then ask the student to find one. I’ve had plenty of teachers admit to me in confidence that they were going to be the faculty advisor for such a club but were told that it would be a bad career move by higher authorities in their district. We have solutions to these problems: even if a teacher can’t or won’t come forward as a faculty advisor, legally the school can’t require the groups to have one.

  As an organizer, I had access to an army of pro bono legal advisers. Every time something went wrong in high schools, I could message them and ask, “What is your take on this?” They’d advise me, and I’d tell the student what to do. Countless times the law has come down on the side of secularism in government institutions like high schools. Sometimes high school administrators would cave. Other times, they were dying to be sued. And anytime administrators would try to drag their feet, the students could call me, and I would contact that administrator and put the fear of God into them.