Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  XVI.

  ______________

  Yerret J. Maclovich: My Father’s I’s

  “It is only in our decisions that we are important.”

  — Jean-Paul Sartre

  A dad’s influence over his son is incalculable. When the father of Yerret J. Maclovich (a pseudonym) was growing up, he was dedicated to Zen Buddhism. Later in life, when diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder, Yerret’s father, terrified of his illness, decided to give his life over to Jesus. Yerret watched as his dad, confronting possible death, begged and cried for his life. This had a profound influence on Yerret, and he decided that he never wanted to face life’s end with desperation.

  Although he was afraid of falling out of favor with both God and his father while he was considering atheism, Yerret was inspired by his former boss, an entrepreneurial atheist, who attempted to link his fate to his own will. Yerret’s secular worldview has motivated him to change his priorities. A poor student in his youth — who often thought that perhaps Jesus would come and fix his life for him — he’s motivated by the idea that our lives are in our own hands.

  I was born in New Orleans, but I spent the majority of my childhood in Chattanooga Valley, Tennessee, right in the heart of the Bible Belt. My mother was a member of the Unitarian Church. She is a theist but never became particularly religious. In his 20s, my dad studied Zen Buddhism at a monastery in Georgia. For a time, Buddhism had a profound influence on him. Growing up, whenever I’d have trouble in my life, he would always say, “Be in the here and now.”

  The influence of religion was always present in Tennessee. I remember people would often say, “God has a plan for you.” When I was in the first grade, in my public elementary school, for the first two months of school, my class held Bible study. I often got kicked out of that class because I asked too many questions. One day, the teacher came into class and said, “I don’t necessarily agree with it, but the school board has told me that I’m no longer allowed to teach the Bible.” For those first couple of months, the teacher had been glorifying God, telling the class that we should want to go to heaven and not to hell.

  My parents eventually separated, and when they did, my dad began to make sure that I went to church. Later in life, he explained to me that he took me there because of religion’s social benefits, that he was a single dad trying to do the right thing for his child. Plus, there was free food on Wednesday nights.

  I didn’t realize how religious Chattanooga Valley truly was until I got outside of the South. We moved to Pickering, Ontario, in Canada, when I was 14. I immediately realized how much more secular that community was than the one in which I had been living. Church and prayer didn’t seem to be a central theme in people’s lives. In school, no one prayed before class.

  When I was in high school, my dad developed an immune system deficiency, a disorder where one’s body thinks that it’s constantly under attack. His body would constantly swell up and itch everywhere. Even though he went to the Mayo Clinic, for about five years, doctors had no idea what was wrong with him. Eventually, he received the correct diagnosis and learned that he’s one of seven people in the world who has his specific syndrome.

  As he began to receive his treatment, he started to change. He was in a lot of pain and was scared for his life. He started to become incredibly religious. Prior to his illness, we would have conversations on any number of subjects, and he would give very analytical insights. After he was diagnosed, in response to questions, he often began to say, “That’s just the way God made the world.” I grew up receiving thorough, thought-out answers from my father. To see that switch was quite difficult to watch.

  His religiosity only grew as time passed. About two years after high school, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. My dad called me and told me to come to our house. I got on the bus and went over. There were two people there. They introduced themselves and said that they were spiritual healers who were going to cure my father of his immune system disorder. Then, they went up to my dad and asked, “Do you want to be healed? Do you want Jesus to enter your life?” He cried out, “Yes, yes!” They started speaking in tongues. My dad was crying, screaming, “Jesus Christ, Lord, Savior of Men! Please save me! I don’t know what to do anymore!” He was begging for his life.

  To this day, my dad continues to seek help from faith healers. He keeps a big picture of Jesus in his room and prays every night. Watching that event — and his overall transformation — had a huge impact on me. I decided that I didn’t ever want to beg for my life. When it’s time for me to pass, I want to be able to die knowing that this is it, knowing that I’ve lived a good life. I knew that I wanted to live a life free of superstition, but I wasn’t quite sure how I would ground my personal philosophy without religion.

  The change in my overall outlook on life occurred very gradually. I remember at one point thinking, “What do I actually know? What actually exists?” Right around that time, I began working for an atheist. He always told me, “If you want something to happen, you’re going to have to go do it yourself.” The way that he lived inspired me. He didn’t rely on anyone else to get anything done for him. He was a human being, and he had the capacity within himself to run a demanding business.

  Books also began to influence me. John-Paul Sartre’s thoughts on existentialism and humanism had a tremendous impact. I found his idea that, ultimately, we humans are responsible for everything, to be true. I agreed with his idea that we each should live to create the world as we think it should be.

  These ideas changed me. When I was younger, I didn’t do very well in school, and I wasn’t particularly concerned with my future. I took life day to day. My new, nonreligious perspective motivated me to get the most out of myself. The realization that what happens in my life is up to me, that no one can do it for me, made me want to take control of my life.

  I knew that, eventually, I would need to discuss my beliefs with my dad. One night while we were having dinner together, he started promulgating the idea that God is great. I finally said, “I think I’m an atheist.” He told me, “You know, that’s evil. It’s evil not to believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God.” We had a small fight, and he even kicked me out of his car. I’m afraid that if any religious person reads this, they’ll conclude that all atheists have father issues. In truth, over time, we’ve actually grown to have a really good relationship. We’ve agreed to disagree.

  What gives me joy in my life is being able to try to change the world to the way that I want it to be. It makes me happy to influence the world with my will. As Sartre noted, you are how you live. In order to be true to yourself and helpful to the world, you must live your beliefs every day.

  XVII.

  ______________

  Jennifer McCreight: The Evolution of Atheism

  “If I could give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I’d give it to Darwin. Before Darwin, I think it just stood to reason for just about everybody that it takes a great, big, magnificent, wonderful, intelligent thing to make a lesser thing. You never see a pot making a potter, you never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith. It’s always big, fancy, smart things making stupid things.

  And Darwin turned that just upside down. He said, ‘No, we can have an absolutely mindless, ignorant, mechanical process which generates minds.’ Then, we could begin to see how the sorts of things that minds do, that is to say, designing things, creating things, inventing things, could be done by matter.”

  — Daniel Dennett

  A seventh-grade Jennifer McCreight answered with a nonchalant “no” when asked whether she believed in God. This was just the beginning of her involvement in all things Godless. Once she became aware of the social stigma associated with being an atheist, she frequently withheld her true beliefs until she entered college. As a founder of the only secular group at Purdue University, a public, conservative, predominately Christian college in Indiana, she was surprised by the amount of support that t
he group received from the student body and its professors. It had 400 people on its mailing list by the time of her graduation, more than most of the Christian clubs on campus.

  Jennifer feels as though she went through two phases of atheism: the first, when she wished that religion was true, and the second, when she no longer did. She began to feel incredibly lucky for this one life. Through her college group, numerous speaking engagements, and a popular blog, Jennifer has become a recognizable figure in secular activism. She looks forward to the day when the movement makes itself obsolete.

  I grew up in northwest Indiana right on the border of Illinois, in a suburb of Chicago. I was born into a fairly secular household. Both of my parents had been raised in religious families, but when I was growing up, we never went to church. We celebrated Christmas and Easter solely because we liked presents and loved chocolate. In truth, I wasn’t really exposed to religion until I was in middle school, when my peers started talking about the subject. Many of them had begun going to church camps and CCD. I didn’t even realize that religious people existed until then. Around that time, when I was in seventh grade, a friend asked me, “Do you go to church somewhere?” I bluntly responded, “My family doesn’t go to church.” He then asked, “Do you believe in God?” I said, “No, I guess not.” He said, “So you’re an atheist then?” I replied, “Is that what the word means? I guess so.” It was a really simple interaction. I had no idea how big of a deal religion was for so many people.

  The middle school that I attended was pretty cool regarding religious discussions. We had Jewish students, Hindu students, Muslim students, and Christian students. No one really seemed to care about religious differences. I remember conversations in which my friends and I would talk about religion and openly ask philosophical questions. Looking back, those were oddly precocious exchanges to be taking place among 12-year-olds. They were more civil than most of the discussions that take place about these topics throughout the country.

  Part of the reason I likely resisted religion was because my dad had always instilled in me a healthy dose of skepticism in all subjects. Growing up, he never identified as an outright atheist, but he also made it clear that he didn’t believe that people needed to go to church to be good. He loved to play the devil’s advocate. I remember one time we were watching a commercial that showed two squirrels high-fiving each other. He sarcastically said, “Oh, I wonder how they trained those squirrels to do that!” I said, “Dad, that’s a computer! They don’t train actual squirrels!” He said, “How do you know?” He would always ask silly questions like that to try to get me thinking. He is also a huge history buff and often said that more people had been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. While he has always been very vocal about his skepticism of religion, he never used the “A” word until after I began my own atheist activism much later in life.

  My grandparents have always been religious. They’re Greek Orthodox. When I was seven years old, they asked me why our family celebrated Easter. I answered, “Because that’s when the Easter bunny comes!” They were very upset that I had never even heard of Jesus. Since that incident, we’ve had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy regarding religion.

  An important intellectual moment happened to me when I was 14. That was the first time that I heard about the theory of evolution. At first, I was convinced that the theory couldn’t be true. I thought, “Life is too complex to have happened naturally” and couldn’t understand how people could answer very basic evolutionary questions.

  These concerns were stirring in my head right around the time that I began to participate in the academic competition Science Olympiad. I loved my coach, who was my former science teacher. He was very pro-evolution. When I told him that I couldn’t grasp evolution, rather than ridiculing my confusion, he said, “I understand why,” and he patiently educated me on the subject. I later found out that he’s agnostic.

  Looking back, my fundamental source of bewilderment about evolution stemmed from the fact that I couldn’t understand its basic definition. At first, all I knew was that evolution taught that life changed over time, that living organisms somehow got new traits. To me, that seemed nearly impossible. I couldn’t understand how if something evolved to be male, a female would somehow also simultaneously evolve in the exact same way to be its partner. It appeared to me that the two had been intentionally guided to reproduce.

  Over time, as I learned more, a light bulb went off in my head. In reality, evolution works very gradually, with many changes taking place over millions and millions of years, having its effects on populations that are isolated from each other. To humans, a year seems like a lot of time, and contemplating millions and millions of years is not easy for us. Beginning to comprehend the time span of evolution — and the changes that can occur within that amount of time — was the tipping point for me. I finally began to see how all of life could have evolved through natural mechanisms.

  This subject got me thinking about God and religion. I started to think, “Maybe God does not answer prayers, but there must have been something that set up everything that we see around us, something that has guided life’s process. The universe is too awesome to be explained in some other way.” I believed the “I can’t comprehend it, therefore there must be something” argument for awhile. I went through a deist phase. Eventually, I realized that, in truth, nothing needed to fill that void.

  I became totally fascinated with evolution and had been freed from the need for some sort of creator to guide the process of life. For the rest of high school, though, I didn’t call myself an atheist because I had become more aware of that word’s social stigma. I found that as my peers were getting older, they were going to church more, and they were getting involved in religious organizations like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I found that if I told someone that I was agnostic, they respected that, like it was a better philosophical position than atheism. To them, it meant that I was still questioning. I think people assumed that if I identified as agnostic, I would eventually agree with their religious perspective. I was very non-confrontational at that time.

  The issue of my religious beliefs continued to come up in my personal life, though. I had a very religious, conservative boyfriend at the end of high school. I continued to use the word “agnostic” because I knew that he could deal with that idea. Whenever I actually talked about what agnosticism meant or examined the lack of evidence for God, he would get pretty upset. In retrospect, I think that he was the person in my life who kept me from calling myself an atheist.

  At one point during our relationship, he asked me if I would go to church with him. I had never been to church before, but I told him that I would go because I loved him and because I knew how important it was to him. I said that if he wanted me to come with him to check out his church, then I would. The next day, he called me up, and he dumped me. He said that he couldn’t date someone who didn’t want to go to church for the right reason: because they believe in God. That relationship had a significant impact on me. It made me realize that I didn’t have to conceal my identity just to make someone else happy. I realized that, first and foremost, I should be honest.

  During the summer before I went to college, I found The God Delusion in Borders. At that point I didn’t know anything about Richard Dawkins or the atheist movement. I thought, “The God Delusion? Who would write such a thing?” I opened it up, and I flipped around the summary. I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is how I feel. I should really buy this book. I’ve never been exposed to anyone who’s felt this way.” I bought it on a whim and brought it with me to school. Reading that book made me realize that I am an atheist, that I shouldn’t be afraid to use the word, that I should try to erase the stigma that’s associated with that word. It made me become a lot more vocal. I realized that I have the right to voice my opinion, too.

  As I was establishing this self-confidence, I enrolled at Purdue University for my freshman year. I experienced some culture sh
ock. While Purdue is a secular institution, it’s known in Indiana for being the conservative, religious public university. When I arrived, there were roughly 50 Christian groups on campus. The Christian groups commonly put flyers in everyone’s mailboxes in the dorms. I couldn’t walk through the school grounds without getting stopped by someone asking me to join their religious group. I felt really alone for a while, like I was the only atheist. That was a really weird experience for me because I grew up having so many friends.

  I lived in the honors science floor. Most of the students in the dorm were at least skeptical of religion. We began to ask, “Why don’t we have a group? Every religion on campus has a group. Why isn’t there a group for people who aren’t, for people who don’t think religion’s a good thing?” I didn’t know how to start a club, but the idea was of interest to me. Then, an incoming freshman the summer before my sophomore year made a Facebook group called “Purdue Atheists.” A friend found it and pointed it out to me. I messaged the group’s creator, and that summer, we wrote up a constitution and turned in all the necessary forms. When we had our first meeting, I booked a room for 40 seats because I didn’t think anyone would care about it. Over 100 people showed up, and dozens were spilling out into the hallways. That made me realize that our group was really important, and I became very active after that.

  Our group meant a lot to its members. Perhaps our best event was a simple public forum that we held, titled “Why I’m an atheist.” People were so relieved to be able to finally talk about why they don’t believe.