Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  Despite my appreciation of contemplative practice, like all religions, I found that Buddhism is inextricable from the people who practice it. Its religious writings, like all religious writings, have been written by people who lived in a particular time, in a particular context. In my view, Buddhism begins with some excellent ideas. But in the same way that Christianity has manifested itself in superstitious and damaging ways, so has Buddhism. Although it claims to be a religion of critical analysis, while I was in Asia, I saw old women who would go outside every day, take prayer wheels, and repeatedly spin them to try to generate good karma. I watched Buddhists who were performing ritual laps around holy sites step over lepers with severed limbs in their attempt to generate good merit. Once, I was sitting in an abbey listening to a lama speak about how the road to enlightenment is found through compassion, through opening one’s heart with love for others. Everyone was reverent, with their heads bowed. Behind him, there was an eight-foot Buddha statue made out of solid gold with an enormous diamond between its eyes. That rock alone could have fed the entire neighborhood for weeks. There’s often an enormous amount of wealth that’s concentrated within religions and, quite frequently, they do not use that money to live out their own stated morality.

  After I came back from Asia, I made a decision to come out as an atheist to my family. I was hoping that doing so would be made easier because my sister had already done so. She had had a fiery fallout with the Church based on gay rights, as the Church sees homosexuality as an aberration from God’s natural order.

  When I came out, I simply said to my family, “I really just don’t think Greek Orthodoxy is true.” My mom was emotionally injured. My dad said, “How are you going to raise kids? Your mother and I were happy to raise you in a church community because it provided a way for you to become a good person. There’s no way that you can possibly teach your kids morals without religion.” I was floored by that statement.

  There were more surprises, too. Over time, I learned that my family’s biggest concern regarding my transformation was not so much about my disbelief in God but rather about how I would meet Greek people and marry a Greek girl. That stunned me. I wondered, “Do Greek people only care about the social aspect of religion?” I began to think that, to many, religion isn’t about believing in God. It’s about community. I have a great deal of affection for that community and for my family, but I was appalled at how quickly my lack of faith had been overlooked and how immediately the attention and concern of my family jumped to cultural consequences. Regardless, I had made up my mind, and the doors of the Church closed behind me forever.

  At first, I was rather emotional about losing my religion. I felt angry at having been lied to and was upset about the way that modern Christianity was behaving. I was also scared because in my heart I was worried that my religion might still be true and that, no matter how remote the odds, there was still a chance that I might end up in an eternity of unimaginable torment. Once I got over that, once I realized that that’s not going to happen, that that’s not real, I found true relief.

  While I’ve never wavered in my atheism, I do understand its limitations as an idea. I think that most atheists, if pressed, will admit that, to some degree, they’re agnostic, as they’ll have to concede that there’s a lot that they don’t know. Because we believe it’s almost definitely true — that we’re as confident that there is no God as we are about our other firm beliefs about the world — a lot of us are pretty comfortable calling ourselves atheists. That’s my personal position, too.

  The transition that has taken place within me has resulted in a positive evolution. While getting rid of my childhood mindset and belief system did invite some new concerns, I’m thrilled to have been freed from a religious thought process. I don’t want to believe a lie or convince myself of something just because it makes me feel good. I think that’s genuinely unintelligent. Insulating oneself in false beliefs — something humans have consistently done throughout history — can allow those beliefs to manifest in damaging ways.

  XXIV.

  ______________

  Greydon Square: A Rational Response

  “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

  — Susan B. Anthony

  Raised in group homes, Greydon Square, born Eddie Collins, has lived a unique and often difficult life. Fascinated by religious concepts, particularly that of Armageddon, he became increasingly devout in his teenage years. He recognizes, looking back, that most of his life, from his youth to his time in the military, has been decided for him — when to eat and sleep, what to do, and what to think.

  In his 20s, he fell in love. His girlfriend, a fervent Christian, encouraged his musical career, which was becoming, ironically, increasingly anti-religious. As Greydon began distancing himself from his faith, she suddenly died.

  Using music as a release, he has released multiple full-length albums, including The Compton Effect, The C.P.T. Theorem, and, most recently, The Kardashev Scale. Learning, he found, gave him a jolt of dopamine. According to him, as long as he got his fix, then he “lived a great life.”

  My life has been somewhat unique in the sense that growing up, I was a ward of the court, born into the system. The foster homes that I was raised in were mostly grounded in religion or had some sort of religious influence, either Seventh-day Adventist, L.A. Church of Christ, or Episcopalian. I was raised in this environment and leaned on religion. I didn’t really have any understanding of why my circumstances were the way that they were.

  Many foster homes are run by old pastors or preachers who started them because they wanted to perpetuate their own views. All of the kids I knew in foster homes had gone through traumatic experiences and were particularly vulnerable. I didn’t know my mother or my father, and my sister and I were separated when I was fairly young. So I learned from my caretakers. What they taught me was religion.

  I was programmed to believe in the basic tenets of Christianity: God, Jesus, the devil, and original sin. I became fascinated with the end of the world, Armageddon. My first rap name was “Apocalypse,” and a lot of my favorite movies and favorite fiction had to do with end of the world scenarios. Religion had the ultimate climactic story, and it was supposed to take place in real life. I felt pretty confident in my religious beliefs, and I never questioned if they were true.

  In addition to its excitement, religion provided me with a sometimes-crippling crutch. While it did provide me with something to break from the monotony of gangs, fighting, chores, courts, social workers, attorneys, and visitations, I had real self-esteem issues and believed that God had intentionally made me unattractive. I thought that my placement in foster care had to do with predestination, a trial that I had to endure.

  I ended up joining the military right after I turned 18. I was really shy and anti-social. On the weekends, I spent a lot of my time in the barracks making music, trying to perfect my craft. It was a way for me to hide. I knew that music would never shoot me or pull a knife on me, it would never reject me, no matter how good or bad I was at it.

  The military was like one big group home. We had allowances. We had outings. Leaders made sure that everyone got along and did what they were supposed to do. Given my background, this environment was something that was very familiar to me. When I got out, I began to realize that most of my life had been lived for me as opposed to me having lived my life, thinking for myself, and deciding my own direction. The transition out of the military was much harder than the transition into it, which showed my dependency on a rigid, structured system.

  After I left the armed forces, one particular person, my girlfriend, had a profound influence on me. We were together during what proved to be a pivotal period of my life. One day, we had a conversation about the origins of religion within black culture. I asked her, “Had our ancestors not been a product of the transatlantic slave trade, would we today as African Americans believe
in the Judeo-Christian God?” I’ll never forget her reply. She said, “African Americans went through the experience of slavery as part of God’s plan. The reason that there is strife, poverty, and conflict in Africa is because He wanted to deliver certain chosen people into slavery 400 years ago.”

  No religious explanation about the world seemed to make sense to me, and I wanted to find one that did. After a lengthy binge gathering information, I went through a period of uncertainty. I thought, “I don’t know if there is a God, but I’m certainly not willing to entertain the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.” To me, that all-loving, all-powerful God came from the same cabinet as the Greek Gods Thor, Dionysus, and Isis. The Judeo-Christian God may be a different bottle of liquor, but they all appeared to me as fundamentally alcohol.

  I did more research on the internet. At that point, I had never heard any black person question the basic beliefs of the Christian religion. I continued writing music. I wrote a rhyme that eventually became a part of one of my first songs. I posted the lyrics to the website ExChristian.net and found that some people on the forum really liked what I was talking about. Once I found out that others enjoyed my ideas, I thought, “There are other people who are asking these questions!” I started writing more, and as I wrote, I ran out of material. I needed to continue to learn.

  When I was young, I didn’t feel like I was particularly smart. I wasn’t born with a lust for knowledge. Any intelligence that I now have has come both from developing a passion for self-education and from the sheer amount of information that I have consumed. When I realized that learning provided me with a shot of dopamine, I wanted to recreate that experience. I needed it. It became an addiction. I tapped my vein. If I OD’ed on ideas, then I lived a great life.

  As I learned more, I began to realize how great of a dude Carl Sagan was. He’s the information junkie’s junkie. Growing up, I had never watched his television series Cosmos. I discovered it as a grown man. Whatever it was that he had that made him speak in the way that he spoke, that made him so eloquent, I knew that I wanted that. Knowledge gave him something, and the only way that he could express what it gave him was to give it back, to try to enlighten people. While I knew that I would never have the intelligence of Carl Sagan, I could share his drive, his passion for knowing the right answer. All that I learned empowered me and fueled my writing.

  Music continued to be an outlet. I began writing about how religion had programmed my thinking, discouraging me from thinking for myself. I remember rapping my first completed song to my religious girlfriend. The look on her face said, “I can’t believe that you’re saying this!” I knew that she had never asked the questions that I posed in my lyrics. At that time, I was angry with religion because, for the first time, I was thinking about the meaning of death. I began to realize that I would never again see anyone who had died. I felt as though I had been cheated with an emotional safety net.

  Despite our religious differences, my girlfriend and I continued to date. She was, to me, perfect. Right before my first album, The Compton Effect, came out in 2007, she began battling a serious illness. She became so sick that she moved into the hospital. I slept on the floor. Even though I was questioning my religion, that didn’t matter.

  Then, she passed away. While I was coming to grips with the implications of losing my faith, I had to deal with her loss, a loss that was unlike any I had ever had. We were emotionally connected right up until the end. I think that I understand why, at the most basic level, she needed a God.

  Losing her was incredibly difficult for me. Looking back, it’s interesting and a bit ironic that she was the first person to believe that I would be musically successful. She used to say, “I just want to be there when you become the man that you’re supposed to be.” She’s not here now, but I’ve tried to become the man that she would have wanted me to be.

  My life has continued without her. Since her death, I have made multiple full-length albums, each with a different focus. The Compton Effect, my first, was dedicated to discussing and disproving religion, while also detailing my own indoctrination. The C.P.T. Theorem, my second, focused on me personally, looking into my past and describing what I had gone through emotionally in my life. My third album, The Kardashev Scale, made arguments against religiosity in a more cerebral way than my first two, while exploring science and technology.

  While my music is now less aggressive toward religion than it once was, I still feel that it’s crucial for people to criticize and understand religion’s ideas and history. To this day, black people still do not raise certain questions about their faith. As African Americans, we need to look at the origins of how we received our religion because it was fundamentally different from the way that most other people have received theirs. We were taught our Christianity with the same madness with which we were broken as slaves. For me, as a black person, I need to understand that truth.

  I do have hope. There are black skeptic, freethinking, nonreligious, and atheist groups sprouting up all over the country. Blacks are becoming active in the American secular community. Black culture at large, though, still largely prohibits certain religious topics from being discussed. With more and more blacks becoming visibly secular, I think that may begin to change.

  My transition from being religious to nonreligious has been like going from black and white to high definition television. I look back on who I was and what I believed, and I view myself as a psychologically weak individual. For humanity at large to evolve from here, I believe that we need a complete social re-education about how we view each other and ourselves. We think we’re all so far apart, that we’re all so different. We’re not. The only differences that we have are those that we create in our own heads.

  XXV.

  ______________

  Chris Stedman: Atheistic Engagement

  “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

  — Horace Mann

  At the age of 11, Chris Stedman accepted Christ into his heart at an evangelical church in Minnesota. Raised into a poor and often unstable family, through his church he found both a strong and a caring community. Over time, however, Chris realized a fact about himself that he knew he could not share with his religious community. How could he? According to what he had been taught, people like him not only got the AIDS virus, they were also punished by God in hell.

  Viewing his homosexuality as a spiritual test, he fasted and prayed, hoping to change his nature. He became reclusive as his internal struggle became increasingly difficult. Then, one night, he turned on the fan in his father’s bathroom, locked the door, sat down in the bathtub, and, with a knife in his hand, nearly ended his life. Shortly thereafter, his mother found out about what Chris had been dealing with and arranged for him to meet an LGBT-friendly Lutheran minister. This interaction would change his life.

  Later, after studying religion at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Chris lost his faith in God. Despite his atheism, his experiences continued to reinforce the importance of interfaith dialogue. After college, he worked for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and has written his own memoir, Faitheist.

  I grew up in an irreligious household in Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul, in a suburb called Coon Rapids. Religion wasn’t really a part of my life when I was young. I was baptized right after I was born, but the baptism was held as an excuse to get my family together and celebrate the addition of a new child. I didn’t grow up going to church and was pretty ignorant of the religious beliefs of others.

  When I was 11 years old, I was invited by some friends to go to a youth group at a non-denominational charismatic evangelical community church. There were a couple of factors that preceded that invitation that put me in a position where such a community would be appealing to me. The first was that the year prior, I had started reading a lot of books, like Hiroshima, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Roots. I became aware of all of the suffering in the world, that people committed horrible atrocities
against one another. I really didn’t have any way of making sense of that, and I was looking both for a way to put human hardship in some framework and to find hope for justice in the world. The other life-changing event that preceded my budding religiosity was my parents separating. By that point, my father had stopped being a reliable force in my life, and my mother went from being a homemaker to simultaneously working multiple jobs. My family began to disintegrate. As I quickly learned, the youth group had a huge support network and people within it who took an active interest in my life, who wanted to hear about my struggles.

  I remember feeling very welcomed. The people there took more than just a superficial interest in me. They immediately cared about what I was going through, and the community was fun and engaging. After my third time there, I thought, “I really like it here. I like these people’s beliefs. They are trying to make a difference in the world.” The idea that there was someone watching over me, someone who would take care of me, was also appealing. So I decided to accept Christ into my heart.

  I became really involved in the church. Wednesday night youth group always kicked off with icebreaker games and worship music. People would then break up into small groups, discuss what was going on in their lives, and do Bible study. I loved reading and discussing the Bible. One of the things that drew me to Christianity was the idea of Jesus being a social reformer. I saw him as a rule breaker. To me, he was someone who had relationships with the people who were seen as less than everybody else. I had grown up in an environment where I could see that there was economic disparity between my family and others in our society. I always felt like I was not seen as being on the same level as some of my peers. According to what I heard from my church, Christianity leveled the playing field. The youth group had a mix of people from all walks of life, both the popular kids and kids like me.