My journey to Atheism!!
I feel quite like a hypocrite living a religious life while at heart being a staunch atheist. Penning down this is perhaps a way to reduce my guilt.
I was born into a quasi religious family who; though were God fearing, were not religious. They believed in the existence of God as a creator; more for the lack of another theory, than anything else. However it was believed in our family that religion was nothing more than a set of man made organizations intended to bring some tangibility into the vague concept of God and to establish practices which would enable us to display faith in God in ways that would not come across as utterly obnoxious and insane to the surrounding community. To drive home that point, imagine there was no religion and people wanted to believe in God. How in the wide world would they express it? Would they all evolve different ways to express themselves? In which case, would it not look ridiculous to one person the weird ways in which his neighbor chose to express his affection for God, because after all any way you choose to acknowledge an invisible intangible being is unnatural and funny, much like how kids speak to their invisible friends and dolls. And being the social beings that we are, would we be able to live with this absence of consensus? Hence evolved religion.
In short, while it is impossible for someone who is religious to not believe in God, it is perfectly possible for someone who does believe in God to not be religious. And we belonged to the latter class.
Life was peaceful with no interference from religious differences while I was growing up, mainly because we lived many many miles away from most of our relatives; as a result of which we were never present at any of our pujas and rituals. On the other hand, we in fact lived amongst Christians, attended their masses and prayed to their God. I should mention at this point that I am technically a Hindu in that I was born to Hindu parents, in that my parents were born to HIndu parents, in that my grandparents were born to HIndu parents.. and so on. I often wonder where it all started. Which one of my ancestors, on one fine day, woke up and decided to be a Hindu. Well, getting back to my point, when I was growing up, if one had asked me which religion I belonged to, I had to say that I was as much Christian or Muslim or any other religion as I was Hindu. I spent the first two decades of my life in this state.
Then Science happened. Science is wonderful in that it strives to ask questions and provide explanations. It exercises your mind by making you think and reason rather than memorize and adopt. It encourages rational thinking and is not afraid of being questioned. When Science happened, it beat all the other ideologies in my life downright. And while doing so, it provided the most elegant and beautiful explanation to various questions I had had growing up as to who created us and how we all came into being. Science provided the answers that the theory of God could not.
When a child hangs a sock out on the eve of Christmas, and finds his much anticipated toy in it the next morning, one can reason it out in the following two ways. You can believe that a jolly old fat man in red with a white beard driving a cart drawn by rein deers flew in, picked from his sack the goodie that the kid had prayed for, and put it in there; OR you can believe that your pretty young dad in pajamas , possibly clean shaven, went to the store, bought it the previous night, wrapped it with love and put it in there. Up to the age of five or ten maybe, the first theory is highly fanciful; after which it increases in its ridiculousness quotient so rapidly that by the age of fifteen, if you still believe in Santa Claus, you will be harassed out of your wits by your peers.
If you spend even five mins thinking about the above example(maybe fifteen for the highly religious), it becomes impossible to deny that it sounds suspiciously similar to the God versus Science explanations we have for nature, and how we all came to be.
Getting back, it was fairly easy for me to be seduced by Science given that the God theory was getting weaker and weaker in my mind, owing to the fact that it had not an ounce of evidence to support, nor any reason why we should believe something that had no evidence to support it whatsoever. And quite rapidly I moved on to being an Atheist. I should at this point accept that there was a short period in time when I claimed to be agnostic for the fear of coming out into the open. I believed that it is simply easier to ignore the entire issue rather than go up against family members and friends with years and years of conditioning.
However, after I got married, a bunch of questions arose in my mind, which jolted me out of my comfortable position as an Agnostic. Given that my extended family was highly religious and performed every single puja without fail, these questions arose in my mind with higher frequencies. The most important of those questions was, What stand am I going to take with my child (if and when I have one) when he/she asks me what I think about the God that his grandparents and friends worship. Do I believe in it?
I know now that when my child asks me that, I will answer in the negative. I will say ” I do not believe in God dear. And I have a reason for it. The earth is flat. We breathe air. Sugar is sweet. Killing is Bad. There is no SantaClaus and there is not God.”
Category: India, opinion, science 27 comments »
August 20th, 2010 at 7:44 am
I so stand by every word you say… God is a power above us so to believe but every other divide is man made.. so for me i relate to you as a human being n nothing beyond that.. it reminded me of a discussion i had with one of very religious colleague n these were the things i was telling her too !!
August 20th, 2010 at 7:57 am
Point One: (Quoting Gurucharan Das – The difficulty of being good) “Hinduism is not a ‘religion’ in the usual sense. It is a civilization based on simple metaphysical insight about the unity of the individual and the universe and has self-development as its objective. It employs innovative mental experiments of yoga that evolved in the first half of the millennium BC, and does not have the notion of a ‘chosen people’, or a jealous God; it does not proselytize, does not hunt heretics. It could not be more different from the great Semitic religions” – Well religion I believe was created as a process of trying to enforce order in a world of chaos. All religions not matter where they originate or what their beliefs are, encourages people to bring out their inner good. Living beings with consciousness (Human or animal) always fear the unknown, for good or for bad. If you tell a human to follow a set of societal rules they may not pick them up, but ad it with the mysterious perspective of god there are chances he may follow them.
The best thing to you can do for the kutty kid would be to let him/her decide their own beliefs. Understand and discover nature on their own, not bias them with our believes. You can tell them what you believe in and what influence you to believe in it, but when he/she asks you, its better to keep the answer open ended for the kid to explore, learn and discover the world on its own.
God is love, love is god..! I see god in your goodness and not as a super power outside playing chess with us. Good deeds leave people around in a positive state of mind, nurturing and inspiring people to reach greater heights.
I will leave you with what Blaise Pascal said “If you believe in God, and He turns out to exist, then you have obviously made a good decision; however, if He does not exist, and you still believe in him, you haven’t lost anything; but if you don’t believe in him and he does exist, then you are in serious trouble.”
August 20th, 2010 at 8:09 am
I have had the atheism VS believers debate with my family members and some of my friends. I have given up on trying to explain to them my position w.r.t. the God question or my views on religion. I realized it is quite pointless because religious people, especially the brainwashed variety, drag atheism down to being ‘just another religion’. Well, if not collecting stamps were to be a hobby then sure … needless to say this kind of a logic doesn’t work either.
Having said that I’m all for religious activities at home! The food on such occasions is simply awesome! ;)
August 20th, 2010 at 8:12 am
Firstly when I talk about God, Im talking about the concept that most people believe in, ie ‘The Creator”. If your definition of god is a set of positive values like love and kindness, then thats great. Nevertheless I still don’t understand the need for you to give it the name God. Why not just let it be a set of positive values.
Secondly I disagree with the fact that you need an incentive or inspiration like God to instill good values in people. You or I do not not kill for the fear of God. We do not kill, because we inherently believe that it is wrong to kill. People have an excellent ability to develop moral values even without societal and religious rules. We should give them the credit for it and stop babying them with imaginary father figures.
Lastly, like a famous Scientist said, letting my child choose his beliefs regarding the existence of God is like saying that I would let my child choose whether to believe if the earth is flat or not. Would you do that to your child? Do you think it is going to benefit them in anyway if you told them that they were free to choose whether to believe in the fact that we breathe oxygen or not. And this could be further extended to any of the numerous proven and established facts. If children were given the choice of establishing all those facts all over again by themselves with no bias, we would have each generation starting from scratch.
August 20th, 2010 at 8:26 am
@Aj: If God exists, don’t you think he would have better things to do than keep a track of how many humans believe in him or not? :-)
The universe is too large a place and we are far too insignificant in comparison – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw
August 20th, 2010 at 8:38 am
I will tell the kid, the world is round, we breathe oxygen, gravity is 9.8m/s^2, fire is hot, and numerous other proven and established facts. What I wont color them with is why all of these established facts came to be so, and who did it come to exist. I will let them question, ponder, discover and conclude that part on their own… Building a bias is when you tell them this was created by God or was not created by God…!
August 20th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Correction “How did it come to exist” *
August 20th, 2010 at 8:57 am
News bulletin: How they came to exist has already been proven and established.
August 20th, 2010 at 9:01 am
@Aj, here are some links to support my claim that it has been proven and established.
A brief summary of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, to set the ground http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Charles-Darwin-Theory-Evolution.htm
And some excellent videos that provide proof as well as theories as to why the community is unwilling to accept the proof.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnzmxeZJeho&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV4_lVTVa6k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V_2r2n4b5c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYphna9UTCk&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYphna9UTCk&feature=channel
August 20th, 2010 at 9:01 am
They have?? Oh do u mean the “Big Bang” theory and stuff?? well tell me something, how did the initial mass of stuff come to exist in the first place?
August 20th, 2010 at 9:06 am
Btw, am not arguing for or against the existence of god, all am saying is there are somethings in the world that cannot be explained with the knowledge we posses as of now, how we perceive them is completely up to and should be the individuals choice…
August 20th, 2010 at 9:33 am
@Aj: Pardon me if I nitpicking here – but a reason is not a choice. It is a plausible rational explanation. What’s the harm in not knowing? I find it better to accept that we don’t know something and then set about trying to find a rational answer to it.
How does it serve any purpose by attributing all this complexity around us to a creator? Who made God then, since he would have to be infinitely more complex than the world around us?
August 20th, 2010 at 9:35 am
@Sagar: True, but its so unfair for us to decide whats important or not for an entity who’s identity and existence is by itself questioned.
Btw, just a fun thought, for scale comparison why look beyond, take within our earth, we humans are what 7 billion? For an ant colony 7 billion is like one colony. :) :) so awesome how nature works..
August 20th, 2010 at 9:38 am
@Sagar: Your way of looking at things is absolutely perfect, its probably the best way to look at things, but then again it quenches your need. The same may not work for a different individual, hence my call to let each person find their own reasons as per their need.. :)
August 20th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Right. and you explanation is that God put it there and designed it such that billions and billions of years later we would all turn out like this and have this conversation :)
Such forethought. God must be a really intelligent supernatural being. I wonder who designed him or rather how he evolved.
August 20th, 2010 at 9:44 am
Exactly. I think all of us are saying the same thing. There are many things we do not know. We should definitely have an open mind and yearn to discover that which we do not know.
However that which we know and is proved, there is no point in ignoring that. If our kids have to go beyond us and find rational explanations for things that are not known yet;we should feed them with no bias whatsoever. Hence, we should tell them as much as is proved and leave out all of the rest, including the theory of God.
August 20th, 2010 at 9:46 am
I didnt say God put it there.. I was just curios how it came to be and is there a scientific logical reason and a know fact for that…. God put it there or some other not yet know scientifically explainable reason put it there is for us to explore..
August 20th, 2010 at 9:48 am
@P: Yup same thing..
August 20th, 2010 at 9:51 am
@P: “Hence, we should tell them as much as is proved and leave out all of the rest, including the theory of God.” exactly… :)
August 20th, 2010 at 9:56 am
PS: read all my “Know” as “Known” :P :P
August 20th, 2010 at 11:40 am
To be precise everyone believes there is some power while rules life on earth.Since everyone has their own way imagination, its up to people to name it as either god or devil or science.Simple
August 20th, 2010 at 11:51 am
@swathi. no what im calling science is not something that has been imagined. It has been proved. Please take a look at the links I posted above for more information. So, my point is , why are people imagining things when there is a perfectly valid, proved, established fact providing the explanation they require. There are a few details that are not yet known as Ajay pointed out. And with regard to that detail, you may imagine if you want, until we discover more. But the things that have been proved atleast should be taken at face value rather than going back to imaginary stuff as you put it.
Generally, if you have questions about more simple things like “why does water flow” or “why does an apple fall down” , do you imagine your own theory, or do you turn to science to see if there is an already established explanation? For every single thing until now, we have always turned to science to provide explanations. But for this, for some reason, even though the explanations are right there, people just seem to be unable to accept it. And that is what concerns me.
August 20th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
To me, God is introduced not just as a creator but also as the power(in fact different powers with different roles and responsibilities) that is governing the entire universe. God was also used to instill fear against doing bad, as an example of the all the good virtues and etc etc. And I did believe in everything I was told. So God is very tightly coupled with many things in life for me for a lot of time.
My first doubt about existence of God started when I started to understand the sheer amount of pain and suffering in this world and that people look more towards God when they are in suffering.
And by reading and looking at all the wonderful people in this world I later realized that good virtues can be taught/learnt by many other means than just forcing the idea of God.
And I learned what Prateeksha said (we do not not kill for the fear of God) by observing the opposite, i.e, people killing each other in large scale. Fear of god is not helping at all !!. Heck, forget about killing. Many people(including me), I believe, know and deliberately do bad things in life. After all, as Mark Twain said “One’s food is one’s poison”.
After all these realizations, I’m still stuck with “God – The creator” as a open question for more years. But one fine day a friend explained theory of evolution. I didn’t even dig deep and read a lot but I just got the idea that there is a
scientific explanation. God for me ceased to exist.
PS: Don’t be surprised to see me in temples doing heavy duty rituals. I have many people that I need to keep happy and so the only choice is to be a hypocrite.
August 20th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Prateeksh,
Kudos – Powerful thoughts, hard hitting article, factual thinking, bold, rational, clear, cold logic.
There are some things for which people have no answers and the supernatural steps in. By many names – Luck, Providence, Good fortune, God, …
Also, mankind is not truly rational and hates responsibility – even for ones own actions : ). So, God or the concept of God – can be hugely comforting – one, to ascribe in areas where science with its ’cause effect’ approach fails to do, and two – for peace..as in ‘We ve done our best, now its in the hands of God’ etcetera, etcetera.
Also its easier and makes a series of concepts credible – cycle of rebirth, heaven, hell, god watching over you, earn good karma, etc – makes it all easy to understand. Goodness and set of positive values, I think you said at the start – so God, helps brings in all that. Mostly, I mean. Not talking about the extremes, that can hurt in the name of God. All of this must have been the reason someone said “If there is no God, we need to invent one”.
Meanwhile, stating a possibility as a fact is bias, unless backed by evidence as the’scientific way’ also advocates. Even the possibility of non existence of God.
The jury is still out, and will be so for a long, long time.
August 20th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
sorry for the anonymity. hoping that will not colour the reception of views expressed hereinafter.
there are a few truisms mentioned in the previous posts that I want to address:
1) we can always answer only the ‘how” of things not the “why”. Which is assumed to imply that the answer to the ultimate “why” is GOD and then again fails because we cannot answer the question “why GOD?”. Well we will never know what happened at the beginning of time and we will never know because of the simple reason that there is no beginning of time. We all need to make peace with the “ultimate why” in our own ways. But what irks me and therein lies the truism is the fact that the GOD as the answer to the ultimate why is also assumed to be in some way the same GOD which keeps track of our sins and good deeds. Where is the connection? Once we make peace with the fact that some random thing happened 13 billion yrs ago, we have a pretty solid and coherent story of how things progressed after that. In other words we do not need a why. In other words a series of well answered hows has pushed the why to as far back as 13 billion years.
2) It is valid to hold on to the belief of GOD until science disproves it. Well this is just a misunderstanding of basic scientific philosophy. In the practice of science the burden of proof squarely lies with the claimant and not the other way round. For example, if I say that there are blue unicorns in some part of the world, it is clearly my responsibility to back it up with evidence. It is not the job of other scientists to go about disproving my claim. This holds true of lot of other disciplines as well. e. g. journalism, law, etc. This is called proving a positive. But somehow the question of GOD’s existence does not fall into any of those categories. It is incumbent on science to disprove GOD’s existence and not the other way round. Why this special treatment? The answer lies in the fact that the theory of GOD is not falsifiable. Science only deals with theories which are falsifiable and provisional. A scientific theory is only as good as the observation which can not be explained by it. This is not a conundrum but the acceptance of the fact that only if we are open to the idea of being proven wrong will we learn something new. So coming back to the point, while stating it as a fact that GOD does not exist can be termed as bias, hopefully saying that “no evidence exists to prove existence of GOD” is not bias. Of course someone will say that “no evidence exists to disprove existence of GOD” either, which is true, but then again science is not in the business of proving negatives.
2) All religions teach us to be good to other people. All I need to say is that a very important clause is omitted there and often consciously. After adding the clause, the sentence becomes: All religions teach us to be good to other people who follow the same religion.
August 21st, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Interesting thoughts. And, to talk about my journey to Atheism, I’m also getting there…
August 25th, 2010 at 6:07 am
@someguy.
Wise words and well spoken. I think I know who you are :) Only one person who reads my blog is capable of writing that comment :)
To other readers who are not from a scientific background what @someguy means to say is simply.
1. The theory that ‘if bing bang is true, then God made even big bang happen for a REASON’ does not hold until we can answer the question ‘why God’.
2. If one claims that there is God in whatever form(whether it be the image of God handcrafting all of us. or the image of God pre planning evolution), it must be proved. The onus is not on the scientists to disprove it.
3. All that religions are doing right now is turn us against each other, however well meaning they were initially. Without religion, there is some hope that we wont find enough reason to make war with each other constantly. Without religion, there is some hope that we will find it in us to accept everyone and love and respect them.