My Religious Journey

I was never a believer.

I have this weird fascination with deconversion stories because I honestly don't know if I would have been able to overcome that kind of emotionally-manipulative indoctrination. I must have read or heard hundreds of deconversion stories over the years. My own religious beliefs changed over the course of my life, but only in that they became more specific as I went from a non-believer who never thought about his non-belief to someone with opinions about igtheism vs apatheism vs weak atheism.

What really changed over time was my perception of religion, and this probably shaped a lot of my attitudes. I guess this is something of a thank you letter for all those ex-Christians and ex-Muslims who told me their stories about how they went from a believer to a non-believer.

My Family and Religion

My father was already a lapsed Lutheran when he met my mother. He had fond memories of being part of a church community but simply didn't believe anymore. At this point, he was one of those non-theists who honestly never stopped and thought about his views, so he never really classified himself as agnostic vs atheist vs igtheist, etc.

My mother is Japanese and was a child in World War 2. Like many, she was told that Japan couldn't possibly lose the war because the emperor was a descendant of the Sun. Then, Japan lost the war. Like many Japanese, she didn't believe in the teachings of Shinto but went through the motions for the connection to her history and heritage. This is all a guess on my part, though, because like a lot of Japanese, mom didn't really talk about her beliefs. She expected me to behave properly in Shinto holy sites, expected me to do the ritual hand-washing and make prayers at temples, but never said one thing about whether she thought any of it was true, and I got the distinct impression she didn't. She also never told me what I should believe.

Aside: as an adult, I found out that the belief that Japan couldn't lose the war because of the emperor's divine lineage was the result of Shintoism incorporating certain Western ideas after America forced them to open to the world following the 200-year peace. Religion is weird.

My father never said anything about what he believed either, although I didn't ask him until I was well into adulthood and found that he honestly didn't think about it. He did on occasion drag us to non-denominational services at the base chapel (communal worship space used by every religion on base). One of my fondest memories in a church service was singing "We Shall Overcome" with a mixed-race group on Martin Luther King Jr's birthday back before it was an official holiday. I don't remember anything the chaplain said in the sermon, but I remember really enjoying the song.

On the one-year anniversary of my grandfather's death, we were still living in Japan. In Shinto, you're supposed to participate in a funeral-like ceremony certain years after a person dies. I know there is a ceremony you're supposed to participate in one year and five years after someone dies, but I don't remember what other years also have the ceremony. I remember being made to sit in that uncomfortable position on tatami on your knees (like I had to do in traditional Japanese homes) for a really long time while I lost all feeling in my lower legs. I was expected to sit still and not fidget, which was very difficult for me at that age, particularly when my legs were asleep and full of tingles. While this was going on, a Shinto priest droned on endlessly while shaking various things at us.

While neither of my parents talked about what they personally believed, dad did explicitly state that religion was important for reasons of culture and heritage and that this was why I was occasionally dragged into Shinto temples or non-denominational church services on whatever military base we were at. No one ever told me that I had to believe any of the teachings of Christianity or Shintoism. No one in my family ever even talked about what beliefs those belief systems had, but I was expected to behave respectfully in worship spaces (not easy for a hyperactive child like I was).

Like my father, I never stopped and thought about what I was. If you asked me, I would have told you I was an agnostic, but that was due to a lack of consideration. Now, I see agnosticism as an answer to a completely different question "What is knowable," whereas theism and atheism are different answers to the question "Do you believe in the existence of any gods?"

Beliefs Outside the Family, but In the Community

I grew up on military bases, mostly overseas bases. These communities are very different from living in America in civilian areas stateside. The communities I grew up in were essentially small towns, but incredibly diverse small towns. It wasn't just racial diversity. Everyone was from different parts of the country. Some people were city folk, some people were rural folk. And, of course, there was every imaginable religion going on around me.

Here is the thing: I never remember any of my friends talking about what they believed in. I understand now that because theists can become angry or even violent when people with other beliefs talk about what they believe, but at the time, I took the lack of discussion to mean that everyone had the same view of religion that my parents had, that religion was important for reasons of heritage and culture, but that no one actually believed any of those stories.

After all, my child mind reasoned, the Noah story was so obviously stupid that it just had to be some kind of elaborate allegory. No thinking person, adult or child, could possibly believe that Noah's story was literally true, so obviously, all those people from all those other religions must have been the same way my parents were. After all, they never talked about their beliefs the same way my parents never talked about their beliefs. I assumed that everyone was going through the rituals just to honor their culture and remember their ancestors. None of my friends talked about what they really believed (that I can remember), so I had no way of knowing otherwise.

Moving to My Own Country

As I said, I grew up overseas on military bases. I was born while my parents were in California, but of course, I don't remember California. I vaguely remember living in Hawai'i when my youngest brother was born, but I was very young and my memory of that time was dim. Most of the childhood memories I have are associated with living in Japan (dad was stationed there both before and after his stint in Hawai'i) and Germany.

After Germany, we moved to Florida, and dad decided to buy a house in the suburbs of Tampa, where we lived among civilians. In other words, I had the peculiar experience of culture shock from moving to my own country in 1980 or so.

Let me try and list some of the things that were different and weird.

Lots of places had too many choices. I had severe choice paralysis trying to decide on a flavor of ice cream the first time I went to an ice cream shop. Back on base, any place that served ice cream had an extremely limited selection. And why did civilian grocery stores need that many different brands of dishwashing detergent? And why didn't civilian groceries have as many Asian ingredients as the base commissaries? Why did we have to go to a separate Asian grocery for certain Asian ingredients?

I would have to say that the racism shocked me the most. The particular suburb we moved to was at the time going through the process of changing from farmland to suburb. Everything was segregated. Friend groups of mixed race were frowned on. Kids at school boasted about burning crosses.

The religious situation was also a big shock. The vast majority of people were Evangelical. I wasn't used to such a mix of religions. Not only that, but the Evangelical kids at school openly bullied anyone who wasn't Evangelical. This was the first time I heard the term "papist" (to describe Catholics if you're not familiar with the term). The Pope was called "the Left Hand of Satan." Any mention by anyone of a belief that wasn't Evangelical resulted in groups of people bullying the person who said it.

And while it was strictly forbidden for any non-Evangelical to discuss what they believed, the Evangelicals themselves would not shut up about what they believed, and constantly shoved their beliefs in everyone else's faces.

It's not just that the behavior of those Evangelicals was so awful, it affected me viscerally, even though I kept shut about my beliefs for fear of being bullied, and I'm ashamed to say that I didn't stand up for other kids who were being bullied by the Evangelical kids. You see, I had spent my whole childhood in a particular environment, and like most people, anything that is different from what I grew up in makes me feel, well, icky. The segregation of Florida and every other part of America I've lived in since Florida makes me feel sick to my stomach simply because it's not like what I grew up with. The shocking cruelty of Evangelicals didn't just shock me because I didn't know how cruel religions could be, but because it was so different from the environment I grew up in, in which people of all races lived together and made friends with each other, without ever discussing what any religion believed.

Because Evangelicals forbid others to discuss their beliefs and won't shut up about their own, this was how I found out that there very much are people in this world who literally believe the teachings of their religion. This was nearly as much of a shock as all the racism.

The Bible verse I heard quoted more often than any other was "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live," and whoever said it always had a terrifying gleam in their eye as they said it. Prior to that, I would have thought most Christians were too ashamed of the witch trials to hold, beliefs like that, much less express such beliefs openly and proudly.

Rebellious teenagers told me that the rock band Journey was Satanic because one of their album covers depicted scarab beetles.

Nearly everyone openly rejected science, especially evolution.

Despite developing a distinct dislike of Evangelicalism, I still bought into the myth that religion was a net good in the world, so it was best not to talk about my lack of belief. I even defended religion as a net good in the world despite being familiar enough with history such that I should have known better.

Moving Away From the South

From Florida, I moved to the Chicago suburbs with my family. Although Chicagoans are less racist than Floridians, they are still pretty racist, and a heck of a lot more racist than the environment I grew up in. Despite having less racism, the communities here are even more segregated than the South was. From the moment I moved here, I still encountered people saying shockingly racist things, but I became more comfortable confronting racists when they say racist things without worrying about facing a lynch mob for having done so. The racism around me was still shocking, but the worst of the racism in the Chicagoland area is nowhere near as bad as the worst of what I saw in Florida on that boundary between suburbs and farmland.

Because Chicago and the suburbs constitute such a large metropolitan area, the mix of religions was closer to what I remember experiencing on military bases as a child. There were groups of friends that included multiple religious views, and roving gangs of Evangelicals didn't gang up on non-evangelicals as they did in the South.

Unlike what I remember of military bases, people were more open to talking about their religious beliefs, or perhaps I was more open to asking them questions about their beliefs. I made Jewish friends and asked lots of questions of them. I hung out with a Muslim and enjoyed driving around, talking, and getting into trouble without drinking. Catholics turned out to be a diverse bunch ranging from people exactly like I imagined theists to be when I was younger, to strident maniacs who felt the Pope should never have admitted that Galileo was right about heliocentrism.

I was especially saddened when Jewish friends told me what it was like to be a Jewish child in a predominantly Christian society around Christmastime and how they felt ignored and left out. For a time, I wondered if the official party name of Likud was "Likud, Bunch of Bastards," because the word "Likud" was always followed by the phrase "bunch of bastards." Without fail. Needless to say, they were all Reform Jews or "cultural" Jews.

Buddhists turned out to be segregated by national origin rather than by race like Christians do. The Japanese Buddhists had separate temples from Thai Buddhists and the other national origins. Every summer, the Japanese Buddhist temple held a Japanese-style festival to raise money. My family often volunteered for these even though none of us are Buddhist.

In college, I met more theists from more backgrounds, including two Assyrians (a Christian minority from Iraq descended from one of the oldest-known city-states) in my fraternity. While I was in college, the first Gulf War happened, and in my frat house there was much discussion about the fact that the Assyrians were suffering the same things as the Kurds, but the mainstream media only talked about what happened to the Kurds. Our Assyrian brothers served as our news source for what was happening to the Assyrians in Iraq during the Gulf War.

During this time, I still had a net positive view of religion and was curious about the beliefs of the different religions and denominations.

Then 9/11 Happened

It's not as if I was unaware of the horrible things happening in the world of religion prior to 9/11. Of course, I was vaguely aware of the Protestant/Catholic "Troubles" in Ireland. Of course, I knew about the Catholic/Eastern Orthodox/ Muslim atrocities in Yugoslavia during their civil war. Since I knew both Muslims and Jews, I heard a lot about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I was even vaguely aware of the various problems in the Indian subcontinent.

But I still labored under the impression that religion was a net good in the world. I still made excuses for religion. I still told people that I thought religion was a good thing, or at least that it did more good than bad.

9/11 shattered those illusions.

I want to stress that I am more than aware that religion isn't the only evil in this world. The world produces enough food to feed every single human, and yet millions starve to death every year thanks to capitalism. Communists managed to stave millions over shorter periods of time through sheer incompetence rather than greed. I'm pretty sure that if you add up all those that capitalism kills year after year, it would be worse than even the horrifying death tolls of the Communists. America still assassinates labor leaders, topples governments, and trains torturers for foreign governments all in the name of capitalism. White supremacists have a shocking death count even without considering the Holocaust.

There are plenty of things in our world that kill more than died on 9/11. Many of those things have nothing to do with religion. I think 9/11 was a shock because up until that moment, I genuinely bought into the idea that religion is a net good in the world.

Around this time, I became more active in openly arguing against religion, and especially against creationism, because I closely associate that form of anti-science nonsense with Evangelicalism. Those evolution-creation debates that I got into led me to look to educate myself more because as a former physics major, biology was kind of a weak point for me.

In seeking out argument fodder for evolution-creation discussions, I stumbled upon the Internet Infidels, which included a message board full of atheists.

The Four Horsemen

Prior to that time, I knew people who were also atheists but didn't know that they were atheists because I didn't bring it up and never asked anyone about it. I was used to keeping my head down for fear of offending theists by saying anything about what I believed. Like most atheists, I was cowed into silence by social convention.

Prior to stumbling on the Internet Infidels, I prided myself on not hanging out with other atheists (so much so that I did not know some of my friends were atheists). I thought that the need to be around other people who believe the same thing was a weakness of theists, and something that I didn't need. Because I was cowed into silence by social convention, I didn't see any value in talking about what I believed.

I originally showed up at that message board looking for argument fodder, and so I mostly lurked without participating in discussions. I read debates between people who knew a lot more than me and learned a lot. Eventually, I read something on that message board that I just had to respond to, and once I started talking, I couldn't shut up.

Around the time I was trying to wrap my head around the difference between strong and weak atheism and why those differences were important, books by the now-infamous Four Horsemen of Atheism started making waves in public. I read some of it, and most of what I read was stuff I already knew from the message board, but those books by the Four Horsemen opened my eyes to the social conventions I had shackled my mind with.

Sam Harris mentioned the taboo against criticizing religion, why it existed, and why it was harmful. The curious thing about culture is that it involves a lot of assumptions that we don't realize we are making and that we are not aware are influencing us and our decisions.

While there is a lot that I never agreed with Sam Harris about, he was dead right about that. This taboo existed, and it affected my thoughts far more deeply than I realized. But isn't that the nature of culture? Culture comes with a lot of unspoken assumptions that most participants in that culture do not realize they are making.

In case you get the idea that I worshiped the Four Horsemen and regarded every word as the Word of Prophets, stop projecting your religious views onto me. There is not one person that I always agree with nor always disagree with. To do so is to substitute someone else's thoughts for your own. I never understood people who could always agree or always disagree with anyone, public figure or private friend. I'm not going to list all the things I disagreed with because this is not the place for that. This is supposed to be about religion.

I never read Dennett, but I read a few books by the other three. Collectively, they convinced me to stop seeing religion as a net good and start seeing it as a net evil.

That's not to say that I have become a tribalist who thinks atheists are always good or that theists only achieve evil. There are plenty of moderate/liberal theists that I count as friends that I care about deeply. There are plenty of moderate/liberal theists who are public figures whose writings and effect on the world I value from William Barber II to Cornell West to John Fugelsang.

But I no longer see it as a net good and now see it as a net evil. For example, religion cannot teach morals. As per the Euthyphro dilemma, it can only trick people into confusing obedience with morality, but cannot act as a source of morality. Teaching people to confuse obedience with morality makes them vulnerable to manipulation by evil public figures, and that's exactly what we are seeing now, from the growing fascism of America, to the already fascist India indulging full-on ethnic cleansing, to the slaughter of civilians in Yemen, to the murder of children for "witchcraft" in Africa.

Religion Is A Symptom, Not the Disease

While I do think we should actively argue against religious truth claims, and should absolutely explain to theists that they are being tricked into confusing obedience with morality in order to expand the political power of religious leaders, I do disagree with other atheists about what would happen if we could wave a magic wand and make religion disappear overnight.

While I do think that removing religion from the world would be a net good, I also think it would be a fairly small net good. This is because a lot of the problems caused by religion are caused by the sloppy thinking that makes religion possible in the first place.

Even if we could remove religion, human beings would continue making bad decisions because we are inherently stupid as a species. If reading a list of cognitive biases doesn't deeply humiliate you, then you suck at critical self-analysis. I have no formal education in logic or neuroscience, but the more I learn about fallacies and cognitive biases, the more convinced I am that humans are inherently prone to believing dumb things for dumb reasons. Religion gives people an excuse to give in to sloppy thinking on purpose, but religion exploited a human tendency for sloppy thinking that would exist with or without religion.

While I have a much less negative view of communism than I did when I was younger, I also agree with Christopher Hitchens that during the Cold War, communism functioned much like a religion, and committed many of the same evils we associate with religion, from indoctrination to suppressing opposing views, a tendency to disregard intellectuals for ideological reasons, and they even had their own prophets.

Religion is clearly a tool of mere political control that allows the powerful to control the masses, but for all that I might be more amenable to communism as an economic approach as I get older, the Cold War communists showed us that even in the absence of religion, any set of ideas (even an economic approach), can be reshaped into a political tool for control that creates many of the same problems as religion.

Goodness knows that we in America are some of the most indoctrinated people on the planet, and capitalism is certainly guilty of much the same in this regard.

While I do think that we should get into apologetics debates with theists, and absolutely should warn every theist about the dangers of confusing obedience with morality, I also think that we would be better served by focusing more effort on educating people about the various forms of sloppy thinking that make religion possible in the first place.

Because if we get rid of religion without dealing with our propensity for sloppy thinking that makes religion possible in the first place, then someone will just find some other political or economic ideology to refashion into a new pseudoreligion to create all the same problems.