Way of the Mind

Responding to No Way’s comment after I mentioned my relief when I stopped being a Christian:

Now that intriques me.  I would love to see that post sometime soon.  After all, if I stopped believing the feeling would be the complete opposite of relief.

I’ve written about it in the past (interestingly, in one of this blog’s earliest posts, How I’ve become an atheist), but I’ll try to answer your question specifically: why the relief?

Well, first consider this: what if Christians are wrong and Muslims are right? If that is so, Allah will send you to “the fire”. Scared yet? There are so many religions (and variations of each religion) out there that the odds of picking up the right one are very, very small. And most of them say their gods are “jealous”, so you can’t pick several at the same time. The fact that you’re a Christian and not a Jew or Muslim or Hindu, or that you’re, say, a Protestant instead of a Catholic, depends just on one thing: where you were born. And while you may have a more liberal theology (“anyone who accepts Jesus is saved”, or even “God wouldn’t send anyone to hell, even though it says he does in the holy books”), that’s a relatively recent thing, and you’re probably in the minority, not to mention that the holy books don’t agree with you. So, statistically, if there is a god or gods and there is a hell, then each individual has very good odds of ending up in it — and of that happening just by chance, because you were born in the “wrong” place and raised in the “wrong” faith. To me, that would be very, very scary indeed, and losing that fear would certainly be a relief. Most believers (including myself, when I was one) avoid living in constant fear of their statistically probable eternal damnation simply by not thinking about this at all; their faith is the “right” one, automatically, because they were raised in it, and it’s “obvious”, so, end of story.

However, my own relief was more related to intellectual honesty; I was always inquisitive, with “the soul of a scientist”, so to say, and only managed to keep my faith by not thinking critically about it, by stopping myself whenever I started to consider the implications, before going “too far” — and, with time, the lines of thought I had to avoid became more and more in number. I knew, subconsciously, that if I thought about it, I would lose my belief, and come to the natural conclusion: that all religions are man-made, self-contradictory, and teach morally wrong — sometimes even repugnant — things. And that the reasons I had for not believing in every other religion could apply perfectly to my own. So, my mind served me so well at school, at college, at work, and to solve problems regularly in life, but it had to be “chained” for me to keep a belief that would not survive a good, hard look? Can you imagine how dishonest, how “fake” that made me feel? To have a part of my life that I had to constantly avoid thinking rationally about? To have two separate standards of reasoning, one I applied to reality and life, and the other to a belief that I just “had” to keep… or else? And yet I blamed myself, not the belief — because I had been taught so.

It’s as Martin Luther said, reason is the enemy of faith. I just disagree with him on which side to pick.