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I believe the internet and mass media will provide salvation.  Not immediately, and not of the religious kind.  Rather it will help repair the slurred reputation of atheists.  In the least, future generations will become more aware of many non-believing role models.  Such as Harry Potter.  Actually the fictional character did believe in all sorts of fantastic make-believe.  But the actor who played Harry seems refreshingly down-to-earth.

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I attended church for years in multiple places. I asked many questions which were never answered. Indeed, it seemed that no one that I knew had ever asked themselves the questions that plagued me.

One day I was in Sunday School in a Methodist church which I had been attending for several months. The teacher was an optometrist in the area. The class members were all college graduates. So, it was a well educated group. The discussion on that Sunday was about God being in control of everything. I brought up the fact that it bothered me that there are millions of people in Africa, Asia, South America, and elsewhere in the world who are dying or barely surviving because of hunger and disease.

The teacher said in a concerned manner that it seemed like I was saying that God is unfair. (How could I do such a thing?) I told him that I was bringing up this problem in the hopes that there is a sensible reason that such an enormous amount of hunger and poverty exists even though God is in control. He asked me what my basis was for thinking these conditions actually existed. This question was as shocking to me as if he had asked me what made me think that cancer existed. After a pause I said, “From multiple sources: magazines, newspapers, televisions, even through church mission drives.”

Then, this worthy man of God turned to the other members of the class and said, “Have any of you folks seen proof that such conditions exist?” There was another long pause. Finally after what seemed like an hour, a lady said, “Yes, there are such conditions. I am a nurse and I have seen a lot of evidence of these conditions in my studies and my work.” No one else said anything. The class ended then without further comment and everybody left. I never heard anything more about it, neither from the teacher nor from the members of the class.

Even a massive disaster does not seem to tickle the brain cells of many Christians. When horrible tragedies happen which make rational people at least question whether there is a personal God protecting us, many true believers respond with neither pity nor doubt. I think some people simply don’t want to discuss the topic, either because of shyness or insecurity. Many, however, see no inconsistency between the tragic loss of thousands of innocent lives and their belief that God is in complete control.

When the AIDS epidemic was at its peak, one of the members of the same Sunday School class remarked to me that AIDS was God’s punishment for the victims’ sins. The horrible pain that victims of AIDS suffer aroused no sympathy in him. Neither did the fact there were many babies who were victims of this dreadful disease.

On another Sunday a woman announced in class that she could not understand why people felt so sorry for the Jews. She said, “After all, they killed Christ.” Except for me, no one responded to her idiotic comment.

This extreme callousness, if we think about it, is exactly what one would expect of true believers in a religion in which the culmination of all of history is Armaggeden, which will, in the minds of the faithful, result in the brutal murder of everyone on earth, except for the relatively few “chosen.” Afterword, those murdered, though dead, will be thrown into the pit of fire to suffer forever. Far from being saddened by their belief in such a bleak future for mankind, this stellar event in their eyes is looked forward to with joyous anticipation.

This brings to mind the title of the old Fifth Dimension song, “Sweet Blindness.” Many Christians will use any number of rationalizations to justify their false sense of security. Believers either deny the existence of unfairness in this world or rationalize it in a variety of different ways. “It is the wages of sin.” “It’s God’s will.” “God will make all things right in the end.” “She will be a better person because of it.” The believer can then go blithely on with his or her life undisturbed by the most horrific events. The faithful are also relieved, at least in their minds, from any responsibility to do anything to prevent otherwise preventable mass suffering. The belief that God is in control of all things at all times and that those who are chosen will enjoy eternal bliss in heaven compels the faithful to focus on the hereafter rather than on real life suffering that is occurring today and urgently needs attention.

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Early in my Junior year of high school, my mom decided to move back “home” to West Virginia. Well, it was still home for her, at least, but after a decade in Florida it was no longer home for me; I felt terribly out of place. I was a strange and lonely kid who read too much and thought too much, and was stuck in the most awkward time of my life. So, when an older cousin asked me to join her church youth group, I did, hoping to find a place to fit in.

I guess I did fit in, for a while. I developed a crush on one of the boys at church and everyone was just so nice. The other kids had all been saved and baptized and the whole congregation seemed so excited about it when a newly saved soul headed up the aisle to pledge their heart to Jeebus. I wanted everyone to like me, so I decided to do it too. That was a very pleasant time for a shy gal in need of approval. Everyone hugged me, smiled at me, told me what a wonderful child I was. A dream come true for one sorely lacking in self esteem!

A few weeks later I had my baptismal ceremony and it was actually quite an uplifting experience. I had that mystical ‘god’ feeling that you read about; I honestly thought I felt surrounded by god’s presence! (As it turns out, a short time later I found I got that same feeling at large rock concerts where the crowd is intensely emotional and focused on the performer.) Everyone continued to heap attention upon me for about the next week, until the next big thing came along – Revival!

If you’ve never been to a Baptist revival, it is truly something to behold. Guest preachers come from far away, having prepared their best, loudest, most intense fire-and-brimstone sermons. It can go on for several weeks, with different speeches throughout the week. (If you have a morbid curiosity and a high BS tolerance, you should try one sometime, if only for reference.) Our regular pastor was not an intense man, normally. He much preferred the “god is love” kind of sermon, and I suppose, so did his flock. When I attended, the morning service was fairly normal, and I suspected nothing. The evening service though, was horrifying… it was entirely too much for a sixteen year old, and I thought I would be sick before the night was over.

Revival was everything you’ve ever seen on TV, and perhaps more. Lakes of fire, eternal suffering and pain, demons, and so on. I hated every second of it. I had been to church before, and I knew that bad people went to hell, but this…this was way beyond some mild-mannered concept of detention or maybe jail. The fear and hate I felt in the room was so diametrically different from the happy glow I had felt in that very same room just one week before that I couldn’t begin to understand it. How could this be the same god? How could a loving god hold you in his hand and protect you in one moment and then decide to torture you forever in the next moment? And for what? As far as I could tell, nearly everything was sinful, and you had to live in fear all of the time in order to keep right with this monster.

That was the last time I ever went to that church or willingly went to any church. Fortunately my mom didn’t seem to mind. She was mostly a Christmas and Easter kind of Christian anyway. A few months later we wound up back in Florida – which turned out to be more “home” for both of us than mom had realized – so I didn’t have to deal very long with the guilt my cousin or my former friends tried to heap upon me.

It took me a long time to figure out what I was going to do with all of those contradictions about the Baptist god. I continued to read too much and think too much, of course. In time I realized that there was so much more that I couldn’t reconcile, and that it just didn’t seem realistic to believe that Christians had the answers. It took me even longer to figure out that nobody else had the answers either. Today I still can’t be positive of what the answer is, but I finally feel that I have a pretty good idea what it is not.

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As a child, I always had a deep reverence for the Presbyterian Church I attended in the Philadelphia suburbs. It wasn’t so much the religious teachings that inspired me as it was the ambiance – creaky wooden floors, hard brown pews, arched doorways and windows, a pleasant musty smell, rich stained-glass, colorful tapestries, graceful floral arrangements, stirring organ music, and other artifacts found mainly in houses of worship.

I felt peaceful in that space, even if the droning minister in the pulpit was a bore. At age 13, as I was being confirmed on Palm Sunday, the minister collapsed and died of a heart attack in front of us.  Despite this emotional experience, I soon began to question in myself many of the church’s teachings. Why, I wondered, do I always have to go through Jesus to get to God? How is it possible that everything could be done in Jesus’s name? Most preposterous to me as I reached my teen years was the notion that somehow almost 2000 years before I was born, Jesus had died for my sins. I remember thinking, that doesn’t make any sense. If anybody’s going to die for my sins, it’s going to be me.

My creeping doubt came to a head during the early 1960s, when our next minister participated in one of the first civil rights marches, in predominantly Black Chester, Pennsylvania. This outraged the White Republican church members, many of whom were in upper management in large Philadelphia-area corporations. Having somehow received a sensitivity gene in a family with an extremely bigoted father, at age 20 I was proud of what our minister had stood up for. But my support and that of my mother in a subsequent church tribunal was not enough to save the minister from losing his pastorate. Hypocrisy abounded in that church. I was ripe for change.

When I was 23, I converted to Reform Judaism shortly before I married a Jew. This seemed like a natural progression to me, since Jesus played no part in the Jewish religion and I could be directly connected to a God that seemed less vengeful and more whatever I wanted him or her, or it, to be.  I also became painfully aware of anti-Semitism, my first taste as a formerly clueless WASP of the sting of discrimination.

Judaism had it’s own set of mesmerizing artifacts and rituals, but after another 23 years my commitment to theism seemed to have run its course. I yearned for a spirituality that I could practice daily without the pronouncements of some venerated supernatural being on high.

Living at the time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I had my pick of religions to try out. I attended Siddha Yoga services for a time, and then the Korean Zen Buddhist temple. The latter seemed more to my liking. Buddhism has no gods. It’s more a sane psychology for living than a religion in the typical Western sense of the word. Many people who attended services at the Zen temple were also Christians or Jews or other theistic religions. They had no difficulties incorporating the Zen lessons into their theistic dogma.

In 1998 I moved from Michigan to Florida. While there are ethnic Buddhist temples in the state, none are easily accessible for me so I practice on my own. Living in the so-called Bible Belt, I again feel the discrimination of being in the minority.  Only recently have I begun to identify myself publicly as an atheist.

Years ago, when I was living in the Northeast US, religion didn’t have a prominent place in the national discourse.  We all coexisted amicably without the need to force our religious views on each other. There was no public outcry that spoke of the Christian foundations of our nation.  It was clear to all of us, without having to talk about it, that religion was something separate from the public sphere.

These days a very vocal minority of fundamentalist Christians has been trying to change that. Their inaccurate interpretations of our founding documents threatens to turn us against each other in a way our founding fathers never intended.

We are not a Christian nation, though many Christians worship freely here.  I, like everyone else, have had the luxury of worshipping however I want. Or of not worshipping at all.  No one should be discriminated against for what they do, or do not, believe.  Religion and spirituality are private matters and should stay that way.  That practice has served us very well for over 200 years.  Why mess with it now?

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A few years ago a close friend (whom I’ll call Tom) convinced me, against my better judgment, to visit the Sunday school class that he and his wife were attending. It was in a fundamentalist Baptist church. He was so pleased with his experience there that my wife and I finally gave in. We attended for several years, primarily because of our friendship with Tom. Tom and his wife did many things to get us deeply involved in the church. As time went by I noticed that I was the only one in the class that raised questions about their religion’s basic assumptions, like the infallibility of the Bible, for instance. I’ve noticed that this lack of questioning is typical, at least in the churches I’ve attended.

After a while, I suspected that Tom was becoming increasingly displeased with my slow Christian growth, as he saw it. This was undoubtedly confirmed when he invited me for lunch one day and used that occasion as a springboard to pressure me to “wake up and smell the coffee.” He said, “Don’t you know you’re going to die?” Well, excuse me, but the reality of death was made very real to me when both my mother and my father died. Moreover, Tom and I had by that time had many discussions about my doubts about Christianity, including the very foundation of the religion. Apparently, those discussions had merely caused Tom to view me as a problem for him to set straight. He didn’t take my doubts seriously and never answered any of my questions.

Later I joined a weekly men’s “share group” that sprang from the Sunday school class. One of the regulars was a young man I’ll call Earl. It was common knowledge that Earl had emotional and maturity problems. Earl had had a very difficult childhood. On one occasion, when no one but Earl and I attended the group meeting, he told me all about his troubled history. His father had been a terror and had even tried to kill him. Earl had never experienced parental love or, I suspected, any other kind of love. He had never been a success at anything. No wonder; he was depressed. I suggested that he seek psychiatric treatment and explained to him that, with the right medication and counseling, he could experience substantial improvement. But it was not to be.

When it was time for Earl to become the leader of the men’s group (the leadership rotated among the members), he was excited about it. Even though he didn’t have a steady job, he insisted on taking each of the regular group members to dinner at his expense. He wanted to go over his ideas for the group. I thought that this leadership position might work out well for him and give him some much-needed self confidence. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

At a meeting a couple of months after Earl had been selected as leader, he used a disgusting word out loud in a meeting. He said “shit.” A man whom I’ll call Pope Innocent was there that night and didn’t mince words in telling Earl that he did not appreciate his language, particularly when spoken on holy grounds. I thought, “Well, shit!” (A few months later Pope Innocent left his wife of 20 years and ran off with a sweet young thing whom he had met doing the Lord’s work. No kidding.)

Earl was removed as leader of the men’s group because “his behavior was not appropriate for a Christian leader.” I told my friend Tom that I thought the decision was a bad mistake, but my opinion made no difference.

As you may have guessed, Earl committed suicide, a few months after he was ditched as leader of the men’s group. The first Sunday after his death, the leader of the Sunday school class, who a few years previously had been a part of Tom’s class, stood before the two classes joined for the purpose of honoring Earl.  Earl’s widow was also present. The class leader said something like the following:

“Today is a time to honor and remember Earl. His wife is here with us. It is not the time to ask why this happened. We can discuss that at a later date. Now is that time for love and compassion.”

The thinking as I saw it was, “We never can be too careful to protect Earl’s poor widow from that infidel (me), who might say just about anything. What if he were to ask how this could happen, in view of the fact that the Bible says that God will never make us Christians bear more than we can handle?”

Tom was clearly behind this announcement, which I felt was directed at me. I was the only person who from time to time raised any questions about the “right” beliefs that a Christian should have.

This is just one example of how blind true believers can be. I think Tom really believed that since I (his catch) wouldn’t be the star true believer that he had envisioned, and that I had clearly demonstrated how insensitive I could be by asking all those diabolical questions, I couldn’t possibly be concerned about the feelings of Earl’s grieving widow. He thought I was unable to discern things that he, as a Christian, knew.

Needless to say, the question of how the suicide of a true Christian could be reconciled with the belief that God will never make a Christian bear more than he or she can handle (which must be true) was never discussed in any later class. Nor, to my memory, was Earl.

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