The Upside of Being An Outsider

Scientific American magazine published an article titled, “In Atheists We Distrust.” The article opened with, “Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to.” The gist of the article is that all of those people with imaginary friends “distrust” atheists. Weirdly, this article claims that a research found “People identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation held similar opinions. Gervais and his colleagues discovered that people distrust atheists because of the belief that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them.” Of course, “no religious affiliation” just describes people who spend Sunday at a bar watching football and praying for some god to help their team beat the snot out of some other team, so that isn’t particularly interesting information.

From my Midwestern perspective, I’ve mostly decided that superstitious people have such a tenuous hold on their “beliefs” that any sort of challenge to the existence of their particular “god in the mirror” is too much to stand. The “individual quality” of the gods those people worship is also suspiciously mirror-like. And, with even minimal knowledge of modern astronomy, physics, and neurology, it takes a shitload of “confidence” (i.e. “ego”) to believe there is anything special in this universe about an individual human. As a lifetime outsider to the whole mystical experience and an introverted observer of human weirdness, I’ve seen this behavior from every “god-fearing:” character in my life; from my father and family to co-workers and acquaintances to public figures. (Especially black collar public figures whose outrage and general intolerant behavior I’ve always written off as financially motivated. After all, if enough people were atheists, nobody would get to pretend to speak for the gods.)   

In the past few decades, I’ve somewhat modified my opinion to something more like, “Nobody believes this shit, based on their behavior.” You can make a pretty rational argument that everyone is statistically atheist because of the currently existing approximately 4,200+ religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, or otherwise supernatural beliefs, few of us believe more than one of the pack. 1/4200^th is 2.380952380952381e-4 or approximately 0.024% away from no faith in the supernatural at all. In all of human history, there have been at least 10,000 religions. A 1/10,000^th belief is close enough to zero for reasonable and practical purposes. Either of those options demonstrate hardly a significant difference between the faithful and atheists. Other than arrogance and tradition, picking a god to believe in is about as random a choice as possible. So, you might as well invent one as take on an existing god. It’s obvious from behavior and conversations away from peers that a substantial number of “the faithful” pretend to be so for social, financial, and other cultish reasons. In those situations, I’ve had a number of ministers admit to me that their own personal faith is considerable less magically-based than the one they project to their parishioners/minions. Back in the Sam Kinison days, it was almost popular for fundamentalist ministers to tryout different career options, admitting they’d been in the religion thing for the money. At least in the US, we’ve regressed a long ways since then and the majority of Americans are back pretending they believe the same shit as everyone else. Cult behavior, in other words.

Again, in my experience and observation, it is fascinating how much even a supposed single god, like the Jewish Jehovah Yahweh, Elohim, the Lord, God, and his/her/its other pseudonyms has at least as many personality traits as believers. And, on a personal basis, those gods more accurately reflect the personality, habits, interests, prejudices, and other traits of the believer than any description on the various holy books. Which is why I call those various deities “the God in the mirror.” It’s pretty obvious that “God created man in his own image” is the reverse of the objective facts. Men and women create their gods in almost exactly their own image; or the image they have of themselves.

For the nearly-70-years I have been an atheist, it seems to me that I have saved a ton of time, money, and energy for useful activities by missing out on the whole magical world thing. I not only don’t have to tithe to some self-proclaimed Speaker-to-God, I don’t have to knock on wood, worry about stepping on sidewalk cracks, carry a rabbit’s foot, wear offensive and uncomfortable jewelry, or worry about what kind of life I’ll have to suffer after death.

And suffering it would be if the after-life my family and neighbors describe is anything like the real thing their heaven would be. I first got a hint of what that would be like as a little kid in my father’s Dodge City Methodist Church. Those “joyful voices” our minister kept calling for were clearly pitch and rhythmically impaired and the polar opposite of anything that could be described as “:heavenly.” Demonic, maybe. Heavenly, definitely not. Crows make happier and more musical noises as do cats.

When my mother died at 34, the “comfort” my family was given from the church and its members amounted to “God works in mysterious ways.” Clearly, not a satisfying answer for anyone smarter than a brick. I was rapidly falling into the group of “people who reject religion because they find a god either insufficiently loving or insufficiently credible.” When my father and I argued about his church attendance requirement, he responded with “Live in my house, go to my church.” A few weeks later, I’d rented a tiny trailer with a friend and I moved out on my own the summer I turned 16 and lived there until I graduated high school and was “finished” with my first year of college (I dropped out.). When my father and step-mother were old, disabled, and no longer in a financial position to pour money and energy into their church, that church vanished from their lives.

Living in the Midwest for most of my life, I’ve been exposed to every variety of what passes for “Christianity” this country has to offer. A few, like Unitarian Universalists have enough other positives to outweigh the occasional mythical and superstitious fantasies, but most are based on cult-like conformity and fear of the impossible unknown (a vengeful god or his bad-tempered fiery sibling). I do not see any advantage, other than not being “different,” to pretending to believe in this silliness and at my age I care even less than before what people think of me for not playing make-believe religious games.

What Am I Missing Here?

Religion and country music have always baffled me and there are a lot of similarities. Both are mostly full of pointless nonsense and both rely on irritating faux-Southern accents to fake sincerity. Religion, apparently, gives the hopeless hope or some such thing. The idea, apparently, is that while this world sucks the next one will be a reward for getting through this one? That seems to me to be a good and useful excuse to do nothing to improve this world. Country music gives the illiterate cornpones something to relate to that isn’t complicated or creatively demanding. There was a long period of my youth where I believed that if I could figure out why people liked country music I’d have the keys to easy fortune. I probably figured it out, but it wasn’t worth the sacrifices I’d have to make to tolerate my victims.

Christianity and assorted cults and superstitions have infested my part of the country so thoroughly that admitting to being a non-believer may be the worst moral failure one can commit. According to several surveys of US citizens, being an atheist makes a person less reliable, less moral, less intelligent, and more unlikeable than practically every other awful thing a human can be. Based on the regular criminal activities, improprieties, and general despicable-ness of Black Collar criminals,it’s hard to figure where religion gets any sort of claim to morality. It’s enough to make me want to migrate northeast to Maine or Vermont where 69% of the population “never attend church or religious services, or go less than once a year,” which is not the same as being atheists but is as rational as the US gets. The top five rational US states are Maine, Vermont (69%), Oregon (65 %), New Hampshire (64%), and Washington state (63%). The closest thing to a “shithole country” in the US, Mississippi, is the most superstitious state at 18%. I was pretty fond of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Washington before reading that data. Now, I’m practically packing to escape Minnesota’s embarrassing 29%.

What has always baffled me about the end goal of almost all religions is the desperate hope for a life-after-death. My father was a less-than-convinced Christian his whole life, but when his final days arrived he was desperate and terrified, the exact opposite of what I’d assumed was the goal in being a Christian. If, after a life of trying to conform to the rules of his religion, he had no confidence in where he was going after death, what was the point? The ONLY thing I can see that religion might provide is that kind of comfort and assurance. If it fails at that, the religion and “faith” has failed entirely.

And that is the point of it all that I am missing. I find absolutely nothing about dying and fading into non-existence to be scary. Life is hard, often cruel, more often disappointing, painful, and, at the end, often incredibly sad. After death, all of that is over and done. I believe, as I have for the overwhelming majority of my days, that I am my brain and the electro-chemical impulses that happen in that small space and large assortment of cells. That’s it. Hit me on the head, hard enough and in the right place, and I might become someone else. That being a known and well-established fact should be enough to blast any delusions or misconceptions about the existence of “soul” outside of rhythmic music appreciation. When my brain dies, the person you and I know as “me” is dead and gone from the universe. Yeah, I know you can’t “destroy” energy, but that electro-chemical energy in my head will become something considerably less organized (“Inconceivable! I know.) and most of it will dissipate as heat. I find absolutely nothing about all of that to be afraid of. I’m a little nervous about the possibility that those last few seconds of my brain shutting down might involve a shitload of pain, but that will last no more than a minute if it happens at all. For me, all of that is a comfort not something I worry about.

Compare that to the obvious fear religious people have of not having been good enough, not having converted enough of the rest of us to their sect, and all of the other fear-inducing concepts behind practically every religion humans have devised. If form follows function, as it always wants to be doing, the function of religion is clearly to provide money, power, and status to the shamans and priests. Good for them, but useless to the rest of us. The forms are the rituals, the rules, and the mind-control tactics, but if they don’t provide comfort when it counts, they are worse than useless. Those forms definitely do not seem to restrict or improve behavior. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions have never demonstrated any sort of improved behavior and are more often used to justify wars, prejudice, inequity, theft and deception, and hate. So, again, I do not see what I am missing by abstaining from magical thinking.