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1. •  
     CommentAuthorMole of Production
   • CommentTimeApr 27th 2006

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   Atheism seems to be the reigning religious identity in this forum. Considering the content of The Huge Entity, this is not surprising.
   
   Where I come from, atheism is stigmatized. In practice, secular or agnostic families are not uncommon in the US--I have countless friends who describe themselves as religious technicalities: "We're Lutheran, I think, but I've never been to church;" "I'm half-Jewish, but I don't 'do' the whole 'jew' thing;" or "I'm a recovering Catholic." But an atheist is very rarely the fruit of tradition. Most American atheists chose their identity at a specific point in their lives. Born-again Christians each have a conversion story, and I suspect many atheists do as well. I suspect this is international to some degree, and if you have input on your own national character, I'd love to read it.
   
   So:
   
   When did you decide you were an atheist?
2. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeApr 27th 2006 edited

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   Nice...
   
   Britain doesn't hold the same moral high regard for religion as America does, at least not any more. If you're religious, so what, it isn't expected to reflect in the way you live your life or alter the secular moral standing society has instilled in you. Some British people are 'religious', some are not (95% of my British friends would call themselves atheist, or at least hard edged agnostic. I don't think this is an exaggeration). On the public stage politics and religion very rarely mix, British politicians do well not to mention their religious inclination, if they have one, for fear the British media will tear them apart (see Tony Blair's recent religious boo boo)...
   
   Britain is not America.
   
   When I was a child my primary school had Bible stuff in assembly time. Mainly the stories and parables. We sang hymns every morning, much to my dismay. At xmas we did the Nativity Play (I played one of the three Kings one year!). This was the only real religious 'upbringing' I had. I was always far more interested in space aliens, dinosaurs, time travel and ancient egypt than religion - even as a child these concepts had more clarity for me than the idea of God.
   
   My mother was brought up Catholic, taught by nuns and all that crazy jazz, but by the time she went to university had come to detest her narrow minded education. My father, as far as I know, had no religion in his childhood, a rare thing indeed in 1950s Britain. My father once told me he was agnostic, mainly because religion was completely irrelevant to his view on life.
   
   My parents have always been respectful of other people's beliefs, they have always promoted an open mind in me and my siblings. The aquisition and exchange of knowledge has always been a big part of my family life. I don't ever really remember believing in santa clause, being the oldest sibling I guess this is quite natural. I cannot remember a time when I didn't have a general understanding of how 'babies are made'. I equate my religious inclinations with these early slices of knowledge. I have NEVER believed in God, nor thought for a moment that there could be such a thing. The very idea is bizarre to me. My family all think this way.
   
   Why do I mock religion so? I might get into that later, I'd like to hear your thoughts first.
3. •  
     CommentAuthorMole of Production
   • CommentTimeApr 28th 2006

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   Thank you for your story, Mr. Danieru, I enjoyed it. Your post about the U of M study I linked to was the reason I began reading your blog.
   
   Anyway, quid pro quo, here's a my story:
   
   I'm from Minnesota, a mostly rural state in the upper part of the upper midwest of the US. Minnesota is the world's largest producer of butter and has more than 10,000 lakes.
   
   Both my parents came from Lutheran families, but my father was of the Missouri Synod and my mother was of the more liberal-leaning ELCA (a sect which allows such heresy as female clergy and applause during the service). When my brother and I were kids the family would attend an ELCA church every weekend, and we would go to Sunday School and all that. We would even say grace before meals.
   
   Our family life, however, was focused on intellectual curiosity, and we were literally taught to question our beliefs. One incident in particular comes to mind. from." The topic in Sunday school one week was creation. I don't remember how old I was, but it was before I'd heard of evolution, and before I'd really thought about "where we come from." The teacher went over the Genesis story in as much detail as 45 minutes gives. This was nothing new, though, as we'd all heard the story before and accepted it much as we accepted the belief in Santa: we knew we were supposed to believe it so we said we did. But then the teacher told us that some weirdos believed that we were really monkeys who'd crawled out of the trees. Having recently grown out of my cowboys and Indians phase (coincidentally entering my dinosaur phase) I imagined she was talking about some tribe that beat drums and danced for their monkey gods. What a silly idea. When I was let out of class, I found my mom and told her what the teacher said about the funny people who thought their grandparents were monkeys, and that we all came from monkeys, and isn't that weird? Isn't that funny, mom?
   
   "Is it really so weird?" she asked me, "It sounds like she was talking about the theory of evolution, but she didn't explain it very well. A lot of very smart people think it does a very good job explaining what we see in nature . . ." and so on. Her father was a professor of biology, so she'd had a thorough education on the topic. Many plastic dinosaurs, countless hours of PBS documentaries, and a few science-for-kids books later I was sold on the concept of evolution. However, I still believed in a god, more or less, and I certainly considered myself a Lutheran. I don't think I even knew that atheists existed.
   
   My brother and I both went to public grade school, but my brother decided to go to catholic secondary school, and I eventually followed him there. At catholic school "religion class" was a requirement, and though a Lutheran version was available for 9th and 10th graders who were "non-catholics," everyone else had to take the catholic classes. There was a loose unity among the non-catholics, but no one ever actually enjoyed the classes. They were about as inspiring as typing class or the government-mandated Health class. It's worth mentioning that one of the first things we learned was the vocabulary of belief: theist, agnostic, atheist, and anti-theist.
   
   During the first months of 8th grade, my second year in catholic school, I started getting in trouble in religion class. I didn't turn in any homework and apparently I was distracting the other kids. I even got sent to the principle, Sr. Kate, a couple of times, and eventually they switched me to another section of the class because I was a "bad influence" on the younger students.
   
   Then one day we covered the topic of purgatory and especially limbo, and the nun described the rules about who goes where and how unbaptized or stillborn babies go to limbo, and how good people who never got an opportunity to convert to Christianity go to purgatory, but if they had the chance and didn't convert they go to hell, and so on. Leading up to this, having spent over a year at a school that required me to go to Mass during the school day but wouldn't let me take communion because I was a Lutheran, I had been thinking a lot about chance in regards to faith, and how silly it was that a person would be damned to hell for simply being born into the wrong family. So after the nun finished her lecture, I raised my hand.
   
   She rolled her eyes, "Yes, Karl?"
   
   "I was wondering how many people in this class do not come from Christian families. Did anyone here convert?"
   
   Everyone just looks at me.
   
   "I guess what I'm trying to say is, considering the billions of non-christian families in the world,aren't we all incredibly lucky to be going to Heaven by default?"
   
   "So you're an atheist?" is the nun's retort. I think she considered it the nuclear option--like, that'll shut him up.
   
   But instead she'd solved a problem for me. I'd been asking a lot of questions and hearing a lot of excuses, and making a lot of excuses of my own, reasoning out a way it could all work together--god, science, jesus, everything. And when she said that, it all clicked. Of course, I thought. That makes it so simple.
   
   So I answered, "I guess so."
   
   It was a very small school, and from then on I was literally "the atheist." The schools diversity was composed of the latino kid, the black kid, and me. I continued there through 10th grade when I'd had enough of daily "You're going to Hell" class (it was first thing in the morning, too: impending damnation makes it hard to crawl out of bed). I left catholic school and attended a wonderful episcopal prep school where they didn't give a damn if you were Lutheran, Wiccan, Satanist, Mormon or nothing at all, and there were kids from all over the world. Complaining about religion got boring because so many people agreed with me, and slowly I forgot about spite.
   
   This post is already a bit long for web content, so I'd best end here.
   
   I find these stories fascinating and I'm sure I'm not alone, so I ask you, Huge readers: what's your story?
4. • CommentAuthorellenclarke81
   • CommentTimeApr 29th 2006

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   y'all should check out a book called 'Darwin's cathedral' by Wilson, it propses that religion evolved through a process of group selection. Religion would enhance group fitness if it encouraged cohesion, cooperation etc amongst its group members. its selective force would be increased if it enhanced a groups competitve edge over other groups too, ie it would not extend its cooperation etc to members of different groups. sounds about right then. tribes that work faster cos theyre scared of the priests, that care for each other in times of sickness, that strive to slaughter or convert foreign tribe members, outcompete tribes that have mere truth to fall back on. religion is an adaptation at the group level.
   how deppressing.
   
   i, like Nietszche, feel an atheism so strong that i suspect it is motivated by belief in and hatred of God. Less atheist than anti-theist really. scary stupid god botherers telling me im bad! I'm nice!!
5. •  
     CommentAuthormike2050
   • CommentTimeApr 29th 2006

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   Another book worth reading on this topic is Pascal Boyer's RELIGION EXPLAINED. Boyer's explanation overlaps with Wilson's, but he also discusses the arising and persistence of religious beliefs in notions such as spirits and life-after-death in terms of cognitive science.
   

   If you don't want to spend the money or the time to get and read a whole book, then check out Paul Bloom's [free] article on edge.org titled "Natural Born-Dualists." (He also wrote a longer article for The Atlantic magazine -- which is online but not free -- titled "Is God an Accident?") Bloom's work with children demonstrates how naturally humans come by beliefs in mind-body dualism and the "intelligent design" of nature.
   

   I'd provide links to the above if I hadn't just gotten a phone call from my wife saying it's time to rendezvous at the restaurant for dinner!
   

   Regards,
   

   Mike

6. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeApr 29th 2006 edited

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   I enjoyed Religion Explained. I got a lot more from it than an evolutionary explanation for religion, since reading it the world has bubbled with hidden agents, perceived intentions and instinctive (and plainly false) assumptions about the workings of the universe. The science of faith exposed:

   What makes scientific knowledge-gathering special is not just its departure from our spontaneous intuitions but also the special kind of communication it requires, [p.321] ... scientific activity is both cognitively and socially very unlikely, which is why it has only been developed by a very small number of people, in a small number of places, for what is only a minuscule part of our evolutionary history. [p.322]"
   
   - Religion Explained

   The book received a heap of criticism when it came out, not least because Boyer rejects the idea that religion is a revalatory phenomenon from the word go. It is this candor though that makes the book worth reading for anyone interested in cultural origins. If you're looking for a book to convert your religious friend into a God hater this isn't it (nor, I suspect, will one ever be written that performs this job adequately. Shame...).
   
   I wrote a piece about these ideas a while back: 'The Evolution of Religion and the Loss of Oneness', my blog always receives most hits and comments when religion rears its ugly head. The belief that belief is inherently worthwhile and somehow outside of the boundaries of scientifically governed, inquisitive society, makes me more zealous than Abraham on the mountain top.
   
   Religion deserves a real good boot in the face. It's time us a-theists, and anti-thesists, got out our hob nailed clogs and marched on down to Sunday school.
   
   ---
   
   P.S. This is godamn genius:
   
   Ten Jews Cooler than Jesus who Died for Your Sins
   

   1. Judas Iscariot
   You should worship him because if he was sent to Hell for his betrayal, which was necessary for the humanity-saving death of Jesus Christ, then Judas is in fact being punished for saving humanity even more severely than Jesus, who only had to suffer on the cross for a limited time before ascending to Heaven.