There and back again: A Journey To and From Faith

The massive majority of people who read this blog will already know me and a majority of those will already know my opinions about religion, faith and theology as it’s a subject I enjoy discussing and have discussed with many of my friends. However, I don’t know that I’ve ever really explained to too many people my “spiritual background” and what has led me to become an unapologetic atheist. You will not find a litany of complaints against the various religions of the world in this post, it’s intended more as a way for me to write down all the things I remember about the role religion has played in my life and where my subsequent fascination with the subject comes from.

I feel I must add a caveat here. I have an appalling short-/mid- term memory, a fact to which all my friends and family will attest. Some things however, you don’t seem to forget. This is especially true of feelings that are tied to emotional or character-defining moments in your life and there is good science backing up this position. I make this caveat as I’m going to assert that I recall things that some may be skeptical about. I’m not a neuroscientist, so I can’t say whether or not my memories have been influenced by my subsequent experiences and cogitation but I can only rely on what my brain tells me it remembers. I should also clarify that I’m not going to get into the detail of science vs. religion or the morality or immorality of religious doctrine. I’ll simply outline why I’ve ended up believing what I do, rather than expounding precisely what those beliefs are.

I hope that this post will give clarity to where my current beliefs are rooted and be interesting to at least a handful of people. I expect that it will also be somewhat cathartic to write and I’m curious to see if I am forced to re-examine any of my strongly held convictions after going through a process of mild self-examination. We shall see.

Humble Beginnings
I was raised as a Christian, like almost everyone else in the place where I was born.    Furthermore, I was born into that particular denomination of Christianity that is dull and dreary but not particularly demanding; Church of England, or Anglican as it is known in Canada. I have no doubt that if I had been born in the Middle-East, I would have been raised either Jewish or Muslim. I have no doubt that if I had been born in Delhi, I would have been raised Hindu or Sikh. If I had been born in Egypt 3000 year ago, I would have no doubt been casting fearful glances sykward to check if Ra was watching me. If I had been born in Scandinavia before it was Christianized, I would have been raised believing in Odin and Valhalla. My point is that I’m not sure that my starting point is overly important. Or rather, it’s not too much different from most people’s starting point. It must surely be obvious to anyone that the vast, vast majority of people who are of one faith or another haven’t chosen that faith themselves but have either inherited it, or in extreme cases been forcibly subjected to it, from or by their parents. In the same way that the majority of people support the same sports teams as their parents and a (decreasing) majority votes for the same political party as their parents, so most children “choose” the God prescribed by their parents. Why would a young person question their parents guidance on a topic so seemingly concrete and definite as well as, let’s face it, utterly boring and tedious to a child?

From the earliest age I can remember, I know that my immediate and extended family would always have described themselves as Christian. I don’t know whether this was simply through association or actual belief, but I don’t remember anyone ever being identified as an atheist or being any “different” based on what they believe. I would also point out that while we all called ourselves Christians and (like most atheists) behaved peaceably and decently to one another and people we came across, I also don’t recall religion ever being a particularly large part of my upbringing. I vaguely recall saying grace before certain meals, but I’m fairly sure that was more rooted in tradition than faith. It’s just what you did.

My earliest memories of going to church are ones of musty old buildings with very uncomfortable seats. I have hazy recollections of being entirely bored by whatever was being said in the pulpit and not really fully understanding what it was all about, other than that some bloke called Jesus apparently loved me. Well that sounds fine, I don’t mind being loved, who does?!? The one huge positive thing I remember from church is the music. Music has always been a central aspect in my life and I can no more imagine a life without music than I can a life without a major organ. I remember feeling moved by “Amazing Grace” and “Jerusalem”, “He’s got the Whole World in his Hands” and “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. I still love these songs and feel entirely non-conflicted about doing so. I loved the sound of the organ and the harmonic sound of the choir singing these hymns. Again, I still do. It should be noted, in the interest of contrast, that I feel the same way about “The Number of The Beast” by Iron Maiden, Beethoven’s 31st Piano Sonata, Abba’s “Super Trooper”, and “Sometimes you can’t make it on your own” by U2. The point being that my love of those songs has nothing to do with their spiritual connection, and everything to do with melody and verse. I was actually in the church choir for a period of time and have very few recollections about it other than feeling excruciatingly nervous and ill whenever it came time to sing, as I was a very shy, diffident child. As far as I can remember, I was never treated with anything other than kindness by our vicar and the other members of the choir and have no “bad” memories from that time other than an incident that happened back at home once that I won’t get into here as it’s not relevant.

I suspect that, like most children, I accepted the notion of God as being a perfectly reasonable, logical answer to the question of existence and the origins of the earth. I know now of course that a young mind is simply unable to comprehend concepts like cosmology, neurology, evolution, bacteria, and genetics. It takes years of education and reasoned thought to start to put these pieces together to understand the nature of the universe and is an area of ongoing research by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. We may therefore forgive children for not asking any awkward questions about whether what they’re being told is true.

Born Again!
When my parents separated and eventually divorced, I’m sure I prayed to God to bring my Dad home and sort everything out. Those prayers (like most) were never answered. As luck would have it, the divorce was the best thing that could possibly have happened for both my parents as they were, and are, entirely incompatible human beings. Obviously I didn’t understand this at the time, but I don’t think that this upheaval had any real impact on my belief or non-belief. I seem to recall that my Mom never took us to church after the divorce though I’m not 100% sure if that’s right. My Dad went to live with my Aunt and after a couple of years, I moved back in with him. I don’t remember the exact year, but my Dad met a woman named Mandy whom he eventually married and has been with ever since. Mandy was recently widowed and they met at a Church, or religious group, that my Dad had started going to, I believe, at the suggestion of a colleague of my Dad’s.

I don’t remember exactly what this church was called, but it was a Born-Again Christian group who met in, from what I remember, an old portable container type of structure. Dad didn’t ever force me to go, but instead asked me if I wanted to. I did end up going along, as my natural curiosity will always get the better of me! Looking back, it’s easy to see how both my Dad and Mandy ended up “finding Jesus” in this way. People who have suffered loss or have little or no direction in their life often fill this void with faith. I’m not going to say this is necessarily a bad thing, as anything that comforts a person in a time of need is generally a good thing, both emotionally and sometimes neurologically. It is hard not to be cynical however about the morality of targeting these individuals and praying on their emotional weakness at a time when they are most vulnerable. That is a topic for an entirely different discussion though so I won’t probe it further here.

I was “born again” some time, I think, when I was around 12. I think I went back to live with Mom when I was 13 or so, so this time frame seems about right. Obviously I was living in what is now called a “broken home” and looking for answers of my own. The people in this group my Dad was now going to seemed warm and friendly and I ended up believing what I was being told. I think more than anything though that I just wanted something to belong to that was bigger than myself. I had a relatively small number of friends at school, wasn’t in any of the popular groups and generally was, again, a good target for such a group as this. My recollections are of so desperately wanting to feel this spirit come into my heart that I’m positive now that I just convinced myself that my heightened emotional state and state of euphoria (in the scientific sense) was the presence of “The Lord”. I now know about things like adrenalin and serotonin and all sorts of other chemicals that can combine to alter your perception and trick your body into feeling things that either aren’t real or can be interpreted any number of ways. I do remember being utterly convinced at the time though that the whole thing was real. I was baptized into this faith at a Methodist or Pentecostal Church somewhere in Scholes I think, but I could have that spectacularly wrong! For the next year or so, I attended church with my Dad and genuinely believed in “speaking in tongues”, the imminent demise of the earth and the return of Jesus (we’re still overdue on the Rapture it seems) etc. I think that I attended this church sporadically for a period of around 18 months.

The Descent Into Reason
Once I moved back in with my Mom (the reasons for which are, again, not relevant to this tale!) I maintained my beliefs for a time. I think this was at around age 13 or so. It was right around the time I started High School anyway. Without the continual presence of and pressure from the church however, my feelings of connectedness to something greater slowly subsided. I don’t attribute it to living with Mom directly, but I think it was during this period when I first started to question my own faith and my own belief in any sort of God. If I’m honest, at that time, I was an incredibly selfish and confused kid and I suspect that one reason I “strayed” could well have been because it seemed like the rules and tenets of faith were too cumbersome and restrictive and I didn’t want to be bothered with them. I suspect though that this was also about that time that my intellect began to kick in a little and the things I was learning about life didn’t seem to match up with what I was being told by religion.

Most of my friends were not particularly religious, but religion isn’t something that we ever talked about. What teenage boys do talk about religion? We talked about the same things all teenage boys in Wigan talk about: Rugby, girls, and… well pretty much those two things. All of us went to The Deanery C of E High School though and church was a regular part of school. We started “Assembly” with the Lord’s Prayer etc. and had church services once or twice a year, but again, C of E is fairly benign dogmatically and I don’t remember anyone at school ever really pushing a religious agenda or forming my beliefs one way or the other. My last two years in high school were spent avoiding home work, avoiding bullies, avoiding embarrassment  (with varying degrees of success) and not having a great deal to do with Church. One thing I do recall though is that I never went through confirmation so I never went up to the front for the blackcurrent juice and chips (crisps to the UK mob) which is what they gave kids instead of wine and wafers.

By the time I wrote my exams in High School, I had already been accepted into the Army, so I didn’t have to worry about my grades at all (unfortunately). I left school to all intents and purposes an Agnostic. That is to say, I’m not really sure I believed in a specific God, but I wasn’t sure about the origins of life and wasn’t going to rule the possibility out. I always had that little doubt in the back of my mind though that pricked at me and said “What if  you’re wrong?”

I joined the Army at 16 years old, 5’3″ and 80lbs (in a wet parka). Being a fairly nervous, shy kid with a bit of a temper is a bad combination with military life and I learned quite quickly that I would have to toughen up and grow up in a bit of a hurry if I was going to make it. To be absolutely plainly honest, the only reason I went through the entire 14 weeks of basic training was to spite those people who I knew were convinced I wouldn’t last a week! In the Army, we went to church every month or so, and went through a much larger service on remembrance day but again, I don’t remember there being any sort of influence brought to bear during my entire time in the Army. I don’t recall any of my friends being anything other than apathetic agnostics. That is, until I left Army college, spent 2 and a half years in Colchester and was posted to the Irish Guards in Chelsea. This was when I was then detached to Northern Ireland and got my first taste of Catholicism.

You Can’t Like Orange if you’re Catholic…
Northern Ireland is a country divided by a common religion: Christianity. Confused? So are most neutral observers. The conflict in Northern Ireland is superficially one between a Catholic minority and a Protestant majority. I’m not going to get into the very complicated and disgusting history of Northern Irish politics as that’s an essay- or book-long discussion. What I did endure though was a systematically prejudicial anti-Catholic propganda campaign leading up to my first deployment. Of the two belligerents in this conflict, the British Military was firmly on the side of the Protestant camp. This was made very clear by everyone who trained us before we went over to “NI”. There are many reasons for this, but one undeniable reason is that since Henry VIII decided he was fed up with the old ball and chain and Rome wouldn’t let him get rid of her, he decided to set up his own religion and therefore create a tension between two sects of exactly the same faith and an built-in mistrust of Catholics by the English.  Another reason is the unavoidable fact that the people in Northern Ireland who tried to kill British soldiers were all Catholic. The IRA was (is?) a paramilitary group who flew under the banner of Catholicism as well as other deceitful affiliations.  It is difficult to be objective about a conflict when one side is constantly trying to kill you and it takes many years and some distance to be objective about it now. I hope I don’t offend any of my ex-Army friends who may read this when I say that I always felt a certain empathy with the IRA’s political cause, though absolutely not it’s tactics. I was never really sure why the British Army was still in Northern Ireland, nor why the Northern Irish people were being governed by the British government. I did know however, that I hated “the bloody Catholics” for continually attempting to redecorate the base in a “hint of squaddie brain” motif. I now of course realize that I despised the terrorists because of their actions, not because of their religion, but that was the easiest, quickest way to identify them. It’s also clear to me now that this hatred was born of a systematic military indoctrination. There are those who would argue that this is a necessary tool that military leaders must use to encourage soldiers to kill their enemy. I think that the troops should be credited will a little more intelligence.

The conflict in Northern Ireland made me much more aware of the Catholic Church, its history and its Dogma and this has been an area of interest for me for many years now.

A New Life
During my later years in the Army I met the love of my life and future wife, Karen, and spent a month (or 3 weeks?) visiting her in Canada. This was when I first met my future in-laws and was pretty much the first time that I really learned that Karen and her family were Catholic. I went to church with them and remember fairly vividly an awkward moment when everyone else went up for communion and I remained seated. This was partially because, at that point, I was still agnostic, but also partially a hangover from having not been confirmed, which in UK means you can’t receive communion. I vaguely remember Karen asking my about this and me mumbling something about not being confirmed, but I recall that this was one of the first times I thought that it would be hypocritical of me to go up and receive communion even though I didn’t believe.

I won’t get too much into the religious side of family life, as it’s an area that one has to tread delicately in in private, let alone in public. I think it is sufficient to say that Karen and I maintain a respectful distance from one another’s beliefs and it seems to work for us most of the time. Karen’s Facebook profile has “something bigger out there” under “Religious views” and I know that’s a view that many non-religious people also share, so I’m not going to comment on what Karen believes as I’m in no real position to do so. Also, I like my balls attached and I quite enjoy sleeping in my bed! 😀

My swing from agnosticism to atheism started probably a year or two after Karen and I were married. I’d spent the previous years not really believing in anything but also not really caring to investigate the issue. I can’t really pinpoint a defining moment where I thought “Wait a minute… what the…”. I think it was gradual development over time. One massive change though was the availability of information via the internet and having access to resources that had never been apparent before to research other faiths and cultures. I went through a period of about 6 years thinking that Buddhism sounded pretty cool and was fairly insular and harmless. I still think that of all the major religions, if I had to choose one on pain of death, that’s the one I’d choose, if only for the fact that intellectual enlightenment is encouraged. In learning about other religions in my quest to find something that fit my intuitions and all the things I thought about but couldn’t articulate, I started to see the patterns in how religions are formed. I started to come to the inevitable conclusion that all the major religions believed basically the same things, operated in essentially the same ways and were basically filling the same void in people’s lives without necessarily being true. I’d say that by the time that Kalyn was born or shortly after, I had decided that none of the major world religions were right for me and moreover, were probably flat out wrong about the important things that they claimed absolute knowledge about.

At around the same time, I had formed a team with and started playing football with, among other people, one Mark Berry. Mark is a chemistry guru who understands a lot about the brain and how chemicals impact it and govern how it works. (I think that’s a good layman’s description, I’ll leave it to him to correct me in the comments if he wishes!) I also met a couple of other scientists and if I recall correctly, discussions about religion, though infrequent, were always treated with a level of disdain from all three. This brought to the forefront of my thoughts in idle moments, inquiry into the areas of science rather than religion to see if there were satisfactory answers. This was where my conversion was really solidified. I know that may sound dramatic, but thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to read and learn much more easily about evolution, genetics, human physiology, cosmology etc. Once I had started to learn more about the building blocks of life, it was hard to reconcile that with any of the religious doctrines I’d been exposed to. Initially this made me feel a little uncomfortable because, as many philosophers and religious leaders like to propose, Science gives you the how, but never the why. The realization that there is no “why” was quite profound for me and I think it definitely changed the way I look at life and morality in particular.

The Horsemen of the New Atheism, and other people
Another defining moment in the development of my beliefs was indirectly through my discovery of Stephen Fry as something other than a Comedian. I’d seen him in Blackadder obviously and was sort of vaguely aware of him in other things. Around 6 years ago however, I discovered QI. This is a British comedy panel show that Mr. Fry hosts where he asks the panelists, usually comedians, questions on “Quite Interesting” subjects. Wandering happily down the YouTube trail I cam across him speaking to a huge variety of topics including religion and belief. This led me to search for other people who had things to say on the matter and led me to discover that there were a great many people out there who seemed to have struggled with the same questions I had. Some of them had even answered some of those questions conclusively!

It was roughly at about the same time that I started having lengthy discussions with my colleague Patrick. Patrick shares a lot of similar views to me and was a great sounding board to bounce ideas off and confirm that what I was thinking was logical. We have since spent many enjoyable hours discussing religion, philosophy, science, culture and all the things that impact “belief” and I thank him for being a consistent confidante.

In the last 4 or 5 years, I discovered people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and particularly Christopher Hitchens. Listening to these guys debate was the final nail in the coffin for me. It removed any lingering doubt I may have had about the validity and usefulness of religion. Dawkins and Harris provide answers in the scientific realm, along with Lawrence Krauss and other eminent scientists. I find that Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and people from the fields of philosophy that point out the moral inconsistencies or deficiencies of religion are always interesting to listen to.

Summing Up
So I went from not knowing any better, to knowing what I was told, to needing something and finding the first thing that came along, to learning and educating myself and finding out the truth. It has been and continues to be a very enjoyable journey that I hope to continue for a great many years to come!

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

 

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2 Responses

  1. Jeff Halderman says:

    Great post Kev. Really interesting to hear about your religious roots. Mine are quite different but the reason for my beliefs, or some would say lack of, are the same. I am far to logical to be religious. 🙂

  2. chris says:

    Your heathenistic rantings make baby Jesus cry. However, I respect your point of view and wish you luck burning in hell 🙂

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