religious self-denial

[mindstalk]

Someone else's post today got me thinking...

I've identified as an atheist from I dunno, age 7? I have this early memory of screwing up my courage to ask my parents, because I thought they were wishy-washy "believe in something" liberals and it's scary to disagree with your parents when you're that young. I also have memories of simultaneously not believing in God, acting like an animist (apologizing to doors if I ran into them, mercy-killing my breakfast sausage by biting off both ends quickly before slowly flaying it), and praying to not-Zeus when home alone during thunderstorms ("if you're going to strike my house, please wait until my parents get home".) [Edit: I may have prayed to "to whom it may concern", with Zeus as the prototype in my mind. Mostly a "I don't really believe but I'm f-ing scared and will try anything" prayer.]

But I've almost never felt a need to deny myself. Only one memory: 7th or 8th grade (so ages 12-14) on the school bus. I got asked what my religion was, and I chickened out (I do not recall what I was afraid of) and said "agnostic".

"What's an agnostic?" said Kid 1.

"Someone who lacks the courage to say they're an atheist", said Kid 2. (I think he did say "lacks the courage" though this is a very old memory.)

Now that's not true for many agnostics[1]. But it was 100% true of me, right then, and I felt the total shame of being called out. I didn't speak up further then, but did vow "never again".

Of course, it's been easy to keep that vow. Chicago, Caltech, San Francisco, IU Bloomington, Cambridge MA... Hanging around Techers and academics... In a lot of my social life you could assume Christians were the actual minority. I haven't had to live in the South or travel to Saudi Arabia, or decide whether I wanted to pretend to be Unitarian or Jewish as a cover.

[1] And there is a genuine "wrestling with belief" agnosticism that isn't atheist. But I suspect there are a lot of agnostics whose beliefs are indistinguishable from atheists but who just don't want the 'atheist' label, whether because it feels too 'strident'[2] or they associate it with Dawkins or whatnot.

[2] "I don't know" feels less confrontational than the implicit "I think you're wrong" of "I do not believe".

Comments

[mtbc]

I wrestled with agnosticism well into adulthood. I would have liked to become a Christian, at least then life could start making more sense, but I could never manage the faith, it just took plenty more for me to realize that I never would.

[zdenka]

Sorry for the gibberish in the first version of this comment--there was some unintentional hitting of keys.

I'm a Jewish agnostic. My level of belief fluctuates. But that's compatible with Judaism, so I don't see it as a problem. :) I'm not an atheist, because I'm not certain there isn't a god any more than I'm certain there is. I think it's all pretty much unproveable. Though if someone could somehow prove that there isn't any god/souls/afterlife, I'm not sure it would change anything about my current practice.

[mindstalk]

> Sorry for the gibberish

In context it almost worked as a surrealist interlude, at least for me. :)

> I'm not certain there isn't a god

In my experience, most atheists wouldn't say we're certain, in the "2+2=4" sense of certainty. But we have a strong feeling about the improbability. (And a stronger feeling about the improbability of specific religious Gods rather than an abstract and hands-off creator a la the Deists.) And we certainly _lack belief_. We are not theists, hence atheist.

A lot of people (again, in my experience) could be called "atheist agnostic", lacking belief and not professing 100% certainty about it, but some emphasize the atheist and some the agnostic.

But yeah, if you have belief that fluctuates around a non-zero level (or even simply frequently reaches non-zero levels) then I agree 'atheist' is not a good word for you. Whereas for me, praying in thunderstorms as a kid was literally the only time I came to close to belief in something godlike. (And as someone who read Greek myths, it was definitely more not-Zeus than not-God.)

[lunartulip]

Back around ages 13-14, I managed to reason myself from "theist because that's what I was raised with and I hadn't bothered to think through alternatives" to "essentially an atheist even if I-at-the-time thought of myself as a deist", before making the jump into self-admitted atheism around age 16 or 17. Specifically, via the pathway of:

1. The most relevant-to-future-plans thing God does is Afterlife Stuff.
2. God is supposed to be a benevolent figure.
3. But there are all these stories about Hell, whose existence would clearly not be compatible with God's benevolence.
4. Therefore, Hell is fake, and those stories were made up to try to push anyone not clever enough to follow through on this line of reasoning into being more virtuous out of fear.
5. ...wait a minute, do I actually have any more evidential basis for non-Hell afterlives than for Hell? Shouldn't doubting the one also mean doubting any others?
6. And how are afterlives supposed to handle slow multi-step processes of brain damage, anyway? The intuitive story doesn't seem to actually hold together well in edge cases, on inspection.
7. Afterlives are fake. By a similar token of lack-of-evidence, God isn't intervening in the world on a regular basis, because otherwise it'd be, like, noticeable. So I guess I'm a deist now!

And then I noticed that this kind of implied a lack of evidence for God existing at all and thus that God probably didn't exist, but for reasons I no longer remember in much detail I continued thinking of myself as a deist for another couple years anyway, until I learned enough epistemology to realize that "I think X is possible but very unlikely" is approximately synonymous with "I believe not-X". (At which point I updated to just straightforwardly thinking of myself as an atheist and stopped participating in most religious rituals (aside from the particularly fun ones), which my parents were disappointed-but-understanding about.)