redsturgeon wrote:Did you ever believe in a god and if so at what age and what led you to not believe anymore? A supplementary question might be, were you brought up in a religious background?
Like most people I `believed' in the sense that I was told by those in authority that God existed and it never occurred to me as a child to question it.
However, also like most other people as soon as I developed the power of independent thought there were far too many inconsistencies and superficially absurd propositions to allow uncritical acceptance. But when, in good faith (so to speak) I asked questions there were no satisfactory answers.
Unusually, I can recall the exact time that what little residual faith remained disappeared. I went to a Catholic prep school and we were receiving religious instruction from a Catholic priest. There was a book called a Catechism, which was basically a book of FAQ's about the Catholic religion. We had to learn sections of it verbatim, and we would then be tested on them by said priest.
One section dealt with a rather bizarre concept called `indulgences'. In order to understand the concept you have to first understand that in the Catholic faith there are basically four possible destinations when you drop off your perch.
The preferred destination is obviously Heaven, but you are only fast-tracked there if you are sufficiently fortunate to die in a `state of grace', i.e. with no sins recorded against you. In practice, as there are so many things that are sinful this is only likely if you are leaving the church after confession (which clears the slate) and you immediately get run over by a bus without having seen any lissom young woman who's inspired lustful thoughts (a sin).
If you've committed a mortal sin and have failed to have it cleared by confession before you croak you're unfortunately destined for Hell. I'd forgotten the definition of a mortal sin, so Googled it and came up with this rather alarming list -
http://www.saintaquinas.com/mortal_sin.htmlI have to say it's really not a good outlook for gays, who seem to be pretty conclusively classified as sinners, and as they will presumably never `repent’ it looks like they’re doomed to the eternal fires!
I was advised at the time that most people died having only committed venial sins (though looking at that list I'm by no means sure) and they were therefore allocated a ticket to the third destination, Purgatory. This was basically a department of Hell, but with the knowledge that your time there was limited, and that once your sins had been purged you were released and taken up to Heaven.
The fourth destination was Limbo, a weird, undefined place where people went who had never sinned but had never been baptised, either and were therefore denied the entry visa for Heaven. In practice, as the Church took the view that people started sinning as soon as they were capable of conscious thought this only in practice applied to young babies who died. (En passant it's interesting to speculate as to whether non-baptised people who had only committed venial sins also went there after a spell in Purgatory ...)
Anyway, the bottom line was that for the vast majority of people the most likely destination by far was Purgatory. And this is where indulgences came in. They were basically a `Get out of jail free' card, which were awarded in return for certain tasks. I can't now recall the details, but there were different types of indulgence - presumably the harder the task the greater the reward.
My moment of truth arrived because one of the indulgences mentioned was a 365 day indulgence in return for saying a specific prayer, the Salve Regina. I must have been about 9 or 10 at the time, and having mugged up on indulgences the night before something was troubling me.
So on the Friday morning I determined to ask the priest, in the hope of enlightenment. What I asked was effectively, "I can receive a 365 day indulgence for saying the Salve Regina. But how can I judge whether this is a worthwhile exercise when I haven't the faintest idea what my sentence in Purgatory will be? If it's a 10 year sentence then getting a year off is obviously well worth the modest effort of saying the prayer. But if it's a sentence of 100,000 years it's a waste of time."
Quite a reasonable question one might think. But by way of an answer the priest came over and walloped me soundly, calling me a "cheeky little corner boy" (a peculiarly Irish phrase used by several of the priests).
I was genuinely shocked by this - I can remember it vividly even today. I had not, as he seemed to have believed, been trying to take the proverbial - it was a genuine question and I'd expected a reasonable explanation, not a clout round the ear.
And it was that clout that knocked out whatever residual faith remained. I took the view that if the people who purported to be God's messengers couldn't answer a straightforward question they were charlatans, and not worthy of any credibility.
Is there any time your atheism slips a little and your feel there might be something more?
I wouldn't describe myself as an atheist, as I don’t completely deny the
possibility of a divine being; it's just that I've never been presented with any remotely convincing evidence of it. As I mentioned in another post recently (I can't recall in what context) the sheer incomprehensibility of the universe as disclosed by modern physics means that if such things as dark matter, wormholes, parallel universes and so on are possible then the existence of a divine being is also a theoretical possibility.
Do you believe people have a choice in believing or not believing?
No. Belief / faith is something that you either posses or don't possess as an innate condition. If you have it you can no more consciously cease to believe than you can change your DNA, and vice versa.
Of course you may lose or gain it during your lifetime, but again this is something that happens at a sub-conscious level, not as a result of a rational decision.
However, I think there are many people who have decided they
want to believe, and many of them may have convinced themselves, at least at some level, that they do. Organised religion can be very useful for a lot of different reasons. For desperately poor people who endure miserable lives it gives them something to aim for, and a reason to carry on. For many middle class people, particularly the stereotypical WASP, it performs a very valuable social role, in cementing their status as a member of a self-selected local community with all the advantages that brings.
I suspect that in both examples the people involved are deeply conformist by nature, and not possessed of much capacity for independent thought, so that although their `belief'' may originally have been to some extent adopted for functional purposes it's become a sort of habit (perhaps that's where the word came from) so that after a time, as with any other brainwashing, they may well believe that they believe it (which is not quite the same as actually believing it).
Despite my lack of belief, I have nevertheless resorted to prayer in times of extreme pressure or misery. I mentally begin the prayer, "Dear God, without prejudice to the question of your actual existence, please could you sort out this problem for me?"
I also find myself thanking God for small favours, like keeping the traffic light on green when I'm in a hurry. It's quite bizarre really, but it undoubtedly helps me to act as though there is some external deity that can sway things in my favour even if I don't actually believe it in the cold light of day.
If I had to justify it I suppose I'd say that God
might exist, so it can't do any harm, but I'd be the first to admit that this is hardly a compelling argument, and unlikely to win many converts.
And of course the one question I sometimes ask myself is would I want a priest at my deathbed? And the answer is that if there was one handy then definitely yes, on the basis that it would be stupid to ignore the chance that they'd been right all along!
A very interesting thread.