Beelzebub has a Devil put aside for me...

In my quasi-infinite spare time I have begun to work my way through the This American Life archives online. For those of you unfamiliar with TAL, it is a public radio program, produced in Chicago and populated by effete New Yorkers, that is syndicated nationwide. Each week they have a theme and they get writers, comedians, and journalists to contribute stories that illustrate that theme. The result is a show that is for the most part insightful, funny, emotionally gripping, and simply captivating. Today I hit up their ten-year-old episode titled "Pray", a show about prayer and Christianity from a couple of secular liberal media archetypes. It reminded me of a lot of crap that has been festering in my mind for some time now about my loss of faith.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that I was raised Catholic, attended a Catholic high school, and, at some point, was so well indoctrinated into church dogma that I was considering the priesthood and attended a conference for young preachers as a representative of my school. It seems a bit ironic to me that I didn't really question my faith until I was fully embedded in a Catholic high school. You see, most Catholics never actually read the bible. Unlike many denominations, the scriptures seem to be a much more tangential component of the Catholic faith. Much more prominent in the Catholic church are the rituals and tradition of guilt. But in my freshman year of high school, we were required to actually read and discuss the bible. If you actually pay attention to the bible, you will find that the very first two chapters of the bible are contradictory. They offer two completely different accounts of the creation myth. And it was all downhill from there. We went through the draconian codes of the Mosaic law. These govern everything from what and how you should eat to what a woman should do when she is menstruating. Oh and it recommends the death penalty for absolutely everything including a sentence of stoning for children who disobey their parents.

So if any of that sounds a bit crazy to you, you and 9th grade me would be on the same page. Of course, my teachers explained these inconsistencies and ancient legal codes away as symbolism and hyperbole. But these explanations were hardly satisfying and my doubts continued to nag at me. By the time I was a senior, all that was required to tip me form believer to non-believer were a series of, in retrospect, minor disappointments and unfortunately poorly timed personal mini-disasters. I won't bore you with the details but suffice it to say that my loose grip on my faith finally slipped away.

In the couple of years that have passed since then, I have struggled with a lot of questions. If not god then what? Without god, is there any sense in speaking of morality? Etc.

But then I thought about what drove me away from the church in the first place: the gaudy pageantry and spectacle of the mass rang false to me, the scripture and demonization of sexuality preposterous, and the notion that the humble servants of god in the church hierarchy should deserve to live in opulent palaces embodied hypocrisy for me. And then there were the fundamentalists. If there was any one thing that I hated most about religion then and now, it was the groups of people who believed that the scriptures were one hundred percent true, in every possible sense of the word. There is something terrifying about people who are fully confident in their own righteousness and who believe that something better awaits them in the afterlife. In non-fundamentalists, this latter belief may provide some comfort in times of sorrow or misery, but in the fundamentalist, it can mean a completely reckless disregard for their own life and for the rest of life here on earth.

Which brings me back to This American Life. The episode I linked above featured Ted Haggard, of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and some of his parishioners. You may recognize Mr. Haggard from the end of the documentary "Jesus Camp," in my opinion one of the most frightening movies ever made, or the fact that this crusader for literal interpretations of biblical morality has a meth and male prostitute addiction. Now normally, the exploits of the batshit crazies on the Christian right are good for either a hearty chuckle or a horrified gasp. But the interviewees in this particular episode of TAL really made me think. Can these people really not see the absurdity of the religious buzzwords and talking points that come out of their mouths? Can they really still believe, in this day and age, that their prayers will drive bona fide witches out of their neighborhoods?

So I decided that my instincts against religion outweighed my questions about the consequences of disbelief.

And then I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and, not only did it answer all of my questions but, it reaffirmed the reasons that I left the faith in the first place in much more eloquent and well thought out prose than I could pretend to emulate here. And so I stand before you today and I have decided to "come out", so to speak, as an atheist (or "Bright" as Dawkins would prefer) once and for all.

So that's it, sorry for the long post. Leave some comments if you want.