Atheism 2 - The Author's Background

 Good morning, everyone!  And apparently by "everyone", I mean all 7 of you!  Hey, that's seven more than I was expecting, so I appreciate your notice.  Today, I'm going to give you some personal background so you can know something of where this is all going to be coming from.  With my next post, I'll launch into the promised subject.

Before I started typing, I made a quick count.  From birth through high school I lived in 14 different houses and attended eight different schools.  I'm not sure why; my father was not in the military or anything like that.  Over the years I jokingly concluded that my dad just really hated mowing the lawn, so every time the City threatened us with a fine, we just moved to another house where the lawn was already cut.

The one constant through all of this was that my family was always very active in the local Southern Baptist Church.  Since I was both reasonably intelligent and perpetually the new kid on the block, I was the target of pretty much every kid with a bullying streak.  The only place I tended to feel safe was in the church.  By the time I was in middle school (we used to call it junior high back then), I was a full-blown Jesus Freak.  This, of course, did not improve my standing with the local bad boys!  I got my butt kicked a lot.

Everything changed when I got to high school.  First, I was becoming increasing frustrated with my pastors and Sunday School teachers responding to virtually all my questions with "God moves in mysterious ways," or "we shouldn't question the ways of God."  This constantly left me spiritually frustrated.  Why would God give me an insatiable curiosity, then refuse to answer any of my questions?  It sort of made me feel like God was a bit of a jackass.  Was there anything inherently wrong with authority figures just saying, "I don't know?"

Second, my home life began to change dramatically when my older siblings moved through adolescence and early adulthood and my parents went through a rather acrimonious divorce.  Suddenly everything in my life was topsy-turvy, and I blamed God for all this upheaval.  I could only think of one way to express my anger with God, and that was to stop believing.  By my sophomore year, I was a full-fledged atheist.  I stopped attending church and started making fun of my peers who still believed.  This attitude cost me more than one intimate relationship, but adolescence is the time when most of us begin to build a personal philosophy, and I was building one with which I was growing increasingly comfortable (a dangerous thing to do, as I will explore later).

Initially, upon graduation, I did not intend to attend college.  I had spent my last few years in high school involved in the band, the thespian club and a radio/television production curriculum.  My intention was to go straight from high school into a career as a radio personality, which I did.  Less than a week after graduation, I was pulling down the graveyard shift on a Top-40 radio station.  That was working well for me until the night that a drunk cowboy got pissed off because I played a song over the air that reminded him of the girl who'd just dumped him and he retaliated by driving to the station and opening up on the plate glass with his trusty 12-gauge.  I survived without a scratch (those old radio turntables are very heavy-duty, plus the police station was about 3 blocks away), but I did decide to select a different, more anonymous, career.

Thus began my years in college.  During my first semester, I took a Freshman Comp class being taught by a rather grizzled old tenured professor, the kind that makes for the movie stereotype.  Never wrote on the board, never referred to the textbook, just sat behind a desk and lectured between puffs on a herculean meerschaum pipe.

We learned very little about composition that semester.  Yes, we wrote themes on a near daily basis, and they were graded on composition as well as content, but grammar was not the subject of a single lecture that entire semester.  Apparently, over the decades of watching freshmen come and go, succeed and fail, Dr. Hanks had come to the conclusion that while, yes, incoming freshmen definitely needed to know how to write, it was even more important that they learn how to think.  The semester was filled with challenges to our critical thinking skills. You might arrive in his class engaged in concrete operational thinking, but, by damn, you were going to leave having developed a pretty decent abstract reasoning ability.

This class offered me my first glimpse into the Socratic method and the Ancient Greek development of logic as a study.  I admit, I took to it like fuzz to a peach.  By this point, I had almost memorized all the old episodes of Star Trek (it seems some UHF channel or another was running them 24/7) and I almost worshiped the character of Mr. Spock.  How much better would life be, I reasoned, if we could all purge ourselves of our emotions (the root of all evil) and just make all our decisions according to the laws of logic (the salvation of all humankind)?  I took no more formal classes in logic because it was difficult to squeeze it into a liberal arts major, even as an elective.  But I certainly launched into a lifelong study of the subject outside of academia.

Within a year or two following my discovery of logic, I decided to turn my new magnifying glass of reason onto the subject of religion.  What will follow in subsequent posts is the process I started then and at least some of the almost 40 years of follow-up. I will, inasmuch as I can, try to include my citations, but, truth to tell, some of this goes way back and I'm not sure if I can still find all those quotes.  Keep in mind, you will not be reading the results of scholarly research, but merely the findings of an ordinary fellow with a reasonable intellect who has an insatiable curiosity for the subject at hand.

I mentioned this in my first post, but it bears repeating - it is not the intention of this blog to start a heated debate, nor to change anyone's mind regarding their own personal philosophy.  If we didn't all build our own philosophy brick by brick then, having something we feel rather strongly about and resist changing to the point of near ridiculousness, I'm not sure we could still think of ourselves as human.  Vehement refusal to change seems to be in our DNA, and I do not exclude myself from that observation.

I created this blog merely at the request of some friends whom I wish to accommodate.  I'm just throwing my own thoughts and ideas out there.  If you, as a reader, find some points intriguing, well then, I guess I made my point.  If you actually do change your mind about a few things, well that's icing on the cake.  If you think everything I say is balderdash, that's okay, too.  We can still go out for pie and coffee later, and the next time we meet it will be as friends.

With the next post (whenever I get around to it), I'll start into my arguments for why I believe in God.  I hope you'll stick around.

Pax