Drawing the Line

 

I’ve thought a lot about personal integrity lately, particularly as it relates to being overt with my atheism. I am an open atheist and I enjoy those debates, but at the same time, I dislike creating unnecessary conflict, especially since I’m at a Christian college, and I don’t want people coming at me all the time. So for me, the question becomes, where do I draw the line between avoiding conflict and retaining my personal integrity? On the one hand, I’m not going to lie if someone asks me about my atheism, but on the other hand, I don’t wear it on my sleeve. This question becomes even more difficult when you ask the next question. Is there ever a point at which I have to tell someone that I’m an atheist, or should I just let it come up in the course of natural conversation? These are hard questions, and it sucks that I even have to deal with them in the first place. I could just take the easy route and just go back into the closet, but I value my integrity too much to do that. So what am I to do?

I would love to just take my time and think this through but I’m finally beginning to have some success with the ladies (I had my first positive dating experience the other night!), and I have to figure this out before things get serious. With this particular girl, I may be a bit lucky because she is in my Honors class, so the topic will probably come up of its own accord, but with other girls, that may not be the case. It’s even more important that I come to the right conclusion here, because these relationships are more important than most others, and I don’t want to screw up over something like this. *sigh* Sometimes being an atheist is more complicated that you would think.

Ultimately, I think it will come down to a question of what I value more. Peace, or personal integrity?

 

On Being Unique

Ah, one of those refreshing posts that is mostly positive. I was discussing life with a friend of mine tonight, and the following thoughts popped into my head. Poor girl; she had no idea that I’d be doing the whole stream of consciousness thing, even if it was an accident. Anywho, I was thinking about normality, and how overrated it is, and this is the result:

People like us, we’re unique. We see things differently. We watch as the world goes by; people living their lives in that predictable, well-worn routine. We sometimes envy those people. We wonder “Why can’t my life be simple? Why can’t I just grow up, go to school, have a boyfriend/girlfriend, get a job, and be like everybody else? Why am I different? Am I doing something wrong?”

That difference is both a boon and a curse. It’s what keeps us up at night. Some nights, it’s the inspiration of a new idea or perspective. Other nights, it’s the depressing reality that despite our best efforts, there is no one on earth who both understands us and that we can share our deepest secrets with. It’s the realization that we will always be outsiders. Even within our chosen friend groups, there are very few people who even realize who and what we actually are.

However, we are the world changers. We are the ones who have the freedom to impact other people without fear, without hesitation. We occupy a special place in human society. We are the outsiders with the power to change things from within. We are thoughtful. We are unique. We are the ones with the power to affect change. Even as much as I sometimes wish to have a normal life, I wouldn’t trade mine for the world.

Afterlife

This is beautiful! I literally sat in tears towards the end! Ironically, it brought to mind a phrase from a hymn, “No guilt in life, no fear in death”. Thanks to Seth and others like him, in Christ I no longer stand. The burden has been lifted. I no longer fear death, but rather celebrate in life! If you waste your life, why care about an afterlife? The guilt is gone, and there is a world out there that is just waiting to be experienced!

Related articles

• The Psychologies of Afterlife Beliefs (freethoughtblogs.com)

Movie Idea! Help Needed!

If you haven’t noticed, most media that is created by atheists (No offense to any of them. I have great respect for those who make videos about science and atheism. Without them, I probably wouldn’t be in the place to have this idea), while logically sound, and technically excellent, often lacks the humanness that makes it possible to have a strong emotional impact with those who have not had those experiences. That’s why you have atheist calling those who are still in the closet cowards, and why we are often accused by the religious of being cold, and emotionless. Frankly, I believe the perceived lack of humanness is why theists often have such a hard time understanding and accepting us.

“So what?” Why does it matter? Many of our deconversion stories are very emotional, even heart-wrenching. In my own experience, when I am able relate my past and my journey out of religion, it immediately disarms the person to whom I am speaking. They then begin dealing with me on a human, empathetic level. The moment that they see atheists as the human beings we are, it becomes nearly impossible for them to view us as merely spiteful, god-hating heathens that want nothing more than to indoctrinate their children and drag them to hell. Even before I became an atheist, I was always struck by the raw emotion in some of the stories of struggle and doubt that were related to me by the non-religious. I became enraged at the abuse that atheists went through for their lack of faith. I believe that it is possible to evoke these emotions from others, just by relating our stories in a compelling manner.

I am writing a script for a film about people’s experiences with religion. I am specifically focusing on stories that showcase non theistic or non-traditional perspectives on Christianity. My film will follow 3-5 people as they journey through the doubts and struggles of faith. My goal is to make it real, to make it raw, and to make it honest. I will not be whitewashing faith, but I also will be showing positive aspects of faith. My goal is to connect with people, and to help them understand perspectives that they might not agree with. My aim is to hit them where they live. I am doing my best to not caricature the religious or the non-religious. I want people, religious or not to watch this film and be able to say “That’s me!”

Here’s the thing; I need your stories. In an effort to keep it real, I want to draw on the lives of real people. I will change details and fictionalize them to the point where you will not be identified, but these stories should be yours. I cannot promise that I will use them all, but I will use parts of many of them. Be as detailed as you feel comfortable doing, and share as much background as possible. If you have the time, I would love to get specific details about the environments that different events took place in, because I’ve found that many times, the setting for an event has as much influence on its impact as the event itself. If there happen to be any Christians on this page, I welcome your stories as well. This is a film about people who are grappling with their faith, not just those who have rejected it. My goal is to have the script finished by the end of this year, and to begin shooting next spring.

If you are interested, email me your stories at eagleandcrossmovie@gmail.com. Make sure to put “Story” in the subject line. You will not be in danger of being exposed. Only my writing team (at the moment, only one other person who I trust implicitly) and I will have access to your original emails.  By using email, it makes it easier to keep track of all the stories, and I can be sure that I won’t miss one. I will reply to each email to confirm that I received it. Also, if you are interested in helping out with the film in other ways (Production Design, Promotion, Funding, Acting, etc.) please shoot me an email as well. I would love to hear from you. Please share this with your friends!

Thank you guys so much! I can’t wait to see this thing come together!

Fear, Hell, and Pottery

While I was helping some of the art majors with a wood kiln the other night, one of my Christian friends (I think she somehow missed that I am an atheist) was talking to another art major, and mentioned that she looks at the wood kiln and then realized that hell will be infinitely hotter and how she feels sorry for all the non-christians who were going there. A massive wave of sadness and anger instantly washed over me, and I found myself reflecting on the horror of subjecting someone to that kind of brainwashing. How much fear they must have. I began to wonder what kind of trauma she subjects herself to without even knowing it. The idea of once again having that paralyzing fear terrifies me. It terrifies me that she goes through life in fear of doubting, and it motivates me to strive ever harder towards the truth of these matters. I want to illuminate people, and this concept of Hell flies in the face finding truth.

Trapped

(I started writing this on Monday night and wrote most of it then, but since beginning to write, I have had two more panic attacks while writing. I feel that I need to write this, but it has been difficult. Military School really screwed with my head)

Last weekend has been absolutely crazy. As I write this, I am incredibly sleep deprived. Since Saturday morning, I have gotten a grand total of 10 hours of sleep. Saturday night, I was finishing up some homework assignments (6000 words of text over the last few days! I counted) when my roommate brought his girlfriend into the room at 1 in the morning (I’m certain that we will be getting a call from security with in the next few days because of that). She was having some serious medical issues, but long story short, we ended up spending the rest of the night at the emergency room.  By the time we got out, it was 10 in the morning on Sunday. I decided to try to just stay up for the next few hours and just go to bed really early that night. Unfortunately, I ended up crashing around 2, and I slept for the next 5 hours. I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep well that night, and since I only had one 9:00 class on Monday and I still had a ton to write, I decided to pull another all-nighter. This was working fairly well until I decided to take a break at 3:00am. I was reading a thread on Reddit about a Christian re-education camp (http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/q6is0/) that brought back a flood of memories, many of which I had unconsciously suppressed, of a Christian military school that I attended when I was in 7th grade. Combined with lack of sleep and being somewhat high off caffeine, one of the top comments triggered a panic attack, which kept me up the rest of the night. That school did quite a number on me, and I had no idea how bad until these last few days when it all started coming back, particularly certain things that I had unknowingly repressed.

When I was younger I wanted to join the military. Because of this, my parents decided to look for a military academy because my parents and I (being the naive people we were, at least when it came to this sort of thing) thought that it would be a good experience. In our search, we found a military school that was advertised as a place to send your children to learn discipline and responsibility while having lots of fun doing military-esque activities (paintball, marksmanship training, etc.) and to prepare them for West Point. In reality, although we did play paintball one weekend, life is hell there. Of the 200+ cadets there, only one of them was actually planning to go to a military college. There were two others who were there just to try it out like me, and the rest were juvie rejects.

One fun thing that they have is in-school suspension (ISS). There are about 70 acres of woodland behind the school where they send you if you seriously misbehave. While you are out there, they force you to do back-breaking labor for 3-4 days with almost no food or water. This is enough to break many adults, and most of the cadets were in 7-9th grade. This only one example of the screwed up stuff they would do.

While I was at school, I sent 9-10 letters to my parents. Only 2 of them actually got to them. During lunch, they would go through all of the letters and read them in front of us. If they found anything that they found even remotely objectionable (ie. if we said ANYTHING negative about the school), they would make us sprint nearly a mile to the road and back. If they really didn’t like what we wrote they would send us to PT or to the Porch (more on that later)

They made my parents pay a ridiculous amount of money (which is part of why I didn’t stay. It was just too expensive) for food and lodging that rivaled that of our best interment camps. With bare bones dormitories with a thin, ripped up mattress to sleep on (if you look at the website, you will find that they don’t allow visitors in the actual student dorms. I wonder why?) and food that was so cheap and ill prepared that even though you were starving, you still didn’t want to eat it, all of this just added to the hell hole that was this school. At night they would lock down the rooms, and the TAC Officers would patrol the halls and outside the buildings to make sure we didn’t make any noise or try to escape. 

Cleanliness was also an issue. While I was there, several of the cadets got staph infections and one kid my age was sent to the emergency room and nearly lost his leg. This sort of stuff is why they would never let visitors anywhere near the dorms. Most of them were built in the early 1900′s and probably had not been thoroughly cleaned in years. Sure, we would clean them every week, but with nothing more than brooms. I doubt they had been sanitized in a while.

There were two types of cadets there. There were the juvie rejects, who made up most of the student population, and there were the other cadets who, like myself, were sent there in an attempt to make us better men. Most of the latter group, myself included, and a good bit of the former group ended up breaking in some way. Often, the other cadets were actively involved in this process through bullying. Occasionally, one of the cadets would make a break for it, and he would get chased down by a few of the TAC Officers, who would then beat him half to death before bringing him back. The one time a cadet did get away, he managed to steal a change of clothes and hitchhike to a nearby town before he got caught. The school actually got the police involved and he ended up getting tased and spending a night in jail before they brought him back. Needless to say, he ended up spending every evening for the rest of the semester in PT.

If there was any minor misbehavior, we would either be sent to PT, or to the Porch. The Porch was what everyone called the Commandant’s office. At the school, the staff were allowed to use corporal punishment. If you were told to go to the Porch, you were to wait outside until the Commandant called you in. When he did, you would go in, and he would give you a lecture before spanking you. When you think of spanking, what do you think of? A few swats with a switch or small rod, right? Not a there. There, you would get the shit beat out of you with a cricket bat. It was horrible, enough to terrify anyone of any age, but especially someone of my age. Fortunately, the one time I ended up on the Porch, my offense was fairly minor, and he eventually let me off with a warning, but he spent a good 10 minutes lecturing me, while threatening to hit me with the bat by swinging it dangerously close to my head. I think he might have been getting off on it.

PT, affectionately called “Physical Torture”, was the other punishment for misbehaving cadets, or cadets that somehow pissed off one of the staff. On their website, they claim that PT isn’t related to their punishment system, but that’s a line of bull. PT consisted of several hours of intense physical exercise designed to make you drop from utter exhaustion. If you didn’t perform at the same level as everyone else or better you were beat and yelled at until you began performing better. I only got sent to PT once, but that is what completely broke me. While I was at the school, I actually developed a type of Stockholm Syndrome which manifested itself after PT when I actually thanked the TAC Officer for putting me through that hell. It makes me sick just thinking about it now, but at the time, it seemed quite logical.

This is not to say that it was all negative. I became more resilient after coming home, and I learned how to deal with tough situations, but that’s not really a fair trade off, especially in light of the last few days. There are two bills being considered by Congress right now (https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s1667) I would greatly encourage you to call or write to your Congressman and tell him to support these bills in order to stop this kind of stuff from happening to other kids.

Think!

Those who have the capacity to think for themselves, yet refuse to do so, whether it’s because of religion, politics, or allegiance to a military or state, are wasting their minds. If you are not willing to question everything, including yourself, and the paradigm you live in, you are not truly thinking, you are following. You aren’t going to learn anything truly useful until you can get into this mindset.

From my studies, I have come to the conclusion that the assertion that God is clearly revealed is much like the assertion that the Emperor really is wearing clothes. It is a false assertion designed to use our fear of looking stupid and ignorant to bring us into line. The fact is, that if a god actually did choose to reveal himself through the Bible (or nature for that matter), he had a very odd way of going about it. It’s almost like he was trying to make us think that it was a book written by men for political ends, what with the pseudepigrapha and later editing out of details (The Hebrews were originally polytheistic and Jehovah was a synthesis of two different gods from two different Canaanite pantheon, for example) that would mess with the narrative that they were promoting. He also seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to cover up his role in nature. To paraphrase Sam Harris, I would challenge anyone to think of a question that we once had a scientific answer for, however inadequate, but that the best answer is now a religious one. Things that religion explains are just things that we don’t understand through science yet, but it doesn’t work the other way around. We used to be afraid of thunder, and we thought it was something supernatural, now we don’t anymore.

My whole journey to atheism started because I wanted to be a better Christian. I was making sure that I was ready to give a defense to anyone who asked, like in 1 Peter. As I studied more about the Bible, its history, and its theology (all from Christian sources, I might add), I realized that I was keeping myself in a box. A thought box. There were certain places that my mind had been trained not to go. As a Christian, you can explore different theological ideas (within boundaries), but you can never truly allow yourself to look at the possibility that Christianity itself might be wrong. The core theology underlying the different creeds may not be questioned. The only way that these ideas may be examined is for the purpose of building up the bulwarks around them. When I hit this wall, I realized that there was something wrong. These ideas should be able to hold up to the weight of scrutiny, and the burden of evidence. If not, why should I believe them?

Once I realized this, and started truly examining these tenants, I quickly realized that they did not meet their burden. Once this occurred, it wasn’t too long before I finally rejected it. I stand by this decision, and I would assert that faith’s purpose is to keep you satisfied with not knowing. Why would you seek out the real answers to the big questions (eg: Why are we here?) if you have faith in an “infallible” book that already gives you those answers? Why would you trust what science has to say if it contradicts your preconceived notions?

Let me just close with a quote by Marcus Aurelius, “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

This is how I want to live my life. Not cowering in fear of hellfire as some do. Not limiting my thoughts to a box of topics as set by religious beliefs. I refuse to be satisfied with not knowing. I will not give up my mind for the uncertain promise of a reward in the hereafter. I don’t know if the conversations about what is True, what is Just, and what is Beautiful and Noble will continue after I die, but those are the conversations I want to be having while I am still here, and I want others to desire these things as well. If I am not doing these things  now, while I am still alive, then I should not expect to do them once I die, if that is even a possibility. I would hope that you would join me in this journey of discovery, wherever you might be now.