Conversion: Chapter 1

I was raised in a casually Presbyterian family. We went to First Presbyterian Church in downtown Dallas for weddings, funerals, Sunday school, choir, youth group, and the occasional Sunday morning service. It seemed more social than religious to me. Even in my preadolescent years, I recognized the template each sermon followed: amusing anecdotal tale, a smattering of toothless jokes, a gentle moral lesson, and an assurance that we, the congregation, were right with God. A couple of times I was exposed to a more passionate version of faith, in the form of a new youth pastor with a guitar and a burning desire to ignite our hearts with love for Jesus, or a weekend at my friend’s Baptist bible camp at which everyone was encouraged to witness for or accept Christ right then and there. I responded, but didn’t maintain interest for long. My default personal belief was pretty liberal. I believed all religious faiths had a road to God, not just Christians. In my naive and idealistic youth, I named my highest values as Truth, Beauty, and Love. I believed that God was basically a loving presence, and that He was most present when we humans loved one another. I think I formed this belief because I wanted a good God, and so I ascribed my own highest values to my personal deity. I had a powerful need to know the meaning of my life, and to be a force for good in the world. I’m sure it was rooted in some childish need for love and approval. It drove me to seek a God that was never there.

In college I started to seek some verifiable truth about God. I attended Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meetings and took a class called “Judaism and New Testament Christianity.” I formed a close friendship with the wife of the IVCF leader and, after answering my many questions and assuaging my doubts temporarily, she “led me to accept Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.” Jesus seemed like a really powerful man-god, displaying the best values of love, charity, courage, and peacefulness. I wanted to internalize his guidance, and as far as I could tell, accepting Christ would cost me nothing. I was “born again.” I pursued that course of faith with the best intentions. I prayed, I read the Bible, I went to IVCF meetings. But even then I didn’t believe that I needed forgiveness, nor did I fear eternal damnation. I could not imagine a God who would consign people to hell for failure to follow the narrow path of fundamental Christianity. Immediately upon my conversion to fundamentalism I became aware of an overwhelming sense of emptiness. I was utterly unable to convince my heart that anyone was listening to my prayers. It began to feel like I was playing some giant make-believe game which I really needed to end because it felt unnatural and wrong. I became depressed as I realized that I could not make the leap of faith required. It went way beyond doubt. I could plainly see that I was trying to believe something which was unsupportable in the face of reality. Jesus was great, but he was dead. I could not believe in, much less worship a God who was so fundamentally brutal and unfair as to demand blood sacrifice to atone for the simple “flaw” of curiosity and willfulness. I kept trying though, to varying degrees for another twenty years.

Two years after I was “born again,” I took an outdoors course, consisting of 22 days of backpacking in the North Cascades mountain range in Washington State. Ten students and two instructors carried food, camping and cooking equipment, climbing gear, clothes, and barest of necessities, meeting at designated re-supply points once a week. Our packs weighed an average of forty pounds, and we covered about 150 miles on foot over rugged mountain terrain. We had tarps instead of tents, and went without such luxuries as soap, shampoo, and toilet paper. We were taught to take only photographs and leave only footprints. We learned to use compasses and geological contour maps to navigate. We got up before dawn to ascend steep inclines and watch the sun rise over high cirques and meadows. We climbed peaks that had never been climbed before. We meandered up and down through soul searingly beautiful mountains and forests in every kind of weather. I remember trudging in heavy rain through forest which had been decimated by fire, awed by the stark beauty of the blackened trees and blazing purple fireweed under the heavy gray sky. I remember sitting on a boulder above a high, curving valley blanketed in wildflowers, watching a train of fluffy white clouds skirt by with surprising speed, following the curve of the near valley wall, filling my nose with the smell of ozone as it briefly engulfed me in white fog.

I was pushed beyond my physical limits many times on that adventure, and I felt mortal fear as I never had before. I was the pale, slim, bookworm daughter of a Dallas librarian. I had never climbed anything higher than the stairs up the bleachers at my college before that trip. On the second day in the wilderness, we crossed a talus field, a tumble of boulders ranging in size from football to panel van. I was already exhausted when we approached it, from hiking several miles and gaining a couple of thousand feet in altitude as we ascended from our starting point. I was off balance and feeling fairly crushed by the extra 40 pounds on my back. I was still breaking in my new leather hiking boots, and had the mole-skinned blisters to prove it. As I committed myself to the traverse, I became aware of how easy it would be to break a leg. It began to seem very unlikely that I could cross those giant boulders without falling, as they tipped under my boots and my backpack pushed and pulled me off balance. I fell behind as I became more and more cautious, crouching down so I could use my hands and half crawl across the talus. I was getting panicky about falling behind and not being able to make it across. I began to hyperventilate. One of the instructors had to climb back down to me and put my arms over my head until my breathing slowed, then coach me across the talus. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. I learned what it means to feel your bowels loosen with fear as I approached my first technical rock climb. I didn’t believe the ropes would protect me from head trauma and broken bones because I could see that I didn’t have to fall far to mangle myself on jagged rock, and we were days from any sort of help. A terrifying high point of the trip was a traverse across a ridge of sharp shale with extraordinarily steep drops off either side. All ten students were roped together as we crossed. If one fell, we all would. I crossed it, walking upright and tall, though I was sure we would fall and be shredded to ribbons on the blades of shale. My reward was to lie on my back on a high mountain peak, feeling like the mountain was breathing under me, lifting my closer to the black of space, just visible behind the blue of the sky. The price of my courage on that and other occasions was paid each night. I had the most terrifying nightmares of my life. Each night, I dreamed of falling over sharp stone into a malevolent void, an empty and voracious black hole which would inevitably devour me. It was simple mortality made real to me.

Living in nature, completely removed from the many numbing distractions of society such as books, music, television, and food, forced me to see the simple structure of life itself. I began to see how hostile nature is to human life. We are so fragile and defenseless against cold and hunger, sharp edges and hard objects. We are slow, clumsy, loud, smelly, weak, and defenseless. I felt humble and small as I walked through those immense and ancient mountains. I came to love and admire the trees, so old and well rooted, beautifully adapted and in harmony with their ecosystem. I found myself gazing into the eyes of birds, deer, marmots, and pika. I felt like the wilderness had a soul, ageless and silent, looking knowingly out from the eyes of the animals. I was pleased, rather than scared to wake one night and find a small animal trying to nest in my hair. I came to appreciate my own ability to adapt as my body became leaner and stronger. I was not a part of this wild place, but I was in it long enough to begin to see it for what it was.

Then came my solo. Our instructors took us to a warm, lushly forested valley where we each set up a small campsite along a river. I was isolated in my own patch of forest with an 8’x10’ tarp, a sleeping bag and mat, warm clothes, and a water bottle I could refill in the river. I fasted for three days, alone in that place, with nothing to do but listen to the river and the wind in the trees. I soothed my empty stomach with cold river water and waited for something to happen. I built the best shelter I could craft with my tarp. It was as symmetrical and secure against the weather as it could be. I was uncomfortable for the first two days, bored, hungry, hot, and plagued with mosquitoes, which gathered in black clouds on the inside of my tarp. By the third day, though, I began to feel strangely calm and no longer hungry. I felt as if my mind and body had slowed and become attuned with the trees and the river and the breeze and even the stones. The trees were threaded with spider silk and dew, lit up with golden sunlight. It seemed like the very fabric of existence was visible as light. I felt more at peace than I ever had before, and I remember thinking, “There is no need for God. Life itself is enough.” It was so simple and so profound to me, and the truth of it was inescapable. God died right then and there for me, though I didn’t quite let go of Him just yet. I wasn’t ready to face the ramifications of atheism then. I needed to work through them slowly and find my own path to the truth.

Why believe?

This is a work in progress. As I come to accept that there is no God, and bone up on all the rational arguments against His existence, I find myself wondering why people choose to believe. The following list represents my thoughts thus far on the subject. I'm pursuing this because I do think that belief in any god does more harm than good for most people, and especially for society as a whole.

People don’t choose to believe in God because evidence supports the theory that He exists. People choose to believe because in our society, it is their best option. It is a fully rational choice to make. Here’s why:

1. Social Convention. To disbelieve is to go against the powerful forces of conformity and tradition. Those who do not believe are portrayed as a threat to the American way of life and all that we as a nation hold dear.
2. Family and peer pressure is similar to convention, but more personal. Being an atheist challenges the dearly held beliefs of those close to us, and there is no denying that this causes friction and misery. The fundamental rift between believers and nonbelievers is irreconcilable, so most of us keep our atheism to ourselves.
3. Self image. Atheists are seen as cold rationalists, lacking all normal feelings of sentimentality and romance. They are thought to be arrogant, unable to feel humility before the magnificence of “the created order.” They are less sympathetic characters than suicide bombers to most Americans. They are considered unelectable to any public office. Coming out as an atheist is harder than coming out gay.
4. Social networking. Churches, mosques, and synagogues are vital centers for social and business networking. Furthermore, sharing a faith confers some degree of trust automatically, because it is assumed that the same moral structure is in the heart of each member of your religious community, plus there tends to be a narrow socioeconomic spectrum within most church/mosque/synagogue communities.
5. Perception of ethics/morals. Atheists are thought by many of the faithful to have no moral center and no reason to behave ethically. Although this represents a grievous misunderstanding of most atheists, who often come to atheism because they feel a deep need to know the truth and be part of a rational society (in which ethical behavior is the result of fully internalized reason rather than some threat of punishment by an all too forgiving deity), this belief prevails. I wonder why believers think we’d all revert to monsters if God weren’t watching.
6. Odds/benefit ratio. To believe is thought to cost you nothing, and even if the likelihood that there is a god is immeasurably low, the benefit (eternity in paradise) is infinitely high. It is the ultimate lottery. Statistically, it makes good sense to believe. The same is true of the inverse, the threat of eternal hell. The risk that hell exists is immeasurably low, but the price is immeasurably high if it does exist, and it costs nothing to believe. Of course you buy in. The truth is irrelevant.
7. Avoidance of pain. Losing faith is like losing a loved one. At least it was for me. There is no fatherly figure listening to my pain, loving me despite my imperfection, carrying me through the rough patches. My ultimate imaginary friend is dead. I still grieve, especially at Christmas and Easter. Both occasions are absolutely hollow and banal for me now. I resent having to participate, though I try to rationalize that generosity and festivity with the people I love is worthwhile in any guise. The most painful part, though, is when I have lost a loved one. The thought that I will never see them again is unbearable, and the thought that every relationship will eventually be severed by death terrifies me.
8. Preservation of mystery. Who wants to live in a world without magic, mystery, and miracles? What do we do with our overdeveloped temporal lobes if we cannot participate in worship and prayer and divine ecstasy? We seem to have been designed for faith. I don’t believe we were.
9. Vestigial survival trait. We evolved to seek pattern and meaning because that is how we learn. Historically, the gaps in our understanding of life, the universe, and everything were huge, and we needed something huge and godlike to fill them. As these gaps, though still immense, begin to shrink, and the fabric of existence takes on a more distinct and comprehensible shape, God ceases to fit. The urge to believe in God is vestigial.
We also evolved to be social creatures. Faith has provided a shared sense of identity to hold societies together, and also the strength to believe we can prevail even when prospects seem bleak. Belief is a survival trait.