“If you are brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello” – Paolo Coelho
I’ve finally let go of my God not so long ago. It was one of the most sensible decisions I’ve made in my life so far, and since then I’ve never looked back.
Being a Christian for more than two decades, embracing atheism didn’t come that easy. For quite some time, I have to go through the process of defending my religious dogmas against the facts. I have to deny what is blindingly obvious for the sake of “not rocking the boat” and for the sake of convenience. I have to put down all the revolutionary scientific findings in favour of all those bronze-age mythologies. And at some point, I even have to make excuses for my God when something in the Bible or even in the world doesn’t make any sense.
Then one day, I finally got the courage to face the truth as it is and decided to grow up and let go of that invisible God that I created in my mind since I was young. I was pretty adamant at first because letting go of my God would mean becoming an atheist, and an atheist label doesn’t sound too appealing to a lot of people including myself that time.
But as I found out later, atheism, just like any other things, is only scary when we don’t know anything about it but if we take a closer look it isn’t as scary as the society leads us to believe.
The question I often get from people when I told them I’m an atheist is “what happen?” especially if they knew me before. Because I am a kind of guy who is really passionate about anything that I get myself involve with. So back then, I was extremely zealous about teaching “Christian values” to others that sometimes my friends would even seek for my spiritual advice. I think it’s fair to say that I was a hard-core Christian before. So I can understand how my being an atheist somehow shocked some people.
Well, here’s what happen. I decided to read the Bible – the entire Bible. And I decided to read Christianity and other religions history from various sources and not just from the washed out versions that we normally get from our Christian administered schools. I decided to read a bit deeper about ancient mythology and civilizations. And I decided to read about what science has to say about the claims of religion.
And the funny thing is, I did not decide to do all those stuff so I will end up as an atheist. It was actually doing quite the opposite. I was initially doing my sort of research to disprove those atheists who were questioning my beliefs. And so I decided to educate myself with my religion, and I started by reading the Bible. And boy was I surprised!
As it turned out, the Bible is a self-incriminating book. If you read the entire Bible, the number of things that you wouldn’t have known had you not done your reading will blow your mind. You wouldn’t even believe that those things are there. That’s why I always encourage people to read their Bible entirely. Read it with an open mind and read it in proper context so you will understand the craziness of some of the stories. I’m sure at the end, you would also want to read other materials to either defend what you’ve discovered or support them. I’m not saying that there aren’t anything good written in the Bible what I’m saying is there are some crazy things in there that if it’s really “the word of god” and not plagiarised from some other civilizations mythology, those stuff shouldn’t be there.
Do I hate religion? No, not at all. But I do have issues with it. I believe that indoctrinating children when they are very young grabs them some of their human rights. I believe that religion in a way paralyzes human mind by encouraging faith-based beliefs and discouraging skeptical thinking. I believe religion creates division and alienate people. I believe religion makes the not-so-smart-but-good-people do atrocious things. I believe that religion is the driving reason for most of the problems that we have today.
But whilst I’m no longer a fan of religion, it would be wrong to say that it hasn’t brought anything good to humankind. I’m from a third world country and have experienced poverty myself. I can tell you that when you have no food to put on the table, when you have no money to buy medicines, when you barely have a roof to put over your head and when everything else fails or is falling apart, religion comes handy. It serves as an antidote to pain, it supplies “miracles” in desperate times, it provides explanation of the unknown and it gives people hope to keep going no matter what. That’s why it’s no surprise that most of the third world countries are very religious.
But putting all things into consideration, I still would say that the world would be a better place without religion. However, I still respect those religious people in the same way that I expect them to respect my belief or disbelief. I think being religious or being atheist is a very personal matter and just like any other things personal, we all have our different take on it. The important thing is we respect each other’s differences and we don’t push our beliefs down on each others throats.
On the issue of morality, I would say that this is the biggest misconception about atheists. I always hear people saying that if they don’t have God with them they probably would be doing all sort of crazy things. But I tell you this, there are so many people who are atheists in these world yet you do not hear or read about them in the news doing all sort of crazy stuff. Those people (most of them Christians I’m afraid) propagating this kind of misconception is describing not the atheists but themselves. They are afraid that everyone is like them, that when nobody is watching they screw things around. Just because atheists don’t believe in God doesn’t mean that we no longer have the sense of right or wrong. I think that atheists’ morality is even deeper than those of religious people. When atheists do good things we do it because they are good and not because we expect some heavenly rewards or something. People can do good or bad things with or without God.
Based on our collective experiences as a society, we decide what is moral and what is not. This then provides as the basis of the society’s moral guide. Morality is not something static, but rather it is something that is continually evolving. That’s why the God of the New Testament appears better than the God of the Old Testament because society’s morality since Abraham’s time evolved and have gotten better.
Another question that I often get from people is that “who dragged you into this?” That’s the thing about some people; they find it hard to grasp the idea that someone could deviate from the norm by himself without somebody dragging him into it. I could safely say that nobody dragged me to atheism. And to be honest I have yet to meet any atheist up to today. It would be interesting to meet some like-minded people in the future.
I know somebody who has seriously questioned her faith after reading the Bible and doing some research but she can’t leave her religion as she has invested so much of her time on it. And she likes the feeling of community and fellowship that her church provides plus she doesn’t want to be an outcast in the society that she is in. And so up until today she continues to kneel and chant to that invisible guy up there. A price she’s willing to pay just to be “in”.
I may not see it in my lifetime, but I dream of a world where reason prevails over emotions, where everyone is doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do and not because a sky daddy is watching over them. I dream of a world where human rights transcend religious bigotry; where diversity of opinions are celebrated and not frowned upon; and where people value each others lives knowing that there’s no other life after death.
I may not see it in my lifetime, but I dream of a religion-free society.
