.:aaron.helton:.
musings.of {'husband', 'father', 'technologist', 'international civil servant', 'humanist', 'skeptic', 'gamer', 'dreamer'}

Considering that atheists and agnostics comprise a fairly small percentage of the population, it was never inevitable that I would arrive at my current frame of mind. I am firmly agnostic (or, depending on the perspective, weakly atheist), the kind who doesn’t expressly believe in a god, and asserts that though we cannot know for sure about the existence of an intelligent creator, current evidence weighs heavily against it. And in any event, such a being is unlikely to look or act in any manner that we’ve devised over the ages. But I did not come to this conclusion overnight, and like so many others, I was raised in a tradition that seldom values the kind of circumstantial examination that can ultimately lead to apostasy. Paradoxically, I owe my agnosticism to my parents, who attempted to raise me according to varyingly “fundamental” Christian teachings (I was even home-schooled for a time), but for whatever reason failed to exorcise the following five traits, which I consider great foundations for rational thought free of reliance on the supernatural.

A note before I get started: I use the term apostasy to describe my divergence over time, and I still find it appropriate in a personal historical context. Although I would not consider myself an apostate now, the willful abandonment of my previous religious views surely could have been described as apostasy. I only reject the term to describe my current view because of the pejorative connotation of the word.

1. Appreciation for Nature through Science

From an early age, I remember being fascinated by the natural world. What little boy doesn’t like dinosaurs and worms? But somehow it went deeper than that. A book that used to be in my collection until I left home for good was the Encyclopedic Dictionary of something or other, full of information about animals, plants, bugs, and plenty more. Up until around age seven or eight, I was sure I wanted to be an Entomologist, as I had more than a passing fascination with insects. After that age I discovered the intrigues of space exploration, and I was determined to study physics or astrophysics, fancying I might one day become an astronaut. In high school that’s exactly what I decided I would try for, but I had changed my study plan to Aerospace Engineering for what seemed then to be fairly obvious reasons. (Side note: I abandoned those plans long ago, understanding now that I might have stood a better chance with Computer Science). But plenty of kids grow up with an exposure to the natural world through science and never become even agnostic, though plenty of people move away from the idea of a literal god to something like a universal presence. So there’s more to it than that.

2. Love of Reading

Although I don’t remember the name of the book, I read my first book at four, a not-too-remarkable thing, actually. In what surely will become a theme in this post, somewhere around my seventh or eighth birthday, I was described as an avid reader, though I did not know at the time exactly what that meant. It was true, however, as I would read anything I could find, consuming (or attempting to consume) many of the books in the house and making countless trips to the library. I would describe myself now as a bookworm, and my only lament about graduate school was that homework took away my time for recreational reading. Reading is and always has been a way for me to explore new world views, to expand my horizons in the safety of my favorite reading chair (or, as often as not in my childhood, curled beneath the blankets of my bed with a flashlight). I’ve always been fascinated with the wondrous possibilities presented in fictitious settings (and sometimes even the intriguing things unearthed in less fictitious works), and questioning was always at the center of it. But I did not limit myself to fiction. My parents also equipped me with a set of encyclopedias (it’s still in my parents’ house as far as I know), a subscription to National Geographic for several years, and more or less continual access to other periodicals. Given the frequency of book burnings in our history, you can see the power they have. Just these first two elements may be enough to indicate the path of apostasy, but there is icing on the cake.

3. Religious Literacy

This may be counterintuitive, but increasing religious literacy, when combined with the other elements on this list, actually can have the effect opposite its intent. By understanding exactly what it is my parents wanted me to believe and why, including verses from the Bible to back up their claims, I was equipped with very specific understanding of counter-claims as they arose in my own mind. During my time as Nazarenes (that is, from about sixth grade all the way through high school), I was instructed on a select interpretation of the Bible, supported by what is known as a Doctrine. For Protestants, a Doctrine outlines what a denomination believes about the Bible. Think of it as a creed. It says things about the church’s ideas of Jesus’s divinity, the nature of the Trinity, and quite often just where in the Bible it says dancing is a sin. These interpretive differences are not important to my point. The fact that so many of them came about at all is what struck me. I knew of at least a dozen in my youth, and am utterly unsurprised to see that the Wikipedia article on Protestantism estimates some 33,000 worldwide, each representing some selectively variable interpretation of one of the numerous versions of the Bible. The existence of so many Christian denominations presented problems for me, since increasingly small groups of people are claiming that their way is the right way. If they all agreed on how to get to Heaven, why would they need so many doctrines? It became apparent that such denominations were personalized to fit someone’s particular interpretation of one or more Bible verses. What sealed the deal for me, however, was when I came to realize that Evangelical Christianity‘s claims that the other billions of people (Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.) were somehow lost and unhappy in their religions. Sometime when I was in high school, my parents procured a book speaking about why Nazarenes believe what they believe (it had “We” in the title, to give it perspective). To do so, it made a comparison between the Nazarene doctrine and other major (usually non-evangelical) Christian doctrines, but then it did something bizarre: it compared the Nazarene doctrine to other world religions. I found this to be an eye-opener, coming to the realization that if Christianity were so great, why were there all of these other religions? Surely they can’t all be wrong if Christianity is so obvious? This one book shattered my world view, dropped the wool from my eyes, and propelled me further down the path to apostasy. In fact, I could probably end the article here, except I promised you five things, and the other two are actually kind of important.

4. The Value of Critical Thought

On the intuitive side, encouraging kids to ask informed questions means they will question things you otherwise didn’t mean for them to question. And I did. I was young indeed when I started exploring questions about infinity (as in, god has been there forever), omnipotence, omniscience, the preordained, and the nature of consciousness. None of the answers (usually a tautology or some variation “just have faith”) ever satisfied my curiosity on the subjects. They still don’t. But these questions are not unusual, and in truth they did not equip me with any new tools. The push to question things came later, as my parents prepared me for middle school, when students start getting a taste of life sciences, which means evolution. In that Creationist way, my parents coached me in the “evidence” for Creationism and why evolution could not be true. It took me many years to undo that damage to myself, but I discovered in such teachings a valuable toolkit: the idea that one could persuade with evidence, and that gathering evidence for oneself often started with questioning. Of course, it’s never enough to simply ask questions. One must also be willing to accept the evidence one finds and change mindset when enough evidence contradicts even the most deeply held beliefs. It is probably not coincidental that many of these tools came together at a time when I was also experimenting with teenage rebellion. But it is coincidental that this particular tool set became available to me, though it was intended for a different purpose.

5. Reliance on Logic Over Emotion

This comes from my father more than anywhere else. Again, the intent was to avoid the kinds of emotions that lead us to commit sins, but also because emotions are sometimes viewed as susceptible to evil influence, ala “it just feels right.” But the message is contradictory. Logic is a fine thing, the greatest tool in the rational thinker’s arsenal, and certainly the sharpest (witness Ockham’s Razor). Yes, it can be used to parse out what actions are good or evil with respect to the Bible, but turn it on the Bible itself and see what happens. My earliest application of this principle led me to the conclusion that the god of the Old Testament was a different god than the one of the New Testament. Once again, I had a tool that was intended for one purpose, but which I had managed to use for others. It led me to where I am now.

Conclusion

Apostasy did not simply emerge for me one day. It took me many years to work myself out of the things I was taught, but what helped were the very tools I was given with the hope of strengthening my faith in god. Some of these tools I obtained at an early age, and I held on to them rarely setting down this path deliberately. In fact, up until fewer than 10 years ago, I was using these same tools to test out the many ideas I’ve experimented with, clinging to the agnostic label that includes belief in a universal spirit, and at times even trying to justify beliefs that I found increasingly implausible. Nothing about this was inevitable, but in the end it was thoughtful and deliberate, enabled by tools my parents gave me for vastly different purposes.