One God Less

(Thanks to my friend Marty for the title.)

As a Christian, I never had to explain myself.

I never had to tell anyone that no, I didn’t worship a two-thousand-year-old zombie. I never had to explain that I didn’t want to make every child pray in school. I never had to justify my views, never got the “really? you believe that?” look from people I met, never had to explain why I celebrated the holidays.

I certainly never had to explain that while I’ve never been in a foxhole under fire, I’m still very confident of my commitment to my ideals. It was assumed that my faith was central to me, and that it deserved respect accordingly.

But somehow belief in one god less than most makes me strange and threatening. It’s assumed that I mock the faith that brings meaning to millions. It’s taken for granted that I want to ban wonder, beauty, and all that’s noble save cold material reason. I  think I’m smarter than everyone and I want to take away the very things they cherish most.

I wish it went without saying that none of that is true. I am not some snide, joyless automaton bent on crushing every trace of spirit, mystery, and meaning. I am not a rigid doctrinaire who finds offense on every coin and oppression behind every prayer. I  don’t find those legged fish funny anymore, I don’t find contradictions in the Bible to be particularly compelling counterarguments, and I don’t mind if anyone prays for me.

What I mind is the fact that I keep having to explain this. What I mind is the fact that many people find it easier to make room in the world for any flavor of belief other than disbelief. Why should it be so unfathomable that I can find wonder and beauty in the world?

I was a teenager the last time I went to the Grand Canyon. I’d seen it before when I was between first and second grades, and I remember my father telling me then about the amazing natural processes the Lord had set in motion to produce such an amazing thing. The second visit was different: somehow he’d become convinced that it all had to have been done by the direct intervention of God, that all those millions of years of uplift and erosion and the drainage of a vast inland sea had never happened.

All this, he thought, was made for us. Planned and shaped carefully that we might know the power and glory of God. And I can understand the wonder in that. It speaks of love and devotion, of another profound gift given with open heart to generations yet to be born.

But that wonder does not speak to me: it’s a plucked string tuned to a key that sounds discordant in my ears. Tell me about the variety of the world, the sheer random glory of all those incredible happy confluences that brought us here. Out of all the people who could have conceived a child, out of all the possible combinations that could have come from the joining of their lineages, there was just one that could have been me – and here it is. Out of all the possibilities – a sea still rolling ceaseless tides in the middle of our continent, a different balance of the tectonic tensions on which we balance like a fractured shell on a still-liquid egg, the stone layered differently to shield the bones of the earth – there was just one combination that could have made those rose-hued rocks rise in majesty over a thin ribbon of river. And there it is.

I feel lucky. I don’t need a world made for me and a destiny written in stars dead and gone a million years before I was born. I need wide-open spaces, freedom, and a world of miracles that mean something to me: the miracle of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the world, not an artisan differing from me only in scale.  I need a way to understand the world that makes more sense than “trust someone you’ve never met”. (My sister says that atheism suits me better than religion: that’s one reason why.)

Give me the chance to chart my own path in the wild and answer to my own judgment. Let me see how incredibly lucky we are for every inch of this world and every instant of this life. Let it not be a gift given but a treasure happened on and cherished.

I used to say I could prove there was no God. I’m a little wiser now. I can’t prove it.That doesn’t bother me. My atheism is a choice, a form of faith, just as carefully chosen and deeply professed as the faith of any Muslim or Christian. (For the record, no, that doesn’t make me an agnostic. An agnostic isn’t prepared to choose, which is another legitimate choice. I feel very comfortable in my choice, even while recognizing it is a choice.)

And it’s the best choice for me. I have no problem letting others make that choice. I don’t know what makes my choice so strange and threatening that it can’t be accepted.

I know that a lot of atheists are angry, dogmatic revolutionaries. They want to break our addiction to Marx’s “opiate of the masses”, to hang every crime and tragedy committed in faith’s name around the necks of the faithful. (If Christ hadn’t died for his followers’ sins, he’d surely be expected to now.)

But it’s not faith that burns books and heretics. It’s dogma. It’s that intransigent intolerance of any way other than your own – the unwillingness to accept that the songs you don’t sing are just as musical and beautiful as the ones bound in your heart like  blood. And just as it has no monopoly on truth or beauty, religion certainly has no monopoly on dogma or intolerance.

Religious belief is one of the last bastions of nearly unchallenged privilege in our society. Challenging the right to primacy of males, Caucasians, and even heterosexuals seems to me  more accepted in the mainstream than challenging the primacy of  religion. I’m certainly not going to argue that as an atheist I endure more injustice than women, the LGBT community, or any number of ethnic/cultural minorities. But this isn’t the Pageant of Oppression, either. Even one injustice is one too many, and our acceptance of it makes us all less.

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