Jesus Loves You: Part One

Religion in Ghana. A topic I have wanted to write about but was unsure how to approach without offending countless friends and family members.

So instead of worrying about who I offend, I am writing a disclaimer: stop reading now if you get offended when atheists discuss religion (which we all invariably do at one point or another). :-)

I have also decided to break up my religion posts as I could obviously fill several books with my thoughts and feelings about religion. So this first part will be about my growing up years and how I came to think and believe the way I do.


Let me start by saying that I grew up Catholic; I was baptized, had my first communion, and went to church on a somewhat regular basis (all before the age of seven). However, right around this time I discovered something important, Santa Claus wasn't real! It was a revelation, as a child, I had believed, at times I had questioned it but the proof to me always lay in the letter I received from "Santa" each year after writing to him. Even at age seven, I needed proof/evidence that he was real. I could not take it on faith, as much as Disney movies tried to covince me that "seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing" (Santa Claus - Tim Allen). So around this time I asked my mom to tell me the truth, and being the sensible person that she was, she told it to me.

Well there I was, a seven year old in an existential crisis (perhaps I'm being slightly dramatic :P). If I had been lied to by everyone (including Canada Post), what else wasn't real? My short life appeared to be based on lies. What about God? What was the meaning of life?

Okay, so perhaps I didn't have all these feelings at once when I was seven year old, but I do remember that being my first break from religion as I began to truly question everything I was told. The adults were no longer all knowing, they could have there own agenda and tell children things that weren't real. I think this was an important step in developing my critical thinking skills (or as religious leaders might say, the first step on the way to Hell ;)


As I grew up I went back and forth between trying to make myself believe and feeling guilty when I didn't. Do other children feel this conflicted abour God/religion? I remember when I was around twelve years old I went to a summer camp that looked amazingly fun; it had canoeing, hiking, singing, dancing, swimming. Basically everything you could imagine in a great summer camp. It looked like paradise on the brochure! So I chose to ignore the little word "Bible" in front of Camp and off I went with two of my best friends.

Unfortuantely, the world Bible should have been bolded or highlighted or something because for a questioning child, that camp was exactly the answer I wasn't looking for. If one said the lords name in vain, pushups were assigned (an additional amount each time), to this day I never use the expression "Oh my God". We were also taken into a little room with three adults and questioned about "When was the first time you took Jesus into your heart?", "Did your parents take Jesus into their hearts?", and "Do you talk with God each night before bed?"


As you can imagine, I was 12 years old and was already feeling terribly guilty for not believing, so what did I do? I burst into tears, explaining that I didn't really know. How was that supposed to happen? Was I supposecd to start hearing voices? Was there something wrong with me?


So instead of enjoying camp like I should have I spent the entire week in a guild-ridden state. Each night I read my Children's Bible. I continued when I returned home but was so freaked out by what I had read in the Old Testatment that I couldn't continue any further.


Time went by and we moved to a new town, Bonnyville. I said goodbye to all my good friends in Hardisty and enrolled at the Catholic High School - my last attempt to become a believer (although I usually tell people that I enrolled in Catholic school because it was smaller than the public high school and I was intimidated, in all honesty, people don't intimidate me, burning forever in Hell does though). 


I am sure that during my time at Notre Dame High School, I was not the only person to become disillusioned with the church and religion. I don't know if I have ever witnessed more hypocrisy in my life. People claiming to be Catholic or Christian, saying one thing and doing another. Or having absoultely no knowledge of religion but preaching that it was bad if you didn't go to church on Sunday. Examples are endless but one that always stuck in my mind was the "no sex before marraige" rule/law/sin? The people I knew that were sexually active were almost always the ones that were the "good Catholics" (i.e. they attended church each Sunday).

Also, I remember one day in religion class studying the Beatitudes, one that stuck with me in particular, "Blessed are the poor, theirs is the kingdom of heaven."  (I was of course shocked at the goodness of it as you can recall that I had only read the Old Testament with its "Though shall nots" - "angry God" as I like to refer to him.) Yet again, the people who were often the biggest proponents of Catholicism/Christinatiy, often were the ones with the least compassion to the needy and the poor. In fact, years later I remember telling some friends that I was going to volunteer in Latin America; this decision was met wtih unenthusiasm at best, derision at worst.



What I learned from this was that being Christian did not mean that you were automatically a "good person", just the same that being an atheist/agnostic/non-believer does not make you a "bad person" (I've gone by all of these names/labels at one point or another). This was truly another revelation for me! I no longer needed to feel guilty about not believing in God. It didn't mean I was wicked or sinful compared to my friends, it just meant that I was the same person I had been when I was only seven years old. I needed evidence to believe in something. Religious people have often told me that I am missing the point, faith is believing based on no evidence. It is not rational, it just is. Unfortunately, I have never fully understopd this point.



Lucky for me, the next two years of my life would allow me to meet people from all over the world with different religions (and people open to discussing these beliefs)! Yes UWC was a glorious two years, I made friends with Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even a Buddhist. The more people I met the more I enjoyed discussing religion and asking questions that had often felt invalid at home. I remember being incredibly annoyed in my first year philosophy class when we were studying Rene Descartes ("I think therefore I am"): he had this very circular way of "proving" that God existed. Needless to say, he did not convince me, although it was the first time I encountered someone using reasoning and deduction in order to justify the presence of God.



I went on to read some "atheist" bibles during my summer holidays and sometimes during the school year; The God Delusion, Infidel, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, etc. and watch a few nonbeliever films; Religulous, Jesus Camp, and George Carlin's "Religion is Bullshit" speech.


Through it all, I've learned that I know nothing. I call myself an atheist because I have met several people who consider those who call themselves agnostics as people that are "waiting to be converted". So in order to save myself from the Scientologists and Jehova's Witnesses, I use a loaded term to describe myself, Atheist. But it truly is a loaded term. I read a study this year, in fact, in which it said that the American people were more likely to elect a Catholic, Black, Jewish, Woman, Hispanic, Mormon and Homosexual over someone that was a self titled atheist (currently estimated at 16% of the US population). Additionally, Pete Stark is currently the only known atheist in the US government. He "came out" in 2007 as has remained the only openly atheist member in the US Congress and Senate. So, apparently I have found a minority that America hates more than gays (that was a joke for those of you that have trouble detecting sarcasm online, :P). Anyway, it has made me think long and hard about the term.

			So perhaps I should take away that title, and answer all religious question with an "I don't know but I'd sure like discussing with you to understand how you think". Perhaps people would be less defensive if I didn't use the term atheist as it seems to conjure images of militant atheists, trying to do away with all world religions as quickly as possible! Yet, the problem with grouping all atheists, like grouping all Christians or Muslims or Jews, is that it ignores a fundamental truth about people, we are all the same. My roomate here in Ghana said to me yesterday that her problem with religion is that it divides people. There it is. Also my big problem, I used to question whether there was something wrong with me for believing. Now I question why no one else speaks up against the brutality and division that religion has created. I don't doubt that religion has done some good in the world, but I must wonder whether without the construct of religious organizations, we would all be better off? Would the Crusades not have occured? (Perhaps without religion Joan of Arc would have been diagnosed as mentally ill and gotten the help she needed instead of being allowed to lead an army into battle and being burned at the stake at 19?) Maybe the Spanish inquisition would not have existed? Perhaps Jerusalem would not have been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times? Would people not feel the need to blow themselves up in the name of God? Again my answer is that I don't know. But I do know that it disturbs me when I realize that instead of being taught critical thinking skills, children are taught to believe what they are told. I don't doubt that there are other children and adults like me out there that question what they are being told. Yet there is no forum to discuss these issues. I was lucky. The only pressure to believe that was put on me was by myself, a bible camp, and a high school. My parents have always been respectful of whatever I chose to believe and I know now that when I was reading the Bible, listening to Focus on the Family, and praying every night; they did not say anything even though they did not have the same views. I was a child but my religious journey was mine to take and they recognized that. Years later I have often discussed religion in my family and I no longer feel alone. Who knew, that they all had questions too?! Nonbelievers do not have this forum of open discussion because respect of religions (Christianity in Canada) is so important that we are often told to keep ideas that are outside of the church to ourselves. Additionally, we (nonbelievers) have nothing more in common than a belief that what we have been taught about various religions does not add up. We have no weekly church meeting, no bible sessions, no bible camps, no religious groups on university campuses to discuss our beliefs. Yet things are starting to change in Canada, I have recently joined the SFU Skeptics club on campus, hoping to be more a part of it next year when I return to SFU. I have also read the the numbers of people who are calling themselves atheist/agnostic/nonbeliever has risen dramatically in the past few years. Got this from wikipedia ;) "Atheism is more prevalent in Canada than in the United States, with 19–30% of the population holding an atheistic or agnostic viewpoint. The 2001 Canadian Census states that 16.2% of the population holds no religious affiliation, though exact statistics on atheism are not recorded. In urban centers this figure can be substantially higher; the 2001 census indicated that 42.2% of residents in Vancouver hold "no religious affiliation."[35] A recent survey in 2008 found that 23% of Canadians said they did not believe in a god." Whether or not this trend is a good thing depends on what your personal beliefs are. Obviously, I am not unhappy to learn that I am not as alone as I felt as a child. There are millions of people, even within my own country, that do not adhere to religious teachings. I am willing to gamble that the majority of these Canadians live very similar lives to their Christina counterparts. So alas, do I even have a point after all of my rambling? Maybe not. Maybe I just wanted to write down and share my religious thoughts with the internet and my lovely readers (i.e. my parents :P). But maybe I do have a point but I am just unable to express it with my limited writing skills (I am only a second year university student after all). So instead of rambling any further, I present to you Bill Maher's speech at the end of Religulous, a speech that truly gets to the heart of what I have been trying to say: The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive forces, the world could actually come to an end. The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it. Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking, it’s nothing to brag about and those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says “I’m willing Lord, I’ll do what ever you want me to do”. Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people, with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas. And anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t. How could I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion but doubt. Doubt is humble and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong. This is why rational people, anti-religionists must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious, they need to look in the mirror and realise that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. If you belong to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, with the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travellers. If the world does come to an end here or wherever (He’s in Megiddo, Israel – where a lot of Christians believe life on earth will end), or if a glimpse into the future decimated by the effects of religion inspired nuclear terrorism, lets remember what the real problem was, that we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it, GROW UP OR DIE! Stay tuned for part two of my religious post in which I discuss Religion in Ghana.... Oh and there was an article in the headlines last week entitled "Atheists and Agnostics more knowledgeable about religion than the religious". Interesting, right? ;)