The De-conversion of Anthony part 4. Life after Faith

"Then what is the meaning of your life?". "You have to believe in something.".  "Why not just kill yourself or go out and rape and kill and do as you please because there are no eternal consequences to your actions?".  These and more absurd suggestions to the options that apparently now lie before me as an unbeliever have been put forward more as ways to illustrate the absurdity of life without faith in a divine father than as legitimate ways to carry on with one's day. Still it does illustrate two points:-


One, that people have a strong distrust for people who are not of faith. And two, it appears that believing in things with no good evidence is the only thing stopping a scores of people from taking to the streets with their rape hats on and their desire for blood boiling. Thank goodness for faith!People may actually do what they desire it seems.

Now to be fair, I don't find many people really think this way. It just is something they find they associate with atheists, agnostics and unbelievers. If God is indeed love and charity and apart from him you can do no good, then one who does not profess a belief in the Daddy Deity can't but be a complete reprobate. A prodigal, scoundrel who is running away from the truth. I thought some form of this when I believed. I had conversations where I wondered how people lived without knowing the joy of the Lord. Doubt was the enemy when all along, doubt was the surest sign that I wanted the Truth and not just what was easy to hear about life.







Life after belief though is different than I expected. It's almost like finding out that you saw the world through ray bans with the splendor of the different hues and  colors of all around you came pre-filtered. Like I suddenly got imbued with feelings and views whose nuance I had never before appreciated. And much like that first light of a brilliant day requires  a moment to be fully taken in after being shielded, so too this time after belief took a minute to come into focus.But now that it is, I am glad for it.

You don't fully realize until you're free of it, just how much faith stifles your ability to formulate your own opinion on matters without the ground floor of that opinion already having been laid out for you and all you can do is cobble together your ideas of the world on top of pre-packaged ideas of right and wrong. Of how the  world works, and of the best ways for us people to flourish. Faith offers the chance to abdicate our very human gift of reasoning for wishful thinking and hope. Those are not bad things in themselves, but left untethered to any form of rationality, wild flights of fancy often end in crashing and burning. It's no secret for example that acts of terrorism are all faith based initiatives with the poster child being a little incident in New York on 9/11.

You may feel safe in the cage of faith, but you're still caged!!

The opportunity to build my life up again, to re-examine the basic tenets of my life was and is still a daunting one. Ideas about love, sex, politics, fashion, music, humor all of the things that color human existence become something you look at with a fresh pair of eyes. What once you took for granted you now have a need to find reasons for, you justify yourself not with holy writ but with careful thinking, examination and yes a helping of wit. Gone are the easy answers and the patronizing platitudes about immortals that act in mysterious ways when they do bad, but are called good and loving 24/7. It's not enough, you are forced to look for answers with the only way we have found in this life to find knowledge. The Socratic, scientific method.

Now before eyes roll and the accusations roll that science is the new religion, I will be the first to say, "Yes, Science is awesome. I love it. So much so that I changed midway my A-level studies from an ARTS course load to a science one because it just produced more solid answers and at the same time demanded more from my imagination,intuition and observational skills. Skills in fact that made me much better at appreciating the arts.


Science will never ever replace religion. Never. They are designed for different things. One is our first stab at understanding the world around us, the other is a new development where we admit that our intuitions and first assumptions about the world are not reliable for understanding the true nature of reality. One was birthed  in the minds of early man, and passed down from generation to generation always slightly changing all the while claiming to be the perfect work of an unchanging being, the other is a dynamic set of theories and observations that is meant to change as information is gathered. One makes us feel better about all the suffering we see around with consolations of a supreme justice and the other let's us know our feelings are of no concern to the universe and any justice we seek we have to find in the here and now. One promises that the best is yet to come, the other teaches that all we have is now.


Along with an appreciation though for skeptical thinking and science, there comes a new found appreciation for philosophy. For learning that it's important to know how to think correctly understanding that a bipedal ape creature handsome and refined as he may look with glasses and a freshly pressed Armani suit is still an animal and thus his thought process and logic is faulty-but eureka we know this and we can keep fashioning a better mind, a better understanding. Also hypocrisy  tends to die down when you realize that you once believed things that you were persuaded weren't true. That stays with you-the knowledge that you could be proven wrong and you best be ready to accept it and change when it happens.

Also you tend not to jump on as many soap boxes

So what can be said of  life after faith?The consolations of poetry and music and food and laughter take on a whole new meaning in light of the fact there is no proof of pie in the sky and this life is all we have.It's no license to act like a complete moron but rather an invitation to celebrate what you can, to truly mourn the loss of a loved one, to feel true sorrow and hence true happiness and joy. Life is meaningless without an end. This moment , right here, right now, will never exist again. We get one go around at this life and it's way too short to waste it living by dogma, living by just copying and pasting the results of other people's thinking. In fact it makes you appreciate all people, people of faith and those who do not believe. You realize just how divisive faith is.

There also comes the ultimate responsibility of how to live your life. There is no perpetual father to guide you, you have to grow up and take the world head on(with a little help from your friends as those wise old Beatles sang) and not lie to yourself about things you have no way of knowing. There is a beauty in mortality. In knowing that life has a beginning and it will have an end. It is terrifying too,the fact that any moment could potentially be your last. That you could waste your life fulfilling someone else's dream, that you could fail to realize that the magnificence of life is that we are all in this together and every one from pauper to president, we have one life. One. We only get one shot. So we best make it count.





Read other pieces on the Deconversion of Anthony : Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 5