I mentioned in one of my comments that a “Christian freethinker” is an oxymoron, or loosely a “contradiction in terms”. I realize I should not have made such sweeping statement that might antagonize some liberal or progressive Christians. I am sorry.

Wikipedia defines freethought as “a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any dogma.” A freethinker is therefore someone who practices freethought.

On the other hand, a Christian, in the broadest sense, is one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ. By this definition, Christianity seems to be incompatible with freethought because the former relies on the “divinely-inspired” authority of religious doctrines to learn about the supposed teachings of Jesus while the latter repudiates such doctrines due to hearsay and circular reasoning, hence my use of the term ‘oxymoron’ to describe “Christian freethinker”.

But upon deeper reflection, I am beginning to believe that there are actually many Christian freethinkers (note the lack of quotes this time) out there. In fact, I used to be one. But it has a lot to do with the timing. Freethought holds that beliefs should be based on reason instead of authority, but most Christians had already acquired their sacred beliefs long before they were capable of rational thought, and so while they would now think critically when presented with new issues or claims, I guess they simply didn’t get the chance to evaluate the quality of the cognitive process by which they originally formed their religious beliefs way back in childhood.

In my personal experience, it was relatively late in life when I encountered cogent arguments against the tenets of my faith. For a long time I merely skirted the Problem of Evil, taking comfort in the belief that God has a purpose for everything, a grand plan that is just beyond our human understanding. My faith was even strengthened after reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time because it somehow seemed to imply a necessity of a Creator, offering “scientific support” for my belief. (I felt uneasy at the part where Hawking suggested how the four-dimensional space-time could be finite but with no boundaries – like the two-dimensional surface of the earth – so the universe could have no beginning nor end but simply be, negating the need for a creator. I was later relieved when he said that such wave-function scenario could only happen in imaginary time, and in real time in which we exist, there will always be boundaries.)

At this point, was I what you would call a freethinker? A lot of people would probably say no because I wasn’t a critical thinker. According to The Critical Thinking Community, critical thinking is “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” And based on that definition, I surely was not a critical thinker.

But critical thinking is not the same as freethinking. While freethought values science, reason and logic, critical thinking is more concerned with how scientific is the evidence, how rational is the argument, and how logical is the conclusion:

It is believed by some philosophers (notably A.C. Grayling) that a good rationale must be independent of emotions, personal feelings or any kind of instincts. Any process of evaluation or analysis, that may be called rational, is expected to be highly objective, logical and “mechanical”. If these minimum requirements are not satisfied i.e. if a person has been, even slightly, influenced by personal emotions, feelings, instincts or culturally specific, moral codes and norms, then the analysis may be termed irrational, due to the injection of subjective bias.

It is quite evident from modern cognitive science and neuroscience, studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no effective feelings, for example an individual with a massively damaged Amygdala.

Freethought is the general process; critical thinking is the quality control. As such, I personally believe that it is actually possible for a Christian to be a freethinker as long as he honestly tries to be rational, regardless of the quality of his rationality.

But once he is presented with a compelling argument against the basis of his faith, he will have to choose between Christianity and freethought. He will either have to remain blind and stubborn – or start reexamining his beliefs. And in my case, it was this image that changed everything:

Once I realized that this “Word of God” is actually just hearsay and might as well be stories concocted by fallible humans with their own personal interests in mind, it was almost immediately that I stopped considering myself a Christian.

To the Christian freethinkers (again, note the lack of quotes), I know it isn’t easy to question one’s faith especially if one believes that questioning will jeopardize one’s immortal soul. But ask yourselves, who are you questioning -God, or just the self-proclaimed human messengers? Once you realize it’s the latter, I bet you wouldn’t think twice about applying critical thinking to every belief you hold sacred. And then you could honestly say that you are, as you always have been, a freethinker, regardless of your beliefs.

Dear CB,

I regret not being able to see you when you last came home to visit. It’s been almost a decade since you left the country and we had somehow lost touch, and surely I could have spared a few minutes – a few hours, even – to meet with an old friend.

But the reason I didn’t see you had nothing to do with time. I did not come to see you because I figured the topic of Faith would most likely be brought about in our conversation, and I didn’t want to lie to you even as I didn’t want to tell you that I no longer have it.

I remember several years ago there was this Q & A being circulated via email. One of the questions was, “What is most important to you?” As I had expected, you answered “Jesus”. Back then I still considered myself a very spiritual albeit not a very religious person, but I wrote down “Truth”.

I realize I’ve been a truth seeker ever since my childhood days. I remember feeling uncomfortable in Sunday school when the teacher told us that Jesus chose the dumb people for his disciples because the bright ones had too many questions. Whether that was biblically accurate or not is beside the point; she was implying that one should simply follow and not think. But I realized that no matter how I tried, I simply could not not think. And there I was struck by the irony of why our God-given intelligence would be the very thing to hinder us from getting closer to Him. I could not understand why the same God who gave us reason would prohibit us from using it.

Still, I managed to stay on the path and maintain a personal relationship with the Lord throughout my adolescence and early adulthood. You might have noticed, however, that I was the liberal type of Christian who always tried to find a rationale for our beliefs instead of just taking them by blind faith.

One of the things I tried to ponder was the presence of evil and pain in a world supposedly created and cared for by the loving and powerful God. I even opened that up to you and you were able to conveniently answer it with the explanation that we are not omniscient, hence, we cannot fathom God’s purpose in His infinite wisdom.

That explanation kept me going for a few more years, but the Problem of Evil had been an eternal bug up my theist ass. I lived with cognitive dissonance as I struggled to rationalize gratuitous – unnecessary, unwarranted, and unjustified – suffering as part of God’s divine plan. And I do not mean only human suffering; even before our species walked the earth (and long before Adam and Eve supposedly committed Original Sin), countless animals had already suffered and died, some more excruciatingly than the others, like the caterpillar whose body was being leisurely eaten alive from the inside by a growing wasp larva that would soon emerge from the caterpillar’s empty shell as an adult wasp ready to mate and lay an egg on another unlucky caterpillar, and the cycle continues as the egg hatches into a larva that digs into the caterpillar’s flesh. Now unless there is a Caterpillar Heaven where all their sufferings will be recompensed, it just didn’t make sense to me to suppose that there was actually a loving Creator.

We were both lucky to be born to middle-class families in a civilized society, so gratitude comes naturally to us for all of “God’s blessings, goodness, and mercy”. But we had no idea what it would be like to live in Afghanistan, North Korea, or Africa. Gratuitous suffering exists elsewhere, and we were not constantly aware of them as we focused on our “blessings” like passing an exam when there were children who never had a decent meal or access to medical care. Our pastors have come up with sophisticated theodicies like man’s “free will” and divine punishment, but when I reminded myself that this was supposed to be a loving and all-powerful God we were talking about, I realized that the apologists were running out of excuses for God’s indifference and/or incompetence.

And so I clung back to the assurance that God has a “grand design” which is just beyond our finite minds’ ken. But then I wondered, how do we know that God indeed has a beautiful plan for His most beloved creation? Unfortunately, I only had the Bible to tell me so, the Holy Book we revered as the true Word of God. However, the Bible contains many major contradictions and divinely-commissioned atrocities that I either had to skip those verses or suspend my reason in order to continue believing its divine origin. But my biggest problem with the Bible was its lack of authenticity considering its stories were accounts of humans passed from generation to generation without the use of a printing press, and that it was only the Bible that proclaimed itself as the “Word of God”.

When I realized this, every belief I held sacred suddenly became fair game – including my belief in the divinity of Jesus. It also dawned on me how absurd is the notion of God’s ultimate “sacrifice” for the salvation of mankind: God created man imperfectly so God now plans to punish man severely and eternally because of the fatal imperfection that God caused in the first place, but because of God’s “love” for man, God bore an only Son, who was actually God Himself, to be offered as a sacrifice – to Himself – in order to satisfy God’s craving for blood and so that man does not have to suffer God’s eternal wrath as long as he believes in the Son. And even the “sacrifice” is not a sacrifice at all considering it was only about thirty years as a man and less than three days as a “dead” man that an eternal Being had to endure. That’s not even a cent to the world’s richest man, and yet Christians consider it to be the greatest gift.

Now you might shudder at my utter blasphemy and invoke Pascal’s Wager to make me reconsider believing, but all I can say is that the teachings of Christianity contradict those of the two other major religions, Judaism and Islam, and if either of them turns out to be the “true religion” then all Christians will burn in hell for believing and blasphemously proclaiming that Jesus was not just a prophet but God Himself.

And what does it mean to “believe” anyway? Is it something one can force upon himself even if every part of his rational mind screams incredulity? I don’t think so. Belief is not a personal choice; rather, it is the product of knowledge and understanding, both of which are not personal choices either.

And then I was left with the ultimate question: Where did everything come from? For quite some time after I left Christianity I considered myself a deist, believing in a Creator who simply caused the cosmos into existence but never intervened afterwards, allowing the universe to evolve according to the natural laws embodied in it. While I still do not discount the possibility of such Creator to exist or have existed, I am now equally open to possibilities that the universe – or at least the pre-Big Bang singularity from which it expanded – has either existed eternally in some form or another or came from nothing as an accident in nature via quantum fluctuations, negating the need for a creator. But more importantly, I highly doubt that a Being powerful enough to be able to create an entire universe would be that petty or insecure to give a damn if I believed in Him/Her/It.

While I consider myself a skeptic, I do not wish to be called an atheist mainly because of the stigma and misconceptions associated with the word, but for all practical purposes I might as well be an atheist because I no longer believe in an intervening god – loving or otherwise. While it cannot be proven without a doubt that such god does not exist, reason dictates that the Abrahamic God’s existence is very highly unlikely, and so I live my life on the assumption that this life is all there is and that the future of our world and the welfare as well as the suffering of our fellow humans – and of the ‘lower’ animals, or at least the ones we domesticate – rest mostly in our hands.

And so, CB, while you might be aghast with my revelation, I simply cannot bear to live in pretense just to avoid disappointing you. I can no longer force myself to suspend reason for the sake of my faith. As Daniel Dennet said, ‎”There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. Whatever we hold precious, we cannot protect it from our curiosity, because being who we are, one of the things we deem precious is the truth.”

But if you really believe that God is the Truth, please pray that He will reveal Himself to me in an unmistakable manner and prove me wrong before it’s too late. With all His power and mercy, surely He will make a way.

Whenever believers try to defend their faith in an intervening God using reason (or more precisely, pseudo-reason), the critical thinker cannot help but point out the fallacies. There is this email being circulated that tries to explain the problem of evil and why God allows pain and suffering:

A man went to a barbershop to have his hair cut and his beard trimmed. As the barber began to work, they began to have a good conversation. They talked about so many things and various subjects. When they eventually touched on the subject of God, the barber said: ”I don’t believe that God exists.”

“Why do you say that?” asked the customer. “Well, you just have to go out in the street to realize that God doesn’t exist. Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? If God existed, there would be neither suffering nor pain. I can’t imagine a loving God who would allow all of these things.”

The customer thought for a moment, but didn’t respond because he didn’t want to start an argument. The barber finished his job and the customer left the shop.

Just after he left the barbershop, he saw a man in the street with long, stringy, dirty hair and an untrimmed beard. He looked dirty and unkempt. The customer turned back and entered the barber shop again and he said to the barber: ”You know what? Barbers do not exist.” ”How can you say that?” asked the surprised barber. ”I am here, and I am a barber. And I just worked on you!” ”No!” the customer exclaimed. “Barbers don’t exist because if they did, there would be no people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards, like that man outside.”

“Ah, but barbers DO exist! That’s what happens when people do not come to me.” ”Exactly!” affirmed the customer. “That’s the point! God, too, DOES exist! That’s what happens when people do not go to Him and don’t look to Him for help. That’s why there’s so much pain and suffering in the world.” * * *

Let us try to dissect the logic here:

Barber - does not believe a loving and all-powerful God exists because of the presence of suffering and pain as manifested by sick people and abandoned children

Customer – does not believe barbers exist because of the presence of people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards

Barber – explains that these people are unkempt because they do not come to him for a haircut and shave

Customer - explains that people experience so much pain and suffering because they do not come to God for help

I cannot even begin to pinpoint the logical fallacies in there because they seem to jump out all at once.  It is faulty to compare barbers to God because whenever you go to the former,  you’ll surely get your hair cut (if that’s what you want); when you seek help from the latter, your prayers are not always answered. Now if the faithful even dare to say that the barber is not there all the time to give you a haircut anytime you want – maybe he’s sick or attending some important event – it must be noted that unlike God, barbers are not omnipotent or omnipresent. And what exactly does it mean to “come to God for help”? If God is omniscient, he knows what we need (and deserve) long before we pray for it – even before we can think of praying for it. And if he is a loving God, he will grant these needs without waiting for our prayers, not to mention there are children dying a slow and painful death due to starvation and disease who are too young to understand the concept of God, much less to pray. But I guess the most significant difference between a haircut and an “answered prayer” is that you can be sure that your hair had not just gotten shorter because of pure coincidence and no external deliberate force.

I must say that while I often criticize religion, I deeply respect the faithful, as many of the people in my innermost circle are themselves believers.  As I often tell them, I respect your right to your beliefs. If you say that you believe in God because of personal faith, I respect that. Even if you say that you believe in God because the Bible (or any other holy book) tells you so, I would still respect that. But once you try to assert the validity of the Bible’s claims by spewing fallacy passed as reason, your beliefs become fair game.

The problem of evil has been an eternal bug up the theist’s ass, and countless theodicies (attempts at reconciling belief in God with the perceived existence of evil) have been written, their answers ranging from almost-but-not-quite satisfactory to totally absurd. Among those I’ve read, I think the only one that gives the slightest hope to the faithful and prevents those in No. 6 in Dawkins’ spectrum from ‘falling’ into No. 7 is that God has a purpose too grand to be comprehended by our finite minds. Perhaps I can respect that, but only because I cannot scientifically disprove it. Just make sure you don’t get too cocky as to proclaim that you can actually prove it.

When observing the complex beauty of the natural world and the diversity of plants and animals and how each species’ characteristics seem perfectly tailored for a particular lifestyle, it is not difficult to jump into conclusion that everything was designed.

I was staring at a small clover garden, admiring the structured leaf formation and how it uniformly blanketed the patch of ground when I realized that underneath the miniature canopy of clover crowns must be a thriving community of insects and other tiny creatures. And beneath the ground dozens of earthworms must be burrowing and ingesting dead matter and minute soil particles, aerating the earth and secreting humus and minerals needed by the clover plant to grow. At this point it makes sense to imagine that this nice little ecosystem must have been orchestrated by an intelligent and loving being.

However, also living underground are thousands of ants, and ants feed on earthworms. Anybody who has seen a live earthworm being attacked by red ants knows that it is a slow and very painful death, the worm writhing and rolling and curling in a feeble attempt to escape the tormenting mandibles that tear all over its soft flesh, each bite leaving behind a burning toxin. It must be one of the most excruciating deaths an animal can experience (although perhaps not as agonizingly slow as that of a caterpillar whose body is being leisurely devoured from the inside by a growing wasp larva). Even if one believes that earthworms have souls that will be eternally rewarded in Earthworm Heaven for all their sufferings under the earth, it is absurd to conceive of an intelligent designer.

A lot of people especially those living comfortably in civilized societies are not aware of this life and death struggle among the lower animals.  Most have not even considered that the burgers they’re munching came from a once-living cow whose throat was slit with a very sharp industrial blade, causing it to stumble and thrash around as its air sacs get filled with its own blood, flooding its lungs and simulating a slow drowning effect that would last several minutes until the cow finally expires. Or that the drumstick they’re nibbling came from a chicken who endured its entire short life in cramped captivity, injected with chemicals to speed up growth for early slaughter.

When you’re on top of the food chain (and blissfully oblivious to the great inconvenience you are causing those below), it is easy to be overwhelmed by a feeling of gratefulness, and there even seems to be an almost instinctive need to seek an object of gratitude. But imagine if we happened to be the cow or the chicken, or the earthworm for that matter. I wonder if gratefulness would come as naturally.

If there was an intelligent designer, animals wouldn’t have to feed on one another. Every creature would be responsible for its own photosynthesis and capable of absorbing moisture and minerals from the air. Predation and parasitism would be totally unnecessary. All animals would also be able to fly, swim, run and burrow, freely frolicking across the bounds of the earth, fully enjoying the planet’s blessings.

And maybe this is why a lot of people believe (or would like to believe) that we have a soul. Perhaps unconsciously we think of the spirit as the perfect form of existence, totally free and having no need for transport, shelter, clothing, air, water, or food. And no need for food means no need for other animals to die just so we can live. The earth would be a true paradise where no creature has to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. If there was an intelligent designer, existence wouldn’t be as cruel, and the struggle for life wouldn’t be as bloodthirsty.

Last night I watched Creation, a film about the life of Charles Darwin and how he came to write On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. What I found especially moving was his own struggle against the authority of religion and the beliefs of his religious wife. With religion he had no qualms, but the fear of breaking his wife’s heart almost stopped him from finishing his book.

In one of the scenes, Darwin described to his friend, a reverend, how some caterpillars never become butterflies because parasitic wasps lay eggs into them. Once the egg hatches, the wasp larva will feed on the flesh of the caterpillar, leisurely devouring it from the inside, killing it slowly and painfully until all that is left is an empty shell. And then the larva will emerge as an adult wasp, ready to mate and repeat the cycle. When confronted with such cruelty in nature, the reverend simply said that it was really not for them to speculate on the mind of God.

How convenient it was for the reverend to say that they had no right to second-guess God’s reasons while religion has eternally claimed to have the ‘revealed’ word of God and stubbornly holds on to this ‘revelation’ amid contradicting evidence, insisting that it is the truth.

Ah, Truth. A word not to be taken lightly. How do we know the truth? That is a very hard question, but we can ask an easier one: How do we know if something is false? For starters, we could shed the light of science into claims asserted from behind the dark shroud of ‘authority’. If there is a God, he/she/it gave us eyes to see and minds to interpret what we see. Science isn’t asking us to believe anything; science is merely asking that we open our eyes.

Religion’s authority is derived solely from what they claim to be ‘divine revelation’. Who indeed would dare question an instruction or doubt a story if it was God Himself who said it? To answer that, one simply has to look at the deists’ definition of ‘revelation’:

Revelation: The act of revealing or of making known. In the religious sense, revelation usually means divine revelation. This is meaningless, since revelation can only be revelation in the first instance. For example, if God revealed something to me, that would be a divine revelation to me. If I then told someone else what God told me it would be mere hearsay to the person I tell. If that person believed what I said, they would not be putting their trust in God, but in me, believing what I told them was actually true.

Now the lack of credibility of this hearsay revelation is not as sinister as the supposed message from God. Religion is basically telling us that this life is infinitely less significant than the next. And because of this, a lot of people fail to live their lives fully in terms of time and freedom, and some don’t get to live a life at all. And for me that is the ultimate wrong.

If religion is this influential in the Information Age, just imagine how powerful it must have been at the time of Darwin when knowledge could only be found in a few books held by an elite few. One of this few is religion of course, and they even have their own brand of ‘knowledge’ which they gladly publish and distribute.

Fortunately, science is steadily keeping up. Religion has practically let go of the literal creation story, shifting to a metaphorical translation disguised as Intelligent Design, but this too is losing ground to natural selection. Then there is the question of the origin of life itself, to which abiogenesis, although not yet a scientific theory in the strict sense, is offering plausible explanations.

With these significant grounds being conquered by science, religion is desperately holding on to its last bastion of authority in its claim for holding the truth: the origin of the cosmos. And with this I remember what Richard Dawkins said in a debate with John Lennox:

“Cosmology is waiting for its Darwin.”

I watched a youtube video titled “Imagine If All Atheists Left America” and it served as another eye opener for me. It made me realize that atheists are the most important people in America and possibly, the world! Most Nobel Prize winners, university professors, scientists, and charity founders are ATHEISTS!!! And the video showed what would happen to an atheist-free America: it will have a poor, unhealthy, unhappy economy. Come to think of it, countries with the least atheist population are those in the third world: Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and the Philippines. Then I did some research. All of this is true, and there is more. Countries with 50%+ atheist population are healthy, happy, and economically stable.

And those in history’s most evil were THEISTS!!! Not atheists but THEISTS – those who worship the Judea-Christian God. Stalin, another mass murderer, was an atheist, no doubt, but he didn’t kill for atheism. Hitler, on the other hand, killed Jews for his religion. It is utterly absurd and ridiculous to say that atheists are evil people. There are relatively few atheists in jail since most of the convicts are theists. Terrorist are Theists. Few atheists even killed anyone.

Most of the notable atheists are promoting peace; they are scientists, trying to improve humanity as we know it. It’s illogical, irrational, and ridiculous that I can’t express my feelings for those who say atheism kills society. Let’s say, what if the theists left society? Maybe less war, less stupidity, less genocides, less freaks, less trouble.

Atheists are good people, no doubt. It’s just a matter of time before you’ll realize this. I’m an atheist and I love humanity. I promote peace. Just because we don’t have God doesn’t mean that we also don’t have morals. Humans should help each other, not discriminate one another. And who do you think does the most discrimination? Think again.

“It has become a commonplace that, were Jesus to return today, he would be appalled at what is being done in his name…. We owe Jesus the honour of separating his genuinely original and radical ethics from the supernatural nonsense which he inevitably espoused as a man of his time…” — Richard Dawkins

Most, if not all, of the earliest Christians in ancient Rome were branded atheists because they frowned on the emperor cult and refused to recognize the Emperor as god, even as many of them were arrested, tortured and killed — so explained the documentary “Rivals of Jesus” shown in The National Geographic Channel. Indeed, these early Christians were atheists with respect to the Roman emperor/god. They were, shall we say, atheists for Jesus.

Similarly, today’s Christians (Catholics included) are atheists with respect to other gods, in the same manner that other religionists are to the Judeo-Christian god. Uniformly, we’re all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. And does anyone still pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Physicist Mano Singham wrote: “If one asks followers of one particular god why they do not believe in a different one, you will usually find that they argue much like atheists, citing the lack of evidence or reasons for belief. The difference is that they apply the rule only selectively, to rule out all other gods except their own preferred one, although there is no empirical difference between them.”

My take is that the plethora of gods ultimately makes a god-believer a theist and at the same time an atheist. If you’d not get schizoid with that…!

However, not a few religionists would argue that no matter what religion one belongs to, and even with the different name(s) for the god(s) he/she worships, these names universally refer to the same and only one God. Aha! the “only-one-God” with multiple bios and resumes? Like the three-hundred or three-persons-in-one? The latter sounds more like the sacheted Nescafe!

Additionally and not necessarily relevant, what explains the fact that Buddhism does not have a god? Would nothing or none be the same as the Abrahamic God?

Alas, we were all born without faith, without belief, without any clue whatsoever of the god-hypothesis. That’s pretty clear. It’s only when indoctrination started in varied stages of our life in various little and big ways did we begin to consciously or unconsciously adopt the faith in a non-existent god — either by having that faith slowly instilled in us or forcibly rammed down our throats.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I can’t remember in my childhood when Santa Claus and Christmas socks were first introduced to my gullible Christmas gift-excited mind; or the moment in our house when I first saw pictures and icons of Jesus’ face, as a baby in a nativity frame or as a half-naked man crucified, and somebody whispered to me saying “he’s the son of God.”

But I do remember viewing a TV program months after 9/11, wherein a little girl was asked who the man in the picture (Bin Laden) shown to her was. Without hesitation she quickly answered : Jesus Christ.

Pardon the kid, but you know the popular image of Jesus is so embedded in our minds that many geniuses could see him about anywhere: From formation of clouds to burnt marks of a toasted bread, from abstract designs of bathroom tiles and soiled urinals to worn out soles of flip-flops. Yet, a National Geographic documentary posited that Jesus may have looked like a dark-skinned, curly, beardless man resembling that of the Judas character in the rock opera/ film “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Which leads me to gutsily croon this Rice/Webber non-Christmas “carole”:

Every time I look at you I don’t understand,
Why you let the things you did get so out of hand,
You could have managed better if you had it planned,
Now why’d you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?
If you’d come today you could have reached the whole nation,
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.

Well, Judas-looking or not, Jesus would have topped Google search hits if the net and Facebook were already in vogue when he was rumored to be walking on water or raising the dead in old Galilee or thereabouts. Conversely, if he were to show up in these parts in this post-Marcos era, he would be an admirable heroic human rights activist, and would possibly be listed as a victim of torture (read: crucified), and/or unfortunately gone desaparicido. Partly because Jesus possessed the radical ethics that Dawkins describes him to have!

Now, this question intrigued me the happy holidays through: If Jesus were to return today, would he be an atheist or agnostic, too? My gut feel: Yes, probably! You know he’s depicted in the bible to have knowledgeably debated with religious elders when he was still a kid. He was, at the very least, a maverick.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
When I was still a pre-schooler, I had difficulty distinguishing Jose Rizal from Andres Bonifacio. It seemed I saw Rizal in Bonifacio and vice-versa. It was only when I was able to recognize the old (’70’s?) two-peso bill wherein, if memory serves, Bonifacio and Mabini shared “topbilling” on the banknote, and contrasting it to Rizal’s one-peso bill did I clearly define who was who. So you can say that money educates the ignorant about history, and also makes hero-worshippers out of pre-schoolers. And oh, how brilliant was that person who originally thought of deflecting money-worship toward other forms of fanaticism.

Anyway, my drift here is: To be a fan of popular celebrities or historical figures brings its own strategic reward. A fan values the admirable traits of the idol/role model and perhaps deliberately emulates his/her attributes, then most likely in the long evolutionary process, somehow those characteristics are replicated in meme-like fashion thereby enriching the human gene pool. Good to hear, thus, there are Catholic followers of Martin Luther King, non-Mason fans of Rizal, or Noranian admirers of Vilma.

But I maintain that atheist ‘fans’ of Jesus must not be confused with atheists for Jesus. You see, I’m no more than a mere Jesus fan now.

Worshipping these celebrities and historical figures as gods is altogether a delusional matter, as one Rizalista cult proves to be no ordinary fans club. Go figure that woman-member who was interviewed on TV about her interpretation of the “INRI” that’s associated with the crucified Christ: She emphatically lectured viewers that the “R” stands for “Rizal”. Arrrrr…!

As I was seeking for answers and looking for truths regarding life, I was disappointed and dismayed when I learned that some ‘truths’ are only illusions. I learned that each and every one of us has his/her own ‘truths’ which, if anyone dares to argue with, it would be a long and tiring argument for sure.

So let me tell you my story on why I became an atheist. This is my JOURNEY TO PARADISE.

I was born in a Christian family, in an environment among what they call the ‘righteous’ and the ‘chosen ones’. But I am an individual, unique, and I have my own thoughts to follow. I realized that I don’t have to follow my family’s traditions and beliefs.

For 12 years I was in a Catholic environment because my family is a devotee of Catholicism. But by the time I was able to understand this religion and belief thing, I started questioning every little detail on why people follow such traditions like the rituals done during Holy Week, the baptism of babies, the signing of the cross, the feast of the patron saints, etc., which are actually prohibited in the Bible, as far as I know.

But instead of answering my questions they just ignored me, so I started seeking for answers. A friend of mine in high school told me that if I wanted to seek for answers to my questions regarding religion and belief, I must read the Bible. And so I did. But instead of giving me answers it created more questions, until one day a neighbor came and preached about the gospel and the “Word of God” to me. She earnestly answered each and every question I had, and although I was a little skeptical of her answers, I accepted them. And because of my eagerness to really have the answers, I decided to become a born again Christian and to study more about the Word of God.

For two years I studied and adopted the beliefs of this sect I was in. I became “The Bible Man” in my family. Sometimes I argued with my mom with regards to what the Bible says about those who don’t follow what God had commanded. But that was until I realized that I was being a freak of this Jesus and his teachings.

I could no longer accept some of the lessons in science, sociology, and philosophy that I encountered in school because of this “have faith and never doubt” thing that I learned in the Bible. Fortunately, I realized I was being illogical and unreasonable at times. I realized that “truth is never told but realized”. And so I renounced my Christian faith and beliefs to grasp freethought for me to gain the real knowledge of life and the most logical and reasonable position that man can ever be.

Christianity had been my hindrance to progress and to knowing the reality and every answer to my questions. I may not know everything in life yet but what I know for sure is that there will be answers in the future. For everything here is explainable by science and logic – maybe not yet now but sooner or later we’ll have every answer that we longed to know and waited for so long. I may no longer be alive at that time, but I’m living right now for that future to come.

I no longer believe in any deity or supernatural things now that I have realized that it’s absurd to believe in such things that have no proofs of their existence. I live my life the way I want it, free from falsehood and absurdities.

But It doesn’t mean that I live a life of nothingness just because I don’t believe in a Sky-Daddy and didn’t follow what my family has taught me. I have my own thoughts and views regarding things, so no one can say I am a lifeless being. Every individual is as unique as his/her beliefs and so we can’t just say to anyone that he/she is wrong for what he/she believes, for we don’t know yet what is true.

And so if I say that God does not exist, you can’t say I am wrong just because you have things that “prove” your claim that God exists. No, God’s existence has been the long time argument of theists and atheists and yet no one has ever proven anything of it’s existence or non-existence. So I may be an agnostic as far as my position is concerned because I don’t know anything yet. But if God exists or not, I don’t care. At the least I know what I’m doing and what I’m supposed to do.

I am an Atheist. It has been one heck of a journey for me indeed. I may not have written all of it here, but this is the best thing that happened in my journey. And though my journey is not yet over, I’ll live for it now, to finish what I started, on this Journey to Paradise.

Here’s a nice short story I read over at The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe Forums. I know it’s a bit late, but I had to ask permission from the author to repost the story here. Anyway, better late than never!

Carol was nine years old when she stopped believing in him.

All her life, she was encouraged to believe, by people whose opinion she trusted.  Those who didn’t believe were always cast as Grinches and Scrooges.  No one liked them.  And they surely would come around someday anyway.

But her curiosity eventually overwhelmed her credulity.  She noticed that all children, naughty and nice, did equally well year after year.  She wondered how he could truly be in all parts of the Earth in one evening, and even the most confident explanations offered her little satisfaction.

She saw images resembling him and people dressed as they imagined he would dress, but never recalled seeing the real man.  She went through the motions of speaking to him, never being sure if he got the message.  Or if it mattered that he did anyway.

One quiet snowy morning, Carol approached Mother in the laundry room, and firmly put the question to her.  Mother failed to suppress a mildly surprised expression, then sighed and finished emptying the drier. She hoisted the basket and said with a bit of a grunt,

“What do you think?  Do you believe in him?”

“Um…I don’t know.  Maybe.”

Carol thought for a second more.  “Probably not, I guess.”

“I think you might be right,” said Mother as she led Carol into the family room, sat on the couch, and began folding towels.  Carol rested her crossed arms on the overstuffed arm of the couch, and her chin on her arms.  Mother’s voice shook a bit when she said, “I’m sorry, honey.”

“That’s okay.  I don’t mind.”

“Good.”

Carol wanted her mother to feel less sorry.  But she felt compelled to ask:

“Why do so many people believe in him?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Because he brings us joy.”

“Can’t we be happy without him?  Like because we’re with our families?”

“Sure, sure we can.  Somehow this all just started and we kind of go along with it.  He’s not what this holiday is all about, anyway.”

“Really?”

“That’s right.  People were celebrating this season long before he came along.  So you can keep on enjoying Christmas without him if you want.”

Carol thought for another few seconds.  “I’d like that.”

Mother smiled.  “Good.  I would too.  Just don’t tell your brother just yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because he isn’t ready yet.”

“But isn’t that lying?”

“Did I ever tell you what to believe?”

“I dunno.”

“I tried not to.  And I never told your brother either.  Just as you did, he believes what he has heard from friends and television and whatever else.  But like you, he’ll get smart.  You have to let him do it himself. You should be proud that you came to me.  How do you think you’d feel if I suddenly came to you and said he’s not real?”

“I’d feel bad.”

“Okay, then.”  Mother was down to the bottom of the basket, where the socks and boxer shorts were tangled together.

Things were quiet for a while and Carol didn’t know why, but she grew slightly upset.  She didn’t know it herself, but she was just a little angry.  And she even missed him a little, fictitious as he was.

“Mom?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Why do we let people believe a lie?  Why don’t the people who know tell the people who don’t know?  Then no one has to believe the lie.  And no one has to find out later that they were wrong for so long.  Oh, and think of all the money we’d save.  And all the time we spend talking about him and making TV shows and singing about him.”  Then she recalled some conversations she had witnessed between two grown-ups.  “And fighting over him.”

That was a tough question for Mother.

“Well, I guess you could say there are things that are real and things that make you feel good.  Sometimes people want to hold on to something that makes them comfortable, and they’re afraid of what’s real.”

“But doesn’t knowing what’s real make people happy?”

“It does make them grown-up, but it doesn’t always make them happy.  Are you happy to know the truth?”

“I don’t know.”

“But do you wish you didn’t know?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll be happy for you.”

The conversation was getting difficult for Carol.  She wordlessly straightened her back and trotted to her room, where she opened a book and began to read.

Full credit goes to T. Azimuth Schwitters.

The following article is a response to my previous post What It Means To Be A Storyteller. It was written by a commenter who calls himself Juan_After_909 and I believe this nice piece deserves to be posted here.

* * * * *

My friend asked why I, the prayerful ‘altar boy’, became an atheist.

Uhm… atheist I am not. Well… almost not.

I’m no Whitney Brown who gave us this soundbyte: “I’m not an atheist. How can you not believe in something that does not exist?” Uhm… how’s that again?

I’m agnostic… really. Richard Dawkins, one of the most notable militant atheists today, considers himself a 6.9 agnostic (or atheist, depending on which end of the numbered onion thread that connects two extremes of opposite certainty you choose to hang on to), with “7,” let’s say, as representative of the strong uncompromising atheist. Professor Dawkins humbly puts himself in that category for the humble reason that he’s a scientist. What science is and what a scientist does, feel free to google.

I’m nowhere near Dawkins’ 6.9, although “69″ conforms with uncompromising sexuality to which my sexth sense is also nowhere near. Brangelina, the couple, are agnostics/atheists, so is Daniel Radcliffe of the “Harry Potter” fame. (Dang! Why do I need to name-drop?)

Why I became not a “Brod Pitt” but instead a “Don’t Taser Me, Bro… Prrrtt” is a long story that I could summarily trace back to the old old angelic rituals of Angelus days.

Anyone heard of “angelus”?

Well, it’s when dusk slowly fell, and hi-fi radio sound went like this: Dong!… Dong!… Dong!… Ga…bi.. ng… lagim…. Oops! I mean: “Takipsilim na muli… ganap na ika-anim ng gabi… oras ng pagmumuni-muni… blah blah blah….”

Surviving listeners and fans of the late radio announcer Johnny “Wow-wow” de Leon of the old DZXL can fill in the blanks. But I must confess that DeLeon’s hi-fi angelus sound of the Angelus hour creeped into my toddler bones and nerves – it was like the “Twilight Zone.”

For the little boy that I was during Johnny’s wowowees, Angelus was a wall in our house adorned by crucifixes, icons, statues and portraits of saints that 6 children plus a mother faced, all of us on our knees, with memorized rosary script that we murmurred in unison. No adlibs and alibis allowed, or you’d get beat. Then teased.

Unaware that I was learning not to like the wall and all, the church to me became an extension of the wall, literally perhaps, as the small village chapel was no more than a hundred steps away from the capizeed frontwindow of our house. So you see, if I was late for Sunday mass or refused to proceed for childish reasons such as fever and swollen tonsils, or missed one unintentionally, which were rather rare, father was quick to brand me a mason, a moro, a komunista, a gusto-mo-bang-mapunta-sa-Lulumboy? (do you want to end up in Lulumboy?) — lost as to who or what “Lulumboy” was. Oh, the dad might have figuratively or colloquially referred to the Boystown, a juvenile rehab located somewhere in, uhm… until now I can’t figure where.

The kind of verbal scares and insults (not including yet the harsh physical beatings) that made the little boy downright confused and subconsciously believed that he was bad — and maybe as “bad” as a good mason, a prayerful moro, or a productive komunista, while tearfully and painfully listening to the angry gospel(s) according to his saintly child-beating father — a father, who, like most fire-breathing priests and pastors, make their listeners miserable by creating in them a sense of self-loathing and inordinate fear.

Lucky enough I wasn’t named “Lulumboy.”

Catholic grade school wasn’t Lulumboy, alright, yet it was there that I got to swallow the teaching that, we, and even a newborn baby is steeped in original sin, and thus deserve to burn in hell. Eventually, street-honed adolescence and youthful activism made me the wavering believer who coldly despised the wall and churchbell klengs and bangs but occassionally and quietly recited the rosary mysteries and other prayers anyways, that, looking back, were done impulsively out of stress, tension, nervousness and outriight fear.

I must admit that the rosary and some other Catholic rituals, in no small way, helped calm me down. Ala tranquilizers they served to relatively clear the confusion in my head, the pounding on my chest, the sweating of my cheeks — momentarily at best. But the tension and fear remained. From what, I had no clear idea.

Until, by some clicks of the mouse, I came across Mother Theresa’s Crisis of Faith, then read Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and had a clear grasp of what the stress, tension, nervousness and fear was all about.

What tranquilizer? I asked, smiling, while re-playing this classic video of funnyman George Carlin: “Religion is Bullshit”.

I often hear religious people say that freethinkers are proud people, leaning on their own human understanding. The faithful claim to be humble, acknowledging our limited wisdom and thereby surrendering mind and will to the Almighty, the Supreme Being of the universe.

At first it seems they have a point, but if we look closely we’ll see that it’s actually the other way around. While theists may appear humble before their God, they are actually quite contemptuous towards people who do not share their beliefs. I could not explain it better than a commenter who calls himself Pecier Carpena Decierdo:

Reason is humble, faith is not. Reason is open to the possibility that its claims are wrong, faith is not. Faith is cock-sure and certain, scientific reason is not. Faith makes claims to super-human knowledge, scientific reason does not.

The only knowledge human brains can contain is human knowledge, that is, limited knowledge. Because all we have are human brains with limited human knowledge, we cannot claim to be certain about everything. Yet faith, that archenemy of reason, makes people believe that they can be certain about things they actually know nothing about.

I just watched a one-hour video on how the universe could have literally come out of nothing by accident, negating the necessary first cause or creator. The speaker remarked that this shows just how insignificant we really are. And it is a humbling thought indeed.

Which leads us to ponder, what then, is the purpose of our existence if we came out of nothing by pure chance? I guess my answer will be that the purpose of our existence is to find a purpose for our existence. Existence precedes essence, and if we indeed came out of nothingness because of pure luck instead of being created by a deity, then I guess that would be the greatest and most generous and most humbling miracle of all. And since we are lucky enough to exist at a point in time and space where conditions are suitable for life, it is wise to open our eyes to the world around and not waste our finite days haughtily holding on to some eternal “truth” that demands suspending our reason. Surely we have better things to do here.

innerminds.wordpress.com

I would like to thank Wes for his invaluable contributions to this piece.

Imagine a single-celled organism. Longing for life, it tries to split itself, and succeeds. It repeats the process a couple of times…A few billions years later it develops the ability for locomotion, and it begins to swim with fins and breathe underwater with gills. A couple of million years after that it leaves the ocean to walk on land, at first on all fours, and then upright on two legs. It develops a level of intelligence unlike any other creature on the planet, giving it vast superiority over the biggest, strongest, and fastest animals.

Aside from bigger brain capacity, opposable thumbs were one the biggest advantages we got too, enabled us to use tools. Creating and using tools were our biggest ace in the hole compared to other animals which were faster, stronger, and bigger than us. It helped even out the playing field by allowing us to manufacture crutches to make up for our physical shortcomings. Without our toys, we wouldn’t stand a chance against a hungry predator. We were lucky that in the greater scheme of things, turns out that it weren’t the biggest or the fastest jocks that made it big, it was the nerd that was handy with a wrench. (Wes)

In the movie Amistad, a slave was invoking the strength of his ancestors when he was about to appear before the US Supreme Court on a case that would greatly determine his fate: “…my ancestors, I will call into the past, far back to the beginning of time and beg them to come and help me at the judgment. I will reach back and draw them into me, and they must come, for at this moment I am the whole reason they have existed at all.”

What we are now, we owe to the struggles of a long line of forebears who fought tooth and nail to maintain their precarious perch in the evolutionary ladder. Nature is not a kind referee, her laws of the jungle dictate that the weak fall prey to the strong. Our lineage had to duke it out with the rest of nature to earn the right to carry on their genetic heritage. It would be a great disservice to their memory to even suggest that what we are here today because we were lucky to have been the favored children of an invisible deity. (Wes)

We are the present culmination of billions of years of evolution and hundreds of years of our ‘modern’ ancestors’ struggle in a world where the animal on top of the food chain belongs to the same species but with a lot more money and power – and how every one of them survived long enough to pass on what would eventually become every one of us. A great majority of our ‘peers’ have already died – became extinct millions and even billions of years ago. Yet here we are. And that makes us more special than being some creation of an Intelligent Designer, in the same way that a self-made millionaire is definitely more special than a very rich man who merely inherited his wealth from his infinitely richer family.

But while evolution highlights us humans as the most highly evolved creature in terms of intellect, we are far from being the most adaptable. Viruses mutate faster than we can develop vaccines for the original strain. Cockroaches are never totally exterminated from our homes regardless of the various ways we try to kill them. And I guess this is a rather humbling thought.

And though at first it may sound like we are not so special after all, what it really means is that each of us is special in his/her/its own different way. For every creature – from the tiny bug that tentatively crawls out of its hole and hides at the first sign of danger, to the alpha male lion who walks as if it owns Africa, to the single working mom balancing family and career – each of them represents a few billion years of the struggle for life.

innerminds.wordpress.com