Rejected Religion
For Emotional Reasons
Katie Terrell
From: "Katie Terrel"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: personal witness testimonial
Date: Friday, April 20, 2001 3:22 PM
Hi,
I found your site through a search with "pedophiles" key word! Just wanted to comment on how I found Jesus and then lost him again. I was in a conservative Christian commune for five years, married a pastor. Was miserable. Prayed a lot for help. Didn't get it: Christian counseling -- didn't change a thing. Went to university and took a sociology class. I wrote a note to the prof (too shy to speak to him) about why Christianity would be a good thing for the state to adopt. He kindly wrote me back explaining all the wars that had been fought over this issue. He didn't condemn my lack of insight, was very polite. I was open to his idea. At the same time I met other professors at the university who were very kind people. This was strange to me because as a Christian you feel different from the unsaved and have a deep seated feeling that only Christians can be good, moral, kind people. They didn't argue with me intellectually at all, just accepted me and became friends. I finally had the courage to throw God out the window and admit believing in him had brought me only grief! I got divorced. I'm a happy atheist now but the only way that happened was through emotional events, not intellectual. Thanks for reading! I'll go read some more articles in your site now.
Katie
From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Katie Terrel"
Subject: Re: personal witness testimonial
Date: Friday, April 20, 2001 7:58 PM
Katie,
Thanks for your letter.
Emotional upheaval can cause someone to reexamine their philosophical position, and adjust their world-view according to what they think is true. Any decision made purely on emotion will not last -- we must at least try to justify it intellectually in order for the change to stick.
Religion, I think, is as close as we come to a purely emotion-based outlook decision. Because most expressions of religion cannot stand on their own accord, adherents must return week after week for an update of their faith, exposing themselves to other like-minded individuals. An outlook that is discovered through reason, I think, is a viewpoint which is much more likely to remain intact without the need to continually "brainwash" oneself as to its truthfulness. Its truthfulness is self-evident, and needs no help to stand up.
Your letter makes strong indications that this is the process you have undergone: you appear to have become upset at what you saw, and this emotional upheaval prompted you to reexamine the facts. As the result of your examination of the facts, you changed your outlook.
This is almost identical to what I went through: I became very upset that the Bible world that I thought I lived in did not pan out as described, and that the Christians I knew were more shallow even than the drunks I'd met; they didn't hold a candle to regular, unimpaired secular people I knew. I was later able to compare, intellectually, what I believed in the religion with what I saw with my eyes. The two did not line up, so I tossed the religion out with the bath-water, so to speak. Although an emotional situation started the ball rolling, my decision was verified by intellectually examining my decision. In fact, had I not examined it intellectually, I stood the risk of reverting to the faith. It is the intellectual examination which now keeps me free from faith even in the face of current emotional upheavals which might otherwise drive me back into religion.
Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe
From: "Katie Terrel"
To: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Re: personal witness testimonial
Date: Sunday, April 22, 2001 4:02 PM
Hi Cliff,
Thanks for your response. I think the Christian religion is very cohesive and logical intellectually, as long as you buy the basic precept, that there is a God and he did write the Bible. Most psychoses have a logic to them too. What lured me into that little nightmare of faith was the statement that it was something "I had to try personally to know whether or not it was true", that it couldn't be known intellectually. I knew that was true for the acid or mescaline experience so I gave it a try. Other people said God showed them this or that, and just because I never got any messages from God I didn't think that meant other people were lying.
You at least had good judgement of character. I liked Christians, most of them, didn't trust unbelievers. Everything that didn't make sense could be explained by the Bible.
I think we are all just animals with big egos. When a line of ants is marching from a food source back to the nest and one gets stepped on, I'm sure he feels that that is a tragedy of cosmic proportions, and all his little brethren are worried and begin to seek God and wonder why it happened to him. Or maybe not. I think when one of us dies or has a tragedy of some sort happen to us, the significance of it is no more than when it happens to an ant. We look for meaning because we can't believe we are unimportant as individuals. Buddhists think our minds are just made that way, to process information in a self-referential way. In all the rest of nature, individuals don't matter at all, just the species. So why should it be different with humans, just because we like to think it's so? I work with animals (horses) so I tend to think in those terms. Tough shit there's no God to care, but that view is the only one that makes sense. I've seen a squirrel caught in a trap being eaten while still alive by another squirrel. It wasn't a moral issue for either one of them.
When a plane full of people crash and die and there is one survivor, Christians say it is a miracle. How can they forget the 99 and say it's a miracle for 1? Never understood that.
Sorry to bend your ear. I've been busy this weekend but want to read the articles on your site. I just moved to eastern Oregon, and everyone here believes in God because that worldview is like the air they breathe. It's nice to be reminded that I'm not the only infidel.
Katie
From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Katie Terrel"
Subject: Re: personal witness testimonial
Date: Monday, April 23, 2001 2:16 AM
it was something "I had to try personally to know whether or not it was true", that it couldn't be known intellectually.
I respond to this one by showing that they are asking me to already believe something to be true in order to find out whether or not it warrants my belief in the first place!
Other people said God showed them this or that, and just because I never got any messages from God I didn't think that meant other people were lying.
No, just mistaken. Lying involves either deliberately saying what you know is not true, or saying something is true without knowing either way. But if you think something is true, if you've had a religious experience or the like, even though your interpretation of that experience may be false, you are not lying.
In all the rest of nature, individuals don't matter at all, just the species.
I disagree. I've seen dogs and cats miss their dead brothers and sisters and sit on the grave in the back yard.
When a plane full of people crash and die and there is one survivor, Christians say it is a miracle. How can they forget the 99 and say it's a miracle for 1? Never understood that.
Religion can do strange things to people's minds. We don't have to understand it, we just do well to acknowledge that drugs and religion can do strange things to people's heads.
I just moved to eastern Oregon, and everyone here believes in God because that worldview is like the air they breathe. It's nice to be reminded that I'm not the only infidel.
My folks moved to Southern Utah where everybody believes in God simply because the land is so beautiful.
-- Except my parents, anyway:
Mormon Temple tour guide, after showing the exceedingly coercive presentation video: "Do you have any questions?" My Father: "No." |
Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe
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