As anyone who knows me knows, I’m a die-heart atheist. I was *very* religious as a child (I grew up as a Methodist, but my faith was actually based on the biblical stories I read), but eventually I realized that I could not be a thinking person and have blind faith at the same time. When I started questioning my faith, I could not reconcile the fact that it was too much of a coincidence that I would have been born to the one “true” religion. Had I been born in Saudi Arabia, I would be a Muslim, had it been India, I would have been a Hindu, and if those religions were not “true”, what was to say that Christianity was? Then there was the factor of the Old Testament. For years, I had been very interested in ancient civilizations, to the point that I had decided to become an archaeologist when I “grew up”. Ironically, that interest have been sparked by my reading of the Old Testament. But when I started reading on Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations, I could not but notice that many of their creation myths were *very* similar to those of the Bible. Abraham, the founder of the Jewish faith, had himself come from Ur, a Mesopotamian city. It made sense that he had brought those creation stories with him, and that that’s how they made their way to the Bible. BUT, the myths were similar, but not identical. Given that Sumerian civilization preceded Jewish civilization, Sumerian myths were older and therefore had to be closer to the “truth”. And yet, when I read them I was reading them as myths and not as “history” – the way I was reading the Bible. This was only a problem because I had always taken the Bible literally, believed not just in the essence of the “message” but in the accuracy of its historical accounts. As I delved more into ancient history, it became clearer and clearer than the biblical accounts were inconsistent with archaeological and historical evidence and were, therefore, false. So the seeds of doubt were there.
During my freshman year in college, I was first exposed and first learned about the “scientific method”, at the same time than I was learning about evolution. The scientific method made absolutely sense to me – in particular the very simple and elemental notion that a theory needed to have evidence to back it up. What was the evidence that there was a god? Human life? But that could be and to me was convincingly accounted by the theory of evolution.
Richard Dawkins is considered nowadays one of the biggest atheist thinkers because of his book The God Delusion, but in reality his seminal work was one of his first, The Selfish Gene. This book explains evolutionary theory so well, so clearly and concisely that it’s impossible for any thinking person to not take it seriously.
I read the Selfish Gene in my Anthropology 1 class my freshman year in college. The class was taught by Vincent Sarich, one of the discoverers of the molecular clock. Vince (as I came to call him) was, at the time, the most intelligent man I had ever met and among the most inquisitive. He was also a terrific teacher and a man not unwilling to challenge PC notions and let science guide him where it did. Twenty two years after that Anthro class in Berkeley, I can still say he was one of the two most important influences in my life (the other one is probably my friend and co-worker Gregorio Dionis, the architect of the criminal procedures in Spain against Pinochet, and the other most intelligent man I’ve ever met). Vince did not only introduce me to the scientific method and the theory of evolution by natural selection (which is really the crux of the theory), but he also introduced me to the concept of parsimony, the concept that the simplest explanation, the one that would take the least steps, was the most likely to be true. That also made a lot of sense to me. Even if I needed to postulate a god as the ultimate creator of the universe, the question was, how did god came into being? I ended up at the same place, not knowing, so I might as well reject the concept for which there was no evidence, god.
So I did, and by the end of my freshman year in college, I’d become an atheist. I haven’t looked back since.
For many years, I found people’s belief in God to be quaint and perhaps necessary for their emotional health. It’s hard to give up on the idea that we are alone, purposeless, and that when we die, we die. And as Marx said, “religion is the opium of the masses”. But in recent years, I’ve become offended by the notion of the Christian god. Offended because that god, said by Christians to be omnipotent, would be, if real, so cruel and even “evil”, that, in my mind, worshiping him, much less wanting to be like him, is in itself an evil act. This is a god, after all, who stands by while he sees babies being raped to deathby some crazy notion that sex with them will cure AIDS (a disease, btw, that has not only disseminated African populations, but has left millions of orphans who now live in squalor and hunger). A god that allows genocides to be committed, torture to go on, children to be turned into drug-mad soldiers, millions to die of hunger and disease. And yes, a god that sent (or at least allowed) a devastating earthquake to one of the poorest and most miserable countries in the world. Why would a god do that?
If you talk to christians, they will tell you that people do horrible things because god gives them a “choice” (but what choice do those babies have to be raped?). That doesn’t explain earthquakes, however. It doesn’t explain why children, little children who have not had a chance to live, and therefore sin, need to die through painful deaths. It doesn’t explain why millions of children worldwide are not given a chance to be loved and fed, why they are turned into monsters or killing machines.
How could a god that cruel invite worshiping? How could anyone worship that god and keep their integrity?