Faith No More: a cautionary tale
Terri Julians finds some sympathy for people who cannot let go of dogma – She was one of them.
Terri Julians
It is very difficult to admit that, after years of believing in something which sustained and fulfilled you to the point of certainty, that you have probably been wrong, misled, deceived or just plain gullible.
A faith or belief on which so much rests is not easily abandoned, which is why I do sympathise with those of faith who doggedly and in the face of so much contra-evidence, hang on to their religious beliefs for dear life. Sometimes it is all they have that makes their lives seem dear to them.
I can honestly say, as a result of my own experiences, that it physically hurts to face yourself and admit that all you have built for yourself which has sustained you through the worse of times, which enabled you to cope with the death of loved ones and justify all that ever happened to you, is actually built on foundations of jelly, albeit a very tasty and seemingly fulfilling jelly.
When the foundations do finally give way and the edifice of belief comes crashing down, it also grabs your insides on the way, and brings your guts, your heart and “soul” and the whole sorry mess down with it.
When it happened to me I lay stunned and injured in the metaphorical rubble trying to get my senses back for quite some time.
Even after it happened I did not want to accept it. I tried with all I could muster to bring it back; I searched using all the old tried and trusted methods; I saw it as a test of my courage and faith, a well worn cliché for such occasions. I called on all the forces of nature, all the spirits and loved ones. Jesus, St Francis, the Tao, anyone and anything at all, to help me get it all back. Nothing happened. Nothing.
As pathetic as it sounds, I really did feel like a naked child out in the cold, abandoned and terrified. I was totally alone with it all to the point where I completely believed there was no point staying alive. I had lost everything, my home, my value; I had failed utterly. I was hospitalised in a psychiatric ward for 2 months; when I came out I was a homeless person living in a tent for nine months while trying to hold down a full time job.
Everything that once sustained me now brought pain; birdsong reduced me to tears so much so that I had to cover my ears. I was unable to look at flowers or listen to beautiful music. The world had become a foreign and foreboding place to be in. I felt abandoned by everything and everyone.
Chance, a very forward thinking and caring GP, and to be honest, a certain amount of bloody minded determination, caused me to stand up on my own two feet, look at the world through new eyes and see it and my life for what it actually is rather than what I wanted it to be or thought it was. Only then could I see that all my beliefs, all my certainties were based on pure wishful thinking; what I wanted them to be; because facing life without those beliefs was just too bloody awful to contemplate. It was a sink or swim moment and I learned how to swim for my life, albeit ungracefully and without direction for a while.
I say all this to hone the point that we would be wise to realise how painful seeing truth and abandoning faith actually is, especially when you think you already had that truth.
If you have a sudden revelation and all in a flash your old faith doesn’t cut it anymore, then that’s all right; you kind of “see the light” and it’s an easy step into Reason. However, if, like me, your faith sustained you, was your best and only friend through the trials and tribulations of all of your life, justified your pain and soothed your fears, then you want to hang on to it, against all reason.
Faith is a giant safety net
Hardship, grief, despair, loneliness are all caught in that net and bounced off into the arms of “God“. God has an answer for everything and they don’t need to be understand, just accepted.
This is why people of intellect, apparent wisdom and reason, can still maintain the juxtaposition of faith and belief in a deity, a creed, book or a hierarchy of priesthood. Even with their logic and wisdom, the thought of being that lost child fending for itself for the first time is overwhelmingly abhorrent and terrifying.
Faith is subjective, therefore only you know how much it affects your life and actions. Only you know the void left when it is gone and only you can deal with it.
It’s a bit like the movie The Matrix; you get a choice of pills; the red one will transport you to reality, with all it’s horrors and discomforts; it may be harder to face that reality with nothing but your reasoning but at least it’s the truth, at least it’s the real world and real life.
The blue pill, however, will enable you to stay in the Matrix, unaware that all you are seeing and experiencing is unreal, a sham. It is an illusion to keep you servile and compliant but it’s better than reality. How many times would we ask the question, “why oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?”.
I think we have to understand why so many people do take the blue pill. Why, when faced with evidence, facts and common sense, so many good people prefer to stay in their Faith Matrix.
Once you step outside there really is no going back not unless you are prepared to live your life knowing you are living a lie just to make yourself feel better.
Divine Justice
I have spoken to people who have lost so much yet gained a real sense of comfort by the thought of this “god”. One couple I spoke with had 3 children killed in a head on collision, their whole family wiped out in an instant. The only way they live with this trauma is to convince themselves that God is aware of this, had a plan for their children and that they, the couple, would find strength in this knowledge. They convinced themselves that they were somehow singled out by God and were part of a grand plan. The event actually strengthened their faith and they were applauded for it.
Now it could be that, without that “faith”, they would have crumbled into pieces. They would have been reduced to gibbering wrecks; shells of their former selves trying to deal with this tragic loss.
Had they been brought up to understand the way life really works, that the terrible crash which killed their family was a random accident; the children were in the wrong place at the wrong time and a series of circumstances, all of which could have played out differently, just happened to play out to a tragic end, then their mindset may have been geared to deal with the harsh reality, however unjust, unfair or cruel it turns out.
One of the main reasons for clinging to faith is “Divine Justice”.
That all the horrors of the world, all the atrocities on small or grand scales, are somehow documented for scrutiny by a god who will make everything alright; who will punish the wrong doers and placate the victims.
People of faith believe that this will happen. It allows them to cope and it is comforting to believe that, no matter what pain or injustice you go through, someone somewhere is seeing it from all sides and keeping account of it.
If you are a good person then you know God knows you are a good person. If you make mistakes he will know you had a weak moment and will still love you and help you work through it.
To turn away from this “certainty” is to turn away from everything that helps you make sense of non-sense situations without losing your sanity.
To contemplate life without this eventual Divine Justice can be too difficult for some people.
To accept that unfortunate things happen randomly or by cruel intent, and that, apart from following the due process of civil law, there is NO justice to be had now or in the future, is anathema to our learned responses.
Deliberate acts of cruelty, torture and murder, on any scale, usually have no justification.
Shit happens and it often happens to the best of people while selfish, cruel people can prosper at their expense. A rapist may win the lottery, an innocent child may get hit by a truck.
Fat, greedy kings keep all the nations wealth to build themselves palaces while the children of their nation die of starvation.
Some people are bemoaning the fact that their central heating has gone wrong while others are trying to claw their children out of the rubble of earthquakes.
None of these things will ever be put right through a Divine Justice but many people simply cannot contemplate this. It is easier for them to go through life convinced that, one day, all this will be put right; that one day, this heavenly entity will put his arms around them and say “it’s ok, I saw all you went through, you coped well and I love you” and then they run into the arms of you’re their children.
Another way of coping is to perceive all the horrors as part of a divine plan. That god always knew what was going to happen and watched it play out because it was part of his plan.
However painful the result, this justification is actually fuelled by the pain because your pain is proof of your faith. You trust God to know what he is doing and, if taking your babies from you through a violent act was his plan then your duty is not to question it but accept it, even though you don’t know what that plan is. You faith will be rewarded when the Divine Justice is eventually dished out.
For the Faithful all becomes resolved through Divine Justice. God sees it all and has plans for all concerned. The pain of loss is slightly lessened by the thought of ultimate come-uppance for the perpetrator and absoloute, everlasting life and love for the victim.
For the Faithless it is a different story.
No matter how much we may like the idea of Divine Justice, we simply cannot accept it; it goes against reason and reality for those of us not in the Matrix.
How do we deal with trauma and grief? Through pain. It is inescapable I’m afraid and part of being human.
Some dissolve under its weight and never emerge whole again; their life grinds to a shuddering halt. Others come through and actually find some strength by using their own experience to help others who find themselves in the same situation. Through their experience and pain they help someone else. The Religious will claim this as their own; however this is not the case.
All of us, with or without faith, are capable of this act of selflessness.
It can be a self helping device to find some solace from a seemingly impossible grief.
Some manage this, some do not.
It is down to personal resource and the love of others that we manage a terrible situation.
For this we can and should take the full credit.
The strength and power of love and compassion which a human is capable of is astonishing.
It is born of a natural resource which some possess more than others for whatever reason.
The Faithful prefer to give this credit to a deity. The Faithless see it for what it is and humbly acknowledge it.
In an ideal world there would be Counsellors available to help people cope with the loss of their faith. People may find help to overcome their experiences of being part of a Cult; I see it as the same thing. The psychological trauma of abandoning or losing Faith should not be underestimated. It can, for some, be an existential crisis; one which can be overcome through finding meaning in ones life without the need for wishful thinking and platitudes.
I admit I still struggle from time to time; I was brought up as a Spiritualist and still hope there is a life after death as I had always believed. Although even in the midst of my beliefs I did not accept any idea of a personal “God”, the thought of someone, somewhere loving you unconditionally is a comforting one. Maybe it takers a degree of courage to stand alone in a scary world.
I still wonder if there are dimensions of existence which have yet to be discovered and quantified which may one day prove the existence of individual consciousness.
Yes, I have heard all the arguments against this but I still wonder about what we do not yet know.
The one thing I am certain of, is that whatever we have yet to discover, I hope to goodness there is NOT such a thing as “God”.
Terri Julians is a Phlebotomist in the NHS and a military history illustrator. She is passionate about promoting secularism, Humanism and freedom of speech.
Faith No More: a cautionary tale,
Gosh! I guess I was lucky, then, to have never believed in the mumbo-jumbo in the first place. Sounds flippant, perhaps, but I honestly cannot remember a time when I accepted any of it (which my parents found deeply disturbing, but couldn’t change).
After nearly 60 years of staunch atheism, my “non-belief” has remained firm, and is probably even firmer now than it ever was.
I am a little undecided on one matter, though: should my tag be TING (There is no God), or TANG (There are no Gods)?
The process of becoming an atheist from being a Christian for me was a gradual one. It was so slow, I was hardly aware it was happening. It was 9/11 that stopped me in my tracks and caused me to THINK – for the very first time – I began to THINK about exactly what it was I so fervently believed in. I do so blush to this day when I contemplate the Christian nonsense that I simply took for granted was true. I can see so clearly how it all began. The “seed” was sown by my parents – or should I call it a “meme”? And my “belief” just became a habit. Not once in my life did I stop and ask “Just a minute, can this be really true?”
As someone that had an extremely emotionally tumultuous exit from the Jehovah’s Witness faith (a fundamentalist Christian type religion with cult-like attributes), this article really spoke to me.
I had to first endure the pain and confusion surrounding the idea that the particular brand of apocalyptic Christianity I’d be brought up to believe was wrong, then, after much research, go through it all over again when I realised that the whole concept of God was extremely improbable and a personal God, nigh impossible! It’s a horrible, gut-wrenching process; deconversion. I would never want to go through it again, but now I’m here, on the other side, I would never want to go back either. I took the red pill and so glad I did. I don’t regret it.
Like Gemma above I was a Jehovah’s Witness, I was born in to the religion and finally cut all ties at age 58.
My “journey” since then has been much as Terri describes hers, and I would like to thank her for expressing so well the painful time one must go through as ones whole world-view has to change.
For those like Gemma and I that have left a Cult it is even more traumatic ,as we leave behind in the Cult our families and a large network of friends, all of whom have little or nothing to do with you as you have “turned your back on God” and the Cult instills in them the idea that you are dangerous to their faith (true, that bit!)
I am pleased to help any on a similar journey in any way I can, I comment on a number of sites and forums for such people, many of whom are near suicide at first.
Having reached a point equal to Terri’s I find I am now much happier than I have ever been in my life, I am now an Atheist and a Realist, my moral values are I feel stronger than a”religious” persons, I have determined them for myself, and would be denying myself if i went against them.
I feel too that I am better equipped to face life, and death, as a realist, if s**t happens I don’t have to wonder how on earth a loving god could allow it.
All in all, life is so much better when you have taken the red pill, the “cold turkey” period is hard, but after that it is onward and upward !
I would like to thank Terri for her insightful article. I think the ultra-rational wing of humanism does tend to underestimate the emotional appeal of religious beliefs, particularly when people are suffering and desperately need help to make sense of it all. (By the way, i recommend a book written decades ago by Rabbi Harold ??? (sorry, can’t remember his name, he was American), ‘When bad things happen to good people.’)
I am lucky I have not had the wrenching experiences described above. Brought up in a Protestant church, I was never really committed to it. Over the course of my adult life, and at different times, I described myself as ‘agnostic’, ‘atheist’, or interested in spiritual things (or something of the sort!) and flirted with other religions such as Buddhism and Quakerism, before deciding in my late 50s that I really was an atheist/humanist, and that was that. Since then I have been much more comfortable with myself, and much more sure of where I stand in argument. But I think I still understand the emotional basis of much faith, and interestingly, I still find a great deal of meaning in the supposedly religious poetry of George Herbert who has been a lifelong interest. But then, I think that his poetry can be understood at a lot of different levels, and I sometimes wonder whether at times he was talking about his religious life at all!
People who leave religious movements that have really been their life, probably need intensive support to help them get through this – it is not just a matter of cold-bloodedly seeing a better argument.
“still hope there is a life after death as I had always believed.”
The best option available at the moment for the rationalist: http://www.cryonics.org/ Affordable to almost everyone if funded by life insurance (costs less then £1/day all in if you’re in reasonable health and not too old).
I’m very surprised that considering the number of atheists there are, only about a thousand or so people world-wide are signed up for cryonics. Why are even atheists and humanists so accepting of death? Is this a hangover from our western christian tradition, deeply enshrined in our culture?
I find interesting what The Skeptics Dictionary has to say about cryonics.
http://www.skepdic.com/cryonics.html
Quotes taken from the Skeptic Dictionary article:
“The simple fact is once you are dead, you are dead forever.”
Yes, but only if you’re referring to Information Theoretic death. The definitions of clinical and legal death change continually with advancing medical science. 100 years ago, someone who’s heart stopped beating would be considered dead; today, people in such a condition are frequently brought back with CPR and defibrillation.
“without a complete isomorphic model of the brain it will be impossible to return a mushy brain to the exact state it was in before death occurred.”
The idea is you’d have such a model, and already people are being frozen using a sophisticated antifreeze technique that preserves tissue down to the cellular level.
“A business based on little more than hope for developments that can be imagined by science is quackery.”
The Cryonics Institute make no claims for potential success (they are very open about the speculative nature of cryonics) and importantly, they are non-profit (so not really a ‘business’ in the corporate sense). The point is that even if there’s only a 1% chance of success, it’s better than the 0% chance that you get through burial or cremation. Surely even a 1% chance is worth a quid a day investment?
“There is no reason to believe that a brain preserved by whatever means and restored to whatever state by nanobots will result in a consciousness that is in any way connected to the consciousness of the person who died two centuries earlier.”
There’s no reason why – if the accuracy of the procedures involved in preservation and restoration are sufficient – it wouldn’t be. To suggest that there is something etherial about consciousness that is not related to the physical brain is akin to arguing for a ‘soul’ in the religious sense. And besides, we routinely awake from sleep (and other deeper forms of unconsciousness, including the heart stopping) as the same people we were before.
As for the business with Ted Williams, it seems as though the guy to put forward the story, Larry Johnson, was/is on a personal vendetta against Alcor and cryonics – see http://www.cryonics.org/immortalist/may10/frozen.pdf
I think the Skeptic Dictionary is betraying a bias (towards the Christian roots of our culture) here.
Here’s a good FAQ on cryonics, from someone working in the field:
http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html
i think you all know I was referring to the non-physical “life after death” here.
Hi Terri, I really loved your article and I’m sorry a discussion of cryonics is happening here.
There are, however, two points that I’d rather not leave unchallenged:
It’s completely inappropriate to apply a probabilistic model to cryonics. Spending £1/week on lottery tickets has a well defined chance of success. Spending <£1/day on cryonics either has every chance of working or no chance of working. I suspect the later, but we just don't know and it has nothing to do with chance!
Secondly, I see the western Christian tradition as less about accepting death, and more about circumventing non-accepted death through wishful thinking.
Terri – thanks for the article, it really made me think – especially about the emotional side of things – I wouldn’t have posted here otherwise
Terri: “i think you all know I was referring to the non-physical “life after death” here.” Maybe. But once we’re serious about there being no such thing, we have to consider the options of physical life after “death”! I freely admit that I feel more comfortable knowing that – no matter how unlikely it may be – I have *some* kind of *potential* back-up. As they say, cryonics is the second worse thing that could happen to you (the first being cremation or burial and decomposition!).
So, for the discussion of cryonics… Whilst it may be off on a bit of tangent to the main subject matter, I think it’s an important discussion; mainly because of the mythos and misinformation generally surrounding the subject.
To address Anthony’s points: no one plays the lottery based on it’s well-defined chance of success. The odds of winning the UK national lottery are something like 14 million to 1. If you were to play completely rationally, you’d have to wait for an opportunity to buy 14 million tickets for one prize draw for a price less than the jackpot. I believe this once happened, and the guy was successful even though he’d bought only a faction of all the tickets, and gambled on no others sharing the winning numbers; but clearly this isn’t the way to go.
Yes cryonics has nothing to do with chance, but it has everything to do with uncertainty, which is as good as the same thing* when you’re talking about a speculative investment. Knowing that the odds of winning the lottery are 14 million to 1, vs. knowing that there may be a speculative future technology that could revive you in the event of a premature death, is hardly a no brainer. Both investments, for all intents an purposes, are “pissing in the wind”. The point I was trying to make is that cryonics is the best bet available to the rationalist for insuring his/her survival in the event of death (as it is currently defined). And besides, anyone with a grasp of general science and geopolitics is able to assess the chances of success with cryonics as better than 1 in 14 million, surely?
Anthony: “I see the western Christian tradition as less about accepting death, and more about circumventing non-accepted death through wishful thinking.” Maybe so, but in practical terms the latter more than often manifests itself in the former.
*although potentially better, as it is knowledge rather than probability based
Greg writes:
“So, for the discussion of cryonics… Whilst it may be off on a bit of tangent to the main subject matter, I think it’s an important discussion.”
Cool – so perhaps you could consider submitting an article about it?
Good, it sounds like you get the difference between probabilities and complete unknowns (Pascal’s Wager becomes a reasonable proposition otherwise). I’d say the rational way to play the lottery is to put smalls amounts of money on it if one enjoys doing so – this optimises utility even though the average financial return is negative.
“perhaps you could consider submitting an article about it?” Will do – I’ll use my posts here as a basis
I must admit to finding the whole cryonics thing as pointless as taxidermy and just as gruesome. However, at the risk of sounding like I am clutching at straws I cannot understand why most Humanist/Atheists shy away so completely from the possibilities yet to be discovered when it comes to the discussion of the possibilities of the survival of consciousness, especially when it is universally recognised that individual consciousness is barely understood and quantified. Just as the existance of God cannot be disproved, neither can these possibilities.
At present the probabilities are that this life is IT and death is the end of it but no one can say it is impossible anymore than the old cliche of men on the moon was once deemed impossible.
Yes it is hard to accept that our unique expression of ourselves will just cease to exist; I have come to acept a sort of reversal of Pasqual’s Wager; if there is some kind of existence in another, yet to be discovered dimension, I would like that; if, however, we do cease to exist then it is oblivion and we will not be aware of our non-existence. Was it Mark Twain who said, “I was dead for millions of years before I was born and suffered not the least inconveninece”?
However, one thing I have to say is that, even if the unthinkable were true and we DO survive conscious death, this still has NOTHING to do with the existance of a God and a need for worship it!
Subservient belief in a deity is as far removed from individual consciousness in any form of existance as can be.
If I “woke up dead” I would still be an atheist! If I was confronted by a demanding God I would take issue with it and risk its wrath.
Religion and the remote possibilities of metaphysics are not entwined at all.
Can open, worms everywhere………
Terri, I agree that God and the afterlife are separate beliefs that don’t have to be entwined. If anything, the afterlife is the more fundamental of the two beliefs – if there is no afterlife is anyone going to care whether there is a God or not?
I’ve never had a crisis, but I had a lot of existential angst that’s taken me years to work my way through. I think eventually I just learnt to accept the world as it is (however it is), since whether I like it or not changes nothing.
Rejecting the notion of self may have helped “me” too, though to be honest “I” don’t think “I” have fully. But it is an alternative to accepting death or believing in an afterlife – if the self never existed in the first place then there is no need to worry about it ceasing to exist upon death.
Yes. I agree. I have actually found that, since accepting that life ends at death, I have more repsect for this life and my time in it. There was always a feeling of, “well if I screw up this time there’s always next time”. Now I feel this is IT, I feel I want to savour every moment. No one is watching me and it’s down to me to get it right. It’s quite empowering as long as you don’t have an overwhelming need to be remembered particularly.
Terri has articulated so well the reasons people hang on to their faiths against all reason. I see it in my parents (in their 80s) who have doubts about god yet fear the realities of the finality of death; I see it in my sister (in her 50s) who bears her epilepsy in the belief that god had a divine purpose in giving it to her. I see it in friends who behave as if this life is a rehearsal for the next. I know that they sometimes doubt their faith, but they fear the reality of no god to direct, forgive and save them, and no afterlife to make up for their wasted time even more. Mine was a gradual realisation that there was no god, although the final leap came in a flash of inspiration one spring day 15 years ago. For me, the world suddenly became more beautiful, life more precious, emotional burdens lighter, and friendships more important. I accept I will die and cease to exist forever. I don’t like it but not liking it doesn’t change it’s inevitability; however, it makes me appreciate even more the time I have and the people I share my life with.
The world was just as beautiful, my life just as precious and my friends just as important when
I was a Christian – why not? I do not see that Christianity is to be blamed for a negative attitude to
the world, it is the person’s negative outlook that is at fault here.
Ginger Nicol: no one here has said Christianity is to be blamed for a negative world; what we are re-iterating is the fact that one can find pupose and meaning to ones life without Religion or a need for a deity.
Many people find their purpose through their faith, hooraye for them; that’s the whole point of my article….when you no longer have that faith, you still want a purpose or a meaning in your life. Some people cannot manage without faith so they hang on to it and I can understand that.
Very moving article. Sorry, that Im not adding to the discussion, but it seems that last post was in July anyway