I remember the exact moment it happened. The moment I realized that I believe there is no God. It is a moment in time I can pinpoint exactly - but it is also a long story that ironically, starts with conception.
My mother was 25, unmarried and catholic when she became pregnant with me. My mother is not a hypocrite. She did not think premarital sex was wrong. She did not think she had done anything wrong. So, she never, ever said she had done anything wrong. She did not want me to believe I was wrong, so she never let anyone say anything of the sort in front of me either. So, from the beginning, I was to view Catholicism as having rules that it is okay to break in some cases. Birth control - no problem. Premarital sex - fine as long as you love the person. It was more important to be nice to people and not hurt others. Hell? Well, it was for people who did really bad things.
So things were all well and good until I had to start participating in a real way. My biggest problem: Confession. I was a very good kid. Really. I'm not making this up. My mom says so. In any case, confession was a problem. What had I done wrong? I was an only child, so fights with siblings were a no go. I pretty much did what I was told. To come up with something to confess, I'd have to exaggerate things. Things like "I got mad at my mom when she said I could not...." This puzzled me though - doesn't everyone get mad sometimes? And I wasn't really all that mad. I needed something to confess, however, so I had to go with it. A few words, three Hail Marys and I was good to go. But I didn't really feel good. If I could have confessed to exaggerating in confession, something I actually did feel bad about, perhaps I would have been forgiven and felt better. In any case, my six year old brain had trouble with the whole idea.
I also had a lot of trouble with the stories in the bible. God asking people to sacrifice their children to him? Men having children with their servants just because their wives had fertility issues? Do the servants have a say in this? A god who wants to be worshiped? Isn't such a god suffering from pride, one of the seven deadly sins? Original sin? That doesn't seem very fair. Why is knowledge a bad thing, anyway? Such questions plagued me. Nothing made any sense.
We moved around a lot when I was younger and eventually, my mom fell out of the habit of going to church. My stepfather wasn't crazy about the Catholic church for various reasons, and we never were in one place long enough to become part of a congregation. My dissatisfaction with Catholicism and what I perceived to be inconsistencies in religion in general continued. Eventually, I figured I was a deist. Like Thomas Jefferson. Or perhaps agnostic.
I went to Catholic church once during the first few weeks in college. I'm not really sure why. I was curious. I left early, finding the experience - once so familiar - alien. I settled on agnostic. I was uncomfortable when people suggested I was an atheist. I was uncomfortable when my mother lamented that she had "let me down" by never arranging to have me confirmed in the Catholic church. I was uncomfortable when no one understood what agnostic meant. Sometimes I still called myself a deist. I was uncomfortable that no one knew what that was either.
I went to a college that focused on science, math and engineering. However, I took a lot of classics courses to meet humanities distribution requirements. In one of my classics courses, some questions came up regarding the plethora of minor spirits - nereids, niaids, dryads, oreads, etc. - basically the various types of nymphs and similar entities in Greek Mythology. "You have to understand," said my professor, with considerable passion "to them, everything was engodded." He meant this in the paganistic sense, of course, and it stuck with me for some time. I returned to it often, as this idea is fairly central to understanding many classical myths and stories.
Sometime later, while still in college, I was off somewhere standing near the top of a hill. The sun was shining and from where I stood, I could see trees, bushes and grass. Birds and a few insects were flying around. It was not an incredible view, just an ordinary, yet pleasant one. At that very moment, the ideas we discussed when studying mythology came back to me. And I saw it. I absolutely saw the trees and the grass and everything as engodded. Or, at the very least, I understood how a people could come to such a belief. And at that precise moment, when the paganism of ancient Greece made perfectly clear sense to me, and I may have even believed it for a moment, all religions became myth.
There was no turning back - something had fundamentally changed. I felt the loss of the belief system tied to me by my upbringing, but the loss seemed natural and inevitable, and I did not mourn. I was relieved. There were no more inconsistencies to ponder, no more problems defining who I was or what I believed. My former views were like remnants of dreams - those shadowy memories that float away as consciousness returns. I've come to realize that what I lost at that moment was not a belief in god, just my belief that I believed.
