Finding God At Lake George

I went to a rodeo last night.












It sounded like a fun thing to do considering we've pretty much done everything else there is to do in Lake George that does not cost an arm and a leg.











We even took a trip to Fort Ticonderoga where I learned how the French and English fought over a small strip of land between two fordable lakes for seven years...or was it nine? I can tell you that I walked out of there miffed at the French for having attacked the Mohawks unprovoked.






I'm a Mohawk.





Back to the rodeo. Who knew they held rodeos in New York State? I didn't, but there I was with my family sitting in the grand stand of a real rodeo, replete with horses and cattle, and guys and gals wearing chaps, ten gallon hats, and pointy leather boots. We had gone horseback riding the day before, so we figured it would be fun to see people who can actually ride and rope and do all sorts of crazy shit with live animals. The MC even did a great job of lathering up the crowd in advance of the show.



I was pumped!!!!!!






That is until he started talking about God.

It wasn't just a God-bless-these-rodeo-performers prayer, but a full-on rant about how the phrase "In God We Trust" is not on the new, one dollar gold coins now in circulation; a political diatribe on how this country was founded by God-fearing, Christian men, and that no matter what your political affiliation is, no matter who you planned to vote for this November, "our fate is still in the hands of the Almighty."

Now I'm not one to push my atheism on anyone, let alone anyone here in the blogosphere. So why would the MC feel the need to push their belief in God on me? I didn't pay $12 to hear this shit. I came to see a fucking rodeo because I had never been to a live one before. It's probably the last I'll ever go see. And yes, I'm well aware that I shouldn't take this personally because he didn't single out atheists or atheism. But I can't imagine a Muslim or Hindu getting warm and fuzzy over his speech.

No matter.....






Skippy got a bit upset with me because of my visceral reaction. I could understand why. Here was this smiling, happy-go-lucky guy now sitting up straight with pursed lips, crossed arms, tapping his foot involuntarily because he's pissed. I sat there and said nothing. I kept my mouth shut and stewed while the rest of the crowd hooted, clapped and hollered.

But I was thinking....

Does he know that words "In God We Trust" did not appear on American currency until 1864; that it did not become the nation's motto until 1956, and that the phrase did not appear on paper money until 1957?

Does he know that the phrase "under God" did not become a part of The Pledge of Allegiance until 1954; a pledge that didn't become commonly recited in public schools until the 1920s?

Does he know that The Declaration of Independence refers to God as "Nature's God", and being endowed by "their Creator with certain unalienable rights"?

Does he know that there is not one reference to God in our Constitution?

Probably not.

What's worse is that the MC went on about how the Founding Fathers intended ours to be a Christian nation. Really? If this is true, how could a score of men, who were so careful and deliberate with their language in crafting these documents, be so careless as to exclude references to the Christian God? These were educated people, some of who were accomplished authors in their own right. They knew what they meant. They left God out on purpose.

As you can see, I had lots of questions for the MC, none of which I could ask him because he sat on the other side of the arena. Nor could I ask any "true believers" near me for fear of starting a fight with my family in tow. I kept my mouth shut, which is pretty much what most atheists are relegated to doing to prevent giving or getting as ass kicking.

As for the rodeo? Meh. After the MC's God bullshit was over and done, it turned out to be kind of boring, the best part being when the female barrel riders did their thing.




I would have had a better time playing mini-golf.




At least this guy didn't try to save my soul. All he wanted was my money.

How I Became an Atheist (Part 2)

About a week after I posted the essay in Part 1, I received an encouraging comment from a blogger named Ran Selig, whose site is no longer up. But in his comments, he gave me a suggested reading list that included Sam Harris's "The End of Faith." It is still the most impassioned and well-reasoned tome on atheism I've ever read.

Since then, I've gone through several works on atheism including those of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. I've even read Spencer Wells (also an atheist) -- who wrote a "genetic" history of humankind -- to gain as much knowledge about who I am and where I came from. But these modern scientists, philosophers and writers are only reviving a secular torch that throughout the years has been carried by the likes of Thomas Paine, Robert Green Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell and Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

The title of the post below is called "Once You Start Down This Road...", which I think is still quite fitting, even now, because it has not been an easy one to walk. There have been times when I have found myself preaching this new choice, and for this, I ask forgiveness of those folks who have suffered my brand of "apologetics" these past few years.

11 October 2004

At Ran Selig's suggestion, I've begun reading "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris and I was amazed at how quickly it "comes out fighting." I'm serious, Mr. Harris gets right to the point of his book regarding the dangers of being faithful to the "untestable" notions purported as truth by all of the world's religions. As I have not completed the book, I will refrain from offering my own biased review of Mr. Harris' work, but it's a difficult book to put down.



And, yet, it's an easy book to put down for those who have not the will nor capacity to confront their own beliefs. More often than not, I find myself positioning my hand so that it obscures the title of the book as I read it on the train or in the cafeteria at lunch out of fear of some religious wacko making a comment or, worse yet, making a physical threat. Such are the times that even in as liberal and "secular" a city as New York, one can feel threatened by the mere reading of a book. But "The End of Faith" is no ordinary book and I feel it will take an extraordinary amount of courage on my part to continue reading it.



I admit it. I'm somewhat of a coward. Always have been. I'd more than likely keep my mouth shut than confront a bully -- be it a physical or intellectual one. I'd rather hunker down and let the storm die down than stand up to it. I wish I weren't like that, but I'm like most people of modest means -- you really can't change the size of your cock. I've learned to live with my shortcomings (or is that "short-cummings"?? ha ha) and fight only those battles worth fighting. I fear that Mr. Harris' book will be my new "field of battle."



As the title of my post states, once you start down the road of reason, you cannot return to being blindly faithful. There is no doubt in my mind that I will lose the company of some friends and, even, family members for holding onto this "faithless" position, yet, I'm determined to see this through. I give a great deal of credit to my wife for allowing me to express my point of view to her. On more than one occasion she's asked me "how do you go from being a faithful church-goer one day to being an atheist the next?" My answer to her is that the metamorphosis was not as sudden as it appears -- that my learning and life experience has led me to this point.



I assured her that I would neither interfere with nor discourage the "religious" education of our children because I feel that it's a rite of passage they must endure. As much as I want to raise my children in a house of reason, I have chosen to continue their exposure to religion because it arms them with the information they'll need to eventually discard it. Again, I have nothing but high praise for my wife on this issue because she respects my position on this matter. While she cannot fathom a life without faith, she also knows that at some point our children will eventually make their own decision on this. If nothing else, I've convinced my wife to let our children "reason" this issue out for themselves.



As for me, I'm too far down this road to turn back. It's very bumpy and difficult to manage and I have no doubt that in the coming months and years, it's bound to get even harder. It's not like I can keep this a secret. I must live and make my living in the same world as everyone else and soon enough, I will be called out on my beliefs or, in this case, the lack thereof. All I ask of my wife, my family, and my friends is that my lack of faith does not make me love them any less than I did when I was faithful; that morality and goodness are not commodities exclusive to the God they worship or religion they follow. I simply have chosen a different path, one based on knowledge and reason, and that they should take comfort in knowing that this is what makes me happy.

How I Became An Atheist (Part 1)

After writing my last post and possibly pissing off a few people in the process, I felt it necessary to explain the genesis of my atheism. Below is a post from an previous blog I used to write. Not that anyone cares, but hopefully, it provides some context to how I came discard 35 years of Roman Catholic indoctrination. I've seen moved beyond the agnosticism expressed below and I'm very comfortable with the idea that we are born, live, die and turn to dust. Anything after that is speculation without proof. But I digress.

First posted 6 October 2004:

I was raised as a Roman Catholic and to this day continue to attend regular mass with my wife and kids, out of respect for my wife's wishes to raise our children in this manner. I have no objection to this religious "training", but understand that I am no longer of that "faith".


My skepticism began when I learned that a large number of priests were found to have molested children in their care. The Church, in trying to avoid the scandal, tried to cover it up by paying off the injured parties and reassigning the "accused" clergy where they sometimes were left to commit the same crime again. Yet, in nearly every mass I've been to in the last 10+ years, I've heard homily after homily spout on about the evils of abortion, secular humanism, technology, you name it. It stinks of hypocrisy that this "so-called" moral authority can damn acts contrary to their doctrine on one hand, yet offer safe haven for criminals in their midst and call it an act of salvation. I suppose it's not just a human trait to protect your own but a "divine" one as well. But my skepticism runs deeper than that.


Not long after the RC Church scandal broke wide open here in the US, I read a book titled "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond which offered a different take on world history and how we as the highest order of mammals evolved to the present day. This book does not simply espouse unsupported theories, but attempts to explain our development as humans relative to the development world at large. He offered cogent explanations on the the development of plants as food, animal use in farming, languages, trade routes, the rise of political entities and centers of power. This all begs the question: Was the Earth really created by ONE God in seven days as the Judeo-Christian scriptures state? Or is Mr. Diamond right in stating that the earth evolved over tens of thousands of years and that the relative evolution of different cultures rests largely on the ecological, biological, and geological fortunes placed before them?


Finally, what cemented my skepticism was a book titled "Galileo's Mistake" by Wade Rowland. Again, another learned piece which revisits Galileo's trial in 1633 and explodes certain myths about what really happened. But make no mistake, this book is also a defense of the Church and laments the loss of spiritualism (Christian spiritualism, that is) in modern society. While I agree with Mr. Rowland that Galileo made a political mistake in challenging the Church's beliefs (afterall, at the time, heresy was a crime that carried life-threatening consequences), where I disagree with Mr. Rowland is with his notion that we've lost something spiritual by embracing the pursuit of knowledge through science. What I find particularly troubling is that he spent so much time refuting human-kind's evolution towards logical thinking while quoting the same people who developed the model. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, all great philosophers and thinkers on whose thoughts rest the so-called Great Western Tradition relied heavily on logic to develop their views regardless of whether the topic was scientific or spiritual in nature. So I ask, was it wrong for Galileo to question the RC Church's notions of heaven and earth, given the evidence revealed to him with the telescopes he developed by accident? Was it not the logical learning embedded in the Western Tradition that made his discoveries and inventions possible? Or was it God-given and, therefore, lacking the all-knowing divine truth purported to belong solely to God? In practical terms, even if you assume that God is all-powerful and divine, why couldn't the Church reconcile it's views with Galileo's evidence instead of Galileo recanting his Copernican beliefs before the Inquisition? Could it have been God's intention to reveal this new information to Galileo, therefore making the RC Church's position wrong?


I don't portend to know the answers. I don't know who's right and who's wrong. Science or Faith? Christianity or Islam? God or no God? But I've pondered this for a long time and have come to the conclusion that my "faith" in anything must be supported by proof in the same way that all living beings are supported with energy. I simply cannot accept the notion that we simply live, die, and turn to dust as science would have it. Something sparked the energy that now gives us this consciousness we call life and I believe that this energy is inextinguishable. Likewise, I cannot blindly accept the notion that my "soul", which I believe this energy to be, is not really mine; that it is given to me by a "God" and can be taken away by a "God" lest I come to terms with this so-called authority. I am simply unable to suspend my notion of disbelief in this manner.


Let's face it, our capacity to reason as humans is limited by what we see, hear, feel and think. While it's true that people of science have revealed a great many discoveries to human-kind, many people of Godly faith have given us "revelations", made without prior knowledge or observation, that we still hold to be true. So on the question of who's universal view is right and wrong, I don't know. But I do know that I have allowed my mind to accept all forms of knowledge and reasoning, and made it my mission to reconcile that information with what I've known to be true in order to make a judgment for myself on whether to have faith in it or not. If I have taken the wrong track, if all I ever need is to have faith in God despite what I see, hear, feel and think, then I'll accept whatever consequence that follows when I die. Until then, I can only see, hear, feel and think my way through this earthly existence....