By WAYNE TOMSETT
Updated: Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:01:41 UTC

I used to be a Catholic. In fact, more than this, I attended a Catholic primary school, and then a Catholic middle school and, to complete the holy trinity, a Catholic secondary school – followed all the way through to 6th form (all tax-exempt institutions, I might add, and could bang on about for another thousand words, but I’ll leave the separation of church and state to another post). Yet despite this, I am now a proud atheist, skeptic, and keen physics and astronomy enthusiast. Also, you will be pleased/surprised to learn my arse remains unmolested, which in light of the relatively recent and widespread child rape atrocities surrounding the Catholic Church, makes me one of the ‘lucky’ ones. Woo hoo.

I was raised in what was a normal Christian family, with married parents, and two brothers. I count myself very lucky in one key aspect of my atypical Christian upbringing, in that my parents never forced religion on me, and never compelled me to do anything I didn’t want to do regarding faith. This in spite of being enrolled in a multitude of Catholic educational institutions, and I somewhat doubt this is a privilege afforded to most children born and locked in to faith.

From a very young age I was taught by Catholic teachers, nuns and devout peers and fellow students. As you might expect, I was a staunch believer in God, Catholicism and other such spiritual woo, and being constantly drenched in faith every day, 6 hours a day from age 5 to 18, did nothing but affirm my belief in a deity. I’d propose that if you institutionalised any belief in this way, even one entrenched in the ludicrous yet hilarious teachings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I have no doubt whatsoever that it would breed an unshakable false conviction in it.

A note on some of my teachers. To be fair to them, I came out of school with a respectable secondary education consisting of five Bs & four Cs (ever the crammer, lazy reviser and thus inevitable underachiever), and all were perfectly pleasant people inasmuch as teachers can be pleasant, in spite of their delusions. However, the RE teacher was an actual Catholic creationist who taught and also believed in the stories of creation, and indeed the horrific, nightmarish atrocities of the Pentateuch. If I hadn't been so enveloped in the religion of my school I might have challenged him on some of the blatant idiocy encased in those myths, but come to think of it, no one ever did. Shock, horror.

Eventually I left, and then did what many rebellious, disillusioned teens do. I bummed around in various shitty jobs before starting college and doing a Diploma in music (which I proceeded to complete with distinction, I might add ... not in anyway related to having my education untainted by dogma) and it was during this 4 year period, which was the only period of my life up to that point that hadn't been influenced in some way by religion, that I eventually broke away from it, and more than this, from any and all belief in any sort of supernatural or spiritual woo. This period of unmitigated freedom of thought was when I developed my interests in music, physics, astronomy and cosmology, and began to truly question my faith.

I wasn’t gripped by the devil of atheism, as if you’d be so stupid as to believe such woo. Nor did I have an epiphany. All that happened felt natural, as the more I learned about the universe from a scientific perspective, the more I questioned every reason for believing in God and gradually discarded every single one as I improved my knowledge base and discovered the proper explanations for the phenomena of the universe. The man writing for you today is a very different beast from the one of school-going age, and one who is happier, more well-rounded intellectually, and all the better for it.

What was most striking to me was that I didn’t miss faith, or God, or spirituality, or concepts of the soul. Nor did I fear some sort of divine retribution from the unfathomably possessive and jealous God. I guess he must have been too busy killing untold thousands of babies with the church’s teachings that condoms spread AIDS - ensuring that the disease continues to thrive through Africa. Or maybe he was helping out those lovely American fundamentalists who picket the funerals of deceased soldiers, calling them fags and praising God for natural disasters like the tsunamis that killed thousands in Japan and India as a punishment for homosexuality. Or perhaps, just perhaps, he is just absent.

Good thing too, considering the Bible is detailed enough to consider every position bar face-to-face sex as sodomy and therefore sin. I’d hate to think I took up any of his precious time as he monitored me going at it doggy style, or indeed, reverse cowgirl, and slowly shaking his head in disapproval.

All of my prior beliefs in the majesty of my deity were replaced by the overwhelming sense of sheer wonder at human achievement, at the endless complexity of the natural world, of the cosmos, evolution, and quantum physics. The way a piece of music can move a man to tears without the need for some spiritual intervention. The awe this inspired put my delusions to shame. I felt intellectually free, and “came out” as an atheist at around age 20, and I’ve never been better.

I would ask all believers of all creeds to take a step forward, and then to look behind you at what you believe in from a position of knowing, of knowledge. When you do, as I did, you soon see how foolish you have been. If this sounds unsympathetic then I am not sorry. You should be brave enough to read books that challenge your beliefs, and you should want to learn about the universe, about evolution and about the natural order without copping out and dismissing facts in favour of your faith-based preconceptions. If all believers were willing to take this step forward, we would be truly free.

Free from the fear of a jealous, nightmarish god, that we feel obliged praise daily, weekly, and on special occasions because he bumbled his way in to wasting millions of years of evolution, allowing 99.9% of all species to have walked the earth to go extinct, just so mankind could be born to sin with dodgy knees and over large frontal lobes.

Free to help our fellow man purely because our time spent conscious is brief, instead of doing it to curry favour with some celestial gate keeper. Free to love whomever we please without judgement. Free to question the world, question authority and learn more about the cosmos without the nagging feeling that our growing knowledge is somehow wrong as it conflicts with the teachings of some lunatic ancient goat herders.

Belief in God is the easy answer; it is nothing more than a crutch for comfort. It is infinitely more challenging, and infinitely more rewarding, discovering the secrets and unravelling the mysteries of life and the cosmos for yourself, and living without an invisible friend to back you up and bail you out when things get complicated.

TAGGED: ATHEISM