My Atheism (Part II)

Continuing on from yesterday's post:

After my high school, undergrad, and master's studies years came my time in The Netherlands, which turned out to be a sort of curveball in my relationship with faith. Looking back, I now view my time in the NL as a period of personal maturation as it concerns some more serious matters, including financial responsibility, politics, and most-relevantly (although somewhat circuitously), my beliefs. Whereas my graduate school years were more a time of exploring my new-found freedom, Holland was where I got serious about it.

The funny thing about Holland though was that it was here that I actually managed to get a bit religious again: I started having religious discussions with friends, going to church, and even reading a few Christian books. I think this arose from being in a new environment where religion wasn't assumed and where practicing religion was therefore more of a personal choice than an social expectation. (Also, it certainly didn't hurt that there were so many beautiful Catholic cathedrals around to help inspire some spiritual sentiments). To be clear though, during this quasi-religious period I still only believed in the Christian god in the figurative sense: I thought he was out there but that the Bible was essentially fabricated and flawed (a strange combination of beliefs, I suppose).

But then I returned home. I don't know what exactly changed, but by the time I had visited Dave in Bloomington only a few weeks in, I had decided I was an atheist. It happened at Dave's place actually, but Dave wasn't involved: having my computer with me, I whiled away a few free moments late at night by looking up video interviews of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on YouTube, and by the time I was driving back home the next day (having plenty of time to think on my eight-hour drive), I had come to the realization that I was in fact an atheist who had just been holding onto a few strands of religion, possibly for comfort's sake.

This realization was both liberating and a little frightening, as I wasn't sure what implications this would have for my life, particularly with my generally-religious family, but I pushed forward anyway, reading books by the two men mentioned above, watching numerous video clips on the subjects of reason and humanism, talking to people about my beliefs (and theirs), and doing lots of thinking along the way.

The way I see it, there is about as much chance of the Christian god being out there as there is for Zeus or Apollo, and I'm okay with that. The only thing I really miss about religion is the opportunity to go to a place where people all share your views (i.e. an atheist church), but this is a small price to pay for spiritual liberation. To be fair though, I guess it's only right to leave some room open for the possibility (small as it is) that I'll find some sort of spirituality later in life, as no one can ever be sure of these things, but for the foreseeable future, I'm sure I'll continue to feel that the only satisfaction I'll ever need by believing in a higher-order will be found in the evolutionary wonder that we are as humans.