My Route To Atheism Part II

When I was about 15 My Mum & I joined the Quakers, I think she needed the support of a structure, but the great thing about Quakers is they don't dictate what your beliefs must be. Mostly they are in fact Christian, but they focus on a moral code centred around being the best person you can be & making the world a better place. They reject the introspective nature of most religions & encourage members to live their faith by going out in to the world. There exists what is known as the 'Quaker Mafia' because they really do pop up everywhere once you know to look for them. Since joining I haven't worked anywhere where there wasn't another Quaker!

I did a lot of growing up in the Quakers - they are very nurturing people, but I also grew more idealistic & continued my delusions about the world, again, being encouraged by kind & responsible adults to believe in the supernatural.

The Massive turning point for me on the route to Atheism came when a copy of 'A Brief History Of Time' found its way in to my hands. I was already very interested in nature but had always been really, really shit (like D at GSCE!) at physics. I can't even begin to describe the effect this book had on me, the wonder of actually understanding how the universe works down to the tiniest detail. To know how time can be bent by gravity, how atoms stick together, to me it was simply the most incredible thing I had ever seen. Unfortunately, as with so many religious minds, it slotted nicely in to my mindset. I actually saw all this as a way to prove my theories about the universe & energy. Quantum theory in the wrong hands simply becomes pseudo science, as bad as homeopathy, reiki, psychicness or any other crazy theory around today, but I was on a search for truth, fired up by having definite facts about the world for the first time in my life, as opposed to theories with no explanation behind them (how do we know where the chakras are?!)

As I read more & learnt about scientific method & the importance of evidence based proof, I began to exercise the logical parts of my brain that had been buried in delusion for so long. I think somewhere at the back of my mind I had known all along that everything I believed in was too good to be true. If we really could be psychic, or use telekinesis or talk to the dead then why were these things not more mainstream? Wasn't it all just a happy daydream that world peace & the enlightenment of all people was inevitable? Learning about science started off an irreversible process inside me that cut through my feelings of foolishness about believing in magic. I went through a long internal struggle, trying to make the things I was learning fit with the things I already knew. I read a book given to me by my Mum called 'The Road Less Travelled'. It's a kind of self help book (but a very good one I'd recommend it!) to do with changing our world map & accepting that in the search for truth we will encounter pain, that pain is a sign we are moving on instead of stagnating.

After this I started reading down the route of psychology, how our human brains can trick us, how people can hypnotise themselves not to feel pain, how people can speak in tongues, have religious experiences & hallucinations, all through the power of the mind the mind. I found it (& still do) incredible. All these things were far more extreme than the personal experiences I claimed proved I was right (generally a warm fuzzy feeling of 'energy'). Even the placebo effect alone could disprove a lot of what I thought I knew.

In one final attempt to cling on to what I knew was safe, I read book that has changed many lives before mine, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I'm not going to go in to its exact contents now, if you haven't read it you should, even if you're an atheist. It gives you lots of lovely, provable arguments to use against Christians! It takes every so called 'proof' of religion or the supernatural & smashes its brain out against a wall. Overnight it forced me to honestly confront myself in a flash of realisation I became a born again atheist.

It was very weird at first, seeing the world through different eyes. If you've ever been really depressed you can kind of imagine what it feels like, your perception is skewed, even when you're not consciously thinking about it. Except it's not even like that because when you're depressed you know you are. Imagine believing for your entire life that everyone is against you but pretending not to be. Your family tell you everyone is against you, people you know tell you it too. You read books about yourself saying that the conspiracy is true, you live your life with this feeling looming over you, every time someone speaks you know it's about you. Then one day, you just wake up. The world is normal, what you see is what you get, you don't have to watch your back or constantly try to second guess people. Everything just.... is. That's what it's like becoming an atheist. A massive weight just lifted off me. I was no longer delusional, the world didn't need its mind changing, everything was exactly as it seemed!

Moving on from my deconversion I felt empowered more than I ever had before to finally take practical responsibility for the world & its problems. Quakers had taught me to look outwards & help people, but there's always a part of you as a believer in the supernatural that thinks things are exactly as they are supposed to be. Since then I have felt so much more in touch, so much more able to deal with the world & its problems. I have also learnt that there is no right or wrong way to deal with things. You just have to experiment & use the evidence to decide what works. It's simple really!

My Route To Atheism Part I

Recently I've watched a couple of really interesting conversion stories (here & here)

One is from a Pentecostal the & other just a very committed Christian! I thought it would be interesting to post my own deconversion story as I come from a very different background from these two & in some ways hippy spirituality is harder to escape from because it doesn't tie you down to any rules & so in some ways seems a lot more reasonable.... anyway... here you go!

I was brought up Christian. Not particularly strictly, but we had to go to church every Sunday, me & my brothers were baptised & the church was a fairly large part of our social life. I went on a few Christian camps & conferences as a youngster & age 10 I chose to be confirmed in to the church which involved meeting up once a week with another church member & taking a course of discussions about faith & the bible. Looking back I'm pretty sure I mostly did this purely because I wanted to be part of the club. All the other kids at church were doing it & I simply didn't want to be left out. My weekly discussion meetings were with a lovely lady who gave me Ribena & chocolate so it was win win really! To be honest, at that age I didn't identify as 'Christian' really, it was more a kind of family social club. My church (URC) was pretty relaxed & no one was trying to make me feel guilty for anything.

When I was 10 my Dad left our family & moved away, & without his influence & probably because she had gone through a big upheaval in her life, my mum gradually began to drift away from the church & became involved with the Glastonbury set - a kind of DIY 'spiritual' belief born out of the hippy generation & moulded to fit modern life.

I kept going to church for a while but became increasingly influenced by my Mum's beliefs which centred around 'energy' - an invisible force in the universe of which we were made & which could be manipulated by humans to do almost anything including heal people, connect with people psychicly (including the dead) & connect to a 'higher plane' where all souls were one & knew the 'truth' about the universe. This energy could be controlled by meditation, mental discipline, ritual ceremony & by living a 'natural' life.

As I was pretty young and immature at the time, I think what really drew me to it was actually the idea of power . Think now how much people are amazed by Derren Brown & other illusionists well I thought that I could learn to do that stuff for real. I was completely enamoured & blinded by the thought that I could manipulate the laws of physics & during this time I began to sink in to a delusion that was only supported by people I trusted. For example, My mum offered me the chance to see a homeopath.

Seeing our homeopath was a great experience, she was a lovely warm lady called Andrea. We used to go to her house & we'd get to talk to her for as long as we needed about our lives, it was a form of therapy. Then at the end of the session she would prescribe remedies to us, & the amazing thing about them was they were for anything! Not just physical ills but for literally anything that was wrong with our lives, Andrea had a pill. Sometimes she would use a pendulum to help her decide, & that was something that really impressed me. You can try it yourself in fact, just get some string & attach a weight to the bottom. Now hold the end of the string in one hand & believe that you can make it swing. Concentrate fully on it, blanking out anything else in your mind. You should be able to get some pretty good movement going on it, some people I knew could make their pendulums fly round & they had really strong energy! For me, this was definite proof - how else could you have just a direct physical effect on the world. Of course it's complete rubbish, you're actually just moving your hand, just minutely enough that even you don't notice, but I wasn't interested in anything that didn't prove my world view.

So I started playing around with 'energy' & learning about the theory of it from people my Mum knew & in Glastonbury. Around this time I went on a Church summer camp where I met a boy & we developed a bit of a thing. I taught him all about energy & we would sit up all night testing our powers & playing weird psychic games. Due to a mixture of staying away from home & being in a heightened environment it all started to get a bit surreal. I was acting exactly like one of those creepy spiritual gurus, it was all very intense. I had an interest in paganism & wicca at the time as well & obviously there was a bit of sexual tension going on too, it was a very surreal week. Afterwards I found out that he'd told people in church about me & they said he wasn't to contact me again as I was clearly influenced by the devil!

As I got older though, I grew out of needing to control things quite so much & focused instead on my own spiritual growth. I learnt about chakras & the way energy is ordered & flows through us, about ways of harnessing it to achieve enlightenment. I went on courses on psychic defence, healing & many other things, picking the bits that sounded fun & ignoring the rest. Most of what I incorporated came from eastern religion, some from paganism, lots of it I simply made up (but still believed in). In that culture you are encouraged to do things your own way. You are taught that each person has their own path & however you chose to raise your energy is fine as long as you don't hurt anyone else. Looking back this seems like such a childlike world view, but I guess for a teenager looking for answers it's very comforting to think that we're all heading in the right direction, just some people are further on than others. It's a movement that sees itself as very tolerant (& in fact is compared to some denominations!) but unfortunately its tolerance is also its prejudice.

It's very hard when you're striving to ardently towards enlightenment, to look at non-spiritual folk & think patronisingly how less advanced their soul is. There's a general belief that when you're born, your soul has chosen its life in advance in order to gain the experiences it needs to be enlightened. So you look at someone in a wheelchair or a poverty stricken country & think they have chosen that life. That's not to say you don't try to help people, but you can see how the danger of prejudice & apathy is constantly there. It's equally as bad as the Christian who thinks God has punished you, or the Buddhist who thinks you have bad karma.

Surrounding all of this was a massive subculture with festivals, drugs & a generally laid back & hippy vibe going on. I immersed myself in this, & actually, this is the one aspect of it that I am genuinely thankful for. I had a bloody brilliant time hanging out with people in fields, singing & dancing, getting high & generally having a whale of a time. If there's one brilliant thing about the spiritual movement it's that they know how to have fun. Also, they do genuinely build up your self esteem, encourage you to be an individual & foster an appreciation of, & respect for, all living things.

Around the age of 15/16 I started going to Quaker Meeting, & that is what the next section is about.