The nature of the Infidel: an introduction

[Note: This was my self-intro posting at Mad Mike's America two weeks ago. I decided to put it up here too.]

In a soci­ety where reli­gion is per­va­sive and taken for granted, we unbe­liev­ers must always be con­sid­er­ing how to deal with its influ­ence, espe­cially when “holy” days roll around (the recent Easter post Zom­bieaster is a good exam­ple on MMA). Per­sonal “decon­ver­sion” (escape from reli­gion) sto­ries are a sta­ple of the athe­ist blo­gos­phere, and some who were raised with a reli­gion but aban­doned it still find them­selves nagged by "spiritual" questions.

My his­tory is dif­fer­ent. I grew up com­pletely with­out reli­gion, and so I have a rather dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on it.

I was born in the US, but my par­ents had immi­grated here from Britain in the 1950s. It’s hard to con­vey to Amer­i­cans what a non-issue reli­gion is in main­stream soci­ety in Britain. Many (per­haps most) peo­ple would, if you asked them, self-identify as “Chris­t­ian” in some very vague way, with­out actu­ally believ­ing in any­thing much. Fer­vent reli­gious belief is (out­side the small Mus­lim minor­ity) very rare, and mis­trusted. The word “Chris­t­ian” con­tin­ues by cul­tural inertia, almost devoid of sub­stance. My par­ents, as far as I know, never self-identified as “Chris­t­ian” to even that extent, but the word was all that was left to renounce.

That’s what I grew up with. I was not taught to reject reli­gion; as far as I can recall, the sub­ject never even came up. I was given a kid’s book of Bible sto­ries (I still have it some­where), but it was just one of the many sto­ry­books I had. As a teenager I became inter­ested in his­tory, and of course that included the influ­ence of reli­gion, but that’s all it ever was to me — a fea­ture of cultural anthropology.

To me, the sto­ries of Jesus and Jeho­vah stand on exactly the same foot­ing as the sto­ries of Zeus, Thor, Aton-Ra, Vishnu, Peter Pan, or Harry Pot­ter. They are just sto­ries which have influ­enced human cul­ture in var­i­ous ways; it does not occur to me to won­der if there are “truths” in some sense to be found in them. I do not believe humans have souls; I do not believe in anything “spir­i­tual” what­so­ever; there is no “God-shaped hole”. On the question of how human free will and con­scious­ness can be rec­on­ciled with the laws of physics, I’m quite con­tent to say that we sim­ply don’t know — yet. Our under­stand­ing of the brain con­tin­ues to advance, and we will fig­ure it out in a cou­ple of decades, as we have fig­ured out so many other things our ancestors thought must be supernatural.

If it weren’t for the fact that the soci­ety I live in is full of resid­ual reli­gious influ­ences — from cre­ation­ism in the schools to molesta­tion in the con­fes­sion­als to inces­sant efforts to enact ancient sex­ual taboos into mod­ern civil law — I’m quite sure that con­cepts like God, souls, spir­i­tu­al­ity, etc. would never even have occurred to me.

What fills me with awe is not the fan­tasies of other humans who lived mil­len­nia ago, but the stagger­ing sweep of achieve­ment since then. Consider how much more we know, how much longer we live, how much more we have, how disease-free our lives are, how many super­sti­tions and taboos we have been lib­er­ated from, com­pared with our ances­tors of a thou­sand years ago — or even a hun­dred. My grand­mother was born before the flight of the Wright broth­ers, and she lived to see men walk on the Moon; what she would have thought of the device on which you are read­ing this post, I can barely imagine.

That is achieve­ment, the achieve­ment of human rea­son­ing power and hard work.

It inspires me because I know where we started from. We are not “fallen” from some ideal state and in need of redemp­tion. We are a bunch of hair­less mutant chim­panzees, try­ing to understand the uni­verse and running a high-tech post-industrial civ­i­liza­tion with brains which basically evolved to hunt ani­mals on the Serengeti. If you look at it that way, we’re not doing so badly.