Who I am, part 3 -- the non-religious life

My two recent quasi-autobiographical posts (on why I'm not a politics blogger and my ancestry and culture) covered a lot but omitted a point which is unusual, at least for my generation -- growing up without religion.

(I dislike the word "atheist".  Any word ending in "-ist" implies some sort of belief system, and my point is that I lack any belief system in that category.  There is no inherent commonality between all people who don't have a religion, any more than there is between all people who don't believe the Earth is flat.)

It's common to run into non-religious bloggers, but most of them grew up with a religion and later left it, sometimes incurring a severe internal struggle in the process, and often by way of switching to a different religion first.  My experience was very different.  My parents immigrated from a country where religion was just not a big issue for most people, even back in the 1950s.  They were quite startled when Americans sometimes asked them questions like what church they attended (and this would have been in the New York City / Long Island area, not the deep South).  In the UK people did not bring up such things.

As I was growing up, my parents never tried to teach me religion, and I honestly didn't have any idea what it was for a long time.  I did have a child's book of Bible stories, but my parents never suggested that these were any different from the child's book of Aesop's fables which I also had.  They were just stories.  My parents never specifically avoided religion or tried to steer me away from it, either.  I can remember seeing Billy Graham on TV and suchlike.  They simply never made an issue of it one way or another.

My father had a background in science and engineering and, I think, became increasingly hostile to religion as he learned more about the history of science.  He had a special interest in the rebirth of science in the Renaissance, and how religion bitterly resisted the progress achieved by Copernicus, Galileo, and later Darwin, as well as fighting against science in countless other cases.  My mother never spontaneously showed any interest in the subject, though much later in life I think she was occasionally a little unnerved by how strongly anti-religion I became as an adult.  To her, it was simply not something people had strong feelings about.

When I went to university and started studying Middle Eastern history, of course, those gaps in my knowledge were rapidly filled in -- given the huge importance of religion in the history of that region, it was essential to understanding.  The emphasis was on Islam, the dominant religion there since the seventh century, although there was also some study of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity, all of which also originated in the Middle East and influenced it.  To this day, though, I have a more thorough understanding of Islamic theology and belief than of those of Christianity.

The idea of actually believing in any of the religions that I was studying never even occurred to me as an option.  My interest was purely anthropological, just as you could probably study ancient Odinism or Greek mythology for years and never think of "converting" to it.

As best I can remember, I have only been inside a church twice in my whole life.  When I was a student, a friend who was strongly Catholic invited me to the baptism ceremony of his new baby; later, when I visited Germany in 1984, I went inside the great Köln cathedral, purely as sightseeing.

Much later, I developed an odd feeling for several years that entering a church would be somehow contaminating, as if any structure where Christianity was practiced had a kind of miasma of evil tainting it.  Later still, I realized this was just more of the same superstition I disdained.  A building is just a building.

But the more I studied, both at the university and later, it was impossible to avoid seeing the immense harm done by religion over the centuries -- the subordination of women, the persecution of homosexuals and unbelievers, the suffocation of the great age of "Islamic science" (which was actually more of a revival of Hellenistic science under Islamic rule, but that's a whole other complex issue) by the re-assertion of strict Islam in the early twelfth century, and the long stagnation of the Middle East under Islamic dogma from the fourteenth century to modern times, just as Europe was embracing secularism and rebuilding its science and civilization.  Later, as I learned more about Greco-Roman civilization, I came to realize how Christianity had destroyed our true Western culture, taken something from us that can never be restored now.

I discovered Satanism in 1990.  Here at last was a philosophy that stood in no-compromise, no-holds-barred absolute opposition to Christianity and all its values, as opposed to the timid and mealy-mouthed stance of most of atheism at that time.  Satanism is not really a religion -- it is, as I think of it, to religion as medicine is to a disease.  It showed me that much of the poison of Christianity has soaked so deeply into our culture that even most atheists are still affected, not realizing that many of "their" values come from the religion they reject.  It is a tool for rooting out the deepest parts of the infection.

Satanism rejects the toxic concepts which are common not just to Christianity but to most religions -- the belief in some kind of higher power outside the self, the subordination of the individual to a higher purpose or plan, the whole idea that life takes its meaning from service to something outside oneself.  These, along with entirely poisonous teachings like "turn the other cheek" and "resist not evil", are obviously attitudes which masters would aspire to inculcate into their slaves, but they are antithetical to true, self-assertive freedom.

But that very rejection of external authority over the individual meant that Satanism could never be an organized movement with effective leadership, or even control who chose to identify with it.  By the early twenty-first century, the Satanist community (that isn't the right word for it, but I don't think there even is a right word) had become overrun with extreme-right politics and, to a lesser extent, infested with pedophiles -- a ludicrous inversion of its original philosophy.  At the same time, the rise of the New Atheist movement provided a new core of militant opposition to religion.  Around that time I ceased to consider myself a Satanist, though I still value the original philosophy.

My views on religion haven't changed since then, but I spend far less time thinking about it, except in terms of its strictly practical impact on the world, such as efforts to ban abortion here or the continuing subjugation of women in the Middle East.  I have an interest in pre-Christian European paganism, including practices such as Samhain and Walpurgisnacht, but purely as a connection to ancestral culture.  I'm certainly not entertaining any idea that the ancient Celtic or Germanic gods might actually exist.

To me, concepts like God, Heaven, Hell, and suchlike are in the same category as mermaids or unicorns -- it's impossible to prove absolutely that they don't exist, but the concept is so unlikely (and just plain silly) that it's not worth spending any time or mental energy on it.  I honestly have never felt any "God-shaped hole" or any such thing in my life.  If I hadn't grown up in a world where religion is an established thing, I really don't believe the very concept would ever have occurred to me.

For those interested in the modern intellectual revolt against religion, I can recommend The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, probably the most important book of the New Atheist movement, and Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an autobiography offering far more drama and extremes than mine.  These books have been inspirational to me in recent years.

[Please don't attempt defenses of religion in the comments.  A blog is not the place for debating such issues, I've already heard all the arguments many times, and I long ago lost any interest in that kind of debate anyway.  This post is for the same purpose as the earlier two -- purely informing readers about my background so they know what kind of person I am while they're reading my other posts.]