Growing up in pre-2000’s, pre-household internet England, I, like most others, was indoctrinated into a very rigid Christian framework of interpretation. Although my family didn’t place much emphasis on religion and weren’t ‘a family of faith,’ the school system had us praying, singing hymns, praising the Christian God and all the rest of it.
Throughout those years, there were many times when the adults around me would say things about the world (and my place in it) that didn’t seem quite right. Being a kid without much information to work with, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, but I got this creeping suspicion that there was something wrong with what I was being told. There were a few incidents like this, and they were a thorn in my side and accumulated over the years to come.
They were cracks in the worldview that had been given to me, and later on in life served as the basis not only to begin to reject it, but also a need to discover the truth.
When I got to my teenage years, three things happened that led to a rejection of most of the beliefs that I’d been indoctrinated into: 1 — I started to discover my rebellious tendencies, 2 — we got the internet at home, and 3 — I started yearning for alternative concepts to fill the gaps of that which I was beginning to reject.
This led me to Atheism, and its appeal was largely its hard-hitting rejection of Christianity and its basis in telling simple, earthly truths. What I mean by that is that it seemed to offer natural explanations of things, as opposed to the traditional religions which relied more on supernatural, mythological explanations of things.
Atheism seemed up to date, whereas Christianity struck me as monolithic remnants of a world that I could not recognise around me. It simply was not relatable, and the people in the Christian stories seemed to live in an entirely different world to our own. Their stories were closer to the stories of Santa Claus and The Toothfairy than actual explanations of how the world works and how to live in it, which is part of what I was beginning to yearn for. I took it as a point of growing up to shed the childhood myths and legends and to seek natural, functional insights about the world around me.
That’s when I embraced Atheism, because, on first glance, it appeared to be the simple, practical alternative worldview that I was looking for. On top of that, it wasn’t taught in any Religious Education class, which gave it the appeal of something that had been deliberately hidden from me in the exact place I should have learned about it.
In turn, this appealed to my rebellious tendencies; a coherent, no-nonsense, hard-hitting rejection of a lot of the things I was led to believe were truths that I had to accept, or else…
It was “Religion” as a whole that I felt I was completely done with — not just Christianity.
Unfortunately, in my not-so-nuanced teenage perspective, my concept of Religion also encapsulated philosophy and spirituality. So, while I began my journey of rejection of the traditional institutions, it took many years for me to realise that my worldview was still lacking in many ways.
What I was doing was dealing in concepts, behaviours, attitudes, opinions, and I was determined to get very good at it.
But even within Atheism, due to my rejection of Religion and everything else I thought that encompassed, I was finding myself more and more at odds with a lot of the philosophical, spiritual aspects of it.
On top of that, I was learning not to like the attitudes of a majority of the Atheists I knew and had learned from. This became a significant turning point for me because, after a while, with their smug confidence and shit-eating grins, they began to look a lot like the religious leaders and keepers of the faith that I had gone to some great lengths to reject and leave behind.
Then, through learning a thing or two about how language influences thinking, came a time when I started to see my stigma against Religion from another angle, and instead had my focus shifted towards religiousness in general.
Religiousness as a behavioural tendency, rather than Religion as an institution.
This eventually led me to realise that most of the Atheists I knew were more religious in their disbelief than most Christians in their belief. And, unfortunately, I had allowed myself to become that exact same way.
Cue a newfound burning interest in philosophy. The discovery of the relationship between language and thinking had broadened my focus, and I realised I could take active interests in a lot more than simply what to think, but also how to think and, perhaps more importantly, how to learn.
“What is the first business of those who practice philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit, for it is impossible to learn that which one thinks they already know.” — Epictetus
One of the dilemmas I faced as an emerging ex-atheist, which eventually helped knock me out of my disbelief-oriented prison, was quite a simple one; if I were being honest with myself, I would have to admit my own religiousness. That could also be referred to as my faith.
That’s the faith I had behind my disbelief in god, or when I used to logically deduce, “I don’t believe god doesn’t exist. I -know- god doesn’t exist.”
Religious people tend to follow a similar kind of logic, albeit with different claims to back it up.
It took some time to accept it, but I eventually had to come to terms with the fact that I was religious in my disbelief. At the time, I’d probably try telling you that I didn’t have faith; only confidence in evidence and reason, but whether or not that was true is actually irrelevant — I was still abusing my capacity to reason, reducing it to religiousness just as every other believer and disbeliever.
Another dilemma I experienced was pretty much a spiralling outgrowth of the first, set ablaze by the words from Epictetus that I quoted a few paragraphs back and reinforced by words from a few others. Their influence on me couldn’t be ignored, and evidence of that is now scattered throughout a lot of the writings I’ve posted here.
The map is not the territory. — Alfred Korzybski
Most of our so-called research and reasoning consists merely of finding arguments to go on believing as we already do. — James Harvey Robinson
Empiricists think they believe only what they see, but, more often than not, they are better at believing than they are at seeing. — George Santayana
The greatest enemy of truth is not the lie, but the belief that you’ve already found it. — Don’t know
All of this and more culminated in a strong suspicion that belief and disbelief would never be enough, no matter how I masked it, and that was after falling for the same old traps for the first twenty or-so years of my life, bouncing from one belief system to another in search for insight and wisdom about all kinds of matters.
I was beginning to understand that the mechanism of thinking itself had inherent flaws, and not only was it not a shortcut to truth, but it was highly likely an inadequate tool for encapsulating the nature of reality, which is what I was trying to use it for.
How could I observe the philosophical insights that I had learned from others, and a few that I was beginning to discover for myself, and apply them to my life while still calling myself Atheist? Or while I had any belief-oriented dog in the fight?
I couldn’t. It’s not possible. It would take either ignorance or cognitive dissonance to overlook these insights in favour of a (dis)belief-oriented mindset, and that struck me as only being useful for matters of identity, ego, community, comfort, habit, etc.
I eventually accepted that this goes for all belief systems, as the subjects of these belief systems usually aren’t matters of imagination or logic alone — they are matters of fact. There either is a god or there isn’t. Aliens either exist, or they don’t. Sticking stickers with emotive words written on them onto glasses of water will actually change the molecular structure of that water according to the word written on it, or it won’t.
On top of all that, believing the notion that perception creates reality, as some have suggested, and being reduced to calling it “My Truth” will never be enough to make it real.
Realising the Stoic insight of Epictetus, any belief or disbelief would only obstruct my view and openness to the potential truth. If I’m going to explore a subject at all, it’s not practical to do it with an angle.
Personally, I find life much more interesting that way anyway. No longer seeking affirmation, my curiosities and questioning lead me all over the world and all throughout history and different cultures. It had been that way during those first twenty or-so years of my life at times when I sought real education and information, which happened a fair bit until I fell into some belief-trap or another.
So, while I eventually had to abandon Atheism, it wasn’t in favour of faith. I didn’t choose belief over disbelief. After all, the way I see it, there is very little difference between the two.
The point was to transcend the realm of belief entirely in favour of something that runs deeper and closer to the core, and to discover a new language of thinking that no longer hinges on faith. A crucial part of this is no longer asking faith-based questions. After all, if it weren’t for what others had tried to have me believe, I would never have asked myself “does god exist?” in the first place, and nothing in nature seems to lead me to that point.
And, as part of a broader philosophical discipline, I refuse to fill the gaps of my not-knowing with some half-assed belief or opinion about it. This tendency gives rise to far too many counter-productive concepts, emotionally-charged ideas, and religiousness as a whole.
I’ll end this one here, but I have written a 7-part series in summary of what I call the “Believe and Disbelieve Nothing” philosophical discipline.
Click here to check that out. It’s only a summary for now, but there’s a book on the way, and a few pages of notes that I’ll post here eventually.
Thanks for reading.
