Atheism in America

I had a startling revelation yesterday that I thought I'd share before my brain clouded over with the stress of exam week.

When I studied in southeast England, I learned that atheism was a-okay. Uni kids didn't form huge religious clubs or outreach programs, nobody ever passed out bibles on streetcorners--even in Canterbury--and I was never harassed into any pro/anti-theistic debate because not only did very few people take the concept of an oversoul seriously, but nobody cared either way. The country was not theistic or atheistic, it was apathetic. How wonderful.

If you look at the CIA Factfile on the UK and scroll down to "Religion" you get this spread:

Christian (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) 71.6%, Muslim 2.7%, Hindu 1%, other 1.6%, unspecified or none 23.1% (2001 census) (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/uk.html)

So, when filling out censuses, about 75% of people do claim some sort of church affiliation. But when you watch the news over there, at least once a week an archbishop or other religious head will be on, complaining that there is a national deficit of churchgoing types. (I'd imagine they try to get on the news whenever they have two weeks or more when nobody shows) Moreover, you have to pay to get into the really neat historic churches around there simply because the people who run it are fully aware that nobody is seriously going in to pray. They just want to wander around and look at the neat architecture. I think most of them are free on Sunday mornings, but then you have to sit and listen. What it looks like, then, is that people still go through the motions of baptizing their children and claiming some sort of belief structure just for simplicity's sake--so that when they have to fill out surveys and censuses they don't have to write "hmm, never thought about it, really" and try and figure out what school of thought they fall into.

That's what British Atheism is, though! It is not a conscious rejection of theology or an inner philosophical debate between the two major schools of thought...British folks just don't care. They're not bothered by it either way and so contentedly live their secular lives--they work, they love, they play, they grieve--without being encumbered the psychological onus that is religion.

I can't do that, unfortunately. I was raised in the American southeast where if you're not Christian, your family gets angry with you and your friends try to change you. (This hasn't happened much since i got into university but middle and high schools were quite another matter.) I went to church for about four years in middle and high schools--a very tiny Presbyterian Church of America run by a fanatic who was so terrified that his attractive teenage daughter would get knocked up that he wanted everybody in the church under age 18 to come to the front and sign a Prayer of Purity, vowing before God, the congregation, and most of all, himself, that they would abstain from sex until marriage--but was never quite able to accept what i was taught there. There were too many inconsistencies. Too many places where it was written in Hawly Scripture that women were inferior to men. Places where it said that the only way to Heaven was through Jesus H. Christ, and everyone believing in other religions was, well, fucked. Particularly people who knew about Jesus but didn't believe he was the son of god (you know, that tiny corner of humanity who reads the Qu'ran or the Torah) as decreed in the year 325 by Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea. By the time i was 16 I'd pretty much figured out that religion was a means by which men could justify some bizarre penis=power sentiment and Americans could uphold prejudice. I opted to go off on my own to discover what it was I truly believed, as an intelligent and interested young American female.

I didn't find anything. Admittedly, i didn't look very hard, but after about a week of fretting i realized that pretty much all religions were simply variations of one another and i stopped looking.

So i tried out Agnosticism. I reasoned that I didn't know where the universe came from, and moreover I would never know, and neither would anyone else. I judged that I didn't know where i'd go when i died, and neither did anyone else, so the question was moot. Easy. Rock on. But conflict arose when i tried to get any sleep with this mindset. I gave my brain the seed "i don't know, i will never know, who cares?" and it took it as a challenge. Damn brain. I couldn't actively believe or disbelieve--i was stuck in the middle, as is the principle of Agnosticism--so i mulled over it, constantly coming back to this argument, and i quote:

"God created the universe." "But who created God?" "Nobody created God, God is eternal." "Eternal?" "Yes, god has no beginning or end. God simply is." "But dude, if God has no beginning, then god never started to exist. Thus god doesn't." "But eternity doesn't work like that. That's the point of it--it is relentless and always has been." "Eternity, and indeed time, are manifestations of mankind. If there is no one around to record the passage of time, does it pass?" "But we age. rocks erode. We can see the passage of time." "Circle of life, yo--matter cannot be created or destroyed. It simply changes state. Matter may walk and talk and read Emerson but it can also collect sediments at the bottom of the ocean out of clamshells which form into islands. Matter on earth is constantly changing forms, so it is impossible to judge the age of the universe based on how much it has decomposed--it will always be recomposing." "Hence eternity." "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "oh shut up."

etc. Needless to say, i spent my first year of university both exhausted from losing sleep over this and smug from feeling smarter and deeper than everyone around me. I was on the brink of something, i was sure of it! But eventually i realized that i'd thought myself into a corner and had to acknowledge defeat. I couldn't draw any conclusive conclusions. So i did the next best thing. I got depressive and bitchy. Then i went to England and got my answer.

The reason I was bogged down by theology was because i was living in a theistic world! When I got away from it, i didn't care! I could live and let live and eat and drink and revel in how nice and secular the world coul..d...FUCK i'm back in America.