Peachy's Ramblings & Muses

“First installment: I’m going to be very careful here, because I try never to offend. However, I will defend my right to privacy, and my right to have any religious faith, or no religious faith. These are constitutional rights in this country. I can’t stop people of various religious faiths from walking down the public road in front of my house, but I can stop them from coming to my front door, or refuse to listen to them when I find out it’s not someone asking for directions. I always do it nicely, and I always let them know I’m an atheist and that nothing they can say will change that.

It’s not a matter of changing my mind, because this wasn’t a choice, it was the result of an organic process that took years to resolve. I didn’t deny my faith, or push it aside because I fancied myself some sort of intellectual. I simply lost the ability to believe in it. Or any other, for that matter. I tried long and hard to find a religion that I could believe in at 3 years sober, because I was told that I couldn’t stay sober without one.

Every religion I studied ended up requiring faith in one supreme being or another, or many supreme beings in some cases, and I finally realized that I just couldn’t wrap my head around that. I finally acknowledged that I am incapable of that kind of faith, and I developed a belief system of my own that has kept me sober for 30 years, married to and in love with the same man for 28 years next month, reasonably successful, and mostly happy for all those years. I’m kind and loving, I don’t have horns or a tail, and I have the utmost respect for the faith of other people, some of whom are people I love. Oh, and I obviously proved that person wrong, who said I couldn’t stay sober without faith in a god.

I have never, and will never try to ‘convert’ anyone to atheism. It’s actually impossible to ‘convert’ anyone to atheism, because it is not a form of faith; it is simply the absence of it. Besides, no one who truly believes in their god can be ‘converted’ by anything I say. Just like I can’t be ‘converted’ back to any religion by anything anyone else says. I’m not looking for scientific proof of the existence of god, just like I never looked for scientific proof of the non-existence of god. It’s not an intellectual exercise for me. Belief is simply something I am incapable of.

The above is not totally true. I believe that if I don’t drink, I won’t get drunk; I believe that my husband’s love for me will never change; and I believe that I will continue to age, and one day die.

There’s another reason I would never try to ‘convert’ anyone to my way of thinking. People’s faith is integral to their lives in a lot of ways, social and emotional. It comforts them in times or grief and strengthens them in times of trial. I would fight anyone who tried to convince my sister that there’s any reason in the world not to believe the way she does. Her faith sustains her, and it makes her happy. She prays for my soul, because she loves me, but she leaves me to my belief system, because what I think has nothing to do with her belief system, and is no threat to her belief system. She knows Buddy and I are atheists, but that doesn’t impact her in any way, so she simply doesn’t care, except for praying for my soul. Her faith in her lord is so strong, she is certain that her prayers will take me into heaven with her, no matter what I think or believe, so she doesn’t fear for my soul. She is protecting it. As I protect not just her right to believe what she believes, but the very basis of her faith as well. She knows that I believe in her, and that I love her faith, because it makes her happy. Besides, I, too love her lord, in my own way, because I still love Jesus and what I learned about him at church camp. She somehow “gets it” that I can love her lord without believing in her religion, and she loves me for telling her that I wish I shared her faith, while at the same time she understands and accepts that I can’t. Like I said, she doesn’t really worry about my soul, because she’s put it into her lord’s hands, and she believes that her lord is powerful enough and beneficent enough to accept my soul into heaven, and that we will all be together for eternity, along with all our dogs and cats.

In fact I envy people of faith from time to time, because that faith is comforting and explains away a lot of things that are incomprehensible to me. Like eternity, or how the space-time continuum began and whether or when it will end, or how the universe can be endless, or where god came from. I can’t comprehend even the notion of something/anything being “endless” or “eternal.” As much as I love Stephen Hawking, and as hard as I’ve studied most of his books, most of it is still beyond my mental capacity to understand. If I am that limited, how can I possibly comprehend the mysteries of the universe? To simply believe that it was all created by a Supreme Being simply doesn’t compute for me, because I always come back to the same question: Who created that Supreme Being?”