Discussing religion is always dangerous and filled with risks but as they say “fools rush in where angels dare to tread.” At the risk of appearing trite, I will begin at the beginning. I was born with a mental state that has been described as tabula rosa (blank slate). I have since modified this view and now believe that the human brain comes with pre-wired tendencies. For more on this subject please read Genome by Matt Ridley. At any rate, considering the human mind at birth (or even at conception) as a blank slate ready to record all life experiences is sufficient for my purposes here.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my parents for sparing me from what Richard Dawkins calls child abuse, i.e., religious indoctrination. I cannot recall my parents ever mentioning the subject of religion. If they were philosophical thinkers, they did not share their epistemological conclusions with me. I was left happily to my own devices to discover my own inner world.
Of course no man or child is an island. I grew up in a small southern town where the water was filled with fluoride and the air with racism and Baptist dogma. They were everywhere and I thought that everyone in the world was Baptist until my older sister proved to be more than the public school system could handle and was dispatched to a private Catholic school. At about the same time I discovered my uncle was Jewish and my religious world was “complete.”
At public school most of my pals were Baptists and it was under their influence (and their parents) that I was recruited into attending Sunday school and church services. I was not much moved by the experience and was bored by the entire matter and began to look for any excuse to duck out on it. Of course, they did not give me up easily and dispatched church deacons and fellow students who had a way of making me feel guilty about my erratic attendance and questionable devotion to their religious views.
By the time I was a teenager my interest and enthusiasm was almost nil and probably would have died completely if I had not started dating a very pretty girl a fellow classmate from my high school. At the time I thought that church attendance was noblesse oblige and it was a major faux pas not to conform. I incorrectly assumed that my girl friend felt the same way. Today even after fifty-six years, she still rightfully blames me for getting her involved with the Baptists.
Once a year our Baptist Church brought in a visiting evangelist whose job was to inject enthusiasm and fear into those who might be wavering in their faith and to build up the church membership rolls. These charismatic performers and master manipulators vacillated between waxing poetic about the love of God and the threat of eternal damnation. They claimed that every time the holy spirit knocks on your heart and you reject the invitation to accept Christ, your heart turns a little harder until eventually it turns to stone at which point you would be lost forever without any chance for salvation. It was during one of these emotional sessions while the choir sang Will You Be Ready?, we went forward and accepted Christ and after being baptized became Baptists.
Around this same time my cousin was invited by one of her school friends to attend Sunday school and services at a local Congregationalist Church. Sometime later she decided to be baptized and become a member. The Congregationalists had higher ethical standards than the Baptists and required parental approval. Her father thought that she should defer important decisions like this until she was older and more mature and refused to give his permission. Years later while in graduate school she converted to Catholicism and married a Catholic. Today she is the mother of nine children and divorced.
After I enlisted in the Air Force, I discovered one benefit of being a Baptist when as part of my duties as an administrative clerk I had the duty of collecting biographical data from newly arriving airman at the base including their religious “preferences.” Things seem to be going well until the base chaplain who happened to be a Baptist called me to complain that he was meeting a number of Baptists who were actually Presbyterians or Episcopalians. It turned out that many Presbyterians and Episcopalians did not know how to spell their religion and simply wrote “Baptist” for their religious preference.
I remained a nominal Baptist until the Air Force sent me back to college to complete my undergraduate degree. It was there at age twenty-four that I discovered and read Ayn Rand and Bertram Russell and became an atheist. I wrote a letter to the Southern Baptist Convention tendering my resignation and found out you cannot resign. I was informed that the only way I could be removed from the Baptist rolls was to join another religion. Today I consider myself a “cured” Baptist.
Joining the Baptist Church was the most embarrassing thing that I ever did. In my defense I would like to reference the fact that the part of human brain responsible for critical thinking is not fully formed until around the age of twenty-five. Recently the president of the Southern Baptist Convention issued a declaration that wives should submit to their husbands on all matters of faith and family. Perhaps bronze-age thinking such as this prompted Kinky Friedman (one-time candidate for Governor of Texas) to remark that the problem with Baptists is they don’t hold them under water long enough.
According to Wikipedia in 2002, there were more than thirty-three million Baptists in North America of which sixteen million are Southern Baptist. Due to their literal interpretation of the Bible they are anti-science and very conservative. They deny evolution and global warming. They oppose guy rights and women’s rights and tend to hold racist views. Their history includes support for slavery and segregation of the schools. They also supported miscegenation laws and were anti-immigration.
The Baptists are the most vocal in their condemnation of other religions and their teachings’ especially Catholicism. It was not unusual to find Baptists in the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan and some even served as the Grand Wizard. Their fundamentalist views has led many to describe them as well as the other evangelicals as the American Taliban. Baptist have among their ranks people such as Fred Phelps, Pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas who makes a practice of disrupting funerals of our fallen military heroes carrying signs declaring, “God hates Fags.”
I continued as a self-proclaimed atheist for many years until I embarked on a self-discovery program of reading, thinking, and writing as a way of clarifying my positions. I read books on theology, religion, physics, biology, and psychology. I found that I could not reconcile atheism with science. I learned that is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God. Atheists and theists are both willing to accept their position without any proof or evidence instead relying on appeals to authority and/or faith. Mark Twain defined faith as believing in things that you know are not true.
My conclusion is deism is the only position that I can reconcile with the sum total of my education (formal and informal) and experiences. Deism allows for the possibility that a supernatural force set in motion a process that created the universe and everything in it but is not involved in the day-to-day operations except through the application of the laws of physics. The “God” of deism does not monitor our behavior, perform miracles, answer prayers, provide for our salvation or modify the laws of nature in our favor.
Related Blog: Why Religion?
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