Introducing myself

This blog is a kind of diary for my thoughts on issues that interest me, especially in regard to science, philosophy and religion.
My username "amomentofclarity2011" was chosen by myself to represent a sort of secular revelation on my former beliefs about god and religion that occured in January 2011. It was a true 'moment of clarity' as far as I was concerned so that was why I chose it. It was not meant as some form of putdown on anyone else. It simply refers to my experience and a reminder of when it happened.

I lived most of my life in Ireland, a country I do love and I find many Irish people's self-depreciating wit satisfying and familar. However I was raised a christian, and more specifically a catholic. Both my parents are of that faith and while neither were overly pushy towards religion, I was throughly indoctrinated by the culture as were my parents before me. They, like so many, were thought to never question the church and certainly not the doctrine. It was ok to dislike a particular priest but not baby Jesus.

As a child I accepted, with some sceptical questioning, the general theme of religion and did absolutely believe in the abrahamic god. It never dawned on me to EVER question that he existed.
I was given a comic book bible while I was 5 or 6, and had my heroes like Samson and David, and dreamed of what it must have been like waaaay back then in such a foreign land. I of course assumed they spoke modern english and that Jesus was just like in the pictures, a white 30ish man with a nice brown beard and a full head of Richard Branson styled hair.

However there were doubts even then. I did have OTHER books like the Greek myths and I also loved Hercules and was fascinated by the Gorgons and Harpies. I saw how fantastical their stories were and never believed they actually happened. However when I read Genesis I was struck by how similar in outlandishness some of the stories were. They all had characters that had special dealings with the gods or were gods made flesh or had superpowers or fought evil beings.
I began to wonder if perhaps some of the old stories were perhaps not literally true but allegorical (yes I understood that term even as a young child even if I probably never used it).

When I was introduced to science in school, along with history and geology, I certainly found it hard to credit many of the old testament tales, especially Adam and Eve and Noah. These simply could NOT be true if they had any relation to reality at all.
I still believed in miracles and many of the old testament tales, but was more sceptical than before because if this book was inspired by a God, then he seemed to have made the book with a lot of very strange tales that could not be true if taken literally. Why would God need to obscure his messages so?
So I worked on the principle that anything that COULD not be true was not literally meant to be true.
I loved the bible, loved the stories, especially of Moses and Jesus and Joseph. I did not like Abraham because of the attempt to kill his son. I understood it was a test supposedly but such a test was morally wrong regardless of the final result.
I began to feel the bible was not infallible. It was more than just needing interpretation, it needed ignoring completely in parts.

Of course I was innocent as a child and did not grasp many of the consequences of what was said in the stories. I simply assumed it was alright because it was in the bible. Yet even so I objected to Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt. I thought that seemed a bit much of a repremand for a fairly mild infraction that harmed noone.

I also objected to the idea that if my friends were not true christian (protestant for instant, remember it's Catholic Ireland), or someone had not heard of Jesus (like the starving ethiopians we saw on TV in the 70's and early 80's), they may go to hell, or at least purgatory. But what horrified me the most was Limbo. I had a vision of a grey mist, endless in all directions and tiny baby heads with tiny wings, much like you see some cherubs being depicted in christian medieval art, foating around with nothing to do, for EVER.

Now of course the church has dumped that completely, but when I was growing up it was as real to us as Heaven or Hell or Purgatory. It was a FACT of our faith. I never accepted that it was a just 'punishment' for being born and dying before baptism. I truly believed it existed, don't misunderstand me, I just did not accept that it was just or fair.

To most of my inquiries my weary and busy parents often resorted to the old "God's ways are not man's ways" or "God has a purpose for everything". But that never answered anything, it just told me that my parents didn't know anything about it either.

I also never understood why Hell needed to exist or what the Devil was supposed to get out of torturing people. The bible clearly showed the Devil to be quite friendly to God, more a sidekick or someone to do something distasteful so God did not have to. Why did he need souls?
Well my mother told me that there was a war in heaven and souls gave power to each side. Whichever side has the most, won. Well that made a kind of sense, although feeling like a powerup to be used in a battle seemed rather dissatisfying. Was that all I was to them? Some kind of currency or food to be used like a commodity. It seemed to cheapen any 'special' purpose for life being created.

It was commonly thought that God was a man in the sky (of sorts) and he watched us and had angels watch us and write down every bad thing we did in a giant book or ledger. Nowadays theologians would call that absurd, at least in public, but that was what we were thought as children.

As I grew older I learned from history and art history the history of the church, the inquisitons, the crusades, the witchburnings, the pograms, the hatred for the jews and the incredible amount of corruption that went on in the Church for over a thousand years. We read about Martin Luther and Protestantism and I had to agree I was on Martin's side for most of his issues.
This certainly helped to separate myself from unquestioning loyalty to the Church. I was still a catholic and a christian and an absolute believer in God and Jesus but I had considered the Church a lost cause.

My 20's saw my gradual drifting away from Catholic faith and more towards a nondenominal faith, especially when I lived in England and came across different denominations. I also encountered other non abrahamic faiths and my view of what God might be changed. I now knew that a God in the clouds was absurd and that he must be much more mysterious and less tangible.
What that actually meant was not something that I had any idea of.

By my 30's I was no longer a Catholic, but I considered myself a christian, but other ideas of god were appealing including Pantheism and Nature personified. Perhaps God was not a 'he' at all, but something much more alien. As I thought through this the bible's stories became less and less relevant and more obviously exaggerated tales. Nothing in history supported Moses and I wondered if anything in the old testament could be trusted.

However I still believed Jesus was at least a wise man, a good man but he was misquoted or mistaken in his alleged claims about being God.

Finally in 2011 I had just completed a government census form and marked myself down as a christian (probably saw myself as a cultural catholic)  because it seems that was what I was supposed to do. However as I looked down the list of options I saw 'atheist'. I was baffled. I had heard of many religions including Wicca, but atheism was not something I was familier with. So I looked it up.
At this stage my beliefs had moved to a form of pantheism mixed with deism, a kind of odd unfocused hybrid that I was still trying to make sense of. There HAD to be a god of SOME kind, that was the rule, so all I had to do was find some way to make that god make sense in face of a complete LACK of evidence.

I google 'atheism' and then 'atheists'. I read the descriptions and suddenly had my moment of clarity.
I completely agreed with the definition, I related to it and all the problems trying to justify a god HAVING to exist no matter what, dropped away.

It changed my life. A great weight was metaphorically lifted off my shoulders. Suddenly I knew I could believe that there was a possibility that no gods were responsible and that theists simply made them up. I understood that it was still possible that a form of god still existed but was not interested in revealing itself. But what mattered was that the theists were wrong, not just confusing or contradictory, but flat out wrong. Their gods did not exist, because they had NO way of knowing objectively if they did. It was still a mystery. I later considered that part my agnostic view (that god existing is unknowable).

This started a journey for the last 32+ months of ongoing research as I sought to understand WHY theists believed in gods in the first place. I knew they were not trying to deceive me deliberately, at least not most of them. I also learned a lot more about my former faith, far more on church history, on other faiths and on logic and how to reason. I also studied science and sought answers that had previously been seen as the domain of religion, and found them.
So that is a brief story of my journey, a tiny synopsis of a LOT of thinking and a lot of research.
I can discuss other aspects in more detail in other posts.