Women Beyond Belief by Karen Garst

Author:Karen Garst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2016-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Letting go of religion was quick and easy. I was sixteen when I had my epiphany. Some time earlier I had undertaken the tedious task of actually reading the Bible, and I concluded that its value system and admonitions were ethically questionable, its claims and assumptions scientifically implausible, and its various accounts inconsistent with one another. One night during my seventeenth year, I tried to make sense of the vast contradiction between the Bible’s claims about the world on the one hand, and my twentieth-century worldview on the other. That night, for the first time, I considered the possibility that the Bible was precisely what it seemed to be: mythology. There was my sense. The contradictions dissolved when I downgraded the Bible from truth to claim. I went to bed a Christian around ten thirty and was an atheist by eleven thirty.

While my process was not in any way extraordinary, the speed of the development was. Many atheists report struggling with these questions for a very long time before they are finally left without any reason to persist in their belief in a god.

So what was different in my case? Almost certainly, letting go of God is easier in one’s youth, when one has less invested. Maybe it was the fact that I did not face any social pressure to keep my religious belief because in my native Germany, atheism just isn’t very shocking, and because my family’s reaction the next morning, on learning that I was an atheist, was something like “That’s nice, dear. Would you pass the butter, please?” But I think at least part of it was the fact that I had not found for myself an aspirational character in the Christian story, nothing of personal relevance that would have encouraged me to maintain an unjustified belief. I had no idea that such a thing was even possible. I did not learn about this possibility until I was twenty-one.

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