Declaration of Reasoning: [SERIES] Faith and Atheism

Declaration of Reasoning: Faith and Atheism [SERIES]
Originally Published: May-2024
Edited: May-2024

By Andrew Samaras

Attempting to understand reality — to comprehend truth — is a journey that traverses a mountain range of existential and foundational questions. A person seeking to make the ascent must examine several key propositions about existence and the universe, such as the existence of god(s), the basis for morality and ethics, and how to find purpose in life. I make the case elsewhere for the necessity of this personal expedition to truth, but some questions loom so high over the landscape, that they impose themselves on the whole ecosystem. Since the dawn of human existence, societies have been founded, nations established, and institutions built according to this landscape, each taking a position on the summits of these big questions, proffering answers, then organizing their systems around those assertions, while insisting the primacy of their peak over any other.

The most powerful, history-writing, influence-wielding forces have traditionally been those states, organizations, churches, sects, and cults that lay claim to the philosophical Mt. Everest: the God question. For this reason, it is necessary to interrogate the assertion of the existence of God, and all the doctrines and truth-claims therein, if one is to truly pursue truth. Subjects including the basis for and utility of faith, the impact of religion on societies, and the validity of holy books must be disentangled and addressed during the climb. The path through these terrains is perilous, obscured by the shadows of belief, emotion, and perception. To even inadvertently challenge deeply held beliefs and earnest faith, can be to send earthquakes through the foundations of the epistemologies of the faithful. The path is so treacherous, in fact, that many choose to ignore these questions and avoid the expedition altogether.

Personal attachment and bias are not the only obstacles to overcome when putting to question deeply (and widely) held belief systems. Beliefs are personal and individual, but belief systems are also categories and identities that transcend nations and transfix societies. These systems must be engaged with on society’s terms, and therein lies the obstacle, because society’s terms are undefined and it’s logic fallacious. Society may speak of God when it is classifying people in terms of their belief or non-belief, but to a fundamentalist, the concept of God that a New Age Christian believes in would be indistinguishable from the unbelief of an atheist. This type of confusion of terms crowds and blocks the already narrow path forward. Along the way, there reliably linger charlatans and peddlers who offer shortcuts and cheap pre-packaged ideological frameworks to lure the masses away from the journey. The tempestuous clouds of circular reasoning hover above, as the truth claim about the existence of God, theological debates about doctrine, arguments about holy book interpretations, and assertions about the impact of religiosity are, in public discourse, knotted in a string of circular logic.

Yet, it is fitting for those who seek introspection and consider themselves students of knowledge and the truth to, with as much precision and clarity as can be mustered, analyze and unpack the various arguments and fallacies buried underneath this most fundamental of truth claims, if only to sharpen their own positions. Likewise, I here will attempt to present my positions on these questions, and to describe the journey that brought me there, in the hopes that it may serve to elevate the discussion and mitigate fundamental confusions buried within the conversation. This, dear reader, not to persuade you, but in the service of transparency and mutual understanding, whereby we may arrive at fruitful conversations. Disagreements we may have, yet I urge you to read with an open mind, that no one may say of you that your beliefs went unchallenged.

ON FAITH:

I am a nonbeliever, an apostate of Christianity, the depths of whose faithlessness came as a great surprise to those friends and family who had guided me down an ideological path and thought I would make a career as a theologian or preacher, as my father had once been. Only to God and me was it apparent that my love story with religious faith was doomed. As a child, before my intellectual big bang, and before I grasped the concepts of science or reasoning, I knew faith. My parents, both of them worldly in their own ways, were also devout, and raised us to believe. Despite their Adventist and Greek Orthodox affiliations, each of my parents maintained non-denominational households, and I thankfully have no recollection of a time when either one imposed a specific doctrine on me, save the basic tenants of non-specific Christianity. They instead encouraged me to study my bible to discover the nature of God, and with encouragement from the Christian schools and theologically-deep church I attended, I set about fervently undertaking that task. I was indeed a true believer.

Despite this religious influence and a sincere faith in the life and divinity of Jesus Christ, and although I enjoyed worship and the sense of community I felt at the churches, camps, and youth groups, I never felt close to God. For all the times when, as a teenager, I was called up to lead Bible studies and give sermons, and I spoke about a relationship with Jesus, I did not have one. For all the hours I spent reading and studying The Book, and books about The Book—for all my seeking and praying, I found many things, but never God. The only true expression of my faith that I constantly carried inside me was a tremendous feeling of guilt. I felt guilty for my failure against an unachievable standard and ashamed at my hypocrisy for pretending that my soul was engaged in my faith when, in fact, the Christian life I was living was beginning to feel like an act. My mind was no longer as easily convinced, and the answers I uncovered in my theological questioning no longer satisfied my yearning to understand reality. My soul was always wandering with my curiosities. And while I had not yet found the tools of my liberation—the sacred knowledge, the answers from the sciences, the unfettered interrogation from philosophy, the dalliances with new experiences—which would eventually chip and chisel through the columns of the temple of my biased understanding, the shroud over my eyes, which was forced upon me before I could even speak, was falling away.

It was not a trauma I endured in my religious upbringing or bad experience with a church I attended that caused me to cast aside my faith. I simply stumbled and plummeted out of it. Faith is like love that way; one can fall out of it just as easily as falling into it. I had indeed fallen out of faith and was now seeing all of the imperfections and flaws that I was blind to before. I saw now that I had been renewing the vows of a relationship to which I had never consented. From infancy, my life had been dedicated and my name signed to a contract, that would enable anyone in a position of religious authority to implant me with their suppositions and infect me with their biases. My faith which was at the core of my being was the result of indoctrination. This is the unfortunate fate for children of faith, and many adults never interrogate or challenge these internalized beliefs. I remember this was the first blemish I noticed on the skin protecting the rotting core of my beliefs.

The recognition of that original theft of my agency led to an acknowledgment that indoctrination is a state of bondage. The faith that had been imposed on me had come with constraints, which restricted domains of research and study, limited knowledge and inquiry, and held my mind captive to a framework, a root algorithm I was trained to use to process every bit of data I gathered in my life. Moreover, the doctrines of my faith were coercing me not to look for meaning anywhere else. They taught that atheists or the wrong kind of believers were destined to live out their days unfulfilled, bereft of purpose and meaning, with nothing to look forward to at the end but a permanent and definitive place in the ground away from God, or worse still, damnation and eternal suffering in a hell of His making.

To aid in the quest to avoid this fate, the holy book produced rules, laws, and doctrine according to which life is to be lived. Unfortunately for humanity, not every rule was as clearly delineated as the prohibitions against murder and theft, and even these are examples of laws and admonitions commanded in one part of the book, which come into direct conflict with messages and commandments that appear later. This strategic ambiguity of the doctrines is a problem that faith alone cannot solve. Some regulations are apparently to be treated as archaic and irrelevant, and others are only applicable in certain contexts, such that faith often becomes an exercise in confirmation bias. Clearly, faith in the book is not enough. Instead, God is said to call his faithful to always be studying the book, constantly praying and invoking, and forever worshipping, in order to gain discernment. This mission is known to be a task for more than one lifetime, and it has a standard which we, imperfect, inevitably fail to uphold. For this, the god of our fathers gave humanity guilt, that they may know when repentance is being demanded of them. This sin—guilt—contrition cycle is a chain that shackled me, among countless others, to religious faith.

I could not even grasp the concept of abandoning “Christ-following” as my life’s mission, but I viscerally and fundamentally rejected my indoctrination and became suspicious of the other circumstances of the upbringing that made me. I began to see, for the first time, the chain of circumstances that had molded me, and my parents, and their parents, and the whole line of faithful before me who had received belief like a gene from their predecessors. Suddenly that strange addendum to the 2^nd commandment made more sense to me. Nevertheless, I still believed that the correct life was one of discipleship, even in doubt, and so I remained, by both circumstance and choice, insulated in a Christian bubble. But the questions had begun to boil over, and my desire for answers became insatiable. Why was faith the outlier, the one aspect of my life that was immunized from the logical thinking I was taught to embrace everywhere else? Why was faith considered a virtue, when I was taught to value evidence, scientific reasoning, and critical thought in every other pursuit? Why was criticism of faith always considered persecution? This was no mere curiosity anymore; I was no longer assured of my beliefs and pursuing clarification. I now found myself in the role of a critic, open-minded, with a desire to know the truth, but wary and unsure where to place my trust.

When belief gives way to mistrust, it is important not to be lured by the siren call of the comfortable. Suspicion is the psychological signal that further investigation is required. For me, the acknowledgment of my indoctrination and the suppression of my mind led to a personal intellectual revolution. I left my small town, my church, my Baptist school, and the hideous uniforms. My world opened. I attended a massive university, and pursued coursework and research opportunities in psychology, physics, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics. I traveled internationally, alone, with no regard for any risk, simply in awe of the majesty of the horizon. I met new friends in Cairo, and talked for hours about the Quran and Hadith in the Mosque of Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad. I engaged with Buddhism and experimented with psychedelics while reading the forbidden philosophies, like those of Nietzsche and Crowley. I emphasize these things not because they are unique, but because they were completely foreign to me.

I exercised my mind to exhaustion, trying to identify all of the ways that my thinking was biased by the religion of my youth. In the process, I identified four key pillars of my faith, which I will address in personal terms in the order and manner in which they came to me. I must note first that I launched this investigation into my life as a Christian, not in rebellion or as an exercise in deconstruction, but in earnest belief that I needed to wipe my intellectual slate clean and assimilate all this brand new data and pursue the truth of the God question from scratch. Despite embracing new experiences, with all the available information in the world flooding towards me, I still believed that an earnest pursuit of the truth using reasoning would lead me to something akin to the faith I was comfortable with, but that perhaps I might find peace on the journey. And while I have still not arrived at anything near certainty yet, I can attest to the fruitfulness of putting faith to the ultimate test by extricating it from one’s identity, pending further investigation.