First, as pointed out, what turned you into an atheist/skeptic can be taken as two distinct questions, which nonetheless often distinctly braid
I, for example, as my very name implies, am a thorough going skeptic, and always look for at least one other perspective on any point
I am also, as near as I can actually describe my views, a non-reverent polytheist with a sinful nature, a tattered null-hypothesis of atheism, and a couple of gods (Papa and JC) who have grudges against me and a nasty sense of humor (The feeling is mutual.)
Question one how did I become a skeptic?
I come from two different traditions of what the muslims and Ambrose Bierce call Hypocrisy, mystically inclined Jews pretending to Be Mary Baker Eddyites in Mississippi, and freethinking German-Scots pretending to be soft-shell Baptists in Texas.
My parents weren't hypocrites. My mother told me nothing is real but the thoughts of Mary Baker Eddy. My father told me when I was seven, paraphrasing Descartes, that all we can be certain of is that we think. So the major question of my childhood was, was I thinking, or Mary Baker Eddy. This made me dubious of authority from the time I was eight, if I wasn't already predisposed that way.
Confirming that, when, as practicing hypocrites, my parents sent me to Sunday School, I decided on the first lesson that Eve was the first scientist, and my hero. Then I was told I was going to hell because I believed in dinosaurs. Without ever having heard of Pascal's wager, I decided there was no percentage in believing anything they had to say
So, at eight, I became an animist, since I knew, as a child, that everything was alive, whatever grown-ups thought. I also decided to believe in the Greek and Norse Gods, since they were the only ones I had heard of. I still, as an actor, superstitiously reverence Dionysios and Apollo as the gods of the theatre. I also quickly added a belief in the Hindu trinity, and I have perceived Brahma and Atman while in mystogogic states.
Nonetheless, my main gods were Socrates, Columbus, Leonardo, Galileo, the founding fathers, Darwin, Marx (by 18), Freud (Since Art Linkletter called me out on national television about wanting to kill my Dad and marry my Mom when I was six.) and Einstein. I have become agnostic about my secular heroes now, though.
And here is the second braid. Did I have a tragedy that turned me against the idea of a just god?
When I was eight, Bobby Kennedy died, and I experienced Pascal's vision of an empty, meaningless void. Other than hypocritical conformity, this Kierkegardian existential nausea is, not an inducement to atheism, but an incentive to take up Pascal on his wager. In my case, your premise to the question is backwards.
On the other hand, the immediate effect was to give me an agnostic/atheist world view for which I was persecuted for years.
Then John Lennon, who had told me God was concept that measured my pain, died an alleged Christian, so I decided to believe in Christ, and that I was going to hell, if it meant I could believe John was in Heaven.
To accept bs, you have to turn your BS sensor off. Three years later I was asking YHWH what I must do to be saved, and He told me ( he often talked to me when I was not taking my meds) to join the army, marry a third-worlder, and kill commies in Nicaragua.
Fortunately, my bs detector came on. I said “Leaving aside, 'Thou shall not kill,' I believe marriage should involve love.”
He said, “They are a stench in my nostrils.” I said, “I don't believe I am talking to God. I believe I am talking to my own libido, which wants to fight and f—k,” and the Gospel God-spell dissolved.
So I became a Buddhist, an agnostic philosophy that understands all is sorrow, until Robert Anton Wilson persuaded that “all is joy” is an “equally true, equally false, and equally useful” premise.
About this time I made falsification and the null hypothesis my operating principles, and wielded Occam's razor until I even doubted my own experience by doubting Marx and Freud. Oddly enough, I was schooling myself in contemplating the mysteries of cosmology, including that Jesuit trojan horse, the Big Bang, while simultaneously contemplating the utter atheism of what Darwin called “this view of life.”
By the time I was thirty-three, I was enraged by the mere mention of Western theism, to the point where I tried to take corrective action by seeking out “intelligent” Christians. Thus I met my ex-wife, who convinced me Christianity was rational, by lying to me about what she believed. So when YHWH told me to marry her or go to hell, it was pretty much do what he said or commit myself.
So, when the prophesied end of the world went by without notice and she left me, I had myself committed and started taking meds. But this made me agnostic, and very concerned with the distinctions between probabilistic knowledge, heartfelt mythopoetic truths, and my superstitious personal beliefs. As for faith and certainty well, an officer may be wrong, but he may never be uncertain, and faith is intentionally committing to a belief you know can't be proven (As opposed to superstition, which is unintentionally committing to a belief you know can't be proven. (Small joke there))
Reviewing my “beliefs” or alleged knowledge, at that point, I decide, using Occam's razor again, that some mysteries appear to be insoluble, and even a solution leaves another mystery behind it. Therefore I am agnostic about gods, ufos, the big bang, and the origin of life, the paranormal, and, having been deceived, human perception, but life experience leaves atheism about any God other than Platonic-Pauline-Islamic's self-contradictory omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent teufal im himmel,
untenable, so I have settled on polytheism, or poly-fetishism. Gods are fetishes, concepts imbued with special significance. More than that, deponeth sayeth not as far as statements I would expect to receive assent to go.
Marx and Feud appear to have gotten it right though, with qualifiers (big'uns) I do almost treat them religiously, if one defines religion as a person's fundamental world-view. Fortunately I am aReichian heretic, and as for Marx, I prefer Harpo.Statistics: Posted by Twain Shakespeare — 29 Jul 2010, 15:15
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