Free Godless by Dan Barker Page B

lonely heart who keeps waiting for the phone to ring, I kept trusting that God would someday come through. He never did.
     
    The only proposed answer was faith, and I gradually grew to dislike the smell of that word. I finally realized that faith is a cop-out, a defeat—an admission that the truths of religion are unknowable through evidence and reason. It is only indemonstrable assertions that require the suspension of reason, and weak ideas that require faith. Biblical contradictions became more and more discrepant, and apologist arguments became more and more absurd. When I finally discarded faith, things became more and more clear.
     
    But don’t imagine that this was an easy process. It was like tearing my whole frame of reality to pieces, ripping to shreds the fabric of meaning and hope, betraying the values of existence. It hurt badly. It was like spitting on my mother, or like throwing one of my children out a window. It was sacrilege. All of my bases for thinking and values had to be restructured. Adding to that inner conflict was the outer conflict of reputation. Did I really want to discard the respect I had so carefully built over so many years with so many important people? But even so, I couldn’t be distracted from the questions that had come to the forefront. Finally, at the far end of my theological migration, I was forced to admit that there is no basis for believing that a god exists, except faith, and faith was not satisfactory to me.
     
    I did not lose my faith—I gave it up purposely. The motivation that drove me into the ministry—to know and speak the truth—is the same that drove me out.
     
    I lost faith in faith.
     
    I was forced to admit that the bible is not a reliable source of truth: it is unscientific, irrational, contradictory, absurd, unhistorical, uninspiring and morally unsatisfying. (I talk about this in later chapters.) Beliefs that used to be so precious were melting away, one by one. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion, eliminating the nonessential doctrines to see what was at the core, and I just kept peeling and peeling until there was nothing left. The line that I was drawing under essential doctrines kept rising until it popped right off the top of the list. I threw out all the bath water and discovered there was no baby there!
     
    Opening my eyes to the real world, stripped of dogma, faith and loyalty to tradition, I could finally see clearly that there was no evidence for a god, no coherent definition of a god, no good argument for the existence of a god, no agreement among believers as to the nature or moral principles of “God,” and no good answers to the positive arguments against the existence of a god, such as the problem of evil. And beyond all that, there is no need for a god. Millions of good people live happy, productive, moral lives without believing in a god.
     
    People sometimes ask me, “What was the one thing that caused you to change your mind?” I guess they are thinking that if they can “fix” that one thing, then I will go back to faith. But there was no “one thing.” It was a gradual process. It would be like asking, “When did you grow up?” We can all point to a general period in our lives, but not to a specific moment. (I once asked that question during a talk at a Unitarian Church in Michigan and a woman spoke up and said, “I remember the exact moment, but I forget his name.”) It is good that there was no “one thing.” I do remember a number of poignant moments of realization, but these were the result of my skepticism, not the cause.
     
    It was during the summer of 1983 when I told myself that I was an atheist. Nobody else knew this for about four or five lonely months. Maybe a couple of my friends, and my wife, were suspecting something was askew, but since I still had a pretty successful ministry the outward appearance was as if little had changed. As far as I was concerned, I was the only atheist in the world.