Faith, Atheism, autobiography and Faith's Resurrection

Can one lose one's religious faith after 40 years? Er yes, but it is not easy as the old conditioning kicks in again from time to time so eternal vigilance is required!

For my part it has been a process and the struggle to lose it saw much back sliding -at least four attempts as I recall over a 20 year period.

Ayn Rand started the process for me 30 years ago but it was Christopher Hitchens youtube recordings in the early to mid noughties re debates and interviews that sealed it for me for the following reasons which I shall outline with some historical detail.

Ayn Rand saw religion as so absurd and so patently ridiculous that it merited it hardly any discussion or analysis in her non fiction beyond asserting her atheist position and dismissing faith and mysticism as the arrant fraud it clearly was but she did it in passing because at the time of writing religion in America was largely marginalized and discredited in public and political life,there had been a massive falling off of religious influence re expressions of faith and it was not until the appalling Reagan appeared and the emergence of the diabolical religious right that all of that was reversed and the Christian religious re asserted their influence directly in politics in a most regressive atavistic pernicious and lamentable way.

Elmer Gantry as it were and his acolytes came back as if from the dead to reap a malign and toxic influence on the US polity which exists to this day with the gruesome spectacle of serial sex offender Trump paying lip service at least to the religious right and bizarrely -or not- getting its imprimatur.

The emergence of the religious right like a cancer on the body politic coincided with Rand's death although she did remark disfavourably on Reagan. But it was not until the emergence of the militant atheists if you will re Christopher Hitchens et al that I first heard the atheist view expressed and it took many years before I finally and fully took it on board.

Religious conditioning is very insidious and powerful because it is integrated into one's whole world outlook,every question is seen through the lense of faith and un raveling that takes a long time,a process of disintegration has to take place and the longer the period of conditioning the harder and more protracted that process will be.

Yet I exaggerate somewhat as in many ways it has been fairly painless and easy. I only have to listen to former associates who are still spouting their mystical gibberish and pretzellogic, their fallacious arguments, their emotionalism, their total dismissive disregard and denial of reason whilst bizarrely attempting to appropriate it in their cause, their evasions, denial of reality, dishonesty, rationalizations, the moral corruption of their personal lives all glossed over and rationalized away by their faith -the whole disgusting obscenity and dishonesty of that is enough in itself to remind me why I abandoned the wholly immoral belief in all things supernatural.

This is to say nothing of the pathetic nature of the above mentioned characters,the feebleness of their minds and the irrefutable evidence that faith and mysticism in a traditional religious setting or not -in my case not- makes people unremittingly stupid - certainly embarrassing and verging on the cretinous.

I close on a word of warning. It is absolutely futile seeking to engage in dialogue with such people once you have abandoned your faith -unless you relish the prospect of playing chess with a squirrel. It is beyond futile to debate them -unless in a public forum when you will be speaking through them to a wider audience and I speak from personal experience!

One more point on this which I have mentioned in the past but is relevant to my specific experience and may be to some others. In the modern world there has been an outcrop since the 60's of alternative culture, the emergence of New Age, independent movements and a do it yourself religion, free market approach as it were -all well and good sort of, but it has led to some organizations which are not church based and who claim that they are somehow the pure faith,  falsely asserting that they should not be judged harshly like the false players of organized religion but as they share exactly the same religious ideology with the same roots ie the bible this is a fallacious claim and one intended to turn the spotlight off them and give them a free pass when they share the exact self same philosophically corrupt source of  faith, mysticism but shorn of its material church based paraphernalia re services,  bureaucracy and clerical hierachies.

To expose the sophistry at work here imagine if ideologically loyal and dyed in the wool supporters of Hitler and his evil ideology kept themselves relatively separate and never went on Nazi rallies and marches or shouted Heil Hitler in the street or wore Nazi regalia claimed that therefor they should not be lumped in with organized Nazism would anybody take such a request seriously? We should treat the no church mystics with the same dismissive derision when they seek to pull the same stunt -and for the same reasons.