“Convictions create convicts.”
—Robert Anton Wilson

Once upon a time, I was the child of a mixed-faith household. My father was Jewish and my mother is Catholic…so I know from guilt. (*rimshot*) But since both Jews and Catholics generally hold religion to be a matrilineal matter, I was baptized Catholic, sent to catechism as a child, and got as far as my First Communion before I was old enough to start asserting myself and break away from church.

I’d never liked church much, but then what Catholic kid does? Between uncomfortable pews, lots of seemingly random standing and sitting, mumbling call-and-response prayers, and droning…songs? I guess you could call them songs, but they reminded me of the a cappella version of Muzak™. And once I came to the conclusion that there was nothing in that building of any significance to me, I was not going to let myself suffer the ordeal that was Sunday mass. I barely tolerated letting Mom drag me along at Christmas and Easter.

How did I come to that conclusion? So glad you asked…

At a very early age, about 8, I started reading Greco-Roman mythology. I tore through those myths and spread out to Norse, Aztec, and other pantheons and stories. Every last one of these societies had firmly believed their stories about how the world began, how the gods interacted with humans, what happens when we die, and how the world would end. And the current religions of the world just sounded like more of those stories to me.

So, for a long time, I was happily agnostic, and unwilling to commit to the idea that there wasn’t some divine or universal consciousness. But the longer I live and the more that I learn, the more I see that there isn’t…that sooner or later (if the species lasts that long), we’ll be able to explain the nature of the universe, our corner of it, and ourselves through means of the applied scientific method. Of course, we have a very long way to go, but we’ve really only been at it in any organized way for the last few centuries. Given that, I’d say we’ve come quite a long way.

What we haven’t found, despite plumbing the depths of the oceans and the ground, despite mapping out every square inch of this milky blue-green marble, is any scientifically-verifiable evidence that supports any of the mythological histories, both ancient and current, known to humankind. Funny how that happens when you tailor your hypotheses and theories to the available data, changing them only when said available data no longer supports them.

Now, if religion stopped at just being a set of comforting fairy tales we told ourselves to feel better about mortality and nudging us toward a more civil society, I wouldn’t mind it so much. But our history clearly shows us just how corrosive a deep, abiding faith that one knows The One True Way™ can be. Crusades, inquisitions, wars, witch-hunts, pogroms, systemic oppression of whole swathes of society, and 20-year-old “elders” harassing me as I walk down the street…screw that. Keep it to yourself, buddy. They’re not content until you’re either converted or dead. This is why I get on so well with pagans/wiccans and non-proselytizing members of other religions in addition to my fellow atheists and agnostics. The rest all have what I personally consider to be an intellectual virus, and are in need of quarantine. Thank goodness for the converse of the right to association…the right to dissociation.

I saw Robert Anton Wilson speaking on several occasions when I was living in Santa Cruz, but on one memorable one I recall him fielding a bizarre and abstruse question from a man who looked the very model of a conspiracy theorist. Something about whether or not RAW thought Tuesday Weld was a primus illuminatus because of some secret signal in one of her movies. And Wilson replied with an amusing anecdote about how there was a local guy in Santa Cruz who spent all his time telling everyone he could find that Stephen King killed John Lennon. He pointed out that one could make the assertion that the spirit of greed and violence of the 1980s, as represented by King, killed the pacifism and idealism of the 1960s, as represented by Lennon, but that “…the difference between an artist and a lunatic is that an artist is in control of his metaphors.”

I also have no problem with people who understand that religion and mysticism are metaphors. Sometimes even useful metaphors. People performing a ritual or praying hard for something can put themselves into a better frame of mind for success in their desired goal. The trouble is when people actually believe that the ritual or prayer magically made it happen, as opposed to simply helping them feel more able to succeed.

Magical thinking is damaging. It encourages people toward apophenia, and discourages them from bending their will and effort toward their goal, thinking that the prayer or ritual will make it happen effortlessly. And when it doesn’t, they so often just dig themselves in deeper, thinking they just need to pray yet harder or perform a bigger ritual…or worse, become a “tool” of their god, heeding only the voices in their head and acting to oppress or even kill whatever their particular bête noir happens to be. Gays, abortionists, government buildings, and so on. Studies have actually established that people with that kind of mindset will actually believe harder when confronted with factual evidence that runs counter to their personal paradigm.

This country (the USA for my foreign readers, if I have any) was founded by masons and deists. They were people who believed enough in the right — nay, the need — for individuals to make up their own minds and not be held prisoner by any monarch or religions sect. And yet, in American society today, atheists are somehow the most despised and distrusted minority to be found. We rate lower than any other group based on any other defining feature. Even LGBTs rate better…though, being lesbian, transsexual, and atheist, something tells me that a goodly chunk of this country would just as soon beat me with sticks as give me the time of day.

Any why? Because we believe what we can observe and measure and no more. We already have more than enough evidence that our planet is far more than 6,000 years old. We have a pretty good idea of how life happened. We know how our species evolved. None of these phenomena required any god, goddess, spirit, or flying spaghetti monster. Anytime someone’s willing to tell you that some space-god seeded deep strata of earth with phony fossils to test our faith or otherwise fuck with us, you know they have one seriously weak hypothesis. That said hypothesis is based on their literal reading of a work of metaphor from about 1700 years ago does not help.

So, to Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, James Randi, and all the other debunkers of superstition and humbuggery (pun very much intended, since religion doesn’t use lube) past, present, and future, I say, “thank you!” When somebody actually manages to take Randi’s million dollars, I’ll happily believe in their deity, paranormal ability, or what-have-you, but not a moment before.

In the meantime, I’m too busy crushing on hot little Laci of the sweet pro-atheist YouTube videos. See? Reason can be entertaining and sexy!