Godless (13 page)
My other brother, Tom, is still a born-again Christian. He gave his life to Jesus at a Billy Graham crusade in the early 1960s, and after some rocky high school and college years (including a shockingly bad semester at Oral Roberts University), he rededicated his life to God. He is a good man, a loving father, hard working and conscientious, now a retired high-school principal, still living in California. He and his wife make occasional missionary trips to Mexico in support of their faith. Although Tom and I have never been very close, we enjoy seeing each other and the subject of religion rarely comes up. I sometimes refer to Tom as the “white sheep” of the family.
My maternal grandmother, “Grams,” was an uneducated, lovingly eccentric and generous woman whose views on religion fluctuated according to her medication. She and I were very close. When she received my letter she must have been torn apart with the issue, writing: “I won’t give in to the Devil.” Later, Grams wrote me again, in a more characteristic mood: “You sure don’t have to defend yourself to me. You are a good man, one of the best I have ever seen, and I am thankful for that. I just stay open minded and try to live a good life. That’s all I can do.” A few years later Grams told me that she had scared off some Jehovah’s Witnesses at her front door, growling, “Get out of here! I’m an atheist!” I don’t think she really was an atheist, because at other times she spoke about God and Jesus in her life. But at least she became more broad-minded. To a large degree this was due to the change in my parents.
My dad’s mother was living in Oklahoma. After Granddad died in 1986, she and I worked on a four-year project, publishing
Paradise Remembered
, a book of Granddad’s collected stories of life as a Delaware (Lenape) Indian boy in Indian Territory before Oklahoma became a state. She was a member of the Christian Church her entire life. When she happened to see one of my appearances as an atheist on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, she wrote me a postcard saying, “I saw you on TV. That is not
our
Danny.” In spite of that understandable awkwardness, we got along wonderfully.
Paradise Remembered
, a book of Granddad’s collected stories of life as a Delaware (Lenape) Indian boy in Indian Territory before Oklahoma became a state. She was a member of the Christian Church her entire life. When she happened to see one of my appearances as an atheist on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, she wrote me a postcard saying, “I saw you on TV. That is not
our
Danny.” In spite of that understandable awkwardness, we got along wonderfully.
My uncle Keith, Dad’s younger brother, was a recovering alcoholic who credited his sobriety to his deep faith in God. He had arranged for me to be hired in my first job as a computer programmer, designing monitoring systems for tank farms, and he was excited to be working not only with a family member, but with another strong Christian (he thought) as well. The job started in 1983, just when I had given up my faith, but he did not know it because I was still hypocritically preaching on the weekends. When he received my letter, he did not reply. We continued to work together as if nothing had happened, and I left it at that. One day as we were driving back to southern California from a computer show in Las Vegas, he pointed to a huge rock formation in the landscape and said, “Isn’t that beautiful!” I looked at it for a moment and said, “Yes, it is beautiful. You can see how the multicolored ancient sedimentary sea beds were thrust upward after millions of years of tectonic pressure and are now tilted at an improbable angle.” He turned to me and snapped, “Do you have to ruin everything?”
I appreciated and respected Uncle Keith immeasurably. Dad’s two other brothers responded in a friendly and civil manner to the drastic change in our views, but Keith ended up ostracizing both of us, refusing to answer letters. I went on to another programming job and never saw Keith again. After I mailed him a copy of
Paradise Remembered
(his own dad’s memoirs), which was received with excitement and gratitude by the rest of the family, he sent it back to me without explanation. I can only assume (as he once implied to Dad on the phone before breaking it off with us) that he was unwilling to associate with his “unclean” nephew.
Paradise Remembered
(his own dad’s memoirs), which was received with excitement and gratitude by the rest of the family, he sent it back to me without explanation. I can only assume (as he once implied to Dad on the phone before breaking it off with us) that he was unwilling to associate with his “unclean” nephew.
My Christian marriage did not last either. When I told Carol that I was writing this book, she asked me not to say anything about her. I suggested that it would seem strange, even insulting, if I cut her completely out of the story. So she asked me to keep it to a minimum. Carol had always wanted to be married to a minister, and although she tried to adapt as much as possible to my change, she could only bend so far without breaking. She was ultimately unwilling to be disloyal to her faith. From her point of view, the bible commands Christians to “be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” From my point of view, having become aware of feminism, egalitarianism and freedom of opinion, I could no longer imagine a marriage in which the man is the “head” of the wife, as the bible sets it up. Divorce is always painful, but we were fortunate that it was not too messy. We did not have much property to fight about, and neither of us wanted to fight anyway. She remains a faithful believer and is now married to a Baptist minister, as she continues to see that as her role in life.
Around this same time, I read Annie Laurie Gaylor’s book,
Woe To The Women: The Bible Tells Me So
, published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which details the harm to women that stems directly from biblical teachings, and I wrote her a letter of thanks, telling her a little of my story. Three years later we were married, and it is one of “our little stories” that she never responded to that first letter. She lost it. But her mother, Anne Gaylor, who was president of the Foundation, found the letter and sent me a nice note asking me if I would write an article for
Freethought Today
about my deconversion. That article, “I Just Lost Faith in Faith,” ran in the summer of 1984. A few months later Anne and Annie Laurie were invited to be guests on Oprah Winfrey’s
AM Chicago
show, at about the time Oprah was beginning to be noticed nationally. She was doing a show about atheism and asked Anne if she knew of any other atheists with good stories to tell, so Anne told her about this former minister in California. The producers called me and I jumped on a plane to Chicago to be one of the guests on the show. Not only was that the first time I publicly spoke about my atheism—on television, no less—but that was also the first time I had knowingly talked with any other atheists. I was nervous, not because of being on TV—I had done a lot of Christian television—but because this was the first time I would be speaking to an audience that was not supportive, and might even be hostile.
Woe To The Women: The Bible Tells Me So
, published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which details the harm to women that stems directly from biblical teachings, and I wrote her a letter of thanks, telling her a little of my story. Three years later we were married, and it is one of “our little stories” that she never responded to that first letter. She lost it. But her mother, Anne Gaylor, who was president of the Foundation, found the letter and sent me a nice note asking me if I would write an article for
Freethought Today
about my deconversion. That article, “I Just Lost Faith in Faith,” ran in the summer of 1984. A few months later Anne and Annie Laurie were invited to be guests on Oprah Winfrey’s
AM Chicago
show, at about the time Oprah was beginning to be noticed nationally. She was doing a show about atheism and asked Anne if she knew of any other atheists with good stories to tell, so Anne told her about this former minister in California. The producers called me and I jumped on a plane to Chicago to be one of the guests on the show. Not only was that the first time I publicly spoke about my atheism—on television, no less—but that was also the first time I had knowingly talked with any other atheists. I was nervous, not because of being on TV—I had done a lot of Christian television—but because this was the first time I would be speaking to an audience that was not supportive, and might even be hostile.
I met Anne and Annie Laurie before the show that morning, talked briefly with Oprah in the green room, and then went out before the cameras. We actually have videotape of the day we met! On the tape, you can see that we are checking each other out. They were a little worried about me, wondering if I would falter or be too soft in my atheism, and I was a little apprehensive about exactly what kind of people these outspoken atheists would be. During the show you can see us all relax as we all realized that we were among friends.
Computer programming became the perfect transitional job for me until I was able to go to work with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. In 1985, the company I was working with moved me to the midwest to be close to the railroad dispatching systems we were installing in Indiana and Illinois. That job was fun! We moved real trains on real tracks, using a custom real-time multitasking system, one of the tasks which I designed myself. I lived in hotels most of that year, and was able to drive up to the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, on weekends and rare days off, and gradually started volunteering there. In 1986, as the railroad systems were needing less maintenance, I decided to stay in Madison and work on a contract basis for the Foundation, designing and installing its first computer system.
In May 1987, Annie Laurie and I were married. The freethought-feminist wedding, a “match not made in heaven,” took place in Sauk City, Wisconsin, at historic Freethought Hall. A woman judge wearing purple shoes with her judicial robe conducted the ceremony, announcing at the critical time, “You may now kiss the groom.” The next month I was hired full-time as public relations director for the Foundation. That’s one way to get a job: marry the boss’s daughter.
In 2004, Annie Laurie and I were elected co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is today the largest organization of atheists and agnostics in the country.
Our daughter Sabrina was born in 1989, a fourth-generation freethinker on her mother’s side of the family and, in spite of her red hair and light complexion, a full member of the Delaware (Lenape) Tribe of American Indians. I am a member from my dad’s side of the family. We also have some Chiricahua Apache blood, from my mother’s great-grandmother, who was in the Arizona tribe from which Geronimo came. (Geronimo’s clan fought the intrusion of the Spanish missionaries.) We have not indoctrinated Sabrina into atheism, as if that were even possible. The last thing a freethinking family will do is coerce thought. We did not take her to Atheist Sunday school (is there such a thing?) or force her to memorize Bertrand Russell. But, of course, she has heard Annie Laurie and me talking about our work and she has attended many of the speeches and events at the Foundation’s annual conventions, which amounts to a kind of “freethought education,” I suppose. In the end, she is her own person, and she knows that she is free to make her own philosophical and political decisions. When I sometimes remind her that she is free to become a born-again Christian or anything she wants, she just snickers and says, “Oh, Dad.”
My four kids from my first marriage are grown now and the daughters are raising their own children. They have always been very good about the whole controversy. Unless they bring it up, or unless it happens to arise in the course of normal conversation, we do not discuss religion. When they visited Wisconsin as children, I offered to escort them to the church of their choice, but they never took me up on it. Two or three times during her high school years my daughter, Becky, sent me a letter urging me to “come back to God,” so I know she struggled with the issue. But I have repeatedly told all my children that my love for them is not contingent on what they believe. They can be Christians if they want, as long as they are good people and don’t hurt others. They went to church with their mother, who worked at a Christian school, and their stepfather, a youth director at a Baptist church and later a pastor. They know what I think. I have never wanted them to be forced into a position of having to choose between parents. They are smart kids, and I have to trust that they have the ability to sift fact from fiction, and right from wrong. Danny now calls himself an agnostic. As far as I know, the girls, who may harbor some nominal or liberal beliefs, don’t seem to go to church regularly. When they were young, I dedicated
Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children
to them, which says:
Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children
to them, which says:
No one can tell you what to think.Not your teachers.Not your parents.Not your minister, priest, or rabbi.Not your friends or relatives.Not this book.You are the boss of your own mind.If you have used your own mind to find out what is true, then you should be proud! Your thoughts are free.
And like my dad, I have also found a new joy in music. When I moved to Madison I started playing jazz piano, averaging more than 100 gigs a year since then. This might sound like a Sunday-evening church testimony, but I have to say that life has been much richer and happier since I was healed of the religious delusion. As the lyrics to one of my songs say: “The superstitious monkey is off my back. I’m thinking for myself, and I am back on track. And I can tell you: life is good!”
Jesus has still not returned, and never will. But who needs him?
Chapter Four
The New Call
The motivation that drove me into the pulpit is the same one that drove me out. I was a minister because I wanted to know and speak the truth, and I am an atheist for the same reason. I have not changed; my conclusions have changed. When I learned that Christianity is not true, I had to decide: “Do I want God, or do I want truth?” You can’t have both.
Though I remain the same person I’ve always been, I have grown in learning—which is supposed to happen to all of us. I say “supposed” because there are some to whom growth and progress represent a threat. Religious conservatives do not want to move on. Religious conservatives have consistently resisted progress, preferring to maintain tradition for the sake of tradition alone, even if the tradition is bad. Some of us have a different priority. We prefer truth to tradition, progress to precedent, learning to loyalty. When I was a minister, I was convinced that I was preaching truth. It didn’t matter then, and doesn’t matter now, that what I was preaching happened to be tradition. What matters is whether it is true. When I decided to follow truth and jettison God, I did not lose a thing. I simply gained a new perspective.
Still, once a preacher always a preacher (in my case, at least), so the question now was, “Should I preach atheism?” Or, would it be better to simply back away from a life of proselytizing and get a real job? Most atheists and agnostics are not preachers. Most are happy to live and let live. When was the last time an atheist knocked on your front door? Has an agnostic ever handed you literature on a street corner?
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