Godless (9 page)
As I traveled across the spectrum, I kept drawing my line higher and higher. I read some liberal and neo-conservative theologians, such as Tillich and Bultmann. These authors, though perhaps flawed in this or that area, appeared to be intelligent and caring human beings who were using their minds and doing their best to come to an understanding of truth. They were not evil servants of Satan attempting to distract believers from the literal truth of the bible. I came to respect these thinkers and even to admire some of their views, without necessarily embracing the whole package. After a couple more years of evolving theology, I became one of these hated liberals, in my own mind, though few people suspected it. God did not spit me out of his mouth.
Interestingly, during this waning of faith, I could still “talk with God.” I prayed and spoke in tongues and it felt the same as always. I was not an atheist yet, but since I was doubting everything else, I began to wonder if I should question my own inner experience. After all, followers of other religions report mystical and spiritual trances, so maybe I should not trust my own subjective emotions. Maybe I should put
myself
under the microscope. If everyone else could be wrong, then so could I. My religious experiences did not get weaker. They did not start to feel hollow or empty. (In fact, I can still reproduce those feelings today, just as strong.) What happened is that another part of my mind—the rational mind—started looking at the emotional part of my mind as if from a distance. I became my own test subject. “Look at that! I’m talking with God. It sure feels real, but it must be a trick of the brain.” It
had
to be a trick of the brain, since it was beginning to look like a personal god probably did not exist. What a strange and wonderful thing to realize.
myself
under the microscope. If everyone else could be wrong, then so could I. My religious experiences did not get weaker. They did not start to feel hollow or empty. (In fact, I can still reproduce those feelings today, just as strong.) What happened is that another part of my mind—the rational mind—started looking at the emotional part of my mind as if from a distance. I became my own test subject. “Look at that! I’m talking with God. It sure feels real, but it must be a trick of the brain.” It
had
to be a trick of the brain, since it was beginning to look like a personal god probably did not exist. What a strange and wonderful thing to realize.
At that time in my migration, with my theology trying to keep pace with my intellectual and rational maturing, I still believed in a god but had no idea how to define it. All the while, I was still getting invitations to preach and sing in various churches, many of which were fundamentalist and conservative evangelical. Long before then I had stopped my direct “soul winning” sermons and tailored my message to be palatable to just about any church. This was easy since most of the churches that invited me at that time were interested in my published music, so I could simply perform a number of songs with brief inspirational introductions and keep the preaching to a minimum. I was able to adjust to the expectations of the audience, becoming more or less evangelistic according to the flavor of each church. Even then, I felt somewhat hypocritical, often hearing myself mouth words about which I was no longer sure, but words that the audience wanted to hear.
In my secret life of private reading I was impressed with enlightened writers in science magazines. In particular, an article by Ben Bova about “Creationist’s Equal Time” in
OMNI
magazine turned the lens around so that I was gazing back at the fundamentalist mindset. The article laid bare the dishonesty of the “equal time for creationism in the science class” argument by asking how many Christians would welcome a chapter about evolution inserted between Genesis and Exodus. I became more and more embarrassed at what I used to believe, and more attracted to rational thought. Like an ancient bone that slowly fossilizes, the bible became less and less reliable as a source of truth and reason slowly took its place. I found myself asking heretical questions.
OMNI
magazine turned the lens around so that I was gazing back at the fundamentalist mindset. The article laid bare the dishonesty of the “equal time for creationism in the science class” argument by asking how many Christians would welcome a chapter about evolution inserted between Genesis and Exodus. I became more and more embarrassed at what I used to believe, and more attracted to rational thought. Like an ancient bone that slowly fossilizes, the bible became less and less reliable as a source of truth and reason slowly took its place. I found myself asking heretical questions.
Where did we get the idea that words on a page speak truth? Shouldn’t truth be the result of investigation and analysis?
If I think it is so easy for millions of people to be misled into a false religion because of a tendency to believe error, what makes me exempt?
If the Prodigal Son is a parable and Adam and Eve are a metaphor, then why is God himself not one huge figure of speech?
I kept moving and moving, picking up the pace, enjoying the scary feeling of “growing up” and learning. My mind felt like it was waking up. In my thirst for knowledge I did not limit myself to Christian authors since I also wanted to understand the reasoning behind non-Christian thinking. I figured the only way to truly grasp a subject was to look at it from all sides. If I had limited myself to Christian books I would probably still be a Christian today. I read philosophy, theology, science and psychology. I studied evolution and natural history. At first I laughed at these worldly thinkers, but I eventually started discovering some disturbing facts—facts that discredited Christianity. I tried to ignore these facts because they did not integrate with my religious worldview.
During those years of migration, I went through an intense inner conflict. On the one hand I was happy with the direction and fulfillment of my Christian life; on the other hand, my intellectual doubts were sprouting all over. Faith and reason began a war within me. And it kept escalating. I would cry out to God for answers, and none would come. Like the 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.
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. I knew there must be other atheists out there, but that was irrelevant. I did not become an atheist because I wanted to join a club. I was not converted by the “atheist movement.” I saw no atheist evangelist on TV who persuaded me to change my views. I came to it all on my own, and that’s how it should be. Almost every other atheist and agnostic I have met since then, who was raised religious, tells the same story: it is a private, independent process of free thinking. That is what gives it strength. It makes my conclusions my very own, valued because of the precious process of being forged and proved in my own mind.
Between the summer and Christmas of 1983 I went through an awful period of hypocrisy. (Can an atheist make a confession? I suppose I am now asking forgiveness from other freethinkers. What should my penance be?) I was still preaching, and I hated myself. I was living with the momentum of a lifetime of Christian service, still receiving invitations to minister, still feeding my family with honoraria from ministry and singing engagements in churches and Christian schools. I knew I should have just cut it off cleanly, but I didn’t have the courage or clear-sighted vision to know how to do that. In preparation for some vague need for what might lie ahead, I took some classes in computer programming, telling my wife that I enjoyed computers and that perhaps I could supplement our income with this skill. Right away I got a job as a part-time programmer of 68000 Assembly Language for a company that makes monitoring systems for the petroleum industry. This eventually turned into a full-time job. (A year later, as an open atheist, I worked as a programmer/analyst designing and coding dispatching systems for the railroads, and I got to do a lot of fun, onsite installation and testing of a real-time multi-tasking system for N&W and Burlington Northern in the Midwest.) This provided me with the perfect transitional job—a way to ease out of ministry. I was still preaching on the weekends and doing some occasional record production at night, but in my mind I was letting go of the ministry. I had no choice.
In November, still a hypocrite, I accepted an invitation to preach in Mexicali, a Mexican city on the California border. I like that town. Even though I no longer believed what I was preaching, I still enjoyed the travel and the many friends I had south of the border. The night after a service in an adobe mission in the Mexicali Valley south of town, I went to bed on a burlap cot in a Sunday School room that doubled as a guest room for visiting preachers. I didn’t sleep much that night. I could see some stars out the window, and I remember staring up at the ceiling as if I were gazing right up into outer space, contemplating my place in the universe. It was at that moment that I experienced the startling reality that I was alone. Completely and utterly alone. There was no supernatural realm, no God, no Devil, no demons, no angels helping me from the other side. No big eyeball judging my thoughts and actions. I am a biological organism in a natural environment, and that is all there is. The stars ingest and recycle matter and energy, and I saw myself as a little, low-wattage star, glowing faintly in the dark universe, destined to burn out like a sun after it has spent its fuel. It was simultaneously a frightening and liberating experience. Maybe first-time skydivers or space walkers have a similar sensation. I just knew that everything had come to rest, that the struggle was over, that I had truly shed the cocoon and I was, for the first time in my life, that “new creature” of which the bible so ignorantly speaks. I had at last graduated from the childish need to look outside myself to decide who I was as a person. This was no mystical experience, but it was uplifting. It was like learning that the charges against me had been dropped for a crime of which I had been falsely accused. I was free to put the matter aside and get on with life.
I was right at the point of figuring out how to end the charade and come out to the world as an atheist, but in a sense, I am glad I went through those months of hypocrisy. I learned something important from that strange vantage point. I remember standing in the pulpit, hearing myself speak words that I no longer believed, seeing the audience react as before. After one service, a woman came up to me with tears in her eyes and said, “Reverend Barker, your sermon was so meaningful. I want you to know that I felt the spirit of God on your ministry tonight!” And I thought, “You did? What does that tell us about the game we are playing?” Of course, I would have said (as many do) that it doesn’t matter who speaks the word of God, and that even though I was a nonbeliever, the message is the same. But this woman told me that she “felt the spirit” on my ministry. I realized that the whole sermon /worship setup is a huge drama that we are all acting out, not just the person in the pulpit, but the audience as self-selected participants without whom there could be no preaching. We were all playing along with the illusionary meaningfulness of it all.
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