Machines Like Us – Science News

My grandmother used to make me say grace, pray at my bedside, and I prayed a lot by myself. My father was an agnostic but he never spoke about religion. My mother was very religious. I was steeped in religion, and as an impressionable child, I was very religious. I had a "close personal relationship with God".

But as I got older I started asking questions. I started to realize that a lot of the stories like Genesis and the story of Noah and the flood were probably just folk tales, and I started to question the whole thing.

As a child I used to believe that you could wish for things (like when you throw money into a wishing well) and they would come true. But when I tried to test this belief, I found that it was not true. I then realized that praying was probably a waste of time. It made no sense when I thought about it. If I needed something, God would know anyway, and if he wanted to do something he would, and if he didn’t, then my praying about it would make no difference anyway. That explained why the success of my prayers seemed to be a hit or miss (mostly miss) affair.

Then I thought about the whole Jesus died for my sins thing. That also made no sense. God made us all sinners and set up some moral standards that are impossible for most people to follow. And he created this special place called Hell so he could torture all of those who couldn’t live up to his standards. Why does God need to kill his son, to convince himself to forgive us for not living up to the impossible standard he set for us in the first place? It didn’t make any sense, and it's horrific, but I believed it anyway. After all of the years of indoctrination, I couldn’t not believe. I felt that not believing would be wrong. My belief was grounded in fear and guilt.

I mentioned my confusion to a friend of mine and he said “Oh, I don’t believe in God”. I was totally shocked. I thought everyone believed in God. I guess this was a turning point for me. I realized that maybe there was a way out of the guilt and confusion. Maybe the simple explanation was just that it was all a fairy tale. I still went on believing for years, but I started looking for alternatives to Christianity.

As a teenager I still went to church with my parents, and I still believed in God, but I realized that the Christian priests didn’t really know anything. They just repeated stories that people wrote thousands of years ago like parrots. They had no idea whether God really exists or not. The whole thing seemed to be full of holes. So I read about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism and other religions. I read thousands of books. Most of the other religions actually made more sense to me than Christianity. I couldn’t see any reason why some of them might not be true. I also started reading about psychology and things like hypnosis.

I rejected Judaism together with Christianity. The Old Testament God was a baby killing monster that seemed more like a cartoon character than anything real. I rejected Islam because it just seemed to be a knock-off of Judaism/Christianity. But I didn’t want to give up my belief in God. I was determined to find God for myself, so I started practicing yoga, which is basically the heart of Hinduism. There are many forms of yoga, but the idea is that they are ways of becoming one with God. They are all about connecting oneself to God. I figured if there was a way to find God, it had to be through meditation and direct mystical experience.

My journey wasn’t as linear as that really. I kept drifting away and coming back to Christianity during my early teen years. A friend of mine once convinced me to go on a Christian camp. There I became “Born Again”. I gave my life to Jesus and all that stuff. I felt like a changed person and I went around praising the Lord and getting all evangelical for a week or two. But since I didn’t actually know many like-minded people I started to feel silly about it and my rational mind started to kick in again. It just wasn’t really me. I re-read all of the pamphlets that they gave me at the camp, and I realized that they were very similar to any other kind of advertising – designed to hook you emotionally. I also noticed a similarity between the practices at the camp and the techniques hypnotists use. It all seemed to be about manipulating people and hooking them in. I wanted to find God for myself, not get conned into believing something.

At the same time, I started to incorporate ideas from other religions into my world view. I started to believe the new-age thinking that all religions might lead to the same place and that they were all different ways of looking at the same truth. My Christian friends were shocked.

I got up very early and practiced yoga every morning. I was mainly interested in Raja Yoga which is all about meditation and direct experience of connection with God. I learnt a lot about how my mind works and I started to feel very close to God. I had many experiences of great oneness with the universe and a connectedness with other people. I started to feel that my consciousness was connected to that of other people and that I could almost see through other people’s eyes at times.

The practice of Raja yoga is supposed to give you the ability to understand the thoughts of others and the ability to override the laws of nature. So being rationally inclined, I decided to test the theory. I already seemed to be getting pretty well advanced in meditation, so I decided to practice levitation. If I could do that, besides being pretty cool, it would prove that my experiences weren’t just self-delusion. I spent about two years practicing meditation and breathing exercises every day trying to levitate off the ground. Well you might guess that it didn’t happen. I also tried to move objects with my mind and all kinds of things like that. There were many times that I fooled my self into thinking I had read someone’s mind or predicted the future - all kinds of things. If you want badly enough to find evidence for such things you can convince yourself.

I started to realize that yoga was too egotistical for me. It was about wanting to be God and it was not really healthy no matter how humbly you approached it. Most of the gurus in India are egomaniacs. They just love the fact that people flock to them and worship them no matter how humble they act. It didn’t seem natural for me to consider myself above other people. I then started to look for a more down to earth religion. Buddhism and Taoism looked good to me.

I found that Buddhist meditation was very similar in practice to yoga, but there was no concept of God. Buddhism made even more sense. It is quite logical and does not require you to believe anything. The idea is that you just practise it and find out for yourself. Unfortunately, that's not really true; it's pretty hard to be a Buddhist without believing in karma and reincarnation. I had my doubts about those.

I drifted between new-age mysticism, Buddhism and Taoism for a few years. I spent years trying to find the mystical, the magical, the non-physical reality behind religion, but the more I looked the less I found. I read lots of books, and met lots of people with all kinds of weird beliefs, but the closer I looked the fuzzier things got. Whenever I got close to the supernatural, the evidence seemed to disappear.

I drifted more and more towards Taoism and Zen. Taoism, as I interpret it is more of an attitude or approach to life than a "religion". It is very abstract and mystical. Taoism is what turned Buddhism into Zen in Eastern China. I still love Taoism and Zen.

My spiritual quest got interrupted by a degree in science (major in pure mathematics). I'm a science geek, but they forced me to take some arts subjects so I chose philosophy and foundations of logic and mathematics subjects. I think that's what really taught me to think clearly. I didn't really apply that stuff seriously to my religious beliefs until later. I sort of believed that religion and science were mutually exclusive. But eventually I started to examine my mystical beliefs seriously using the new thinking tools that learnt in my science degree. After that I realized that I had become an atheist. It now seems to be the only viewpoint consistent with reality (IMHO).

In the end I realized that I had made a big mistake in my reasoning that wasted many years of my life. I thought that because most people believe in the supernatural, and because there is a vast amount of literature and "evidence" about the supernatural, there must be some factual basis to it. But that doesn't follow logically. It may be that belief in the supernatural is a psychological phenomenon. It just means that people have a tendency to look for meaning in life and look for logical connections even where there aren’t any. When you understand that people are easily fooled and don't always think rationally and we tend to exaggerate and remember things incorrectly, it becomes clear that most people are just brainwashed by their culture, and are slaves to their own psychology. At that point I stopped thinking about religion. That was over twenty years ago.

I only really got seriously interested in religion and philosophy again after 9/11. Now I realize that we can't just happily ignore religion anymore. Us atheists need to stand up and be counted.

Regards,
Pythagoras

My Story starts out similar to Cindy's in that my parents tried to keep my brother and I away from the church. Their reasons for doing so are much more interesting though.

My farther was raised Catholic but my mother was Jehovah's Witness. When they married there was so much spite from my mother's family that she was disfellowshipped (the Jehovah's Witness equivalent to excommunication) and disowned by her family.

When my brother and I were about 10 and 11 years old respectively they suddenly realized that there were two little boys in the family that hadn't heard "the good news" yet. So we finally got to meet the grandmother we didn't know we had. She invited my brother and I to stay with them for a month that summer and we went.

The result is that my first time ever in a church was in a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall. Being ten years old and being preached to about the apocalypse scared the crap out of me. "What's that only 144,000 people getting into heaven WTF?"

This was about the time they started medicating me for ADHD. About a year later as a result of my antisocial behavior at school (what a surprise, a tiny pissant school in a tiny pissant town couldn't deal with someone a little bit different) I was sent to live with my Catholic grandmother.

While she made me attend mass with her every week she never made me take it too seriously and the Catholics never tried to scare the crap out of me with visions of hellfire and damnation like the Witnesses did.

As a result I'm probably a bit softer on Catholics than I am on a lot of the other religions. The way i see it is this. There are a lot of Jews out there who consider themselves atheists but still consider themselves culturally to be Jewish. In this same way I consider myself to be an atheistic Catholic.

I don't believe in any way that the bible is the word of god or any other such nonsense. But I still have a lot of those old Catholic idiosyncrasies stirring inside me. It can't be helped.