In a recent program, the staff of TAL coordinated with NPR’s news division to produce an hour long, behind-the-scenes feature on the recent U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis. I highly recommend this fascinating program, which answers questions on the hows and whys of the mortgage implosion of 2007-2008.

What the show uncovered was at once both surprising and not. It was surprising in terms of the brazen greed, sloppy assumptions and barely disguised fraud the program uncovered. And yet it was not surprising: Isn’t that trio – greed, laziness and fraud – at the heart of all scams?

As I listened to this sordid tale, spun out in the words of a bartender-turned-mortgage-broker and a mortgage “bundler” who made $75,000 to $100,000 a month (a month), I found my thoughts turning to religion.

Now, hold on just a minute. As a born-again Christian for 30 years, I don’t believe that religion is primarily driven by greed, laziness and fraud. I know that the televangelist stereotype that some lifelong atheists adopt for all religious people is false. I’m well aware that most religious believers are sincere, good-hearted and many are self-sacrificing.

However, there were certain parallels between the mortgage crisis and religion that intrigued me. The first was a retreat into an impenetrable thicket of jargon. Did anybody really, truly understand all the fast talk, statistics and lingo thrown around the mortgage industry during the years when the U.S. housing market was considered invulnerable? Similarly, can anyone lacking a Ph.D. in philosophy muddle through the high-falutin’ verbiage of sophisticated, postmodern theology?

The second parallel I noted was willful ignorance. People who had been in the industry for years knew darn well that NINA (“no income, no asset”) loans were junk. Heck, people who never went near the mortgage industry could tell you that much. But “everybody” was writing NINA loans and happily making money hand over fist. Those who dared raise objections were derided as nay-sayers and ridiculed for missing out on the windfall. Similarly, it seems like “everybody” believes in some kind of god, and also values faith as the highest virtue. Religious believers are suspicious and critical of those of us who cast a skeptical eye on their faith.

Finally, I found another common point in the over-reliance on assumption and authority. The U.S. housing market was a “sure thing,” the story went. The statistics (later found to be outdated and irrelevant) were rock solid. No one seemed to have learned anything from the bubble-and-burst cycle of overvalued American technology stocks less than a decade ago. Similarly, conservative Christians start from the assumption that god exists and wrote the bible through divine inspiration of the holy spirit. Liberal believers can point all day to gurus, books and dissertations, but can’t seem to summarize their own beliefs in a few simple paragraphs.

What did I conclude from this odd confluence of ideas? Mainly that I’m glad to be a skeptic. I don’t care if I’m missing a god gene or I’m derided by religious people for being “cold-hearted” or “uber-logical.” They don’t know that I’m a romantic, emotional woman working in a creative field, so they can’t know that their assumptions are way off base.

Besides that, experience has taught me that questioning, probing and holding out for objective proof is the best way to avoid wrack and ruin in life. And believe me, I’ve seen lots of wrack and ruin in the lives of friends and relatives who value faith as the highest virtue, lean on authority instead of thinking for themselves, and are all-too-eager to believe.

If you develop the mental muscle to consistently cut through jargon, insist that people explain what they mean in plain English, examine assumptions, scrutinize motivations and question authority, you become inoculated against falling for the “next big thing” – whether it’s an investment or a religious belief.

- Karen

I’m quite persuaded that the anthropomorphic “old man on a throne” god of the three major world religions is a fictional character. But is there some greater entity, consciousness or purpose in the universe (or of the universe) that’s simply beyond our finite skills of detection?

There certainly could be.

A line in The Ghost Map (a wonderful nonfiction book I’ve written about here before) sticks in my head. The book tells the story of the last great cholera epidemic of London and the two men (a doctor and a minister) who solved the disease transmission puzzle. Specifically, they isolated a contaminated water pump in the neighborhood where the outbreak occurred and shut it down, stemming the epidemic.

But they did their work before the germ theory of disease. As author Steven Johnson put it, the idea that invisible cholera molecules were floating around in that water would have been as laughable to them as the idea that invisible fairies are floating around in our gardens is to us today.

So I don’t close my mind to the possibility of god, but I also don’t hold my breath waiting for a sign from this inscrutable divinity. As I move farther away from evangelical Christianity, I find myself developing more confidence, self-reliance and independent coping skills. My life is freer, happier and more fulfilling. In fact, sometimes I wonder whether my lack of striving for “spiritual truth,” when all around me people seem to be obsessed with it, means that I am missing something.

Do I lack a god gene? Have I “hardened my heart”? Is my spiritual “radar system” shut down? Should I care?

Remember The Emperor’s New Clothes? A post by science blogger (and outspoken atheist) P.Z. Myers takes off on that with The Courtier’s Reply. What do you think? Is there an inscrutable, complex and mysterious being out there somewhere that humans should worship? Or is the emperor really naked?

- Karen

A new member of an ex-fundy support group I help moderate addressed this topic recently and his answer was so interesting that I asked him if I could re-post it to this group and he graciously consented.

Bryan wrote:

I wanted to share an epiphany I’ve had after many years of wandering a post-fundamentalist wasteland. Maybe it will have meaning for some of you.

My Southern Baptist fundamentalist belief began disintegrating right around the time I went off to college. This was very painful for me (as I’m sure comes as no surprise to most of you). I fought it every step of the way as my faith slowly bled from me — my belief in Christ had formed the core of my self image, and my view of myself collapsed along with the elaborate theological construction that had undergirded it.

This was triggered not by liberal intellectual college professors, but by my inability to rationalize the failure of my earnest prayers to head off my parents’ divorce. First my belief in the effectiveness of prayer inexorably eroded, and eventually my dogmatic mind could no longer hold my rational mind at bay. For about 30 years I struggled in my search for meaning. I couldn’t escape the influence of that fundamental Christian tenet that without God, life has no meaning. I was agnostic, but I kept looking for some alternative way to believe in God so that I could recover the sense of meaning I’d felt as a fundamentalist.

I was caught up in the idea that I had to first decide whether I believed in God before I could build a new system of belief. I was never able to get beyond that first step. Yet after the painful experience of losing my faith, the last thing I wanted to do was to build my view of the world and sense of meaning on top of another rug that could be pulled out from under me. I’m happy to say that, in the end, I found a way of understanding that made that first step unnecessary.

A couple of years ago, as I was shaving one morning before going to work, I was thinking about a book I’d been reading on evolution. I have some educational background in biology, and I started thinking about some of what I remembered about the molecular basis for life — the fact that we (and the living things all around us) are mind-bogglingly elaborate constructions, assembled from raw materials drawn from the environment by the cells that comprise us. Beyond this, we each begin life in the form of a single cell that contains all the information needed to drive a developmental process over many years that eventually leads to conscious beings capable of experiencing love, and beauty, and wonder. In one revelatory instant I realized ! — whether or not God exists, our existence is a wonder. As I thought about this, it became clear to me that although many of us spend much of our lives in “the fog of the ordinary,” feeling that each day is pretty much like the last and wishing for something more, we are in fact swimming in, and even composed of, a sea of wonder. I developed a strong conviction that this is actually the more accurate way of viewing our circumstances.

As my conviction concerning this view grew, a sense of meaning began growing within me. I struggled for some time to find a way to concisely express what was, for me, a new way of viewing our place in the universe, and eventually boiled it down to the statement that my aim is to fully cherish the wonder of our existence. I’ve found this to be a powerful statement that can elicit a sense of conviction and meaning like what I once felt when meditating on Biblical declarations. Thinking about this naturally led me into thinking about how I should live in light of this conviction, and I eventually boiled this down to a simple dictum: promote well-being.

During the 30 years that led up to my epiphany, I was searching for something I could believe in without fearing that future experiences or discoveries would invalidate my belief. Believing in, and feeling, the wonder of our existence has accomplished that for me. It is valid whether or not there is a God. This view carries emotional import. In the two years since coming to this view, there have been many times in the midst of daily experience when I’ve repeated those simple phrases to myself (fully cherish the wonder of our existence, promote well-being) and found that they uplifted me and helped me re-orient my thinking (just as repeating scripture to myself once did). I don’t know whether this will be meaningful to any of you, but for me this view has come to have real emotional power, despite the fact that I have no certainty concerning our origin or the ultimate nature of the universe. I hope that some of you might find this helpful in your own search for meaning.

- Karen

Why did I venture outside the box and begin to find so many standard doctrinal answers unsatisfactory, while my Christians friends stayed perfectly content in their faith? Why couldn’t I just drop the doubt and recommit my life to the Lord, as I’d seen “backsliders” do in the past?

I’m no smarter than many of my Christian friends, nor am I more sophisticated or better educated.

So what was it that caused me to push off from the comfortable port of fundamentalist belief, where I’d been happy for so many years, and set out – alone and wary – for unknown lands? Why did fellow travelers veer into nearby ports like the emergent church, liberal Protestantism or Catholicism, or more exotic destinations like Buddhism or New Age belief, while I was compelled to continue my journey?

This question occupied my thoughts for a couple of years. Then two childhood memories finally answered it.

One experience took place at Christmastime when I was probably 6 or 7. My mother and I were in the kitchen working on a craft project and my younger siblings were – for the moment – occupied elsewhere.

I had always believed in Santa Claus, but for some reason that day I started musing aloud about him. “You mean those reindeer can pull that sleigh around with all the toys for all the kids all over the world?” I looked over at mom, but she didn’t answer. She just smiled to herself. I persisted: “Can he really travel all over the whole entire world in one night, and get all those presents delivered on time?”

I expected mom to reassure me immediately and I was surprised when she didn’t. She just looked at me, still smiling mysteriously, and said, “Well, what do you think?”

In that instant, I knew. I’d been duped; lied to. And not only me, but all kids, everywhere. There was a vast adult conspiracy, and even mom was in on it. The realization, with its attendant loss of innocence, crushing disappointment and shock, was not dissimilar to my much later – and much more gradual – realization about god and religion.

But back to my girlhood, only this time a few years earlier. I’m 4 or 5, and I’ve crawled into my parents’ king-sized bed early on a Sunday morning. Mom and dad are talking about something I don’t understand. Dad, a secular Jew and amateur science buff, keeps mentioning some guy named Darwin and “natural selection.” I can tell this Darwin guy is upsetting mom, a fundamentalist Christian. But dad persists until mom is so angry she gets up and leaves the bed. Dad sighs – retreat is mom’s favorite way of ending an argument. But she can’t resist getting in the last word: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” she calls out from the bathroom. “Genesis 1:1.”

That’s it, end of discussion. And for me, it’s enough. I want to side with mom – I always want to side with mom – and I’d heard that phrase enough to know it was god’s word: The last word. After all, if god said it, I believed it. And that settled it.

Examining those two memories explained to me why I had stayed with religion for so many years, and why I finally left religion when so many of my friends and relatives have not. You see, like my dad, I’m a natural-born skeptic. I’ve never fallen for a financial scam, bought a “miracle cure” or gone to work for a multi-level marketing agency. I want proof before I buy something; good evidence before I believe. Just like it did with Santa, my mind naturally puzzles things out logically all on its own.

If mom hadn’t been so invested in my believing in god and going to church, I have no doubt I would’ve been an apostate by age 10. Or at least by age 20, when I went through a serious period of doubt during my early college years. It was the extreme importance that mom placed on religion, and the importance to me of not disappointing her, that caused me to exempt Christianity from my brain’s natural scrutiny.

Mom said it, I believed it, that settled it.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m sure it was no coincidence that I first allowed myself to entertain serious questions about Christianity as my mother sank into the fog of Alzheimer’s disease. Nor was it a coincidence that I realized I no longer believed during the grief-stricken year after her death in 2000. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was also during that year that my gay brother – who’d long estranged himself from the family – came out of the closet. Neither of us had been free to truly be ourselves while mom was alive.

I realize that skepticism doesn’t appeal to many people. Even in my ex-fundamentalist support group, probably 60% retain some belief in the supernatural. Some are still Christians (just not the fundy type), others are pagans, New Agers or just plain deists.

None of that appeals to me. Left to my own devices, I’m convinced now, I would have been an agnostic atheist many years ago. It just took me a lot longer than it should have.

How about you? Have you thought about why you entertained your own doubts when those around you did not?

- Karen

Before Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead proved that cholera is a water-borne illness, there were myriad theories about how it was transmitted and cured. The patent-medicine industry spent huge amounts on advertising all sorts of quack “remedies,” writes author Steven Johnson:

“Ordinary people had long cultivated their folk remedies and home-spun diagnoses, but until newspapers came along, they didn’t have a forum beyond word of mouth to share their discoveries. At the same time, the medical division of labor that we now largely take for granted – researchers analyze diseases and potential cures, doctors prescribe those cures based on their best assessment of the research – had only reached an embryonic state in the Victorian age. … For the most part, this meant that the newspapers of the day were filled with sometimes comic, and almost always useless, promises of easy cures for diseases that proved to be far more intractable than the quacks suggested.” pg. 46

Some of the cures advertised for cholera included castor oil, disinfectant sprays, opium, ether, laudanum, linseed oil, hot compresses, heroin, leeches, laxatives and brandy, Johnson says. What no one ever proposed is the cure that actually works: hydration.

What was going on here? Anecdotal evidence. A particular cure would be administered and – lo and behold – the patient would recover! Someone would get a patent on the treatment and hawk it as a “miracle drug.” What people didn’t realize is that anecdotal evidence is next to useless: People recover spontaneously due to circumstances that have nothing to do with the “miracle drug.” Modern science teaches that valid data must be collected through rigorously controlled methodology and in large enough numbers to discount randomness and coincidence.

I often see religious people point to anecdotal evidence to “prove” the validity of their belief system. I understand the impulse: I grew up practically worshiping personal testimonies. “Jesus rescued me from sin,” “My life was terrible until I found the Lord,” “God healed me after I prayed.” Of course these experiences are meaningful for those who tell them. But are they really valid “evidence” for others to accept a particular truth?

My thinking on this changed radically around 2002, when I realized that all religious people recount personal experiences, mystical healings and life-changing “encounters with the divine.” My church taught me that the personal spiritual experiences of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Jews, etc. were Satanic deceptions designed to trick them into believing wrong doctrine. But as my blinders came off, I contemplated: If I considered pro-Christian anecdotal evidence persuasive, how could I discount the anecdotal evidence of other groups?

My spiritual experiences couldn’t be verified by anyone other than me, yet I expected others to take them on face value. How could I be so arrogant as to discount the spiritual experiences of people from other religious traditions? In the end, I couldn’t. That left me with two choices: Either everyone’s sincerely believed, dearly held spiritual experiences are equally valid, or none of them are. This realization was the beginning of the end of my religious belief.

Today, anecdotal evidence doesn’t persuade me of the truth, just as it didn’t persuade Snow and Whitehead when they investigated the 1854 cholera epidemic. I’m glad to be in such distinguished company.

- Karen

The sentiment is inaccurate, but it’s not hard to understand. Strictly defined, a-theism is simply non-belief in god(s); a-gnosticism is not knowing whether there’s a god, or admitting that the question can’t be answered. There’s even a new memoir out by an atheist called (you guessed it), Nothing.

When I first shed 30 years of evangelical Christianity, I felt great relief and freedom in the realization that atheism was simply an absence of belief. After all, I’d spent my entire life reciting theological creeds, signing church mission statements and listening to authority figures and holy texts tell me what was – and wasn’t – approved for my belief. I wore myself out trying to reconcile church teachings with my often-contradictory gut instincts and personal observations; and trying to reconcile one group’s absolute teaching with another that also claimed to be “the only right way” to believe.

It was liberating to put all that behind me.

But just because I no longer hold supernatural beliefs of any kind, that doesn’t mean I “believe in nothing.” It’s just that now, I get to evaluate and define my beliefs for myself, something I’ve been working on recently.

I must admit, I’m much more careful now about deciding what I believe – and what I don’t. For the time being, I don’t belong to any humanist organizations that could provide me with a framework of positive beliefs: Swallowing an entire belief system when I was a child, and then struggling to live within that system as I matured, didn’t serve me well. So perhaps I’m gun-shy about joining any group. That may change eventually.

I also strive to hold my beliefs loosely, and I’m open to scrapping some and picking up others over time. Indeed I welcome such changes, as I hope they would provide evidence of my continued growth as a person.

It seems to me that, if we are to encourage more people to let go of their intellectual and emotional clinging to religion and superstition and tradition, we need to present them with some positive alternatives. Pushing them out into a moral void, or telling them to “follow the scientific method,” might work for some, but those options are unattractive, amorphous and frightening to many people.

So … what DO I believe? Here are a few thoughts, but this is by no means a comprehensive list:

I believe in logic and reason, tempered by compassion and humility. I believe that skepticism and the scientific method are the best means we have for evaluating claims of all kinds. I believe in the power of love and mercy, the transformative nature of education and the ability of art to unite us by illuminating our shared humanity. I believe that, without any need for supernatural origins or governance, “life will out.” I believe in progress and the power of the human mind to continue solving problems and deciphering the mysteries of the universe. I believe in optimism and the potential for every human being to choose good over evil.

Far from showing me to be cynical, depressed or angry, these beliefs probably expose me as an utter Pollyanna! I know that I have a much more positive worldview now than I did as a theist, when I was convinced that humanity was corrupt, people were evil and the world was “all going to burn” – and not a moment too soon!

What about you? If you no longer hold religious beliefs, what do you believe and how did you decide what you believe? Have you joined any secular groups that hold principles of belief? If you are still a religious believer, do your personal beliefs sometimes differ from established doctrine?

- Karen