“Please allow me to introduce myself, I am a man of wealth and taste…”
My name is Ron Tavalin, and it is no accident that I am quoting from the Rolling Stones’ classic Sympathy for the Devil, although it must be admitted that it is due to my sense of irony rather than any alleged wealth or taste I might possess!
I am an atheist, albeit a reluctant atheist. I say “reluctant” because I really wanted to believe in the existence of the Judeo-Christian god to the point that I earned my BA and MA in conservative evangelical schools and taught at one for 4 years. Even so, I had numerous debates with my pastor during that time about the existence of god, and over time felt increasingly pressured to make a break with my faith and come to terms with who I am and what I believe.
Joining the Enemy
In a sense, I’ve come out of the closet. I can empathize with homosexuals when they say that they became increasingly distressed over time as they tried to conform to the expectations of a largely heterosexual society, and finally having to deal with their orientation publicly. I’ve been through a similar process, being reluctant to write this article and declare my non-religious affiliation in a public forum, but since I had on many occasions declared my faith in public forums, I felt that I owed my lack of faith the same dignity.
For many years of my adult life, “the atheist” was the ultimate enemy. Names such as “Hitler” and “Stalin” were often bandied about in the same breath as “atheist.” Atheists were arrogant, satanic, and bestial. It was assumed that atheists either hated the Judeo-Christian god and lashed out at him from displaced hatred over an abusive or vacant father figure, or, like Satan, spit on the cross from a pathological need to rebel against authority. We Christians stood firm in our confidence that the particular god we bent the knee before was not only real but the only real god (we have “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” after all!), and that while Muslims were wrong, even they were better than godless atheists. Let’s face it: to be called “godless” in this society is not a compliment.
Now I count myself among the hated “without hope and without God in the world” as Paul would write in his epistle to the Ephesians (I realize that Paul was speaking of Gentiles who did not know Christ, I am simply re-appropriating his phrase).
Preferring Godlessness
Still, godlessness is a preferable state to the one that I partook of for two decades. I no longer have to consider a horrible tragedy such as the Holocaust wondering, “How could God let that happen?” I don’t have to look at a discovery like human origins in the light of mitochondrial DNA and ask, “Well, what act of mental contortionism is required to reconcile this fact of reality with Genesis 1:26-27 or 2:21-22?” The more that one honestly looks at the world and compares it to Scripture, the more one is forced to see that there is not only disparity; there is obvious and irreconcilable contradiction. Something had to give.
I could either affirm, “Sola fide!” (the rallying cry of the Reformation meaning “Faith alone!”), or drop my faith. Both answers were equally precipitous; a fall from one side means an expulsion from Eden into the lake of fire, and a fall from the other side means a descent into irrationality, superstition, and the suspension of reason. I chose to drop my faith.
Temptations of Faith
Admittedly, even though I have been expelled from Eden, the sacred Garden still tempts. It tempts with promises found few other places: meaning in life, a hope that survives death, everlasting forgiveness. It tempts with a ready-made lens that sees everything in black and white, right and wrong, spiritual and carnal. It tempts with its sweeping explanations of where we came from, who we are, and where we are going.
While Eden’s siren song still echoes in my ears, the problem was I could never fully retreat into a mythical world no matter how lovely, how venerated, or how comforting it might seem. This is true not just for Christianity, as there are many other “Edens,” or surrogate realities on the market today. The problem is that they all have their price. The price of life in the sacred environs of Eden is willful ignorance, because it begins and ultimately relies upon a Kierkegaardian “Leap of Faith” expressed in the absolute suspension of reason, from which, like the river in Eden, everything else flows. Only after many years of honestly wanting the claims of the Bible to true with reality and mentally trying to force them to fit with a variety of intellectual sleight of hand tricks, could I choose expulsion from Eden, because I could not pay the price. I could not, as Jesus commanded, become like a little child as much as I wanted.
And I wanted it. I envied the faith of many around me; how they could argue for such things as a literal six-day creation with certitude, vigor and doctrine-black finality. I envied the way they could somehow shut out the brightening progress found in the scientific endeavor just to exult in the mysteries of their faith. I suppose that it is more accurate to say that it wasn’t their faith I envied, rather I envied their life in that happy faith-based world and their disconnect from the real world. I wanted to be in that happy world and out of this sad world that confronts me everyday. All things being equal, only Mephistopheles would prefer hell to heaven.
Even so, I believe that it is better to live life from a realistic, rational and uncompromisingly honest perspective than it is to live in a paradisiacal religious myth of anti-intellectualism and magical thinking.
Unlike Mephistopheles in the Stone’s Sympathy for the Devil, it is not with glee that I watch people continue to kill each other over gods they made; rather it is with great reluctance and some sadness that I stepped away from the confident and volatile world of fundamentalist monotheism and its violent war against the world as it is, emerge from the closet, and say, “Here I am, I am an atheist.”
