Holy Smoke!
Rather than coming up with a title on my own, I’ll steal the title of the post I’m linking. Via Carnival of the Godless, I came across Holy Smoke at A Load of Bright. He compares quitting religion (as I did through December, then formally announced as of the first of 2007) to quitting smoking (which I did almost instantly in January 2004, even before I knew I was pregnant). It’s a striking comparison to me — one that resonates with me.
A sampling:
One question that is often asked of atheists is, “how are you going to replace religion? People need religion. If you take it away, what are you going to put in its place?” Many atheists answer this question on face value, normally with an outline of secular humanism. This is correct in a sense, but the question is actually heavily loaded. It assumes that people need religion. Do they really?
I used to think I needed cigarettes like I needed food. At times, when I was broke in university, I would scrape pennies from the floor of my car and the backs of couches to buy cigarettes while my cupboards were bare. “I need a cigarette”, I’d tell my bemused housemates, “I need one”. When you smoke, you are imbibing poison into your body. If there is one thing that, by definition, your body never needs, it is poison. I didn’t need a cigarette. I needed food. If you don’t eat, you die. If you don’t smoke, not only do you not die, you live longer! It’s easy for me to say that now, but at the time I was convinced that it was an essential.
Just as we are all born atheists, we are all born non-smokers. Do people really need religion, or do they just not know any better? Obviously, not all people need religion – the existence of happy atheists proves that. So why would some people need it and not others?
Over time, I’ve found myself filled with nearly zero angst about my walking away from religion in general, Christianity in particular. When I first even contemplated (not out loud, even — just in my head) the idea that God might just not be, the emptiness wasn’t unlike the craving for a cigarette — a loss that, had I not fed an addiction, I wouldn’t have ever recognized.
These days, when I consider religion, it’s largely in relation to how I’m raising my daughter, and how I can coach her to think critically about everything she encounters, even “truths” that I might tell her. Someday, she might be atheist/agnostic. She might be Christian. She might be Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, or a New Age flake. Whichever she becomes, my wish is that she will have spent time genuinely considering *why* she believes what she does.
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I can’t resist the urge to tell you about something I observed last semester, when I took English 1B with a nontheist, Marxist professor (those two things don’t always go to together, but that’s what he was). Anyway, he was the kind of professor that did not sugarcoat his beliefs about the world. He said that there was no such thing as Heaven, that God does not “will” things and that things do not happen for a reason. I mean, that’s cool and all. I don’t take offense because he was a great, fair and interesting professor, and taught me a lot. BUT…
I noticed that he did have a worldview that gave him immense purpose in his life. Although he is not a spiritual person, he frequently talked about helping the poor, liberating the oppressed and about the evils of capitalism. He is the leader of the teacher’s union at my collge, and is involved in anti-military and anti-war causes. He marches in the street to fight for rights of undocumented immigrants. You need not have religion to believe in these causes (and, sadly, many Christians are against Christian principles like nonviolence and tolerance).
My point is this: he has a worldview that gives him a reason to wake up in the morning, much like deeply religious people. He acts on that, gets involved in organizations that support social change, to better the world. In that way, I find him remarkably “religious.”
As you know, I am currently just observing a lot re: Christianity. I think it is used partially to manipulate me in my family, and scaring me out of having sex before marriage (or even *thinking* about it — because that’s childish according to Brio, remember?) I have some issues with it… but sometimes, I think that were it not for Jesus, and even Hugo’s influence in my life, I would be struggling in a much different way.
It’s a great parallel (religion and smoking) and sometimes I miss the *idea* of both – but not all the crap that comes with it when you really partake;)