Former atheists: what convinced you to believe in God(s)?

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I was your typical teenage genius. Way too smart for your shit. Like every other Christian atheist, my atheist journey started when I realized there was no such thing as Santa Claus. Christians misjudged the effects of modernism on their traditions and so failed to update their Christmas tradition to compensate. That critical oversight spawned hundreds of thousands of atheists. Nowadays they have a sense of humor about it. Would have saved me a lot of trouble.

Anyway, I could see the great distress inflicted on my mother whenever I was as critical of religion as newly-minted atheists are wont to be. So out of respect for my mom I toned it down and turned online for answers. Social media was in it’s absolute infancy in those days, there weren’t even a lot of forums around, but I did find a now-defunct news blog, in the tradition of FARK, called Morons.org.

It was filled with all kinds of people who thought religion was stupid and silly, and while I could see their perspective coming from gay people wanting civil rights, I couldn’t ever just throw in whole-heartedly with atheism. There was always some nagging little bit of cognitive dissonance demanding careful attention.

I bounced around different web forums and had scores of debates on religious topics with people who were more or less intelligent, and more or less religious. I eventually learned that yes, you could in fact be both religious and intelligent.

I also found another type of religion. Wicca claimed to be ancient, but never really pretended to actually follow the old beliefs. I thought it was interesting, the thrill of maybe finding a “real religion” was compelling. I joined a Wicca coven for that and other reasons. It was there I received my “spiritual initiation.” I did a lot of meditation, read a lot of spiritual material. I was compelled by an oath I took to at least take it seriously, and I did my best.

What’s not to love?

I was on my way to becoming a real priest when life intervened and I had to move, of course I couldn’t take my coven with me. Even a year as a religious dedicant hadn’t really shook loose my deep-seated atheism, while I understood the concepts of spirituality, I still thought of it all as psychological and not real. In fact I never really shed that feeling, only learned to make peace with it over time, and in fact, work it into my spirituality.

You see, religion is spirituality defined and shared amongst a group of people. Spirituality does not have to be defined. I graduated from massively-shared religion, to a private cult, to my own beliefs.

How did I find those beliefs? In my coven days, I started reading everything that struck my fancy about alternative religion and spirituality. The coven directed me towards esoteric and occultist works, each of which had it’s preconceptions and lessons, and on my own I found Osho, who I really took to. What introduced me to Osho was The Rajneesh Bible, which I’d randomly picked off the shelf in a bookstore and introduced me not just to teachings, but to the private inner life of an Indian spiritual sage. How he thought about other Indian sages and other traditions. Anybody interested in enlightenment should pick up a copy of one of the Rajneesh Bibles, I think four were printed.

(probably drugged up in this pic)

My next big teacher was David Hawkins, author of Power vs. Force. His big idea was that spiritual growth could be quantified and put on a scale, using a technique he called applied kinesiology. I experimented with the technique and found it interesting enough to work with, but not the ultimate tool to unite science and spirit that he thought it was. I devoured his books and spent many years coming to an understanding of his ideas.

It was at some point in reading Hawkins that I realized that just about everything I’d spent the last ten years thinking about revolved around God and it was pretty foolish to say that I didn’t believe in some kind of God. I admitted that God existed and then made dinner.

It made my mom’s day when I told her a few years later that I actually do believe in God now. She told me it was part of her daily prayer ever since I told her I was an atheist.