ryansutter·net

As I chronicled in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series, God and I had a long rocky relationship. We went from good buddies to uncomfortable partners to, ultimately, distant relatives. The end came far more swiftly than I had ever imagined possible.

One day in early 2004 I had a question in my head. How could ecosystems function without predator/prey relationships? I asked my wife about it, she agreed that it was puzzling. I asked my friends the Zimmermans about it, they not only agreed it was strange they also added some fuel to the fire by mentioning that they doubted Noah’s Ark as well. In one afternoon of researching some of this material online my entire previous worldview about Jehovah, creation and the last days was shattered and so was I.

The point of these posts is not to talk about why the flood didn’t happen or any of the apologetic, historical, or philosophical arguments about God or religion so I won’t get into all the reasons that my faith suddenly shattered. The point is to chronicle the history of my relationship with God and I have to admit that the way I felt towards him at the moment I discovered the Flood was a myth and that the history I had been taught was impossible was betrayed. I felt like he had lied to me. I went into the bathroom at work in tears and prayed to him over and over to make something make sense with what was happening. I was finding all this evidence that everything I had been taught had been a carefully constructed myth, a lie, and I couldn’t understand why Jehovah would allow that to happen. I had wrestled with myself, skipped college, done so many things because I believed he wanted me to and yet he hadn’t been honest with me. His organization had been allowed to construct carefully crafted lies like the Creation book to convince people like me that they were on solid footing with their ideas about God and I had bought into them. How could he do that to me?

I didn’t immediately decide God didn’t exist but I did fairly immediately decide that I wasn’t sure he did either. The evidence for his existence seemed to hinge on believing he existed in the first place or else it appeared to be flimsy and dishonest. I decided to consider myself neutral on the subject of God until I could research further and figure out if there was any way back to him.

I wound up divorced, again, and eventually also left the Jehovah’s Witnesses which ended a lot of things in my life (like my involvement with the Nuclear Gopher record label I had founded and more importantly my relationship with my family). But things between me and God weren’t done yet, not by a long shot.

You see, believers often think that atheism is some sort of hatred towards God or even a denial of the possibility of God. I consider atheism to be something a might bit different. Atheism, for me, started as a step back from actively believing that Jehovah God was a real person into a neutral place in which I was able to consider the evidence with an open mind as to whether he existed or not. Basically I began an investigation to determine if there had ever been anybody on the other end of my lifelong relationship or if it had just been me talking to myself all along.

My investigation of God turned out to be even more interesting than I had ever expected. First off, I was startled to learn that the God I had grown up with, Jehovah, had a deep and interesting past that predated the Hebrews who made him famous. I found out that he had been worshipped by the Canaanites as El and by the Akkadians before them and the Babylonians before them and the Sumerians before them. I found out all about the deep roots of the Bible stories that I had assumed were invented by the Israelites, but weren’t. I found out just when and where the tetragrametton YHWH was corrupted into the form Jehovah that my peculiar religious cult had venerated as the name of God. I learned a lot about the followers of this God, but I couldn’t find him. The more I learned about him, the more it became obvious that Jehovah only differed from Odin, Zeus and Jupiter in so far as people still believed in him.

There was no finding God in the study of history or the Bible because, let’s face it, the Bible is a little history and a lot of fiction all mangled together. It’s a human product, written and extensively edited by humans, and fascinating as it is, it has no more to tell you about any sort of God that exists in reality than any other book.

No, if I was going to reconnect with God on any level, I needed to look elsewhere. The Bible turned out out to be a dead end and I was able to satisfy myself that Jehovah was one God I could chalk up to fiction. Still, I tried to think of other conceptions of God, conceptions of God that could actually have a chance to exist. Not sky gods who created planets for fun and muddled in their inhabitants affairs, but gods that could be explicitly experienced and required no faith to believe in.

I looked then to myself and the question, just who had I been talking to for all those years? Who was making me feel guilty? Who was making me feel safe? Who was I leaning on, bargaining with? Who? And the answer was obvious… my own conscience.

This was a little surprising to me. I had for years thought of myself as a person who had a malfunctioning conscience. I didn’t think that my own inner voice was a very reliable guide because it seemed to want me to go against what I thought God instructed in the Bible. I wasn’t supposed to steal or covet, I did both at various times. I wasn’t supposed to lie or commit fornication, ditto for those sins. What was strange was that I never recognized that the disapproving parent looking over my shoulder when I did things I regretted wasn’t God, it was me, questioning myself, judging myself, telling myself “this is not who you are, this is not what you really want to be” and I just never recognized it.

Once I realized what that voice was, who it was, who God had been all along, I saw my life differently. I realized some basic things about myself. For one, I realized that I desire and thrive in a strong family environment and that I’ve beaten myself up over the years for stupid decisions in relationships because they have kept me from building the strong family unit that I crave. I realized that while I have urges and cravings, I do not wish to let them define me. They are not who I want to be, and they are not who I am. They are just urges and cravings. I used to think that I was basically at war. There was God propping up my better nature on one hand and me fighting to undermine it on the other. Suddenly I saw that it was just me all along and that who I wanted to be didn’t require a God and was in fact hindered by belief in one.

Believing in a God caused me to see my own internal strength as external, as something I had to beg for, hope for, and feel humbled to have received despite the fact that it was simply a well I could have drawn on at any time with a proper understanding. Believing in God caused me to hate myself instead of learning how to understand the complexities of being a self-aware animal with millions of years of evolutionary programming living in the artificial construct of civilization where some of that programming is inappropriate. Believing in God caused me to make bad decisions and use them as evidence for myself that I was a fundamentally flawed human being. Losing that belief, recognizing God for who he was, united my mind and made me feel like a whole person for the first time since I was a very young child.

A Buddhist might say I’ve found God, that he was in me all along, etc. I’m not saying it’s God though. I still don’t believe that to have a good, strong, part of yourself that makes you wish to do what is right, a conscience, morals, requires that you call it God. I prefer, in fact, to call it what it is… human. I went looking for God and I found my inner human. Now I’m one happy, healthy atheist. Thank God.