Member-only story
Nature’s God and God’s Nature
atheistic meditations on religious meanings
Brief Personal Background
Growing up Southern Baptist in Oklahoma, I was exceedingly earnest about my religious convictions. Of course, I believed in God; of course, I went to church regularly; and of course, I read the Bible daily. But, within three years of leaving home, I found myself an atheist, happy to disassociate myself from anything and everything that smacked of Christian fundamentalism, especially the arrogance, intolerance, and outright hatred that seemed to exemplify so much of Christian evangelical belief.
Although I remain a happy atheist to this day, my own fairly well developed views on religion and religious belief continued to evolve informally as I studied the scriptures and writings of an array of religions from around the world. Nothing I encountered in these investigations seemed more central to my own thinking than the Christian teachings on love and loving kindness that I learned ‘at my mother’s knee’.
But, that wise counsel gave me no reason to believe in a superhuman being, especially a celestial ruler of the universe who sentenced earth people to everlasting torture for being gay, or committing adultery, or engaging in sacrilege (although I never quite figured out what that actually meant). I understand that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is particularly unforgiving of misdeeds relating to sex: “Among the sins gravely contrary to chastity are masturbation, fornication, prostitution, pornography, and homosexual practices.”
For over a year I met with a Society of Friends group, discovering that a religion with no authoritarian system of required beliefs suited me right down to the ground. When I first gained courage to speak at a Meeting for Worship, I somewhat defensively apologized for being an atheist. No one batted an eyelash, one member saying to me after the Meeting that most of them were agnostic. I re-affirmed my preference for the term atheist, because I knew for certain that I did not believe in the kind of God that consigned gentle, loving people to everlasting hell-fire and torture for committing minor infractions of a morality dreamed up by a tribe in the Middle Eastern deserts three to five thousand years ago.
