Atheism, Conversion, and Class?

[vixengrl]

Against all the good sense I have, I started reading the HuffPo religion section, mostly because I like trawling for bloggable nuggets in what sometimes feels like a slurry of glurge. I came across an interesting article, which I'm actually only highlighting for one sentence, just because it sums up something I've noticed in how believers react to nonbelievers which puzzles me.

The article is here. The weird sentence is this one:

I'm no religious zealot, but I do like the idea of atheists being introduced to another perspective.

My husband is an atheist who used to be Catholic and all of his family still is. My family is variously Lutheran, Catholic, and Baptist. We've both read Buddhist and pagan works, and know people who are Buddhists, Muslims, Wiccans, etc.

Given that most people have some sort of theistic belief-system, introducing an atheist to "another perspective" strikes me as a little like introducing an islander to water. And yet this really seems to be how believers sometimes approach us--I've received amusing "From a friend" kind of pre-written e-mails that go on about the Bible as if I've never read it.


(Apropos of the study: I'm a working-class kid, and my education is what it is. I have an undergrad degree, but I'm mostly an autodidact. I tend to think of my own path toward atheism as being closely connected to my liberalism--which has roots in both my class-consciousness and my attraction towards the "reality-based" viewpoint. I would have thought that inculcating a non-theistic and rationalist view would tend to prevent recidivism to theism--but people do seem to "reconvert", or have offspring that select a faith-path. This amazes me. Enough so, that I won't comment on it because I can't even say I really see how it happens: only that I've been "exposed to that perspective", too.)

[lazarus]

1. heh

Sometimes I think of those people who say gays just haven't tried sex with a lady yet, or something like that. The idea that someone has fully considered and then rejected their precious mythology just doesn't fit with their world view. So we must obviously have just not tried hard enough to pray, or not read the Bible properly, or something like that.

I had some JWs stop at the door a few weeks ago. I was in a fairly good mood, so I didn't invite them in for play, but they just had to ask if I had read the Bible at all. I told them I had, twice, and am reading it again right now. "Didn't you get anything out of it?" My response: Why do you think I'm an atheist?

[realisticphish]

2. right

they always say: "I'd like to tell you about Jesus."

Yeah, I spent the first 18 years of my life being told about Jesus. That doesn't change anything. There are few, if any, people in even my generation raised as atheists. Therefore, we come with built-in perspective

[onager]

3. Thanks to you, no thanks to the pretentious asshats.

...introducing an atheist to "another perspective" strikes me as a little like introducing an islander to water.

Nail, meet hammer! And thank you for that perceptive snark.

I was raised an SoB (Southern Baptist). But as a kid I often stayed with a relative who dragged me to the Fire Baptized Pentecostal Holiness Church.

When I escaped all that to Southern California...my ex-wife was a sort of SoCal temporary Jesus Freak, who dragged me to meetings "where there is no leader." My ass - there was ALWAYS a leader, usually some dickwad with a guitar and a Bible. A former gf was briefly a $cientologist, so I had a good look at that scam.

And as I often rant/brag, my job has taken me all over the world. I've seen varieties of religious experience that would put William F-ing James on the laughing gas permanently

With Muslims during Ramadan in Saudi Arabia, I drank the Holy Water from the Zamzam Well. In northern Taiwan, I watched the admittedly beautiful ceremony of propitiating the Sea Goddess. Right outside my hotel in Tokyo, I would go sit in a Shinto shrine just for the peace and quiet. In Cairo, I bribed a custodian and climbed into one of the city's highest minarets - built in 1492 CE, with a great view of the old-school-religion Giza pyramids shimmering in the distance.

Argh! Sometimes I feel like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate..."

HOWEVAH...while seeing all that stuff, in my atheist skin I never believed for a second that any of those rituals had any effect on reality. Any more than the evangelical tent revivals I saw in childhood produced real faith healings.

(Apropos of the study: I'm a working-class kid...

Same here. My father was a construction worker. My mother did all sorts of different jobs, from waitress to seamstress. About half of my family sharecropped cotton on the farms and the other half worked in cotton mills processing it.

...and my education is what it is. I have an undergrad degree, but I'm mostly an autodidact.

Ditto. I got my BA degree in night school while I was serving in the Marine Corps. Ironically, that degree is from the infamous Pepperdine University (remember Ken Starr? LOL!).

I'm convinced that Pepperdine only used otherwise unemployable professors for us off-campus proles.

So my faculty ranged from John Birchers, to diehard anarchists who had us reading Proudhon and Emma Goldman, to an active-duty Marine infantry officer who set us to dissecting Shakespeare for political dirty tricks.

I could not have POSSIBLY had a broader college education!

:rofl:

Never thought much about "class and atheism." I'm thinking about that right now, and hope to one day post something remotely intelligible about it.

So thanks for getting me thinking about it. I guess...:-)

[awoke_in_2003]

7. "Blade Runner"

I thought I was the only other person that would admit to having seen that movie :)

[lazarus]

8. really?

that's a top ten of all time kind of movie. Have you caught the final cut of it? I prefer it without the narration from Deckard.

[awoke_in_2003]

9. No, I haven't...

will check netflix, though.

[trotsky]

4. Well that fits neatly with the very common religious meme...

that an atheist just had a bad religious experience, and became mad at gawd because of it. Odd how that author spends a lot of time whining about how atheists supposedly look down on believers, and then spends the rest of her article looking down on atheists, belittling their positions, insulting their intelligence, yada yada. Pot, kettle, and all that.

I too am a former believer, grew up in the fairly liberal ELCA. As I lost that faith, I explored Buddhism and read a ton of philosophy. When I took a comparative religions class, I attended Catholic, Jewish, and Quaker services. I've introduced MYSELF to those other perspectives, thankyouverymuch. And not one spoke to me.

But of course that doesn't sit with the believer. I'm still just either in denial, or haven't had the right introduction yet, obviously. :eyes:

[Warpy]

5. I don't know about the connection to class

My own mother was lace curtain Irish, from quite a wealthy family, who was an agnostic who believed in reincarnation and considered herself a practicing Irish Catholic. My dad's family were academics, well enough off to be educated and educators, but I think he was much more of a believer.

They both died unbelievers. I had nothing to do with it. I've been a working class atheist all my life, but with a working knowledge of several classes other than my own. I find believers and atheists in all classes.

I just find it odd that people at the bottom with the least reason to believe in a benevolent deity seem to be the ones who most do.

The arrogance that says atheists need to be "introduced" to religion is a common one, I'm afraid.

[Odin2005]

6. I come from a working class rural Lutheran background.

I've had enough "exposure", thank you very much. I'm also mostly an autodidact.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

11. I'm sick of hearing about Jesus too.

I was raised Presbyterian, graduated from a very fine Presbyterian university, became a Unitarian(which fit me better than any other church), trolled through xtian churches, became a full dunked xtian, had to leave because all that original sin-you are worthless and awful-shit made me suicidal.

Now I'm an atheist Unitarian Universalist and I read a lot of Buddhist scriptures, particularly Mahayana (Chinese). I'm very interested in Kwan Yin and the Taras, as archetypes of compassionate goddesses, as so much of our religion is male-dominant and I'm sick of that too.

And here in East Texas where they beat ya over the head with Jeebus all the time, I'm about ready to spread atheist propaganda around.

My grown daughter is an agnostic. I think that's pretty cool.

All authority figures and institutions take your personal power away from you. If you let them. So don't let them tell you what to think.

[Odin2005]

12. I'm also an Atheist UU who is into Buddhism, but mostly Theravada (SE Asian) for me.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

13. Cool.

I ordered all the original Nikayas in the new translations by Bhikkhu Bodhi (except the new translation of the Numbered Discourses which is not ready yet) from Wisdom Publications. www.wisdompubs.org

I also ordered the basic text "In the Buddha's Words" in which Bhikkhu Bodhi has kindly given us some direction in where to start reading.

Heavy stuff but quite interesting.

[progressoid]

10. That's interesting.

I've often thought that it would be a good idea for religious types to be exposed to other perspectives.

Like most of us I have explored nearly all active types of religion. Some quite thoroughly. That's sort of how I got to this place.

Of course, for other people, exposure to religions other than their own, it may only reinforce their own faith. Mileage varies.

[vixengrl]

14. Responding under my own thread--but it's neat to find that other

atheists also have wandered through different paths like Buddhism--which I am actually still fascinated by. (My house looks like what I call the "Thing Dynasty" with Buddhas and Kwan-Yins. Which also describes my decidedly atheist hubby's tattoos. My tats are Egyptian.) I suppose I won't find as many people who also went through the "High Magick"/Wicca path to arrive at non-belief, but I tried a bit of everything. My personal slant is along Socrates' line that the unexamined life is not worth living; except for me, it's that the unexamined belief system isn't worth having. As a result of this idea, I am always looking for what the good take-away bit from any culture or faith might be, without necessarily embracing it.

Is it snobbish if I view people who settle on any particular faith path as "settling"? And, as a faith-oriented follow-up, how would anyone else respond to the idea that atheism is also a form of settling or giving up?

(My answer to that is that doubt is active thinking--to be a skeptic means questioning. My atheism is as turned-on intellectually as anyone else's faith, because I have to also invent my relationship to the world always against new data, and still be logically coherent--in other words, I'm a reality-based liberal by both philosophy and affect, but I really have to think about it. I conbine Mahayana with the Wiccan rede and with Christian humility--sometimes. The consistent part is weighing moral pros and cons. In other words, atheism has to be active at least in the way I view it--because it is a rational exercise.)

[lazarus]

15. I dabbled in Wicca

when I was younger. All my friends were Wiccans, but I never could bring myself to really believe any of it. My wife is sorta Wiccan, but more atheist than not.

My atheism is very active. I'm currently re-reading the Bible (Skeptic's Annotated, very fun), have read all the Mormon books, and am going to do the Koran when I finish the Bible. I'm also reading The Portable Atheist on the side.

[TZ]

16. My mother thought it was good for all of us to be exposed

to a little religion so we could make up our own minds. We were raised in a secular Jewish way but went to Sunday School with the Unitarians for awhile. Personally I think thats appropriate, let the kid make up their own mind. None of us were forced to go if we didn't want to though...:)

[DavidDvorkin]

17. That's sort of related to the arguments theists produce that they are

sure will instantly convert the atheist they're talking to. They do it in a manner that says, "I bet you never thought of this!"

Odds are that the atheist considered that argument, along with many others, during the period of his life when he was liberating himself from religious belief.

[DavidDvorkin]

18. The last four paragraphs of that article

are meaningless babble.

[iris27]

19. Outside of that one sentence, the rest of that article is pretty much slurry.

YOUR sentence, however ('introducing an atheist to "another perspective" strikes me as a little like introducing an islander to water'), is fantastic and I kinda want to put it on a t-shirt.

Does the author of the HuffPo piece think she has discovered anything insightful? Most studies show that lower socio-economic classes are primarily theistic, and atheists tend to come mostly from higher SES groups, okay. Well, then, wouldn't it be fairly obvious, and pretty much the furthest thing from "a curveball" that the converts - i.e. people who grew up in the opposite tradition from where they landed as adults - would be just the opposite? I mean, not to get middle school here, but...duh.

Kid from a working class family here ("upper-class poor" according to my dad). Deconverted from Christianity at 20, while halfway through putting myself through college.