Thursday, April 28, 2016

What pop culture influence primed you for atheism?

I feel like this is kind of a tricky question, because I think the tendency is for the hardcore religious people to look at that kind of thing and say, "see, that just brainwashed you into losing your faith; that's why I don't let my kids watch or listen to anything secular!" Dan Barker once made the comment, "If I had limited myself to Christian authors, I would still be a Christian to this day."
Of course, we atheists see that is a recognition that it's important to expose yourself to different viewpoints to increase your chances of reaching conclusions which are actually consistent with reality. But for dyed-in-the-wool believers, that can just be read as a cautionary tale which should teach diligent Christians to quit reading and watching the infidel material you've been absorbing, because it could cause you to lose your faith (not because your faith is wrong, of course, but because those heathens are so darn good at deceiving people).
I actually had a whole debate with my brother one time, after he said that he thought my enjoyment of comics and such worldly media was partly responsible for my break from the church. I don't remember him ever being able to give any good reasons why he thought that was the case, but the point is that when believers become non-believers, other believers who want to hold onto the feeling that their belief is rational look for things like this to justify how the apostate only left for irrational reasons.
That being the case, I have to state up front the caveat that I don't think this did anything like that (brainwashing me into apostasy or making me leave for irrational reasons), and in fact I don't think this really did much to make me leave the church in the first place (the question is about what primed you for atheism, and I wasn't a full-scale atheist until long after I left the church). With those caveats, I think the answer for me is a podcast called You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes. The show features Pete interviewing various famous people (the vast majority of whom are fellow comedians), but as the title suggests, they get into some topics that are far off the beaten path of the usual interview, and one of those topics is God and religion. So while listening to that podcast, I heard people with a lot of different viewpoints talk about why they held those viewpoints.
What's kind of ironic, though, is that there's been this weird sort of mirror parallelism between Pete's story and my own. His upbringing was similar to mine in that he was raised in the church and sincerely believed it himself, but then he lost faith as an adult. When I first started listening to the podcast, I was still a dogmatic believer, but chill enough that it didn't offend my sensibilities to listen to someone who had left the church. I guess I just figured my faith was stronger than his, and I inwardly cheered whenever one of the guests professed faith as well.
Anyway, this mirror parallelism I mention is basically, in the episodes I listened to as a believer, Pete was very much like, "fuck religion, I'm just done with it," and it seemed like most of his guests were atheist or nonreligious. But then, in the episodes I listened to after I became more of a full-scale atheist, Pete seemed to drift back to a more spiritually-minded, "I don't go to church but I do pray," "I don't know if the stories in the gospels are true, but I really like the ideas they convey" kind of guy, and it seemed like more of his guests were either somewhat religious, or the kind of person who calls themselves an agnostic and says it takes just as much faith to be an atheist as a theist (to his credit, Pete usually did a really good job of straightening those people out about how "agnostic" and "atheist" are not mutually exclusive, and how ascribing the label of atheist to yourself does not necessarily indicate a claim to knowledge).
I recognize that this is most likely an effect of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, at least in part, but it still kinda humorously seems as if Pete Holmes (and the show) are going along this path that seems to mirror and reverse my own. I suppose it would be really funny if, after a few years, I slid back into a softer "spiritual, but not religious" stance, and then the episodes I was listening to at that time showed Pete developing into a rabid anti-theist.
So yeah, that's probably a much longer answer than anyone would ever expect to such a simple question.

No comments:

Post a Comment