Every now and again I get a wistful feeling when I hear someone talking about how satisfying her or his spiritual beliefs are. Such people are often very sincere, I know; when you have a belief, it feels like certain knowledge. So the heartfelt expression of their words is filled with that sense of “real” immanence that looks like bliss. I am not above being moved by the sincerity of others. But I am also aware that this sincerity is no measure of reality or factual truth.

Artist's Anthropic Interpretation of 'God'

A child can very sincerely pray to Santa Claus to give them some special, achingly desired gift. His or her belief in Santa Claus is utterly genuine, and the faith that Santa will hear his or her prayer is absolute. But we know that there is no fat, jolly, white-bearded old man with apple cheeks and a twinkle always in his eye. We know that it’s us, the adults, the parents, who will provide whatever gifts we can reasonably provide.

Yet there is something so moving about a child’s sincerity. Their mistaken belief (that there is a Santa) can lead us to long for the days when we (if ever we) believed in that benevolent, altruistic old man. It is of course akin to the belief in Providence, under whatever name we choose or grew up with. I hear people talk about how their “relationship” with their deity fulfills them, nurtures them, makes their lives better, makes them better as people and sees them through the hard times. And how could one not want that?

If I believed, though, my world would have to be totally different. You cannot un-see the things you’ve seen; cannot unlearn your life’s education by experience. If I believed, I would have to be someone else. And the thing is, I used to be someone else. I used to believe. I was brought up in a basically Catholic household and, like most children, I accepted things my parents told me were just simply true. I asked the kinds of questions kids ask, and I got the kinds of answers kids get, including the “Well, son, God works in ways we don’t always understand” type of answer. And this might have been enough to keep me keeping on with my family’s religion. To paraphrase what the Bard wrote: I could have been bounded in a nutshell, and counted myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I had bad dreams. Those bad dreams were not just dreams, of course; they were bad experiences that shook my whole little world to the core and broke its foundations.

For some people, this is exactly what brings them to a religion. If I believed, I’d cite those horrors as being high among my reasons for my belief. Really, though, those horrible experiences were simply what unmoored me and set me adrift. I can point to them now and say that they are, collectively, the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the things that led to my atheism were spread out over a much longer period and perhaps were rooted in the days before so many terrible experiences had come to pass.

If I believed now, it would have to be in an entirely unfathomable deity beyond any hope of interaction. If I believed now, I would no more accept Jesus than I would Vishnu or Mithras or Mohamed. If I believed now, I might actually hold all the New Age stuff in even more contempt.

Those wistful feelings I have… I understand them in myself. It is not that being an atheist is somehow inherently lonely. Atheists have the same world believers have. Atheists have families and friends and social lives just like anybody else. What atheists lack is a delusional, childlike buffer against the realities of the world. And sometimes it feels like that’s a real loss. When someone else can take up a rosary or join hands with their friends and pray that things get better, I can only look on and shake my head. Only action in this world gets results. As has been demonstrated time and again, prayer has no effect whatsoever on the odds, the statistics, the real world outcomes of events. There is no Santa Claus.

Augustine with his mother, Monica

Tertullian

If I believed, my beliefs would have to take the real world into consideration. My deity would hear no prayers. My deity would be essentially amoral and unconcerned with what we do. My deity would be beyond good and evil. My deity would effectively act (if that word could be considered applicable) as if it didn’t exist at all. But I don’t believe. Nor am I a fool. There is no reason to believe in that which effectively doesn’t exist. Let the Tertullians of the world say, “Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est“. Let the Augustines practice their rhetoric. And let them leave me in peace. I have put away childish things, and I have turned away the “innocent” comfort and the tortured apologia.

Sometimes I suffer a wistful feeling, and that’s only natural. Life is unapologetically difficult sometimes, just as it is beautiful at others times without asking for credit.