How I Stopped Being An Atheist.

A story of philosophical and religious conversion

In my last article, I spoke about how I was born an atheist and a rebel. My parents’ combative attitude to religion and authority really shaped my consciousness in my early years. My scepticism created a creative and experimental mindset but also complete chaos in my life. I see in young people I know the same existential angst my rational scepticism created in my life. I see myself in them. They lack a clear identity and feel the need to identify with something more substantial than themselves, but cannot trust anything outside their minds.

I have listened to their stories about suicide, confusion, and anxiety. I shouldn’t be shocked because I had been an angsty teen myself. Still, the thought struck me: these kids are losing their minds. Nobody was saying anything to stop them. They were like water rushing downhill and getting out of control, and nobody was saying:

‘No. Slow down.’ You don’t want to think about thirteen-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds losing their minds. These should be the days of happy and carefree childhood, but the kids are under siege, just like the rest of us. Constant exposure to the ills of the world through the internet has made kids more cynical and anxious. They are more sheltered physically than ever but more mentally vulnerable. Life has never been materially better, but what is missing?

I saw in them overdeveloped minds and inexperienced spirits, spirits that cannot restrain their destructive patterns of thinking. There are limits to individual thought. I made arguments for thinking for yourself, but the intellect can make an image of life, simple, two dimensional, a fascinating toy but an unsolvable Rubix cube. This can make even complex problems seem maddeningly simple until you try and solve them. When I look back on my confusion as a teen and how my mind works now, I realised that it didn’t have to be that way. There was nothing really wrong with me, I was intelligent but poorly trained. The mind isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything.

As a generation, we Millennials are a bunch of narcissists. We were often taught that our mind is the most extraordinary most precious thing in the world and that we could do anything or be anything, but this was a lie. It’s hard to even be a basically decent person. It requires a great deal of attention. Being a good person is not something that will be done with the click of a button or the flick of a wrist.

Intelligence, in fact, has no correlation with being a good person. There have been many geniuses who died penniless and alone with no significant achievement and nothing but loathing for the world. The nazi’s highest-ranking generals were all of mensa level intelligence. It did nothing to stop them from seeing how simply wrong their actions were, in fact, intelligence can often do the opposite; the Unabomber had an IQ of 167. You get my point. Learning humility and being a responsible person who pays attention and works hard is far more important than intelligence; this has been the most freeing knowledge of my life thus far.

When I was younger, I would climb out onto my roof to look at Dublin and the street below at night and sometimes I would think about jumping off. I thought how much easier it would be to not exist than to exist. How everything was so complicated, my family, friends, school, maybe I would be better off not living? I cursed God for giving me such a cursed life, which I couldn’t control. I didn’t even believe in God, yet here I was, blaming him.

When I went to my mother looking for answers about why I felt so messed up, I explained to her that:

‘It felt like everything inside me was in the wrong place,’ like I was a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces had been shuffled. Or a game of operation and some evil surgeon had switched my organs around.

My body was sealed up with this internal chaos. It was a disorganised conceptual body, a liver for a heart, and lungs for kidneys. There was no way of getting inside myself to fix the mess, I had to just carry it around inside me like hot burning coals. I knew something was wrong, and that feeling carried on through most of my life. Thinking back, I was more an abstract concept trapped in a boy’s body than a boy. I didn’t even feel like a boy. At that time, boy was a gender category assigned to me. This is how little access I had to my own body and my own feelings. A lot of the confusion we see in young people these days is precisely that, confusion. They are confused because we have let go of stability, and they are paying the price for our experimentations, we destroyed the categories that allowed order in the world.

When I was younger, I was a stranger to myself, to my family, to my community, and to my culture. A substantial proportion of the population is suffering from the same thing. Alienation is always projected outwards into the world, projected onto the political structures of power, an object of focus for anger and resentment. That feels good. It feels good to blame someone, to have an enemy who can absorb all of your own worst characteristics, be it God, the government, or the system. Whoever, they are the bad guy, and you are the good guy. How do we solve this us vs them problem? How do we offer certainty to kids in this time of considerable uncertainty? How do we providing real identities for people to grow into, which are meaningful and not pointless? As Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, you have to sacrifice your youth for something. We need something we can believe in, a principle that unites us.

What I do know when I am confused, or lost, is I sit down and have a conversation with my conscience. I asked what I should do? I listen to the answers, I negotiate and then do what I am told. This exercise requires trust, humility, and forgiveness, I haven’t heard many words like those lately. When you listen to your conscience, the bits of the psychic organs have a voice in your mind again, the opportunity to restore balance comes about. Still, often this will not be what you or the majority of people want, listening to your conscience will not make you popular. But through this path, you learn to trust yourself again and build a future that you can believe in, a meaningful and real tomorrow.

The reason I didn’t listen to my conscience before, to my parents, society, or anyone else, is because I saw the order as the bad guy. That control, order and masculinity were not trustworthy, like an evil businessman. Sure order can be evil, but it is also essential to living a meaningful life. I was told God was corrupt and bad as a teenager, and by extension, I was the moral authority of the world; I had not yet mastered brushing my teeth properly. Chaos and creativity, and disorder were good but that never brought me peace. We are at the tail end of a lot of good intentions and bad ideas in the 21st century.

Life is not a perfect science, and we would not be here if not for those who came before us and the sacrifices they made. Just because you don’t agree with the past doesn’t mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater and not believe in what has gotten us this far, I mean would you trust an idea that had been tested for 40 years or 4000? We claim to be empathetic, compassionate people, yet still judge the people of the past with no mercy, people who are dead and not here to defend themselves. I still see their ghosts, the screws they turned, the walls they built, the work of the past is what guards us against the cold outside and whatever lies in wait in the dead of night. We are indebted to the past. Yet people act like they have done a grave injustice in building this society and allowing us to exist.

Often times I wonder if God came down and said to me,

“Do this, this and this, and then you’re going to die with no reward...” Would I listen? Faced with a future I could no longer profit from, could I do the right thing? That’s the story of Jesus. His conscience, God, said: ‘look buddy your times up, this is the hill you are going to die on’ And unlike the rest of us, who would run and hide, Jesus said, ok, I’ll do as I’m told. He put aside his ego and his scepticism and rationalizations and excuses. He thought, ok, I’ll just do what I’m told. Jesus went knowingly to his death for the good of everyone else, and we still know this story 2000 years later. If you could make a story which would last more than five minutes these days, you would be doing pretty well, so you have to wonder, what is it that lets such a story last so long? Bring the story to your door even if you don’t want it, even if your heart is closed you still know it by heart?

I was twenty-three years old the first time I ever feared a crucifix. I caught a glimpse of a cross on the roof of a church from the speeding train in Berlin, and I shivered because suddenly, I knew what the story meant. I felt the horror of that step into the unknown from where there was no return, the leap of faith. I was terrified. I am terrified. It is a heavy burden knowing that your life matters, and I think that is why some people pretend theirs doesn’t because to accept your life matters would mean facing your failures. Becoming an adult means taking on responsibility for yourself and your potential in a real way. That doesn’t always feel good. In fact, if you take it seriously, you can be petrified, but as Carl Jung said:

“The start of maturity is when childish defiance turns to fear...”