Annika (South Africa)

In the Roman Catholic Catechism, apostasy is held to be a mortal sin, one that condemns the sinner’s immortal soul to hell if the sin is not confessed and absolved. That is what I have been since my late teens/early twenties, about two decades ago: a mortal sinner in the eyes of the Church and some of my family members and friends. It is the discomfort and misplaced anguish of these friends and family members over my becoming and remaining an apostate that concerns me, not the threat of hell everlasting, which I consider to be a not-very-convincing and crookedly manipulative subterfuge.

I grew up a girl second youngest among three brothers. Our parents had immigrated into South Africa from Europe but weren’t forcefully strict on religious matters. In defiance of Church edict, my mother took The Pill because four kids were, in her view, enough. Still, we went to church, confessed our sins, said our Hail Mary’s, did Confirmation, attended Midnight Masses, listened to the Pope whenever he had something to say to the world, and followed many of the other Catholic traditions. As is usual for young children, making friends with others wasn’t difficult for me and, at various times, I counted among my friends children of Jewish, Anglican, Greek Orthodox, assorted Evangelical and various Protestant parents. From a young age on I was for some reason fascinated by the insides of houses of worship and so I accompanied some of my friends to their religious services. I think that by illustrating vividly that conceptions of “god” are many, varied and generally irreconcilable with one another, these experiences helped later on with my renunciation of religion, but they weren’t the main impetus because at the time I didn’t appreciate the full import of the doctrinal misalignments I was observing.

My brothers and I read a lot compared to other kids our ages, probably because both of our parents were avid readers and our father had amassed over time a sizeable library focussed on history and politics, although there were all sorts of other works of fiction and non-fiction to choose from. We had an Encyclopaedia Britannica which we often consulted to find out more about a topic or to dig up obscurities that we kids would challenge one another with à la Trivial Pursuit. Some of my brothers’ toys were more interesting to me than some of my own; I particularly recall a Mecchano set and a gyroscope that were sources of endless enthralment for me, providing many, many hours of deep absorption.

My elder brother was more of a rebel and an individualist than either my eldest or youngest brother. In general, I got on best with him and he started collecting music in his early teens, something I too started doing a few years later. Our tastes were similar and were often called “eclectic” because we avoided the mainstream (though not totally), and instead sought out alternative material well before “Alternative” became its own genre (and a misnomer). Among such recordings, there also were to be found strong counterculture and fringe offerings that, while sometimes perhaps of dubious musical merit, often had thought-provoking lyrics that challenged various accepted social norms. An example especially relevant in the present context is Public Image Ltd’s Religion. Such exposures broadened cultural horizons and simultaneously showed that no conventions are above being questioned, at some point, by someone.

At school, we had religious instruction right from the beginning. Initially, this consisted of readings from the Bible by the teacher, and I always immensely enjoyed the stories, especially those of the Old Testament, perhaps because they painted vibrant yet simple pictures contrasting god’s absolute right against men’s clearly depraved wrongs with striking images of mighty, even excessive, wrath being visited upon transgressors and deserters of the faith. In later years, religious instruction classes were broadly split two ways into Roman Catholic and Protestant/Lutheran/Evangelical denominations, which aroused my first suspicions that something was not quite right with this god thing: why were we not all the same, belief-wise?

During the latter half of my high school years, my aptitude for mathematics and science flourished, mostly at the hands of a science teacher who had abandoned a more lucrative position in industry, where his job, by his own account, was “to develop washing powders that wash whiter,” in favour of a teaching post. He had both a real passion for these subjects and the ability to convey the salient points of a topic clearly and succinctly, so I and a very few others would often remain a few minutes after class to ask him all manner of questions related to science and mathematics. I think it is he, more than anyone else, who engendered and helped me develop a critical faculty at an early age.

It was around the same time that I became increasingly bothered by something of a disparity between the tenets of the religion I had grown up with and the world I was observing. In essence, it was that the world is not how one might expect it to be, assuming that an omnipotent, omniscient, supremely benevolent creator had shaped it for humanity’s purposes. This went further than just the so-called Problem of Evil (of which I had no knowledge at the time) that theologians and apologists do their level best to sweep under the carpet. I saw good people being thwarted and bad people getting away with doing bad things. I saw the suffering of animals and the hurt of broken dreams. I saw the incongruity of unrequited love, the despondency of dashed hopes and the callous rudeness of untimely and undeserved death. I saw lopsided unfairness besetting with indiscriminate abandon the world on its every turn.

Surely, no god this good and this powerful would – could! – let things just carry on that way!? No apologetics or theodicy was adequate to abracadabra such an increasingly jarring discordance away. This niggle’s insistence increased over time, becoming a blemish, a stain, a blot, a flaw, a glaring fault that eventually led me to a full-blown rejection of my religion. In its initial stages, it could rightly be said to have been a “disappointment” in god but it was no less effective for that in calling (a, any) god’s existence into serious question and bootstrapping my journey towards atheism.

At the universities I attended where I completed undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in mathematical physics, the scientific method itself and a few non-degree-purpose courses in formal logic, philosophy of science and epistemology helped consolidate in my mind the dawning realisations about the essentially baseless and rickety nature of the framework that is religion, how it not-very-subtly weaves threats of divine retribution into its stories and how it exploits young minds’ uncritical acceptance and obedience of authority and, more generally, people’s natural hopes, fears and insecurities.

Moreover, and equally importantly, these studies crystallised for me the many grave logico-ontological difficulties with, even self-contradictions inherent in, the supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and supremely benevolent nature of various posited (monotheistic) deities. The inundating verbosity of theological “arguments” for (a, any) god’s nature and/or existence all struck me, after the unnecessary fat had been pared away, as little more than an overly contrived, inordinately convoluted, but ultimately sterile series of bogus semantic conjuring acts. In contrast, scientific arguments, though seldom easy, were always amenable to concise presentation. While wrestling with these issues, I wasn’t yet ready to jettison entirely all ideas of transcendence and mysticism. I immersed myself in many of the common popular delusions like astrology, tarot, auras, etc. in the hope that they might lead to a more profound understanding of the world and life. But the camel’s back was already severely strained. Each of these pursuits after a while and upon scrutiny seemed based on ideas that were no better, no more solid, no more fruitful than the religious ones I was finding less and less satisfying.

Over a period of about three years, I eventually came to understand fully that there is no real value in superstitious and wishful thinking. I think that that realisation helped make me, ironically, a calmer and more contented person. My parents had taught me right from wrong and there was no reason to fret over what a disinterested and overwhelmingly improbable god might have in store for me. Perhaps this shift in outlook even contributed significantly towards my finding a wonderful, compassionate and likeminded husband, and thence a daughter who is a major golden thread in the tapestry of things that give our lives meaning and purpose. No religion or god required for that.