On Atheism

I spent 22 years of my life as an agnostic.

ag·nos·tic

Pronunciation: \ag-ˈnäs-tik, əg-\

Function: noun

Etymology: Greek agnōstos unknown, unknowable, from a- + gnōstos known, from gignōskein to know — more at know

Date: 1869

1 : a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god

So it was a very big step for me when, a few months ago, I made the big leap to atheism.

athe·ist

Pronunciation: \ˈā-thē-ist\

Function: noun

Date: 1551

: a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

 For some time I believed that atheism was level with theism in the unsupportable assertion that there is or is not a supreme being as defined by theist organizations as an omnipotent and omniscient conscious entity.

the·ism

\ˈthē-ˌi-zəm\

Function: noun

Date: 1678

: belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically :belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of the human race and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world

god 
\ˈgäd also ˈgȯd\

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old High German got god

Date: before 12th century

1 capitalized : the supreme or ultimate reality: as a : the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe b Christian Science : the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind
2 : a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship; specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality
3 : a person or thing of supreme value
4 : a powerful ruler

I find it interesting that Merriam-Webster dictionary places a special subsection of the definition for the capitalized God, as opposed to the lowercase. God the presumptive supernatural creator as opposed to the idea of any supernatural being.

su·per·nat·u·ral

Pronunciation: \ˌsü-pər-ˈna-chə-rəl, -ˈnach-rəl\

Function: adjective

Etymology: Middle English, from Medieval Latin supernaturalis, from Latin super- + natura nature

Date: 15th century

1 : of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially : of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil
2 a : departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature b : attributed to an invisible agent (as a ghost or spirit)

So, as an agnostic, I was defining myself as impartial, that I was incapable of making an informed opinion on whether God was a realistic idea I could pin my beliefs on or that it's an unsupportable claim with enough evidence to the contrary to disprove its existence. God, ghosts, spirits, bogeymen, angels, tooth fairies, goblins, unicorns and any other mythological creature have the same amount of empirical evidence as the other. I do not believe the tooth fairy exists because I found out my parents were the ones putting money under my pillow and they were lying about it. That wasn't incontrovertible evidence of its nonexistence, but my faith in the tooth fairy was shattered by that breach of trust.

A few months ago I realized that deep down inside of me, no part of me is capable of believing in the uppercase God.

This has been an important part of the whole 12 steps thing -

• Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
• Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
• Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
• Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
• Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
• Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.

 I think it's very well-established by now that I have trust issues. Why should I trust the same creature who I'm told put me through all these "tests of faith" that have had such horrible lasting effects on me, just because he wants to see if I can trust him afterward? That is an abusive relationship, and so I am avoiding it and having faith in myself instead.

I have faith that I am greater than I have allowed myself to be, and that everyone is greater than they are told they can be. I believe strongly in the power of the individual person and feel that if any 'miracle' occurs it has less to do with a supernatural god meddling with our lives and more to do with the individual person who made that miracle occur.

Accepting a power greater than myself is a poor wording at best for what I will need to do to make it past step 2.

And then, now that I have humbly accepted that I am an inherently inferior creature, for step 3 I need to turn my will and my very life over to this very same entity that has been supposedly responsible for all the trauma I have been through? Why should I trust it? Because I have no choice? Again, the power dynamics of this relationship make it inherently abusive and I need to escape it, not embrace it.

But let's say that I do give in, I do stop fighting the fight because I see that it's not getting me anywhere, I do accept that I am broken and inferior and that I need guidance from something greater than me, greater than anything human, and that I can define it however I see fit so long as it's superior to me. I need to then make a moral inventory of myself to find every single way I am inferior to it, humbly ask this entity to remove my defects, and then somehow accept that this creature has a specific 'will' for me, a purpose, which is to spread this message to other defective people.

I understand that there's a much more humanistic interpretation of these steps hidden between the lines, and that there is group empowerment in individual disempowerment, and so long as one is associated with the group one gets the benefits of empowerment because the individual was clearly unable to handle the power themselves and became an addict.


This whole process is ultimately what made me realize that I am an atheist. I am absolutely unable to even humor the idea that there is a conscious supernatural being watching over us all. If I could it would be much, much easier to accept the 12 steps and work through them. Instead I have to fight the wording and find what it is that is conceptually beneficial to it all, what it is that they're really meaning for me to feel, and then move through them with that in mind. As a side note, that approach makes it much more likely I'll really integrate the lessons into my life as opposed to lip servicing them which is a major issue in AA.

So, I can no longer claim not to have taken sides. My trust issues made that decision for me.

I'm definitely an atheist, and it would take one hell of an amelioration of that broken trust for me to think otherwise. And since I don't think that sort of thing is really what this God creature is known for, I'm just cutting it off. Agnosticism is humoring it too much for me.

Anger

I've been awash with anger today, and can't sleep. I tried to distract myself with Lost, but as soon as I was done I just started up again thinking about every single person I know and coming up with exactly what it would take for me to say that would really deeply hurt them. I'm posting here because I don't want these things in my head just in case I lose control and they slip out.

I'm just furious, at everything, and I know right where it's coming from. Today I was treated without an iota of trust by someone who I was depending on. He didn't listen to me, and I didn't have a chance to hear him out to see if he has a good reason, and I can't see him again until Monday. I know what's best for me, and when I'm not in a position to make good decisions I do something about it, like check in to a hospital. What's triggering this anger is a lack of basic trust, stemming in part from my constant need to make a case for myself. People presented with the cold facts of my life too often treat me like I'm subhuman. I've watched people dropping their capacity to empathize with me, like blowing out a candle. I've been forced by circumstance and humiliation to try to talk to them until things changed. These memories have a lasting effect on me, they aren't going away.

This guy had better be right about what he advocated, but I need him to sell it to me. I want it so much, it would make things so much easier for me, but I can't operate like this.

I need to sort out my trust issues, badly. I'm hurting myself the most here, by all this rumination on other people's insecurities.

Opening up

I often find myself lost in conversation, losing all concept of time. I become immersed in the dynamics of the dialogue. I analyze so much in the other person and in myself, and in how the other person's thoughts and perceptions and attitudes affect my own, and how I might be affecting him or her. When I'm talking to someone interesting, it's like I move to a different plane. Outside of the conversation and the thoughts and memories it evokes, nothing exists, including time. Just mentioning time snaps me back in reality, which is often unsettling.

A recent conversation brought the realization that I'm opening up more, that I'm asserting my own identity, which up until recently I was entirely unaware existed. This may be a bizarre rhetorical question, but really, is this what it's like to have a personality? Because it's foreign to me. I've always just given back what people wanted from me, I've been entirely reactionary in conversation. To go one step further, if I pushed myself to do something it was because of someone else's perceptions of me or my fear of their judgment. I asserted myself as independent and free spirited not because I was, but because that's how it seemed I was best off being perceived. It's what it seemed the right people would admire in an art student. It was all subconscious, I never set out for such dishonesty, but because I absolutely loathed myself I denied my identity and personality the right to influence my behaviors.

A friend of mine wrote a powerful, fantastic poem called Safety. I hope she doesn't mind my excerpting it, I just feel it expresses exactly what I want to say right now.

"... pretending
is the only piece of me
I have left.
So insincere, so empty, so necessary
submissive stilettos staring a thousand miles away
the real me
is seeking and hiding from me
and the world
and for now
I stay on the door step
locked out
without the key..."

I'm going to do an animation around that poem, maybe this spring. I'm still working on how I want it presented, trying to go past the words, to express the images behind them more than the ones in front of them if that makes sense.

Here's a quote from Judith Herman's "Trauma and Recovery" that's obliquely related.

Her desperate longing for nurturance and care makes it difficult to establish safe and appropriate boundaries with others. Her tendency to denigrate herself and to idealize those to whom she becomes attached further clouds her judgment. Her empathic attunement to the wishes of others and her automatic, often unconscious habits of obedience also make her vulnerable to anyone in a position of power or authority. Her dissociative defensive style makes it difficult for her to form conscious and accurate assessments of danger. And her wish to relive the dangerous situation and make it come out right may lead her into reenactments of the abuse.

The key to the whole complex was empathic attunement. It was deeply rooted in my subconscious, impossible to unsurface, but it dictated all my behaviors, all my personalities. I occasionally wondered if I had dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities), but I was conscious of the behaviors of all my 'alters'. And I wasn't completely at the whim of whoever I was talking to, just to people I respected. If a person was in a position of authority or otherwise earned my trust and respect they won me, in whatever form they wanted me to be. My identity was fluid. My personality was intangibly malleable, pliant, versatile, adaptable, plastic. I said I liked to keep people on their toes when I surprised them with something seemingly out of character for me, but really, they were just seeing a glimpse of a different personality intruding. I think everyone does this to some degree, but I feel like I achieved a certain appalling, subconscious virtuosity to it.

I was at the bottom rung of the totem pole - I hated myself the most. My self loathing was to such an extreme that my mind felt more at ease having deleted myself from my mind, resulting in a sort of autonomous denial of my identity's existence. I truly felt like I was a series of shells, of personalities, and that some were closer to this idea of a 'core' me, but in reality they just kept getting smaller and smaller to infinity, all of them hollow, with yet another shell inside each.

It's difficult to describe the feelings behind that belief - the intense psychological numbing required for it to happen wipes out all related emotion.

Anyway, what matters is I feel that I'm opening up the bottom shells and they're somewhat less opaque than the others. I can see a solid form in there somewhere, I've just got to break a few more walls down and maybe I'll see it.

Maybe I'm on the congo river, seeking out my Kurtz. But I don't believe in a 'heart of darkness', just like I don't believe in original sin. Nothing inside of me now leads me to believe in any form of inherent evil. I wonder what it would be like to be a true sociopath.

Dishonesty

I went to the NA meeting, and was the only person there that didn't speak. It wasn't that I had nothing to say, I just was afraid to say it. That doesn't really happen often for me. I generally am able to speak up and say what's on my mind. But somehow I just clam up at NA and AA, I guess because I never shot heroin or did crack or coke or most of those other narcotics, I never sold my mom's jewelry for a fix. But I do get a lot from hearing them talk, and I'm going through so much of the same stuff. It's just difficult to open up there, despite how open and nice the people are. After the meeting I hung out with a few of them for a while, but I got super anxious and left.

Tomorrow morning I get to go to group again. Because I skipped it today it feels a little awkward, but at least it's just the morning group. Or wait, no it isn't, it's also the substance abuse group. That's going to be a trigger for sure, both for anxiety and for wanting to drink or get high.

I'm so upset by the required urinalysis. I don't want to have to do that, and I may have to twice a week. It's very telling that it upsets me, though. I'm trying to be sober, it should be a good thing, they're keeping me honest. But that's just it, on the half full side I guess what bothers me about it is that I don't like being thought of as untrustworthy. If there's anything that causes me to rage, and I've thought about that a lot, it's when I'm treated as the things I've always been called.

Airhead
Irresponsible
Untrustworthy
Unappreciative

Even (or especially) when it's true, those labels make me so blindingly upset I can't handle myself rationally. I have to show my student ID every time I enter my own home, and that really bothers me because it makes me feel untrustworthy. I've been called those things so many times, I can't even write about it without feeling the need to go smoke.

The less pretty side of why I'm so bothered by requisite urinalysis is that it feels safe to be able to lie, to not have forced honesty. What's the big deal with a little drug use? What's the big deal if I slip and drink a little? Sometimes I just need it, and I don't need to be judged for it! That's the little voice in my head, the one that says I'm special, that they won't understand, that I don't have a problem and I can handle mild usage and it won't hurt, that it will just loosen me up and actually help me.

I have to face the truth. I am untrustworthy, and they need absolute honesty on whether I'm using, which they can only get through drug screening. The fact that I've built up such explosively negative emotions around being thought of as untrustworthy or irresponsible makes it much harder to accept. I've spent so much of my life trying so hard to prove my dad wrong about me, especially when he calls me an airhead, which was one of his favorites. That one bothers me the most because it's the most blatantly disrespectful of me and plainly wrong. I'm the opposite of an airhead, if there is one. I always have way too much going on in there - I'm only ever absent minded when I'm high, and that's a fantastic relief for me.

I'm not able to commit to staying clean for the duration of my time at columbia, much less the rest of my life. I can't imagine always being sober, forever. I think of all of my treatment as just a temporary roadblock in my ultimate goal of being able to use responsibly. I don't know if roadblock is the right word, because I do acknowledge treatment as being necessary to that goal. That's all so unrealistic anyway. Using is inherently irresponsible, I'm an addict, I can't use in moderation. If I use at all, if I allow drugs to be my crutch, then I'm cutting off my own legs. And I don't want to be on crutches for the rest of my life, I want to walk on my own.

It's just so much easier to disappear into drug use, and I can accomplish so much when I'm using, I really did do so much work. But I was so unhappy, it so wasn't worth the cost, and I don't think I have it in me anymore. I don't have the same panic-driven burning engine that pushes me through the night to prove myself to everyone. That was a horrible time of my life and it sickens me to remember that feeling, that need to perform.

Change, change change. Too much of it, all the time. Seven years ago I was 15. Six years ago I was 16. Four years ago I was 18. Two years ago I was 20. Last year I was 21. This year I'm 22. I've lived so many lives in seven years! My brain hurts.

Abuse

Here's a passage from this book I've been reading, "Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Herman:

This malignant sense of inner badness is often camouflaged by the abused child's persistent attempts to be good. In the effort to placate her abusers, the child victim often becomes a superb performer. She attempts to do whatever is required of her. She may become an empathic caretaker for her parents, an efficient housekeeper, an academic achiever, a model of social conformity. She brings to all these tasks a perfectionist zeal, driven by the desperate need to find favor in her parents' eyes. In adult life, this prematurely forced competence may lead to considerable occupational success. None of her achievements in the world redound o her credit, however, for she usually perceives her performing self as inauthentic and false. Rather, the appreciation of others simply confirms her conviction that no one can truly know her and that, if her secret and true self were recognized, she would be shunned and reviled.

This is almost verbatim something I've talked to my therapist about and now, because it's in this book and is so precisely accurate to one of my biggest issues, I've spent a lot of time thinking about its roots. This is in the context of child abuse. What other roots can cause this intense a complex? When I was a kid, were my parents' behaviors abusive?

I know they love me, and I love them. They've been there for me, at least financially and in terms of bringing me to therapy and such. But they rarely show affection or pride for me, and often seem very emotionally distant. Because they treat affection toward me like it's something awkward, limited or even shameful, I have a hard time reciprocating anything. Both of them remind me now of another few passages in the book:

The abused child is isolated from other family members as well as from the wider social world. She perceives daily, not only that the most powerful adult in her intimate world is dangerous to her, but also that the other adults who are responsible for her care do not protect her. The reasons for his protective failure are in some sense immaterial to the child victim, who experiences it at best as a sign of indifference and at worst as a complicit betrayal. From the child's point of view, the parent disarmed by secrecy should have known; if she cared enough, she would have found out. The parent disarmed by intimidation should have intervened; if she cared enough, she would have fought. The child feels that she has been abandoned to her fate, and this abandonment is often resented more keenly than the abuse itself.

... In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent. Sometimes the child attempts to preserve a bond with the nonoffending parent. She excuses or rationalizes the failure of protection by attributing it to her own unworthiness. More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent. She may in fact feel more strongly attached to the abuser, who demonstrates a perverse interest in her, than in the nonoffending parent, whom she perceives as indifferent.

... In the course of normal development a child achieves a secure sense of autonomy by forming inner representations of trustworthy and dependable caretakers, representations that can be evoked mentally in moments of distress. ... In a climate of chronic childhood abuse, these inner representations cannot form in the first place; they are repeatedly, violently, shattered by traumatic experience. Unable to develop an inner sense of safety, the abused child remains more dependent than other children on external sources of comfort and solace. Unable to develop a secure sense of independence, the abused child continues to seek desperately and indiscriminately for someone to depend upon.

...Thus, under conditions of chronic childhood abuse, fragmentation becomes the central principle of personality organization. Fragmentation in consciousness prevents the ordinary integration of knowledge, memory, emotional states, and bodily experience. Fragmentation in the inner representations of the self prevents the integration of identity. Fragmentation in the inner representations of others prevents the development of a reliabe sense of independence within connection.

... The sociologist Patricia Rieker and the psychiatrist Elaine Carmen describe the central pathology in victimized children as a "disordered and fragmented identity deriving from accomodations to the judgments of others."

I think that in a way, I thought of both of my parents as how this book describes the 'nonoffending' parent, though I certainly spent my entire 20 years of living with them in constant fear of offending my dad, who was prone to flying into fits of rage over the tiniest things, and when his anger was even remotely justifiable he really lost it. One time I recycled a box of something, and the bag of recyclables was next to the stove, which had a burner on boiling water. It was maybe a foot away from the flames. My dad screamed, "Everybody, wake up!" at the bottom of the stairs, stomped up them two at a time, and I remember being so scared to admit it was me, but I did and he was absolutely furious. We went downstairs and found that the bags had been ripped apart and tossed all over the kitchen. At first I thought the dog had done it and found it a little awkwardly funny, but I was horrified to find out that my dad had done it in a rage, and that the mess was my fault because I had been so irresponsible. He made me clean it up. My mom helped, I think. Anyway, that's one of my clearer memories. I also remember him wrenching the keys from my hand after I tried to get in the back door once, and locking the door on me, locking me out of the house. I walked several miles in the rain without a coat or my purse, to a friend's house, who wasn't there, so I spent the afternoon crying in a sub shop, Kastore's. They gave me tea and a jacket while I was there, free. He was mad at me because he and I got into an argument, I think over how he had been drowning squirrels in the back yard, and I was too upset to handle it so I said I needed to take a walk to collect myself. He saw it as disrepectful. I can remember a lot of times that he would be screaming at me over this or that and he'd hold my shoulders and force me to look him in the eyes, which I often couldn't do. He was rarely physically violent, but that one bothered him enough to throw me into a door once.

Reflecting on this, I'm reminded of how much I admired the trees in my back yard. I used to talk to them, and saw them as living beings, as friends. I guess they were the idealized people in my life. They just constantly grew and were so strong, and I was the only one who could climb them all the way to the top, a hundred feet above everything. I'd climb up in them and read, or just relax and appreciate how it felt to be rocked back and forth by the wind in the summer. I knew, deep down, that they would always be there - they had been there before I was born and would be there long after I died.

One of them, the biggest and strongest, died because the neighbors put a salt pile next to it, so we had to cut it down. Another died after a big gust of wind blew it over and it crushed half the back yard - I can remember the sound, I was bolted awake by it and instantly found myself in the doorway of my room by the time it hit the ground. Several others were cut down with it because they had been damaged by the fall, or because .. my dad wanted to? I'm not sure. They must have been damaged by the fall, or were otherwise dangerous, or he wouldn't want to waste the effort and money cutting them. Although I remember we had to fight to convince him not to cut down the last beloved maple tree, one which Kim had particularly liked and which I had spent a considerable amount of my childhood sitting in. It was damaged, but not severely.

Our cherry trees died of fungi or rot, two more trees died probably because they were too close to the street and our town salts too much and cuts away indescriminately branches that go near the phone lines or over the street.

The latest tree to go was the Mulberry tree. It was like my last childhood friend. The other maple tree has always been more Kim's friend than mine, though I like it too. My dad decided one day that it had been bothering him for too long - the birds that ate the berries pooped purple on his car, and the berries fell in his swimming pool which he never uses and never cleans but takes care of the chemicals and the equipment. So he tried to force me into helping him girdle it. I didn't realize what he was doing until I was outside, and I freaked out. I was sobbing pathetically about it to him and of course he couldn't understand what made me so upset. I didn't even really understand. This was just a few months ago, and it still hasn't been cut down. He just girdled it so it would die a slow death. Earlier that day I had been thinking happily about how the berries were just starting to come in, and I was so excited for when they were all ripe. Most of them were green, but a few were purple and I had eaten a couple. I guess what excited me brought dread to my dad.

Sometimes I think I'm just too sensitive, too emotional, too this or that, but that's just putting the blame on me. I shouldn't try to take responsibility for what bothers me. That's a whole other post, though.