On My Belief

As a child I believed in God.

I believed in God with a child's faith--I never doubted it or questioned it. I also believed in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, alien abduction, ghosts, demons, psychic powers, astrology, and spontaneous human combustion. I believed in magic and thought the world was a magical one, that there were dark secrets and incredible powers that people could and did unlock. I looked forward to the day when I would encounter these strange and supernatural things.

Because of my fierce interest in all of these things I sought them out. This was before the Internet was a thing that could be used by a kid at home, so I was limited in my ability to learn about the monsters and magic I was sure populated the world. I would find books about werewolves and ghosts in the library and beg my mother to buy me magazines about monster sightings or dragons. Every weekend I would go to Bible school and hear about all the miracles and goodness of God and all that stuff.

My Bible study group was called Sparks or something like that. All I can remember about it is there was a weird little white puppet the teachers would use to talk to us about God and we had plastic crown pins that we got to put fake gems in for memorizing Bible verses or something. In these classes we would pray, of course, and the teachers told me that by praying I would feel God's presence and would know how to deal with problems. I prayed when they told us too, as earnestly as I've done anything in my life. I would call out to God and thank Him for everything I had and ask Him what to do about problems in my life or how I could help my mother and father love each other more when they were separated.

Never did I ever feel the presence of God, despite my wanting it more than almost anything. I felt like there was something wrong with me. I lied to my teachers in my Sparks class and told them that I could feel God's presence, that when I asked Him for advice I would hear Him telling me what to do. I decided perhaps I wasn't faithful enough or that perhaps God thought I was doing well enough and didn't need his help.

In the meantime I continued to peruse all the written things I could about the supernatural. The X-Files was probably the biggest show on television when I was a kid and it reinforced my belief in the fact that there was more to the world than met the eye. We moved into a house without my dad and got cable television and I added shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, and In Search Of... to that list. Everything I consumed told me I was on the right track, that supernatural things were just around the corner and I would encounter them soon--I already had friends in school who claimed to have seen ghosts and aliens and whatnot, I was sure I'd find the same things soon enough.

But I didn't. I never found a dragon egg or a ghost's ectoplasm, or felt the presence of God when I prayed. My father began to teach me about scientific forces like surface tension, centripetal force, and gravity. These things fascinated me as much as the supernatural things of my much younger days and I was ecstatic to apply them to my beliefs. I had grown frustrated with the lack of evidence of the magic I knew existed. Eyewitness accounts were great, and there was some physical evidence of course, but never enough. I'd grown old enough to understand the concept of a hoax and nothing made me more angry than reading about proof I'd thought was real turning out to be hoaxes. I became skeptical of the accounts I read not because I didn't think the things the people claimed to experience didn't exist, but because I was afraid to believe another hoax.

I began to apply my rough understanding of science to these things and they always came up lacking. Logical thoughts seemed to always hedge the monsters back further and further from what seemed possible. The Loch Ness monster, I thought, was a plesiosaur or a colony of them. But what were they eating? A predator that large needed more food than a lake in Scotland could provide. Where were the corpses, if it was a breeding population then how could there be no dead animals washing ashore? No droppings or anything other than a few fuzzy photographs and iffy eyewitness descriptions.

Reluctantly I began to think perhaps there was no Loch Ness monster, or Bigfoot. I consigned these and other monsters to a category of disbelief with the possibility that I might change my mind sometime in the future. I became, I suppose, a kind of agnostic in regards to giant monsters.

I still remember the first time someone suggested to me that God might not be real. My cousin was watching me and I said something about God, he said, "Maybe there's no God at all," to me. I was absolutely blown away. I very concept of God not being real had never entered my mind. At the time I was only vaguely aware that there were even other Christian religions besides Baptists. The idea was too big for me to wrap my young mind around and I pushed it to the back of my mind and rarely thought about it.

As years went by and I continued to see no ghosts, no aliens, and no angels I began to move more and more ideas into the "probably not" column of my mind. I would return more and more often to the words of my cousin and would consider the idea that God did not exist. I couldn't stand it--because if there was no God, then what would happen when I died? Even as a very young child I was terrified of death. More than once my mother would find me crying in my bed or the tub because I was thinking about her or my father or sister or myself dying.

If God was not real, then what happened when you died? If God didn't exist then how could Heaven? When you died was it like sleep, but much deeper? The thought made me terrified. I would think back to my earliest memories--confused, blurry recollections of a trailer and wooden toys and my father hugging my pregnant mother. And beyond those memories? Nothing. Was that what death was? Oblivion? No thoughts, no feelings, no anything?

It was too much, I couldn't accept it. I was too young to realize that now it was fear that fueled my belief in God and not faith.

One day, I remember it vividly, I was swinging on my neighbor's swing set and mulling these thoughts over in my mind. I had worked myself up into a scared frenzy, thinking about God and whether or not He was real or made up like Santa Claus. I leaped out of the swing at the same time that I made a decision. God might not be real.

I went up a believer and came down an agnostic.

As I grew older and information became more easily accessed and I learned more about life and myself, I dropped the rest of my beliefs about aliens and ghosts and psychic powers one by one--always sad that the world was becoming less magical and more material, but unable to lie to myself about what I saw. It wasn't until my mid teens that I became a true atheist and committed to the idea of a fully material universe, and my youth made me more than a little bit of a prick in regards to my new "beliefs". I think back to my highschool/late teen self and shudder.

Now I still devour stories of monsters and aliens and possessions. I still want there to be ghosts, I still want there to be a kind and loving God--but I know there isn't. My youth of belief has led to a lifetime of skepticism.

And I'm a better person for it.