Sinnerman?

In the years past, I was a tad hesitant to reveal my atheistic thinking whenever I was asked about my religious beliefs.  The hesitation resulted primarily from a concern over how my response will be received.

An "atheist" is often imagined by the religious as equivalent to one with loose morals and every possible bad habit that one can imagine, whereas my life is far from that, as a non-smoking teetotaler who does not go near the deadly sins of gluttony or sloth or envy or greed.  I am not one who is quick to express his anger either. As for lust, hey, recall what President Jimmy Carter said? Pride I have in plenty. So, it took me a while to overcome the concern that my atheism might project me as somebody that I am not.

But, then quite a few years ago, I emerged from the religion closet, and ditched my "agnostic" label in favor of the "atheist" one.  And, liberating it has been since!

In this essay on why people quit religion and how they find meaning again, the author writes:

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of navigating life after religion is coming to terms with some of life’s biggest questions, or existential concerns. Each human has to find some way of making sense of deep, pressing questions: Who am I? Am I all alone in the world? What is the meaning of life? What happens after I die?

The author of that essay, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He writes that “many people continue to find religion to be a source of strength and meaning in their lives.” They do, indeed. I don’t go around questioning their beliefs unless they draw me into that conversation.

Every religion offers its own answers to life’s biggest questions. A cousin, who is a firm believer in the religion and practice in which I was raised, once decided to engage me in a conversation. So, of course, I jumped right in with a question: What if it turns out that the answer offered by vedic Hinduism to the question of what happens after death is wrong, and it is another religion that has the correct answer? What if it is zero returns on a lifetime of investment in a particular faith?

Any person of faith surely has to consider the possibility that another religion’s answers to our existential questions could be the correct answer and, therefore, their faith won’t deliver the results. But then, I suppose the faithful are called the faithful for a simple reason: They remain committed to their religion, which provides clear and comforting answers to the big questions.

Those of us who leave religion behind have to look for answers on our own. As I walked away from brahminical Hinduism, I found life to be a lot more fascinating and rich and complex and human when now it was up to me to develop the moral guidelines to live by without the old religious prescriptions. For all the non-believer that I am, I consciously think about my existence, and worry about what it means to be human.  Perhaps I think about it too much that my words and actions piss people off. But, all I try is to stay true to the values and ideas that are important to me without trying to tell others about how to live one's life.

For an atheist like me, when bad things come my way, like when I got laid off in a Zoom meeting, I do not need a god to turn to.  I understand that like how good things happen in life, well, bad things happen too.  Life is like the snakes-and-ladders game that we played as kids.  We love it when ladders boost us, but curse the snakes that make lives miserable.  But, that is life. I am acutely aware that the entire cosmos does not exist only to serve me and my interests!  The cosmos is. It doesn't have feelings towards me or you or anybody else.

If Earth itself is nothing but "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam", as Carl Sagan poetically described it, and I am nothing but a mote of dust on Earth, then, it is wildly crazy how trivial I am in this universe, which is all the more why it is important for me to understand what life and my existence means. In so many different ways, as many posts here and in the previous blogging platform that I used reveal, I am trying my best to understand what it means to be human, and what my place is in this universe whose vastness I cannot even begin to imagine.

Of course, one can see many aspects of the old religion in the manner in which I go about my atheist life. Losing my religion does not mean I don't value and cherish many of the lessons that religions offer.  There is plenty to be understood about the human condition, and a religious lens certainly provides valuable insights into some of them.

More often than not, it turns out that I practice traditional religious values in my irreligious life more than many faithful do. Many years ago, an evangelical Christian couple who were my neighbors told me that I lived a Christian life more than most Christians do. Years later, that same couple voted for the guy who unleashed white supermacist and neo-nazi forces on the country. It surely has to be a twisted religious interpretation that justifies voting to power a guy who is everything that any religion says is how we should not live. I broke off relations with the couple; for all I know, they simply cannot wait to vote for him in this election too.

Unlike that couple and most people of faith, I live a Socratic examined life, in which I ask myself what might be the right thing to do when decisions have to be made. It turns out that living the life of an atheist is way more wonderful than I could have ever imagined.

In such a framework, for instance, I am sure I would have arrived at a bottom-line of eating animals is cruel even without any brahminical upbringing. Many years ago, when I was in India, I needed to get away from Chennai after a couple of unbearably hot summer days.  My father suggested Yelagiri. The entire family went there for a weekend.

While walking around in the morning, I noticed two goats tied to a lamp-post outside a meat stall.  A few minutes later, when returning to the hotel, we passed that place again.  There was only one goat, and it was bleating away.  The other one was hanging dead with its innards exposed. The bleating goat knew what had happened, and knew that it was next in line for the butcher’s knife. One doesn’t need vedic Hinduism to see and hear animal cruelty, right?

The essay author, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, and I are in agreement; he writes:

Some work lies in crafting a life and identity after religion. Here, the goal is to go past being defined by what you are not, such as non- or anti-religious, and move toward a sense of self defined by you are. Consider your core values and strive to align your life around these values, so you can live them out with integrity.

Exactly.

There’s a reason why my thoughts drifted towards this topic. It is Navarathri in the Hindu faith. Nine nights (and days) of celebrating the feminine divine. And three weeks later, it will be another high holy day of Deepavali which is also known as Diwali.

This old professor does not like the word Diwali for a simple reason that there is no “w” sound in the old languages of India. I wish they would at least write it in English as Divali, because it is the “v” sound that is written out in, say, Tamil or Hindi. But, pointing out such things to the faithful is not my concern. More than anything else, I fully understand that life is not about grammar issues.