I don't
recall exactly when it was I gave up the notion of a god. It was not one of those epic moments about
which one later says "I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing
when" thus and so took place.
Though it was an event that shook me, it would hardly have disturbed the
dust on a seismograph.
I can,
however, say for certain that it happened late in my four years of high
school. A Catholic high school,
ironically, Cardinal Spellman high school in the Bronx. And, in retrospect, the incident feels embarrassingly
naive.
Along
side of literature, algebra, Latin, and gym classes, religion classes were required
in Catholic high schools (there's a surprise).
And, while most of the academic courses were taught by brothers (the
male equivalent of nuns) and lay (civilian) teachers, the religion classes
called for the big guns – priests. The
perpetuation of faith could be entrusted to no one less.
In one
of these classes, Biblical miracles came up, specifically with respect to the
story of Moses and the escape of the Jews from Egypt. Fun! It
was always impressive and comforting to hear how God intervened on behalf of
his chosen people with timely and awesome miracles.
But there
it began. Someone (perhaps I) marveled
aloud about the mighty hand of God parting the deep, turbulent waters of the
Red Sea to allow Moses and his horde to cross and escape the pursuing Egyptian
chariots (Charlton Heston as Moses in The
Ten Commandments rendered a stirring reenactment of that awe-inspiring moment). Father (let's call him ... O'Hara) smiled
tightly, and said: "Wellllllllll
... not exactly." Huh? "You see there are times," he
continued in a voice that rose an octave or two, "when the water level of
the Red Sea is so low, so low you could just amble across it." You mean walk across it? Low tide?
Then where was the miracle?
"Wellllllllll ... the miracle is it happened just when Moses needed
it," he replied.
Okay. Then, of course, there was the miracle of the
manna from heaven. The edible substance that, according to the Bible (and
the Quran), came snowing down from God's pantry to
feed the Israelites during their travels in the desert. God again looking out for his own. "Wellllllllll ... not exactly,"
Father O'Hara intoned. "You see
this manna is vegetation in the area that blew in from nearby trees." What, like pollen? "But the miracle was that it
happened," he hastened to add, " just when Moses and his folks were
hungry."
And the
Nile water turning to blood? Don't tell
me ... "Wellllllllll ... there's
these organisms in the water, you see, that turned the Nile water red,"
the discombobulated cleric conceded with a shrug, "and the bugs killed the
frog-eating fish, which in turn caused a population explosion among frogs and
..." Okay, got it. There were no real miracles, just good
timing.
I left
that class with a heavy and unshakable feeling of betrayal. If Father O'Hara and presumably the brothers
and the lay teachers and the nuns and everybody else, except for me maybe, knew
that there are natural explanations for the Biblical miracles, then why teach
us these events enrobed in myth and hyperbole to begin with? Why not teach the episodes as naturally
explainable but miraculous in their timing?
That would have been enough for me.
But not anymore. All bets were
off. Everything was now open to
skepticism and challenge. No more taking
things "on faith." For me, faith had become the self-deluding practice
of believing in something against the evidence of your eyes and brain and common
sense. I found I could no longer drink
the Kool-Aid.
Whether or
not I was naive to be as scandalized as I was about the non-miracle miracles,
the fact is that the shock opened my eyes and knocked some sense into me. From that moment on, religion became
irrelevant and, though I'm not crazy about the label (a discussion for another
time), I have been a confirmed atheist. What you see is what you get.
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