A Skeptic, a Feminist and a Professor walk into a bar (Part 1)

Note: I consider myself an a skeptic, a rational thinker, a feminist and an agnostic. The first two parts are regarding where I am today, and how I got here. The last is about an issue that is important to me that regards both.

Part 1. Skepticism.

Some of you knew me in High School, and if we've ever talked about my past, I walked all sorts of 'spiritual' paths: Roman Catholicism, Non-denominational Evangelical Christianity, psudo-westernized Buddhism, psudo-wiccan-ism, Taoism... and a myriad of others. After I walked and believed with all of my heart in each and every path that I walked, that it would lead to better life, that it would lead me to happiness, that I wouldn't be depressed and none of it came to fruition, I examined my life and became a very bitter angry cynical atheist.

I embodied the stereotype that makes atheism unpopular. I wore shirts that were all black and said ignorant phrases about religion, and openly was blasphemous towards just about anyone who would listen except my grandmother. Jesus/Yahweh were frequent targets as was L. Ron Hubbard, and to a lesser extend Mohammed, Joseph Smith, any anyone with a notion of spirituality. I believed we were born, lived whatever life we wanted to (and it didn't matter), died and nothing else. That everything we did was futile, that anything you tried to accomplish or love or create was ultimately futile, because wouldn't last, or would die or would never make a lasting impact.

I was extremely intense, I was very confrontational, I got in your face and I made it clear that I was incredibly angry. I offered no quarter to religion, spirituality or people who believed in any of it. I was an arrogant human, knowing that there was absolutely no god, that there is no soul and there was no afterlife. And anyone who couldn't see this was a moron and deserved nothing but derision, scorn and contempt.

This was a viewpoint I held for a very long time. I read as much as I could on Christianity, Judaism and Islam (mostly because they are the ones most common in my westernized culture), and picked it apart with relish. I couldn't get enough of "edgy" people like Frederich Neitzsche, Ayn Rand, Bill Hicks, Marilyn Manson, George Carlin, and Bill Maher. I think you can now see where my cynicism came from.

After a while, this life style wasn't satisfying either. It provided me no comfort, no kind of solace in knowing that this life is short, brutal and incredibly unfair for every living thing on this planet, and no real hope. I viewed my life as something that wasn't really unique and it wasn't anything special.

I thought I was being rational and being passionate; rather than what I was: a bitter curmudgeon who read books and thought himself educated. Who listened to passionate rhetoric and thought it to be logical, and then parroting beliefs. A man who fell into every logical fallacy while arguing, and thought that even though he never persuaded anyone, he 'won' the argument.

I started by examining myself, and what I really though and believed. I read and really digested what some of these writings by Rand, Maher, Dawkins and others saw why I felt so cynical and a bit depressed. They were cynical. They were making us vs. them distinctions. They were being 'passionate' of their beliefs, then turning around and not tolerating that some people see their 'passion' as 'shoving it down your throat'. The same thing they accused believers of doing. These hypocrisies and the attitude of I am right, you are wrong was really getting to me. I didn't want that. I didn't like what I was becoming. I wasn't being critical or logical- I was a person who's was living an uncritical, unexamined life.

Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins and most of the "new atheists" were arguing from emotion and not logic. They were drawing their conclusions before they critically examined their evidence. They were falling into the same traps that I thought Fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, and New Age practitioners fell into: they were arguing from the assumption that their viewpoint is right will always be right and has always been right. There was no direct evidence stating absolutely that there is no god or gods/goddesses.

There is evidence for evolution by natural selection, evidence for general relativity, and for gravity, and evidence for the big bang. All of theories (scientific theories, testable, falsifiable and the best logical explanation we currently have) are being tested every day and if proven false can be rewritten and falsified. As written, most deities are untestable scientifically. We can look at claims written in holy books and point out things that science has proven is not true, and back it up with testable evidence, but one cannot dismiss something is true or not true if you cannot examine evidence that does not exist. It is simply not testable.

Now, I live my life in an agnostic fashion. I see no evidence for a deity, so I live as there is no deity. But I can be wrong.

This to me, is the beauty of science... that life is complex, and that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And this subtle complex and intricate system is one of the things that makes me happy to be alive.

The wonderful scientist and skeptic Carl Sagan once said -
There is no other species on the Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

Part 2 will continue with Feminism.