Sunday, One Woman's Journey From Despairing Atheism to Faith

THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL, ILLUSION OF SUPERIORITY

MINE WAS A DESPAIRING PRIDE, a lonely pride and ultimately an alienating pride. But it provided a dark kind of solace. Feeling like an insider is terribly seductive. Once you're there it's hard to back down. To retreat from the precipice of despair would mean would mean 'those people' you whom you've taken pride at sneering at...really did know more than you.

It would mean giving up the lonely, terrible sense of being special by virtue of everyone else being a fool.

Yet I was troubled by what I knew of myself. I sense the pride that sustained me was not really healthy; it connected me too easily to contempt and predisposed me to isolation. I knew I was prone to vindictive and intense anger, perhaps all the more terrible because I almost never let it show. I knew I was capable of physical as well as verbal rage. I once lost my temper at a fencing tournament and in a split-second vented my anger by hitting my opponent so hard on the mask that my sabre broke. I was frightened by my own loss of control, so I pretended it was an accident, but I knew it had been deliberate. Whenever I glanced into the deep well of anger in my heart, I knew all was not well.

My atheism was eating into my heart like acid.

On 9/11 I was at first genuinely shocked by that vicious destruction of innocent life, until I began to rationalize myself out of my emotional reaction. What did these people matter to me? Why should I grieve for strangers? It worked; I stopped caring....In a transitory moment of insight, I recognized my condition as numbness, not superior rationality.

However satisfied I declared myself intellectually, however impregnable this intellectual fortress of atheism seemed to me, it was a terrible place to live. It's foundations were not on solid rock as I thought, but on shifting sand. Even as I grew more intellectually enamored of atheism, I found myself having a harder time living in light of its conclusions.

My worldview was entirely negative. I could not have explained the source of my own rationality, nor of my conviction that there were such things as truth, beauty and goodness. My worldview remained satisfying to me only insofar as I refrained from asking the really tough questions.

So I didn't ask those questions.

What I didn't realize at the time was how inconsistent I was. I used the language of morality, even as I argued that the Source of all morality did not exist....but I was sure that the words 'good' and 'evil' referred to real things and I ought to strive for the good, even if it didn't benefit me personally.

Although my creed held that there was no ultimate meaning, I did, stubbornly believe there was such a thing as truth---and I valued truth as an absolute good. That is why I so firmly rejected what I thought faith was: making yourself believe something comforting but untrue.

And I wanted to know and live by that truth---no matter what.

----Holly Ordway, Not God's Type, A Rational Academic Finds A Radical Faith