Jesus sighed (in exasperation)

What's wrong with this picture of how a young, worldly Manhattanite became a Catholic?

A few summers before, my sister and I had taken ourselves to Europe, and when in Florence, we visited the baptistry. We stood under the dome, under a bearded, dark-eyed Christ looking down on us from the ceiling, seated in judgment, surrounded by angels, saints, evangelists, and prophets. His face gave me a start. I recognized this face, although it had never been made visible to me by the churches I'd grown up in. This was the Jesus of the lover's sigh. Of the mother's sigh. The Jesus I had been praying to all my life, whose open hands offered infinite mercy. There he was suspended above us, arms outstretched, suffering everyone to come unto him, whether indifferent, curious, hostile, or humble. He had been sitting there for centuries, wanting really only a few things from us while people came and went below him. Come unto me, if you want to, everyone down there flipping through guidebooks, taking pictures, arguing about where to have lunch, tugging your children on to the next sight.

That day I saw that I could not be anything other than a Christian.

Where do I begin?

The most obvious shot across the bow here is that the statue was not Jesus; it was an artistic representation of Jesus specifically intended by the artist to impress. That's the kind of thing that artists do; we're usually way more into impressing people than we are into boring people. Creating boring stuff just isn't as satisfying as you'd maybe think.

Note that she had been raised Christian as a child, and only converted to Catholicism later, in her twenties. Already her mind had been primed with the Jesus meme from an early, impressionable age, which makes what she immediately says next hardly surprising:

I could not be a Buddhist. That seemed faddish — what you did when you wanted to be spiritual without having to subscribe to a religion that was unpopular for the way most of its adherents practiced it. It was what hippies and vegetarians did, and I wanted no part of it. If the Beats embraced it, with their sloppy rhapsodies, I wanted no part of it. I was too much a lover of Christ and his words to leave him behind for Judaism or the Unitarians. He had come alive to me — for me? — in that baptistry in such a way that I knew it would be impossible to follow anyone else. If you walked into a building and, upon Christ's looming, you felt that you should drop to your knees, even though you had spent your life arranging things so that you would never be in such a supplicating position, you had to give up: He was yours, and you were his.

Of course you couldn't believe in any one of those other religions; they didn't have Jesus in them! You know, the Jesus you had been praying to all your life. But Catholicism is nice and arcane, while still having Jesus in it! Bish bosh, and Bob's your uncle!

Really? that's all it took? You don't reject those other religions because you found the claims made by each are bereft of compelling evidence to support those claims, but instead simply because they don't have Jesus in them, and/or they seem "faddish"? That's the extent of mental deliberation that takes place when you make decisions? Or is it just religious claims for which you turn off your brain when evaluating?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

My introduction to religion was as a young, impressionable child when my mother attempted to raise me as a Christian. I think back then I probably believed tenuously at best. She had been sure to instil a fear of Hell in me, and I think I generally accepted for awhile the claim that there was some kind of god "up there" somewhere. But that was about it, and I already saw a number of cracks growing.

Praying never did anything for me. I never felt anything special; no "presence", no sense of empowerment or of anything more than me talking to myself inside my head. We were never really a church-going family, but my mother always seemed to go from one to another and would drag me along. We even went to a Catholic church at one point, where I took communion. The cracker tasted like shit. I remember thinking at the time that they should have used Wheat Thins instead. But free wine for a 7-year-old? Woohoo! It was a really massive room, with what looked like hundreds of people all packed into seats arranged like a colosseum around the pulpit, and we were up in the nosebleeds to the right of the pulpit. I'm guessing there was a mass and that was why we were there that day, but I don't think she ever explained why we went there that day so I don't know for certain. I do remember quite vividly, however, as the priest led everyone in prayer, how I didn't close my eyes and instead just looked at everyone, this sea of people all with their heads down and eyes closed, and suddenly felt really creeped out.

I definitely didn't believe the events in the Old Testament any longer than it took for me to stop believing in Santa Claus. The creation, Adam and Eve, the talking snake, Noah's ark, those were about as believable as the other fairy tales I'd been told like Jack and the Beanstalk or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And on the other hand, the whole Jesus thing never made sense to me either. How he could be the son of God but also be God? And how is it a sacrifice for him to die when he knows beforehand that he'd be okay and back up in Heaven in no time? Nor did it make sense in the first place for God to have to come up with this incredibly complex, Rube Goldberg machine of a plan to impregnate some peasant woman immaculately with his magical seed so that he could grow up to serve as a human sacrifice (and what's that about?) all to forgive humanity of its "sin". And if Adam and Eve were bunk, then the original sin for which Jesus "sacrificed" himself never existed, which kind of made the whole thing pointless for him to go through in the first place. But even if Jesus' death did wipe away all sins, what sense did it make to have infinite punishment for finite crimes? And it especially didn't make sense for knowledge and complicit acceptance of all of that to be the membership card you need to get into Heaven. What about all the people who died before Jesus did? What about the people who never knew about Jesus even in the months after his death simply because they lived in France and news travelled really slowly back then? And every excuse offered only created more questions. When I was around 18 or 19, I sat down and read the whole Bible over the course of a couple months and that was the final nail in the coffin, pulling the plug on a belief in Christianity which was by then already on life support.

In 2005 I attended a Buddhist monastery in Greenwood for a few months in order to immerse myself in it and be able to learn about Buddhism and decide for myself if the claims made held up to scrutiny. I even filmed and edited a video about the Wheel of Life with the help of the monastery's iMac G5, and met the founder and Principal Guru of the monastery, H. H. Jigdal Dagchen Sakya Rinpoche. It was a valuable experience and I met some really quite lovely people there, but in the end there just wasn't any "there" there. The evidence for reincarnation was shaky at best, most likely making it in to Buddhism because it was what Siddhārtha already believed before he sat under a tree for 49 days thinking up Buddhism. And sitting around with a bunch of other people simultaneously reciting mantras in Tibetan made about as much sense as if we'd been reciting hymns in Latin.¹

Earlier and throughout my life, I had done this with several religions, practically running the gamut, from animism to shaminism to pantheism and beyond. I've studied the Abrahamic religions and their myriad branches and sub-branches. I've read up on Bahá'í, Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, Taoism and Hinduism. I've looked at ancient, extinct religions like the paganism of the ancient Norse and shiny new religions like the John Frum cargo cults of Oceania. I've even taken time to try out tarot cards and astrology, the latter of which always seemed especially silly to me because nobody ever seemed to account for leaplings like myself. Religion after religion, tradition after tradition, belief after belief; they all made astounding claims without providing a shred of compelling evidence to back them up.

In the end I dismissed all of them, becoming an atheist. But I dismissed them because I did not find their arguments compelling, not because they didn't have Jesus in them or seemed "faddish".

If any of the things which all those religions out there claim to be true are true — any of the claims about what happens to you after death, forces acting upon the world in your life that you need to account for, and so on — then investigating them to evaluate their veracity should be a very important thing indeed. If someone tells you that your spirit is going to live forever, and that if you don't watch out it'll spend the rest of eternity being punished, wouldn't you at least want to find out if such a spirit exists? Since our beliefs inform our actions, and our actions have consequences, don't you want to have as many true beliefs and as few false beliefs as possible?

It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg

Last year, 11-year-old Kara Neumann died from diabetic ketoacidosis after her parents, instead of seeking medical help, simply prayed for healing. She had been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. The girl's parents, who have both since been convicted of reckless homicide, attributed the death to not having enough faith.

''If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God,'' [Dale] Neumann testified. ''I am not believing what he said he would do.''

A little girl is dead because her parents accept as true the claim that, as the father said, "God promises in the Bible to heal" and made a decision — based on that belief — to hover over her, chanting to their magical sky wizard to save her instead of taking her to see a doctor who could treat her and give her a chance at living a long and happy life.

In 2003, then-U.S. President George W. Bush told then-French President Jacques Chirac that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

How can Bush be so fanatical in his beliefs? Because he accepts as true the claims in the book of Revelation. That's it. He just really, truly believes it. And why not? It's in the Bible! Why should it be at all surprising that if you tell someone that a war in the Middle East will bring about 1000 years of sheer awesome, where everyone gets to live in peace with lifespans of a whopping one hundred years, all the animals become pacifist vegetarians, and people don't have to do anything other than eat, drink and hang out all day telling Jesus how cool he is — and they believe you — he or she is going to want to start a war in the Middle East?

Intellectual freedom is essential to human society

Do I like the fact that 25% of U.S. citizens believe a book of Bronze Age myths is literally true? Of course I don't. Nor am I happy with the fact that 85% of Americans apparently believe in one form of superstition or another. But whether or not I'm happy with what people believe is a different matter from whether or not people should be allowed to believe it, and on the latter I am a staunch advocate for freedom of religion. People should be free to believe what we like; but we aren't free to do what we like. We can't kill, We can't steal, We can't yell "fire" in a crowded theatre. Believe what you will, but if you take actions based on those beliefs which cause harm to others, you're accountable for those actions; that's one of the cornerstones of any free society that is based on the rule of law. But freedom always comes with responsibility. That's why it's important to not just believe everything you're told without compelling evidence to support it. That's why investigation and experimentation is important. That's why critical thinking and logic is important. That's why the scientific method and peer review are important. These things comprise a toolkit with an excellent track record of being able to separate out what's likely to be true from what's not likely to be true. And what's not part of that toolkit is the method of dismissing a claim merely because it doesn't conform to your own preconceived notions and prejudices.

Nobody is saying you don't have a right to believe whatever you want to believe. I'm against the idea of thought police as much as the next free-thinking person. In fact, that aversion to the very idea of thought crime is one of the many things that drove me away from Christianity in the first place; what else is sentencing someone to be tortured for ever and ever and ever because they thought the wrong thoughts anything but sentencing them for thought crime? No, that way is tyranny. You are free as anyone else to believe what you will; I'm just saying that you might want to put a little more care into deciding what it is you do or do not believe.