moving beyond fundamentalist atheism (salvation chronicles appendix - free)
as a radical atheist, i was a different kind of prisoner than i had been as an evangelical: a prisoner who was still fundamentally confined even if they had been granted many more privileges
this is appendix material to the salvation chronicles
written in december 2022
minimally edited; minor additions; stylized with the capitalization used at the time
my views have changed since this writing: i no longer identify as an atheist
“You’re being very… chill about this,” I say cautiously. “Considering you’re a passionate atheist and everything, you’re accepting the notion of a spirit demon very… gracefully.”
….
“The thing about being an atheist is I don’t have a problem with belief. I just don’t like religion.”
“So witchcraft is fine, but God is not.”
“Sort of, yeah,” Fiona says. “I can accept that you accidentally summoned a demon to take away your best friend, but I can’t accept the concept of original sin.”(Caroline O’Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts)
I cannot say I regret being an extremist atheist to the same extent that I regret being a fundamentalist Christian.
I doubt I can even say I regret my fundamentalist atheism at all, since it was a necessary stage toward freeing my mind from the infantilizing effects which Evangelical Christianity has upon the brain. But even if my atheism functioned as an effective antidote to the fears of Hell and sex which many clerics are still striving to inject into the minds of children, and even if my godlessness helped me purge myself the most perverted aspects of Christian morality, the stridency of radical atheism still restricted my experiences in new ways which I am now overcoming.
All atheism signifies is the outright denial that God or gods exist. In that sense, I think Fiona’s definition might be a little too unfocused, as she credits her atheism to a distaste for religion and does not mention God at all. Even so, as I was reading All Our Hidden Gifts, this particular passage about atheism and witchcraft halted my progress. She gets it, I thought. This is what I’ve been telling people for a few years now, only to receive some of the most puzzled and even concerned expressions from the many materialists within my social circle.
Yes, I am an atheist, I try to explain, but I try to find it easy to believe in spirits, both good and evil ones. I like the idea of believing in witchcraft, tarot, astrology, and the summoning of demons. I suppose I lack the respect most atheists seem to have for the scientific method as the final word on truth. Then again, this isn’t really about truth. It’s about exploring other ideas for the sake of their aesthetic appeal, although I want to believe so strongly that: yes, I end up believing.
photo my own (prospect park, brooklyn)
When I recently proposed to a similarly-minded friend, also an atheist, that we attempt to summon a dark entity, both of us were a little too afraid to go through with any ritual. As Maeve, the protagonist of All Our Hidden Gifts, suggests about one of her friends, we simply have too much respect for the occult to turn it into a game.
When the demon-summoning idea came to me, we had just been finishing up some Christmas shopping at Barnes & Noble. It was an experience which renewed my fantasies of committing the ultimate act of defiance against my old faith by communing with God’s most wicked enemies.
Atheism was not a conclusion I came to after years of careful study. Atheism was an emotional release, and the source of that emotional release would have been as easily inclined toward paganism as toward science.
There were times in my early 20s, the height of my atheist fanaticism, when I almost even wished God were real, just so I could pursue an adolescent delusion of leading a rebellion against him like Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials. My mom used to tell me God would prevail at Armaggedon, but I was angry enough to look Christians in the face and tell them I’d see them on the battle field at the end of days.
No, logic has never truly had anything whatsoever to do with my atheism. If I’m being honest, the deciding factor for me on the road to atheism was not the cool rationality of science but rather something like the Devil in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
My friends, laughing, assured me that I would fall to me knees before the power of the Lord, and I dreaded my seemingly inevitable submission every time I heard “O Holy Night.” Regardless of God’s reality, however, I have steadily been drawn ever closer to the topics forbidden by his ministers. and not only by ministers: by scientists as well.
The Barnes & Noble we visited held a massive section flooded with books, some of them huge and expensive, on ridiculed and dangerous fields ranging from spellcraft to divination to communication with spirits. I can’t recall seeing anything quite like it sixteen years ago in high school.
“As Christianity recedes,” I suggested triumphantly, “paganism is spreading.”
My friend nodded eagerly. We were planning on starting a coven together. As my readers know, the coven did not turn out well:
Having grown up Evangelical, I know the terror which these dark arts inspire among many Christians. They believe wholeheartedly in witchcraft but see spellcasting as a tool of the Devil. My mom always told me: “don’t let anyone ever tell you that witches aren’t real! They are real, and they get their powers from Satan!”
I often told this to people at school: witches are real! you fools!
This is why I wasn’t allowed to read Harry Potter.
And that was also why I wouldn’t read it secretly.
I self-oppressed when it came to witchcraft.
I grew up believing in the witchcraft my elders warned me to avoid. In a sense then I have always believed in witchcraft: my mom, my church, my grandparents, my aunt, and even some of the adult friends of my parents taught me constantly to believe in witchcraft. I say this simply because: I never needed to make my way to witchcraft; I’ve always seen witchcraft as real: whether as enemy, friend, or ambivalent.
photo my own
So at Barnes & Noble, I was greatly pleased to imagine the old distressed Christian parents, worried that their children might end up tampering with demons, and I found myself hoping that these parents would fail to pass down their cherished religion to their own kids.
Yet I didn’t want or expect these children to become atheists.
At least in America, I cannot imagine a scientific materialism replacing Christianity. Humans seem innately to sense and perceive something more to reality than the physical world around us. Perhaps thanks to the advent of the Enlightenment, Science, and Capitalism, many of us now insist upon the supremacy of “reason” over the “senses,” despite the fact reason is ultimately rooted in the senses.
We have spiritual senses, but our doctrines tell us that these are illusions, and so we ignore them. We are only supposed to use the first five senses: the senses after the fifth sense we are taught to discount and view as nothing more than fantasies. But this is no different from never using your eyes or ears: our senses have dimmed.
Ever since humans invented electrical lighting, our belief in a binary between the “supernatural” and the “natural” has become rigidly enforced; and the dividing line keeps shifting toward the right, as if a void of nothingness were steadily expanding, sucking up all the beings we once knew to be real.
Take the declining presence of elves, or hidden people, in Iceland.
Perhaps it is true that electrical lighting is what has driven away the hidden people. Suppose we accept that spiritual beings only reveal themselves in the dark of night or in the deep recesses of an unexplored landscape. Anthropologist Adriënne Heijnen suggests both in “Dreams, Darkness, and Hidden Spheres: Exploring the Anthropology of the Night in Icelandic Society.” Thanks to modern science, that darkness which once concealed spiritual beings is now subjected to artificial light, and the beings who naturally enjoy the dark have fled from the artificiality which we have imposed upon the earth.
excerpt from “Dreams, Darkness, and Hidden Spheres: Exploring the Anthropology of the Night in Icelandic Society”
The lights we put up have obliterated the stars and cast a great emptiness upon a sky that is actually filled with endless amounts of beauty. If the light we cast upon our streets and across our society has taken away the stars, what else have we lost?
We have no sense anymore for the reality of the world.
I try to be optimistic.
At least based on the obvious prevalence of astrology and the growing demand for spellcraft books, I cling to the hope that both the Enlightenment and Christianity will struggle to overcome the intensifying appeal of paganism, or at the very least both will abandon their fundamentalist angles and freely adopt ideas from “supernatural” perspectives that do not force us to limit our senses in the name of being “reasonable.”
We humans want something more than materialism. As organized religion weakens, a currently disorganized paganism, taking ideas that have been passed down across multiple regions for many centuries, slowly replaces it, satisfying the yearning.
As an Evangelical, I liked to boast that my mind was closed not only to all ideas but also to all interests which might jeopardize my salvation and send me to Hell. Once I left that behind, I went through a brief phase of radical open-mindedness, yet the most doctrinal atheism soon rebuilt the crumbling walls around my brain. It was not enough to reject the existence of the Christian god.
Dogmatically convinced that all supernatural experience was nothing more than a trick played upon me by my brain, I also rejected all forms of both religion and spirituality, all in the name of being seen as a “reasonable person” who had left faith behind. For me, radical atheism was simply a new way of closing my mind to all ideas and experiences which contradicted my strictly materialist worldview: I thought that by hiding within the fiction of materialism, easy to believe in during a technological age, I could avoid ever again experiencing the trauma I had inside of Christianity. In that sense, when it came to witchcraft, I approached my witchy interests like I would approach a girl after being abruptly dumped and developing serious trust issues.
I was unwilling to consider becoming a witch because I had thoroughly replaced the intellectual suffocation of fundamentalist Christianity with the uncompromising materialism of New Atheism.
Lately, I have been wondering why I would have wanted to trade one fundamentalism for another. It was much worse, of course, as a Christian.
For so long I felt a need to scan virtually everything according to whether it would cultivate or undermine my faith in Christ, whether it would inspire me toward righteousness or incite me into sin. That meant being weary of all kinds of books, television shows, video games, musical artists, politicians, news outlets, philosophies, and social activities. To be free from those restrictions — to intentionally think, do, and say things that I knew the Christian god deemed sinful — was one of the most intoxicating aspects of becoming an atheist.
But even if my mind was always much more open to new concepts in general as an atheist than it ever had been as a Christian, my newfound zealotry against religion allowed certain anti-theistic doctrines to limit me from the truly free pursuit of ideas, which for me means pursuing ideas not only for the sake of understanding “objective reality” but also for the sake of simply deepening my engagement with anything that interests me. When confronted with witchy beliefs in astrology, goddesses, tarot, demons, spirits, or sorcery, I dismissed them all without any investigation or consideration, telling myself that all of that stuff was bullshit, mocking it with my friends. All the while, I wanted to know more about these mysterious fields.
Outright disbelief in the occult, which came like nothing to my friends, came to me only with great difficulty. I was drawn to paganism, and I have always gravitated into conversations with those who practice it. Even as a radical atheist, I was attracted toward people who believed in the occult, and I would often ask them questions respectfully in the hopes of learning more about their perspective.
But I was careful. As a defense mechanism to keep me contradicting the pseudo-religious principles of my radical atheism, I always told the pagans that I was a deeply convinced materialist. I said I wished I could believe in spirituality but I just couldn’t. Yet I was suppressing the embarrassing fact that some part of me already did believe. I was refusing to acknowledge the products of my own senses because I believed they were “unscientific.” Eventually, I gave in. I began reading more occult books myself.
I remember one atheist friend of mine ranting to me about how he couldn’t believe how stupid people were for believing in astrology. “How can they think,” he said, “that the position of the stars affects their personality?” He scoffed, looking to me with confidence about my agreement. Instead, I told him that isn’t really an accurate description of astrology. The universe, I explained, is a whole, and everything is connected. It’s a simple principle, I told him: “as above, so below.”
There is a correlation, but not necessarily a cause, and that is why the position of the stars matters in terms of events on earth. We are all ultimately one, united together in the universal compassionate soul, and gravity never stops: the gravity from the most distant stars is touching us right now.
Apparently unable to believe that I was seriously defending astrology, he pressed on, but in doing so, he only revealed that he had neither read nor considered the ideas he was so viciously attacking.
He told me none it made any logical sense, and I told him it’s not about logic, it’s about poetry.
“Magic is about poetic thinking,” I explained, quoting a book I had recently read on the subject. I said it in a tone that showcased my seriousness about the topic, but he looked at me like I was delusional. He incuriously repeated a few misconceptions about astrology. Intimidated by his confidence, and anxious to make sure he saw me as a “serious” “thoughtful” “rational” “man”, I reassured him I didn’t really believe. I had just read a book about it.
His face seemed to ask me why I would read a whole book about astrology.
“It was only one chapter!” I added. “In a book about the dark arts as a whole.”
He grimaced. We shifted topics.
There was no hope: he was a fundamentalist atheist. This, I knew, would be like arguing with my grandma about Jesus. His whole expression reminded me of how one super Christian relative reacted when she saw me get a Buddhist book for Christmas. As if protecting herself from a devilish presence, she recoiled a bit in her seat. Comparing her in my mind to my scoffing companion, I felt like I had merely traded Christian pastors for the high priests of atheism as the new guardians of what I might respectably read or consider. My issue, I mean, wasn’t that he disagreed with astrology. It was that he constantly and viciously attacked it without knowing anything about it, almost as if he were a Christian youth minister warning children about the lies they were going to learn in biology class about the origins of species.
This socially enforced closed-mindedness, which was one thing I hated most about Evangelical Christianity, had followed me into my liberation. I would be an idiot, I thought, if I sat around reading witchy books. Better to read books by snickering neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists debunking it all. Just as I had once divided books into those which edified my faith in Christ and those which undermined it, I was now dividing them into those approved by Reason and those which Reason opposed. As a radical atheist, I was a different kind of prisoner, one who was still fundamentally confined even if he had been granted many more privileges. To be truly free, I needed to be able to remove the guardrails of reason when electing what to read.
Like all organized religion, my fundamentalist atheism kept me within certain Thought Boundaries defined by made up concepts about the “scientifically possible” and “the scientifically proven,” leaving me with a sense of shame about my interest in those realms of knowledge and experience which lay beyond science’s sanction.
Now I have freed myself from that shame, and I have ceased to care about the atheists’ concerned expressions when I tell them that I have been reading about magic. It feels more natural and liberating to consider new concepts from an emotional and sensory perspective instead of merely from a logical and scientific one.