Two of my students are pregnant.  An acquaintance of mine just had a miscarriage.  A relative has recently attempted suicide – twice.  I just found out that one of my ancestors may have been murdered.

Life.  Death. Hmm.

I never really believed in Santa Claus.

 “Around the world in one night?”  I ask my mother as we sit by a globe. 

“Yes, to all the children in the world,” she smiles. 

“That sounds impossible." 

As a child being raised by Christian parents I was horrified at the prospect of death and an eternal life in heaven.  It was meant to be a consolation, but it frightened me.  My parents were bewildered and upset by this bizarre perspective I had somehow developed.  Around age 8, for a period of about 6-months, I could not stop cycling a small voice in my head that repeated, “I hate God.  I hate God.  I hate God.”  My parents told me that it was the devil trying to influence me.  Eventually it stopped.

My condition worsened as I grew into a teenager – I was petrified by a fear of death and the ever-after that I was told would be my reward for other types of fear.  I have never been a “fun” person to be around, but in high school I was a pure, undiluted black fog that clung to the walls.  This was not due entirely to religious issues but to various neurological afflictions as well (though I suppose you could label my former faith as such).  My faith was never incredibly deep, but it was there, and no matter how devout someone may be he still has to deal with the dogmas of the faith he professes.  My dogmas involved heaven and hell, but I was equally afraid of both.

In 2002 my uncle, a long time drug-addict and mentally ill, finally commits the suicide he's been attempting for so long. 

Someone says, “He’s probably in hell, you know.” 

That was cute. 

I met my wife in college and married her in the spring semester of our senior year.  We are still married.

I met someone else in my senior year of college though.  I began to steal away to the library on campus in between classes.  I couldn’t let my girlfriend know what I was doing.  I would jog up to the second floor and wind around to a wooden table that sat by a massive window-wall.  As the snow or rain ran parallel over the outstretched mountains outside I would pull a small piece of paper out of my backpack – it was littered with a series of hastily etched digits:

p. 22

p. 45
p. 67

The list went on.

Why Atheism? by George H. Smith.  I wouldn’t dare check the book out, so I returned everyday to it and pulled it off the shelf, read a few pages and put it back.  I felt like I was having an affair – but I suppose it was only an affair with my own mind.

Christian-lite.

Deist.

Agnostic.

Atheist.

That was the progression.  It took about a month.  It was beautiful and easy – my brain was alive – buzzing with the possibility that I had nothing to worry about.  The little doubts I’d always carried were finally turning into something that resembled the person they resided in.

Fear.  That was it.  The fear of Hell kept me in the faith and the fear of Heaven kept me in a dandy of a theological mess. 

My wife didn’t find out that I had abandoned our shared faith until after we were married.  That was wrong of me.  But she’s still here and I’m glad.

So now what do I do?

 “What do you think it will be like when you die, then?” 

I look at my wife, “Like it was before I was born, I guess.” 

My father believes in the idea that a person “once saved is always saved” - so he thinks he’ll meet me in Heaven despite the fact that I’m a nonbeliever.  If that’s what comforts him, then let him have that.

“What would you do if God appeared to you? What would you do if God showed up right in front of you?” 

It’s a sincere question that a relative asks. 

“Which god?” 

After Carl Sagan’s death rumors abounded that he had converted shortly before he passed away.  He realized in the last hour of his life that he was wrong about many things, primarily regarding religion.  These stories of miraculous conversion of a nasty nonbeliever at death run rampant in our society.  The dominant religion gets their “win” without ever having to prove it and the credulously inclined among us carry it with them as a trump card when they encounter the ilk of the “foolish”.  (Sagan's wife Annie Druyan vehemently denies these rumors)

 “If a religious official shows up to perform my funeral service I’m going to break some rules of nature and come haunt the bastard,” I tell someone. 

My wife jokes that when we’re buried she’ll have a Celtic cross over her grave and that I’ll have a beaver or some other silly looking animal.  I actually like the notion – perhaps the Oregon State mascot but a little more mellow, eyeing the delicious faux-wood of the crucifix that sits over my wife.

Let me also leave you with this little gem from Annie Druyan, wife of Carl Sagan and genius in her own right:

"I remember that one time Carl was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: 'What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?' Carl looked at him and said, 'Do something meaningful.'"