PZ Myers the Saint of Atheism has started a nice little regular column on his blog called "Why I am an Atheist" (http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula). There have been so many people writing to him, and him posting them, that the original post is now lost in the sands of time. Anyways, I thought since I am an atheist too, why not chronicle my journey into atheism. After all, whats the point of calling myslef a self-certified genius and not acting narcissistic ? So, here we go :
I am Krishna Dev Oruganty, and I was born and brought up in India. My first experiments with the deity began around the age of 7 or 8. My grandmother had died around the time. I had not had much contact with my grandma, since we were in Delhi and she was in A.P, miles away. I remember that my mother and father were upset when they got the telegram (remember those?), and my father even booked an airplane ticket to go to A.P. I envied him for flying like that, and I pestered my mother incessantly to figure out how he could reach there the same day. Anyway, next day we went with my mother to the railway station, and landed in A.P. As soon as we went inside our house, my mother saw some of our relatives, and they hugged and started crying saying things like "She left us. We are left alone", and things like that. The next thing I noticed was my grand mother's body on ice with two cotton balls in her nostrils. It all seemed quite interesting to me, and I don't remember crying. Anyway, I was quite excited to see her cremation, but unfortunately, according to Indian customs, I was not allowed to go there. I kind of took revenge for that by doing my 'experiment'. I was told by my parents, that I was in 'maila' the word that describes the mourning period in Telugu. It means that we are in some sense 'unholy' so whatever we touch etc, should be 'purified' later. My revenge consisted of secretly holding a big ladle in my hand during the 'maila' period and not telling anyone about it.
The next few months were spent alternatively feeling brave for defying my parents, and fear of 'god's wrath' upon me. You can imagine that to my young imagination, it seemed like pretty soon, I would die of ladles falling all over me in return for the transgression. After a few months, it dawned on me that nothing like that was going to happen. I was left wondering what it really meant. Did it mean that I was kind of forgiven this one thing ? Or did someone accidentally 'purify' the ladle and so my transgression was not an actual transgression ? And that was when I began to wonder about god's wrath. Sometime later, one of my class mates told us a story about St Thomas school in sector III RK Puram. It was built behind a church, and the rumors flying around was there was a ghostly hand that sweeps across the class room, and takes way children. Now, to my scientific mind, it sounded like bogus. I thought, well if something so serious was happening, we would hear about it on the news, wouldn't we ? And since it was not on the news, it cant be true. That led me to ask all other kinds of questions. If god exists, surely ghosts have to exist too since they seem to kind of derive from the same substance one more potent than the other. And the two concepts became inter-twined in my mind.
At this point, I was in 6th class, and we had SUPW periods. It stood for Socially Useful Productive Work, and was meant to teach vocational skills. We used to call them Some Useful Periods are Wasted, since we never did anything in that time. One of my teachers decided that instead of letting it go waste, we can have some kind of a debate class. One of the topics was on ghosts. I read a lot of psychology books to understand the ghost phenomenon, and the more I read them, the more I did not believe they existed. Around the same time, we had the famous "ganesha-drinking-milk' episode. Those of you not familiar with it, the episode was a frenzied day in India, when rumors started to fly around that through a miracle, all ganesha idols had started drinking milk. Now, my school organized a ganesha milk drinking mela, and everyone made idols drink milk. Some people I remember were even crying with joy, seeing signs of 'divine power'. Now, the first thing I noticed was the liters of milk flowing away from the idols. So, in effect there was no drinking being done. But the frenzy was quite palpable. I am proud to say that I did not succumb to the temptation of believing it for a second. This incident played a major role in proving to me that god's power does not exist except in our minds.
As I grew up, I began understanding a bit more about the world. When I was in ninth or tenth, for example, people used to give me pamphlets stating that some guy opened a temple somewhere and everybody was supposed to re-distribute the pamphlets. That is fine, but usually these pamphlets also contained dire warnings for the non-believers. The stories informed us kindly that some idiot like me threw away the pamphlet and died of a heart attack. Another guy threw it away and all his money was burgled on the same night. And so and so forth. I was sufficiently enlightened to throw these away, and nothing ever happened to me. At that point of time, I felt that perhaps there is a god, not a personal god of prayers and bullshit that people want to believe, but maybe a god that actually is quite pure and unselfish etc etc. And the great sages like Vivekananda and others perhaps knew something that we actually don't and have realized the 'true god'. At around this time, my mother and others began believing in this guru called Mata Amritanandamayi. She has done a lot for poor people and I like her for that, but she also claims some kind of connection to god, which I don't like. Around the same time, one of my cousins got addicted to drugs, and I saw him once hallucinating and talking to someone not really there, and the similarity in the behavior was not lost on me. Now, my mother insisted that I go to the Ashram, and help out etc. My selfish motive was to be with my crush Meenakshi, who would also be there, or so I had heard. Anyways, part of me wanted to believe something would happen and it will suddenly open my eyes and I will see the glory of the 'true god'. Now, Amma as she was called, is also known as the hugging saint. And people would line up to be hugged by her and she would give you some Vibhuti or something, and whisper something in your ear.
There were two things I imagined would happen when I went up to her. One, she would whisper something to the effect of "I know what you did last summer". Or she would whisper "Oh my god, I finally get to meet you. All my life I was searching for my guru, and here you are", and a bolt of lightning and thunder, and I will see the glory of the lord and take Amma's place on the pedestal. I actually felt the same later, when I went to Dharmshala and saw Dalai lama there. So, it was with very high expectations that I went up there and all she whispered was "study, study, study". What the hell, I was already doing that. But it taught me that there is nothing so special or spiritual about the gurus. They are just like us. And with that, I finally realized that the whole idea of God is an illusion created by us to fool ourselves or others into believing that the world actually makes sense. The truth is it does not make any sense at all. And I started reading religious texts from the point of view of how exactly they are fooling us. And the more I started reading them, the more I realized that there are common themes. For example, every one of us does something good and something bad. Religions pray on that. I mean, look at my reaction to approaching Amma. It was either "I know what you did last summer", or "the little budha". Replace them with hell and heaven and you have the essence of every religion in the world. It is all designed to keep people's behavior in check. If we don't have that fear of doing wrong things and the reward of doing good things dangling before us, would we really exist as a society ? So, the very fact that we exist as a society means that we evolved a mechanism to keep us from anarchy. That is the true work of genius, and the creation of the 'god concept'. And once I realized that, I did become enlightened. It has not made me any worse than I was before. Only now, I do good things because I know I have to and not because of fear of punishment or expectation of any reward. And I know very well, that most people are not that smart to figure the simple truth, so they need to be shown the two extremes, to keep them in check. And that ladies and gentlemen is the crux of why I am an atheist. I am smarter than most people, so I refuse to believe what the idiots are believing... mu haaa haaa haaa haaa....
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