In my last post I wrote about a notable atheist and ancient history scholar named Richard Carrier. The following is an excerpt from Richard’s own atheist testimonial, first published on the Secular Web, which is interesting because Richard dabbled in some ancient Chinese religious philosophies before becoming an atheist. Enjoy.

From Taoist to Infidel

My experiences with religion as a child were all good. My mother was a church secretary at a First Methodist Church only a block from our home, and I attended Sunday School fairly regularly, but my parents rarely insisted that I attend any sermons. The religion sold at this local business was a very liberal brand of Christianity. It was more like a preschool and social club, and that made it an excellent asset to the community, and a place of fond memories for me. Amidst arts and crafts, lunches, running and climbing about, and basic learning, the alphabet and numbers and whatnot, Sunday School had its story time. Bible stories were always on the menu, intermingled with other popular fables and parables, and it was never even suggested there was any difference. The Good Book was always treated as a collection of handy tales used as springboards for teaching moral lessons, not as a history book. Indeed, I was never once told that unbelievers go to hell or that I had to “believe on Christ” to be saved or anything like that. All good people went to heaven, so you’d better be good. That was it. Jesus in this version of Christianity was little more than a moral teacher. Being the Son of God made him an authority on the subject but had no other importance. Perhaps it was no accident that everyone who attended this church was very kind and jovial and all around just good folk.

During my first few grades, whenever I had free time in school (and wasn’t running and climbing about) I read for myself only the New Testament (red letter edition, of course–I think any child loves books with different colors in them). But the moment I got home my nose was in much bigger and better books: all manner of encyclopedias, my favorite reading material. The Bible was boring and not very informative, and hardly intelligible to a child, but it was the only book anyone ever gave me that would fit in my pocket. Yet I never had the feeling that I was doing anything religious, or what I was reading was special in any way, apart from the fact that everyone seemed happy or impressed to see me reading it, which I never understood since these same people thought I was weird for reading encyclopedias, which I knew, even at that age, were more educational. As I grew older, my social life expanded, and my spare time at school was spent completing homework, leaving no time for idle reading, and my appetite for knowledge grew to deeper levels of sophistication.

The New Testament had given me no useful information about the meaning of life or the nature of the universe. Later I learned that people extracted from it such things, but they only did so by importing ideas and concepts that aren’t in the book itself, and so just reading it alone I found it to be shallow and unsatisfying. Its message was obsessed with strange moral rules that no one around me ever followed. Instead of turning the other cheek, people called for more cops and longer prison terms. Far from giving thieves their cloaks, people kept baseball bats by their beds and hung signs that said Beware of Dog. While the very Son of God Himself defended a whore from moral condemnation, whores were routinely morally condemned, most ardently by the Devout.

Then there was all this talk about the worm that never dies and morbid metaphors about washing with blood, and so forth, that weren’t very relevant to the world I saw and wanted to understand. Littered everywhere was exultation about the Good News, but God forbid should any passage ever clearly explain just which news that was supposed to be. At one moment it seemed to be the moral message, which I already observed was nonsensical, at another it was about a horrible End Times that hardly sounded good. No one around me thought a Nuclear War was good news, yet it sounded like the very same thing. At yet another moment it had something to do with Jesus dying for something called sin, even though it was never explained how he could die for it when I was always taught to seek forgiveness from the person I’d wronged. At yet another time it was the fact that there was an afterlife “so don’t despair,” which even as a child I found to be rather childish. And so on. It was confused, illogical, often unintelligible, but always irrelevant to the social and political reality in which I lived. Where was any explanation and defense of democratic values? Where was gender equality? What was wisdom? What was virtue? How come all my encyclopedias were full of the beautiful, wonderful things of the universe, yet not a single peep about them from the Son of God Himself? One would think he of all people would have had a kick ass science education, having the most powerful and knowledgeable father in the universe and all. I wanted to know what the fundamental nature of the universe was, what the fundamentals of a moral life really were, how to achieve happiness in this life. The Bible didn’t help. Better moral wisdom came from mortal word of mouth around me, and far more knowledge from other books, and from school, where I majored in science and took and mastered every science course offered. So with the other childish things I put away as I approached my teen years, the Good Book was among them.

And so I became a seeker. Rather stereotypically, I entered teenage hungry for truth, for something that made sense of it all, for direction. The universe just didn’t seem right. Hypocrisy was everywhere, problems abounded, along with contradictory opinions about how to solve them, and the most basic facts about the world were, or so I thought, unexplained by scientists, who were clearly those who were best able to get the answers. And yet the one book everyone said had all the answers was shallow, frequently confused or uninformative, unnecessarily verbose and obscure, and contradicted the society I found myself in. Worse, it read like a preachy fable: no logical arguments, no demonstrations of evidence, just assertions, and vague ones at that. It had nothing to say about democracy or science or technology, the three things that most defined my world. How useless. So I lived a life of the mind, and thought and studied, always anchored by a stable home life and friendships. Logic alone led me to what I would later discover was an ambiguous form of agnostic deism.

Then a miracle happened. At least, it was what believers would call a miracle. In a bookstore hunting for a dictionary for school, I had a feeling that told me to turn. I did, and the first thing I saw was a Jane English translation of the Tao Te Ching. I took it up, and, like Augustine, turned to a page at random and read. What it said was so simple, so true, so elegantly and concisely put, and so wise, I knew this was the answer. I bought the book and read it all through, and from that day I declared my faith in Taoism, my first real religion.

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The Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing) is the foundational text of Chinese Taoism/Daoism, and is attributed to one named Laozi (Master Lao). Daoism has a long and interesting history in China. If you are interested in learning more about its history, culture, and practice, I can recommend the concise Daoism and Chinese Culture by Livia Kohn. Considering how much Christianity dominates Western culture, particularly the United States, it is always interesting to learn more about Eastern traditions – if at the very least to ask a Christian what religion he or she would follow had he or she been born in say, China rather than Ohio.