No religious explanation about the world seemed to make sense to me, and I wanted to find one that did. After a lengthy binge gathering information, I went through a period of uncertainty. I thought, “I don’t know if there is a God, but I’m certainly not willing to entertain the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.” To me, that all-loving, all-powerful God came from the same cabinet as the Greek Gods Thor, Dionysus, and Isis. The Judeo-Christian God may be a different bottle of liquor, but they all appeared to me as fundamentally alcohol.
I did more research on the internet. At that point, I had never heard any black person question the basic beliefs of the Christian religion. I continued writing music. I wrote a rhyme that eventually became a part of one of my first songs. I posted the lyrics to the website ExChristian.net and found that some people on the forum really liked what I was talking about. Once I found out that others enjoyed my ideas, I thought, “There are other people who are asking these questions!” I started writing more, and as I wrote, I ran out of material. I needed to continue to learn.
When I was young, I didn’t feel like I was particularly smart. I wasn’t born with a lust for knowledge. Any intelligence that I now have has come both from developing a passion for self-education and from the sheer amount of information that I have consumed. When I realized that learning provided me with a shot of dopamine, I wanted to recreate that experience. I needed it. It became an addiction. I tapped my vein. If I OD’ed on ideas, then I lived a great life.
As I learned more, I began to realize how great of a dude Carl Sagan was. He’s the information junkie’s junkie. Growing up, I had never watched his television series Cosmos. I discovered it as a grown man. Whatever it was that he had that made him speak in the way that he spoke, that made him so eloquent, I knew that I wanted that. Knowledge gave him something, and the only way that he could express what it gave him was to give it back, to try to enlighten people. While I knew that I would never have the intelligence of Carl Sagan, I could share his drive, his passion for knowing the right answer. All that I learned empowered me and fueled my writing.
Music continued to be an outlet. I began writing about how religion had programmed my thinking, discouraging me from thinking for myself. I remember rapping my first completed song to my religious girlfriend. The look on her face said, “I can’t believe that you’re saying this!” I knew that she had never asked the questions that I posed in my lyrics. At that time, I was angry with religion because, for the first time, I was thinking about the meaning of death. I began to realize that I would never again see anyone who had died. I felt as though I had been cheated with an emotional safety net.
Despite our religious differences, my girlfriend and I continued to date. She was, to me, perfect. Right before my first album, The Compton Effect, came out in 2007, she began battling a serious illness. She became so sick that she moved into the hospital. I slept on the floor. Even though I was questioning my religion, that didn’t matter.
Then, she passed away. While I was coming to grips with the implications of losing my faith, I had to deal with her loss, a loss that was unlike any I had ever had. We were emotionally connected right up until the end. I think that I understand why, at the most basic level, she needed a God.
Losing her was incredibly difficult for me. Looking back, it’s interesting and a bit ironic that she was the first person to believe that I would be musically successful. She used to say, “I just want to be there when you become the man that you’re supposed to be.” She’s not here now, but I’ve tried to become the man that she would have wanted me to be.
My life has continued without her. Since her death, I have made multiple full-length albums, each with a different focus. The Compton Effect, my first, was dedicated to discussing and disproving religion, while also detailing my own indoctrination. The C.P.T. Theorem, my second, focused on me personally, looking into my past and describing what I had gone through emotionally in my life. My third album, The Kardashev Scale, made arguments against religiosity in a more cerebral way than my first two, while exploring science and technology.
While my music is now less aggressive toward religion than it once was, I still feel that it’s crucial for people to criticize and understand religion’s ideas and history. To this day, black people still do not raise certain questions about their faith. As African Americans, we need to look at the origins of how we received our religion because it was fundamentally different from the way that most other people have received theirs. We were taught our Christianity with the same madness with which we were broken as slaves. For me, as a black person, I need to understand that truth.
I do have hope. There are black skeptic, freethinking, nonreligious, and atheist groups sprouting up all over the country. Blacks are becoming active in the American secular community. Black culture at large, though, still largely prohibits certain religious topics from being discussed. With more and more blacks becoming visibly secular, I think that may begin to change.
My transition from being religious to nonreligious has been like going from black and white to high definition television. I look back on who I was and what I believed, and I view myself as a psychologically weak individual. For humanity at large to evolve from here, I believe that we need a complete social re-education about how we view each other and ourselves. We think we’re all so far apart, that we’re all so different. We’re not. The only differences that we have are those that we create in our own heads.
XXV.
______________
Chris Stedman: Atheistic Engagement
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
At the age of 11, Chris Stedman accepted Christ into his heart at an evangelical church in Minnesota. Raised into a poor and often unstable family, through his church he found both a strong and a caring community. Over time, however, Chris realized a fact about himself that he knew he could not share with his religious community. How could he? According to what he had been taught, people like him not only got the AIDS virus, they were also punished by God in hell.
Viewing his homosexuality as a spiritual test, he fasted and prayed, hoping to change his nature. He became reclusive as his internal struggle became increasingly difficult. Then, one night, he turned on the fan in his father’s bathroom, locked the door, sat down in the bathtub, and, with a knife in his hand, nearly ended his life. Shortly thereafter, his mother found out about what Chris had been dealing with and arranged for him to meet an LGBT-friendly Lutheran minister. This interaction would change his life.
Later, after studying religion at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Chris lost his faith in God. Despite his atheism, his experiences continued to reinforce the importance of interfaith dialogue. After college, he worked for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and has written his own memoir, Faitheist.