Life is far better for me now. I’m a much more powerful person than I was, as are my parents. They’re more liberated because my brother and I have pushed them to read and become more educated. For my mom, living with fear, guilt, and magical thinking was not good for her. I’ve been able to do a lot more with my life and my career than I would have if I had hung on to the religious ideas of my youth, although I do wish they hadn’t taken up so much of my life. It would have been better not to have had to go through all that, but since I did, I’m glad that I’ve come out on top. It’s nice not to be afraid all the time.
VIII.
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JT Eberhard: Evangelical Activism
“I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And I’d urge you to look at those of you who tell you at your age that you’re dead until you believe as they do. What a terrible thing to be telling to children: that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift, think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.”
Shy youth from Arkansas don’t generally jumpstart their professional careers by attacking religion in the Bible Belt. But that’s just what JT Eberhard did, and he’s damn happy he did so. After a proselytizing high school teacher convinced him to commit himself to evangelical Christianity in his mid-teens, JT finally read the Bible. He was an atheist by the time he was finished. Shortly thereafter, he read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, which convinced him of the dangers of religion and that activism against its influence was necessary to create the kind of world in which he wanted to live.
What began as joke — drawing Flying Spaghetti Monster emblems on the sidewalks of Missouri State University — has progressed into a purpose-driven life. He has helped organize multiple Skepticons, the largest annual secular convention in the Midwest, is a frequent religious debater, and has worked at the Secular Student Alliance as America’s only organizer of secular high school groups.
I grew up in Arkansas in a secular household. My father’s an atheist. My mother, while I was growing up, was a very light deist. I became a Christian when a couple of my teachers proselytized to me in high school. It is understandable that I would have an interest in religion because I was a socially awkward kid, and joining a religion was a quick way to make friends. My sophomore year in high school, I converted. My parents weren’t thrilled, but they never told me that. They have always nudged me to form my own path.
I was invested in all the things that Christians tend to be invested in: going to church, trying to convert people. I was like most religious people, completely unaware of its theology. Bill Keller Ministries has confirmed that about 10% of Christians have actually read the Bible. Even though I was a practicing Christian, I had never read the Bible, yet I thought that it was the authoritative guide to faith. At one point, I attended a meeting of Promise Keepers, a huge, very anti-gay rights, “fundegelical” convention in Tennessee. I often pulled arguments off of the internet on subjects about which I had very little comprehension and regurgitated them to people. I certainly believed that I was right and that I had a personal relationship with God.
Mostly, I was a guilt-ridden Christian, especially regarding sex. I tried to be pure and felt guilty when I couldn’t be. I was convinced that non-Christians were going to hell, so I always asked myself, “What can I do to save them?” I think that urge is what inspires a lot of Christian activism. The problem is that that notion tends to be able to twist good intentions in some very evil ways.
Actually reading the Bible certainly changed my mind about religion and Christianity. I turned over the last page and thought, “I don’t believe any of this.” I very, very quickly went through all phases of religious de-conversion, from Christian to strong deist to weak deist to agnostic to atheist. At the time, I didn’t even know the terminology. In a matter of a couple of months I went through all of them. For a while, I was searching for another God. Quite quickly, though, I realized that other religions are all, fundamentally, bullshit.
When I lost my faith, there were three emotions at work. I began to realize all of the harm that religion causes in the world, so the first emotion was anger that any force on Earth could produce so much badness. I also had anger at other people for letting religions slide, for not being more informed. That led to the second emotion that I felt, which was guilt over the things that I had done and said as a Christian. The third emotion was compassion for those who had been and were being harmed by religion. If religion never caused suffering, I wouldn’t care about it. For me, losing my religion was like taking off a wet, sweaty shirt. I wanted to get it away from me.
I still had commitments to values and ideas, but I began to no longer have such an emotional attachment to them. If someone beat me in an argument, it didn’t matter to me because I became less emotionally attached to my beliefs. I became emotionally attached to the truth, so I enjoyed changing my opinion. When I found out that I had been wrong about religion, I was glad to have one more thing figured out.
When I first became an atheist, I wasn’t particularly outspoken. It was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith that made me become a vocal atheist. The whole book was written in an accessible way. It was written for people like me to understand. There was one sentence in particular in that book that stuck with me, and I use it repeatedly because it convinced me that I needed to openly speak my mind. Paraphrased, it says, “We live in an age when someone can have both the resources and the intellect to construct a nuclear weapon and still think he’ll receive paradise for detonating it.” That hit me hard.
After I read that book, I had an intense emotional reaction. I feel like I have a fairly strong sense of justice, and I realized that there was no greater threat to justice than religion. So, as a compassionate person, I wanted to do something about it.
In college, I started to get involved in atheist activism. My friends and I started drawing Flying Spaghetti Monsters on our campus, and at one point we were stopped by a campus security guard who asked, “Are you part of a campus organization?” I lied and said, “Yeah, absolutely!” He asked, “Which one?” Because I have an appreciation for stupid humor, I said, “College Republicans.” He bought it. The group decided that if we were going to continue to be active on campus, we would need to create an organization so that we wouldn’t get in trouble. All we needed to create an organization were constitutional bylaws, five members, and approval from the student government. So we got five people, we filled out the paperwork, and our official group recognition passed student government by three votes. Over time, the group would grow exponentially.