Rather than coming up with a title on my own, I’ll steal the title of the post I’m linking. Via Carnival of the Godless, I came across Holy Smoke at A Load of Bright. He compares quitting religion (as I did through December, then formally announced as of the first of 2007) to quitting smoking (which I did almost instantly in January 2004, even before I knew I was pregnant). It’s a striking comparison to me — one that resonates with me.
A sampling:
One question that is often asked of atheists is, “how are you going to replace religion? People need religion. If you take it away, what are you going to put in its place?” Many atheists answer this question on face value, normally with an outline of secular humanism. This is correct in a sense, but the question is actually heavily loaded. It assumes that people need religion. Do they really?
I used to think I needed cigarettes like I needed food. At times, when I was broke in university, I would scrape pennies from the floor of my car and the backs of couches to buy cigarettes while my cupboards were bare. “I need a cigarette”, I’d tell my bemused housemates, “I need one”. When you smoke, you are imbibing poison into your body. If there is one thing that, by definition, your body never needs, it is poison. I didn’t need a cigarette. I needed food. If you don’t eat, you die. If you don’t smoke, not only do you not die, you live longer! It’s easy for me to say that now, but at the time I was convinced that it was an essential.
Just as we are all born atheists, we are all born non-smokers. Do people really need religion, or do they just not know any better? Obviously, not all people need religion – the existence of happy atheists proves that. So why would some people need it and not others?
Over time, I’ve found myself filled with nearly zero angst about my walking away from religion in general, Christianity in particular. When I first even contemplated (not out loud, even — just in my head) the idea that God might just not be, the emptiness wasn’t unlike the craving for a cigarette — a loss that, had I not fed an addiction, I wouldn’t have ever recognized.
These days, when I consider religion, it’s largely in relation to how I’m raising my daughter, and how I can coach her to think critically about everything she encounters, even “truths” that I might tell her. Someday, she might be atheist/agnostic. She might be Christian. She might be Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, or a New Age flake. Whichever she becomes, my wish is that she will have spent time genuinely considering *why* she believes what she does.
