Atheism

In retrospect, I was fortunate--when, at the age of eleven, I formally, deliberately and for cause, at the end of a formal study or catechism of the Christian religion (taught me, with the explicit intention of  converting me to belief in that faith, by an accredited Protestant minister--nice Mr. Hamlin) instead of announcing my conversion, as I had implicitly, at the beginning of the course, promised that I would (Ah, those implicit promises!) when I should have completed the study of the Catechism--I declared myself, rather, a total disbeliever (fortunate, I say), that it was merely and only the childishly implausible, philosophically third-rate, intellectually disreputable, impossibly vulgar, unwashed peasant mess of a Christian god that I therewith foreswore my implicit promise to believe in, and not all gods, or any god.  Indeed I made quite a calculatedly infuriating (poor, nice Mr. Hamlin!) point of saying that, if I ever did need anything more than my own conscience and my own honest contrition and my own sincere effort to atone for my sins (in order to guide me in my moral course through the world), I would certainly far likelier appeal to one of the male gods of Olympus--Zeus, Hermes or Apollo--to "save" me, than to Jesus.  It wasn't really till I was fifteen or so, reading an abridgment of De Rerum Natura, with its magnificent apostrophe to Venus, that I completely understood that I was an atheist--a sound, sober, rational atheist at my heart.   And, for some reason, that made Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas (speaking of the Goddess of Love and Beauty as if she really existed), even more beautiful. With Lucretius at your elbow, despite his warnings against Cultus and superstition, you take an indulgent view of sweet, sad, beautiful implausible Mythos--It isn't till you dig a little deeper and read further afield, that it begins to dawn on you that, beyond leprechauns, and Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny and "Angelic Pow'rs," there are horrors and nightmares--Minotaurs and banshees and Goddesses of Death--swirling at the bottom of the Chalice of Delusion and Unreason. But fortunately, by the time I had to confront the historical and cultural fact of Kali (with her necklace of skulls, and her girdle of severed human arms, dancing on the corpse of Shiva in the Battlefield), I had already utterly, a priori, come to disbelieve in her--and to despise, as contemptible and far, far beneath me, the murderous and superstitious devotion of Thuggees.

The important point, about my having so early in my life dismissed the silly, morbid, cruel, neurotic and gratuitously unpleasant fantasm of Christianity, is that I never spent enough time among the Faithful to absorb (as, by osmosis apparently, the belief in such things is absorbed) the really strange things that Xians believe in without, quite, acknowledging or even consciously knowing that they believe in them:  The Devil, for example, and Eternal Hellfire.  These bizarre and deeply morbid convictions which most Xians do in fact hold steadfastly, and, somehow, communicate to one another--and which, in fact, they live, and die, in mortal fear of--but which are completely omitted (so far as I know) from their official catechisms, I have never, ever, entertained the slightest belief in--rather less even than I've ever, for one brief, moment credited the existence of vampires or werewolves.  I thoroughly enjoyed Bram Stoker's Dracula  when I was in high school, and willingly enough suspended my disbelief in vampires while I was reading it, but, unlike 'Twilight' fans, or most women, I find nothing sexy in the undead.

But, getting back to those imaginary, sleep-inducing (when enumerated) sheep whose care, at the age of eleven, I cheerfully relinquished to an equally fictive Good Shepherd--The happy consequence, of all of which scrupulous refusal to believe in things for which I saw no evidence, and which I felt no compulsion of conscience to believe in, was that I was never even tempted thenceforth to believe in things simply because other people believed in them, and that I found it easy (without necessarily fully realizing the radical depth of my perception) to recognize those whose beliefs were, in essence, given them from a consensus of other peoples' beliefs, and infallibly to judge them, without my always quite being conscious of so judging them, as moral lunatics--whose works are profitless, worthless, senseless and meaningless--and, for the matter of that, not seldom morbid and gratuitously unpleasant: Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, and Edgar Poë, not to mention William Faulkner, John Updyke, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy--and just about any contributor to the New York Times editorial page (except Frederick Crews and Vladimir Putin) that you could name.

Boldly I say so, having read little more than synopses of the works of those so dismissively named. Yet confidently I assert that it will be a pleasant, cool and dry day in Oxford, Mississippi before I'll read 'A Rose for Emily,' The Sound and the Fury, 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' or The Scarlet Letter.