Disconnection

When I first created this page I intended to update it much more frequently than I have. It is important for me to put my ideas out there, but work and life get in the way I suppose.

The reason it's important for me to post my thoughts here is that ever since I left religion I've felt disconnected. I used to have such a large community of people that had the same background as I did and who had the same beliefs. That was a very comforting thing. Anyone who's had the experience of being part of a church community knows what it's like to walk into the building and feel kinship with people you don't even know on a personal level. You were connected with so many people - but those connections were built on the assumption that you believed all of the same things they did. When you no longer believe then that connection is gone. I think that's part of the reason so many people are afraid to leave the church - it's a very lonely experience. 

That community connection is very hard to replace. Since I've left I've developed relationships with friends and colleagues outside of the church community, but for me there's still something missing. I think part of it was that my prior religion was so interwoven with my culture. We were all Egyptian and we were all Christian. I think I've done a reasonable job of filling the "beliefs" void by finding like-minded atheists - but its as if nobody can understand the whole of me - it's only half. Never in my life have I met anyone who grew up in my culture, walked my same road and has come to the same conclusions. I'm not conceited enough to believe that I'm so special that I could be the only one. I know there must be more out there. Maybe they're too afraid to admit publicly who they are? Maybe it's hard to find each other because we don't congregate in a church anymore so we'll never encounter each other?

To any formerly Coptic atheists out there, I'm here and you've found me. Let me know you're there.

Why I Left Religion

I think a good place to start would be to explain my own path to atheism.

As the vast majority of Middle Eastern people are, I was born into a religious family. My parents were Coptic and I spent my childhood going to church several times a week. I was made a deacon and I was very proud. While I did attend a non-Egyptian school, most of my closest friends when I was a child were Coptic like me.

It was because I was so immersed in the life and culture of my religious community that I started to see holes in the system. I was raised to believe that the church was good and that the things it did were good. I was raised to believe that if you followed the church's teachings, that you would be a good person. As I started getting older - around 17 or so - I started to realize that the things I saw every day were not so good. The priests would give lectures full of factually incorrect information, and anyone who tried to correct them were ridiculed. They loved the power of their position and used it to control their congregations in areas of life that had nothing to do with religion. They would use communion - arguably the most important sacrament - as a tool to blackmail people they had personal issues with. They would withhold communion (and sometimes publicly embarrass) people with whom they had any issue. The priests had become kings in their churches. I would see certain deacons being revered because they were there early and had the nicest voices, but I knew those same deacons to be drug users and people who cheated their way through school, and generally lacked any substantial moral fibre. Everywhere I looked I could see that this church had no idea what it meant to be good, praised people for superficial adherence to their rules, and loved power. And when people in the church did do something good, they made sure everyone else knew about it because what's the point if you don't receive praise?

Ironically though, my initial reaction to all of this was not to become less religious, rather more. I had read the Bible and I knew that these things I was seeing were not what the gospels had preached. In fact, for every wrong thing I saw, I could find a Bible verse telling us NOT to do it. The religion had become so warped that it could justify doing the opposite of what the Bible said. My reaction was to become even more Christian in the sense that I took the Bible to be the ultimate guide to moral living. The reason the church was so corrupt was that it failed to do what the Bible instructed. I had no doubt about the factual and moral rightness of everything Jesus said in the Bible. This led me to reject the Church and distance myself from it. My philosophy at the time was that it was less important to be Christian than it was to be Christlike. I took Jesus to not just be my personal saviour but my personal friend. Having realized that the church was not following Jesus and wanting to be more like him myself, I felt that it was me and him against the whole world. I knew the secrets of his teachings and how everyone else was doing it wrong. I've never felt closer to anyone.

Distancing myself from the community was the most important step, and the hardest, towards accepting reason over dogma. When you are as immersed in a place as much as I was in the church during my childhood, you live in a cultural bubble. You hear the same things over and over. Everyone thinks and behaves in the same general way. Old ideas are reinforced and new ideas are kept out. When you're inside this bubble, it seems like the bubble is the whole universe. You can't even conceive of what exists outside of it. You don't even want to conceive of it because the bubble is good and the outside is where the devil lives. But once you're outside, you wonder how you could ever have believed the things which you once did. It is a great liberation, but also a great loss. I lost the community that I had known. It was the one place where I was an "insider" - everybody knew me and accepted me because I had been one of them.

About the same time that I started to distance myself from the church I was in my early days of university. I was outside of the church's bubble now, even though I was still held to the teachings of the Bible. University was the next big turning point for me. It was when the world really started to open up and I was exposed to so many new ideas and people. My classes in philosophy, history, and science showed me perspectives I hadn't known before because they were outside of the church's bubble. It also showed me that the Bible was not this perfect, unique, unchallengeable thing I had believed it to be (this is a complicated subject and hopefully I will expand on it further in the future). When it comes to freeing people from superstition and dogma, there is no substitute for education. The more people learn of the world, the less room there is for religious ideology. Every time a religious person understands a scientific fact, they must alter their religious beliefs to match it. This process does not work the other way around. The data do not change, the dogma does (granted, people can simply ignore data to hold onto their beliefs, but closing your eyes to data does not equal understanding it). There is no overemphasizing how important education is.

As important as it was, the knowledge I gained from my post-secondary education was not what got me over the last hurdle away from religious thinking. At this point I was still a person who was trying to lead a Christlike life. Even as my belief in the perfect Bible was being chipped away, I strongly held onto Jesus. The most important teachings in my mind were that we ought to not judge others, and that we should treat others the way we'd like to be treated. To this day I see no downside to this philosophy. This is what is really important. His teachings were far more about how we relate to each other, and not how many hours we should spend at church, what the special magic words to say at church are, or how we should adhere to a rigid social structure.

It was this philosophy of nonjudgment and kindness that led me to reject religion. Eventually this was the only thing I could salvage of my previous beliefs. For me, it is the only part of the Bible that has intrinsic value. Education was important, but it was the PEOPLE I met along the way that showed me what it really meant to be a human being.  As I finished my undergraduate studies and went on to further education, I met a lot of people. Diverse people from all walks of life. From all beliefs, cultures, orientations, socioeconomic classes, worldviews. I came to know these people and they came to know me. These were people who did their best to make the world a less cruel place. They didn't spend their lives cloistered inside a building crying to an invisible person. They were people who devoted their lives to making the world more happy and more free. They weren't trying to improve the lot of only their own kind or community, but all people everywhere.

My philosophy would not allow me to judge any of these people I met. This was a problem though. For someone who accepts what the Bible says, I was supposed to believe that these were bad people who were rebelling against god. They were literally heretics, infidels and apostates. I've come to believe that these words, while meant by the religious to denote the worst of people, should be considered badges of honor. They are words that describe people who have rejected dogma and had the courage to think outside of the bubble.

While the Bible tells us not to judge, the Bible itself labels broad sectors of society as evil. It tells us that no matter how these people behave here on Earth, they are doomed to eternity in hell because they don't have the right beliefs or accept the right deity. This was the final cognitive dissonance that I could not accept. I could not accept that a good god would condemn all of these people to eternal punishment for not believing in him. This was not the attitude of a good god, but of a child throwing a tantrum. These people were my friends. I knew them. They did not deserve what the Bible said they deserved. Such a punishment is fundamentally incompatible with goodness. And since the Bible said that god is good, then I guess the Bible is wrong.

The process of deconversion is not easy. There are a lot of things one loses along the way. Despite all of its flaws, religion is a comforting thing. It gives us a sense of community. It helps us feel that we're not alone. A quote that I read once that really hit home basically said that losing your faith in God is like suffering the loss of a best friend. That is how it feels. Religion also helps us deal with our eventual mortality. Death is a scary thing to think about sometimes. While religion does all of these things, unfortunately it is not true. The question we must all ultimately answer for ourselves is: what is more important, happiness or truth? I chose truth.

Welcome to Freedom

Welcome. The recent events in our country have encouraged me to create this page to connect with other Egyptians who are beginning to question their religion or who have realized that there are better ways to guide our lives than from old men and ancient books. Until recently I did not believe that there were many fellow Egyptians who were of this sort. I am proud to say that our great people have proven me wrong. The overthrow of a religious tyrant and the call for a secular, well-reasoned government has given me hope that perhaps there are more of our kind than I had expected. As you can probably tell, I am an expatriate Egyptian. I hope that I can use this forum to connect with other freethinkers from the homeland and from across the world. Whether you are a former Muslim, Copt, or if you were lucky enough to have been raised free of religion, welcome.