I was asked this question recently, and when I replied I gave an honest and quick answer. "I just like the music." It seemed like a fairly simple question at first, and a straight forward answer, but both seemed to stick in my head for a while because the more I pondered the question, the more the answer got a lot deeper than whether or not I simply liked a particular song. It gets into how I interpret music, how I became an atheist in the first place, and probably more importantly, how my views on religion have changed as I’ve gotten older.
So yes, for those who missed it, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God, or in a supernatural being watching over us and guiding our lives. That said, when it comes to music it doesn’t mean religious language has no meaning to me. I hear the same words everyone else does; I just interpret them differently.
Take Breaking Benjamin’s song “The Dark of You,” for example. When listening to these lyrics;
When all has come to life. We live, we breathe, we die. They call me to the light. Forever lost in time. With every dream we find. We feed, we burn, we lie. The fall of humankind. The everlasting light.
Someone of religious faith might read that verse as a reflection on humanity’s temporary and flawed nature. We are drawn toward darkness, sin and failure, but beyond that lies salvation in God and the promise of something eternal.
When I read those same lyrics, I also hear the idea that human life is finite and that the world can pull us toward darkness and despair almost like quicksand. The difference is where I find the light. To me, salvation comes from within: focusing on what is still good, refusing to let setbacks define you, and continuing to take the next step forward.
You see, I don’t need to believe in a literal Hell to know what it feels like to go through one. Depression can be hell. Grief can be hell. There are periods of life where anger, hopelessness or circumstances can drag you into a pretty dark place. Salvation, in that context, can simply mean finding your way back out again. Redemption can mean realizing you screwed something up and trying to become a better person afterward.
Skillet is probably an even more interesting example because their Christian faith is far more obvious. They've even been known to hold small prayer sessions during their live concerts. Getting back to lyrics, in “Awake and Alive” it's written;
I'm awake, I'm alive. Now I know what I believe inside. Now it's my time. I'll do what I want 'cause this is my life. Here (right here). Right now (right now). I'll stand my ground and never back down. I know what I believe inside. I'm awake and I'm alive.
Personally, I love those lyrics, even though what I believe is quite different from what John Cooper means when he sings it. For me, being “awake and alive” was the realization that this is my life to live, and it was time to live it on my own terms. There is no plan laid out for me, no predetermined path waiting to be followed. If I want my life to move forward, I have to take responsibility for it, make my own choices, and put myself in the driver’s seat. If you feel a slight contrast there with the old “Jesus take the wheel” idea, that’s intentional. When it comes to my life, there is no one else to take the wheel. It's up to me.
With that said, you can clearly see a boundary that's been established for me. I have no issue with a musician talking about their faith or making it part of their music. They’re entitled to express what they believe just as much as I’m entitled to express what I don’t believe. At the same time, I've never been to a Skillet concert because I’m not particularly interested in being preached to. I can love the music, pull my own meaning from it and leave the sermon for somebody who follows that faith. I don’t see any contradiction there.
Maybe part of the reason I can separate those things so easily is that religion wasn’t always something foreign to me. I grew up a Protestant Christian in the United Church of Canada. That said, when I think about my early churchgoing experiences, religion honestly isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.
What I think about most is Family.
Sunday mornings, as a child, meant waking up early and having my parents get my brother and I ready for church. Once we got there, seemingly everybody was around us. My grandparents were there. My aunts and uncles were there. Even my cousins were there. We all took part in the service, sang the hymns, listened to the scriptures and heard the stories. I remember having some very lovely ministers over the years who were genuinely pleasant people to be around. We also had Sunday school, which I enjoyed because there were usually artistic things involved, and anything involving making or drawing something was going to get my attention as a kid. Gluing macaroni to a paper plate was especially fun. There were actually a lot of fun times, and to me that stands out over and above the religious purpose behind it.
After church, everybody would gather at my grandmother’s house just down the street. My grandmother and my aunts would be in the kitchen making pancakes, bacon, eggs and whatever else was going onto the table that morning. The men would be in the living room discussing projects and life in general. Then the dinner call would happen and the whole family would sit around together and enjoy one heck of a family brunch. We'd then hang out for a few hours afterwards, maybe go to the park down the road, and eventually everybody would head home.
This is what church meant to me. It was a day to be close to my family, spend time with them, and build memories . Looking back on it now, I honestly couldn’t tell you how much of what I loved was religion and how much was simply family. I don't ever think I could have been labeled as a religious kid. I was just a kid who loved having his grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins all in the same place every Sunday.
Music was always a big enjoyment in the church as well. I still love many of the old hymns even though their religious meaning has largely disappeared for me. They carry memories. They remind me of people, places and a part of my childhood that I still look back on fondly. Becoming an atheist never required me to throw all of that into a garbage can and pretend none of it mattered. It didn't mean that I suddenly rejected God and started worshiping the Devil. In fact, atheists don't believe in the Devil either.
As for when I actually became an atheist, there was no dramatic moment where I slammed a Bible shut and announced that I was finished with God. That's really not how atheism is born. As I got older and started thinking for myself, the belief gradually stopped making sense to me. The questions and contradictions grew while the faith slowly faded away. By the time my mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1992, when I was 14 years old, it could have been said that I had already lost my belief.
I want to make that timeline very clear because it would be easy to read what comes next and decide that I became angry at God and that’s why I’m an atheist. That isn’t my story, nor is it the truth. That said, there were many events around my mother's illness which further solidified my already lost belief.
During her illness, I remember reaching a point of desperation where I still prayed for her. What stands out to me about that memory is how unnatural praying felt. There wasn’t any faith behind it anymore. My mother had cancer, I was terrified, and I was willing to try anything that might somehow make the situation better. So in the midst of my sorrow I prayed. I questioned, asking how he could turn his back on her now that she needed him the most. I bargained, offering my faith to be restored should he prove his existence by ridding her of the disease. I pleaded, not knowing how I would survive without her in my life.
Nothing miraculous happened, of course, and that experience added weight to my already non-existent faith. My mother was a genuinely good person. She was a follower of God and a strong believer in church. I knew what kind of person she was, and I couldn’t reconcile what was happening to her with the idea of an active, loving deity. I also couldn’t make sense of two young boys having to watch their mother go through that, then being told there was some greater reason behind it.
That was, actually, the worst part of it. When she died, people tried to comfort me in the ways people often do. They told me she was with God now, or that she was in a better place. I know why they said those things and I know they were just trying to help. I don’t resent anybody for offering me comfort, which made perfect sense to them. That said, it didn't comfort me at all. I didn’t want my mother to be with God. I needed her here.
A year later, my stepmother came into my life and became an incredibly important person to me. While she has now also passed on, she had actually been part of my life longer than my mother ever had the opportunity to be. In many ways she had the chance to become more of a mother to me than my own mother was able.
I can look at that relationship and be incredibly grateful for it without deciding that my mother’s death must have been necessary for it to happen. In fact, I take serious issue with the idea that this could somehow have been "the plan" all along. If God’s plan required my mother to die so that another mother figure could eventually enter my life, I would have some fairly serious questions about whoever came up with that plan and they would answer for it.
My mother’s death remains a tragedy. My relationship with my stepmother was something wonderful that happened later in my life. I’m perfectly comfortable letting both of those things be true. I don’t need some deity behind the curtain arranging those events for them to have meaning. As they say, life goes on.
By the time I entered my first marriage, roughly in my mid 20's, religion had completely disappeared from my life. That said, my new wife was Catholic and I suddenly found myself surrounded by a different version of Christianity than the one I had grown up with. At the time I saw very little value in religion, but I went through the motions anyway because it was important to my new wife.
Getting back to the differences in religions, I never really felt at home with Catholics. Even some of the smaller experiences made Catholicism feel very foreign to me. Communion is probably the easiest example. Because I wasn’t Catholic, I couldn’t receive the Eucharist. To me it was just a wafer they'd put on your tongue. I'd gone through something similar growing up, although in the United Church we had little cubes of bread. That said, in this new experience while I could walk to the front with everybody else, I had to cross my arms over my chest and receive a blessing instead of the wafer.
I understand that there are theological reasons for that practice, and I’m not suggesting the Catholic Church should have rearranged its beliefs to make me comfortable. I’m simply describing how it felt standing there. The only other people I had noticed doing the crossed-arms thing were children. There I was, as a grown man, feeling like somebody had politely directed me toward the kids’ table. Quite honestly, it was embarrassing.
That feeling stood in pretty sharp contrast to my childhood memories of church. The United Church I remembered felt open to me. I walked in with my family, took part in everything, and never really thought about whether I belonged there. If someone new joined the church it was announced and they were openly welcomed without any hesitation. They didn't have any restrictions placed on them. They didn't have to jump through hoops to be accepted. But in the Catholic environment, I was constantly made aware that I wasn’t Catholic and therefore wasn’t fully part of what everyone around me was doing.
That said, there was an experience that affected me much more deeply and involved my, at the time, stepson. He was gay, and before he ever directly told me, I had already picked up on enough that I didn't need any confirmation. More importantly, I could see the amount of stress he was carrying around because of it. I didn’t think he was likely to initiate a conversation himself, so one day when the two of us were alone in the car, I decided to open the door for him.
I don’t remember every word of that conversation and I have no interest in manufacturing some perfect movie scene decades later. What mattered to me was making sure he understood that I knew who he was, that I was completely okay with it, and that nothing about it changed how I felt about him. I wanted him to know that he had somebody, officially, in his corner. I saw somebody I cared about struggling and took it upon myself to be present for him. That's what mattered.
I also want to be fair to his family because they weren't the villains in this story. His mother was never against him and he was very close to his sister. He also had an aunt who was gay herself, and who had a pretty awesome partner that I got along with swimmingly. That said, he still feared their reactions to the truth of who he was, due to the doctrine he had been brought up with.
The person I think he feared telling most was probably the person he loved most, his grandmother. She was very Catholic, and he was afraid that she would reject him. Of course, she didn’t. She loved him before she knew and she loved him after she knew.
That part has always stuck with me because the rejection he feared never actually happened, yet he had still spent all that time being afraid of it. The religious teachings he had grown up around had contributed to an expectation that this part of himself could cost him the love or acceptance of somebody who meant the world to him. His grandmother herself proved that fear wrong, which I think says something pretty wonderful about her.
That experience became one of several moments where I took pride in the man I had become, without religion directing me. I’m not claiming that my atheism gave me better morals than a religion would have. I’ve met wonderful people who were very religious and I’ve met atheists who are complete assholes. A religious label tells very little about the quality of the person wearing it. What mattered to me was realizing that I had my own compass to follow.
I hadn’t needed a doctrine in that car. I didn’t need to wonder whether I would be rewarded for supporting him or punished for failing to do so. Somebody I cared about was hurting, I had the ability to make that burden a little lighter, and I chose to act.
Unfortunately this marriage would come to an end after my wife cheated on me, and I carried an enormous amount of anger from that for a very long time. The loss felt bigger than the marriage itself because I had become part of this other family. People I loved and had grown accustomed to having in my everyday life suddenly weren’t there anymore. In my mind, her infidelity had ripped an entire new family away from me, and I was justified in blaming her for it. I couldn't comprehend how someone who followed such strict religious teachings could so openly violate the tenants they claimed to hold so dear. It made me bitter, and I held onto that anger for years, carrying it into several subsequent relationships.
Eventually, I came to realize I was carrying around far too much negativity from my past. It was like an IV of poison, slowly dripping into my veins day after day. There were old hurts, resentment and anger, and utter bitterness over things that had happened over a decade earlier. One day I decided that being bitter wouldn't change what happened, nor was it making my life any better. I had to start working on letting it go.
One of the biggest pieces of that was my ex-wife. Long after we had separated, I still carried that pain deep within. So I found her contact information, sat down, and wrote her a long message explaining how everything had affected me and how much anger I had carried because of it. Then I told her the most important thing I could... that I forgave her.
Forgiving her didn’t erase what happened, what she did to me, or make it acceptable in any way. I had simply reached the point where I didn’t want to keep carrying the anger anymore. She had done what she had done long ago, but I was the one keeping the emotional consequences alive inside myself every single day. The only way to wipe the slate clean, to finally close that chapter of my life and let go of all that bitterness, was through forgiveness.
She responded to the message, and to her credit, she apologized for what she put me through. She also told me that she finally understood how deeply she had hurt me because the person she was currently with had actually cheated on her. Experiencing the other side of that betrayal had apparently made her understand something that she hadn’t completely understood before. That being, the severe pain you inflict when you betray someone who trusted you so implicitly.
I didn’t take pleasure in hearing that, nor did I really feel she was deserving of compassion. What meant something to me was the acknowledgment. For the first time, I felt like she truly understood the actual consequences of her choices. That whole experience got me thinking more deeply about forgiveness and accountability.
Her family had been religious, and from my perspective I had seen people participate in a cycle where they could do something wrong, attend church, seek forgiveness, receive that forgiveness and then move on. I know that genuine repentance in Christianity is supposed to involve more than simply showing up on Sunday and wiping the slate clean, and I’m certainly not claiming that every religious person behaves that way. I am saying that I have personally watched some people use religion as a cleansing palette for the cruelty and greed they live their life by.
The one thing the church never seemed to answer when it came to penance, in my eyes, was "What about those you've wronged?" I can understand the desire to be forgiven in some spiritual sense, but that doesn't remove your obligation to apologize to the humans you've actually wronged. You can regret the things you do but still need to change your behavior so you don't repeat it. The actual damage you inflict doesn’t simply vanish because a person you hold in high authority tells you that your sins have been forgiven.
Interestingly, I had already decided to forgive my ex-wife before I knew whether she would acknowledge any of this. I didn’t know what her response would be when I sent that message. The act of forgiveness had become something I needed for myself. Her apology actually mattered to me, but my ability to finally rid myself of the bitterness was never dependent on her response.
That period of my life changed how I thought about a lot of concepts I had once associated with religion. Forgiveness was one. Compassion, guilt, redemption and even the idea of healing fit into the same category. I had experienced some of these things in a very real way without God playing any part in the process. It came from within myself. I was now in control of my own life, which led to me prioritizing my own mental and physical health.
That also led me to a question I still find interesting today: how many things we describe as religious ideas are really human ideas that religion has spent thousands of years putting language around?
Humans have always had to deal with grief. We’ve always hurt one another. We’ve always needed ways to repair relationships, live together, understand death and decide how we should treat each other. Religion offers one framework for dealing with those things. That doesn’t necessarily mean those things originate with religion.
As I started dealing with more of my own baggage, my hostility toward religion gradually started disappearing too. I reached a point where I didn’t want to carry all that negativity around anymore, whether it involved my ex-wife, things from my past or religion itself. Once the fog of depression and decay began to fade away, positivity and curiosity had room to move back in.
I’ve always been a curious person. When I was younger, a lot of that curiosity gravitated toward fantasy. I still love that stuff. Give me Dungeons & Dragons, Fallout or some huge fictional world to explore and I’m quite happy. Science and the natural world were always there too, though. I remember gravitating toward books about science and how things work when I was young, especially if they were full of illustrations. I'm much more of a visual learner, which is odd considering how easily I can write paragraphs of text (such as this).
As I got older, I became more of a sponge for information in general. Space fascinates me. Science fascinates me. History fascinates me. I wanted to know how the Earth works, how the universe works and why things are the way they are. Interestingly enough, religion eventually became another subject in that pile.
I started reading about Buddhism, Hinduism and other beliefs that hadn’t been part of my upbringing. I want to make something very clear about that too: I wasn’t shopping for a new religion. There wasn’t some spiritual hole inside me that I was hoping could be filled. I had already reached the conclusion that religion wasn’t for me. This was pure curiosity, in the same manor that I'd look at the engineering involved in designing hydro dams or how glaciers helped shape the Northern Ontario region I call home.
Religion has played an enormous role in human history, culture and behavior. Once I was able to look at the subject without immediately feeling disgust, I wanted to know more about what other people believed and how they had arrived at their beliefs.
Walking away from that, I still didn’t believe the supernatural parts of religion, but I did find ideas within different religions that I could respect. Buddhism is probably an easy example. I can respect teachings that encourage calmness, compassion, self-control, reducing suffering and resolving conflict peacefully. I can admire somebody who dedicates their life to trying to live with those principles without actually believing in their religious teachings. That became an important distinction for me.
- I can respect a person.
- I can respect their ideas.
- I can respect their devotion.
- I don’t have to be religious to do so.
It also brings me back to a question I’ve asked myself about religious people who genuinely do incredible things for others. Is their religion making them good, or are they just good people who have found an outlet through religion to express their goodness?
In all honesty, I hope it’s the latter. I would hope that if somebody who spends their life helping people woke up tomorrow to concrete proof that there was no God, they would still want to help people. I’d like to believe that kindness belongs to the person and religion simply gives them one particular framework through which they express it.
So where does that put me? Well, I don’t look at the universe and feel that something is missing because there isn’t a God in it. Quite the opposite, actually. The idea that matter, time, natural processes and an almost incomprehensibly enormous universe eventually produced a person capable of intellectually sitting here and wondering about the universe that created it is, quite frankly, amazing to me.
We’re part of that universe. The elements in us came from it. Life happened here, and somehow out of all of that came human beings capable of thinking, loving, building, destroying, forgiving, making music and asking questions about why any of this exists in the first place. That is an absolutely remarkable and beautiful reality which I feel is only diminished if you overlay the belief that somebody figuratively snapped their fingers and deliberately placed us here as part of His plan.
Somewhere during all of these experiences, I became comfortable with the fact that the responsibility for my life belongs to me. My morals are mine. My choices are mine. My mistakes are mine. If I hurt somebody, I have to deal with what I did and hopefully learn enough from it that I don’t repeat it. If I make somebody's life better, I didn’t need the promise of a rewarding afterlife to make that worthwhile. I took ownership of my self worth.
For a long time, religion seemed to offer people an outside source of validation. God loves you. God has a plan for you. God says you have value. I eventually realized that I didn’t need to cling to a deity to tell me that my existence was worthwhile. I could decide that for myself.
That realization carried over into my happiness too. I can’t control everything that happens to me. My mother getting cancer certainly wasn’t something I could control. Being cheated on wasn’t something I could control. Other people will make choices that affect me, people I love will eventually die, and occasionally life is simply going to kick me squarely in the teeth. There will always be things that are out of my control and that's just a fact of life. The true power comes from realizing that I'm in control of how I respond to that.
I can carry anger around for the next twenty years or I can put it down. I can watch somebody I care about struggle or I can decide to be there for them. I can screw something up and decide whether I’m going to own that mistake. I can spend my life waiting for somebody else to tell me that I’m worthy, or I can build a life where I'm accountable to myself.
That’s where personal responsibility became such a big part of my atheism, although I don’t really think of it as an atheist principle. It’s simply how I’ve learned to live. And strangely enough, that brings me all the way back to music.
When Skillet sings about knowing what they believe inside, I understand that line completely. I know what I believe inside too. We just happen to have different answers.
When Breaking Benjamin tells me to stay in the light, I can take that as simply staying positive without needing God to enter the equation.
When a song talks about darkness, redemption or salvation, I have plenty of experiences in my own life that give those words meaning beyond some religious connotation.
The beautiful thing about music is that the songwriter gets to put their meaning into the song, while I, as the listener, get to decide what those words mean to me personally.
As I say all of this, understand that I’m not interested in convincing religious people that they’re wrong. I’m not looking for anyone to validate my atheism either. People are entitled to figure these things out for themselves, and I think that freedom should cut both ways. I’ve simply reached a place where I don’t need religion to tell me who I should be. I don’t need a deity to validate my existence, and I don’t need the promise of something afterward to push me to make the most of this life.
I spent a lot of years questioning, being bitter, healing, learning and eventually becoming comfortable with who I am and what I believe and don't believe.
Somewhere along the way I found my inner peace, and I didn't need faith to do so.
