LETTER: An Atheist’s Tale Part 1 – An open letter to Professor Dawkins

First, thank you for writing The God Delusion, after having considered myself a staunch atheist for most of my life, I had slipped into agnosticism for a number of years, and your book, along with Sam Harris’ equally excellent publications, finally confounded my own conviction in my atheism (or as I now prefer non-theism).

Since my earliest memory of childhood, I remember having a feeling towards religion that I can only describe today as ranging from outright aversion to uneasiness. Having grown up in generally secular Denmark (a country that has sadly not yet divided Church and State constitutionally), I still had the misfortune of being subjected to Old Testament reading throughout “Christianity Class” in Primary School (which gave way to Religion, a mandatory subject in Secondary and High School, atheism was not discussed).

I always had an intuitive feeling that “something was wrong”. We can still only speculate on the precise nature of intuition, but if you believe the theory that it is a manifestation of knowledge from your subconscious making itself heard in the conscious mind. As a bookish child, I had read much about dinosaurs, the solar systems etc. at a relatively early age, and perhaps the feeling of inherent wrongness in the teachings of Christianity was created by a subconscious conflict between the facts I had learned from science and the facts presented to me in Christianity Class.
My background was not religious, both my parents had been confirmed, because, as they would both explain to me later: “That was just something you did.” While my mother could be described as a spiritualist and still finds some comfort in the Church, my father had left the Church early and has never given any thought to either religion nor to atheism since (at least not actively).

By the time my own communion came up, I had grown into a staunch atheist, but also sadly somewhat of a polarising figure as I still had a very vehement mechanistic scientific worldview, utterly disquieting to religious people around me (what I today find my more mature worldview seems to cause less consternation, if just as little actual impact).

In a class of 27, 5 opted not to be confirmed (one was a Jehova’s Witness), myself among them. It was not a decision that was met with universal understanding, and despite my parent’s being atheist, it did mean waving farewell to a big party, and more importantly for a 13-year-old, a lot of money from well-wishing relatives.

Today, I am glad I held firm, and stayed to my convictions. It caused many social confrontations, as I took an aggressive stance and would cordially accept invitations to celebrations, but only under the condition that I would not attend the Church part. This meant missing parts of events like my sister’s confirmation, and the baptism of a good friend’s first child. Again, this raised eye-brows, but Denmark being relatively secular, nothing more.

Years of discussion with religious friends followed and often I would find my arguments trumped by the arguments Sam Harris’ presents to so well in the beginning of his book. I don’t know if it was this, or a slight temporary conviction in relativism, that had me fade into agnosticism, but once I picked up the God Delusion and “End of Faith”, I finally saw the arguments supporting what I had always believed to be true, and, more importantly, solid logical and rational refutations of the standard religious apologist points.

It’s ironic that another book of more spiritual nature (I would belong in the camp of atheists in which Sam Harris has often placed himself in his talks: the atheists who have a keen interest in spiritualism), convinced me further of the demonising effect religion has upon human culture.
I read with great interest the “Power of Now” and “A New Earth – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” by Ulrich Tolle, a graduate in languages, philosophy and literature from University of London (he is more commonly known under his alias “Eckhart Tolle”, a name no doubt chosen in honour of “Meister Eckhart” the 13th century German theologian, philosopher, and mystic, who was tried for heresy by the Franciscan-led Inquisition but died before his verdict could be announced.

While the neo-spiritual nature of Ulrich Tolle’s works may be off-putting to some rational thinkers, the core principle’s championed in his books is sound: true happiness is achieved through a disidentification from your thoughts and emotions helping you to transcend “your ego”, that is the false identification with forms and labels (such as body, mind, social roles, material possessions, religion, dislikes, nationality and so on).

He goes on in “A New Earth” to outline the issues that a lack of this disidentification with our egos causes in the world today, and when I read this, I was struck by the irony that a deeply spiritual work like this so clearly highlights that religion is currently the strongest identifier we have, and thus the most powerful barrier to a world in which people have reached a new level of self-awareness, broken down the wall of separation between individuals, and transcended petty superficial differences in favour of our deeper interconnectivity (that we are all connected, even at the quantum-physical level is a theory now proposed with great conviction by visionary thinker “Ervin Laszlo” in “Science and the Akashic Field” and “The Re-Enchantment of the Cosmos” and is not an idea unique to spirituality).

Indeed with Eckhart Tolle, Ervin Laszlo, and the great scientific minds of the 21st century, an amalgamation of spirituality and science is at hand that fills me with some hope that religion will be eradicated in the process and replaced by a new non-dogmatic worldview.

Thus convinced that my earliest instincts had been right, I once again abandoned any pretense of agnosticism and became a fully fledged atheist, if not an ardent anti-theist.

To be continued...