The Zeitgeist

The modern condition: faith without gods.

“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ‘til the end of time! But He loves you!” - George Carlin

Every generation has its conversion story. Mine wasn’t baptism by water, but by Wi-Fi. The first time disbelief felt holy was through a stand up comedy skit.

Zeitgeist was the red pill I swallowed in 2007. I was fourteen years old, and all the questions I’d been stockpiling exploded in my mind like the Big Bang itself. The peyote of entertainment.

Like most good Americans, I grew up going to church on Sundays. We belonged to Lakewood, the megachurch, even before Joel Osteen took over and turned it into what it is now. It was an event- the music, the dress. I don’t recall disliking church as a child, I quite enjoyed it because our mom was as silly as we were. We played hangman on the backs of tithes and offering envelopes and she always brought a purse full of candy and an array of gum. For some reason, my sister and I made a habit out of chewing Trident gum with the wrapper on. I’m only just now questioning if this was another of the pranks she played on me and I was the only one doing it.

As already established, “question everything” was stitched into the fabric of my being. Still, I tried to believe. I tried to make sense of what I was being told, even though I couldn’t reconcile why bad things happened, how dinosaurs fit into Genesis, or why prayer always felt like a one-way call. I was told that I could “hear the Holy Spirit” if I listened- and damn it, did I listen. I even tried pretending I could hear God speaking back in my prayers, but I was also always aware of my pretending. Maybe I didn’t yet have the gift? Maybe it only revealed itself on your twelfth birthday or something?

In the age of technology, though, my questions had somewhere to go. I didn’t raise my doubts to my mother, and certainly not to my grandmother. I’d heard my dad’s stories, the almost-jealous tone in his voice about my ability to ask questions at all. When he questioned Pastor Burling (my pawpaw, his father) about God, he was made to sleep on the porch. He still blames that moment, that porch exile, for the rebellion that came next.

One afternoon at my sister’s apartment, she and her boyfriend put on Zeitgeist. When Carlin landed the punchline— “but He loves you,” something clicked. I felt an immediate understanding. There was just no fucking way. And from that point forward I never again questioned my questioning of a god. Any god.

I can’t explain how that moment was like a religious experience in itself, except to say it left me permanently altered.

Thanks to the internet, I discovered The Four Horsemen- Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and especially Christopher Hitchens. I devoured their debates like sport. Ironically, I felt less alone not because the big man upstairs was with me, but because there were others out there thinking the same way. For a while I was slightly extreme- almost feeling that people around me were fools for not questioning, not waking up. They had to have been schizophrenic, right?

With time, though, my edges have softened. I’m still a skeptic, but I’m no longer interested in converting anyone to disbelief. I’ve come to respect the ways people make sense of their lives, even when I don’t share their frameworks. I’m stern now in not debating or questioning others’ faith the way I once did. It isn’t my job to wake anyone up—only to keep seeking my own understanding.

Children become skeptics for the same reason adults become scientists, artists, and writers. They notice contradictions and can’t stop tugging at the thread. And I was hooked. Science became everything to me because where religion made sense of nothing, science made sense of everything.

I stopped praying for answers and started moving toward them.