On Accidentally Atheisting Myself Backwards Into Buddhism*
I grew up Catholic, with a very strong sense of a connection to God. As a small child, I used to talk with Him. And I imagined that He would talk back to me. Not that He would tell me to do stuff or anything. He’d just respond to my prayers with comforting messages, or to tell me that He loved me back. We had a pretty chill relationship.
As I got older, I came to realize that I had likely been talking to myself. Which was a bit embarrassing. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of having believed in something for bad reasons. So, I spent years trying to tease out what in my head was actually true about God, and what was more of me attempting to comfort myself. It took me years and years and years of searching, study, and rationalizations, but I finally—in my mid-30s—got to the point where I was comfortable admitting to myself that I no longer believed in God.
It was a freeing experience for many reasons. (Not having to despair for friends and family enduring an eternity of torture is a lot to get off your shoulders.) But It was also a little sad. God had been my friend. At least I thought. And there was now a God-shaped hole in my life. The universe suddenly seemed a bit empty.
This feeling bothered me, and I’m not really one to ignore things that bother me. I find a problem and I worry it until it goes away or becomes a big enough problem that it requires real action. In this case, I sort of poured myself into science. If I’m going to die and go nowhere, if everything around me is just harsh reality, then I wanted to understand as best I could just how harsh that reality is. I wanted to understand life in the coldest, most clinical way I could.
But here’s what’s funny. That’s not how it worked out. I was expecting to face dead-eyed math and steel myself against its ungiving nature. But, as it turned out, the more that I felt myself understanding the cold mechanics of the universe, the less cold and mechanical they seemed. I was finding a familiar warmth in the experience.
For the longest time, I didn’t know what to do with this feeling. I just kind of walked around confused, wondering if my brain had stopped working correctly (this was during quarantine, so that seemed rather not unlikely). And then one day, my wife was watching an instructional video on tai chi, and something in it connected with me. Nothing specific to this video—more related to the general feeling of the practice. It reminded me of when I’d briefly flirted with Taoism during college. The simple philosophy of letting things be. I was always way too anxious to ever put any of that stuff into practice. But it always made sense, and it always seemed like a lovely way to live. If you could manage it. Which I never assumed I could.
It was that moment on that day when I saw that tai chi video that something finally clicked for me. Here was a pathway. I couldn’t explain it in words (still can’t), but this connected perfectly with my earlier experience, like two two pieces of a puzzle. And I was suddenly overwhelmed by a new passion. I wanted to find more puzzle pieces.
Anyway, this all led me down a bunch of strange paths and into a bunch of stuff that I’m hoping to unpack in this blog.
I’m still an atheist. And I don’t actually consider myself a Buddhist. But I have found a lot to love in the philosophy. And similar philosophies. And I think I’m a happier person for the lessons I’ve learned.
- Sorta.
