How The Miracle Of Childbirth Turned Me Atheist

I was raised Qabbalist in the full-on 19th century English spiritualist tradition-- Golden Dawn, Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, Aleister Crowley and the rest. My dad believes the Illuminati are real and that alien overlords from the outer planes rule the workings of the world, and I grew up believing it, too. He is a professional astrologer, and our entire family lived by astrology. We were brought up surrounded by eclectic pagan traditions, and after studying the Qabbalah for many years I decided my practice really had always tended more toward Wicca, and eventually became an ordained priestess (ordained by the intarweb, thank you! Yes, that's right, the Church of Universal Life, exactly where my dad got his mail-order ordination decades before!). We lived in a lot of beautiful rural areas, and I grew deeply attached to the earth and the natural world around me.

This love of nature translated into studying it. Lots and lots of studying. Because, I reasoned, if you believe in magic, what better study than the natural processes of the world, in all their glory, their astonishing complexity? If you believe in God, then what better window into the mind of God than to study biology, chemistry, physics, all that you can cram into your brain over a lifetime of constant learning? What better way to honor the cosmos than to approach your observation and study of the wonder that is the natural world in accordance with the scientific method? Pure poetry, every bit of it, from 1 + 1 = 2 all the way up through the expanding universe! Added bonus-- keeping up with new breakthroughs in fields of scientific study provides an ENDLESS wellspring of wonder! To me, that was pure magic, and still is.*

Thanks to a great ninth grade Western Civ teacher, I became a confirmed cynic and critical thinker at 14-- I just didn't have the nerve to admit I found many of my dad's practices to be questionable. Not even to myself. I was deeply troubled by my lack of belief, and I threw myself into the fervent study of all manner of religion and mysticism for the next 20 years.

But when my own child was born, I rebelled.

It started when my dad sent me my son's astrological chart and interpretation. I held it in my hands and remembered how all through my life I had been labelled by my parents. Their beliefs about me were so firmly shaped by something I was not! "That's a very Cancerian reaction.... You did that because Mercury's in retrograde.... You feel X about Issue Y because your Moon's in Taurus and Venus is in your tenth house...." It was maddening. It had limited me-- not just in the eyes of my parents, but in my own eyes as well. It took me a quarter of a century just to be able to regard myself as a capable, logical thinker (because Cancers are all emotional, dontcha know!). I could not do that to my child. I wanted him to be seen for who he is and what he does, not for the configuration of the stars at his birth! What the hell is that but an exercise in creative rationalization? I resolved that I would not label my child according to some stupid externality over which he had no control.

I threw the natal chart away unread and felt immediate relief.

Like the burp of Mack in Dr. Seuss's classic Yertle the Turtle, one tiny rebellion was all it took to send a nice shockwave of "OH MY GOSH, I DON'T HAVE TO BELIEVE IN ANY OF THIS!" cascading through the rest of my irrationally-held dogmas. And BOY did it feel good!!! I had thought I wanted to raise my son with a strong religious background to help him resist the pull of fundamentalist churches, with their highly social profiles. Growing up, I had felt our family didn't do enough group-oriented, social ritualizing and I wanted my boy to have those social ties in a religious context which I felt I had missed out on. But every time I might have tried to pass mythological (religious) asssertions about the nature of reality off as fact, the words turned to ash in my mouth. Atheism became my cool drink of water. I realized a far more valuable gift to him would be a set of critical-thinking skills with which to evaluate any claim put before him.

Being a parent is an awesome responsibility. When my child first looked up at me with trusting eyes, the realization crashed into me, "I am responsible for teaching this new little person the truth about the world around him." I knew then and there that I could not be tempted by pretty half-lies. He came into the world needing help understanding objective reality, and I was going to HELP, not hinder him in that understanding! I don't want my boy growing up accepting pseudoscience as fact, like I did. I don't want him to suffer for decades under the belief that his own private thoughts can hurt him or other people, like I did. I don't want him thinking his world will be worse if he doesn't do Ritual X, but if he does it wrong, something even worse will happen, like I did!!! Like any parent, I want better for my child.