The moral bankruptcy of atheism: My recent conversion

At some point in my late teens, I became an atheist.

I do not remember the exact moment when it happened. I was raised as a Roman Catholic in a fairly religious middle-class Jamaican household. My atheism was born a year and a half before I migrated to the United States at the age of 20 in 1985. Strange as this might sound, my disbelief seemed like a gift from God. What better way to enter a wonderful country where I would inherit a new world and make a new life for myself, than with a clear and distinct mind devoid of superstitious beliefs about an ineffable God who resided in the sky. The decision to become a writer and a philosopher gave my atheism the principled vocational dignity I thought it deserved.

I relished the new freedom I found in my intransigent atheism. A surge of autonomy and a sense of power seized me in a way that I thought was possible only in dreams of flying. I felt what, in retrospect, was a false sense of invulnerability where things happened simply because I willed them. I never lost my moral compass; however, I did hubristically take on the demeanor of being a God unto myself. The feeling of empowerment was intoxicating.

At some point in my early to mid-30, my atheism began to undo itself — despite my best efforts to the contrary! The intensity and conceptual haziness of that experience is now ripe for the telling. Truth be told, it betrayed all thoughts I had, despite the fact that, as an academic philosopher, I prized thinking as my most celebrated way of functioning in the world. Today, I see that living in faith with the Lord is not incompatible with reason.

If man is endowed with reason, and if he is made in the image of God, then reason is a supreme attribute of God. It is from Him that we inherit this rational faculty.

Despite my reluctance and my panic at the loss of my self-image as a free-thinking atheist, my disbelief dissipated, and I found myself in the occasional throes of deep religious sensibilities for which I had no explanation.

Silently, relentlessly, the notion that atheism was no longer an option I could live with pressed itself into my thoughts. But the new-found release from atheism was short-lived. For the next decade, a battle waged deep inside my soul: I traversed the irreconcilable states of belief and disbelief. One moment God felt so close I could almost feel Him next to me. The next moment the universe felt devoid of His presence and, often, despite having found love, and worldly success, I was possessed of a sinking void and emptiness that today I know with full certainty that only the Lord can fill.

But I willed myself to believe.

I needed to believe.

Need was not enough. I adopted elaborate rituals and practices which played an invaluable role in strengthening my spiritual core. I cried out to Jesus while denying he was the Son of God in my heart. The universe’s answer seemed to be: Silence.

While driving to work over two decades ago, my entire thought process suddenly came to a halt. I was confronted with questions that seemed to emerge from nowhere. A voice said to me: “What is the talent that I have given you, the one thing without which you mistakenly believe your life to be not worth living?” The answer that came immediately: Writing.

“If you are having difficulties praying to me,” the voice continued, implacably and calmly, “then why not use the talent I gave you to pray? Use your writing as a form of prayer. Write me letters.”

As I sat at my desk that morning, I peered deep into my soul. Intellectually, I abandoned the commitment to atheism. I saw the void, the existential bankruptcy of a life I had been living. I felt like a gutted fish. But need is not belief. I would spend the next 20 years praying and navigating among the registers of belief, agnosticism, and atheism. It would not be until 2019 that I would have a full-conversion experience and give my life to the Lord.

But what is the nature of that void? What was it that despite professional and personal success in life left me bereft of a deeper meaning than the one I had cultivated in my life?

I have come to believe that life presents us with a disclosure of possibilities from which to choose to make a life for ourselves. In that disclosure out of which we make myriad choices, we come to believe in the permanence of our choices. Whether we stake our well-being and derive meaning from a deep commitment to a career that may be as strong as a vocational calling or even a marriage, there is an ephemeral and finite depth to such endeavors. Careers fail us, or we experience the high and low points in them and come to realize that our soul is hungry for a vaster and deeper and more infinite encasement.

Our being yearns to aspire to and emulate an ideal such as we can never encounter on earth. This soul hunger is often the basis for addictions, and sexual promiscuity. My form of addiction was workaholism. I drove myself relentlessly in the service of my secular goals, telling myself that my vocational calling as a professor and writer was the highest reaches that my aspirational identity could aim for. I thought I was being subsumed into the actual natural order of my life because there seemed to be a deep connection between my vocational calling and my soul-fulfilment.

I had not realized that atheism is not just separation from God who is the source of all life and creation. The separation results in a deep chasm between one’s conception of oneself and a universal metaphysical order that comes from God’s creation mandate that links all human-beings together in cosmic unity if they find they create a personal custom-sized individual meaning for their lives. But faith is about discovering the true meaning that lies in God’s laws, His love and His divine purpose for our lives. There was an inverse relation that existed between the creation of my own personal meaning and its continued expansion in relation to my soul.

The bankruptcy of atheism comes from its rejection of God’s goodness. It is a rejection of the gift of eternal companionship, stewardship, protection and, above all, a love that is timeless, and suffers from none of the finite limitations of human love. I began to see the moral depravity of renouncing God when I realized that the glorious purpose He had for my life was being sabotaged by my own willful and short-sighted vision of what constituted a good life.

Now, after years of fighting God, accepting Him and then rejecting Him again, I can say these words to the Lord:

How I long to be a supplicant for You, to wake and serve Your will, to have Your paean hymns engraved in my throat. They are there, Lord. And now: To hear melodious incantations, sighs, chants, and harmonious yearnings make me sob.

Lord, You alone make me happy. And so, I know this for sure, and I will proclaim it to all who will hear me:

Lamentation is the voice of God writing His hymns into our hearts.
Jubilation is the cry of God as He rejoices in our personal victories.
Sadness is his sigh at the pain He feels in witnessing our privations.
Silence is His permanent presence in our souls.