[David Sklansky]

I hate it when I come up with an idea that I hope may be original and it turns out not to be. Such was the case with my idea that God can't see the future. Turns out some guy named Boyd develeped a similar theory and its called Neotheism. So I'm done with that subject.

This next idea, I fear, has also probably been discussed before. But in case it hasn't, we'll name it after me.

I have often been perplexed by the degree of certainty Not Ready and others have about the motives of non believers. They can't seem to accept that many of them simply gradually came to not believe based on things they have learned. And how it doesn't fit in with a personal God. One who cares about humans and sometimes intervenes in our life and answers prayers. In my case my non belief stems from factors including my knowledge of gambling, magic, physics, astronomy, logic, and probability. How they all tie in I have not yet fully explained. Maybe someday.

But religious people seem to think that all non believers have a hidden reason. They want to be God. They don't want some being with authority over them. They want to be more sexually promiscuous. They want to fit into the academic community. etc. etc. Those reasons may be conscious or subconscious. But I am quite sure those things don't apply to me because I can remember specifically each time I became more skeptical. It always occurred when I was reading or thinking about something. And that something was NEVER in regards to religion. Only later on did I realize that the knowledge I gained was another "nail in the coffin" Surely many other people came to that non belief in a similar fashion.

Anyway in pondering recently how I became more and more skeptical, it occurred to me that my skepticism was not accompanied by psychological anguish (except one time at a funeral). And I realized why. It is because I was born Jewish.

The fact is that children of Jewish families have to traverse less psychological roadblocks to come to the conclusion that the Judeo Christian God probably does not exist. There are two obvious reasons. The first is that they don't have the guilt and anguish associated with giving up a belief in Jesus. They have been taught all their life that he was just a man and that to believe otherwise is not only blasphemous (or is it heretical?) but just plain stupid. Thus it is not as lengthy a journey from belief to non belief to someone who is brought up Jewish as it would be to someone brought up Christian.

Secondly, is the perhaps even more important point that Jews do not believe that non believers are doomed, as long as they are righteous people. Which obviously again makes it that much easier to accept non belief if your brain points you in that direction.

The bottom line is that there is less reason to suspect an agnostic of Jewish descent to have psychological issues in his decision to not believe. There is not nearly as great an implication for that person in that decison. And it is more reasonable to assume his non belief comes strictly from scientific type thought than from emotion (eg. "there can't be God because he allows tsunamis").

Christians on the other hand have a more tortuous road on their way to non belief. There are more terrible implications to such thoughts than there is to one raised Jewish. But I'm not sure what this means. On one hand it helps lend credence to Not Ready's theories since moving from Christian to atheist is so much of a bigger deal that we can suspect some sort of psychological pathology is at work to propel someone that far from his origins. On the other hand, those Christians who can show there wasn't a psycholgical component to their conversion to non belief, but rather merely an intellectual and scientific component, should perhaps be taken even more seriously than their Jewish counterparts. They reached their conclusions in spite of what they were taught were bigger risks. Far bigger risks.

This post does not have any final conclusion. I just thought it might be useful to classify nonbelievers into the camps of ex Jews and ex Christians (obviously there are other categories as well) and to get a thread going about the subject. The Sklansky Atheist Phylum.