Forward to the 2022 edition

I wrote the material on this site twenty years ago. I scanned the last remaining copy of the original paper booklet to a PDF.

Reading it in 2022, it seems strange. “Believers in God don’t use this form of ‘belief’ any more. Why would you argue against that? Nobody thinks like that.” But every person I knew at the time thought like that. They freaked out about my atheism so much, that conversations like this were most of my social interactions until I created a new life and got to know more people in 2003.

The discourse on the internet has moved on. Some would say the points on this site are so obvious that they don’t need to be said. We have broadly succeeded. As I walk through my life today, no one no one acts affronted and shocked that I’m not a Christian any more. No one challenges me to provide reasons for why I don’t believe in God. You can feel free to believe in God, as far as I’m concerned. You no longer can use it to weild social power over me. However, the vast majority of people will switch sides to whatever is popular. They will punish nonconformity. And so, twenty years later, if you are quietly going about your private faith, the social pressure is against you, and works in my favor!

So, to people of faith, I propose this deal for our friendship. I would like for you to bring it up, once, in order to not lie to me about what you believe. Then we will let it drop. I’m willing to do the same in return. And so here I’m bringing it up, once, on a website, so that I’m not lying about it. I have no interest in pressuring believers in my personal relationships with them. We can just stay off the subject.

Here’s what I have to say to those who don’t believe in God, but the excesses of Internet Atheists have made them sick of Atheists. I can hardly blame you.

You do not believe in God, and you also do not approve of talking about the reasons at all. You see it as mean-spirited and paranoid. Beating a dead horse. But there are still social settings where the horse is not dead. You, yourself, might not need an atheist’s essay on the problem of divine hiddenness, and you might not know anyone who needs it. Perhaps you’ve never met someone who needs it. But that has something to do with insular filter bubbles. There are many, like I was, for whom rational apologetics in favor of Christianity is an ill-fitting inheritance, but their community can use it to control them. It’s just that you have never met one. Each of us can live our whole life interacting with a range of people that seem to be from all walks of life, when in reality it’s a tiny slice of the population. It doesn’t represent the world at large.

Just this week, someone from that world emailed me after listening to my audiobook podcast in which I just finished narrating the book Meaningness by David Chapman. He introduced himself, told me about his journey out of Christianity, and asked about my journey. I saw that this essay might be for them. I let my old domain and web-hosting expire in 2009, and this essay could no longer be found on the web. So today, I’m restoring it here. Who knows who might stumble on this and change their life for the better, if they’re in a situation like mine was twenty years ago. And you might want to proceed to read Meaningness next.

-Matt Arnold, August 2, 2022