Famous people losing their religion: stories

[Fake Messiah]

I heard and read some touching stories of famous people at the moment they lost their religion. These are some that "stayed" with me because there is something startling when you see people being freed from shackles of religion.

Alan Alda

I was still going to mass every Sunday, because I believed that if I didn’t, I would take a one-way trip to hell. I was twenty-two, and the nuns’ words from my adolescence still burned in my ears. I envied people like Arlene and her father, Simon, who seemed not to need to believe what someone else told them they had to believe.
[...]
Then the priest reached the moment when, after consecrating the host and holding it in both hands, he lifts it above his head. I looked at it. I had always looked at it. But this time I noticed that the other people in the chapel were bowing their heads. Maybe I should be bowing my head, I thought. But, no. If you’re not supposed to look at it, why is the priest holding it up? We’re going to be swallowing it in a minute; why can’t we look at it? This led to a train of thought I had never taken before: I wonder how many of these people bowing their heads actually believe that this is the body of Jesus? Do they realize you can’t regard it as just a symbol? And suddenly, in that moment, I remembered what the Jesuits had taught me. “No matter what,” they said, “you have to follow your conscience.” And I thought: I don’t know what these other people believe, but if I’m honest with myself, I do not believe the priest is holding anything but the same piece of unleavened bread that it was a few minutes ago. I was like the boy of fourteen again, refusing to rise from the pew, holding stubbornly to his right to think for himself.

And then I remembered a second thing the Jesuits had taught me: If you don’t believe in transubstantiation, you’re automatically excommunicated.

I’m out, I thought. I didn’t quit; they don’t want me. They let me go. I’m fired.

A ray of sunlight fell across the chapel, just the way it did in The Song of Bernadette.

Arlene had never opposed what I believed. She never did anything more than ask questions. It took a while, but I began to ask questions, too, and when I did I saw that as logical as I had thought I was, it was as if there were parts of my brain operating independently, not even aware of one another. Arlene had brought me closer to facing these parts of myself. She was introducing me to a notion of reality and compassion I had never known before.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

We still had our differences. She and my father were Catholic. Every Sunday until I was fifteen, I went to church with them. Then my friends started asking why I did it. They said it was stupid. I had never given it much thought one way or the other. It was a rule at home: we went to church. Helmut Knaur, sort of an intellectual among the bodybuilders, gave me a book called "Pfaffenspiegel", which was about priests, their lives, how horrible they were, and how they'd altered the history of the religion.
Reading that turned me completely around. Karl and Helmut and I discussed it in the gym. Helmut insisted that if I achieved something in life, I shouldn't thank God for it, I should thank myself. It was the same if something bad happened. I shouldn't ask God for help, I should help myself. He asked me if I'd ever prayed for my body. I confessed I had. He said if I wanted a great body, I had to build it. Nobody else could. Least of all God.
These were wild ideas for someone as young as I was. But they made perfect sense and I announced to my family that I would no longer go to church, that I didn't believe in it and didn't have time to waste on it. This added to the conflict at home.

Arthur C. Clarke

Without knowing it, I became a logical positivist at about the age of ten. Every Sunday, I was supposed to make the two-mile walk to the local Church of England—it was a long time before I discovered there was any other variety—to attend a service for the village youth. To encourage us to sit through the sermons, we were rewarded with stamps illustrating scenes from the Bible. When we had filled an album with these, we were entitled to an “outing”—i.e., a bus trip to some exotic and remote part of Somerset, perhaps as far as twenty miles away. I stuck with it for a few weeks, then decided—to quote Churchill’s famous memorandum on the necessity of ending sentences with a preposition—“This is nonsense up with which I will not put.”
Half a century of travel, reading, and contact with other faiths has endorsed that early insight.

Paul Haggis' mother

He was raised Catholic and when he was 13, his mum pulled up the parish priest for buying a new Cadillac. "The priest said, 'I thought about this a lot and God wants me to have a Cadillac.' My mom told  the priest that she had thought about it a lot, too, and God did not want them going to mass at his church any more. So I take that from her, I guess. No matter what your belief, you have to be able to question it."

Isaac Asimov

I remained without religion simply because no one made any effort to teach me religion—any religion. I have been left free and I have loved the freedom. I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.
[...]
By the time I was reading the Bible, however, science fiction and science books had taught me their version of the universe and I was not ready to accept the Creation tale of Genesis or the various miracles described throughout the book. My experience with the Greek myths (and, later, the grimmer Norse myths) made it quite obvious to me that I was reading Hebrew myths.

Richard Dawkins

I listened [Elvis] with delight – for my hero sang that every time he saw the wonders of the natural world around him, he felt his religious faith reinforced. My own sentiments exactly! This was surely a sign from heaven. Why I was surprised that Elvis was religious is now beyond me. He came from an uneducated working-class family in the American South. How could he not have been religious? [...] Elvis was speaking personally to me, calling me to devote my life to telling people about the creator god – which I should be especially well qualified to do if I became a biologist like my father. This seemed to be my vocation, and the call came from none other than the semi-divine Elvis.
I am not proud of this period of religious frenzy, and I’m happy to say that it didn’t last long. I became increasingly aware that Darwinian evolution was a powerfully available alternative to my creator god as an explanation of the beauty and apparent design of life. It was my father who first explained it to me but, to begin with, although I understood the principle, I didn’t think it was a big enough theory to do the job. I was biased against it by reading Bernard Shaw’s preface to "Back to Methuselah" in the school library. Shaw, in his eloquently muddled way, favoured Lamarckian (more purpose-driven) and hated Darwinian (more mechanistic) evolution, and I was swayed towards the muddle by the eloquence. I went through a period of doubting the power of natural selection to do the job required of it. But eventually a friend – one of the two, neither of them biologists, in whose company I later refused to kneel in chapel – persuaded me of the full force of Darwin’s brilliant idea and I shed my last vestige of theistic credulity, probably at the age of about sixteen. It wasn’t long then before I became strongly and militantly atheistic.

Roger Ebert

I was a voracious reader in grade school and early on began to question the logic of the faith. To be informed it was necessary for me to just simply believe was not satisfactory. Some things just didn’t make any sense. If God was perfect, I reasoned, how could he create anything that contradicted his creation? This conclusion, reached in grade school, was later to lead me like an arrow to the wonderful theory of evolution. We were not taught creationism in grade school, and I learned that the Church was quite content to get along with Darwin. The questions that plagued me didn’t have to do with science but with fairness. If you committed a mortal sin, it might depend on sheer chance whether you would get the opportunity to confess it before you died.
Why had God, who was all-powerful, devised this merciless moral mechanism for his creatures? He created paradise and in no time at all his very first humans, Adam and Eve, did something that made perfect sense to me. I would have eaten the apple myself. Now humankind was condemned forever to the prospect of hell. Did hell even exist before there were people to occupy it? If only the fallen angels lived there, why didn’t God in his infinite mercy choose to keep us someplace handy where he could encourage our rehabilitation? And who dreamed up the system of indulgences, even plenary indulgences, which reminded me uneasily of Get Out of Jail Free cards? The Church began to resemble a house of cards; remove only one and the walls fell.
At some point soon after my discovery of Playboy magazine I began to live in a state of sin, because I simply could not bring myself to confess certain transgressions to a priest who knew me and could see me perfectly well through the grid of the confessional. Logically I was choosing eternal torment over a minute’s embarrassment. This choice was easy for me. When I saw Harvey Keitel placing his hand in the flame in Mean Streets, I identified with him. The difference between us was that long before I reached the age of Charlie in the film, I had lost my faith. It didn’t make sense to me any longer. There was no crisis of conscience. It simply all fell away.