I heard a call from a woman once on The Atheist Experience. She was in tears because she didn’t know what to do with all the guilt that she felt, now that she was an atheist. Christians who did something wrong could just go to God and repent, and feel clean. But she had to live with it, and she didn’t know what to do with it because she couldn’t repent to a God she didn’t believe in.
It was a truly heartbreaking call. You could tell from the woman’s voice that she felt deeply overwhelmed and trapped. Very alone.
What I hear from most atheists these days, frankly, isn’t much help. They tend to say that, unlike Christians, atheists have to own their mistakes, like permanent marks on their character, and they can never go away. A Christian can murder dozens of people in cold blood, repent, and feel, well, clean as Sunday morning. An atheist, however, who cuts off someone in traffic has little recourse for any guilt they may feel later.
This is the line many chest-beating atheists I come across seem to tell Christians to rub in a sense of superiority. And if I were pandering to them, I’d repeat it. But I’d like to be honest: That’s not what I do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I handle guilt, and I’ve found the most effective way I’ve found to do it is to accept what I’ve done, but realize that it does not mean I’m a bad person to my core. I’ve just done something out of ignorance, or done something that hurt somebody else. Maybe that needs to be remedied, somehow, to make the other person feel better. Maybe there is some empathy I feel for the other person’s pain. Maybe there is the discomfort I have from doing something that I shouldn’t have, and it having severe consequences.
I accept this. But I also know that it’s something I’ve done. It does not make me a bad, evil person. It is a fact of my life, not a mark on my entire character.
I came to this conclusion after seeing this reality in other people. I’d read up on the people who committed the worst crimes in history, as a Christian, and I kept being struck by the fact that these people were not all terrible people. The murderer-for-hire Richard Kuklinski who teared up when he talked about how much he hurt his family. The serial killer-rapist Ted Bundy who worked, for free, all-nighters on suicide hotlines. Even the mass murderer Adolph Hitler started out trying to be a painter.
To say these people hurt others horrifically is an understatement. We should be furious at the terrible things they did. We should be angry at the kind of people they were to do such evil things. No question. I cannot begin to imagine how much pain and hurt these people put others through; it boggles my imagination, and makes my blood boil.
Even so, as I looked at their lives, I was disconcerted by the fact that less and less remained black and white. I had a harder and harder time saying that people were just full-stop evil. Especially looking at their history and how they came to be who they were.
A song that haunts me was written by Sarah Mclachlan and is called “Adia”; it kinda spells out where I’m coming from. McLachlan’s best friend, Adia, had a boyfriend, and eventually the boyfriend dated and married Sarah, creating a rocky relationship for them. Sarah Mclachlan wrote the song out of her guilt.
The line that gets me is, “We are born innocent. Believe me, Adia – we are still innocent. We all falter, but does it matter.”
[youtube]https://youtu.be/Q5wW8N4pt3U[/youtube]
And it’s true, in a way. I’ve never seen a guilty infant. We belonged here. And then life happened, our psychology formed, and we developed the thinking we thought would give us the best chance to survive and thrive. Some of it hurt others. But it all came from that innocent origination that grew gradually into you. So at some level, you are still that person. You’re still innocent.
And yet, you sometimes hurt other people. And yet you have motives that aren’t always the best, or you are dishonest, or you do something you know is against your moral system.
But here’s the tough question: are those indications you are evil, or are those flaws in your actions?
I’m not saying that there’s nothing to fix. What you did had consequences, and like anything that you might break or impair, you may need to do something about it. And other people may have to react to what you did in ways that ensure you don’t hurt them or others.
Being empathetic for how you hurt people may be a good thing, and ultimately what they may want. But does this really mean that the positive ways you influence the world have to be impaired by crippling guilt?
I don’t think so.
I still feel guilty at times. But over time, I’ve noticed that what I tend to do is accept what I’ve done without feeling awkward about being in the world. I make peace with the fact that I’m still here. I also realize am where I am because of where I came from, partly – and that’s not just an excuse to dismiss the situation, but a diagnosis so that I can better plot out my future, as well as possibly change the environment so others don’t make mistakes and do the damage I did.
I make mistakes, some of them very consequential ones that hurt people. I do things that don’t always have pure motives behind them. And this introduces discomforts in myself, in relationships, and in various circumstances every once in a while.
I’ve found, however, that when I’m feeling guilty I have a harder time fixing what’s broken; the guilt cripples me. But when I admit the mistake and the damage it caused even as I accept my own existence, I have the ability to move forward and fix what needs to be fixed. We falter, we make mistakes, but there is still the possibility to learn from them and work to heal the damage with a sense of dignity and empathy, rather than be trapped in the guilt.
I guess that’s what I would say to the woman. That when she cuts someone off in traffic, she can think about the results of that, and realize it as a mistake (if it truly was) that she can learn from and apply to the future. It does not define her as a bad person. It is, rather, another step in learning to be in the world.
I think one way this is superior to much of the Christian way of viewing things is that Christianity often (though not always) encourages a “forgive and forget” kind of thinking, which often leaves the problem intact once the guilt is gone through repentance. As an atheist, I accept what happened, feel empathy for those I hurt, and take it as a lesson learned as I work to resolve the situation in real life; a guilt that is encouraged by a God I can’t see is not necessary. This solution, it seems to me, helps me come closer to actually solving problems.
Thanks for reading.