I almost died when I was 26 years old, and that's why I'm an atheist.
O.K., that's not really true, I just thought it would make a punchy opening line. I was actually already an atheist at that age, but my experiences back in 1990 have only served to reinforce and strengthen my nonbelief. On March 27 of that year (exactly nine years before this column was put online), I had a stroke. Specifically, a cerebral hemorrhage. A congenitally weak blood vessel in my brain burst while I was on a business trip, and I fell into a coma. My wife got a call at work from a hospital in the suburbs of Chicago, telling her to get there quickly, because I probably wouldn't survive the day.
I spent four days in a coma, six weeks in the hospital, and four-and-a-half more months in rehab, but I did make a reasonably full recovery. However, there's nothing like having been in a coma to remind you that personality, memory, thought and emotion-everything we think of as "mind"-are utterly dependent on the activities of a functioning brain. I say "having been in a coma" rather than "being in a coma" deliberately; I'm amnesiac for the period from about two days before to more than a month after my stroke. (So if I had a near death experience, it was wasted on me!) Nevertheless, the changes I've experienced in my personality, outlook, and even tastes, along with the eerie sensation of having a two-month gap in my awareness, have provided rather vivid evidence for a materialist perspective on consciousness.
For some reason though, near misses like this tend to reinforce the theism of others. Typical of the kind of remarks I got while I was recovering and afterwards was the comment of a friend's mother: "Someone up there must have been looking out for you." And of course any number of prayers were said on my behalf; for one thing, my mom had a word with the priest at her church. The attitude of the believers implies one of two scenarios about their god, neither of which is particularly comforting:
Since God is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and so on, he's presumably just as responsible for the stroke as for my recovery. This reminds me of a game we used to play when I was a little kid, in which you'd push someone as if to shove them into traffic, then grab them and say "Saved your life!" God must really like this game.
But as we know, the believers like to say that God's only responsible for the good stuff. You can't blame him for anything bad that happens, but you'd better thank him for anything good. I, on the other hand, have learned:
Recovering from misfortune requires effort on one's own part, together with the aid and comfort of loved ones and, in the case of injuries or illnesses like mine, the attention of highly trained professionals.
I guess I just don't get why religion is supposed to be so comforting. I'd rather rely on myself and the support of other humans than the whims of this God fellow.