Atheist and Arab with Pamela Ghanem
In the run-up to the 2022 Lebanese parliamentary elections, I started a 15-episode podcast series where I tried to showcase candidates I believed in and endorsed. I felt the impact of these long-form, measured and less bombastic (than IG stories) podcast episodes was impressive, and I enjoyed recording them.
After the dust had settled, I decided to longer episodes with guests I respect or admire, discussing areas of their expertise or a lived experience I feel is worth sharing with whoever wants to listen. The first episode of this series was with a dear friend of mine, Pamela Ghanem, and we discussed a subject often taboo in our part of the world: being an atheist.
The conversation kicked off with our personal journeys of losing faith. For me, it was starting my Biology studies at AUB as a heavily religiously conservative Maronite Catholic. Soon enough, I realized the complexity of Nature and how elegant natural selection was, the need for a “creator” wasn’t cutting it. I felt immense guilt, as Catholics usually do. Maybe it’s Satan testing me. Let me read a few books about scientists who found faith. Every book made me lose faith even more though. Eventually, one behavioral neuroscience course with a professor that literally changed my life, kicked me from the precarious cliff to the other extreme, and after a year’s struggle, became a happy, fulfilled person without a god.
We then jumped in to compare the rise of religious extremism everywhere, whether in at home in the Middle East, or right here in America with overturning of Roe vs Wade in a major victory for the Christian right and an even bigger blow to women’s rights.
The conversation then moved to why faith seems ingrained in us, and my take on how nature selected for us to assign intention to inanimate things, and how that evolved as we settled down in sedentary towns and cities and became more creative with our belief systems (that often reflect civilization at the time of each belief system’s ‘golden age’)
The conclusion was a message to Arab men and women in countries where their lack of faith could land them in jail, or buried in the ground. If it compromises your safety or liberty, you don’t need to risk it. We care about you, we don’t want you hurt. Knowing we have this one life, we appreciate how precious and unlikely it is, and squandering it for promises of an afterlife seems like such a waste of human potential in the closest thing to objective reality we experience.
