The Freedom to Be Religious as an Atheist

“In other words, now that I have become an atheist, I feel free to appreciate and even dabble in various religions. To put this in terms of Waits Paradox: Once one has quit religion, he is free to be religious.”

In the 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes, Tom Waits says to Iggy Pop, “The beauty of quitting [smoking] is that, now that I’ve quit, I can have one. Because I’ve quit.”

This is a funny snippet of dialogue because it sounds absurd even though it technically makes sense. If one quits smoking, then he is a non-smoker. And a non-smoker does not become a smoker just by smoking one cigarette.

Call it the Waits Paradox: Once one has quit X, he is free to do X.

I have recently been considering this logic in terms of atheism. I was raised as an evangelical Christian and, for many years, I took the religion quite seriously. At that time, all religious notions that were not fully in lock-step with my own were utterly anathema. Catholicism was a lost cause. Mormonism was laughable. Islam was backwards and dull. Hinduism, nutty. Buddhism, vaguely interesting and non-threatening but also, theologically, a non-starter.