Mac Geek Mike Lee is a committed atheist living a deeply spiritual life

Mike Lee, Mac Geek, "world's toughest programmer," atheist and deeply spiritual person. Mike Lee, Mac Geek, "world's toughest programmer," atheist and deeply spiritual person. Photo: Mary Brunson Photo: Mary Brunson Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Mac Geek Mike Lee is a committed atheist living a deeply spiritual life 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

One big thing I've learned over the past four years of writing this column is that a person's spirituality will often surprise you.

The way we connect with the divine is profoundly personal, whether we're members of an organized faith or prefer to blaze our own paths to God and Goddess. I've discovered that evangelist preachers aren't always prim and proper, scientists can wholeheartedly embrace ideas they can't prove, Buddhists aren't always tranquil and polytheists may happily believe in one God. Even atheists can have what I would describe as deeply spiritual lives.

The latter realization came by way of my interview this week with Mike Lee, a name familiar to Mac geeks around the world. Lee and his team developed the wildly popular iPhone app, "Tap Tap Revenge" (over one million downloads within four weeks of its release) and recently released Puzzllotto for the iPhone, an app that combines real-world charity with a digital adventure through a dark jungle populated by big-eyed critters and strange spirits.

Lee, 32, describes himself on his blog as the "world's toughest programmer." That toughness was born out of surviving an abusive childhood, which was followed by a mostly unsuccessful search for meaning in the Christian, Buddhist and Shinto faiths. Lee, who grew up in Hawaii and now lives in Cupertino, eventually became a committed atheist. Still, he continues to cultivate the values that were important to his samurai ancestors, believing that "a life lived according to the virtues of rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honor and loyalty should please any reasonable deity."

I discussed discovering the divine in programming code and electronic connections, saving the Madagascar Lemur and altruistic capitalism with Lee via e-mail.

When I find myself in a moral quandary, I'll analyze the problem on my blog and discuss it on Twitter. My peer group's role in resolving moral quandaries didn't change when I swapped the church pews for ergonomic Aeron chairs and the songbook for a MacBook.

Can you give me an example?

I'll give you a recent one, about citizenship. This came up when I traveled to Nevada to help get out the vote for the Obama campaign. I thought, what if citizenship was something you had to earn instead of simply being a birthright? Maybe the reason why people can't be bothered to show up to vote is because they don't appreciate that right, because they didn't have to earn it. And maybe they should have to fulfill certain requirements, like an immigrant would have to do, to gain that right. So I wrote some posts on Twitter, and that led to a big debate that raged on for a couple of hours. The discussion taught me a lot. The basic conclusion that I reached is that nationhood is just a bigger form of neighborhood. We all live here, and we have to get along; the only way for that to work is for us all to be equal, as citizens. If you made everyone apply to be a citizen, it would separate the country into two classes, and that would be a huge mistake.

You grew up as an evangelical Christian. What role did religion play in your upbringing?

Religion was everything; it was all consuming. My own life was a distant second to my duties as a Christian. In fact, to die in the name of religion actually seemed appealing to me from an intellectual standpoint. I spent most of my time reading the Bible, going to church and preparing for the coming apocalypse.

You thought the world was coming to an end?

I didn't think the world was going to end - I knew it was going to end. I believed that the book of Revelation was the true prophecy of events that would happen in my lifetime. If I was pious, I would be lifted to heaven in Rapture, but if I messed up I could go through the apocalypse and earn my place in heaven as a martyr.

You told me that you began questioning your religious beliefs when you were in high school. What happened?

I'm not sure why, but by high school I had begun asking myself what separated the stories in the Bible from, say, the myths of ancient Greece. I sought answers to this question in the one place you're told you can trust, the word of God. But the more I read the Bible, the more I saw its flaws. That was the first crack in my faith, but it got wider as time went on.

Ultimately, my questioning led to a kind of restlessness unlike anything I had experienced. The pivotal moment came after high school, when I was 18. I was in limbo about where I wanted to live, what I wanted to be in life. I read this book called "Kokoro," by Natsume Soseki, which argues that every life has an ideal path that it should follow, and at a certain point you can get so far from that path that the only thing to do is kill yourself. It made me question the path I had been on as a Christian. It was the first time I looked at my life in something different than religious terms. I thought, "There is no Armageddon. There's just you and the world, and what are you going to do?" Well, I wasn't happy where I had ended up. It seems silly now ... I was just 18, but I thought that I had really messed up. I wanted a mulligan on existence. And the only logical thing to do was to kill myself.

You were dealing with a lot of pain in your life, not just because of your doubts about Christianity, but because your family situation was very difficult.

I was in the middle of a war going on between my parents. These were adults who were supposed to be raising me, but instead I became a victim in the crossfire. My mother and my stepfather, whom I lived with, hated my father. They used me as a proxy for him, blaming me for everything they thought he ever did, and punishing me by shaming me and beating me. I would do something my stepfather didn't like, and he would whip out this belt and go to town. It wasn't the reluctant spanking of a frustrated parent. It was gleeful. He made it very clear that he enjoyed beating me.

I guess you had the option of turning to your religion to make sense of all this horror or rejecting it ... why do you think you opted to turn away?

In the church, they taught us that man was created with a hollowness inside him. You could fill that emptiness with sex or drugs or partying with your friends, but at the end of the day, all these things will leave you empty. Only Jesus can fill that hole, and until you come back to him, you will never know peace. That's what they told me, but deep down I felt certain that it wasn't true. Yeah, I knew there was a big hole inside of me, but I was determined to find another way - other than Jesus - to fill it.

Where did that lead you?

For a time, I sought refuge in my father's culture. He was born in Japan - so I listened to Japanese music, studied Japanese literature and watched Japanese movies. I considered my official religion to be a mix of traditional Shinto and mass-market Buddhism. In other words, I held the same religious beliefs of any other Japanese person.

As part of this practice I would pray to my great-grandfather and the local gods of where I happened to be. Reverence for one's ancestors is an important aspect of Shinto doctrine. I still revere my great-grandfather and respect the local gods, though I've stopped praying to either. If pressed to reconcile the animism of Shinto with my rational world view, I'd tell you that every place has its own spirit, each rock its own being. But I consider the personification of that spirit to be a metaphor, the way I believe in Santa Claus as the personification of Christmas.

I've lived all over Oahu, but I spent my most formative years in Manoa valley. This was where I became a man, and it's the one place on earth I consider home. Its moist, rich air hits my brain like a drug, filling me with nostalgia in a way the rest of the island no longer can. That feeling is my understanding of the sacredness of a place.

You say that you believe in spirits and you're talking about sacredness. So why did you become an atheist? And how is that not a contradiction?

My search for religion was ultimately a search for answers posed by life's big questions. Why are we here? Where are we going? What are we supposed to be doing? Without a doubt, how you answer those questions frames the way you experience the world. But whether you interpret the feeling that you get from, say, a walk in the woods, as the presence of God or the spirit in the animist sense or even as chemicals flying around in your brain, the feeling is the same. The sacredness that a Christian or a Shinto adherent or an atheist experiences is the same feeling, in my opinion. We're all living in the same world. It's just the interpretation of that experience that changes.

Don't those differing interpretations matter? They are, after all, the source of a great deal of conflict in the world.

Sure they matter. Your beliefs affect how you act in the world, and that's important. At the same time, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about how my views may differ from someone else's. That was one thing about Christianity that really bothered me - the need to impose one's worldview on another person. At the end of the day, people should be left alone to do their own thing. As long as they're not actively interfering with other people, their lifestyles are their own business.

Did you just wake up one day and realize you were an atheist? How did it happen?

It wasn't a sudden thing. I was looking for answers in different religions and not finding them. Then one day I picked up a book that seemed to explain everything. It was "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. He uses science to explain the way life works. And it made me realize that the reason I had been suffering so much, struggling to fill that hole inside of me, wasn't because I hadn't been a good Christian or that my faith hadn't been strong enough. It was because I didn't have a purpose.

Everything in nature needs a reason for being. Every creature toils, whether it's a bee making honey or a lion chasing down prey. It dawned on me that the cure for my hollowness inside was finding my own purpose, finding a way to be useful to humanity. I was asking the wrong questions. Instead of saying, "I'm miserable, what does God want from me?" I should have been asking, "What does nature want from me?" When I stopped trying to please God and instead tried to please nature, things got a lot better.

The other day you said to me, engineering is my religion. What did you mean by that?

Well, it fulfills that sense of purpose that I was looking for. It's very useful. It solves problems. For me, being happy means making other people happy. When you solve problems, you create happiness.

One of the projects you're doing now is developing an iPhone application to raise awareness and money to help lemurs in Madagascar. How did you get interested in lemurs?

It started when I bought the book "Lords and Lemurs" for my wife, who has a thing for the big-eyed critters. After reading it, I became really concerned for the future of Madagascar. And so my company United Lemur was born, with the goal of fostering altruistic capitalism. We develop iPhone apps and donate 10 percent of our App Store revenue to nonprofit organizations. We recently released Puzzllotto, an exploration puzzle game that's set in the dark jungles of an "eighth continent." The donations went to the Madagascar Fauna Group, an organization dedicated to protecting lemurs and other endangered wildlife in Madagascar.

You talk and write a lot about radical altruistic capitalism -- what is that, exactly?

In "Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith explained that people did not have to exploit others to be wealthy. Smith showed that everyone could be wealthy if they each went about their business to their own selfish ends, but within reason, and with an eye toward the common good. The caveat is important, because without it, capitalism fails at its primary goal, which is the betterment of all mankind.

I call the sustainable form of capitalism that creates profits for all "altruistic capitalism," and the form that creates profits for some to the detriment of others I refer to as "exploitative capitalism." Most businesses ignore the distinction and pursue whichever is most convenient. Our radicalism is in our complete rejection of making money to the detriment of others, to the point where we might be a little too nice. But better we be too nice, rather than just nice enough.

It's interesting that you have a focus on social causes in your business, although you're an atheist. Some people feel like the world would run amuck if we didn't believe in God, that morality comes from or is at least enforced by people's spiritual beliefs.

Adam Smith tackled this exact question in his first book, "Moral Sentiments." What he eventually comes to is that humans, unique among animals, have the power to imagine themselves in another's situation. And Richard Dawkins proves that this aberration, this "empathy," is a net win for natural selection. Empathy leads to altruism, which is the impulse to help others. From this springs a central tenet that is the basis for all morality: Treat people like you want to be treated. Rather than being told (what to do) through some clumsy book addled with arcane rules, my ethics are woven into my very genes.

Finding My Religion wants to hear from you. Send comments on stories and suggestions for interview subjects to miller@sfgate.com.

During his far-flung career in journalism, Bay Area writer and editor David Ian Miller has worked as a city hall reporter, personal finance writer, cable television executive and managing editor of a technology news site. His writing credits include Salon.com, Wired News and The New York Observer.