So I said that Steve is a perfect example of why not to be an atheist, and why not to be a theist. What the heck was I talking about? Let’s start with why not to be an atheist, since that’s probably confusing most of my regular readers.

Steve and I were both raised in secular families. Our parents didn’t go to church, didn’t talk about religion, didn’t explicitly teach us anything about God or Christianity, didn’t force some sort of belief system on us. So why do I think Steve ended up a Christian while I ended up an atheist? Because there was one thing my parents taught me that Steve’s parents didn’t: skepticism.

People have been discussing this a lot now that the new wave of atheists are reproducing. We don’t want to indoctrinate our children into atheism, but most of us don’t want them to be swayed by religious people either. So what do we do? I think Dale McGowen, author of Parenting Beyond Belief, has it right: we need to instill skeptical thinking into our children. You know, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime? Well, tell a kid something’s irrational and you help him for a day, teach a kid how to think rationally and he’ll teach himself for a lifetime. …Not sure if that phrase is going to catch on, but nevermind.

Steve’s parents were atheists, but they didn’t actively try to instill those skeptical thinking skills in him. So once Steve was exposed to religion, he was easily swayed. He was told something was wrong because he wasn’t religious, and he believed it, like so many people unfortunately do.

But I think the bigger issue here is why you should not be a theist.

Why do I really think Steve became religious? I can tell you with some confidence, knowing his personality, that it was because Christianity on campus gave him a sense of community. Like I said before, Steve has always been sort of nerdy and socially awkward – he doesn’t make friends very quickly. He was the only person of our group to go to that university, so he was friendless for a long time. But then a student in one of his classes invited him to Bible study, and the rest is history.

I’m sure the Christian students are nice people, and that’s just what Steve needed. They offered friendship when no one else did, and those sorts of warm fuzzy feelings are enough to get someone thinking that religion is the thing they’ve been missing in their life. Compared to Steve’s home life, where his parents had a hard time making ends meet and would frequently argue, the stable, happy Christian students probably looked like the better alternative.

I should be happy that he found friends, but I’m sad that they’ve changed him. He’s lost a lot of his wit and won’t dare to crack an “inappropriate” joke anymore. He used to be an absolutely brilliant poet and writer, and now all I see on his Facebook are little poems about God. I can’t help but think if he just would have gone to Purdue or IU, where many of his high school friends were, that things would have been different. Or even if he had a club for atheists or agnostics at his university – maybe he could have found a community there.

So I guess this is why I’m so upset about his conversion. I feel like it’s painfully obvious that he fell into this because he’s this shy guy who needed some friends, and the Christian students are looking to snatch up those kind of people. But at the same time, he’s still the same wonderful friend, and I don’t want to make him miserable by discussing this with him. I’m just going to leave him be.

What would you do?

This is post 2 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

On Wednesday I made a post about how I seem to only make friends with fellow non-theists, though not on purpose. Well, that’s not entirely true anymore. Just like I had some religious friends turn atheist, I have had one nonbeliever turn religious.

Let’s call him Steve.

Steve and I have been very close friends for ten years. We met in 6th grade when he had just moved to town from a far away state. It was a very stereotypical story: He was (well, still is) extremely nerdy, shy, and overly nice. If you remember anything about being 11, this means he was teased mercilessly and had a hard time making friends. I had just come out of a couple hard years of experiencing the same sort of childhood shunning, and when I saw the kind of crap he was going through, I immediately befriended him. I knew how awful it was to be the nerdy outcast, and I didn’t want him to suffer through that.

He was one of my best friends throughout middle school and high school. Steve was technically my first boyfriend after I worked up the nerves to ask him to Turnabout, but after about a month we realized we were really just meant to be friends. Now we’re more like brother and sister, which means a lot to two only children*. When it comes to deep philosophical discussion about religion on God, I’m sure most of that happened between us late at night over AIM when we really should have been sleeping or doing homework.

But as graduation approached, I became solidified in my atheism, and Steve moved to Christianity.

At first I didn’t even realize it was happening. We talked less because we attended different universities and just had hectic schedules. He mentioned something about making an effort to read through the Bible, which I didn’t see as so bad. I’ve actually always felt a bit guilty that I’ve only read excerpts – I mean, if you really want to judge something, you should have read it, right? But I figured this wouldn’t be a problem with Steve, since both of his parents were atheists and he was never raised with religion.

By the end of our freshman year, Steve was a Christian who went to church every Sunday and Bible study multiple times a week.

When he told me about his extracurricular activities, I was shocked. I asked him what made him feel like he had to be Christian, but like most religious people, he could only give vague answers about how he knew it was right, etc etc. I was mostly surprised because Steve has always been an extremely bright guy, great scientist, and rational thinker – one of those weird people who thinks math is fun. That’s not to say there are no smart theists, but he would have been the last person I’d expect to convert to Christianity (well, other than Richard Dawkins, maybe).

I remember my first reaction was to debate. I went through the usual “Why I don’t believe in God” checklist. If he had been born in India he would have just as easily been born a Hindu, how can God answer prayers if he already has a divine plan set up, why is there evil in the world, etc etc. But then I stopped. He wasn’t debating back, and he didn’t want to. Steve is the ultimate “live and let live” sort of nice guy (to the point where his neutrality can be annoying), and I didn’t know why I was doing this to him. He would never try to convert me, never judge me, never become less of friends with me because I’m an atheist – and I can say all those things knowing they’re 100% true.

So I caught myself and stopped debating him. I told him I’d still love him no matter what…well, as long as he didn’t become hateful or an evolution denier, which made him laugh. A good sign. And we’ve sort of had a truce ever since. But when religion comes up, it still makes me twinge a bit. We used to trade books back and forth all the time, but when I gave him The Golden Compass, he just happened to never get around to it. He’ll jokingly follow my shouts of “Jesus Christ!” with a “loves everyone” – which he says with a chuckle, but I know he’s probably annoyed that I’m taking the Lord’s name in vain. And when he talks about school, it invariably turns to religion. I mean, how can it not? All of his friends are through Bible Study, and his only extracurriculars are that and church. The thing that prompted me to write this post was that he just told me he’s joined Campus Crusade for Christ, which made me want to vomit a little. For those of you who aren’t familiar with CRU, it’s the Christian student group equivalent to a mega church – it’s huge, charismatic, and bent on converting as many students to Christianity as possible (you know, in case you didn’t get that from the word Crusade in their name). I could handle him in the little local groups, but CRU? To say I’m disappointed is an understatement.

But why am I so upset about Steve suddenly finding God?

I guess to an extent I feel somewhat responsible. That I was his best friend, yet somehow he still has bought into what I see to be a superstition and delusion. But I think the thing that upsets me the most is that Steve is a perfect example of why not to be an atheist, and why not to be a theist. And I will explain what I mean in Part 3.

I’m sure some of you have “lost” nonbelieving friends to religion. How did you react?

*Technically I have two half-brothers, who I love greatly, but they’re much older than me so I didn’t grow up with them. We have more of a cousin like relationship.

This is post 1 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I’m a bit unusual in the sense that I wasn’t raised religious, that I never “converted” to atheism. But I also think I’m unusual for another reason.

I don’t really have any religious friends.

I don’t think I did it on purpose. Even in high school, where I considered myself “agnostic” and basically didn’t want to think about religion anymore, almost all of my friends were non-theists. I didn’t select them for this reason: many of us had known each other since we were little kids. But when I think of my close group of friends, the demographics were something like this:

2 Atheists
3 Agnostics
1 Not very serious Wiccan (who is now an Atheist)
2 “spiritual but not religious” people

I had other friends who were liberal Christians or Hindu, but they were school friends – we never really spent time together outside of class.

I thought maybe this was a fluke, but the same thing has happened to me in college. Of my original group of friends I made freshman year:

3 Atheists
2 Agnostics
1 Liberal Christian

But I didn’t grow up with these people – we just happened to be roommates. Granted, it was on the Honors Science floor of the dorm, so that probably skewed the odds…but it’s like we accidentally found each other. I didn’t screen the girls on the floor or in my classes to find the heathens – we just happened to clump together.

Do I think this is just a coincidence? No, I’m sure there’s a rational explanation. I wouldn’t say my high school group found each other because we were all religious outcasts – most of my friends were forced to go to CCD or Jew Camp or all sorts of community things where they could have made religious friends. Even with those opportunities, we accidentally became close friends with all the other heathens. I think we even encouraged each other’s nonbelief to an extent. Middle and high school were times where we would discuss belief a lot (we were nerds, shut up), and probably reinforced skeptical thinking in each other.

More importantly though, I bet we’re just drawn together because we have similar values. Not only are we all atheists, but we’re all liberal, nerdy, slightly perverted, etc… That doesn’t mean all atheists have those attributes or that no theists do, but it’s a pretty good stereotype. That would also explain college, where we didn’t grow up together and reinforce each others beliefs. They were already there, but overall our personalities just happened to match. But one thing about my hypothesis doesn’t work: all of my atheist friends have good religious friends.

Why am I the one person with only atheist friends? Now that we have the club, it’s even worse. Well, I mean, it’s wonderful because I’ve made so many more good friends through our meetings. But now I have tons of atheist friends. I even “lost” my one token Christian friend because he became an Agnostic – I guess we’re a bad influence on him. I’m not actively avoiding theists. Hell, I don’t even find out a person’s religious beliefs right away – how could I be avoiding them? Am I subconsciously distancing myself from theists? Or do they distance themselves from me when they find out about me being president of a club of atheists?

Part 2 tomorrow: Why this actually matters to me