I grew up very active in a conservative Southern Baptist church. I
served in music ministry, set up Vacation Bible School, went on
domestic and international mission trips, took Bible courses at a
Baptist college, and chaperoned youth trips. I truly believed in God
with all my heart, with all my mind, and with all my soul.
I always thought that Christians became atheists because they were mad
a God; that it is an act of rebellion against giving God total control
of their life. The complete opposite happened to me.
I drifted away from the faith for several years because I became
disillusioned with the mingling of right wing politics with the
pulpit, but then I discovered several progressive Christian writers
such as Shane Claiborne and Donald Miller, and I felt a renewed zeal
to study the Bible and pursue my personal relationship with God. It’s
funny that this pursuit of God led to my atheism.
Several years ago I traveled to Japan and China and visited Shinto
shrines and Buddhist temples and it occurred to me that these people
that I was meeting and getting to know have morals and ethics often as
great as or greater than most Christians I know. I read Confucius
Lives Next Door by T.R. Reid and pondered how can so many Asians have
such high moral standards, lower crime rates, strong communities and
families, all without Jesus?
Around this same time, over the span of several years, I began to
learn more about the world around me. When I was little, God was
bigger than I could imagine and there was no truth, no morality
outside God. One day I came across this thought exercise: “If God told
you to kill someone, would you do it?” Of course the answer would be
that God would never ask me to do that. “But if he did tell you, that
it was for the greater good, part of his plan?” I would have to answer
no. My morals would never allow me to take another life. I’m a firm
believer in non-violence and pacifism. At this moment I was almost
shocked to realize what this means: my values go beyond God – go
deeper than God. It is as if God got a little smaller, or the universe
as I know it got a little bigger.
As I studied the Bible more in my quest to grow closer to God, the
more issues with theology I discovered. Perhaps the greatest issue I
had was with salvation, or put simply, “who goes to heaven and who
goes to hell.” If salvation is though faith in Jesus alone, then it is
unjust to condemn those who have never heard the Gospel, and equally
unfair if these people get a “free pass” to heaven while those who, to
varying degrees, have heard the Gospel are judged.
The more and more I learned about the world, the more I disagreed with
the exclusivity of faith in Christ. Somebody who earnestly says a
prayer accepting Jesus, then goes about life as usual, is more
deserving of heaven than a Buddhist monk who dedicates his entire life
to feeding the poor and clothing the needy, and caring for the sick?
After all, Matthew 25 pretty plainly states that those who do “unto
the least of these” are rewarded with heaven and those who selfishly
do not are condemned. How do you reconcile “faith alone” with this
teaching? How does simply saying a prayer supersede this? Maybe just
praying the “Sinner’s prayer” and repenting of sins is not enough.
I thought that perhaps I am a Universalist – that there are many paths
in life and all people will eventually be reconciled to God. But if
this is true, then why is there a need to believe in God anyway?
What’s the difference, as long as I seek to live out the message of
Matthew 25 and seek to “love my neighbor as myself?”
Still, I tried fervently to seek God in spite of growing doubts. I
wanted to believe that he existed. I prayed that he would show me the
way. Lying in bed at night I prayed until I cried, begging that he
would restore my faith. I read more Christian books and studied the
Bible more fervently.
Eventually I accepted what my heart and mind was telling me – there is
not God. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Jesus’ teaching, but that
his divinity and the existence of a God seemed increasingly unlikely
in light of what I was learning about the world around me. I never
stopped believing in the Bible in the sense that it is the greatest
source of moral truth in my life. Jesus’ teachings such as the Sermon
on the Mount and Matthew 25 form the basis of my ethics. I will always
follow my conscience and seek peace, justice, equality for all people
through love.
I guess some Christians will say it is okay – people take many paths
and all people will be reconciled to God eventually. Some will say
that I’ll eventually “come back around.” Some will say that I was
never a Christian to begin with, or that I was not predestined, or
elected, by God. My faith was completely real to me for the better
part of two decades. I was certain that God heard and answered my
prayers. I felt his supernatural presence in still quiet moments of
worship.
But now I realize that it was just a creation of my own mind. I want
to be honest with myself and use reason and logic, not blind faith, to
explore the world. Life as a human being is very precious, and it is
something to be cherished. I want to spend my life creating “heaven”
on earth for the “least of these.”
James Willamor
United States
I think we, as atheists, in our efforts to get theists to really think about what is in the Bible, tend to dismiss it completely as a source of moral guidance. Of course, taken as a whole, it is a horrific moral document. But there are parts of it that express, sometimes quite beautifully, the morals that social animals need to create well-functioning societies.
I think about the admonition to owners of fields to not cut the edges and to leave the fields ungleaned, so that the poor can come and collect a little food. Though I bet that that one was more honored in the breach, as so many of the more generous rules tend to be, at least the idea that if you can afford to help the poor you should is expressed.
There is nothing wrong in finding things like that in the Bible and making note of them. But don’t forget that any literature written by a human is likely to have such ideas imbedded within them. There is nothing special about the bible in that respect.
Bravo! I’ve been following this series, and this is one of the best-written of all of the “Why I am an atheist” essays.
And that puts the lie to the xian claim that atheists “suppress the truth in unrighteousness”.
Not that it will stop them from saying that of course.
Hi James,
I’m interested in your feeling of a supernatural presence. Can you describe how this felt, and how “real” an experience it was in hindsight. Was it literally like a person present to which you talk and that seems to talk to you as an independent mind, or more like an abstract sense of spirituality. I’m asking because so many christians say they have this presence in their life, and it is something that is completely foreign to me myself.
What makes you think you’re so special that god would never ask you to kill someone? It is a cruel, sadistic bastard:
I enjoyed this account very much, especially as someone involved in teaching Asian studies in the United States. I’m convinced that this country would be much improved in all kinds of ways if everyone was forced to spend a period abroad during high school or college and gain some sort of comparative perspective on the world. Few of the students who reach me at college level have ever left this country at all – and that in spite of the fact that I’m teaching at an expensive private institution. It’s not surprising, then, that they’ve never had cause to reflect on the world-view they’ve been served up since infancy. Thanks, James, for showing that some will come to question their assumptions even so.
Oh for crying out loud, hard line breaks.
Wait till you’ve read The United States of Europe by the same T. R. Reid. Mwahah.
I’d be interested in hearing as well (or from anyone else for that matter). I have epilepsy which can produce a lot of strange feelings, like deja vu, an intense fear of mortality and death, and a lot of other “funny feelings” that simply can’t be described to someone who hasn’t experienced them. All of those go away completely with medication that specifically targets partial seizures. Even I hadn’t realized they were related to that until I switched drugs. It makes me wonder if most people experience micro-seizures normally without realizing it.
One of the best accounts of the series so far. Touching, and nicely written.
I read a story (which was probably not really true, but illustrative anyway) of a Native American asking a Jesuit missionary “what happens to those who have not heard the Gospel?” The Jesuit said “nothing, they aren’t punished,” or something to that effect. The Native American replied “Then why did you tell me?”
Anyway, I enjoyed reading your story. I have often been told I’m just mad at God and I’ll come back. I am not any more mad at God than I am at The Judge from Blood Meridian or O’Brien from Nineteen Eighty Four or Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter. They’re all fictional characters, and rather evil ones too I may add, but fictional nonetheless. I simply have no good reason to believe in God or any of these absolutely preposterous fictional deities concocted in the brains of humans centuries ago. Now, I am often mad at those who do believe in these literary characters and believe that gives them license to do appalling things… but that’s not why I’m an atheist. I’m an atheist because I like to think about things and, when using thought, realized God wasn’t real.
nicely done, James…
The Moses connection occurred to me as well- and I try to point to Moses as an example of the kind of unethical lesson I would not want to teach anyone.
Also, the Asian thing too– US citizens need to travel, learn and change
This was my journey, too. I started asking questions and then (increasingly frantically) kept adjusting my beliefs to find some way to keep God that made sense with everything else I knew about the universe. Richard Bach (of Jonathon Livingston Seagull and a host of other inspirational books), Neale Donald Walsh, Unity church, Unitarian Universalist – each was comfortable for a while until new questions came up. Each incarnation also had less and less God in it. Finally the bubble popped as I accepted, as you did, that there is nothing there.
The sensing a presence/spiritual experience – that was one of the last things to sort out. I did have those experiences. Then I read about a man who had intensely spiritual experiences all the time. He would have episodes where everything was glowing with a heavenly light and he felt God. It was traced to seizures in the part of the brain that directs our attention and assigns importance – it seemed a seizure there gave everything equal importance. In another study they could reproduce a sense of presence with magnets over the brain.
Nice post, and similar to my own experience.
As for those asking about ‘feeling God’s presence’ (Tyrant of Skepsis & Midnight Rambler), I can answer that, at least for my own part.
I was christian until the age of ~17-ish. I have at many times deeply experience what I would have at the time called ‘feeling God’s presence’. I don’t actually believe that Atheists are capable of feeling anything remotely similar – I certainly cannot anymore. To understand it, you have to yourself understand how deeply many Christians think on the bible, and how deeply and fervently they pray. In doing this, you can actually enter a sort of trance-like state. All your thoughts are dominated by what you consider at the time to be the most beautiful and elegant Truths, with a capital T. When you couple this with the belief that the literal creator of the universe is present with you and you can communicate directly with God via the privilege of prayer, it is a powerful feeling. The way I’d describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it is thus:
I have taken a reasonable amount of so-called recreational drugs over my early adult years. Ecstasy is a drug which basically blisses you out completely when it’s good – everything is great; you feel a deep sense of peace, goodwill, happiness and even joy, feel like you’re literally floating along on a cloud, and at the same time have an incredible rush of energy. I have literally never felt a better feeling, and now that I don’t take drugs anymore, don;t expect that I ever will. There are many physiological changes that go along with this state, as you might imagine. While I could never attain those sort of heights without drugs, ‘feeling the presence of God’ felt somewhat similar in many regards, though of a lesser intensity. At the same time, there was a sense of beauty, awe and wonder. Do you remember the first time you saw Hubble’s ‘Pillars of Creation’ shot of the Eagle nebula? That same sense of dumb-struck awe and beauty was there when I ‘felt God’s presence’ in my deepest prayers/meditations on the bible. It was something you FEEL strongly. It was deep seated. It felt undeniable. And it felt great.
These days I attribute it to some sort of physiological reaction that I could bring on – it was almost as if I could marshall Serotonin and dopamine and deploy it in force at will. Also mixed in was the sense of wonder. I’d bet most people in here would get the sense of wonder from the beauty of the natural world. I think the need for a sense of wonder in Humans is powerful, and Christians get their fix from imagining a being who literally created everything and can do anything – who can ‘number the very hairs on your head’. The beauty and the mystery of the natural world is shifted back one more level of abstraction, onto a God who created it all and is therefore even more mysterious and beautiful.
Anyway, these are just my thoughts from my time as a Christian which ended about 15 years ago. However kooky it may seem to people in here, at the time it was my entire life, seemed perfectly self-consistent and the Bible did indeed shape my morality and values significantly; the bits that I’d read by the time I was in my mid-teens, anyway.
Thanks for writing, James.
Nicely done James, thanks.
If you all will indulge me I have been trying to summarize my thoughts on the whole “why do people believe in the fairytale?”. I post these (again and amended when a post like James spurs. Posting forces me to think more – and exposes my thoughts to review and criticism too.
Excuses/reasons for believing in the god stuff are:
* you are insane
* you are not INSANE but your brain is playing tricks on you (e.g. with epilepsy)
* you can parley it into money, a job, your desired squeeze, or the like
* you are a dolt
* you are intellectually lazy or never felt motivated because god/religion are not really important in your life and thus never thought about it enough to declare an opinion honestly.
* you can compartmentalize so completely, or your faith so vague or just ritual, you never have cognitive dissonance to trouble you.
* you have a strong RWA innate personality that additively craves the certainty of religion dogmas and doctrines and the hierarchy it imposes on us and creatures and the environment
* you culturally like the bennies of the group-think
* you are coerced in profound way by your society/country
* you calculate risk/benefit and conclude no upside to declaring being atheist
*you are a super good person who earnestly wants to do good and are scared deep down that without god/religion you’ll be less inclined to be the person you want to be
* you cannot do without the warm fuzzies and want strongly to believe you believe
Of course there is mixture and shading throughout. But I claim the last reason two predominate for most sane, free, modern educated people. This god stuff is the only fairytale and myth in which people can drown their sorrows and tribulations without society chastising them, and/or the infrastructure religion seems to offer the best chance at doing good in the World.
People do not really believe – not at the numbers claimed. If they did medical insurance companies, medical facilities, seat belt manufacturers, alcohol distillers , etc. would cease to exist. I stand by that!
Wonderful writing, James, and enjoyable reading for me. I’m always happy when someone mentions Asian countries having high moral standards and low crime rates without the Christian God. This seems like such a strong argument that we can be “good without God,” and I wish more people would consider it.
I took a philosophy course on religious thought for shits and grins in college one semester that had a fundamentalist in it. The professor didn’t seem to mind us other students baiting him from time to time. We once asked him if he would kill his parents if God told him to. He said he would need a sign from God as well. So we said that after hearing God tell him to kill his parents, he looked outside and saw the same command in flaming letters written in the sky, would he do it? He said that would be good enough for him and he’d do it. We were astonished, to say the least.
concernedjoe @ 16,
I was a devout Christian for 20 years before becoming an atheist. I had faith and then I didn’t have faith anymore but I’m not sure I could tell you why, and it’s not for a lack of introspection on this matter. ‘Why’ questions are pretty hard to answer. I could write quite a few of these ‘Why I am an atheist’ essays, each detailing a different aspect of HOW I came to stop having faith but I’d have a hard time telling you WHY I lost it and WHY I had it in the first place beyond the fact that I was raised in a Christian home and in a country where supernatural beliefs are a perfectly natural part of everyday life. I could count on one hand the number of people I know who don’t believe in the supernatural. This obviously influenced my belief system but I wouldn’t go so far as to call that coercion, nor would I pinpoint it as the reason for my beliefs back then. I may be wrong though.
The stuff on your list doesn’t account for simple ‘faith’ and I think that’s where it falls short. You give a bunch of excuses/reasons for belief that are all based on your perspective (as someone who I’m guessing has never been a person of faith) but you have no understanding of where the other side is coming from. I know that ‘I believe because I have faith’ sounds ridiculous but note the biblical definition of faith as “the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” For a Christian with this mindset faith *is* evidence. In my own personal experience my faith was strongest when concrete evidence was at its weakest because it filled the void as evidence in and of itself. I know that sounds absolutely kooky. But I was as sane when I was a Christian who thought that made sense as I am now as an atheist who struggles to figure out why I ever had that kind of faith. I wasn’t intellectually lazy. I’d read the Bible cover to cover several times by my late teens and I asked loads of questions and engaged thoroughly with the material and I certainly didn’t compartmentalize it as it was the fundamental basis for my everyday life. I don’t have an RWA personality. I can’t bear group think. It wasn’t a risk/benefit calculation. And trust me, there’s nothing particularly warm and fuzzy about a fundie Pentecostal upbringing.
My point is I think your efforts to understand this thing will be in vain as it’s hard enough for someone like me who lived and believed it for 20 years to get it. So for a person who has never experienced this nonsense in a personal way I don’t expect you to be able to explain why people believe in the fairytale. But of course I’m not saying you shouldn’t keep trying if that’s what you want. Good luck!
Ella thanks for your thoughtful response.
I think you make a good point. To say briefly what I gathered:
My “* you are intellectually lazy or never felt motivated because god/religion are not really important in your life and thus never thought about it enough to declare an opinion honestly.”
is not sufficient to cover ” * … thinking about it but still clinging for whatever reason to (probably imprinted for many years) faith ..”
I have not “wordsmithed” my addition .. but I hope I get your point – seems to be a good one.
Yes, exactly!