Like others, I was raised in a fundamental Christian household, first as an Independent Baptist and then a Southern Baptist. We went to church at least three, sometimes five times a week. I was a good girl, very obedient and believing, but I remember being thrown by a Sunday school teacher’s answer when I asked where your soul was – floating above your head, she replied. So I was a bit skeptical of souls from third grade on. (Side note – I reasoned there was no santa when I was five because santa’s presents were addressed to me in my dad’s handwriting. Ditto with easter bunnies and tooth fairies. I wasn’t completely naïve, just when it had to do with religion.)

I excelled in everything God- and church-related; I wanted to be a good example of a Christian from an early age. So after I was saved at four years old I worked hard to learn as many Bible verses as possible, to be obedient, to witness to my friends, to hand out popsicles at the park on hot days, etc. One of my proudest moments was when I won my state’s Southern Baptist youth Bible Drill contest and got to go to nationals. I taught Sunday school and Vacation Bible School from high school on, sang in the choir, helped lead our music program while in college. Over the summer of my junior year of college I married the pastor’s son, my high school beau (because God told us to get married), and we led the youth group together, intending to go to seminary after a couple years. At this point I had been part of the church for twenty years and it was the source of all of my comfort, friends, fun, and work.

My changes started while in high school. I was convicted over and over that I wasn’t “truly saved” and spent many nights and mornings desperate and crying while studying my Bible. One day something clicked, I forget what it was, but I had an “experience” that I thought was salvation for real, so I got re-baptized. A year or so later my new year’s resolution was to understand how salvation works, so I spent a lot of time analyzing Bible verses and reading Christian authors. Except that things started unraveling. I gave up the notion of the soul entirely, then later miracles, then prayer. By the time I got married in college I believed God had pre-ordained everything and didn’t interfere with the world, because that wouldn’t make sense. An astronomy course my senior year of college opened my eyes to actual science and messed more with my already-hanging-by-a-thread belief system. It didn’t help that my husband was a philosophy major who discussed logic puzzles with me every day. So for a year my beliefs came undone as I watched, helpless, rationalizing everything in an attempt to hold it together. Then one day I narrowly avoided a car crash and realized I hadn’t prayed. It’s impossible to describe the floor falling from under your feet , the helplessness. I knew I didn’t believe in God anymore, but had no idea what to do. My husband was headed to seminary, my church was my lifeline, my whole life revolved around God and Jesus.

After some months’ awkwardness, I discovered my husband had also stopped believing in God. We finished up at the church and fled town within a year, anxious to separate ourselves from religion. Now I had no friends or family, no work, only a husband who was as unhinged as I was. Lots of alcohol, some counseling, and ten years later, we’re still together. It’s a rare thing to have a friend who shared such an experience.

So why am I an atheist? The short answer is because I finally saw my religion for what it was: a confusing set of beliefs that made no sense once carefully considered. That said, I would not wish this experience on anyone. Sure, I consider myself more moral and caring than I ever was before, but I also lost all my friends and am still rebuilding the trust of my family and my husband’s family. In the end, it’s worth it to be a rational person, but I will always feel haunted by my past and have regrets.

CM

Richard Dawkins likes to compare openness about one’s atheism with coming out of the closet, but in my case they were even more closely related.

Like so many kids I repressed my homosexuality out of religious (in my case, Christian) compunction and social phobia. But once I finally begrudged myself some sex in college, I knew intuitively that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I reacted against the idea of the victimless crime, described as sin by the Bible. But while I had shed my denominational identity, I remained stuck in a kind of anachronistic deism. Indeed, having jettisoned the doctrine of original sin, I probably overcompensated with an overly optimistic view of nature and its presumbaly benevolent creator.

So I was in for a shock when some of my friends started coming down with, and dying from, AIDS (this was the early nineties). Of course I knew about it from reading the newspaper and watching television, but I had put off revising my worldview until now. How to explain AIDS? Of course I already knew that it wasn’t divine punishment because there was nothing wrong with sex and, anyway, it had spared many “fornicators” including myself. But it didn’t exactly accord with my new-model deism either. I was experiencing a crisis that was as much intellectual as emotional.

Resolution beckoned in the form of evolution, which I had learned in high school but never related to my daily life in that hiatus between polio and AIDS. With its frequent mutations in response to medication, HIV was (and still is) the poster child for evolution. I began to take a more jaundiced view of nature, which seemed increasingly like a struggle for existence. But I found reassurance in the thought that all this took place without reference to morality or values, instead deriving from the virus’s need to replicate and adapt to its environment.

I suppose plenty of people going back to Asa Gray have been able to reconcile evolution with their religious beliefs. But as I was seeing it in its cruelest guise, I could not. To me, evolution was an irrational and wasteful process that was fundamentally incompatible with any definition of creation. And if you take away creation, what is left for a god to do?

So it was my experience as a gay man, specifically of religious homophobia and the AIDS epidemic, that brought me to atheism. At first glance, those seem to have little in common besides their coincidental effect on the gay community. But in accepting my sexuality and recognizing the true nature of AIDS, I embraced what is rather than what cannot be. To me, atheism is the “reality-based community” of journalists’ dreams.

Nick Harding

I suspect that there are a variety of origins and influences that flowered our reasoning processes or otherwise led us to connect with our sense of rational thinking, and by extension, to our atheism.

For me, the seeds were started in early youth; a fascination with how things work, a desire for understanding, a love for experimentation, tinkering and measurement,… a burgeoning appreciation of science as a tool for discovery and truth, an envy and respect for all the groundbreaking scientists with their efforts and trials throughout history, as well as a strong respect I had for my older brother whom I looked up to for his extensive reading and desire to know what is ‘real’ in the world, especially its mysteries.

Much of what I’ve seen over the past three decades has been disconcerting, as youth seemingly lack a desire to be instilled and inspired with the wonder of science and the freedom of rational thought.

There are some freethinkers (and theists of various persuasions) feel a desire to ‘coexist’ (as the artistically clever bumper sticker expresses) with others of different beliefs, or simply feel that the dogmas inherent in the belief systems of others are just not ‘on the radar’ and don’t pose much in the way of cultural or intellectual threat. Personally, I started to get a worried sense about the shift in cultural and social attitudes as we entered the 1980’s and began, as a country, a gradual ‘creep’ to the political right, with its associated disregard for–even hostility toward– certain areas of education (especially science), art ( with a penchant for censorship), media ( the ‘ liberal “elite” ‘). Some, like Newt Gingrich and others, lament the ‘decline’ of Western culture and values, as they ironically fail to pay even lip service to some of the foundational blocks of Western culture–free thought, logic and reason– while espousing and defending the virtues of the religiously devout (which they themselves often conveniently ignore). Yes, religion is an essential tool in the toolbox of the political right; manipulating and harnessing the dogmas of the devout for political gain (and presumably personal gain), reciprocally, as the vociferous devout among us flex the political muscle of right wing politicians to further their narrow, religiously ideological agendas.

These issues are central to my disdain for religious belief and many of its practitioners, stemming strongly from this insidious marriage of religious belief and political power and the danger it poses. Increasing religious influence in our political systems presents a potential for long range threat to the material and social structures of our national and international cultures, with its most corrosive influence on the most essential tool for cultural advancement and continuing understanding of the universe we’re immersed in: the minds of future generations and how they evaluate, discover and accept what is real,… and what is reliable about how we explore our world.

I believe this corrosion needs to be widely understood, exposed and actively countered in the United States in particular. It’s hopeful to see there are many notables with influence and reputation in the scientific, philosophical and educational communities who are standing up and working hard to build a strong front. I certainly hope to continue to learn, understand and support, in my own way and time, what may turn out to be a new Enlightenment,..or perhaps a Re-Enlightenment.

Ben Ehrmann