When I was four (or thereabouts) I was taken by an elderly “aunt” (I think she was a friend of my maternal grandparents) to a church in Manhattan to “see the animals in the stone”. Now I had previously been taken to the American Museum of Natural History and had seen the mounted dinosaur skeletons, etc., and I was eager to see more – especially those which were not yet extracted for the rock.

So I eagerly accompanied her to a church which was lined with marble. To my dismay there were no animal skeletons embedded in the stone: some vague shapes which, if you stretched your imagination a whole lot, could be interpreted as a rabbit, or a squirrl, or a bird, or something else.

After waxing lyrical about the “animals in the stone” my “aunt” then proceeded to start talking about Jesus and God and Heaven.

The first part of her discourse – about the animals in the stone – was obviously blown out of her ass – although I didn’t think in those terms at that time. So I took the second part, about God and Jesus, etc., as just more of the same.

That experience inoculated me: Sunday school, Bible lessons, etc. etc. etc. – you name it – rang false false false from then on.

As I matured, of course, I became more sophisticated in my reasoning, which is only to be expected. But no matter how bullet-proof an argument for God apparently was, I KNEW, from the start, that it was bogus, and I just had to poke and pry at it some more to find the catch – the unstated and erroneous assumption, the false premise.

It has been more than 6 decades, now, and I grow weary of the lies the proselytizers spew with unfailing energy.

Neel Ode

I’m sure you are more than flooded with posts to this category, and probably still being flooded more and more each day. As a sociology student, I absolutely love reading the various ways people came into atheism in our religious soaked culture. After some mulling it over, I decided I wanted to send mine is as well. I don’t know if it will ever get posted, but I still wanted to add my story to the pile. You should consider compiling all of these into a book. I know I would read it!

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household, in a small yet deeply religious town, in the heart of Oklahoma. Obviously, Christianity was presented to me as the only possible way. But, I was lucky. During my childhood I had an uncle who doted on me, having no children of his own, and often stepped in to provide babysitting and care when other family members were busy. My uncle never made noise about his beliefs, mostly, I believe, because that would have cut him out of the family and community. Whatever he believed, I’ll never know. What I do know is that he loved planting seeds of doubt, oh so subtly, in my head. He had two loves in his life, science and history, and he took every moment to go off on long-winded rants about both, usually in ways that would cause me to doubt the myths I had heard without causing suspicion from the believers.

I remember one beautiful starry night, in mid-December, he woke me up in the middle of the night to pull out the telescope and gaze up into the sky. He told me about the constellations, who they were named for, and what they had done to deserve such a special place. As we talked about ancient myths and the cultures of those myths, he threw out a jewel. Sometimes women got pregnant outside of marriage, but that could have been very dangerous for them. Wouldn’t it be safer to simply say “God did it”, whomever that God was, then to risk death? With the story of the virgin-birth of Jesus around me at that time, he managed to put doubt into my head without actually bringing up Mary or Jesus. It was sneaky, and beautiful.

When I was finally old enough to toss off Christianity, I flung myself into paganism. My reasoning, as cloudy as it was, made sense to a young girl who was trying to escape. One, the brand of Christianity I was raised in was very, devoutly anti-women. At my church, women and girls were to sit in the back of the church and be silent, rising shortly before the men to assemble in the kitchen area and prepare the after service meal while the men and boys got to hear the just-for-them sermon. Suddenly coming across a religion, as fuzzy as that term might be, where I wasn’t seen as chattel was breathtaking. Finally, I was an equal person! Secondly, my uncle had tempted me into looking at the history of Christianity, and a lot of what I read showed me that they took a lot of their ideas/beliefs/traditions from pagan religions at that time. To me, if Christianity had to steal these from the pagans, the early Christians must have known that these pagan religions were more true, more right. They wouldn’t have stolen from them if they were not superior in some way. (In my defense, I wasn’t a wand waving, spell casting pagan. I looked down at those types as ignorant. I was more of a history book reading pagan, believing there was some “greater power” that didn’t need our worship and was more concerned with the big picture than our puny, little selves.)

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself a young mother who was desperate to give my kids the education I felt I had missed out on. In order to teach them better about the world, I knew I had to understand it better. So I threw myself into the subject that was glossed over so much when I was a kid: science. Again, I was lucky to have an uncle that secretly brought me books and pirated videos of Sagan and Hawking when I was a teen, but I wanted my kids to be exposed to these types of ideas at a younger age, to not have to overcome a decade of religious brainwashing first. As I began to look more into these areas in order to break them down for my kids, I started to understand something. I held on to paganism because I needed a Why. I needed something bigger than myself, bigger than the whole of humanity, bigger than the universe, to give meaning to it all. I conceded that such a power might exist in such a way that our current scientific abilities were not able to detect it, but I still felt that it was there. Because it had to be there. Because there had to be a why.

As soon as I realized that was the reason I held on to some belief, I felt foolish. There doesn’t have to be a why, random things happen all the time for no reason. Finally getting that let me toss of what was left of my beliefs and accept that I’m an atheist. I think my uncle would be proud.

Summer
United States

I am an atheist by necessity, only because religious superstition exists in the world.

I would be delighted if, upon one happy day in the future, that priority sank to the level of historical novelty and I could devote my energies exclusively to more pleasant and constructive and progressive pursuits that do not resemble the burdensome toils of janitorial maintenance.

Helping to clear the world of the pestilence of religious tyranny is a duty I do not shirk and I am proud of what modest help I can bring to the effort. I remain ever vigilant to find ways of increasing the effectiveness of my activism, but I would gladly part with the “atheist” identification if religion and superstition disappeared and rationality and critical thinking became the default attitude in the world.

As long as superstition enslaves people and makes life miserable if not unbearable, I must be an atheist, but I’d much rather be, simply, an artist and educator, and be able to build upon the foundation of knowledge already established, introducing the marvels of natural reality to young people and those who sincerely value their curiosity of the real world without having to give my time to religion for ANYTHING, including the reason for being an “atheist”.

Unfortunately, we don’t yet live in such a world (far from it) but my idealism doesn’t trump my practical realism either, and so I must be an “atheist”. So be it. Let the conflict roil on and evolve inevitably into one or another outcome.

Meanwhile, I will continue to remain optimistic for the prospect of a superstition-free world as long as I see light on the horizon and can cherish an entirely HUMAN hope for a better future, virtues which the grubby, greedy hands of religious authority cannot take from me, let alone assume credit for.

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