I am an atheist simply because I don’t believe in God, gods or anything supernatural. I cannot prove otherwise but the onus is on the claimant to present credible evidence, not just arguments from ignorance (complexity, beauty, science doesn’t know everything, etc.) and other logical fallacies.

I never believed in gods, even during the years that I attended Christian kindergarten and elementary schools. I took the Bible stories as just that — stories. And classmate’s claims that God wrote the Bible made no sense to me. God was just so…not there.

I went through a supernatural phase though. In the 1970’s, I was intrigued by Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of, pyramid power, the Bermuda Triangle, Nostradamus, and other pop pseudo-sciences and pseudo-profundity. And Disney’s Escape from Witch Mountain had me trying to fly with the mere power of my thoughts. I could feel myself flying with my eyes closed but not when opened. Darn reality.

Also, it took some time for me to completely reject superstition. I had to be careful of my thoughts lest the universe use me as an ironic example, like choke to death on a vitamin pill, or instill cancer if I got too happy or full of myself. Perhaps it was due to residuals from Christianity and/or cosmic karma crap. I got over it. Now, there’s no more universal score keeper. Exciting! Now I can simply be responsible for my actions, not thoughts, and balance my personal needs and desires with social responsibility and environmental stewardship. No gods required.

Torsten Pihl
United States

My journey to atheism started with a discussion with a coworker who also happened to be a Christian minister.

Although I was raised Catholic, I had long ago grown out of much of the dogma. I had no problem accepting science that conflicted with church teachings and I generally tried to be a good person without appealing to the Bible for instruction. However, I still clung to the belief that there must be a god, and that I needed to believe certain things or behave in a certain way in order to get my eternal reward after death.

One evening, I watched a fascinating documentary on the Discovery Channel about some of the creatures who were direct ancestors to the dinosaurs. The next day, I mentioned it at work, specifically bringing up how the show talked about the eventual evolution of the creatures of that period into the dinosaurs. I had no idea what kind of reaction it would bring. My minister-coworker retorted with “Oh, you mean how it never happened?” He then launched into a whole tirade about how we have no evidence for evolution, and the earth is not old enough… It was basically a lot of the nonsense from AiG, although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time.

Even though I was still religious at the time, I fully accepted an old earth and evolution. To be honest, I probably would have considered myself an intelligent design proponent, had I known the term, because I still believed that humans were somehow special. The most annoying part to me was that I had nothing with which to fight back. I just flat out didn’t know enough about evolution to make a solid argument. I decided then and there that I would not be caught in that situation again. I went out and bought The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins).

I was enthralled. I could not put the book down. I had no idea that we had naturalistic explanations not only for evolution, but for all of the processes that allow it to happen — all without having to appeal to any supernatural being. After finishing Watchmaker, I read Your Inner Fish (Shubin), and The Selfish Gene (Dawkins). I kept thinking to myself, “If we can explain how life evolved through purely naturalistic processes, what else can be explained in that way?” The next book I read was Atom, by Lawrence Krauss. Wow, we can explain just as well the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang through today as we can the evolution of life on Earth! That pushed me over the edge. Something hit me. I realized that all of my coworker’s arguments for the existence of god were appeals to the unknown. He didn’t understand these processes, so he used his god to fill in the gaps. Once I better understood how the universe worked, there were no (or at least far fewer) gaps to fill. We don’t need gods to explain any natural processes in our universe. That one single fact is so liberating!

There was still the spiritual side of things, but I was already rather thin there anyway. More reading, more walls falling. I read The God Delusion (Dawkins), The End of Faith (Harris), God Is Not Great (Hitchens), and Breaking the Spell (Dennett). The spell was, indeed, broken. For the first time, I truly saw religion as a curse, rather than a blessing. It was during that time that I decided that I was a good person regardless of my beliefs, not because of them. Truth be told, I am probably a better person today without any of that nonsense filling my head.

It makes me a little bit sad when I see or read interviews with prominent authors like those above, in which they bemoan that their works are primarily read by people who are already of like mind, and that they aren’t really making a difference. If I could say just one thing to them, it is that I am proof that they can make a difference, and I hope they never give up the fight.

Michael A Pipkin
United States

I stopped going to church when I was eleven or twelve. I didn’t leave in anger or despair. I didn’t leave in a huff. Religion had simply stopped making sense to me.

The reasons are pretty common, I’m sure. I had come to see churches as human institutions primarily concerned with perpetuating themselves. The doctrines of salvation or damnation due to accident of birth seemed fundamentally cruel and capricious. I couldn’t understand why an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being was so infantile that it would demand my worship. None of it seemed moral, by any moral standard that I had been taught or understood.

Beyond that, it seemed to me that being moral was important, and that if morality was important, being moral because it was the right thing–rather than out of fear of eternal punishment–was important. The eternal punishments and rewards of Christianity–and I knew no other religion–devalued morality, rather than encouraging it. Instead of making morality the center of a good life, it reduced it to a life of brown-nosing, a way of tricking “Dad” into giving me the keys to the car, when deep inside, I would know I didn’t deserve them.

Religion (and God) became irrelevant. I didn’t so much disbelieve as stop caring. I considered supernaturality as supernatural and therefore beyond knowing. I called myself an agnostic, not because I wrestled with the existence of God, but because I didn’t care about it. I didn’t believe in God, but neither did I believe in the non-existence of God.

While that position hasn’t changed, I now call myself an atheist, recognizing that I don’t believe in God, and that atheism describes that position better than agnostic.

So, why am I not open about it? I face no individual social sanction not to proclaim my beliefs. There are no clubs *I* wish to join that would exclude me for atheism. I live in a community where acknowledgement of atheism wouldn’t affect me, personally. Churches are peripheral here, not central.

My son, however, had some brain damage at birth. He is a wonderful kid. His disabilities are not extreme, but they are present and noticeable. As a result, he is socially isolated. Secular organizations have failed completely in addressing the social needs of our sons. The organizations that have accepted him, where the kids have welcomed him and helped him be part of the group have all had religious elements. I feel a responsibility to participate in those organizations, to recognize the value their acceptance provides for kids like my son. That’s part of my own, personal morality.

Some of those organizations–Boy Scouts, in particular–do not allow atheists to participate.

I would prefer, of course, to find organizations that accept without the strains of religiosity, but I’m not in a position to make that choice. When we find something that works for us, a group where he’s accepted, we have to stick with it. I have to give back to the organizations that support those groups, even if they’re flawed.

Perhaps it would have been possible to find non-religious organizations that were accepting and supportive. We found the ones we found. I might have looked harder in the atheist community if not for its intellectual snobbery, if not for its habit of mocking those who write confused letters and e-mails.

Within the adult atheist community I see wit and intellectual consistency. I see vigorous and rigorous argument. I see courage and conviction. What I don’t see much of, is kindness. Maybe when the movement gets past the sexism and classism debates, when it’s carved out enough social space that it doesn’t feel the need to constantly be on the attack, there will be room for more of it.

bob

Few scraps of useful genealogical information have been salvaged by my family members, but here’s one: a branch of the ancestors were Huguenots, who fled Europe to come to the colonies because of the Inquisition.

I had to do my own research to find the connection to the Spanish Inquisition, which turns out to have had a bloody beginning in the south of France. It was, if anything, even more ferocious there, as the link between politics and religion manifested itself in first the acceptance and then the kingly condemnation of those upstart protestants.

Once the monarchy ran out of money, they also ran out of tolerance as the popes, wealthy beyond kings with income from parishioner tithes and selling indulgences, bargained for political support in return for their money and well-fed armed forces. French rulers gave them a free hand and the torture began.

So the screams from the dungeons persuaded my forbears, and others of the skilled, learned, critically-thinking class that composed the Christian Protestants, to skedaddle off to other parts, finally including England and then the western hemisphere. You can read about it in history – the exodus of the skilled class jump-started Britain’s industrial revolution.

Skip forward a few generations to my mother, a lovely girl with a nervous disposition. That’s what they called it before her volatile moods were diagnosed as bipolar syndrome, with a touch of Borderline Personality Disorder, that catchall for a condition that would have gotten her burned at the stake in Salem, with the hearty approval of everyone, even the non-superstitious-witch-hunting faction.

And when she was cycling through a really crazy spell, she’d occasionally cite some disjointed religious reference as the reason her mania was justified. She’d carry an old bible around, with little notes stuck inside and passages underlined. She got messages nobody else heard, and some were in that book, though for all the relevance to reality it could have been Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy or the Book of Mormon, or any other work of imaginative fiction.

A few weeks before a major breakdown and resulting adventures that make good storytelling now but occasioned plenty of heartbreak and worry then, she came up to me and with the intensity of the manic phase, told me how she got a message from God in a tuna fish sandwich.

“I was eating it and suddenly I had to spit out the next bite – it was so salty, it was horrible! It was awful, like there was a cup of salt in that sandwich, and then I realized it was the tears of Jesus, shed for us!” She had no further insight into penance or salvation, and never spent a moment in prayer or reflection. Religion was just one more symptom of her intense lifelong mental illness, which would have been enough to make me a critical thinker even if it offered the faintest shred of aid or comfort, which it has never provided.

I guess the lesson for my family is: if someone shows up with a Good Book, run for your life!

Stella