When I was 7 years old, my 2nd grade teacher was giving a lesson about dinosaurs. Another student asked a seemingly sensible question at the time, why hadn’t the Tyrannosaurus Rex eaten all of the people. The teacher replied that dinosaurs and people didn’t live at the same time. This answer didn’t sit well with me and in a rare case of assertiveness, I muttered defiantly, “Yes, they did.” The teacher’s eyes went wide and her gaze snapped onto me, burning the image into my memory, and stated, “No. They. Did. NOT!”

I can only imagine that my teacher must have thought she had a creationist in her class. But in my young, malleable mind, I was calling forth reference materials such as “The Flintstones” and “Captain Caveman”. While her harsh admonishment may have temporarily put me off from classic schooling, it started something else in me. If I was to be so publicly scolded for my ignorance, I wanted to know why I was wrong. More than that, I wanted to know how to find the real answers.

That philosophy of curiosity stuck with me. When I tried to apply this in my catechism classes however, not only was I not given a good reason for many of the strange traditions and beliefs in the Catholic religion, but people became angry with me for honestly trying to figure them out. Their anger told me they didn’t know either. “Faith,” I was told tersely, was essential to understand, but never once given a reason for that either. I got the distinct impression that discovery was not a valued virtue in religion. So, it ceased to be important to me.

I am an atheist because the things I want to believe are only the ideas that have a satisfactory answer to the question I should have asked my 2nd grade teacher and have since asked repeatedly of those seeking to share the “truth” of their religion with me, “How do you know that to be true?”

Matthew Kiffmeyer
United States

I am atheist because religion cannot answer questions. Because religion is disrespectful to every other species with which we share this planet. Because the universe is all the more beautiful without any gods and their magic pointing fingers poofing things into existence. I am an atheist because I love science and despise magical and irrational thinking. I’m an atheist because I’ve seen to many intelligent people destroyed by fear.

I am an atheist from a southern Baptist family. I suspect I would have become an atheist eventually, but I’m glad I abandoned it at an early age. As a child I questioned everything. One of those annoying kids whose favorite question was why. When I asked my grandmother who wrote the bible, I was told god. My first thought was a mental image of a book falling out of the sky and hitting some poor sucker on the down. I knew that books required writers, printing presses, publishers and why were there so many versions of the stupid thing. This and a dozen other questions were not the straw that broken my back.

I was willing to accept the concept of a god, heaven and hell on sufferance barring better evidence. At age twelve I stopped taking it so. I’ve had animals all my life, from the time I was three years old. I lost my first pet to feline leukemia, which led to a brain tumor, which led to his early death by veterinarian. I was there the whole time and deeply regretted the vet’s refusal to allow me to burying him properly. An unfortunate and deeply sad event, but a normal part of life for any pet lover. After his death I turned to my grandmother for comfort and I imagine anyone who came from a Baptist household can guess what she said. ìAnimals don’t have souls.î I had known humans were animals from the time I was about six, given the other options at the time were plants and rocks (my knowledge of fungi and bacteria was a bit lacking at six years old). If humans were not animals, what were we? If humans were animals and had souls, then why exactly didn’t every other animal have a soul? And why was I believing in a religious doctrine so full of holes a child could find them if I couldn’t have my animals in heaven? At this point I said screw it and abandoned Christianity all together.

I had not abandoned religion all together and spent years exploring other religions and doctrines, which were fine to a point, but there was always this slip into magical thinking. Every time you look at them with a clinical eye they would burst like a soap bubble. Eventually I stopped looking, though I continued to call myself agnostic, not realizing that was a bit of a misnomer. When I was in college I was walking to class and had an epiphany that there were no gods. I was more surprised at how little that bothered me. After a brief but amusing foray into solipsism, I found atheism respite from all the silly superstitions that surround me.

I am an atheist because I am not afraid. Because evolution is more amazing the more I study it. Because I love science and research and knowledge, and I despise the people, who in the name of an invisible sky daddy, prevent people from getting to see it. Because I don’t care what other people do so long as it’s consensual. Because I want to reduce suffering and see everyone live in this glorious, amazing universe full of living things that evolve, stars that explode and spin and get eaten by black holes, an expanding universe, social behaviors in sharks, complicated trophic webs, and ecological homeostasis (guess what classes I’m taking this semester) .

I am an atheist because I never stopped asking why.

Megan Foley
United States

My upbringing was a casual blend of secularism in the home with Catholic and Protestant bits thrown in when friends and family took me to churches. I went to a Lutheran day camp with a family friend, Catholic mass with an aunt and Baptist revival with another aunt, etc. What I learned at home wasn’t anti-religion, but pragmatism, rationality and an appreciation for sense making. When my mom or dad took time to explain something to me, I would then be asked “Does that make sense?” I learned that sense making was a mutual effort, something people did together or not at all.

So during Sunday school when I first learned of the burning bush story and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, there was much sense left unmade. A talking, burning bush is one thing. Kids are expected to accept goofy talking characters, but I couldn’t accept the horror of a father holding a knife to his kid’s throat. When I blurted out in all innocence “I’m sure glad my dad isn’t a Christian” the Sunday school teacher reprimanded me. Later I found out that I was considered disruptive and asked not to return. That experience lead me to classify Christianity as something only adults understood properly, like bills, work, coffee and why my parents occasionally locked their bedroom door. The appeal of adulthood was there though, and I felt particularly grown up when we sang “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb” since I wasn’t allowed to watch scary movies at home due to my youth.

Enter adolescence. I became willing to forego logic for the sake of participating in social activities, travel and adventure with an evangelical youth ministry. For some time I was quite successful in ignoring the blatant hypocrisy all around, but ultimately the cognitive dissonance became a burden too great to bear. The evangelical Christian answer to coping with feminine sexuality is for the men to simultaneously guard against it as if it were wickedness and horde it as if it were a prized possession. Girls and women should be subservient, detached, receptacle like objects. I was entering a time in which I wished to be valued more as an adult human who could accomplish things, but was devalued based on the sexiness of all that I was becoming. Was I glory or was I filth?

The precipitating event leading to my whole hearted embrace of atheism came when one particular youth minister committed suicide. He was in his 50’s and was known to enjoy ministering to the young women. At his funeral, memorial service and afterward people cried when they spoke of what a good man he was and how happy he must be in heaven. How his holy father called him home early and such garbage. He was, in fact a predator who deserved a hell I wished I could craft. I was, in fact a whole human who deserved life, love and the freedom to explore the world without shame regardless of my anatomy.

The simple act of self-reclamation is a joy I have both struggled with and reveled in since. To command my own presence, indulge my own curiosity, demand sense making to my own satisfaction, be treated as a fellow human, and all the complications that follow are endeavors worthy of a life’s work without necessity for reward or punishment beyond.

Ange
United States

I am an atheist because I’ve seen hundreds of people die.

Around the time of my brother’s birth, my father decided that we should all start attending the CoE chapel on the local naval base (he was a retired naval officer) and within the year, my brother and my ten-year-old self were baptised. Some four years later I was confirmed, after being forced unwilling to confirmation classes. This class demanded a weekly essay on some biblical topic; deeply unfair, I felt, when I was the only one in the class who went to a highly academic school, and already had 4-5 hours of homework each night. I bought into the mythology, because adults were always right, or so my obedient self had been taught, but the essay was usually scribbled sitting in the back of the car on the way to class.

I think the chaplain knew.

On leaving school for university I fell in with a very catholic contingent, and here the first cracks really showed. They used condoms instead of the pill ‘because it’s easier for god to make a condom fail if he wants you to be pregnant’.

Hmm.

I found out that engaged couples had to attend a class where celibate, single men told them how to be married, because god says.

Hmm.

And confession magically erased any bad stuff you’d done, but didn’t really explain why you still needed a day of judgement.

And I began to see people die.

The first was an old man gasping his last with acute pulmonary oedema.

The next was a young cyclist.

A nine-year-old boy, of asthma.

A girl with cystic fibrosis.

A fifty year old woman with teenage children.

The list lengthened, and now I can no longer remember all their deaths, though some of them do stick in my memory.

What they had in common was…nothing other than death. Old people, young people. Children and babies. Sick and healthy. Deliberately or accidentally. Fighting all the way, welcoming it or simply giving in to the inevitable. Distressed or peaceful. Merchant bankers and newborn babies, elderly paraplegics and young athletes. Road accidents, cancer, lifelong disability, infections, heart disease, respiratory failure…I learned all the ways a human being can die.

Now at this point a religious person would be nodding sagely and deciding that I had got angry, and turned away from god. That I raged against him and his cruelties.

Wrong.

Have you ever seen someone die? One moment they’re there, a person, the sum of all the experiences they’ve ever had, a fantastic bundle of memories, desires and hope. And then it’s gone.

The match sputters out, the clockwork toy winds down, the tree falls to earth, and it’s over.

And it’s only in the last sixty years that we’ve really made a difference. Before that, we died like flies.

Were the people back then less deserving? Were they more evil? Were they less religious? I don’t think so. In fact, I know they weren’t. So why were they not deserving of all the things we have today? Why did two of my father’s siblings, twins, die before they were five years old of preventable childhood diseases and end up buried in Egypt in the 1930s? Why is every advance that humanity has made been paid for in blood, again and again and again?

No apologetics can explain the way the world simply is. No amount of hand-waving can hide the fact that the majority of humanity still suffers, much of it beyond our coddled imagining. I cannot compartmentalise this, for to do so would be to deny that suffering was real, to wave it away, salving my conscience with the lie that it was all for some hidden purpose. I am not willing to lie to myself and even less am I willing to lie to those around me.

I don’t have parables of how I do good in the world, or trite recitations of lifesaving heroics. I’ve saved lives, but that, to put it bluntly, is my job. There is no god to be pleaded with, bargained with; it is us, homo sapiens, who save each other’s lives, who offer comfort to the dying, who create and invent and build a better future for ourselves.

Send that mythological monster away. Your child died because there was nothing further human beings could do to save him, your sibling lived because human beings successfully pulled her back from the brink. And that effort belongs to all of us.

And, as far as I’m concerned, it’s enough.

Fiona Wallace
UK/Tasmania