This essay was originally going to be just the one sentence: “I am an atheist because I am educated.” It’s laconic and full of all sorts of wonderful implications: theists are ignorant, the truth is that there are no gods, if only people could be shown that truth they would all realise it and the abuses of religion would disappear forever. There’s probably a touch of smugness in there too.

As well as being an atheist, I’m a huge procrastinator and between thinking up that as an answer and actually submitting it, I thought about this further and realised that there’s far more to it than the fact that I have been lucky enough to receive an education. To see why education was not a sufficient requirement for atheism I had to look no further than my own family.

I was raised as a Catholic. The church had its clutches on me until seven (although luckily only in a metaphorical sense) and for many years afterwards. Although some members of the extended family back in the old country didn’t appear particularly church-going, I had always assumed that the family had been Catholic for generations, for all I knew going back for two thousand years. It was only a few years ago, decades after the pantomime when I first explicitly told my parents I was an atheist – “I’m not a Catholic.”, “Yes you are.”, “No, I’m not.”, “Yes you are. That’s what it says on your birth certificate.”, “My birth certificate also says I’m not even a foot tall and only weigh a few pounds. I’ve grown up since then.” – they reconciled themselves to my lack of faith and the whole matter was regarded as academic, I had a chat with my grandmother and found out that it’s really only my mother who is religious and the reason why she was such a devoted Catholic daughter to not particularly religious parents.

My mother was an intelligent girl. Even if her parents weren’t religious themselves, they recognised that she had a lot of potential and wanted the best education they could get for her. Unfortunately the best education available was at the local Catholic school. From what I gather the stereotypes of Catholic schools of the era held true there; the teachers were all nuns in habits with a deep devotion to the teachings of Rome, a strong ruler in their hand and a knowledge of how to use it to instill the fear of God into their pupils. What would otherwise have been the best education my mother could have had at the time was poisoned by these black-clad sadistic authoritarians and to this day her mind remains stunted by it.

Compared to the educational opportunities I had as a boy in the seventies in eighties, the opportunities my mother had as a girl in the fifties and sixties would have been limited. The pursuit of maths and science would not have been encouraged anywhere near as much for her as it was for me. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel a huge sense of sadness at the potential wasted when an intelligent woman tells me with all sincerity that praying to Saint Anthony will help me find lost objects, and an even larger sense of rage when she tells me that she believes in a literal eternity of hellfire, and that fear of such makes it very hard if not impossible for her to question what she was taught as a young girl.

Why am I an atheist? The reason why I believe there are no gods – at least the proximate cause – does have to do with the fact that I did receive an education. Without it I wouldn’t have all the little jigsaw pieces I’ve used to make my model of the world, and it’s this model that’s given me an abiding love of the scientific process. It is most emphatically not a religion. It recognises the fact that its description of the universe is sometimes inaccurate or just plain wrong and endeavours to incrementally correct it. It acknowledges that the human brain likes to make patterns even when patterns aren’t really there and tries to circumvent this tendency when it can. It does not say that the Universe is thus because I or a voice inside my head say so and nay-saying will bring forth retribution, but because I did these experiments and made these observations and that you can do them yourself to verify it or come up with your own experiments and observations if you think they’ll do a better job explaining it. It’s because of this that I accept what science says as a fairly good approximation of what the Universe really is like. Despite the charlatans or the misinformed, science has not found any evidence for the existence of gods and until it does I am not going to believe that there are any.

The reason why I find the above reasoning valid – the ultimate cause of my atheism – is harder to pin down. Could I just have easily followed the same path as my mother? Creating a model of the world where Catholicism – or any other theistic religion – had the answer to everything and any inconsistencies could be explained away by evil forces or just ignored for fear of divine punishment? I’d like to think that it’s because I am more independently minded than her, but is that a fair assessment? Maybe it’s because my education had more science lessons and fewer cruel nuns.

The seeds of cognitive dissonance would have been planted when I was about ten or so, before I had any issues with authoritarianism. Religious teaching was no more complicated then “Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, but you need to follow his rules.” Science was a lot of cool facts but little explanation about how we knew these facts. I wanted to know how, if there were these monkeys that slowly turned into men, where did Adam and Eve come into the story. I did not get a satisfying answer. I did not abandon Catholicism then and there – like many I could make an accommodation between religion and science – but it was the first time I could not blindly follow religious and scientific teachings simultaneously and have to choose one over the other.

I was a fan of Jesus, but found his weekly fan club meetings were boring and pointless. Science I mostly got from books telling me – mirabile dictu – that there were beautiful spiral galaxies out there, and planets with spots on them bigger than the entire Earth or that had rings! There’s stuff that blows up if you get it wet, and a gas that will poison you with one breath, but if you mix the two together you get salt! The stuff in my pencil was made of the same stuff as a diamond, just arranged in a different way! We used to be little monkeys before we changed into people! Me and my dog had the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather! One hundred million years ago there were these big lizards walking, swimming and flying around the place!

When I look deeply into the question, perhaps the real reason I am an atheist is because to a ten – or almost forty, for that matter – year-old boy, dinosaurs are cool. Perhaps it’s not too late to tell my mother that.

Phil Hoenig
Australia

I was brought up in a Church of England family. No, that doesn’t quite do it justice. I was swathed in the church, surrounded by dyed in the wool Anglicans, from the moment I was born. I went to a service at least once a week, every week (even when on holiday). On top of that, I went to sunday school, church youth group and pot luck suppers. I have sung in plays, musicals, carol concerts and outdoor events. I’ve even appeared on Songs of Praise!

It was against this backdrop that I slowly began to perceive other possibilities.

I don’t think I’d ever truly believed. I wanted to believe. I even had, what felt at the time, spiritual experiences. But I think I knew even then that these were nothing more than sensory manipulation – beautiful music, twinkling candles, incense, harmonious voices and shared emotional experiences.

I was educated at a grammar school and was introduced to mind openers such as world history, physics, chemistry and critical thinking. In my late teens, I subscribed to New Scientist and developed an interest in physics. Later, I read A Brief History of Time and, although I struggled with the maths (I’m more of a humanities person), the concept of deep time and the vastness of space fascinated me.

Around this time, I began to see the injustices in the world outside the church yard wall. My social and political awareness was developing at a time of Band Aid, Nelson Mandela, Apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, AIDS and a growing awareness of LGBT issues. I also began to perceive discrimination against my own gender whilst listening to the debates over the ordination of women priests.

In my early twenties, I started to pick up bits and pieces about evolution. Having only a rudimentary grasp of biology, I again looked to popular science books and eventually discovered Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale.

These different threads were weaving a pattern in which there was less and less room for a god.

I stopped going to church with my family when I was 18 but it was perhaps another decade or so before I would call myself an atheist. In the intervening years, I read about different religions, humanism, secularism, rationalism, scepticism and feminism. I am “out” to my friends and some work colleagues but not to my parents, although I’m sure they suspect. The reasons, as always with such situations, are complicated.

At present my reaction to religion is similar to that of ex-smokers towards cigarettes. They can be far more vehemently opposed to smoking than a non-smoker would ever be. In the same way, I have a visceral reaction to religions and religious behaviour, especially when I get a knee jerk response from that inner child who grew up in a church.

I am now trying to remove those angry knots and burrs from my tapestry so that it only reflects the beauty and wonder of my one precious lifetime on our amazing planet.

Clare
United Kingdom

I am an atheist because the God I loved and served faithfully just got too damn small. Too formulaic. Too predictable.

I was born again in high school and was a committed believer all the way through high school and college. I loved Jesus and was sure God was the answer to everything. I believed in grace and mercy and love. My God was huge. And perfect. And more loving, compassionate and mysteriously wonderful than anything I could describe.

Then I went into full time ministry. I could tell so many stories now about the corporate waste, the hypocritical leadership, the stupid acronyms and formulas that were used to shrink God down to a sellable product. My God shrank right before my eyes. It took disillusionment with ministry to make me stop and rethink my beliefs. The nagging feeling that there was something tremendously wrong with evangelical christianity that I had successfully repressed for years became too strong. The mental gymnastics I had been performing to explain away God’s sexism, anger, vengefulness and petty demands became too much for me. For the very first time, I looked at my beliefs from a skeptical viewpoint.

I wanted my God to withstand the test. I held on to bits and pieces of my faith for awhile. But, intellectual integrity demanded that I accept what is true over what I wanted to be true. I no longer believe in any of it. And, to my surprise, as my God got tiny and unbelievable and I was forced out of my insular world, an indescribably huge and beautiful world opened up around me. The truth has set me free.

A Texan
United States

I am an Atheist because I was raised without religion and figured out pretty quick that it was silly all on my own. My parents are both Atheists, but when I was young, they certainly didn’t try and convert me to their beliefs. I believed in God as a child, in a private personal way in that I believed that I had come from “Heaven” and that I had slid down an invisible slide into my mummy’s belly. I discarded God before I even discarded Santa and with much the same calm sense of understanding, like an imaginary friend I had outgrown. My parents were always open to questions and my Father in particular was my favourite bouncing board for all the questions I had about religions, he answered my questions as clearly and accurately he could; needless to say none of it ever made any sense to me. I am 19 and I still have fascinating conversations with my Father, I have questions, he gives me the best answers he can, if I don’t know and he doesn’t know, and it wasn’t a half rhetorical philosophical/sociological question then I do what research I can; it’s that simple. I went to church for a while as an “adult”, so that I could join a choir, and I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about, a lot of frivolous mumbo jumbo really. I am a practicing Atheist; I do celebrate the big Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, except in a secular-almost-pagan way, celebrating the opportunity to be with family more than anything else. I am a third generation, non-theist and a second generation Atheist, no Grandma who tried to guilt me back into the faith, no parents threatening to disown me, I probably had a less stressful childhood than most, no fear of coming out to my parents (BTW I don’t actually intend to tell them as I am as of yet undecided but if I end up being serious enough with a woman to bring her home to meet the parents, I’m pretty sure they would roll with it) no confusion when learning evolution (in high school they had us divide into groups and each group would teach the rest of the class a section from the text book in the evolution unit—the video PZ posted on fish diversification in the Congo made a really good example—I totally rocked it) and most of all no fear of asking questions. Being an Atheist isn’t a bad thing especially when growing up, Atheist children are raised to think critically, to ask questions, to weigh social actions against social reactions as opposed to divine ones; In other words, I believe in thinking, I believe in learning, and I believe in not being a dick. Why do people have a problem with Atheists again?

E. Knight
Canada