I cannot remember a time when I didn’t suffer from what was later diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder. Imagine being a child (even under the age of 5) and being so depressed that suicide seemed the only option. I was raised as a practicing Christian. My mother took me to church every Sunday and I took in what was said. I believed that the way I felt was a punishment or moral failing from God for some failure on my part. I tried very hard to be “good.” When I reached middle school the illness reached its height. During my years in the fifth and sixth grade I was suicidal daily. Everything felt dark and unchangeable. I carried a piece of broken glass with me at all times so if the pain became too much I could slit my wrists at any moment. This was when the bipolar aspect really kicked in and I had psychotic symptoms. I thought people met and planned on ways to get me to kill myself; the blood couldn’t be on their hands. If people were talking and laughing as I went by, it must be about me. I redoubled my efforts to be good, even though the whole religion thing had begun to seem suspect. I clearly remember sitting in pew somewhere between the ages of 5 and 8 and thinking, “this just doesn’t make any sense.” Luckily for me, I was born with a very scientific mind. I always had questions and logic and science seemed to me to be the best paths to a clear answer. Initially these took the form of me questioning what was wrong with me, why was I a suffering? Between 5th and 8th grade I researched mental illness and determined I was suffering from either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. I still believed, even with my scientific views, that my illness was my fault. The religion in which I was raised seemed to imply I simply needed to try harder and become a better Christian. I tried to reach out for help from adults, but my fear that my illness was brought on by myself precluded me from doing so. As I grew up, I began to question even more. I was always interested in astronomy and physics and they focused my mind on science and the scientific method. Despite my illness, I excelled in school. I moved on through high school and began college. I finally was able to ask my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. After trying several drugs, I found one that keeps the demons mostly a bay. I married a wonderful man. I continued schooling and received my AA, BS and recently my MS.

There is simply no way there is a god. Why would a god allow a child to suffer in the way that I did? Why would a god allow any child to suffer from disease, neglect or abuse? These were the initial questions that started my atheism. I always found the basic Christian tenets iffy at best, even when I was very young; but I thought it must be because I was not trying hard enough. As an adult, I now easily state my atheism when asked. I am surprised at how many people ask me, “but what happens when you die?” I find their fear of the unknown a poor basis for believing in a deity. I have experienced fear in my life, but I still look out at our amazing universe and am at peace with the idea that I may never know all the answers. And that’s ok.

Anonymous
United States

I was raised in a house with a large property far from any city, where the night sky alone provides you with all you need in order to begin dealing with the fact that the universe is….. really freaking complicated. I would play outside on a regular basis, digging in the ground, taking apart plant life, searching for new creatures in my pond, and almost every time I’d learn something new. When I was first really introduced to religion by one of my best friends I was about 9. I went home and told my parents about this idea that my friend’s family had about this guy who hangs around behind the scenes and takes care of all the stuff we can’t understand. They as usual kept their own beliefs out of my way and encouraged me to explore this new concept and build my own opinion. When I approached my friend about it he said that I could attend church with him and his family one day. When I asked what church is all about he told me, you get up early Sunday morning, go to a building with a bunch of other people and listen to a man talk about a book for an hour or two. I declined without a moments hesitation, Sunday was one of my only two days off from school where I could play at home where I felt comfortable. I was fine with not knowing the supposed secrets of the universe, as long as I could explore it on my own.

My interest in religion disappeared for years, I never felt that it effected me. I saw it maybe as a fine and easy to understand placeholder for reality through the ages until science came along. My aforementioned friend and I were perfectly fine without speaking about religion, going on around 17 years now and he’s never once pushed anything on me. Him being my only window to religion for many years I thought that was the case for all of the religious community, they had a belief as a family, it made them feel good, but they didn’t literally believe every word and didn’t try to change my life with it.

It wasn’t until later on that I started to get a bigger picture, that there’s plenty of people who do take everything in their bible literally and without evidence, something I cannot even imagine doing. In my opinion if you want to get a deep feeling from a book, pick up a science text, read about the solar system, evolution, quantum mechanics, it all seems like fiction or even magic, the deep feeling comes when you realize that it has real evidence in it’s favor. If I read something new it almost takes me back to when I was a kid and I’d find something I’d never seen before on my property. When I hear of those from the religious community, for instance teaching children to ask dead end questions like “were you there?” when in the presence of a moon rock and told it’s age, I almost get personally offended. Asking creative questions is how we move forward, if everything is already explained as magic, we stall. I became an atheist from a previously apathetic standpoint because of miseducation, a reason quite benign in comparison to the atrocities I now realize are carried out in the names of gods all over the world on a daily basis. I am an atheist because I fear for our future and refuse to be associated with those who would see those fears come to realization, whether unconsciously, or with the best of intentions.

Will
Canada

As a child, it never occurred to me to doubt the existence of god. I’m not sure I even realised it was optional. When I was ten, after my mother’s remarriage, we started to attend my stepfather’s church, in which he was (and is) a very active member. This church is well known in Edinburgh for being ‘charismatic’ and ‘evangelical’, by which I mean that the organ had been dispensed with in favour of guitars and there was a lot of swaying and clapping of hands. They were very into the alpha course.

Every summer, the church would organise a retreat at a large house somewhere in the country for a week of prayer and bible study, and my older sisters and I were always taken along. The worst of these was when I was 12; that was the memorable year when the ‘Holy Spirit’ was sweeping through the land (or at least through the evangelical churches). For a week I was stuck in a remote house in the highlands of Scotland while everyone around me was filled with the holy spirit and started swaying, shaking, falling down and speaking in tongues. I spent most of the week hiding.

Around this time, I started to read a lot of old myths – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Celtic and so on. It occurred to me that those people who had worshiped Isis thought they were right just as sincerely as I did about Jesus. And once I’d acknowledged that question, what about Muslims or Hindus? I asked my stepfather – how did we know that we were right? He told me that it was just a matter of faith (which was honest of him), and I accepted that answer. And I believed in god – but not unquestioningly. I had doubts. I saw so many contradictions in the world, so many things that didn’t make sense thought the lens of faith. But I ignored the contradictions and assumed I just didn’t understand. Perhaps we needed god to set off the big bang, I wondered. And perhaps he nudged evolution along.

Ultimately, what saved me was science. It never occurred to me to doubt that evolution is true and I never really believed that creationists existed until the horrifying day when I discovered that my mother and eldest sister (both highly educated, otherwise intelligent women) are creationists.

And one day, I finally caved to my doubts and actually considered a question that had been hanging around at the edge of my consciousness for years. It’s accepted among most Christians that humans are the only human beings to have souls. Dogs, cats, horses, goldfish – nothing. Chimps, nothing. We assume the Australopithecines had no soul. So what about Homo habilis? Or Homo erectus? No. So when had the soul appeared? Which individual was the first Homo sapiens and had the first soul? Of course, I knew that was a ridiculous question. But it had to be asked, because if there was no soul, there could be no afterlife. No heaven, or hell. And if there was no afterlife, there was no god, and it was all an invention of people who were afraid of death, and so convinced themselves that they would live forever.

Of course, that wasn’t all, and it look me a while to completely let go of my faith, but it’s gone now. I miss it sometimes. The idea that there is an omnipotent being out there who loves you and will do anything for you is incredibly comforting. But I’ll take what I have now – the ability to see and appreciate the world as it actually is and nothing more – over a lie any day.

Annabel
United Kingdom

I am seventeen years old. I have been an atheist for about a year now. I don’t wish to sound overdramatic, but it’s been hard. I’ve never been on the receiving end of mistrust or had to hide myself before, and it’s been difficult to get used to.

I grew up very religious. My mother is a devout Catholic, and she had the most influence over my religious beliefs until I gave up my faith. My father is an agnostic with a healthy disdain for organized religion, though he never talked about this with us (I guessed, and finally got the truth out of him two years ago). Nearly every night, my mother would read to my brother and I from our children’s bible. She taught us, however, that the church and the bible weren’t always right-her way of coping, I guess, with the contraception ban and the thinly veiled hatred of gays. Later on, I went to Sunday school and then to Catholic school, which I still attend now. I believed in and loved God and Jesus with all the fervor of a young child.

As I grew older, however, things started not making sense. The whole notion of a “loving God”, for one thing. I went on a mission trip to El Salvador and saw for myself human suffering of a magnitude I had never known before. When I asked how God could let these people live that way, I was told that God was just as upset as I was, but he couldn’t do a thing about it. But how did they know? Was that something they were just telling themselves to reconcile all of the pain in the world with a God who loves us like his own children? A religious trip ended up sowing the first seeds of doubt in my mind.

I started thinking of Moses, who had supposedly met with God on Mt. Sinai to make the Ten Commandments. If those events had actually happened, couldn’t Moses had just carved the tablets himself to cement his control over the Hebrews? Could all the prophetic dreams that happen in the Bible just have been that-dreams? Could people have just been hearing voices? Mental illness had to exist back then, after all. I was very worried about the direction my thoughts were taking me. I didn’t want to burn in hell for eternity, and I didn’t want to have to admit to myself that death was the absolute end. But my thoughts consumed me until I had to admit to myself that the Bible had no authority to me anymore, and concede my atheism. And though the lack of an afterlife disturbed me at first, I realized that I would not feel anything, since I had not felt anything before I was born, and therefore I would be unaware of nonexistence.

I was at peace with my new identity when my mother forced the truth out of me. I had originally planned on not letting her know until I went away to college, because I had had a feeling she would be upset. It was during a fight we were having because I’d told her to the truth about not going to Confession that day at school. She gave me the third degree and finally, I cracked. Her reaction was worse than I’d thought it would be. She accused me of “dropping a bomb” on her, and that someone had obviously influenced me to believe what I believed now, and that this was just a phase that teenagers went through. As I pride myself on being a free thinker and that I’d come to this conclusion on my own, that irritated me. But then she told me that if I continued down this road that I would lose all my morals, and that I would end up as a criminal or worse. I think as a result of that day there’s a rift between us, and I honestly believe she has less respect for me than she did before.

I don’t plan on keeping my atheism a secret forever, but I’m “closeted” for now until I meet people who are more open minded. At my Catholic school, most of the people I know are very religious. One of my best friends teaches religion at her church. I don’t want to alienate them; when they think of atheists, they think of Christian-hating nihilists who want to kill all believers-not an exaggeration. I’m not one of those people at all, but indoctrination tends to get the best of people, and I don’t want to end up without friends. I’m also dating a guy who is great in every way except that he’s a Baptist religious conservative, and I wouldn’t want to alienate him either. My mom is trying to get me back to believing. This year for Christmas she got me a book about “miracles” that happened during the Holocaust. I really wanted to say that if God had managed to prevent the Holocaust, that would’ve been the greatest miracle of all, but I held my tongue. And it’s even worse that slandering atheists is acceptable everywhere, from the media to the highest levels of government.

Despite all of this, I am very happy in my unbelief and I don’t see myself having faith again. I like the new integrity and peace this identity brings me. When I do good things for people, I’m not doing them to score brownie points with a deity. I don’t have to rationalize and justify the Bible-“oh, God can’t think that about gay people. It was just Leviticus’ own prejudices coming through”-in order to believe in it. I don’t have to angst over why a benevolent God would allow such evil to go on in our world, I can just accept that no higher power exists and that people cause the world’s woes, with no supernatural entity that can stop them but won’t. I can just live my life knowing that this is the only one I’ll get, so I should live it well.

Something that is said a lot at my school is that faith sets you free. I don’t understand that. Faith had only chained me with doubt, confusion, and guilt over so-called sin. Lack of faith has set me free-free from dogma, free from hatred, and most of all, free from a petty, malicious, overgrown Santa Claus spying on me in the sky.

Julia Brandon

Not really — if HL Mencken wrote a letter for the “Why I am an atheist” series, I’d really have to reconsider the whole premise. But Mencken was asked by Will Durant to answer the question, “What is the meaning of life?” in 1927, and his reply would fit in pretty well here. So I stole it from Letters of Note.

(By the way, new submissions to that story now trickle in at the rate of a couple a week, and I’m still throwing them all into the pool. There is no shortage of future entries, but you can still email them to me. Of course, now you’ve got to match Mencken in quality.)

Dear Durant

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

Next to agreeable work as a means of attaining happiness I put what Huxley called the domestic affections—the day to day intercourse with family and friends. My home has seen bitter sorrow, but it has never seen any serious disputes, and it has never seen poverty. I was completely happy with my mother and sister, and I am completely happy with my wife. Most of the men I commonly associate with are friends of very old standing. I have known some of them for more than thirty years. I seldom see anyone, intimately, whom I have known for less than ten years. These friends delight me. I turn to them when work is done with unfailing eagerness. We have the same general tastes, and see the world much alike. Most of them are interestd in music, as I am. It has given me more pleasure in this life than any external thing. I love it more every year.

As for religion, I am quite devoid of it. Never in my adult life have I experienced anything that could be plausibly called a religious impulse. My father and grandfather were agnostics before me, and though I was sent to Sunday-school as a boy and exposed to the Christian theology I was never taught to believe it. My father thought that I should learn what it was, but it apparently never occurred to him that I would accept it. He was a good psychologist. What I got in Sunday-school—beside a wide acquaintance with Christian hymnology—was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous. Since that time I have read a great deal in theology—perhaps much more than the average clergyman—but I have never discovered any reason to change my mind.

The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves grovelling before a Being who, if He really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected. I see little evidence in this world of the so-called goodness of God. On the contrary, it seems to me that, on the strength of His daily acts, He must be set down a most cruel, stupid and villainous fellow. I can say this with a clear conscience, for He has treated me very well—in fact, with vast politeness. But I can’t help thinking of his barbaric torture of most of the rest of humanity. I simply can’t imagine revering the God of war and politics, theology and cancer.

I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. The belief in it issues from the puerile egos of inferior men. In its Christian form it is little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on this earth. What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing while it lasts. Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing. Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire most—courage and its analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that one who fights God, and triumphs over Him. I have had little of this to do. When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good for ever.

Sincerely yours,

H. L. Mencken