Last night I had a dream. In this dream I had reason to believe that a room in my house was inhabited by a poltergeist. I couldn’t actually see the entity but I had good reason to believe it was there because inanimate objects were constantly being moved from where I had left them. Of course I also could have been mistaken as to where I had put them. So I conducted an experiment. I left a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor and out loud, informed the poltergeist that “I have left a pair of shoes in the middle of the room and I am now going to leave the room, close the door, and return in 10 minutes. If you want me to believe in your existence I want you to move the shoes to somewhere else in the room”. Then I left. On returning, sure enough, the shoes were neatly placed on the table. In my dream I repeated the procedure several times and each time the shoes ended up on the table.

I imagine I have dreams like this because as a young teen I discovered science fiction and avidly read the entire contents of my high school library. Stalwarts such as John Wyndham, Lester Del Rey and later, the ‘new wave’ of science fiction authors such as Bradbury, Ballard and Ellison became my sustenance. From there it was an easy step into the decidely dodgy world of ESP, ley lines, the mathematical profundity of the pyramids, Erich von Daniken and Lobsang Rampa. You name it, I’ve probably read it.

Looking back on this period, now armed with a PhD in cognitive psychology, I wonder whether reading these books acted as a type of partial wish fulfillment. We all wish the world were different to how it actually is. In my case this was characterised by such thoughts as wouldn’t it be great if telepathy were real? Imagine being able to privately communicate with someone at a great distance without having to worry about dialing codes or whether the battery has enough charge. Excellent! Talking to dead relatives and close friends? Cool! Visitors from outer space in saucer shaped craft? Fantastic! Being able to move objects at a distance? Wow! Curing any emotional ill simply by talking through your feelings, guided by a simple, universal template of human psychological structure? Awesome!

An omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent entity that created the universe (and us, to look just like him!) and responds to all your needs…….

But let’s be honest here. There is no such thing as ESP, telekinesis, reliably effective Freudian analysis, flying saucers etc. How do we know this? Well we’ve observed and experimented, and crunched the numbers. And observed and experimented and crunched the numbers again. And again. And not only formally, in laboratories, but informally, in the field, in our everday observations and thoughts. And as for that omnsicient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent being, or even an omniscient entity of any sort, well again, the numbers, whether from philosphical or empirical investigation, simply don’t add up.

So, in the best tradition of personality psychology in categorising human beings, I observe a psychological continuum between those who perceive the world in terms of wish-fulfillment (believers) and those who perceive the world in terms of evidence (rationalists). Or, in other words, a continuum based on an individual’s existential honesty.

Using my dream as analogy, whether the shoes had moved or not, the rationalist would simply accept the state of things as found and the scientific world-view would be amended accordingly in that the poltergeist hypothesis would gain some support. If the shoes had not moved, however, the poltergeist believer would have their world-view threatened and likely be trying to convince us that the shoes really had moved. Substitute god for poltergeist, and the shoes would have moved in the spiritual dimension, or actually would have moved, if god was willing, or their remains the possibility that the shoes will move, if only we had more faith….

That is why I am an atheist. I simply aspire to perceive the universe in as true a way as possible; which entails being honest about my psychological makeup, i.e., my own wants and wishes, no matter what the data is telling me. It’s not that I don’t believe in god. I simply have yet to see any convincing data (or philosophical argument, for that matter) that the hypothesis is true. Belief just doesn’t come into it.

Gary Hill
United Kingdom

Why am I an atheist? 2 reasons…I was too logical as a child, and because the church told me I was going to die horribly, my soul was doomed, and there’s nothing I could do about it and my suffering was going to be a gift from god.

Let me explain. I was raised catholic and always hated the church. I had no problem with God at that age, but the church and it’s silly rules seemed to counter every fiber of common sense even unto itself. I saw very early on that every year literally the same gospels were always being said…the story always stopping, and the vast majority of the holy book never being referenced. It didn’t take long for me to see that “Hey, I heard this last year, and the year before…why don’t they change things up and read a different reading?” Then I read the book cover to cover, and understood exactly WHY they were leaving a lot out! So being an innocent child, I asked the priest if he’d be willing to explain at easter during his speech why God made the pharaoh’s heart harden so he’d refuse to release the slaves so he could torture the innocent people more and kill the babies when the pharaoh wanted to let them go several times. It just didn’t seem like a godlike thing to so. I was told “absolutely NOT” and the “wise priest” simply walked away! Seemed a simple question so why the hostility.

That’s when I started listening at church…REALLY listening. I listened how every week we were asked to mindlessly say the creeds (“I believe in God, the father almighty…I believe in Jesus Christ…etc…”), saw how we were all called the lowest of the low and only through belief would be we saved, and noticed it to be exactly like brainwashing techniques we were being taught in school that captured soldiers would be put through in the Korean/Vietnam wars. I questioned why we had to confess sins to a priest when God knows and sees all…seemed pointless to me to tell a HUMAN something when it’s GOD who’s doing the forgiving and odds are he set up the situation in the first place! That was another thing…I saw early on that EVERYTHING good was God, and EVERYTHING bad was Satan, no exceptions. People died, satan did it, one person saved, God did it.

Since I had so many questions and the priests were refusing to answer them, my parents encouraged me to attend an after church program, kind of alike a special school for advanced theology. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but the teachers and bishops certainly didn’t enjoy me! I have hundreds of tales, but they all basically followed this template:

(bishop) So it is through Jesus that you will be saved and the Holy spirit is in you.

(me) But what about the Egyptian gods…or the greek gods? Aren’t they just as real?”

(bishop) No, those are myths, but our tales are true. There is only one god.

(me) bit the Bible itself says that God is to be judged AMONG THE GODS, and the first commandment says “have no other gods before me” That’s pretty plain that there are other gods. Didn’t you KNOW that was in there, I read it just the other night!

(bishop) Well…er…ummm…if you read it again and again the spirit will help you INTERPRET the true meaning of the verses, so don’t look at it so literally.

(me) but you said the book was the holy word of god, and now you’re saying not to take it literally? Which is it?

(bishop) clearly Satan is trying to deceive you, you should pray for guidance. Now moving on…it’s through Jesus that you will be saved, so let’s open our books to…

Yup…it was Satan who was making the words say what they did. same every time, I’d have a good point, the bishop would accuse Satan of twisting things and insist he was right, then drop it entirely and just repeat his original point ignoring any further questions from me. I was seeing that the church was clearly full of it, but still had the core beliefs in God. Christians who converted know how hard that last bit is to let go of.

But it became VERY easy when I was told I was hopelessly doomed. You see, due to a childhood accident I have a severe phobia of ashes (long story, not relevant). As you know, a phobia is an irrational fear, beyond all control, and the accident certainly wasn’t my doing. I cannot be near them without panicking, and certainly cannot allow them to touch me at all. . Now for the non-ex-Catholics reading, one of the Easter duties is to receive a spot of ashes on our forehead to symbolize your creation (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”) and it basically renews your pact to not value your body but instead your soul, binding it to God. Obviously THAT wasn’t going to happen, and my parents understood completely why I refused that one, but it bothered me that my soul may be forfeit. So one day I asked the bishop with the priest standing right there beside him what I could do instead. Basically here’s the conversation paraphrased from memory:

(bishop) The easter duties are sacred, you MUST perform them to be saved.

(me) But I can’t…it’s simply impossible. Isn’t faith and actions enough…Father Landrey said last week that…

(bishop) No, by choosing not to receive the ashes your actions show you have no faith. Let God guide your emotions and simply receive the blessing and trust him…

(me) NO! I CAN’T DO THAT!!! Don’t you understand??? I pray, I do good, why would God care about some stupid ritual that HE made impossible for me?

(priest) God wouldn’t afflict you with this, but Satan would. Through God you can beat this though, let your faith guide you to him.

(me) but God did bad things to Job, so why did you assume Satan did it? Besides, again why would God care if I got some stupid ashes smeared on me regardless of how else I act? Are you saying that believing in everything you’re saying and Jesus and God and doing good to others and loving everyone and helping everyone isn’t enough? That God would damn me to Hell just over some stupid ritual that I can’t do because he made it impossible???

(both talking over each other) Yes…God didn’t give you your fear, Satan did…you must follow his runes…have more faith…beat your test…doesn’t matter how good you are the Easter duties must be performed or your soul is doomed…

(me) NOTHING I CAN DO WILL GET ME TO HEAVEN??? GOD wants nothing to do with me if I don’t get the ashes?

(bishop) I’m sorry, but yes, that is true.

(me) Than when you told me he was a just and loving god you were lying, and I don’t like liars!!! He’s just a cruel bully toying with people apparently, Job, Pharaoh, Moses, his own son…ALL of them got their lives destroyed by your God, NOT SATAN!!! GOD!!!

With that I stormed out, told my parents the story, and never looked back to catholic faith. Exploring other faiths I found that these rules didn’t apply, but that was even more revealing. They all believed in God but had different rules for salvation. How did THEY know they were right and the others wrong? What made them different han those who believed in the “false myths” of the Greeks? THEY thought they were right too! So I studied ALL theologies looking for one that actually could back up their words, as clearly I was lied to several times already.

To my surprise (but nobody here’s surprise), NONE of them had evidence! Not one had anything concrete, it was ALL faith!!! But science could explain a lot and more importantly was willing to admit when it couldn’t. THAT was the key to me…the willingness to encourage questions and demand answers…admit when they don’t know something, and then test until they do to discover an answer. The entirety of astronomy was based on not knowing but guessing and testing, and more and more on earth had explanations as soon as you researched it.

I still believe that something may help guide the world and nature, and that something MAY even be a god. It may just as well be an extradimentional entity we ASSUME to be a god, or maybe it’s all some other force or interactions with real physics we simply haven’t discovered or understood yet. The day that a faith can prove their claims I’ll be the first to believe again…until then, they have to prove their claims a lot better than “have faith”. Faith is for defeatists…reason and logic is what the world operates in, and now, so do I.

Anonymous
Canada

I was raised Catholic, not too strictly. My big sister was the lucky one that went to Catholic school for early elementary. I guess I just kind of floated along, not too strong on religion, but not exactly divorced from it. In 1970, my sophomore year in high school, I saw my first comet (Comet Bennett, a beauty) and got hooked on astronomy. I kind of slid gradually into the realization that the picture religion painted was not exactly correlated with the facts and the appearance of the actual universe, unless you did some serious weaseling and rationalizations. That was my wake-up call. Empiricism trumped dogma. I have been an atheist and an amateur astronomer for 41 years now. The most difficult part for most of my Christian friends and relatives to grasp is the willingness to say “I don’t know- there isn’t enough evidence.” All of my most religious or woo-oriented acquaintances cannot fathom not having total knowledge of the universe. They crave it so much, they invent it out of nowhere. That always struck me as being so tragically sad, not being secure enough in our own mind that you grasp frantically at anything, no matter how counterfactual or downright harmful.

Jim Atkins
United States

I was raised in a creationist, fundamentalist home. If you’ve ever seen those videos where Ken Ham tells the crowd of kids to ask scientists, “Were you there?”, then you’ve seen a little bit of my childhood. I looked forward to getting our quarterly copy of “Answers in Genesis” (a magazine that Ham’s organization puts out). Later my dad subscribed to their “Technical Journal” of creationism because I was so interested in nature and science. When I was very young I was at one of those presentations that Ken Ham gives, and I am embarrassed to admit that at one point I even did ask a geologist “Were you there” as he talked about rock formations in Mammoth Cave.

I went to church at least twice a week, was in a christian school until college, listened to christian music exclusively, was in a very christian Boy Scouts of America troop, and I didn’t know a single person who wasn’t from one of those circles. All of my knowledge of ‘Atheists’ and ‘Darwinists’ came from creationist writings. I never had a ‘rebellious’ phase and was eager to please the authority figures in my life. So I really didn’t have any motivation for questioning the dogma I’d been given. I was growing up to be a zealous defender of “scientific creationism”.

And that was what brought it all crashing down for me, starting around my 16th birthday. I wanted to engage the other side and fight the good fight for Jesus, so I decided to figure out what the “evolutionists” could possibly have to say for themselves in the face of our awesome arguments and “facts”. The first thing I looked into was the claim that fossils formed over millions of years. Every real creationist has seen pictures of ‘petrified’ hats, boots, clocks, etc. This seemed like pretty good evidence that the scientists were wrong. But with a little bit of reading I found out that the hardened artifacts that the creationists were showing off were not, in fact, fossils. They were simply encrusted with calcium deposits. I also learned that replacement fossilization (where the organic molecules are replaced by inorganic minerals) occurs slowly because of diffusion rates, which are very easy to determine experimentally.

I was concerned that my heroes had been misinformed on that issue, but my faith was far from shaken. I simply thought that we would need to look deeper and we would find a way for fossilization to occur rapidly (in those days I planned on becoming a ‘creation scientist’). And I was excited about writing an explanatory article for Answers in Genesis because I really thought at the time that they would want to correct their error.

But while I was doing that I also started looking into ‘carbon dating’, which was another topic that was often ridiculed in creationist literature. I was told that it all depended on the assumption that everything had always been basically the same on the earth, but since god had magically created the earth in some unknown state and then flooded the whole thing that those assumptions were flawed. I was curious as to just what those ‘assumptions’ were and did some reading. I very quickly learned that carbon dating is only one of a large number of radiometric dating techniques, all of which agree on dates. And the ‘assumptions’ of other dating techniques (especially potassium-argon dating) were really impossible to argue with and produced data that was definitely incompatible with a young earth.

I then looked into a whole range of topics covering geology, cosmology, and biology; and literally everywhere I looked I saw dishonesty coming from the creationist side. So I briefly looked into ‘Old Earth’ creationism and ‘Theistic Evolution’ but ironically I had already been inoculated against those ideas by my Young Earth Creationist upbringing. The theology made far less sense and was even less consistent if you accepted an old earth. And by that point I was so disillusioned that I was critically thinking about Christianity itself and realizing just how ridiculous the beliefs were. I still considered myself a believer but was having serious doubts.

When I finally started thinking of myself as an atheist it wasn’t because of evolution or theology (this was only a few years after starting down the path of reason, but they were long and painful years). My parents got sucked into alternative medicine and I tried extremely hard to show them that they were being fooled by opportunistic charlatans. But I made no progress and was baffled at how people could believe something that had no positive evidence and was so obviously silly. And that’s when I became an atheist. I saw the clear parallel between religious belief and fake medicine, and I gave up my belief in god entirely. I’ve been religion-free for six years and my life has only gotten better. I am openly an atheist with everyone (except my parents, who might actually be killed by that news) and I really do think the future is bright for rationality and secularism.

Adam
United States