I am an atheist because there is no proof for any gods and the rationalist and sceptic in me insists that the burden of proof relies solely on those making the claim for a religion. This may seem to be a fairly straightforward position to those who read this site but it still amazes those religious people who ask the question. The path to this realisation was an interesting one.
I am an atheist because of Alcoholics Anonymous. My mom is an alcoholic, and had been in the group and sober for as long as I can remember. AA was my religion growing up, even more than Christianity. While I would go years without setting foot in a church, I sat outside of AA meetings and listened to everyone share and repeat the twelve steps and the Lord’s Prayer several times a week. I learned all of the twelve steps and all of the slogans. I was taught my mom had a disease, and that her disease would kill her if she didn’t attend these meetings. I was taught that while I was important, god and AA had to come first in her life. I was also taught that alcoholism was a family disease, that it was genetic, and that I was doomed to either become alcoholic myself or marry an alcoholic.
The reason I have decided to become an atheist was based around my experience with religion growing up. I come from a Catholic family, that by alot of means were very liberal in their practices. I remember tending a Catholic preschool at a very young age when my grandmother was deeply involved with the church. It was then my first exposure to religion had taken root. My mother, who practiced her religion very loosely, had decided that the teachings of Christ should be taught to us through the means of a protestant church. So beginning at the ages of 5, we would begin going to a baptist church located in the down town area of my city. I can vaguely remember the smell of old wood and mold in the place as the pastor and his constituents would do their best to ease the anxiety of all of the new kids tending to their Sunday services.
There are quite a few reasons as to why I am an atheist. My father decided he was, after being raised in a fundamentalist household. My grandfather was a believer. To me it seemed my father was reacting to his upbringing and taking a lot of pleasure from aggravating my grandfather. Even so, atheism made sense to me.
I think that my journey away from religion has been a reasonably uncommon one, since I had to guard against confirmation bias for atheistic arguments, rather than those for the Roman Catholic faith in which I was raised. That is to say, when I first had doubts about the Christian story, I already earnestly hoped that the God I had been taught about did not exist. I was wary that my doubts about Christ rising from the dead had been driven by my instinctive desire that I didn’t want this guy to be the Son of God, rather than from any objective consideration of reality.
I wasn’t going to write one of these. Pontificating is a joy and all, but honestly, the answer’s pretty simple. I gave the matter some thought on and off over the years until I shed religion like a snake sloughing off an old skin. No revolution required. Then I got dragged to the Veteran’s Day program at my baby sister’s school, which was my school, too, once upon a time.
Ironically, my other’s staunch Catholicism sowed the seeds for my rejection of god. Not in the way one might expect, through so perfectly illustrating the hypocrisy and contradictions between her speech and actions (although there was that, too). Instead, her choice to bear 11 children in 18 years (I know – crazy! I’m number 9 – everyone always wants to know.) meant that my eldest siblings were effectively a different generation, and they held far more sway with us younger kids than our parents ever did. Fortunately for me, those siblings had come of age in the early seventies, and were heavily influenced by the counterculture. My eldest brother, an aspiring musician who was an early follower of punk and new wave, was like the Pied Piper to the rest of us – and he was an atheist.
As Bob Dylan sings,
“The country I come from is called the Mid-west,
I was taught and brought up there the laws to abide,
and that the land that I live in has God on it’s side.”
Sometimes I feel like I’m not a “true atheist” because I never drank the cool aide to begin with, and I did not have to go through the conversion process that most atheists identify with.
Growing up in the Bible belt you were always surrounded by Christian dogma.
As a Mexican, I was raised following most of Catholic traditions. Even when my parents aren’t that devout themselves (I suspect they are closet atheists), they go with the flow and as a family we participate of important celebrations. I always was critical about beliefs and irrational thinking and that got me a few discussions at school, but nothing too prominent or problematic.
