I grew up in a Catholic household and attended parochial schools from kindergarten until high school graduation. I took communion weekly but never truly swallowed what the sacrement was intended to be: the conversion of a strange round wafer into the body of Jesus. I told myself I believed it, and I said, “Amen,” when it was my turn in the communion line. I knew what the right answer was–and by golly, I wanted that “A.”

At around age eight, the tapestry started to unravel. After learning of the existence of different belief systems around the world, it occurred to me that one line in the profession of faith we recited was obnoxious, arrogant, and unfair to non-Catholics: “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” I stopped saying it as a form of silent protest.

I quit going to mass once I went to college. I dabbled with various denominations after I married an Episcopalian, especially after we moved to a small southern town and had kids. Not only did it provide a comfortable community, it seemed like what we should be doing, particularly for our sons. My attendance was sporadic at best, and ceased altogether when we moved to a small college town in southwest Virginia, though my family continues to attend a church.

When my oldest was 12 or so, I was holding forth to him on my thoughts about religion. It started with my disdain for organized religions, the hypocrisy and judgmentalism of many religious people, yet a concession that many others–people we know–are good and derive profound benefits from religious faith. I explained that in high school, I learned that “religion” is defined as “answers to the questions of the mysteries of life,” then held forth on the mythologies that peoples of various cultures have developed over the millennia to explain how and why we are here. Given the numbers, the variety and the lack of accord, I just doubted that any one was correct. And given the advances in scientific understanding of matters that address many of these questions, I didn’t really have much use for religion after all.

He asked, “So are you an atheist?” I said I didn’t think so, but would get back to him. Despite my indoctrinated aversion to that label, I felt I owed him and his younger brother an honest evaluation and answer.

I began reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, and on a weekend home alone, watched Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God, which moved me to tears of relief. It was as though I could finally let go of the last gossamer thread of the falsehood. Finally, I’d found ideas, thoughts, concepts and a worldview that accorded with my own, that rang effortlessly true with an unmistakable clarity.

At long last, I recognize that we must write our own test of truth; it is our responsibility to find honest answers for ourselves. As for me, I believe that there are no gods. I am an atheist. I’ve earned this “A.”

The Heretic Next Door

This isn’t so much about why I am an atheist so much as when I recognized that I was one. In the 70s, the public schools in Richmond VA had become such inner-city honor-culture shit holes that my parents, aware of my general timid nature, decided to send me to a cheap Catholic school instead. My experience there, despite bullying by peers was actually kind of pleasant. The nuns were the full-on types regarding their habits and convent life, but were of that odd variety that probably emerged after Vatican II was put into place. Guitar masses, Kum-ba-ya, warm fuzzies=good, cold pricklies=bad and all that. On nice days we had classes outside. The math program was especially good, and there was no in-school time dedicated to Catholic doctrine or any other Xtian doctrine to speak of. I imagine there must have been a morning prayer but those kinds of banal memories are the first to get washed away as we get older. There was, however, mandatory mass on Tuesdays and Thursdays which I kind of liked since they were held in a beautiful church next to and affiliated with the church that Patrick Henry ostensibly gave his “give me liberty” speech. ( Oh, and George Washington slept here too…I’m just sayin’). And there was the ritual and the mediaeval sounding call and response largely sung in Latin. All very exotic and entirely new to me.

But tender souls beg for beatings just by existing, so of course there were bullies, two in particular that gave me such regular grief that I actually kept a little notebook that mapped out where and when I shouldn’t be at any given place and time in order to avoid “the boot” as it were. The thing is, they were terrified of the main priest who presided over the church and the school, and most of that anxiety centered on the mandatory monthly confessions that all the Catholic kids were required to make. Although required for the Catholic kids, it was “optional” (could it have even been allowed? I couldn’t take communion for instance) for non-Catholics. I remember the first non-threatening thing those boys said to me was along the lines of “you’re lucky you don’t have to go to confession.” I said it didn’t seem that bad, so, in a change of tactic, instead of threatening me, they dared me to go to confession, and there would be a five dollar bill at the end of it if I did.

The anonymous side of the confessional was like you would imagine. However, there was also an option to sit with the priest face to face, and I’m sure this is what I was being paid to do. So I did it. He was a nice enough guy. I remember him asking if I was Catholic (he must have smelled my Methodist blood), and me saying no and him asking why I had come. I told him I was just curious and then he asked if there was anything I wanted to confess. I told him I had hit my sister and talked back to my parents (neither of which I had done), then conveniently skipped the part about my recent discovery of the joys of masturbation (I was 12).So, long story short; The bullies actually paid up and then quit bothering me after that. I remember thinking ‘what were they so afraid of’, followed by a quick and completely uninteresting realization that it was all crap. I also realized at that moment that I had never believed any of it in the first place. I had just never really thought about it.

There was also a time when I was 6, when I prayed to god that my runaway basset hound would come home. I remember even then feeling like I was simply hedging my bets. Might as well? You know?…Shows what a crock Pascal’s wager is…Cross your fingers behind your back…Even a kid can do it!…right.

Ashley Bell

I’m an atheist because it is natural to be so.

In every time, people who were not subjected to irrational fears and intelligent enough to be free from social conditioning were atheists.
That has been true for a very long time: the first documented atheists were Greek philosophers about 2500 years ago.
Through time, when social conditions let life be bearable, people have found they don’t need a god to fear or invoke in battle.

So, let’s say everyone is being born an atheist, and so he/she remains as long as no one makes his/her life miserable by terrorizing her/him.

Fernando Santagata
Italy

I once had a believer ask me “Every atheist I’ve met believes in something. So what do you believe in if not God?”

“Nothing” I replied. At the time, this was probably true. Even now, I can’t say that belief takes any part in what I consider to be transcendent, but there are some things I know to be true, and this knowledge, gained through science, is what allows me to comfortably call myself an atheist.

I don’t have to believe that mankind is like a newborn baby who’s eyes are darting around a lit room for the first time and noticing things, it’s self evident. To a newborn, everything is surprising, everything is new. As her attention shifts from her mother’s nose, to her eyes, she is learning. She’s adding it all up and forming a cumulative collage of her surroundings. Over time she’ll begin to understand who she is and develop a sense of self.

Humans are doing the same thing as we focus our telescopes at the farthest depths of a vast and incomprehensible universe, or hurl protons at one another at close to light speed to see if we can catch a glimpse of what they are made of when they collide and break down into even smaller pieces. Mankind is an infant in an infinite universe. It doesn’t require belief to recognize or understand this.

Just as a newborn would feel alone and helpless if she didn’t see the soothing eyes and hear the gentle voice of her mother, so does humankind look out into her universe and pray that there is something there, some comfort to be found. Here a believer would say that there IS something there. They claim they can see their celestial father smiling back at them and stroking their hair. “It’s all right” they hear him say, “I will take care of you if you trust in me.”

I do not share that delusion, but I do however feel that sense of longing. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. All mammals, most birds, and a smaller percentage of cold blooded animals exhibit extremely tight bonds between at least the mother and her young through infancy and adolescence. Not until they are ready to survive on their own do parents cut ties with their offspring. Evolution has thoroughly conditioned us to need that relationship. It doesn’t surprise me that we collectively long for a cosmic hug.

However, as we humans open our eyes for the first time, and let out that first intergalactic scream, we are coming to the conclusion through science that our virgin birth has luckily not rendered us helpless or alone at all. More like a colt or a fawn, we are able to hit the ground running and fend for ourselves. Billions of years of evolution have already done the job of making us self sufficient. No parenting is needed, no hand holding or teaching; we will learn and grow, and when we reach adulthood in some distant future we will be beautiful, strong, confident and humble for having made it so far; together, not alone.

The sense of awe and wonder I feel when thinking about such things doesn’t require me to believe in anything supernatural or irrational. It doesn’t require me to take anything on faith.The feeling that comes over me when I’m able to just sit and think about the universe and how lucky I am to be a part of it, but yet how small we all are in it’s presence, is a transcendent experience that requires me to “believe” nothing, only to come to “know” as much as I can in the blink of an eye we call a lifetime.

I find comfort through knowledge, not faith. Life has meaning because there remain things to be known. To the believer, a life with unanswered questions is void of meaning, to me, a life with all the answers penciled for me is pointless.

Erik Abretske

Because I am an adult.

Graham Martin-Royle
United Kingdom

Growing up as a little kid I was not exposed much to devout religion. I only went to church when my sister and I were visiting our grandparents who were southern baptist. One time I remember sitting in the pew listing to the pastor talk one moment about how we should fear Jesus Christ and the next moment how Jesus was Love. It didn’t make sense to me one bit. That’s when I started questioning. As I grew I started having intense sexual feelings for other guys, even before puberty. I wished and prayed to god that I wasn’t gay but the feelings just grew and became more intense. I began hating myself for who I was because I felt if god made me this way he must hate me too. When my grandfather passed away when I was 14 all the church folk stood around saying things like, ‘God has called him back,’ and ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ To me it sounded as if they were saying god gave my grandfather lung cancer and made him suffer a terrible death just to bring him back to Him. I realized that was total BS. If there really was a god that was all loving and powerful, he would not give someone a horrible disease causing gross suffering just to ‘bring him back.’ He would not work in mysterious ways, he’d be upfront and to the point. With that realization I was able to free myself of the homophobia of religion and just struggle with the societal taboo of homosexuality. I eventually overcame my self hatred and came out at 18. One year later my mother came out to me. Oddly enough when she came out as a lesbian she ‘Found Jesus’ through the local gay church and became a born again gay christian. Yes, those do exist. She once admitted to my sister and I that one of her biggest regrets is that she didn’t find Jesus sooner to allow us as kids to share in her revelation. I looked at her and basically said I am alive because of the absence of Jesus. Growing up I hated myself for being gay. If I hadn’t been able to free myself of the thoughts that god hated me as well I firmly believe I would have killed myself for being gay.

Erik
United States

A simple question deserves a simple answer: I am an atheist because I have no reason to be otherwise.

I was raised religious, but even at a young age, it didn’t “take”. I accepted what I was told as truth, but I didn’t believe what I was told. I’m not actually terribly good about believing in things, which is what I appreciate about the scientific method and the natural world. What I believe is not important to the world outside of my head, but what I do is. It’s extremely liberating to not have to invest belief in things- I just accept what works and ignore what doesn’t. New evidence can’t challenge my beliefs, only change what I accept as useful.

I’m still a human being, and I still very much want certain things to be true. I can’t claim that I’m always so coldly rational, but it’s something I get to aspire to.

Remy Porter
United States

Once upon a time, I was a child (believe it or not). My mother taught me to read very early, at about two or three, by reading to me and showing me what it was that she was reading. She tested me, by reciting from a different page: I caught her. She taught me to read for imagination and entertainment, and for information and education. I learned to love to read, for all purposes. In addition to the old standbys, like the Alice in Wonderland books, we had Uncle Remus and The Little Engine that Could (teaching acceptance of race and gender), the Golden Encyclopedia. National Geographic (the magazines and the maps), someone’s textbook of anatomy and physiology, and anything else that looked interesting.

Mom taught me something else of vital import to this subject. She had told me, many times, of seeing people and events that on-one else saw: the universe she lived in differed from mine, but no-one in the family seemed to find it remarkable. Since no mention was ever made that her condition was not abnormal, I accepted that it was what everyone did. Among the lessons were:

• I had to find my own universe, by reading, listening, observing, and synthesizing some coherent (to me) place to live and think;

• I need to accept people as they are, rather than imposing my arbitrary ‘should be’ on them;

• any statement (in memory or in discourse) of information must always be accompanied by source and reliability identification.

I was in my fifties before anyone –her psychiatrist, in this case — mentioned ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ as a description of Mom’s reality.

We would spend the summers on her father’s farm, to escape the city heat, she said. Dad joined us when he could. Grampaw was a tenant farmer on forty acres of reasonably good dirt; he was also a deacon, and sometime preacher, at a local Southern Baptist church. Thus, he imposed on me the rule that only material ever worth reading was his bible. The farming magazines in the sitting room were pretty skimpy. It was either too hot and stinky, or too dark and stinky, to read the Sears catalog in the outhouse. So I read his bible: the whole thing. It was terrible, containing nothing of interest (no reality, no reliability, no entertainment, nothing worth imagining). It must have impressed Grampaw that his 6-year-old grandkid could read that well; he let me read his magazines after that.

I had learned, independently, that doing some things would result in a feeling of severe unpleasantness; I later learned that this feeling was called ‘guilt’, and the only remedy is to fix whatever my actions had broken. The actions that caused such guilt were characterized as ‘bad’. My problem was that my attempts to predict whether a given action would be ‘bad’ or not were not very reliable: there were to many false negatives. Later in my childhood, someone told me that these predictions were called ‘morality’, and that ‘morality’ was what churches were all about. So, with Mom (and sometimes, Dad, a Mason), I investigated.

We examined the teaching of many different christianities, like Disciples of Christ, Episcopalianism, Methodism, Lutheranism and Baptism. None of them could give me any guidance on improving my moral understanding: I still had to learn by doing, and suffering the consequences. None of them were of assistance towards my goal. Each of them, however, taught a conflicting story: “We go by the bible; we’re right and everybody else (that goes by the same bible) is wrong.” My lesson there was: ok, ignore the christianities, in their arrogance, and go straight to the putative source. Although I had read the bible, years earlier, I realized that I had grown some over those years. Maybe, says I, I was too young to catch any meaning in the work. I read it again, more than once: still no coherent, morally useful content, other than a few obvious things that were not at all original.

I gave it up, and called myself an agnostic for the next few years. In college, I encountered Ayn Rand, both her fiction and her non-fiction. The fiction works are ambiguous, so that some people find there ideas that I have never seen (greed, mostly), and they fail to see the ideas that I find useful (empathy, honesty, cooperation). Her non-fiction is more concrete and (shall we say) objective, particularly her works on epistemology.

From that, I learned this lesson: the arrogance of faith never works; the humility of the scientific method does. That taught me, in turn, to call myself an agnostic atheist: I don’t know whether any gods exist (or an specific god exists); without such knowledge, necessarily based on scientific processes, I cannot profess any belief in such a crittter.

From early Libertarianism (more Randish than now), I finally got the ‘moral compass’ that none of the christianities offered: Do not initiate force or exercise fraud on anyone.

Se Habla Espol

Or more specifically why I am not a believer in baseless unsubstantiated authoritarian truth claims on penalty of unending unendurable permanent agony and immolation on behalf of an all knowing all powerful father figure whose love and compassion for me is rivaled only by his plans to punish me for the most vanishingly small signs of disobedience. I don’t believe, not as a matter of blind faith but because nothing substantial has been presented upon which I can make a conscious choice. My “belief” is a conclusion not jumped to. I’m am not unconvinced, rather there is nothing present to be convinced by one way or the other. My “belief” in God is exactly equal to the belief that I am God and the creator of all that is and exactly as valid as any other such truth claim.

David Bramblett

Like others, I was raised in a fundamental Christian household, first as an Independent Baptist and then a Southern Baptist. We went to church at least three, sometimes five times a week. I was a good girl, very obedient and believing, but I remember being thrown by a Sunday school teacher’s answer when I asked where your soul was – floating above your head, she replied. So I was a bit skeptical of souls from third grade on. (Side note – I reasoned there was no santa when I was five because santa’s presents were addressed to me in my dad’s handwriting. Ditto with easter bunnies and tooth fairies. I wasn’t completely naïve, just when it had to do with religion.)

I excelled in everything God- and church-related; I wanted to be a good example of a Christian from an early age. So after I was saved at four years old I worked hard to learn as many Bible verses as possible, to be obedient, to witness to my friends, to hand out popsicles at the park on hot days, etc. One of my proudest moments was when I won my state’s Southern Baptist youth Bible Drill contest and got to go to nationals. I taught Sunday school and Vacation Bible School from high school on, sang in the choir, helped lead our music program while in college. Over the summer of my junior year of college I married the pastor’s son, my high school beau (because God told us to get married), and we led the youth group together, intending to go to seminary after a couple years. At this point I had been part of the church for twenty years and it was the source of all of my comfort, friends, fun, and work.

My changes started while in high school. I was convicted over and over that I wasn’t “truly saved” and spent many nights and mornings desperate and crying while studying my Bible. One day something clicked, I forget what it was, but I had an “experience” that I thought was salvation for real, so I got re-baptized. A year or so later my new year’s resolution was to understand how salvation works, so I spent a lot of time analyzing Bible verses and reading Christian authors. Except that things started unraveling. I gave up the notion of the soul entirely, then later miracles, then prayer. By the time I got married in college I believed God had pre-ordained everything and didn’t interfere with the world, because that wouldn’t make sense. An astronomy course my senior year of college opened my eyes to actual science and messed more with my already-hanging-by-a-thread belief system. It didn’t help that my husband was a philosophy major who discussed logic puzzles with me every day. So for a year my beliefs came undone as I watched, helpless, rationalizing everything in an attempt to hold it together. Then one day I narrowly avoided a car crash and realized I hadn’t prayed. It’s impossible to describe the floor falling from under your feet , the helplessness. I knew I didn’t believe in God anymore, but had no idea what to do. My husband was headed to seminary, my church was my lifeline, my whole life revolved around God and Jesus.

After some months’ awkwardness, I discovered my husband had also stopped believing in God. We finished up at the church and fled town within a year, anxious to separate ourselves from religion. Now I had no friends or family, no work, only a husband who was as unhinged as I was. Lots of alcohol, some counseling, and ten years later, we’re still together. It’s a rare thing to have a friend who shared such an experience.

So why am I an atheist? The short answer is because I finally saw my religion for what it was: a confusing set of beliefs that made no sense once carefully considered. That said, I would not wish this experience on anyone. Sure, I consider myself more moral and caring than I ever was before, but I also lost all my friends and am still rebuilding the trust of my family and my husband’s family. In the end, it’s worth it to be a rational person, but I will always feel haunted by my past and have regrets.

CM