Richard Dawkins likes to compare openness about one’s atheism with coming out of the closet, but in my case they were even more closely related.

Like so many kids I repressed my homosexuality out of religious (in my case, Christian) compunction and social phobia. But once I finally begrudged myself some sex in college, I knew intuitively that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I reacted against the idea of the victimless crime, described as sin by the Bible. But while I had shed my denominational identity, I remained stuck in a kind of anachronistic deism. Indeed, having jettisoned the doctrine of original sin, I probably overcompensated with an overly optimistic view of nature and its presumbaly benevolent creator.

So I was in for a shock when some of my friends started coming down with, and dying from, AIDS (this was the early nineties). Of course I knew about it from reading the newspaper and watching television, but I had put off revising my worldview until now. How to explain AIDS? Of course I already knew that it wasn’t divine punishment because there was nothing wrong with sex and, anyway, it had spared many “fornicators” including myself. But it didn’t exactly accord with my new-model deism either. I was experiencing a crisis that was as much intellectual as emotional.

Resolution beckoned in the form of evolution, which I had learned in high school but never related to my daily life in that hiatus between polio and AIDS. With its frequent mutations in response to medication, HIV was (and still is) the poster child for evolution. I began to take a more jaundiced view of nature, which seemed increasingly like a struggle for existence. But I found reassurance in the thought that all this took place without reference to morality or values, instead deriving from the virus’s need to replicate and adapt to its environment.

I suppose plenty of people going back to Asa Gray have been able to reconcile evolution with their religious beliefs. But as I was seeing it in its cruelest guise, I could not. To me, evolution was an irrational and wasteful process that was fundamentally incompatible with any definition of creation. And if you take away creation, what is left for a god to do?

So it was my experience as a gay man, specifically of religious homophobia and the AIDS epidemic, that brought me to atheism. At first glance, those seem to have little in common besides their coincidental effect on the gay community. But in accepting my sexuality and recognizing the true nature of AIDS, I embraced what is rather than what cannot be. To me, atheism is the “reality-based community” of journalists’ dreams.

Nick Harding

I suspect that there are a variety of origins and influences that flowered our reasoning processes or otherwise led us to connect with our sense of rational thinking, and by extension, to our atheism.

For me, the seeds were started in early youth; a fascination with how things work, a desire for understanding, a love for experimentation, tinkering and measurement,… a burgeoning appreciation of science as a tool for discovery and truth, an envy and respect for all the groundbreaking scientists with their efforts and trials throughout history, as well as a strong respect I had for my older brother whom I looked up to for his extensive reading and desire to know what is ‘real’ in the world, especially its mysteries.

Much of what I’ve seen over the past three decades has been disconcerting, as youth seemingly lack a desire to be instilled and inspired with the wonder of science and the freedom of rational thought.

There are some freethinkers (and theists of various persuasions) feel a desire to ‘coexist’ (as the artistically clever bumper sticker expresses) with others of different beliefs, or simply feel that the dogmas inherent in the belief systems of others are just not ‘on the radar’ and don’t pose much in the way of cultural or intellectual threat. Personally, I started to get a worried sense about the shift in cultural and social attitudes as we entered the 1980’s and began, as a country, a gradual ‘creep’ to the political right, with its associated disregard for–even hostility toward– certain areas of education (especially science), art ( with a penchant for censorship), media ( the ‘ liberal “elite” ‘). Some, like Newt Gingrich and others, lament the ‘decline’ of Western culture and values, as they ironically fail to pay even lip service to some of the foundational blocks of Western culture–free thought, logic and reason– while espousing and defending the virtues of the religiously devout (which they themselves often conveniently ignore). Yes, religion is an essential tool in the toolbox of the political right; manipulating and harnessing the dogmas of the devout for political gain (and presumably personal gain), reciprocally, as the vociferous devout among us flex the political muscle of right wing politicians to further their narrow, religiously ideological agendas.

These issues are central to my disdain for religious belief and many of its practitioners, stemming strongly from this insidious marriage of religious belief and political power and the danger it poses. Increasing religious influence in our political systems presents a potential for long range threat to the material and social structures of our national and international cultures, with its most corrosive influence on the most essential tool for cultural advancement and continuing understanding of the universe we’re immersed in: the minds of future generations and how they evaluate, discover and accept what is real,… and what is reliable about how we explore our world.

I believe this corrosion needs to be widely understood, exposed and actively countered in the United States in particular. It’s hopeful to see there are many notables with influence and reputation in the scientific, philosophical and educational communities who are standing up and working hard to build a strong front. I certainly hope to continue to learn, understand and support, in my own way and time, what may turn out to be a new Enlightenment,..or perhaps a Re-Enlightenment.

Ben Ehrmann

I went to a Catholic parochial school in St. Paul for six years, was an altar boy, could pretty competently read Latin, and casually accepted my Catholic faith. But I never believed in it, any of it. It all, even to a child, seemed to not…work. But I didn’t finally lose all semblance of any belief in a god until I worked for the prison system here in MN. I’m an RN, and have always chosen to work in the underbelly; treatment and detox centers, group homes for profoundly developmentally disabled adults who also had mental illness diagnoses, psychiatric units, hospice, and where I totally lost my faith, in a maximum security prison hospital unit.

Every day I addressed the health care needs of many offenders in the system, some not so bad, some inconceivably horrid, and dangerous, most stupid, lazy, and incompetent. But one offender, a sexual predator and murderer of children, totally destroyed any possible belief in a god. This man kidnapped a five year old girl from a church, and over the course of a day, forced upon her almost every filthy, violent, savage assault you can even imagine, and many you most probably can’t. But it wasn’t the rapes, or cigarette burns, or hair yanked out, or the beatings that killed her. It was his feces forced down her throat. Then he tossed her in a dumpster like some dead cat.

I usually never read the court transcripts from any of the men I took care of. I didn’t want to know, afraid I might be influenced to provide less than good health care. I wish I hadn’t looked up this piece of shit’s court record as well. But here’s what killed god for me. This little girl “loved Jesus” according to her mother. And god is supposedly all good, powerful, knowing etc. All I could think of was where is god? When this child went through every possible humiliation, forms of pain, terror, you add your own adjective here, where was god? Theodicy is always the fly in the ointment, Epicurus nailed it a long time ago, but the kindest thought you could take from this is that god is, as Twain put it, a malignant thug. No manner of convoluted magical thinking can excuse what happened to this little girl. If there is a god, even remotely like what most of us have been taught, he’s an enemy, beneath contempt, worthy of our hatred. If he exists, fuck him. But he doesn’t.

One last thing, to all those idiot whining pharmacists and other “health care professionals” who are troubled by Plan B birth control pills. I provided competent, professional care to the monster in prison. I changed his diaper, he was an old man by the time I knew him, after a quarter century in prison, gave him his medications, checked his blood glucose levels, in short, acted professionally. Professionals don’t get to pick and choose who they care for.

Steve
United States

In short, I was able to see the beauty of science with my own two eyes from a very early age.

My father loves science. Accordingly, when I was a 4 year old afraid of an earthquake he taught me about plate tectonics. I spent hours asking him questions about the universe when my mother was at work on the weekends, and I was gifted my first telescope at the age of 7.

So when the bible teacher (in a public primary school I might add!) told us that earthquakes were created by god when I was 8 years old, I immediately realised religion was a fraud. It’s lucky I did, because I later discovered that I was a lesbian. Who knows how much pain and repression I would have suffered if I had allowed that bible teacher to brainwash me!

Beth (the very happy lesbian)
New Zealand

Religion didn’t seem to be very important in my earliest years. We didn’t pray or go to church except for maybe twice a year and then whenever someone died or got married. Strangely, I ended up in Catechism in preparation for First Communion. Somehow I botched that up and didn’t attend when I was expected but I got another chance at it when I hit 4th grade. That was the year I started to attend Catholic School. It was totally voluntary. I wanted to go because my neighborhood friends went there. I made it through First Communion that year being very skeptical about the whole body and blood thing. We were taught that “amen” means “I believe” and that when you receive Communion you are expected to reply “amen”. What bothered me more would have been being the only student who didn’t go through with this. Everyone else did it and believed. I must have been doing something wrong.

Sixth grade brought my third year of being an alter boy and also a heavy dose of science. This increased the amount of conflict I had in dealing with a resurrection, miracles, and the existence of God. Again, I went along with the duality because there’s no way that a bunch of adults could be wrong about this. For a short while, we had an occasional visit from Father John on Wednesdays. It was our opportunity to talk with him about God. I didn’t say much; I didn’t have to. The class asked every question that I had. It was like we had discussed what to ask him just moments before he walked in. He was calm and pleasant as ever, but I noticed something peculiar about his responses. The answers were a bit to the side. There was little that was a very direct from him.

I left Catholic school for 7th grade and returned back again for 8th because my naivety got me in trouble. I went through with Confirmation with the same result as Communion. I knew things were “all in His timing” so I just waited patiently afterward. I thought this was supposed to be a big deal, big enough that I should notice something happening but I didn’t.

High school came and went without any religious influence and I started getting caught up on all the secular things of which I had been unaware. When I finally left home at 20 I bounced around from church to church, from non-denominational to evangelical. I did some soul searching. I was convinced I was doing it wrong and really wanted to know Him. I asked Jesus into my heart. I cried. Nothing.

My wife and I got married at Silverwood Mennonite Chuch in 2000. We were both believers, and very minimal at that, but certainly not Mennonite. That was from her side of the family. I would probably still be a minimalist believer in the Christian god if it were not for another dose of evangelism. Some members of her family were a bit extreme. Religion wasn’t just a part of them, it was them. This created conflict. I never liked being unsure about things that should be so important, so I was forced to try it again. The exception this time is that I took a different approach. My research started with understanding the meaning of words, ones that i taken for granted such as belief and knowledge. The internet proved to be a wonderful tool for finally getting some objective answers. I was fascinated with the amount of knowledge out there. The more knowledge I gained, the less I believed in God. After a hard year of digging, my conflict was resolved. I came to the realization that I did not believe. I was atheist and I found it to be reasonable.

Rod Chlebek

After careful thought and consideration, I decide I would write in as to why I am an atheist. Up until about six years ago, until I was 22, I was a believer in fairy tales. I believed that when you blessed yourself and made the sign of the cross that it would be as though it was a “direct telephone line” to God and that whatever I said would go straight to his ears. During mass I would count the number of times I blessed myself to make sure I “hung up” so that in case I thought of something bad it would not go straight to him.

I used to have a rosary and miraculous medals with me at all times, and even carried a scapular and small figures of Mary and Jesus in my purse. After tenth grade I stopped going to church mainly because I hated the parish I went to and detested the monsignor there, who always seemed to be the one officiating. But I still carried those trinkets with me wherever I went. Even though I no longer believe, I still cannot bring myself to throw them away, for sentimental values (gifts from my parents and grandparents).

As far as science goes, I was taught evolution in school and it was not until high school that I learned that people actually thought the world was six thousand years old. Needless to say, those girls were terribly misinformed then as they are now. I am at least thankful that I never believed in that nonsense. The Big Bang makes more sense than creationist stories about how the earth was formed. I love physics and engineering, and am going back to school to learn more about it and to get my degree in mechanical engineering (I know, big leap from fashion design, but I always want to know how things work and why and now that I am 28, I realized what I wanted to be when I was 18 is not what I want to be now that I am no longer a teenager).

The biggest thing that caused me to question and ultimately read about religion more than anything was the child abuse scandal and when the Catholic Church decided there was going to be no more Limbo, which goes back to my constant need to understand things and why it is done that way. I could not believe that no one would come forward for these kids and how dare the priest cover for themselves. It disgusted me that basically the entire hierarchy of the Catholic Church cared more about the pedophile priests than they did for the children whose lives were ruined because of them. Additionally when the Catholic Church announced a few years ago that despite the fact that they are infallible, they made a mistake for a few millennia and that unbaptized babies no longer go to limbo they are in heaven. My grandmother had a stillborn baby some fifty odd years ago and she spent every day until her death ten years ago thinking that she would never see her baby in heaven because the Catholic Church told her it was in Limbo with no chance to be with her.

It was because of this anger that led me to start reading about Catholicism and its history, which led to reading about Protestants and finally other Abrahamic religions and a little of the other world religions. I read why Jews didn’t accept Christ because he did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. I read about how there is no evidence for Jesus aside from the Bible. I started to realize that if I grew up in India and raised Hindu, I would believe Hinduism is the only way, or if I grew up in Saudi Arabia I would be Muslim and Islam would be the only way. I started to question why would God only allow his religion to be given to only a few select people. I then started to realize that it was all crap. It was all man made and it all boils down to this one thing: people are afraid to die and are afraid that there is nothing after our time on this earth is over.

Through time and reasoning I came to the conclusion that all religion is false and that I now pity people who believe in it and base their whole lives on pleasing an invisible man in the sky. My family is now what we joke as being on the “Dark Side”, and my mother is pretty much an agnostic now. My siblings are also atheists as well and my dad is a strong agnostic too. I am not going to go back to believing in fairy tales ever again. If only the rest of the world would too.

Anne Marie
United States

When I was four (or thereabouts) I was taken by an elderly “aunt” (I think she was a friend of my maternal grandparents) to a church in Manhattan to “see the animals in the stone”. Now I had previously been taken to the American Museum of Natural History and had seen the mounted dinosaur skeletons, etc., and I was eager to see more – especially those which were not yet extracted for the rock.

So I eagerly accompanied her to a church which was lined with marble. To my dismay there were no animal skeletons embedded in the stone: some vague shapes which, if you stretched your imagination a whole lot, could be interpreted as a rabbit, or a squirrl, or a bird, or something else.

After waxing lyrical about the “animals in the stone” my “aunt” then proceeded to start talking about Jesus and God and Heaven.

The first part of her discourse – about the animals in the stone – was obviously blown out of her ass – although I didn’t think in those terms at that time. So I took the second part, about God and Jesus, etc., as just more of the same.

That experience inoculated me: Sunday school, Bible lessons, etc. etc. etc. – you name it – rang false false false from then on.

As I matured, of course, I became more sophisticated in my reasoning, which is only to be expected. But no matter how bullet-proof an argument for God apparently was, I KNEW, from the start, that it was bogus, and I just had to poke and pry at it some more to find the catch – the unstated and erroneous assumption, the false premise.

It has been more than 6 decades, now, and I grow weary of the lies the proselytizers spew with unfailing energy.

Neel Ode

I’m sure you are more than flooded with posts to this category, and probably still being flooded more and more each day. As a sociology student, I absolutely love reading the various ways people came into atheism in our religious soaked culture. After some mulling it over, I decided I wanted to send mine is as well. I don’t know if it will ever get posted, but I still wanted to add my story to the pile. You should consider compiling all of these into a book. I know I would read it!

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household, in a small yet deeply religious town, in the heart of Oklahoma. Obviously, Christianity was presented to me as the only possible way. But, I was lucky. During my childhood I had an uncle who doted on me, having no children of his own, and often stepped in to provide babysitting and care when other family members were busy. My uncle never made noise about his beliefs, mostly, I believe, because that would have cut him out of the family and community. Whatever he believed, I’ll never know. What I do know is that he loved planting seeds of doubt, oh so subtly, in my head. He had two loves in his life, science and history, and he took every moment to go off on long-winded rants about both, usually in ways that would cause me to doubt the myths I had heard without causing suspicion from the believers.

I remember one beautiful starry night, in mid-December, he woke me up in the middle of the night to pull out the telescope and gaze up into the sky. He told me about the constellations, who they were named for, and what they had done to deserve such a special place. As we talked about ancient myths and the cultures of those myths, he threw out a jewel. Sometimes women got pregnant outside of marriage, but that could have been very dangerous for them. Wouldn’t it be safer to simply say “God did it”, whomever that God was, then to risk death? With the story of the virgin-birth of Jesus around me at that time, he managed to put doubt into my head without actually bringing up Mary or Jesus. It was sneaky, and beautiful.

When I was finally old enough to toss off Christianity, I flung myself into paganism. My reasoning, as cloudy as it was, made sense to a young girl who was trying to escape. One, the brand of Christianity I was raised in was very, devoutly anti-women. At my church, women and girls were to sit in the back of the church and be silent, rising shortly before the men to assemble in the kitchen area and prepare the after service meal while the men and boys got to hear the just-for-them sermon. Suddenly coming across a religion, as fuzzy as that term might be, where I wasn’t seen as chattel was breathtaking. Finally, I was an equal person! Secondly, my uncle had tempted me into looking at the history of Christianity, and a lot of what I read showed me that they took a lot of their ideas/beliefs/traditions from pagan religions at that time. To me, if Christianity had to steal these from the pagans, the early Christians must have known that these pagan religions were more true, more right. They wouldn’t have stolen from them if they were not superior in some way. (In my defense, I wasn’t a wand waving, spell casting pagan. I looked down at those types as ignorant. I was more of a history book reading pagan, believing there was some “greater power” that didn’t need our worship and was more concerned with the big picture than our puny, little selves.)

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself a young mother who was desperate to give my kids the education I felt I had missed out on. In order to teach them better about the world, I knew I had to understand it better. So I threw myself into the subject that was glossed over so much when I was a kid: science. Again, I was lucky to have an uncle that secretly brought me books and pirated videos of Sagan and Hawking when I was a teen, but I wanted my kids to be exposed to these types of ideas at a younger age, to not have to overcome a decade of religious brainwashing first. As I began to look more into these areas in order to break them down for my kids, I started to understand something. I held on to paganism because I needed a Why. I needed something bigger than myself, bigger than the whole of humanity, bigger than the universe, to give meaning to it all. I conceded that such a power might exist in such a way that our current scientific abilities were not able to detect it, but I still felt that it was there. Because it had to be there. Because there had to be a why.

As soon as I realized that was the reason I held on to some belief, I felt foolish. There doesn’t have to be a why, random things happen all the time for no reason. Finally getting that let me toss of what was left of my beliefs and accept that I’m an atheist. I think my uncle would be proud.

Summer
United States

I am an atheist by necessity, only because religious superstition exists in the world.

I would be delighted if, upon one happy day in the future, that priority sank to the level of historical novelty and I could devote my energies exclusively to more pleasant and constructive and progressive pursuits that do not resemble the burdensome toils of janitorial maintenance.

Helping to clear the world of the pestilence of religious tyranny is a duty I do not shirk and I am proud of what modest help I can bring to the effort. I remain ever vigilant to find ways of increasing the effectiveness of my activism, but I would gladly part with the “atheist” identification if religion and superstition disappeared and rationality and critical thinking became the default attitude in the world.

As long as superstition enslaves people and makes life miserable if not unbearable, I must be an atheist, but I’d much rather be, simply, an artist and educator, and be able to build upon the foundation of knowledge already established, introducing the marvels of natural reality to young people and those who sincerely value their curiosity of the real world without having to give my time to religion for ANYTHING, including the reason for being an “atheist”.

Unfortunately, we don’t yet live in such a world (far from it) but my idealism doesn’t trump my practical realism either, and so I must be an “atheist”. So be it. Let the conflict roil on and evolve inevitably into one or another outcome.

Meanwhile, I will continue to remain optimistic for the prospect of a superstition-free world as long as I see light on the horizon and can cherish an entirely HUMAN hope for a better future, virtues which the grubby, greedy hands of religious authority cannot take from me, let alone assume credit for.

anchor

I am an atheist simply because I don’t believe in God, gods or anything supernatural. I cannot prove otherwise but the onus is on the claimant to present credible evidence, not just arguments from ignorance (complexity, beauty, science doesn’t know everything, etc.) and other logical fallacies.

I never believed in gods, even during the years that I attended Christian kindergarten and elementary schools. I took the Bible stories as just that — stories. And classmate’s claims that God wrote the Bible made no sense to me. God was just so…not there.

I went through a supernatural phase though. In the 1970’s, I was intrigued by Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of, pyramid power, the Bermuda Triangle, Nostradamus, and other pop pseudo-sciences and pseudo-profundity. And Disney’s Escape from Witch Mountain had me trying to fly with the mere power of my thoughts. I could feel myself flying with my eyes closed but not when opened. Darn reality.

Also, it took some time for me to completely reject superstition. I had to be careful of my thoughts lest the universe use me as an ironic example, like choke to death on a vitamin pill, or instill cancer if I got too happy or full of myself. Perhaps it was due to residuals from Christianity and/or cosmic karma crap. I got over it. Now, there’s no more universal score keeper. Exciting! Now I can simply be responsible for my actions, not thoughts, and balance my personal needs and desires with social responsibility and environmental stewardship. No gods required.

Torsten Pihl
United States