My journey to atheism started with a discussion with a coworker who also happened to be a Christian minister.

Although I was raised Catholic, I had long ago grown out of much of the dogma. I had no problem accepting science that conflicted with church teachings and I generally tried to be a good person without appealing to the Bible for instruction. However, I still clung to the belief that there must be a god, and that I needed to believe certain things or behave in a certain way in order to get my eternal reward after death.

One evening, I watched a fascinating documentary on the Discovery Channel about some of the creatures who were direct ancestors to the dinosaurs. The next day, I mentioned it at work, specifically bringing up how the show talked about the eventual evolution of the creatures of that period into the dinosaurs. I had no idea what kind of reaction it would bring. My minister-coworker retorted with “Oh, you mean how it never happened?” He then launched into a whole tirade about how we have no evidence for evolution, and the earth is not old enough… It was basically a lot of the nonsense from AiG, although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time.

Even though I was still religious at the time, I fully accepted an old earth and evolution. To be honest, I probably would have considered myself an intelligent design proponent, had I known the term, because I still believed that humans were somehow special. The most annoying part to me was that I had nothing with which to fight back. I just flat out didn’t know enough about evolution to make a solid argument. I decided then and there that I would not be caught in that situation again. I went out and bought The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins).

I was enthralled. I could not put the book down. I had no idea that we had naturalistic explanations not only for evolution, but for all of the processes that allow it to happen — all without having to appeal to any supernatural being. After finishing Watchmaker, I read Your Inner Fish (Shubin), and The Selfish Gene (Dawkins). I kept thinking to myself, “If we can explain how life evolved through purely naturalistic processes, what else can be explained in that way?” The next book I read was Atom, by Lawrence Krauss. Wow, we can explain just as well the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang through today as we can the evolution of life on Earth! That pushed me over the edge. Something hit me. I realized that all of my coworker’s arguments for the existence of god were appeals to the unknown. He didn’t understand these processes, so he used his god to fill in the gaps. Once I better understood how the universe worked, there were no (or at least far fewer) gaps to fill. We don’t need gods to explain any natural processes in our universe. That one single fact is so liberating!

There was still the spiritual side of things, but I was already rather thin there anyway. More reading, more walls falling. I read The God Delusion (Dawkins), The End of Faith (Harris), God Is Not Great (Hitchens), and Breaking the Spell (Dennett). The spell was, indeed, broken. For the first time, I truly saw religion as a curse, rather than a blessing. It was during that time that I decided that I was a good person regardless of my beliefs, not because of them. Truth be told, I am probably a better person today without any of that nonsense filling my head.

It makes me a little bit sad when I see or read interviews with prominent authors like those above, in which they bemoan that their works are primarily read by people who are already of like mind, and that they aren’t really making a difference. If I could say just one thing to them, it is that I am proof that they can make a difference, and I hope they never give up the fight.

Michael A Pipkin
United States

I stopped going to church when I was eleven or twelve. I didn’t leave in anger or despair. I didn’t leave in a huff. Religion had simply stopped making sense to me.

The reasons are pretty common, I’m sure. I had come to see churches as human institutions primarily concerned with perpetuating themselves. The doctrines of salvation or damnation due to accident of birth seemed fundamentally cruel and capricious. I couldn’t understand why an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being was so infantile that it would demand my worship. None of it seemed moral, by any moral standard that I had been taught or understood.

Beyond that, it seemed to me that being moral was important, and that if morality was important, being moral because it was the right thing–rather than out of fear of eternal punishment–was important. The eternal punishments and rewards of Christianity–and I knew no other religion–devalued morality, rather than encouraging it. Instead of making morality the center of a good life, it reduced it to a life of brown-nosing, a way of tricking “Dad” into giving me the keys to the car, when deep inside, I would know I didn’t deserve them.

Religion (and God) became irrelevant. I didn’t so much disbelieve as stop caring. I considered supernaturality as supernatural and therefore beyond knowing. I called myself an agnostic, not because I wrestled with the existence of God, but because I didn’t care about it. I didn’t believe in God, but neither did I believe in the non-existence of God.

While that position hasn’t changed, I now call myself an atheist, recognizing that I don’t believe in God, and that atheism describes that position better than agnostic.

So, why am I not open about it? I face no individual social sanction not to proclaim my beliefs. There are no clubs *I* wish to join that would exclude me for atheism. I live in a community where acknowledgement of atheism wouldn’t affect me, personally. Churches are peripheral here, not central.

My son, however, had some brain damage at birth. He is a wonderful kid. His disabilities are not extreme, but they are present and noticeable. As a result, he is socially isolated. Secular organizations have failed completely in addressing the social needs of our sons. The organizations that have accepted him, where the kids have welcomed him and helped him be part of the group have all had religious elements. I feel a responsibility to participate in those organizations, to recognize the value their acceptance provides for kids like my son. That’s part of my own, personal morality.

Some of those organizations–Boy Scouts, in particular–do not allow atheists to participate.

I would prefer, of course, to find organizations that accept without the strains of religiosity, but I’m not in a position to make that choice. When we find something that works for us, a group where he’s accepted, we have to stick with it. I have to give back to the organizations that support those groups, even if they’re flawed.

Perhaps it would have been possible to find non-religious organizations that were accepting and supportive. We found the ones we found. I might have looked harder in the atheist community if not for its intellectual snobbery, if not for its habit of mocking those who write confused letters and e-mails.

Within the adult atheist community I see wit and intellectual consistency. I see vigorous and rigorous argument. I see courage and conviction. What I don’t see much of, is kindness. Maybe when the movement gets past the sexism and classism debates, when it’s carved out enough social space that it doesn’t feel the need to constantly be on the attack, there will be room for more of it.

bob

Few scraps of useful genealogical information have been salvaged by my family members, but here’s one: a branch of the ancestors were Huguenots, who fled Europe to come to the colonies because of the Inquisition.

I had to do my own research to find the connection to the Spanish Inquisition, which turns out to have had a bloody beginning in the south of France. It was, if anything, even more ferocious there, as the link between politics and religion manifested itself in first the acceptance and then the kingly condemnation of those upstart protestants.

Once the monarchy ran out of money, they also ran out of tolerance as the popes, wealthy beyond kings with income from parishioner tithes and selling indulgences, bargained for political support in return for their money and well-fed armed forces. French rulers gave them a free hand and the torture began.

So the screams from the dungeons persuaded my forbears, and others of the skilled, learned, critically-thinking class that composed the Christian Protestants, to skedaddle off to other parts, finally including England and then the western hemisphere. You can read about it in history – the exodus of the skilled class jump-started Britain’s industrial revolution.

Skip forward a few generations to my mother, a lovely girl with a nervous disposition. That’s what they called it before her volatile moods were diagnosed as bipolar syndrome, with a touch of Borderline Personality Disorder, that catchall for a condition that would have gotten her burned at the stake in Salem, with the hearty approval of everyone, even the non-superstitious-witch-hunting faction.

And when she was cycling through a really crazy spell, she’d occasionally cite some disjointed religious reference as the reason her mania was justified. She’d carry an old bible around, with little notes stuck inside and passages underlined. She got messages nobody else heard, and some were in that book, though for all the relevance to reality it could have been Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy or the Book of Mormon, or any other work of imaginative fiction.

A few weeks before a major breakdown and resulting adventures that make good storytelling now but occasioned plenty of heartbreak and worry then, she came up to me and with the intensity of the manic phase, told me how she got a message from God in a tuna fish sandwich.

“I was eating it and suddenly I had to spit out the next bite – it was so salty, it was horrible! It was awful, like there was a cup of salt in that sandwich, and then I realized it was the tears of Jesus, shed for us!” She had no further insight into penance or salvation, and never spent a moment in prayer or reflection. Religion was just one more symptom of her intense lifelong mental illness, which would have been enough to make me a critical thinker even if it offered the faintest shred of aid or comfort, which it has never provided.

I guess the lesson for my family is: if someone shows up with a Good Book, run for your life!

Stella

I’m an atheist because there is nothing else I can be.

My parents are both British scientists. I was born in Africa because my father was doing postdoc work on, I believe, giraffe respiratory physiology (we have pictures of him standing on a ladder holding a mask over a giraffe’s nose) but spent my first seven years living in England. While I was aware of religion and churches because, well, in Oxford it is difficult to go thirty feet without banging into a church of some description, it never really occurred to me that the people who attended those churches did so because they believed in a god. I didn’t even truly understand that both my grandmothers were believers. Church to me meant Nativity scenes, ringing bells, those little palm-leaf crosses, the smell of brass polish and damp and lilies, cross-stitched kneelers, worn carvings of various saints, and (most fascinating of all) graveyards with all sorts of interesting headstones and tombs in them.

We moved to America when I was seven, and have lived here ever since. I’m thirty-one and I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that people, many of whom are otherwise quite sane and sensible and have advanced degrees, actually believe that a god exists–let alone that that god a) requires people to live up to an impossible standard, b) damns them to hell for not living up to this impossible standard, and then c) creates and murders an avatar of himself to “redeem” everyone from the artificial damnation he himself invented. I can understand the idea of wanting to shift responsibility for oneself and one’s decisions to a greater authority, but the Big Three Abrahamic god is such an insecure, reactionary, vicious, cruel, irrational, demanding, and untrustworthy entity that I fail to see why anyone would give (H)im the time of day.

My parents never told me that there was no god; they just never suggested to me that there was one, and therefore I grew up without the need to believe in one. Without, in fact, the ability to believe in one. Sometimes I think it’d be easier, in a country as overwhelmingly christian as the US, to be able to believe in their god to the point where I was no longer cross with the vast majority of the population for subscribing to such a bloody stupid concept. Proselytizers I’ve come across have said “you just have to have faith” that a god exists, but how? I can say “I believe in the Great God Om and His holy horns” or “I believe in Ahura-Mazda” or “I believe that the Republican Party is not a conclave of viciously misogynistic homophobes who hate the idea of anyone anywhere having a good time,” but I can’t actually follow through on any of those statements.

Most of the time I don’t discuss my atheism with people other than my close friends (or the internet) because it always comes down to the fact that yes, I do think religion is not only stupid but actively poisonous, that continuing to give tacit approval to this limited and illogical worldview hinders humanity’s development as an intelligent species, and that people who are clever and educated and literate enough to understand the scientific method damn well ought to discard fairytales and embrace reality. This is not a popular viewpoint and rarely leads to constructive discussion so much as “so you’re calling my (father, mother, doctor, academic advisor, etc) stupid for being a Christian/Jew/Muslim?”

I’m calling your authority figure intellectually dishonest. Which may on some levels be worse.

Elizabeth
United States

When I was 7 years old, my 2nd grade teacher was giving a lesson about dinosaurs. Another student asked a seemingly sensible question at the time, why hadn’t the Tyrannosaurus Rex eaten all of the people. The teacher replied that dinosaurs and people didn’t live at the same time. This answer didn’t sit well with me and in a rare case of assertiveness, I muttered defiantly, “Yes, they did.” The teacher’s eyes went wide and her gaze snapped onto me, burning the image into my memory, and stated, “No. They. Did. NOT!”

I can only imagine that my teacher must have thought she had a creationist in her class. But in my young, malleable mind, I was calling forth reference materials such as “The Flintstones” and “Captain Caveman”. While her harsh admonishment may have temporarily put me off from classic schooling, it started something else in me. If I was to be so publicly scolded for my ignorance, I wanted to know why I was wrong. More than that, I wanted to know how to find the real answers.

That philosophy of curiosity stuck with me. When I tried to apply this in my catechism classes however, not only was I not given a good reason for many of the strange traditions and beliefs in the Catholic religion, but people became angry with me for honestly trying to figure them out. Their anger told me they didn’t know either. “Faith,” I was told tersely, was essential to understand, but never once given a reason for that either. I got the distinct impression that discovery was not a valued virtue in religion. So, it ceased to be important to me.

I am an atheist because the things I want to believe are only the ideas that have a satisfactory answer to the question I should have asked my 2nd grade teacher and have since asked repeatedly of those seeking to share the “truth” of their religion with me, “How do you know that to be true?”

Matthew Kiffmeyer
United States

I am atheist because religion cannot answer questions. Because religion is disrespectful to every other species with which we share this planet. Because the universe is all the more beautiful without any gods and their magic pointing fingers poofing things into existence. I am an atheist because I love science and despise magical and irrational thinking. I’m an atheist because I’ve seen to many intelligent people destroyed by fear.

I am an atheist from a southern Baptist family. I suspect I would have become an atheist eventually, but I’m glad I abandoned it at an early age. As a child I questioned everything. One of those annoying kids whose favorite question was why. When I asked my grandmother who wrote the bible, I was told god. My first thought was a mental image of a book falling out of the sky and hitting some poor sucker on the down. I knew that books required writers, printing presses, publishers and why were there so many versions of the stupid thing. This and a dozen other questions were not the straw that broken my back.

I was willing to accept the concept of a god, heaven and hell on sufferance barring better evidence. At age twelve I stopped taking it so. I’ve had animals all my life, from the time I was three years old. I lost my first pet to feline leukemia, which led to a brain tumor, which led to his early death by veterinarian. I was there the whole time and deeply regretted the vet’s refusal to allow me to burying him properly. An unfortunate and deeply sad event, but a normal part of life for any pet lover. After his death I turned to my grandmother for comfort and I imagine anyone who came from a Baptist household can guess what she said. ìAnimals don’t have souls.î I had known humans were animals from the time I was about six, given the other options at the time were plants and rocks (my knowledge of fungi and bacteria was a bit lacking at six years old). If humans were not animals, what were we? If humans were animals and had souls, then why exactly didn’t every other animal have a soul? And why was I believing in a religious doctrine so full of holes a child could find them if I couldn’t have my animals in heaven? At this point I said screw it and abandoned Christianity all together.

I had not abandoned religion all together and spent years exploring other religions and doctrines, which were fine to a point, but there was always this slip into magical thinking. Every time you look at them with a clinical eye they would burst like a soap bubble. Eventually I stopped looking, though I continued to call myself agnostic, not realizing that was a bit of a misnomer. When I was in college I was walking to class and had an epiphany that there were no gods. I was more surprised at how little that bothered me. After a brief but amusing foray into solipsism, I found atheism respite from all the silly superstitions that surround me.

I am an atheist because I am not afraid. Because evolution is more amazing the more I study it. Because I love science and research and knowledge, and I despise the people, who in the name of an invisible sky daddy, prevent people from getting to see it. Because I don’t care what other people do so long as it’s consensual. Because I want to reduce suffering and see everyone live in this glorious, amazing universe full of living things that evolve, stars that explode and spin and get eaten by black holes, an expanding universe, social behaviors in sharks, complicated trophic webs, and ecological homeostasis (guess what classes I’m taking this semester) .

I am an atheist because I never stopped asking why.

Megan Foley
United States

My upbringing was a casual blend of secularism in the home with Catholic and Protestant bits thrown in when friends and family took me to churches. I went to a Lutheran day camp with a family friend, Catholic mass with an aunt and Baptist revival with another aunt, etc. What I learned at home wasn’t anti-religion, but pragmatism, rationality and an appreciation for sense making. When my mom or dad took time to explain something to me, I would then be asked “Does that make sense?” I learned that sense making was a mutual effort, something people did together or not at all.

So during Sunday school when I first learned of the burning bush story and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, there was much sense left unmade. A talking, burning bush is one thing. Kids are expected to accept goofy talking characters, but I couldn’t accept the horror of a father holding a knife to his kid’s throat. When I blurted out in all innocence “I’m sure glad my dad isn’t a Christian” the Sunday school teacher reprimanded me. Later I found out that I was considered disruptive and asked not to return. That experience lead me to classify Christianity as something only adults understood properly, like bills, work, coffee and why my parents occasionally locked their bedroom door. The appeal of adulthood was there though, and I felt particularly grown up when we sang “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb” since I wasn’t allowed to watch scary movies at home due to my youth.

Enter adolescence. I became willing to forego logic for the sake of participating in social activities, travel and adventure with an evangelical youth ministry. For some time I was quite successful in ignoring the blatant hypocrisy all around, but ultimately the cognitive dissonance became a burden too great to bear. The evangelical Christian answer to coping with feminine sexuality is for the men to simultaneously guard against it as if it were wickedness and horde it as if it were a prized possession. Girls and women should be subservient, detached, receptacle like objects. I was entering a time in which I wished to be valued more as an adult human who could accomplish things, but was devalued based on the sexiness of all that I was becoming. Was I glory or was I filth?

The precipitating event leading to my whole hearted embrace of atheism came when one particular youth minister committed suicide. He was in his 50’s and was known to enjoy ministering to the young women. At his funeral, memorial service and afterward people cried when they spoke of what a good man he was and how happy he must be in heaven. How his holy father called him home early and such garbage. He was, in fact a predator who deserved a hell I wished I could craft. I was, in fact a whole human who deserved life, love and the freedom to explore the world without shame regardless of my anatomy.

The simple act of self-reclamation is a joy I have both struggled with and reveled in since. To command my own presence, indulge my own curiosity, demand sense making to my own satisfaction, be treated as a fellow human, and all the complications that follow are endeavors worthy of a life’s work without necessity for reward or punishment beyond.

Ange
United States

I am an atheist because I’ve seen hundreds of people die.

Around the time of my brother’s birth, my father decided that we should all start attending the CoE chapel on the local naval base (he was a retired naval officer) and within the year, my brother and my ten-year-old self were baptised. Some four years later I was confirmed, after being forced unwilling to confirmation classes. This class demanded a weekly essay on some biblical topic; deeply unfair, I felt, when I was the only one in the class who went to a highly academic school, and already had 4-5 hours of homework each night. I bought into the mythology, because adults were always right, or so my obedient self had been taught, but the essay was usually scribbled sitting in the back of the car on the way to class.

I think the chaplain knew.

On leaving school for university I fell in with a very catholic contingent, and here the first cracks really showed. They used condoms instead of the pill ‘because it’s easier for god to make a condom fail if he wants you to be pregnant’.

Hmm.

I found out that engaged couples had to attend a class where celibate, single men told them how to be married, because god says.

Hmm.

And confession magically erased any bad stuff you’d done, but didn’t really explain why you still needed a day of judgement.

And I began to see people die.

The first was an old man gasping his last with acute pulmonary oedema.

The next was a young cyclist.

A nine-year-old boy, of asthma.

A girl with cystic fibrosis.

A fifty year old woman with teenage children.

The list lengthened, and now I can no longer remember all their deaths, though some of them do stick in my memory.

What they had in common was…nothing other than death. Old people, young people. Children and babies. Sick and healthy. Deliberately or accidentally. Fighting all the way, welcoming it or simply giving in to the inevitable. Distressed or peaceful. Merchant bankers and newborn babies, elderly paraplegics and young athletes. Road accidents, cancer, lifelong disability, infections, heart disease, respiratory failure…I learned all the ways a human being can die.

Now at this point a religious person would be nodding sagely and deciding that I had got angry, and turned away from god. That I raged against him and his cruelties.

Wrong.

Have you ever seen someone die? One moment they’re there, a person, the sum of all the experiences they’ve ever had, a fantastic bundle of memories, desires and hope. And then it’s gone.

The match sputters out, the clockwork toy winds down, the tree falls to earth, and it’s over.

And it’s only in the last sixty years that we’ve really made a difference. Before that, we died like flies.

Were the people back then less deserving? Were they more evil? Were they less religious? I don’t think so. In fact, I know they weren’t. So why were they not deserving of all the things we have today? Why did two of my father’s siblings, twins, die before they were five years old of preventable childhood diseases and end up buried in Egypt in the 1930s? Why is every advance that humanity has made been paid for in blood, again and again and again?

No apologetics can explain the way the world simply is. No amount of hand-waving can hide the fact that the majority of humanity still suffers, much of it beyond our coddled imagining. I cannot compartmentalise this, for to do so would be to deny that suffering was real, to wave it away, salving my conscience with the lie that it was all for some hidden purpose. I am not willing to lie to myself and even less am I willing to lie to those around me.

I don’t have parables of how I do good in the world, or trite recitations of lifesaving heroics. I’ve saved lives, but that, to put it bluntly, is my job. There is no god to be pleaded with, bargained with; it is us, homo sapiens, who save each other’s lives, who offer comfort to the dying, who create and invent and build a better future for ourselves.

Send that mythological monster away. Your child died because there was nothing further human beings could do to save him, your sibling lived because human beings successfully pulled her back from the brink. And that effort belongs to all of us.

And, as far as I’m concerned, it’s enough.

Fiona Wallace
UK/Tasmania

I am an atheist because I no longer blindly accept what people tell me. I used to be a conservative, practically fundamentalist, Christian. I was raised that way and never thought to question it. Then I started blogging. I made a Christian blog and arrogantly thought that I could convert the world. I ended up meeting a whole host of people who believed differently than I did, but the really crazy thing was that they weren’t demonic or evil the way my pastor always depicted them! Once I realized that they really were just people like me, I began to question everything I’d ever been taught. It took me two long and painful years to finally accept what I’d come to know – there is no God.

Mandi Ottaway
United States