This is a letter I wrote my aunt in 2007 after she asked why I wanted to take her faith away from her.

Why I am godless.

I don’t understand how perfectly rational, intelligent, kind, and responsible people can believe in a God. It baffles me totally. And I think about it a lot, not like I feel like I am missing anything myself but in wonder at how this belief can be corrected. You know, I wouldn’t trade our family for any other family, I enjoy and love them all and the fact that most have faith saddens me somewhat.

I do not see any god anywhere I look. From the maelstrom of quantum mechanics in particle physics, to the busy chemistry of each living cell, to the beautiful physics of aerodynamics, to the majestic geology of our earth, to the titanic forces in our solar system, to the stupendous forces driving our galaxy and universe… it is all so awesome and beautiful that to attribute any of it to God’s creation is, to me, insufficient. That there are questions and problems with what we understand only makes discovery all that more meaningful. It is all so hugely complex in total, but it all builds upon many simpler things. Evolution is perfect simplicity which builds very slowly into the complex beauty of life we have today. I feel that beauty in my heart much better than I can express in words. Even without the controversies of life and evolution, the complexities of the universe are so much beyond a god, needs no explanation with a god. God is so unnecessary.

I have a saying that has gelled in my mind over the last year or so… Atheism: Natural Morals, Real Meaning, Credible Truth.

Our morals come naturally, someone writing them down and calling them the word of God seems like plagiarism to me. And I think they added in the rules to help control the masses better, or at least to control the women better. It looks to me that our natural morals come from our need to survive, we can’t survive if we are killing each other, we are wired for survival and propagation of the population. Stoning women for adultery seems wrong and it is, it isn’t a natural moral, but the writers of the “messiah’s” words seem to have another motive, valid at the time maybe, probably to help control the population to their benefit. The need to survive and procreate is very simple but a lot of things derive naturally from it. Helping others, kindness to your children, education, it just builds and builds on it. To me it boils down to “relieve and prevent suffering, give pleasure.” If I am doing that in any way, I am being true to my morals.

Real meaning in life also comes from the need to survive and procreate, to do so means we must discover how our world works, adapt, learn, overcome problems, coexist with the individuals of our species, coexist with our world. This is real meaning to me. To worship a deity hoping for a good result when I die doesn’t provide any meaning. The discovery of our world may be the most important and leads us into our future. If we stop, we will stagnate and suffer. I think our species made a mistake creating religions, it is a dead end that we have to back out of to progress on, but maybe it was a lesson we had to learn.

Credible truth, the biggest being that this is it. This is heaven, hell, whatever you make of it. This is your one life. You are only borrowing the atoms you consist of for your sort life time and then they are recycled into the universe to be used again. I am ok with that. It doesn’t scare me. I wish it weren’t so but that is the way of the universe. We are such a small mote in just our galaxy which is a small object in an immense universe. But the meaning of life is to be all that you can be to your family and friends, community, and world. That is a real truth that I can believe in.

Why is this important to me? I see thousands dying monthly, sometimes daily in fighting to the death over what are to me fairy tales. Fighting over essentially worthless land, fighting for what boils down to power. Much of it in the name of their religion. It makes me angry. The war in Iraq has many religious overtones that disturb me. The trillions of dollars this is going to cost us is going to hurt.

I didn’t mean to write this on a Sunday, it just turned out that way, I’ve been busy and I had to compose it some in my mind first. I had a great day yesterday with flying passengers for the 99’s scholarship fundraiser. Allena came over and helped out the ladies. It was one of those things I do that gives real meaning to my life, showing 10 people their world from above.

Tom Hail
United States

Six years ago, when I was about nine, my primary school class studied ancient Greece. We did the usual stuff- the scientific contributions, the art, the mythology. One afternoon we had a lesson on the gods, which I very much enjoyed. I was thinking about how cool and badass Zeus was with his lighting bolts and toga, and in came the local reverend to tell us a story from the Bible. (In retrospect, this should never have happened and I should have used my seat on the pupil council to prevent this and the Christian songs in assembly from ever happening ever again, but I didn’t really notice at the time.) I paid little attention to the reverend, thinking about Zeus and Hermes and Aphrodite and Hades and Poseidon and how much better they were than this capital-G ‘God’ that the reverend was talking about. But I still knew that they were the wrong gods and the one in the bible was the right one, the real one. After all, if he was just another story like Apollo and Ares, why would we sing his praises every Monday and pray to him every day before lunch? It was then that it hit me. The god that the Reverend was talking about was just another story. He was no different from Zeus and Poseidon: just as false, just as much a story. That is when I became an atheist.

Kyle
Scotland.

To put it simply, the idea of a god or gods is preposterous; if there were any higher being which had sway over this world, we would see some measurable signs of it, which are markedly absent. Furthermore, had any such thing happened throughout history, there would be some form of consensus throughout historical record of this being or beings, but what we have from history instead is a large number of contradicting accounts. As a final note, the motivations of religious figures are transparent: They have everything to gain from perpetuating these stories, and we have seen their capability to control people through these religious teachings.

Chris Kwolek
United States

Hereby my reply, as requested, for why I am an atheist. My name is Maarten-Jan and I’m from the Netherlands.

Since I was a child, I was always interested in learning new things. I loved reading. Fiction was a big part in it, but I also had several science for kids books, about astronomy, insects, history and more. My upbringing was more or less catholic light, I went through all the steps of becoming a catholic, but me and my parents rarely attended church. I believed in god back then.

My first ‘rebellion’ against the church was when I was 11. I had to go through the process of confirmation: I hated every step of the way. From what I remember, this was not because of a crisis of faith or something, but mostly because the whole process was freaking boring. I never liked going to church, and in this confirmation period, I had to attend church-like meetings every week.

I remember fighting with my parents about it, and I believe in one of those fights I proclaimed disbelief in god. My parents only pressed the matter of my confirmation because of their view that if you start something, you have to finish it. They did not put my little sister later on through this terribly boring process. I can’t remember if my claimed disbelief was real, or just to upset my parents. I do remember it was not the big issue.

When I went to high school, religion faded into the background. I attended church once a year, with christmas, and that was mostly it. I never really thought about it, I just hated going to church because it was boring. Because I went to the Gymnasium, I got in contact with the old Greek and Latin language and mythology. I loved these old stories of gods and heroes.

In the second part of high school, literature became a huge part of the curriculum, with regards to the Dutch, English and German classes. I remember that my Dutch teacher discussed the relation of literature to the views of the people of the time, and the use of old themes in mythology is prevalent in literature. He labeled the Christian faith, with the side note that not everyone agreed with him on this, as a mythology as well. I immediately recognized this to be true. From this point onward, I consciously rejected christianity as a whole and the belief in a god.

Because I went to a secular school and my very mildly religious parents, I believed for a long time that the whole world believed more or less like I did. When I finished high school, I went on to the university. I educated myself on evolution (I dropped biology in the second year of high school, evolution was in it, but not a big part of it), and I got to read the God Delusion of Dawkins.

Through youtube, I got into contact with Thunderf00t (and the WDPLAC) and AronRa videos and eventually the atheist experience. I realized there were a whole lot of people that disagreed with me (and held really idiotic beliefs). Furthermore, I got the words to define my belief as a secular humanist, atheist, antitheist, rationalist and free thinker.

Ironically, I only learned of the dogmas of catholicism when I was already an atheist. I was surprised and frankly horrified that so many people actually believed that stuff, and that no-one ever told me about this when I was in the church (although that may not be too surprising, considering their goal of keeping people in the church). The only thing I got back then was the happy story about Jesus, forgiveness, et cetera.

From that point forward, I became an active atheist, I argued a lot with my parents and online, I read several books on the subject, watch hundreds of youtube videos, and got to read Pharyngula. I am continuing to argue, test my beliefs, and learn new things until this day. My search for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth will hopefully continue throughout my life.

Best regards,

Maarten-Jan
Netherlands

When I was a child indoctrinated into the catholic church I said my prayers. I prayed for the starving to be fed. And I prayed for the end of all wars. Realizing that as hard as I prayed, thousands of people were still starving to death and war continued, they weren’t being answered. That or it was a resounding it’s part of gods plan.

This was the beginning of my ascent into the enlightenment. Then there was the hypocrisy of idol worship. I couldn’t understand the priests telling me not to worship idols while they prayed to the various saints. And then the all completely unbelievable; we are the right religion, every other religion is wrong.

Following my catholicism I tried other religions because I was still sold on the god thing. But I soon realized that none of these religions could produce a valid miracle or an answered prayer that wasn’t just as easily answered by praying to a milk carton And of course, god himself could not be produced.

I found myself thanking science for seeing reality as it really is. I have to say the final straw for me was watching Carl Sagans “Cosmos.” Telling the story of the emperor crab opened up a door to a whole new world for me. And from then on it was Atheism for me. No more guilt, no more sin, no more fear of hell.

Sam Salerno
United States

My story is fairly simple. C.S. Lewis did it.

As a kid I had an extremely active imagination, I loved to believe all of the stories my Mum told me about fairies and magic woods etc. I had a voracious appetite for books, and the one that seemed the most real, the most plausible was the story of Aslan, singing the world or Narnia and surrounding country into existence. A giant, mysterious and wise talking lion, now there was a God you could believe in! Of course, my mother, being the brilliant woman she is took the time to explain that you cannot believe everything you read, and that you must think carefully about whether something is true or not. She is and never has been religious, but my father is (in that weird creepy way of mumbling and muttering at odd times around the house), so my mother was careful to leave it up to us kids to decide for ourselves. Trouble began when during Sunday School and storytime at the front of the congregation with the Minister, I began comparing Jesus and Aslan, as their similarities seemed obvious to me (I’ve only just learned recently that this was by design!). Of course it was then carefully explained to me by the adult believers around me, that the story of Aslan was just make-believe, but the story of Jesus was very very true. I immediately recognized this as ridiculous. I understood that I had no idea whether a giant talking lion had the ability to come back from the dead, or sing a world into existence, but I had plenty of evidence that human beings certainly couldn’t do any of the things they were claiming Jesus did. The combined stories of the Narnia Chronicles made for a far more convincing gospel, and C.S. Lewis seemed a much more reliable source, his writing was simpler and far more direct, not cloaked in metaphor that constantly needed to be explained, and everyone knew he had really existed as he had been alive far more recently than the Bible’s authors, and it seemed strange to me that someone would not have confronted him about lying if it was all just made up (I didn’t quite have a grasp on the whole ‘fiction/non-fiction thing’ yet). But the adults around me insisted that the more plausible story was false, and that their story was the truth. In my little brain it seemed obvious that they were mistaken, and if they were wrong about that, I reasoned, they could be wrong about everything.

We all continued to go to church, even long after my Dad left, as my siblings, my Mum and I enjoyed the sense of community, and the damn good burgers they made for the lunch afterwards. My Mum was even the church secretary for many years, making the bulletins every week, and I was the janitor during my teen years after my brother quit. But passed the age of five I knew that there was a very big dividing line between the way my thinking worked and the way the rest of congregations did, and I often found myself feeling sorry for them. As a kid it was weird knowing that in this regard you are probably smarter than many of the adults around you, but I think it was a big confidence booster, and has kept me questioning authority figures all my life, which has been invaluable in terms of my life as a “science enthusiast” and a sensible human being in general.

I will admit though, there is still a little part of my heart that insists that Aslan is real, and I just haven’t found the right wardrobe or picture frame yet. And if it is ever revealed to me that there is a God, I have every confidence he will have a lovely big mane for me to cuddle in.

Kate
Canada

I am a religious agnostic because of science, an atheist because of probability, and an anti-theist because of religion.

Matthew Cook
United States

This essay was originally going to be just the one sentence: “I am an atheist because I am educated.” It’s laconic and full of all sorts of wonderful implications: theists are ignorant, the truth is that there are no gods, if only people could be shown that truth they would all realise it and the abuses of religion would disappear forever. There’s probably a touch of smugness in there too.

As well as being an atheist, I’m a huge procrastinator and between thinking up that as an answer and actually submitting it, I thought about this further and realised that there’s far more to it than the fact that I have been lucky enough to receive an education. To see why education was not a sufficient requirement for atheism I had to look no further than my own family.

I was raised as a Catholic. The church had its clutches on me until seven (although luckily only in a metaphorical sense) and for many years afterwards. Although some members of the extended family back in the old country didn’t appear particularly church-going, I had always assumed that the family had been Catholic for generations, for all I knew going back for two thousand years. It was only a few years ago, decades after the pantomime when I first explicitly told my parents I was an atheist – “I’m not a Catholic.”, “Yes you are.”, “No, I’m not.”, “Yes you are. That’s what it says on your birth certificate.”, “My birth certificate also says I’m not even a foot tall and only weigh a few pounds. I’ve grown up since then.” – they reconciled themselves to my lack of faith and the whole matter was regarded as academic, I had a chat with my grandmother and found out that it’s really only my mother who is religious and the reason why she was such a devoted Catholic daughter to not particularly religious parents.

My mother was an intelligent girl. Even if her parents weren’t religious themselves, they recognised that she had a lot of potential and wanted the best education they could get for her. Unfortunately the best education available was at the local Catholic school. From what I gather the stereotypes of Catholic schools of the era held true there; the teachers were all nuns in habits with a deep devotion to the teachings of Rome, a strong ruler in their hand and a knowledge of how to use it to instill the fear of God into their pupils. What would otherwise have been the best education my mother could have had at the time was poisoned by these black-clad sadistic authoritarians and to this day her mind remains stunted by it.

Compared to the educational opportunities I had as a boy in the seventies in eighties, the opportunities my mother had as a girl in the fifties and sixties would have been limited. The pursuit of maths and science would not have been encouraged anywhere near as much for her as it was for me. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel a huge sense of sadness at the potential wasted when an intelligent woman tells me with all sincerity that praying to Saint Anthony will help me find lost objects, and an even larger sense of rage when she tells me that she believes in a literal eternity of hellfire, and that fear of such makes it very hard if not impossible for her to question what she was taught as a young girl.

Why am I an atheist? The reason why I believe there are no gods – at least the proximate cause – does have to do with the fact that I did receive an education. Without it I wouldn’t have all the little jigsaw pieces I’ve used to make my model of the world, and it’s this model that’s given me an abiding love of the scientific process. It is most emphatically not a religion. It recognises the fact that its description of the universe is sometimes inaccurate or just plain wrong and endeavours to incrementally correct it. It acknowledges that the human brain likes to make patterns even when patterns aren’t really there and tries to circumvent this tendency when it can. It does not say that the Universe is thus because I or a voice inside my head say so and nay-saying will bring forth retribution, but because I did these experiments and made these observations and that you can do them yourself to verify it or come up with your own experiments and observations if you think they’ll do a better job explaining it. It’s because of this that I accept what science says as a fairly good approximation of what the Universe really is like. Despite the charlatans or the misinformed, science has not found any evidence for the existence of gods and until it does I am not going to believe that there are any.

The reason why I find the above reasoning valid – the ultimate cause of my atheism – is harder to pin down. Could I just have easily followed the same path as my mother? Creating a model of the world where Catholicism – or any other theistic religion – had the answer to everything and any inconsistencies could be explained away by evil forces or just ignored for fear of divine punishment? I’d like to think that it’s because I am more independently minded than her, but is that a fair assessment? Maybe it’s because my education had more science lessons and fewer cruel nuns.

The seeds of cognitive dissonance would have been planted when I was about ten or so, before I had any issues with authoritarianism. Religious teaching was no more complicated then “Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, but you need to follow his rules.” Science was a lot of cool facts but little explanation about how we knew these facts. I wanted to know how, if there were these monkeys that slowly turned into men, where did Adam and Eve come into the story. I did not get a satisfying answer. I did not abandon Catholicism then and there – like many I could make an accommodation between religion and science – but it was the first time I could not blindly follow religious and scientific teachings simultaneously and have to choose one over the other.

I was a fan of Jesus, but found his weekly fan club meetings were boring and pointless. Science I mostly got from books telling me – mirabile dictu – that there were beautiful spiral galaxies out there, and planets with spots on them bigger than the entire Earth or that had rings! There’s stuff that blows up if you get it wet, and a gas that will poison you with one breath, but if you mix the two together you get salt! The stuff in my pencil was made of the same stuff as a diamond, just arranged in a different way! We used to be little monkeys before we changed into people! Me and my dog had the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather! One hundred million years ago there were these big lizards walking, swimming and flying around the place!

When I look deeply into the question, perhaps the real reason I am an atheist is because to a ten – or almost forty, for that matter – year-old boy, dinosaurs are cool. Perhaps it’s not too late to tell my mother that.

Phil Hoenig
Australia

I was brought up in a Church of England family. No, that doesn’t quite do it justice. I was swathed in the church, surrounded by dyed in the wool Anglicans, from the moment I was born. I went to a service at least once a week, every week (even when on holiday). On top of that, I went to sunday school, church youth group and pot luck suppers. I have sung in plays, musicals, carol concerts and outdoor events. I’ve even appeared on Songs of Praise!

It was against this backdrop that I slowly began to perceive other possibilities.

I don’t think I’d ever truly believed. I wanted to believe. I even had, what felt at the time, spiritual experiences. But I think I knew even then that these were nothing more than sensory manipulation – beautiful music, twinkling candles, incense, harmonious voices and shared emotional experiences.

I was educated at a grammar school and was introduced to mind openers such as world history, physics, chemistry and critical thinking. In my late teens, I subscribed to New Scientist and developed an interest in physics. Later, I read A Brief History of Time and, although I struggled with the maths (I’m more of a humanities person), the concept of deep time and the vastness of space fascinated me.

Around this time, I began to see the injustices in the world outside the church yard wall. My social and political awareness was developing at a time of Band Aid, Nelson Mandela, Apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, AIDS and a growing awareness of LGBT issues. I also began to perceive discrimination against my own gender whilst listening to the debates over the ordination of women priests.

In my early twenties, I started to pick up bits and pieces about evolution. Having only a rudimentary grasp of biology, I again looked to popular science books and eventually discovered Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale.

These different threads were weaving a pattern in which there was less and less room for a god.

I stopped going to church with my family when I was 18 but it was perhaps another decade or so before I would call myself an atheist. In the intervening years, I read about different religions, humanism, secularism, rationalism, scepticism and feminism. I am “out” to my friends and some work colleagues but not to my parents, although I’m sure they suspect. The reasons, as always with such situations, are complicated.

At present my reaction to religion is similar to that of ex-smokers towards cigarettes. They can be far more vehemently opposed to smoking than a non-smoker would ever be. In the same way, I have a visceral reaction to religions and religious behaviour, especially when I get a knee jerk response from that inner child who grew up in a church.

I am now trying to remove those angry knots and burrs from my tapestry so that it only reflects the beauty and wonder of my one precious lifetime on our amazing planet.

Clare
United Kingdom

I am an atheist because the God I loved and served faithfully just got too damn small. Too formulaic. Too predictable.

I was born again in high school and was a committed believer all the way through high school and college. I loved Jesus and was sure God was the answer to everything. I believed in grace and mercy and love. My God was huge. And perfect. And more loving, compassionate and mysteriously wonderful than anything I could describe.

Then I went into full time ministry. I could tell so many stories now about the corporate waste, the hypocritical leadership, the stupid acronyms and formulas that were used to shrink God down to a sellable product. My God shrank right before my eyes. It took disillusionment with ministry to make me stop and rethink my beliefs. The nagging feeling that there was something tremendously wrong with evangelical christianity that I had successfully repressed for years became too strong. The mental gymnastics I had been performing to explain away God’s sexism, anger, vengefulness and petty demands became too much for me. For the very first time, I looked at my beliefs from a skeptical viewpoint.

I wanted my God to withstand the test. I held on to bits and pieces of my faith for awhile. But, intellectual integrity demanded that I accept what is true over what I wanted to be true. I no longer believe in any of it. And, to my surprise, as my God got tiny and unbelievable and I was forced out of my insular world, an indescribably huge and beautiful world opened up around me. The truth has set me free.

A Texan
United States