I am an Atheist because I was raised without religion and figured out pretty quick that it was silly all on my own. My parents are both Atheists, but when I was young, they certainly didn’t try and convert me to their beliefs. I believed in God as a child, in a private personal way in that I believed that I had come from “Heaven” and that I had slid down an invisible slide into my mummy’s belly. I discarded God before I even discarded Santa and with much the same calm sense of understanding, like an imaginary friend I had outgrown. My parents were always open to questions and my Father in particular was my favourite bouncing board for all the questions I had about religions, he answered my questions as clearly and accurately he could; needless to say none of it ever made any sense to me. I am 19 and I still have fascinating conversations with my Father, I have questions, he gives me the best answers he can, if I don’t know and he doesn’t know, and it wasn’t a half rhetorical philosophical/sociological question then I do what research I can; it’s that simple. I went to church for a while as an “adult”, so that I could join a choir, and I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about, a lot of frivolous mumbo jumbo really. I am a practicing Atheist; I do celebrate the big Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, except in a secular-almost-pagan way, celebrating the opportunity to be with family more than anything else. I am a third generation, non-theist and a second generation Atheist, no Grandma who tried to guilt me back into the faith, no parents threatening to disown me, I probably had a less stressful childhood than most, no fear of coming out to my parents (BTW I don’t actually intend to tell them as I am as of yet undecided but if I end up being serious enough with a woman to bring her home to meet the parents, I’m pretty sure they would roll with it) no confusion when learning evolution (in high school they had us divide into groups and each group would teach the rest of the class a section from the text book in the evolution unit—the video PZ posted on fish diversification in the Congo made a really good example—I totally rocked it) and most of all no fear of asking questions. Being an Atheist isn’t a bad thing especially when growing up, Atheist children are raised to think critically, to ask questions, to weigh social actions against social reactions as opposed to divine ones; In other words, I believe in thinking, I believe in learning, and I believe in not being a dick. Why do people have a problem with Atheists again?

E. Knight
Canada

I could answer this question simply, by saying: because I no longer believe in God. But the reason this belief slowly ebbed and changed a young, conservative, fundamentalist Catholic into a fire-breathing liberal atheist was primarily the fact that the claims of religion are wrong.

If you pray every day for God to change your life, to get rid of your bad habits, your sins, your problems and nothing happens; if you see how restrictive and unnatural the rules your religion has; if you start to see how absurd it is for people wearing special gowns and hats to get some special say; if you come to understand that you are being told what to think, what to do by people with absolutely no grasp on reality; in essence if you find out that the God-voice you listened to was yourself and that religion is the biggest game of let’s pretend in the world..

Well then you stop believing.

And I’ve been better for it every step of the way.

Thomas Prentis

There are a multitude of reasons that I’m an atheist. With the exception of a brief time as an “angstheist” when I was a teenager, none of those reasons include denial or anger. Rather than focus on the negative, I’d rather focus on positive and start from the beginning.

I am an atheist because I am fortunate enough to be a member of an order of apes that evolved intelligence. This evolution may have wired us to see patterns and believe the absurd, but the intelligence we’re gifted with also allows us to overcome this shortcoming. I am an atheist because there were men and women before me who refused to believe that the mysteries of the natural world were to forever remain unknown. Collectively, they developed the most reliable means available of uncovering these secrets. I have no doubts that I would be dead (a severe impediment for being anything beyond compost) if not for this scientific revolution; let alone capable of writing this letter.

I am an atheist because I’m not afraid of questions to which I don’t have answers. Instead I am, like many before me, driven to embrace the search for truth, regardless of what strange, frightening or fantastic truth that search my unearth. I do not require fairy tales to reassure me and push an illusion of purpose.

I have been fortunate to have parents that cared more about my well-being than about indoctrinating me into their faith. They taught me to be a decent human being without the fear of divine retribution. I was taught to appreciate the truth and to discard any falsehoods I may have acquired. Perhaps most importantly, that is why I am able to say that I am an atheist.

AJ Champlin

I’m afraid my history of unbelief is uneventful and boring compared to others. There was no blinding moment of insight; no dramatic discarding of the chains of superstition; no wild and passionate confrontations with theistic family or friends. I was born and raised in picturesque British Columbia, Canada, which bears the proud statistic of being the most godless state or province in North America. My father comes from a fairly devout Roman Catholic family; my mother from a United Church of Canada family. Neither were believers in any real sense. Our family never attended church besides occasional accompanying my Roman Catholic grandparents when we visited them in Ontario (by the way, my Catholic grandparents were saints, who never forced their beliefs on us as children, and were always supportive of our life decisions). Curiously, my family retained the habit of saying grace before dinner; a mere rote of “Bless us, O Lord, for these thy gifts, for which we are about to receive, amen”. There was never any faith behind it; it was like saying “Bless you” after a sneeze.

(As an interesting aside, one of my distant relatives (great-great-grandmother, I believe) was one of the people reportedly “healed” by the recently canonized Saint Andre of Quebec. If true, this marks the first and last time that God bestowed any gifts on me or my family.)

As a child, I loved learning about science and nature, particularly Astronomy. I read, re-read, and re-re-ad infinitum-read books on Astronomy. I was utterly enamoured by the cosmos; the silent grandiosity of galaxies, the terrifying power of supernovae, and the majestic constellations that grace our night sky. One book I had compared and contrasted the Big Bang theory of the universe’s origin with the biblical Genesis. Though I was still young, and I did not fully grasp the scientific method yet, I remember thinking “How do they know the Bible is true? How can they back up the Genesis story with facts?”. Thus, I recognized early that the Bible, and religious ideology in general, was an empty promise; a mere story told to the gullible and the fearful.

Unfortunately, my skill (or lack thereof) with mathematics made a career in astronomy exceedingly unlikely. As a youngster, I also displayed aptitude for music, thanks to early piano lessons and the like. In high school, I was a part of virtually every musical group that my school offered. It was in high school music that I started having confrontations with religious classmates. Many had come from church choirs and the like, and wanted/demanded that we as a group pray before a performance. This irked me, and I would often reply with a snarky “shouldn’t we be praying to Dionsyus, the Greek God of wine, music and partying, instead of God?”. Or when someone tried to sell me the idea that Christianity is a religion of love, I would reply if it’s the same religion of love that murdered millions during the Crusades and Dark Ages. At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I was a new atheist before I had any idea that such a thing existed.

After high school, I was left adrift. My confidence in my music skills was at an all-time low; I didn’t think I could make a career out of music. At my mother’s behest, I enrolled in night school, to add some courses that I had elected to skip earlier. It was here that I fell in love with Biology, and the sciences in general. I aced just about everything thrown at me (although I continued to struggle with Math). To cut a long story short, I went on to attain a diploma in Biotechnology, a BSc in the same, and an MSc in Microbiology. Today I work as a researcher in a local biotech/pharmaceutical company. I still enjoy music and play piano and guitar recreationally. Only recently (last 2 years or so) have I come to identify myself as a new atheist, and have started to read the works of the movement. I don’t do much in the community…as mentioned above, B.C. is a godless haven, and the religious have little influence on our society. But I fully support my brothers and sisters who, by accident of birth, are forced to live in areas where religious influence is strong.

Matt Waldbrook
Canada

I am an atheist probably since I was 10. I guess it was an inevitable gradual process that comes to be by learning about science and plain old common sense.

A few events I remember that shaped my skeptic mind went on like this:

While learning about the origin of the Universe in the 4th grade, a teacher made the ridiculous mistake of putting in the same level the Big Bang, the Steady State, and none other than the “God done it” hypothesis. I was 9 but even then I knew one definitely didn’t belong there. And while there already was definitive evidence for the Big Bang and the Steady State was long gone, the teacher didn’t seem to know this – nor did she know the answer to my sincere but apparently unconfortable question – If God made it, then who made God?. She was religious as most people in Colombia are (we used to be officially catholic until 1991) and she brought her ideas into the classroom despite them not being on the textbook. Unfortunately I was the only one taken aback by this.

Anyway, she didn’t like me very much and was constantly bothering me about my long hair.

Another thing that happened was realising how much in common the local indigenous myths and other folk tales had with this other story everyone- including myself – seemed to take more seriously. Everybody was just obviously making stuff up to explain what they didn’t or couldn’t know. Once I learned about this and about the other myths and legends from everywhere around the world I asked myself “What if we were colonised by the chinese or some other culture?.

It became evident that any people will create and postulate what they need in order to make sense of what they can’t undestand. In that moment I knew that religions must all be man made.

Finally, I learned about Evolution and really understood what it meant for our supposed “special place in the cosmos”. My biology teacher insisted that while it’s true that we’ve evolved, we are somehow appart from the rest of all species. I knew this was rubbish, I’m an ape and so are you – deal with it.

Somehow feeling at the same level than a snake, a gorilla, a fish, or all those bugs that creeped the hell out of me back then, made me realise how incredibly fortunate I was to exist along them, and have the joy of sharing this precious time in this incredible world with the company of my family and friends, and to not waste my time with superstitious nonsense.

This, among many other things, is what lead me to the conclusion that reality is all there is and matters, so learn and appreciate all you can about it. And that’s why I’m an Atheist.

…and also not an astrologer, not a witchcraftist, a vicious antihomeopath, also not a ufologist, well… you get the point.

Thinking Shogun
Colombia

I rumbled Santa and religion before I was 6 and I really thought until I got to high school that everyone knew both were tosh but just Yes, Virginia pretended for kids.

I thank my parents for *never* mentioning *anything* to do with religion. I think they had faith of some sort but they were determined that I should make up my own mind.

I have no idea if *any* of my teachers were religious and I thank them for their profound professionalism. It honestly never occurred to me that people really believed any of that stuff when the things in my school and local library books were so much cooler.

I am atheist because I was allowed to make up my own mind. This was one of the many advantages of growing up during the 70’s in New Zealand.

Doug Mackie
New Zealand

Humanity, despite existing in discrete units (which we call people), is really one grander entity which breathes and behaves in peculiar manners. The casual modern anthropologist can easily witness the human machine’s idiosyncrasies, though often these details go unnoticed for being too ingrained into the quotidian lifestyle. Why most subway-car riders, for instance, deign not to speak nor make eye contact, or why these creatures by the thousands prolong internal discomfort by withholding offensive gaseous emissions can be understood as an adaptive response to living in close, interactive proximity with one another and living to certain established social standards which evolve over time. Without consciously considering why or how these responses came to be as they are, many millions passively act them out on autopilot.

The human autopilot transcends actions and delves into thoughts and beliefs. I have wanted to perform an experiment whereby a handful of assorted passers-by would be propositioned to agree or disagree on the statement that consumption of sugar causes hyperactivity. Without a doubt the response would be a staggering ‘yes’, and my experiment would demonstrate a general understanding of this concept in the populace. The interesting quirk of this exercise is that in truth, this understanding is unfounded, and is instead the result of many generations of hearsay and anecdotal evidence. Why, then, is this non-truth so prevalent?

How does the singular human machine operate? It has up-time and down-time, ill days and well days, nutritional needs, waste removal systems, mood swings, shaving needs, clipping needs, washing needs, and dirty deeds. On the molecular level, its nuance surpasses anything Steve Jobs could have dreamed of, and it always hangs in a tenuous balance between health and death. Naturally, the ways of sustaining the singular human machine must be conservative; that is, whatever worked the day before could and should work again today. One foot in front of the other, and so on, leads man to his mate and home, and puts bread in his mouth, and allows him to breathe through the night to see the next day. He cannot afford to dramatically alter his schedule lest he neglect his body’s urgent requirements for refreshment.

By understanding that the autopilot which guides man through his living-chores also guides his assumptions and understandings, one can see the main reason for why I am an atheist. The gods are the giddiness of children after they eat too many cookies; the gods are understanding that illness is due to humour imbalance; the gods are knowing that the left-handed are evil. Without evidence to sustain it, the god-concept is the co-pilot to the autopilot of the human machine – it was there yesterday, and is therefore true today, all things coming from god, post hoc ergo procter hoc. I do not believe in gods because the concept is a human response to a lack of information about our bodies.

What I suspect sustains the non-truth concept of god or gods is a shared quasi- understanding of similar yet distinct psychosomatic phenomena. Another way, it can be understood as such: two parties who can at least minimally agree on having experienced some similar conscious feeling can more easily misappropriate the cause of that feeling to an external agent than can either of them alone. A thousand parties who can at least minimally agree on having experienced the same phenomena increases the apparent truth even more. Through generations of snowballing, the assumptions which underlie the god-concept have been taken as granted without warrant, and the result is the rainbow of devotions that exist today. They are the product of (and targeted at) mens’ minds, in order to make sense of shared sensations and feelings. Cognitive psychology and an emerging neuroscience will expose nuances of the human condition that gods once were so useful to explain.

Steven Ahern
United States

From Krasnaya Koshka – an American living in Saint Petersburg, Russia — and Professor Myers, you are better than pelmeni! I thank you for being you.

My grandparents on my father’s side were “lapsed” Mormons but they were very adamant I–being the first grandchild–be unlapsed Mormon. Maybe to make up for their unbridled smoking, drinking and gambling. I so loved playing craps and poker with my 21 great aunts and uncles and my grandparents I had no choice but be plopped into Primary. They made it sound great!

My mother is from Germany and was lapsed Lutheran. She told me when I was quite young that it was all stories but maybe I should adopt it to make my father’s family happy. “Gemütlichkeit.” I was mostly concerned with Mom’s feelings. Okay then, off to Primary I go! By myself.

It was strange being four/five years old and in church alone. I got my PTL ring and was really quite proud. I was a lonely “sunBEAM” but there are worse things to be. I saw popcorn poppin’ on the apricot tree. Lead me, guide me, walk beside me, help me find the waaaay, teach me all that I may learn to live with Him one day. Mormons have super catchy children’s tunes, I’ll admit.

I was honestly quite bewildered by the Mormons but I loved the attention. A small child dumped off alone is bound to cause a stir. One day, Bobby Ball smashed my face into the drinking fountain and I bled all over my yellow dress. It was the day after someone ran into the fence of the Temple so I went home with bloody dress, spouting, “That drunk who hit the sacred Temple is going to hell!” My mother yanked me right out of Primary. I never went back. I traded my PTL ring for a Dolly Madison chocolate pie.

I never understood what religion was for. My mom told me when I was 12 and curious, “Go to all the churches nearby and see if anything fits.” So I did. It was all very interesting but still made no sense to me. That’s when I first read the entirety of the KJV. I read it the same time I read “Roots” by Alex Hailey. I must say, the two side by side made me sick. I was horrified.

So religion never made any sense to me. It made me a post-kindergarten bigot and made me ill, but it never made sense.

The Church of Latter Day Saints being right across the street from my high school and the fact that they had basketball tournaments for young women and the fact that I was a jock in high school brought me right back to the place where I’d ditched Primary, ten years earlier. All my friends were Mormon. I was in the church more in high school than I had been ever before.

I was asked to be a “Special Counselor” (“special” meaning I was half-born Mormon but horribly lapsed) at Camp LoMia the summer of my sophomore year, and I agreed. Camp LoMia was the all girl Mormon summer camp and my humongous crush would be there (who was a notorious lesbian) so I’d be idiotic to refuse. (I was also quite a notorious lesbian at my high school at that point.) Before I could go, however, there was the necessity of a private counsel with Deacon Bigler. Okay.

I was very familiar with Deacon Bigler because he had lived across the street from us since I was two years old. He was the rat bastard who beat my little brother with a baseball bat (plastic, but still) for accidentally knocking over a cat litter box. I had babysat his five children many, many times. The last time I had not gotten paid because I’d brought a Coke can into his house. I’d forgotten about his “root beer only” thing. I disliked the guy. Well, no, not really “dislike”, I just thought he was a hot house flower (my mom’s term for anyone who can’t make it outside of their own controlled environment).

I met with Deacon Bigler in a tiny office at the church after school. He asked me, “Why do you want to be a Special Counselor?” I was not daft enough to answer, “Because Marla Denim will be there”, of course, so I said, “To commune with nature.”

“I presume you mean ‘to commune with God’.”

“Oh yeah, sure.”

“I’ve heard things about you. Maybe you’re not on the righteous path. Maybe I shouldn’t let you go.”

Criminy, hot house flower, do you know what high school lust is? Marla will be there! I just remained quiet.

He then proceeded to tell me the story of his deep love for his deacon, as a teenager, and how they slept together many times, in really vivid detail. (This was not a first for me–after coming out, I was inundated with adults spilling their homosexual exploits out to me. Deacon Bigler’s “news” to me was really old news.)

“But I chose God’s path. I think you will, too.” So I was allowed to go.

If I’d ever fancied a god of any sort, it was knocked out of me by the rampant hypocrisy all around me.

Since then, religion makes me laugh, except when it pisses me off. That the Mormons forked so much money over to “defend marriage” when I know of two gay Deacons in the church really fucking infuriates me. Maybe Deacon Bigler wasn’t gay? I ran into him in the airport of my hometown not one year ago. This is what transpired:

“I see you haven’t changed.” His words to me.

“I am who I am.”

“I regret everything.”

“Okay.”

“No, I regret it.”

“Okay. I have to pee before I get on my plane.”

“I made a mistake.”

“I understand. We all do at many points in our lives.”

“My… friend Deacon __________ died.”

“Ah, I see. I’m so very sorry to hear that. I know how much he meant to you.”

“And… I think you know, I think you understand….”

“But you’re still Mormon and still tithing?”

“Of course.”

“I have to catch my plane.”

I’m not sure why NOW, when he’s over 60 and I’m over 40, I should just allow him to be regretful—to me.

Mormons made my being an atheist essential and then ‘sealed’ it many times over. I really feel sorry for the people ambered in religion who cannot break out. You have one life and you live it in regret?

I am proud to be an atheist. To be moral. To be honest. And to have few regrets (my regrets are tiny in comparison). There is nothing better in this world than living true to yourself.

Krasnaya Koshka
Russia

At age 14, I was sitting in the St. Pius the 10th Catholic Church, and it occurred to me that the apostolic succession and pretty much all of Catholicism could really be founded on a game of telephone.

We all know of the game of telephone: an original message is passed on from person to person, mutating in amusing ways both accidentally and deliberately. Stories of Jesus could have started false (You should have seen the miracle he worked in the previous town!) or could mutate and optimize to most effectively dazzle audiences, even during JC’s lifetime. Not to mention the decades after until they were written down.

And now, 40+ years later, I realize (thanks to Pharyngula) that “provenance” is the word I have needed to describe my path through skepticism and atheism (or agnosticism.)

From 14 to 24, I didn’t encounter any skeptical or atheist literature. I argued vigorously with quite a number of creationists online, and thought that as an evolutionary biology student that I was pretty hot stuff. Until eventually some creationist (with more than the standard two neurons to rub together) claimed I was making up evolutionary just-so stories based on my authority and nothing else. And galling as it was, I had to admit it to myself. I had a provenance problem. But the bright side was that I looked at Creationists, and saw that their provenance problem was much worse and incurable. I could drop a few of my made-up arguments, limit myself to published science and identifying creationist fallacies, and I was fine.

One of the more noisome religious arguments I encountered was the accusation that science was due to pride, while religious believers were humble. I developed my own response based on provenance. Scientists, I would say, are the humble ones. Because not only must they restrict their claims to those based on evidence, but it must also be evidence that anyone else can confirm. The religious are the prideful ones: claiming that their prophets are the only ones with access to the truth. It’s a very common trick to accuse your opponent of your own sins, and thus one of the first we should expect from the religious.

Provenance also calls most philosophy into question. 99%+ of it is crap, for the simple reason that the provenance of its assumptions is unsupportable. A priori knowledge indeed! You don’t have to look far for “gut feelings” a la Steven Colbert. My favorite recent example of appeal to gut feelings is the first clause of the first sentence of the preface to Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”: “Individuals have rights….” That’s straight from his gut, an assumption of Natural Rights. He might as well be saying that individuals have souls for all the evidence he lacks. Some more modern philosophy, such as that of Daniel Dennett, does better by starting with reasoning based on the sciences, especially the biological sciences.

I used to think I was scientific and rational. Now that I know a little more about where my knowledge comes from, I know that I cannot depend on it without confirmation. When we start learning, we accept uncritically. After a while, we do start to test our knowledge for inconsistency and coherence with our own observations. But there is such a huge welter of knowledge that we cannot take the time to test it all, nor to re-derive it for ourselves. Imagine having to re-derive all the mathematics you learn in school. Mathematics that took the efforts of hundreds of mathematicians over thousands of years to create. So the vast majority of our knowledge is accepted on faith. What sense of “rational” is that? Rational turns out to be a Humpty-Dumpty word: it means whatever we want it to when we want to bash somebody else for not being rational. Is scientific any better? Maybe. Scientific provenance has to do with intersubjective confirmation of observations and how they match models or theories. At various times I have confused this with tribal loyalty to scientific knowledge. But very little of my life is actually concerned with doing science: usually I tend to use science as a censor for claims that I judge “unscientific”, such as homeopathy. Why do I trust science to be correct for such use? Not because I have confirmed all of the science I have learned, but because when ever I have tested scientific knowledge, it has stood the test of intersubjectivity. I have recapitulated the origins of the knowledge, the provenance, on occasion. So if I want to characterize myself as scientific or rational, it is at best relative to someone who is less so in a particular field.

Questioning the provenance of knowledge is perilous. After you discard the baby falsehoods such as gods and the rest of the supernatural and fictional crud, you quickly discover that pretty much everything else is also built on a foundation of sand. There is no ultimate truth or reality that we can’t question. We are left without even a foundation of sand: we are floating. What is left is reliable knowledge: knowledge that we can confirm intersubjectively, such as science. We can assemble that knowledge into a consilient raft without a foundation. That’s plenty to construct glorious social concepts of reality. We don’t need illusory anchors such as gods or religious beliefs: fictional whimseys can be enjoyable, but we don’t need to take them seriously to deal with the real world.

Mike Huben
United States

I’m an atheist because I don’t need what religions are selling. It’s all about death, really. No one wants to die. Scientists are working on extending lifespans and religious people are working on eternal life, reincarnation, etc. Isn’t one life enough? Sure, it sounds great to live forever, but it would get boring I’m sure. Everyone loves the idea of heaven because no one really thinks about it. I see this life as heaven. Heaven shouldn’t last forever. I equate it with a trip to Disney World. Would you really like to stay at Disney World for a year? A month? All expenses paid? It sounds great! But even little kids would be crying to go home before too long. It would lose its charm.

Now that I’ve had kids I look forward to that day (hopefully far away) when I can rest and look back on my tiny contribution to this special world. A world that happened to settle into a spot that was conducive to it creating life. How fantastic! And it will be enough just to say I was here. That I got to be born. That I got to live when billions of others didn’t even make it out of the womb. And that my genes (through evolution) will eventually be in every human on earth, just like our genes contain bits of ancient Egyptians and other Africans. No one thinks about heaven, but at the same time it’s all they want. But only if their lives don’t feel like heaven. I have what I need in this life. And it’s enough. And now I get to experience things all over again through my children. What better gift? But I’ll have had enough when I’m old. If I spent my entire life wondering where I was going when I died, I’d forget to live.

Thomas Lawson
Canada