Carl Sagan and DMT.
Alex Fairchild
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Carl Sagan and DMT.
Alex Fairchild
I’m an atheist for all the standard reasons of logic and evidence that others have already articulated, but I’m also an atheist because of a feeling that religious belief can blunt one’s sense of wonder. As a child, the things that struck me as most beautiful and awe inspiring appeared to be off religion’s radar screen. Where were the giant sequoias in the bible? The Grand Canyon and the other National Parks? Bears? I would have been a sucker for religion had my parents been Mormons or animists. My grandmother showed me a 3-D postcard of Christ wearing a bloody crown of thorns. My mom didn’t like this, so grandma revealed the postcard as if it was pornography, something hidden and very special. I didn’t get it. Jesus would blink his eyes open and shut as you tilted the postcard. This freaked me out a little; normal kids prefer live people to dying ones. Even as a five year old, I can remember being revolted at the cruelty of a doctrine that had no place in heaven for cats and even considered the question ridiculous. Richard Dawkins called religion a crime against childhood. That resonates with me, although I grew up without much distortion from religious education.
I married a lapsed but still religious Catholic. (We all have criteria, and I drew the line at Republicans or smokers.) Charles Darwin is a bit of a role model for me in terms of reconciling my total lack of faith with my dear wife’s residual attachment to her religion. He lost his faith, but loved his wife enough to support and accept that she retained hers. Anyway, like Darwin, one of the crosses I bear is occasional attendance at church. Last Easter, the priest was talking about the miracle of the resurrection. My usual Church-service meditation on the history and sociology of the Hellenistic world wasn’t doing it for me. I actually listened to the priest, and I was getting pissed off. Torture is not some abstraction. It is a grotesque crime with nothing redeeming about it, and real people suffer their entire lives from having been tortured. The Father tortured the Son to death and then resurrected Him to free us from sin? That’s obscene. What kind of manipulative organization would glorify it? And why would anyone pick an event like this as the foundation to build some elaborate theological structure and claim that it reflects something fundamental about the universe?
Just when I thought I could stand no more, a warbler appeared outside the window, gleaning insects off of the forsythia bush. Call it a miracle: A bird weighing less than the change in my pocket flew from Colombia en route to Canada. It makes this journey twice each year, and it can do this for a decade. Here was something of tremendous beauty, real and tangible and available to anyone with curiosity. The priest would probably offer some Hallmark sentiment about God’s love for all of His creations, at least until they fly into windows, or toss off a phrase about the beauty of God’s creation that has the effect of stifling inquiry more than encouraging it. To be fair, the Catholic Church accepts evolution and there are Jesuits who have a pretty solid understanding of biology. But even they would insist on Easter Sunday that the defining event in all time was the brutalization of a man during the expansion phase of the Roman Empire.
I don’t get it. I’ve never heard a believable rationale for separating religion and science, and the whole progression of science pretty much proves we’re not the center of the universe. This warbler seemed like a small but welcome messenger from the vast and impersonal universe outside the church. The mysteries of the resurrection and the volumes of theological speculation built upon it seem like weak tea, pale and downright unimaginative compared to the remarkable fact that this warbler and I share the same basic architecture and chemistry, that the warbler has even more in common with the tyrannosaurus down at the Field Museum, that a creature so small uses the stars to navigate, or any of the millions of other things that can be known or asked about both human and bird. The church has nothing emotionally or intellectually satisfying to say about the terrifying vastness of time and chance that created me, the world’s most easily-entertained mammal, or the warbler I was observing. I am an atheist because the universe is unexpected and beautiful in ways that bear little relationship to the myths or beliefs humans create to interpret it.
SP
United States
Why am I not an atheist …
… and why I am.
I am not an atheist because:
I distrust and criticise certain organised religions because:
I am an atheist because:
But what could steer me in the opposite direction? Probably the same things that could steer any atheist…
I could be converted to theism if:
Such things as tortillas depicting blurred silhouettes of Mary (or any other second-tier deity) do not count. If you’re there, God, you’re on notice! Any time is fine. No tricks – and come alone (if indeed there’s only one of you, otherwise, bring the whole parthenon).
mandrellian
Australia
I’m an atheist because I grew up in an environment free of the notion that religious teachings were true, in any sense. Whenever atheists who’ve recovered from religion talk about it, they seem to have had to sometimes struggle to reject the claims of faith – imagine how easy it was, for me, growing up with the opposite assumption: that it was a historical artifact and belonged with times gone by. When I was a kid I learned about the ancient Greeks and Zeus and Olympus, the Romans and Poseidon, the Vikings and Odin, the Jews and Yahweh, and the Egyptians and Bast – and it’s blindingly obvious that these myths are just stories to tell around the fire. For most of my life I largely ignored religion, until I started to study political philosophy and became uncomfortably aware of religion’s long role as a technique for political control. It was Seneca’s quip: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful” that made me realize that if you’re going to engage in a political dialogue with another person, you will often need to address religious indoctrination just as you sometimes need to overcome national or tribal indoctrination. Since I realized that, I now am willing to engage in frank dialogue with another person regarding their religious beliefs in much the same way as I would with a person I encountered who held repugnant racist ideologies, xenophobic politics, or a counterproductive political philosophy. So, I’ve always been an atheist but now I am “strident” about it because I’ve realized that religion is one of the things that exacerbates ‘normal’ conflict and therefore needs to be argued against.
mjr
United States
I can tell the story of my atheism in steps. It’s a bit of a revisionist history; now, when I look back, I can see that something had a huge impact on my life, that its repercussions influenced me in many ways. But at the time, I never thought of what happened as a step. Each day I felt like the same person as I was in the one before it. I never felt as though I had experienced any major change, or that I was a new person. The events I describe happened, and in this order, but as they were happening I didn’t think of them as significant.
In the third grade, I learned that there were other religions. This shocked me. As I had understood it, there was one god, and one word of god, and his word was the truth. The fact that there were other gods and other truths had eluded me until this point, and merely learning of their existence gave me some doubt. Why were there other religions? Why hadn’t god spoken to these other peoples like he spoke to Noah, or Moses? Why were their different Christianities? Suddenly, my childish notion of hell became far more upsetting. Before I had thought it a place for the people who did bad things; I assumed that they knew god’s commandments, and were thus knowingly defying their duty. To go to hell, one had to go about it intentionally, or so I thought. Suddenly, this wasn’t true. You could go to hell for believing in the wrong god, or for not even knowing that god existed. Intentions didn’t matter as much, only that you’d picked right. These ideas troubled me, but I couldn’t put them into words. In the end, I fell back on the idea that god loves everybody, so I must be missing something significant.
When I got to high school, I had been getting sexually harassed for two years already, and the boys in my year had also been touching me in ways I found uncomfortable, but during class. Their timing made my own studies more difficult, obviously, and it rendered me mute. I didn’t really know how to tell the teachers what was happening, and I didn’t know how to interrupt because frankly, I could hardly believe this was happening myself. So, the teacher would drone on, occasionally look at me, perhaps notice my discomfort, and proceed as if nothing was the matter. In the present I like to think that they also couldn’t understand what was happening, although I’m less sure of that.
In the first month of my freshman year, though, my best friend was raped. She later tried to kill herself. This was clearly more devastating for her than it was for me, and I only bring it up because it seemed very obvious to me as a result that rape was horrifying. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to help her, and she was just fading away. I have never seen anyone as unhappy as she was. I realized that what was happening to me was probably also bad – it had always made me feel awful, to clarify, I’d just never known that anyone else would think it was bad. I still didn’t talk about it, though. It was much less bad than what my friend had been through, and I now knew that if no one took her experience seriously, they probably would laugh at mine.
I wondered where god was in all this. Not in an angry, he-should-have-my-back sort of way, but in a literal way. I went to church every Sunday for my entire life, and as near as I can tell, god has no opinions at all on rape, sexual harassment, sexual assault, or actually any of the issues women have to deal with. I knew the church was against abortion, premarital sex, and being gay (I was raised catholic in an area with lots of fundamentalists), but beyond that, there was literally no guidance. There were no ethics relating to this at all, or if there were, the priests were very tight-lipped about them. When my friend tried to go to the police, the school administration, anyone, she got no help. People thought she shouldn’t have been hanging around this guy, and she shouldn’t have had a beer beforehand. What did she think would happen, people demanded. And also he played sports and was a good student. Nobody seemed to consider her rape a problem, let alone an evil. At some point I concluded that if ‘thou shalt not rape’ hadn’t made god’s top ten list, god was wrong. Unfortunately, I didn’t yet become an atheist. I still believed in god, I just thought I’d been in the wrong religion. I left the catholic church, which may sound like a big change, but it didn’t actually feel like one at the time. I had simply compared what I believed to what the church believed, and found that we didn’t match up very well. I had never made the comparison before because I’d never been pushed to. Catholicism was part of my identity. I’d been confirmed, I’d confessed, and I truly believed in god. I had felt that my catholicism was something I’d earned and a part of who I was. I didn’t question it until then.
Thus began my mission to find a religion that didn’t hate women. Ideally, I hoped to find one in which women were equal to men. This, clearly, would be the one true religion, because it would address everyone’s needs, and it would have a god who loved everybody. I hoped it would have some answers for me, too. I do want to add that I considered science briefly as a possible recourse, but not too seriously. The popular image of science and scientists is pretty unfriendly to women, as is the history of science and women, and picking something that seemed to also dislike women would have gone against my goal. I wound up looking into neo-paganism and a bucketful of woo, these being the religions that were kindest to women. The trouble with this was that I couldn’t actually make myself believe that magick was real, or that ritual was important, or, well, much of any of it. Only a few months into this new religion I found myself unable to continue because I came to a really obvious conclusion. If I could just make religion up as I went along, if I could pick and choose as I saw fit, why did I think religion was real? By definition, making shit up is not the truth. This thought was immediately followed by a far more uncomfortable one: what if there is no god?
I couldn’t face that thought; it was completely devastating to me. It wasn’t just that that would mean I was essentially alone, or that there would never be any kind of justice in the next world, or even that there might not be any answers, then. These thoughts sucked, though. I was mostly horrified at the idea that this would be it. I’d never see my deceased grandparents again, I would only have access to what my body and mind could physically and mentally accomplish, and everything that I’d previously considered meaningful would simply vanish.
So, I didn’t face it. I went to college and I studied the humanities and social sciences. I hoped to learn more about what it meant to be human, and more specifically, how that related to what it meant to be a woman (I’d gotten the notion that people thought they were two different things, go figure). Somehow between learning statistics and learning about how anthropologists conduct field research, I started to realize that nothing had actually changed. If there wasn’t a god, there had never been a god. That would mean that my life had been deep and meaningful to me for other reasons. It was still deep and meaningful.
I started learning about how scientists looked for the truth, and how social scientists looked for the truth, and I became quite taken with the scientific method. I graduated, read The Demon-Haunted World, became aware of feminism, and just kept thinking and reading. Finally, when I was 26, I reapproached the question of god. It didn’t hurt anymore, and I found I could give it serious thought.
Truth is no longer something I have to believe in, it is something I can see and study. Doubt isn’t a character flaw anymore, and neither is not knowing the answer. I realized that there was no reason to believe in god, that everything I’d attributed to him in my wonder is explainable through evolution, the movement of glaciers long ago, the tilt of the Earth on its axis, and other natural phenomena. And, even more surprisingly, that these natural phenomena are even more wondrous than god was. The strange gaps in god’s commands regarding modern issues, his obliviousness about rape, and his really strange dislike of certain foods were more easily explainable when I realized that there probably wasn’t a god. The idea of a god doesn’t explain anything, actually, and in fact raises many uncomfortable questions. Especially if you are a woman. It also turns out that feminism and atheism go together really well.
So, as you can (hopefully) see, this is a story about how I didn’t actually change that much at all; I only changed how I thought.
Frances
I became an atheist for incredibly stupid reasons. To be fair, I was ten years old.
As soon as I started reading well at about age four, my parents started throwing books at me. Anything I showed the slightest interest in, I was allowed to read, and I tore through everything. When I was nine, I was given a huge ton of books to call my own after a family friend died and everyone decided that a lot of his books were appropriate for me. It was the complete Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, plus some of the Lang fairy books, plus a lot of books about mythology:Greek, Norse, etc.
I read them passionately; I still believe to this day that a lot of those fairy tales are really genuinely cool stories. My family is and was very religious — my father is a minister — and so I was also well-versed in Christian mythology. I slowly started realizing that the supernatural forces in the stories I was reading were gods just like the god I went to church every Sunday for. And, honestly, a lot of the things the Christian god did were nowhere near as awesome or interesting as the things the non-Christian gods did. And since they were all gods, and worshipping god was the important thing . . .
I took what to me was the most logical step, and made up my own religion. One with really fucking awesome gods. I don’t really want to describe it, because it’s really deeply embarrassing now, as are most “profound” decisions that you make when you’re ten years old. They were awesome at the time, okay?
The important thing was that I was faithful. I made up my own rituals and obesiances, and followed them piously. I prayed to and thought about my religion all the time. I prayed – begged, really – for specific things to happen, and none of my prayers were ever answered, no matter how hard I believed or how rigorously I followed the ritual I’d created. I eventually came to the decision that my religion was obviously false, because it showed no results. And if my religion, with its incredibly awesome gods that was much better than Christianity, was false, then probably all religion was false. So I began atheism while sulking prepubescently about not having my prayers answered.
I did say it was a stupid reason.
I clung to that reason, though, through adolescence; in retrospect, I’d say I believed a good and true thing for stupid and awful reasons. Which, you know, happens a lot, maybe for most people, so I’m not beating myself up over it too much. But because I was already invested in the belief, I started to read about atheism in high school. Everything was so incredibly interesting — Christian theology is, in a lot of ways, like a long string of logic puzzles — that I got hooked. I became so deeply invested in those puzzles that I eventually got a BA in philosophy at a small religious university that specializes in theology and basketball. I got four years of theology classes there, too, and they simultaneously provided me with pleasure in giving me new logic puzzles to worry at, and distressed me because they also provided me with very loud classmates who would declare indignantly that it was wrong to question the Bible. Those courses also gave me good reasons to stay an atheist. Those logic puzzles almost inevitably worked out to disfavor the supernatural, and those theology courses that were intended to teach me about religion as a social force for good ultimately taught me a lot about how religion can be used as a bludgeon. I believe now the same thing I believed when I was ten – both versions of me are atheists – but now I have better reasons.
I have a very good theological education, and I don’t regret a minute of what I learned, even though some of what I learned was hard — particularly the parts where I was informed by classmates that I will never be anything but an godless dyke cunt because of my gender, my sexual preferences, and my religious beliefs. (They would, of course, never say those awful words, but it was … made clear. ) The unconditional love of my religious parents in no way prepared me for the way that other people would judge, and sometimes abuse me because I was unapologetic about having learned that religion was fiction.
I’m working on a PhD now in English literature (because that’s where the real money is, har, har). I’m starting to hate the process of academia, but I still love the work of unpacking texts. It’s a gorgeous exercise, to me, working with fiction; it means we, meaning those in the profession, are looking at lies to see how much truth we can get out of them. It’s sort of a game, a social joke, a logic puzzle. Knowing a lot about Christianity — about, in fact, all mythologies — is an immense gift for what I do. It is intensely frustrating, as an atheist, to teach a classroom full of undergraduates who mostly identify as Christian, but who are so deeply ignorant about the Bible that they cannot understand literary references to it. I can grudgingly accept that I have to explain the Trojan War so students can understand Yeats’ poems, but I get very angry when I have to explain, for example, the book of Job so people can understand TS Eliot to a room full of people who say they’re faithful Christians. They are prepared to believe in their religion no matter what, but most of them do not understand what it is they’re swearing fealty to.
Ultimately, I am an atheist because my lovely, loving, faithful Christian parents let me learn too much. When I asked questions they didn’t know the answer to, they would say, “I don’t know. Why don’t you go see if you can learn the answer?” And I would — sometimes poorly, but I would try to track it down. They are wonderful, loving people, and loving them has taught me that just because you think someone is wrong does not have to mean that you think they’re stupid. My parents are not stupid people, and they taught me to be curious and demanding in how I interpret the world, which I think makes them incredible parents. I am proud to say that they are such good and responsible parents that they helped make me an atheist.
Sarah
United States
(Two today because I forgot yesterday!)
While I have always deep down been skeptical of the reality of gods and spirits, I spent much of the last twenty years of my life as a self-described pagan of one sort or another. Every so often, my own internal sense of self-deception would go off, and I would renounce the frippery of gods and magic and so forth, only to come back again. Why? The strongest thing religion– whether it be monotheistic or polytheistic– has going for it is a built-in social support mechanism. It makes life incredibly easy in the sense that one doesn’t need to go out and find emotional, social, or other forms of support. It’s there, with plenty of people who will accept you and praise you and call you “brother” for precisely no other reason than because you happen to be on the same arbitrary “belief team” they are. It is incredibly difficult to consciously remove oneself from that sort of supportive system.
I am an atheist because I have finally realized that wanting to believe something is not enough. I need to embrace that which I really do believe and make do with the consequences of that belief.
Joseph
United States
It sure seems like it was bound to happen, sooner or later. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in a family with ties to the religion stretching back multiple generations on both my father and mother’s side. Any religion, if it is to survive, has to retain members; and it would seem that my family has historically been rather susceptible to the allures of this one rather peculiar vein of Christianity.
Growing up in central Georgia I was aware of this lineage. I have family stretching all the way from Portland, Maine to Tampa, Florida (a veritable seaboard of piety), and the expectation to carry on in the religion of my upbringing was obviously implied. So, I dutifully carried out that which was expected of me. I studied the bible, using the conveniently provided study materials printed by the Witness’s controlling organization The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society; I participated in the preaching work; and I shied away from forming close friendships with those outside of the congregation. I didn’t actually visit the home of a non-Witness friend until I was in High School (Ah! Now THAT got your attention!).
My immediate family had its collective faith shaken by the divorce of my parents when I was at the tail end of Middle School. He was disfellowshipped (a shunning practice similar to excommunication) shortly prior to this and the rest of us tried to continue on, drawn together by the camaraderie inherent in organized religion. One of the teachings of the religion is that a Witness should not form personal relationships with nonbelievers (read: Non-Jehovah’s Witnesses, not simply non-Christians). Moreover, a Witness should not have any dealings at all with a disfellowshipped or ex-Jehovah’s Witness. This posed a problem: my father was disfellowshipped, but he was also my father.
The leaders in the congregation will usually try to ignore this rule as it relates to children and their parents, terming it a matter of conscience between yourself and God. But the expectation is that you will drift away from your unrepentant parent as you get older. It was obvious that my father was finished with the Witnesses, and I had some decisions to make. I was 14 and my family was the congregation. I started to work towards getting baptized. (I should mention two things: I never actually stopped associating with my dad during this time, although I certainly saw less of him and felt awkward being around him at points; and baptism for the Witnesses is a personal choice taken on after learning the teachings instead of a ceremony performed shortly after birth.)
Another thing that began to happen at this same time relates to another important part of my life. I’ve always been interested in science and I would pour my heart into science projects at school. Of course, science and religion don’t usually get along, especially as you delve into the deeper sciences. Evolution was one of these sticking points. Want to know how I dealt with it? Simple, I ignored it! But it made a damn sight more sense than the creation myth, so I kind of ignored Genesis too. Fortunately the Witnesses don’t teach a literal 7 day creation so I didn’t have to deal with young earth hogwash. I eventually settled on God using evolution as a means of creation, but this too was technically against the teachings of the congregation. I decided on this in early High School, 18 months or so before I was baptized. It was the first time I really questioned a tenant of the faith; a change that would sit dormant for a few more years, waiting for the right catalyst.
It was also during the first two years of High School that I started developing closer friendships with my classmates. I had discovered friends! And girls! And girls who were also friends! Yes, I was a little late to the party, but I was dealing with a strange religion on top of the usual powder keg of teenage emotions. Yes, the religion was beginning to appear strange even to me.
So, my three sins were thus: I doubted the teaching of absolute shunning based on my desire to continue associating with my father, I doubted the creation myth based on scientific evidence, and I desired to have fun with people my age who weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses because I was human. Make no doubt, I was still the awkward kid and a total flake but I honestly was trying. Still, during all of this I was working toward being baptized. Eventually, I was, late in my Sophomore year of High School.
So the stage was set, I was now a baptized member of the Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. My “three sins” weighed upon me, but they were never something I received council from the congregation on, much less a reprimand. I had began to keep my personal life separate from my spiritual life. That distinction would have been alarming to my brothers and sisters in faith back then. I was essentially leading a quiet double life. Never once did I do anything elicit, I never even broke the tenants of the faith in my personal life, but the gap between the two sides of myself slowly widened in my mind. I began to realize that getting baptized had really been a last ditch effort to jumpstart my own faith. I asked myself an important question, “Why did I get baptized, and what does it really mean to me?” My answer? “I don’t know.”
I slowed and eventually stopped going to congregation meetings, though I would still go to the larger assemblies and conventions and to special events like The Memorial (a yearly celebration of the Lord’s Evening Meal, as outlined in the Gospels). Finally, it all came to a head right after Senior Prom. I stayed at a friend’s house with a group of my favorite geeks that night. Through an interesting fluke, that next day after prom was the Sunday of the “special talk”, given a month or so after The Memorial. I was having fun playing video games and hanging out with my friends when my mom called to remind me about the special talk. I tried my best to avoid going, but eventually relented.
I rushed home, threw on a suit and tie, and just made the opening prayer. I sat in the back and felt, for the first time, total alienation from the words being spoken on stage. I saw the faces of those I knew and loved sitting around me; my family and friends, the Elders who had helped me prepare for baptism, all my brothers and sisters in the faith. I felt that I and all those sitting around me had been deceived. This wasn’t the true religion. Furthermore, was there really a true religion? Was there a God? This time my answer was different, it was, “I don’t think there is.” The realization was swift, the two hours sitting there at the special talk in 2006 were my catalyst. I told my mom about my decision later that day. She broke down into tears, she even prayed with me, tried to study with me. She would later develop doubts of her own.
I told my best friend at the time at school the next day that I was done with the Witnesses. She was ecstatic. She told me what her mother had said upon seeing me fly out of her house the day before, on my way to the special talk. She’d remarked that it was surprising to see someone my age with strong enough faith to always make it to church. What irony!
I graduated High School and went to College. I studied art and humanities, taking time to look around for another religion that might fit me better. I never did. I was an Atheist from that moment at the special talk, even if it took me a little while to figure it out. I started reading Dawkins and Pharyngula along with anything else I could get my hands on. My love for science has been thoroughly rekindled after spending some time away from it. The awe and wonder that I never really experienced with faith now plays fiddle to every waking hour of every day.
My brother is also an atheist, although we took separate paths to get there. I spent twenty minutes on the phone with my dad while writing this. He is a deist, still believing in God but with his own ideas. My mom is somewhere in between, she doesn’t go to meetings any more, but she hasn’t given up her belief in God. I still get along well with my family, although I’m careful not to rock the boat too much when I’m around them. Admittedly, I took the easy way out chosen by many ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses: I simply stopped going. I could officially denounce the congregation, but that wouldn’t accomplish much. Those that still associate with me would be forced to stop, and I refuse to let the strangle of religion take anything else away from me.
So, why am I an atheist? Because my three sins weren’t actually sins after all.
Jesse Stapleton
United States
At first, I was an atheist as a sort of default state. No one had told me to be otherwise. The idea of a god or gods had not been given to me, and was not in any sort of even semi-clear form for quite some time. I do not recall when I finally was exposed to this idea.
I remember watching the Peanuts Christmas Special and being kind of confused as to what the heck Linus was talking about as he explained Christmas to the rest of the cast. So far as I was concerned, Christmas was a time to hang around with the extended family, eat delicious things, and exchange presents. What he was saying seemed like a fairy tale.
Speaking of extended family, a number of them displayed strange things in their homes. In the main floor bathroom of one set of grandparents was a depiction of the ten commandments. I didn’t know the context for it for quite some time. I didn’t ask. Some of them seemed like common sense, some of them I did not really understand for a while. I was a shy child, you understand, and tended to let people tell me what they thought was important when they chose to do so, at least at that phase of life.
Insofar as I got a clear idea about religion from my parents, my mother gave me a general sort of contempt for people using it as a reason to be complete dicks to eachother, and this may have led to me thinking the whole business was a little silly. I tended to be quiet and let people assume I was one of them. Churches were weird places to me. There was a sense of cameraderie and belonging there, certainly, and some of the singing was nice, but the words slowly felt creepier and creepier. I wondered if there were things that people were not telling me that made the whole busines smake sense, and may have been waiting for it to come up on its own.
When I moved out of my parents’ lair and in with some friends, a few hundred miles away, I accompanied said friends to the church they attended for a while, and this was pleasant enough. The strangeness began to creep back in, though, and between a Bible study session at which asking if we had some more support for this (as opposed to letting a source confirm itself, which seemed questionable at best) got me some unwelcome looks, and a guest speaker who seemed to be rejecting conclusions based upon observation as somehow not impressive enough for him, I stopped going.
Faith was becoming my problem with the whole business. The more I learned, the less I wanted anything to do with it. Just accept sometthing without support? How could a person learn anything of any use that way? Bad ideas could never be rejected, and new ones never accepted if one just accepted what one was told first without question. Mystery was not beauty, mystery was a huge target to anyone with an appetite for knowledge, and I very much counted myself in that group.
Since then, friends have tried to mend what they saw as a broken relationship with God, but missed the point. I do not hate God, I just don’t think he’s there. I’m not closed to the possibility, but neither will I accept it without rigorous examination, and have yet to find an argument for theism that is at all convincing.
Theists are welcome to keep trying, but I can’t say I think much of their chances.
DJJ
Canada
First, a complete lack of religious experience – I’ve never heard the voices of angels, nor felt the hand of the god upon me. Had a brief time in Sunday school as a child, but the stories never made any sense to me. Had people dear to me die in my presence, never felt any spirits wandering about.
Second, a good education. I’ve always preferred the explanations provided by science.
Third, reading the news, and reading history. I think the existence of the Pope pretty well proves the non-existence of the christian god, at least the biblical version.
And finally, my life is complete and happy without talking sky fairies.
cliffman
