I am an engineer and I work in a science field, in particular that of astronomy instrumentation development. I became atheist some years ago when an atheist colleague and I started talking about religion. I argued the points that “you can’t get something from nothing”, and “what’s the point of it all then”, quite for vociferously for ~3 hrs and then went home.

I thought a lot about what I was arguing, and also the contradiction I was living. In my career, I lived everything “evidence-based”, but in my personal religious life it was faith-based. Although, even though I prayed and all that, I was never, I don’t think, a 100% hard-core believer.

I realized that I was living a life of intellectual hypocrisy, that it lacked integrity, and that I couldn’t live like that anymore. Truth mattered to me more than comfort, and the science I had learned since working in the astronomy field made the notion of the existence of an elusive supernatural deity quite frankly ridiculous.

I went to work the next day, and declared to my colleague, “that’s it, I’m atheist”. And I’ve never looked back. There is simply no evidence to support the existence of a god or gods, and in fact all of the evidence is contrary to that existence. I feel free to think and question what I like, and no longer have a ‘target’ on my back. I find that socializing with religious people is like socializing with people who really believe Santa Claus exists. Much (although not all) of my family, including my daughters and my wife’s family are highly religious. I find there is a barrier there to true communication; really getting to know people and what they are like and think at a deep level is off the discussion list, because of religion. With my family who is not religious (and they are quite well educated as well), some deep and interesting discussions occur, as happens as well with my atheist colleagues.

It came with a price, though. I believe turning atheist was the major contributing factor to my divorce, which happened a few years later. A very painful and expensive process! But now I’m with someone who is atheist as well, and life couldn’t be better. I have read many books in the meantime, starting with ‘On the Origin of Species’, many of Dawkins’ books (reading ‘God Delusion’ was like savouring a delicious meal), Harris, Hitchens, books on psychology, books on morality, and now blogs. I also believe I have a much deeper appreciation of our/my existence, the Universe, and all of the complexity and wonder involved. Life is good. Life as I know it is exceedingly rare and precious. And life is finite and must be enjoyed to its fullest. That’s what I try to think of and do every day.

BCskeptic
Canada

There are a lot of reasons why I’m an atheist. The idea of worshipping a god who seems to have all the evils and psychological problems of a North Korean dictator, who would send me to an eternity of torture for thinking the wrong thing, who demands total, eternal devotion and praise from his supporters, and would then show those he had saved images of me being tortured for their delight (it’s Catholic doctrine, fact fans!) … well, what a bastard. Fuck that God. Every Earthly equivalent of ‘Heaven’ only exists in dictatorships. God’s Palace sounds just like Saddam’s – all gleaming marble and gold taps. Day to day life in Heaven sounds like a perpetual Soviet Victory Parade. None of the things I value in life seem to exist in Heaven. I like to elect my leaders, I like freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

But that doesn’t mean that god doesn’t exist.

For me, as I judge the competing truth claims of religion and atheism, the most compelling reason for me to be an atheist is that religion is consciously untrue. That, in other words, priests and believers lie.

We see it reported all the time on this blog. The first time some creationist says something crazy about junk DNA or how evolution is just a theory … well, it’s common or garden ignorance. Not their fault, we all have to learn things some time.

The second time they say it, it’s a lie. The third time, it’s a policy to lie.

The Catholic Church, to pick just one example, routinely lies. Did you know there are holes in condoms that let AIDS out? Did you know Hitler was an atheist and that the Catholic Church fought Hitler with all its might? Read the Cloyne Report and see that Bishop Magee prepared two reports about child abuse – one for the police, another for the Vatican. Oh, but the Vatican can’t be expected to know what some local priest is up to … he was the man that found Pope John Paul I’s body. He was private secretary to that Pope and to John Paul II.

Conscious, repeated lies. Not mistakes.

Another aspect of the same phenomenon is the double standard. Priests declare moral relavitism is a scourge of society, that there’s good and there is evil and nothing inbetween, that they can show you the difference and that if you even *think* bad thoughts, you’re guilty of them. Then they cover up another priest raping an eight year old, deliberately withholding evidence from the police. When they are caught, they play the ‘well … everyone’s human. It’s all trumped up by the media. Did you know that this stuff happens all the time’ card. Pick one. To me ‘is raping a child bad?’ is not a moral conundrum, it’s not a time to pick at definitions. If my best friend raped a child, I would phone the police, I would tell them everything I knew, and I would have no moral qualms about it. I don’t believe in moral absolutes. I do know that raping a child is wrong. If some smarmy theologian wants to pick as that as ‘intellectually inconsistent’, please, please let’s discuss that in comments. I double dare you.

It goes further than the Catholic child abuse scandal. Beyond the almost identical Mormon abuse scandals, or the Scientology abuse scandals, or … well, the list goes on.

If an atheist accidently credits the wrong loony idea to the wrong branch of one Christian sect, they’ll get a long, patronizing speech about how we’re woefully ignorant of theology, that the Holy Church of the Ratfucker Jesus might believe that, but the person you’re talking to is from the Sacred Chapel of Christ Ratfucker.

Then they’ll take the credit for all religion ever. ‘What has my religion done?’ a Protestant will say, ‘why … just look at the Sistine Chapel’. ‘How dare you insult the 90% of people on this planet who believe in God?’. Let’s accept that 90% of people in the world are religious for sake of argument. The majority of those people aren’t even monotheists, let alone Christians, let alone Protestants, let alone Sacred Christ Ratfuckers.

Meanwhile … talk to someone who’s been trained at a seminary. Training to be a priest is, from the accounts I’ve been told, very simply being taught how to lie. The comforting lie, the ‘things to say to the people who’ve read the Bible and spotted that it doesn’t say the things you say it does’, the lies necessary to keep the institution from external scrutiny. Priests understand that what they teach isn’t what they believe – they have ‘a more nuanced’ understanding. That there are a lot of things they have to keep vague, very simple questions they must not allow to be asked (‘who does the Bible says is going to Heaven?’, to pick one). Always, always, it’s ‘avoid a straight answer’.

Jesus said some wise things. One of them was “A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit”. Truth does not come from lies. Creationists lie. The Vatican lies. Anglican theologians explain that the bits in the Bible that are true are true, the rest are metaphors. They don’t even *understand* truth, in other words.

So, a simple question to believers: if they’re telling the truth, why do your holy men lie to you so frequently and so consistently?

Jemima Cole

I was a Christian. Mostly I was a Christian because my mother was a Christian, I think my father was too, but he rarely went to church or talked about it. All my friends were Christians; all the adults I knew appeared to be Christians too. The First Baptist Church in the small town in Massachusetts I grew up in was less than a half a mile down the road. My Great-grand father had donated the organ; my Grandfather had painted the picture behind the baptistery. This church was literally in my blood. From before I can remember, I went to Sunday school, as well as Sunday service. Going to church was just what you did, not going was unthinkable. This particular church, which was considered to be Northern Conservative Baptist, was only moderately fire and brimstone. Sure Jews, and probably Catholics, were going to hell but, I wasn’t aware that any other kind of religious people like Muslims, Buddhists, or even atheists existed. There were also Methodists and Congregationalists, but they were almost like us.

Most of the organized activity in my life was either at school or at church. I went to Daily Vacation Bible School in the summer, later on I joined the Christian Service Brigade, a Boy Scout like organization, but with heavy Christian influence. The best thing about CSB was summer camp. It was up in Maine on the shores of Lake Bunganut. There were crafts, swimming, canoeing, campfires, archery and more. And of course, preaching, but not too much. It was great to get away from home and parents and meet a bunch of other kids, and some pretty neat counselors. Back home there were prayer meetings, testimony nights, bible quizzes with other churches. I sang in the church choir starting at twelve. I even helped clean the church with my best buddy who was sort of the janitor.

I was “saved” and born again with full immersion baptism. My name was entered in the church rolls and they gave me a real nice bible. I tried really hard to make contact with God/Jesus, to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I never seemed to feel anything like it. I am now fairly sure that I never really believed in any of it. I’m sure that I did everything because it was the thing to do.

As time went on, doubt began to creep in. At first it was sex, in the form of masturbation, that started it. If God watches everything, he was watching me, and knew all of the nasty thoughts I was having about girls. The fun of what I was doing eventually won out over the fear of God. Then there was the behavior of the supposedly upright Christians. The deacon would gas unwanted puppies and kittens with lawnmower exhaust. People would stand up on Testimony night and tell us what good Christians they were, and then their actions would belie it. Conflicts grew between what I was told in church and what I perceived outside of church. I couldn’t believe my Catholic friends were going to Hell because they didn’t believe the way we believed, I couldn’t believe that people in Africa would go to Hell just because they never heard of Jesus. As I learned about the real world and science, the Bible stories were harder and harder to take as real. It was the introduction to the Theory of Evolution in high school thanks to a wonderful biology teacher, and the religious resistance to it, that led to the most major crack in my faith so far. After this point, my religious involvement was mostly lip-service and inertia. My drift towards atheism had begun.

The rudiments remained. I still identified myself as Protestant on Navy forms, in Boot Camp and “A” School I sang in the Bluejacket Chorus at services in the Mainside Chapel every Sunday. Going and singing really didn’t bother me, in fact I loved the old hymns (and still do), I just didn’t believe the message anymore. Other than going to church to sing, my church going days were pretty much over, I just saw no reason to go except for weddings, funerals and baptisms. I was married in a church, by a minister, but that was really pro forma and to keep my wife’s family happy. This was in Scotland and our Banns were actually cried.

For years I basically ignored religion, beginning to think of myself as agnostic, still not quite able to internally let go of it all. This was probably the result of the deep brainwashing I received as a child, the fear of hell, the fear of being condemned, the fear of the devil, the fear of taking that final step. Then around the 80’s, things began to change. First came the Moral Majority and the beginning of religious involvement with politics. The obvious hypocrisy and lies that were coming from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were beginning to sour discourse in America. Then came 9/11 and I started digging into Islam, this was followed by the “Intelligent” Design movement. As I started digging into it, helped greatly by access to the internet, I came across some real atheists, starting with Austin Cline at About Atheism; this led me to Panda’s Thumb, then to P.Z. Myers’ Pharyngula, then on to Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett. I was learning about what atheism really is and found that there were many people who had let go of their childish fears. When I finally faced up to the idea, which is certainly true, that there is no god or gods and that religion is based on superstition and fear, I, like Saul on the road to Damascus, felt the scales fall, not from my eyes, but my brain. The Problem of Evil no longer existed, the perceived guilt of punishment for what was supposed to be bad behavior evaporated. I was no longer in fear of a capricious, spiteful god of the OT. I no longer had to try to reconcile the supposed miracles of Jesus with the real world. Although sometimes, in the depths of the night, I can still catch the dim whispering gibberish of the imp of religious nonsense that hides, desperately, in the dim corners of my brain.

My atheism is confirmed when I see all of what science and rationality can explain about the way the world and the universe works and, indeed, much of the way the human mind works; and then look at what religion, any religion, can explain. Religion explains nothing; virtually every truth claim it makes can be shown to have a natural explanation that can be supported by evidence and observation. Science is constantly making the box that religion keeps god in, the box of things that sciences does not (yet) have answers to, smaller and smaller. “Goddidit” explains vanishingly less and less. Nothing of what we know about the world and the universe that it is in requires any action from any god to explain it. God exists alright, god and angels and demons and miracles and heaven and hell all exist inside the human mind.

Now, the older I get, I’m in my sixties, the more I am absolutely convinced that the life I have now is the only life I get and that when I die I will only live on in the memories of those that knew me.

Red Mann
United States

Before anything else, let’s get some definitions nailed down first: I call myself atheist, but it’s only in the weakest sense of the word, and nearly anyone who doesn’t understand the orthogonal nature of atheism (belief claim) versus agnosticism (knowledge claim) would call me an agnostic. That is, while I have no specific God-belief, I also don’t claim positively that there are no Gods, no way, no how, no where, no sir. Formal or dogmatic atheism of this sort is at best unfalsifiable and at worst immediately self-refuting; even the Catholic Encyclopedia gets that much right.

With that said, here is my background: raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, I am the oldest of three siblings, with a sister and a brother at 2 and 6 years younger respectively. All three of us went to CCD, but it seems like I was the only one it took hold of; my brother could best be described as “ignostic” and my sister is, sad to say, the living embodiment of every negative atheist stereotype on the planet. I mean it. She has no philosophical background, almost no knowledge of the history or mythology around any religion, and zero grounding in logic. Her entire argument can be summed up as “Religions people do stupid things, therefore all religion is wrong and there is no God, homie.” My parents, as you might expect, are extremely cavalier about their supposed beliefs, and I think it’s fair to call them Deists.

Unfortunately, the CCD program I went to was run by a bunch of hellfire and brimstone charismatic Catholics, and I personally got fire and brimstone pounded into me from a very young age. I believe this was responsible for a lifetime of panic disorder, OCD, anxiety, depression, and schizoid symptoms. It only got worse when I discovered (well, admitted to myself more like) that I was a lesbian around age 16, though the signs had been there since early junior high. Luckily, though, I had stumbled on either Deism or “liberal” Christianity without knowing it, and simply lived like my parents for a long time.

That changed around 2008, which was the start of a still-ongoing series of kafkaesque, frightening events which have so far lost me everything from jobs to a long-time lover to…well, if my parents hadn’t let me move back home I’d be dead dozens of times over. In April 2009, having had brushes with insanity, homeless, and death (and not in this order), the floodgates opened and I found myself in the middle of a perpetual religiously-fueled nervous breakdown. This is the sort of thing former fundamentalists usually describe: constant shakes, oppressive fear of hellfire, feeling as if some huge, angry deity has it out for you, and so forth. This led to over 2 and a half years of obsessive and unhealthy research into the origins of the Abrahamic religions, much study of Biblical languages and text criticism, and archaeology. The result is that most people think a) I have a Master’s in religious studies and b) I’m in the throes of terminal caffeine poisoning.

These have not been good years. My resting heart rate and blood pressure have spiked, I lost a lover of almost 4 years largely due to her inability to handle the panic, and in general I feel as if all my axons have been sandblasted. I am afraid of everything. But, thanks largely to people like Richard Carrier and Dan Dennett, I’m escaping the Abrahamic religions. I still have some residual fears left over, and forget what I learned when sleep-deprived or panicked. But progress is being made.

As to why I’m an agnostic-atheist specifically: evidence. Not just lack of evidence for certain propositions, but anti-evidence against them. I tend to play devil’s advocate (angel’s advocate?) for any position I oppose, as a way of keeping honest; yet despite that, no apologist from Craig to Bahnsen to van Til to Aquinas to Anselm to Bultmann has been able to offer competent theodicy and apologetics. Science has disproven the major tenets of the Abrahamic faiths. Bob Price and Richard Carrier have done stunning work in revealing the seeds of Christianity in Judaic thought (cf. “Not the Impossible Faith”) and while I am not a mythicist I agree with much of their scholarship. Quiet, softly-powerful Dan Dennet introduced me to philosophy, and Dan Fincke (Camels With Hammers) has personally been helping me work out some moral philosophy and meta-ethics, for which I owe him a debt that can never be repaid. And you, PZ, have given me a home base in the world of freethought, introducing me to many other likeminded people via Pharyngula.

I am on a quest to regain what was lost so long ago and re-integrate myself. I want to breathe innocently again, and not feel that I must hold all existence in contempt or still all desire for it being the root of suffering. I want to experience the quiet and peaceful wonder of existence, the universe-spanning transcendence Sagan and others spoke so lovingly of, and which is my birthright as a scientist. I want to sleep peacefully in the arms of the Milky Way above and wake refreshed to the blue of the sky. And someday, I want to love and be loved again. None of these are possible in a milieu that assumes for its foundation that we are evil, fallen creatures at the mercy of a Bronze-age throwback who thinks that an eternity of torture is meet for finite sins. I am learning that it is not so; but I have lost so much in the learning.

Hazuki Azuma

If you throw this question out in China, “why are you an atheist?” in most cases it will be taken as a joke. This is also perhaps the only thing that the communist Party has done right to this country, that is, to seed a strong scientific spirit in China’s education system, but which doesn’t by any means excuse its brainwashing of Chinese students with Marxism and Maoism. Sadly rumor has it that Christianity is growing rampantly in China, which I suppose is due in large part to the fact that the majority of Chinese are suffering, a topic that I should spare for the thesis here. Had I grown up in a religious environment, I barely think I could break free from this sort of ideological slavery. For this reason, I always keep an extra piece of respect for the atheists in western countries, now and in history.

I came to the States three years ago as a newly college graduate, with a thirst for higher education from American universities, something I had always been dreaming of attending. My first stop was the University of Minnesota, which really didn’t disappoint me with its strong research background. In retrospective, what was sort of disappointing was that University of Minnesota is in Minnesota, a place filled with “harassing” Christians of assorted denominations.

My first clue was the ceaseless invitations from numerous churches to participate in their friendship meals. Considering that China has gone not too far away from its once massive poverty, enticing Chinese students with food is indeed a good strategy. I myself fell for many times, but every time I had to eat with prayers and preaching, which indeed undermined the flavor of the already-not-as-good-as-Chinese American food. There were some other churches taking a less confrontational way. They formed “volunteer” organizations to help Chinese students in settling down such as airport pickup and provision of free furniture, but none of their activities didn’t wind up with Jesus.

Believe it or not, back then I was not as of new atheism as I am today. For one thing, I had never heard of PZ Myzer. Candidly, I had no inkling what was really going on in Christianity, although I might have been under a vague—but, of course, illusorily mistaken—impression that Christianity leads Americans to behave. As a person (a to-be scientist!) curious about almost everything, I couldn’t help but explore the intriguing question “in such an era in which almost everything can be reasonably explained by science, why people are still believing in nonsense?”

I thereby accepted many of those invitations—again, partly for the meals. I went to church on an almost weekly basis, which perhaps outperformed most Christian peers, and I attended quite a few bible studies. My best friend was an American Lutheran, who doubted evolution because scientists haven’t figured out the origin of life yet, which, translated in our words, means because evolution conflicts with the literal version of Bible. And I even had an American grandpa, who was, to cite his own words, “still open about whether the earth is 6,000 thousand years old or billions,” under which circumstance, I rarely bothered to spell out the number 4.6.

Looking back, along the years of intensive interactions with Christianity, I did grow in my knowledge of what a thing it really is, thanks to both the repulsive content of their holy book and, more importantly, all the speeches, debates, blogs, books by those outspoken, heroic atheists whose names are too familiar to be mentioned here. It may sound a bit implausible that a person from the far East has joined in this New Atheism movement, but I did turned from a mere listener to now a brave—brave in the sense of in a foreign country—refuter whenever I hear nonsensical religious ramblings.

I am an atheist partly because of the environment in which I grew up, but more because of the fact that, even though physicists haven’t figured out how the universe begun, posing creators does not answer any questions whatsoever, let alone a monstrous one as the Judeo-Christian god.

More excitedly, atheism has become such an important part of my life. I will continue combating religious doctrines, as should all atheists, for protecting our lovely and innocent kids. My resolve has been especially reinforced upon seeing Hitchens’s special care for a nice-year-olds in this latest reception of the Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year Award. The contrast between the dying hero and his attempt to list suitable reading material for a thriving young mind is exceedingly heartwarming and stimulating.

I could go on and on, but let me stop here. One last point, let us atheists help those personal faiths be kept personal.

Fred Young
China and United States

Unlike most atheists I have come across, I am an atheist because I am a profoundly irrational person; my life is dominated by narrative, by fictions and lies, performance and artifice. In other words, I am a literary scholar. Two factors shaped my early life: I was raised without early first hand exposure to religion by an artist and a psychology professor who self-identified as atheists, and my extended family concealed a dark secret about my grandmother. Because I was not exposed to religion until the fourth grade, when little friends started trying to “save” me, the Bible stories I encountered struck me as no more believable than any of the many, many other narratives I had been reading. Middle Earth, Wonderland, Oz, Avonlea, Villa Villekulla, the court of King Arthur, and even Narnia had primed me to look upon the Biblical Judea as just another historical fiction.

The fact that no one in my family would tell me why my grandmother had only one leg sparked any number of possible explanations in my overactive imagination, each one embellished until it became a pathos-filled romance of suffering and redemption. This early lesson in my own brain’s ability to speculate wildly illustrates perfectly the psychology of religion and the drive to find unambiguous answers to things that, for various reasons, are beyond our ken. And even when, as a young adult, I was given the “real” answer in the form of newspaper articles describing the incident, it quickly became clear that this “answer” contained yet more unanswerable questions (no one will ever know why my grandmother’s step-father attempted to murder her in a drunken rage, or why he missed and ended up shooting her in the knee). I am a relativist through and through, largely at ease with ambiguity. Science per se has almost nothing to do with my atheism.

Ellen Rees
Norway

I grew up very active in a conservative Southern Baptist church. I
served in music ministry, set up Vacation Bible School, went on
domestic and international mission trips, took Bible courses at a
Baptist college, and chaperoned youth trips. I truly believed in God
with all my heart, with all my mind, and with all my soul.

I always thought that Christians became atheists because they were mad
a God; that it is an act of rebellion against giving God total control
of their life. The complete opposite happened to me.

I drifted away from the faith for several years because I became
disillusioned with the mingling of right wing politics with the
pulpit, but then I discovered several progressive Christian writers
such as Shane Claiborne and Donald Miller, and I felt a renewed zeal
to study the Bible and pursue my personal relationship with God. It’s
funny that this pursuit of God led to my atheism.

Several years ago I traveled to Japan and China and visited Shinto
shrines and Buddhist temples and it occurred to me that these people
that I was meeting and getting to know have morals and ethics often as
great as or greater than most Christians I know. I read Confucius
Lives Next Door by T.R. Reid and pondered how can so many Asians have
such high moral standards, lower crime rates, strong communities and
families, all without Jesus?

Around this same time, over the span of several years, I began to
learn more about the world around me. When I was little, God was
bigger than I could imagine and there was no truth, no morality
outside God. One day I came across this thought exercise: “If God told
you to kill someone, would you do it?” Of course the answer would be
that God would never ask me to do that. “But if he did tell you, that
it was for the greater good, part of his plan?” I would have to answer
no. My morals would never allow me to take another life. I’m a firm
believer in non-violence and pacifism. At this moment I was almost
shocked to realize what this means: my values go beyond God – go
deeper than God. It is as if God got a little smaller, or the universe
as I know it got a little bigger.

As I studied the Bible more in my quest to grow closer to God, the
more issues with theology I discovered. Perhaps the greatest issue I
had was with salvation, or put simply, “who goes to heaven and who
goes to hell.” If salvation is though faith in Jesus alone, then it is
unjust to condemn those who have never heard the Gospel, and equally
unfair if these people get a “free pass” to heaven while those who, to
varying degrees, have heard the Gospel are judged.

The more and more I learned about the world, the more I disagreed with
the exclusivity of faith in Christ. Somebody who earnestly says a
prayer accepting Jesus, then goes about life as usual, is more
deserving of heaven than a Buddhist monk who dedicates his entire life
to feeding the poor and clothing the needy, and caring for the sick?
After all, Matthew 25 pretty plainly states that those who do “unto
the least of these” are rewarded with heaven and those who selfishly
do not are condemned. How do you reconcile “faith alone” with this
teaching? How does simply saying a prayer supersede this? Maybe just
praying the “Sinner’s prayer” and repenting of sins is not enough.

I thought that perhaps I am a Universalist – that there are many paths
in life and all people will eventually be reconciled to God. But if
this is true, then why is there a need to believe in God anyway?
What’s the difference, as long as I seek to live out the message of
Matthew 25 and seek to “love my neighbor as myself?”

Still, I tried fervently to seek God in spite of growing doubts. I
wanted to believe that he existed. I prayed that he would show me the
way. Lying in bed at night I prayed until I cried, begging that he
would restore my faith. I read more Christian books and studied the
Bible more fervently.

Eventually I accepted what my heart and mind was telling me – there is
not God. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Jesus’ teaching, but that
his divinity and the existence of a God seemed increasingly unlikely
in light of what I was learning about the world around me. I never
stopped believing in the Bible in the sense that it is the greatest
source of moral truth in my life. Jesus’ teachings such as the Sermon
on the Mount and Matthew 25 form the basis of my ethics. I will always
follow my conscience and seek peace, justice, equality for all people
through love.

I guess some Christians will say it is okay – people take many paths
and all people will be reconciled to God eventually. Some will say
that I’ll eventually “come back around.” Some will say that I was
never a Christian to begin with, or that I was not predestined, or
elected, by God. My faith was completely real to me for the better
part of two decades. I was certain that God heard and answered my
prayers. I felt his supernatural presence in still quiet moments of
worship.

But now I realize that it was just a creation of my own mind. I want
to be honest with myself and use reason and logic, not blind faith, to
explore the world. Life as a human being is very precious, and it is
something to be cherished. I want to spend my life creating “heaven”
on earth for the “least of these.”

James Willamor
United States

I grew up in the typical uber-conservative christian home, but always had doubts. The answers given to my questions were never quit satisfying, and always had the air of “If you pray/read the Bible hard enough, long enough, sincerely enough, you will understand!” I distinctly remember hysterically sobbing, clutching at my bedsheets, literally begging “God” to make me “feel” him like those around me claimed they could, or to understand. When nothing ever happened, I was told that God was testing me. I accepted that, begrudgingly.

Sadly, I still tried to conform– going to church, youth groups, attending a conservative Christian college, even serving as a missionary overseas. During that last experience, I had a few days where I might have actually “felt” God in my life (or what I was told was what God was like). . . . but the powers that be heard of my newfound joy and happiness and immediately called meetings about me, and emotionally and professionally ruined me. Years of church-abuse followed

I came back to the States, PISSED. I tried a non-denominational church, and while the people were nicer, I still felt that nagging sense that I just didn’t belong. I would never fit, I wasn’t good enough, I asked too many questions, I was a woman, I was a thinking woman, I was pretty– all reasons that I would never be heard, acknowledged, or taken seriously. Ever.

Finally, I realized that if my church was a boyfriend, he would be an abusive SOB, and anyone that knew and loved me would be BEGGING me to run away, run hard, just get away from that bipolar, controlling, abusive asshole. It was a eureka moment: I was in an abusive relationship!

I gave up religion, but didn’t know what else was out there. I thought I still believed in a god, something anyway. . . until I heard a woman interviewing a Catholic-turned-Atheist on the radio. And he was describing this new personal responsibility he had– no more asking God to do everything for him, now it was all on him. And while that sounded scary at first, I found the idea very attractive– you mean, I could control my own life? Sadly, it was a revolutionary thought. The interviewee also described how every day, every moment was now precious, because this life was all he had– there was no cheery there-after to lean upon. He talked about being a nicer, more generous, more loving person, because he wasn’t functioning under that huge Judgment Umbrella that Christians love so much. He sounded FREE. And while it sounded like an initially scary journey to begin, it sounded like one that would prove more than well worth the effort.

And he was right. It was interesting too, because it was only after I became an atheist that I felt all those things the Christians told me that God would bring me– happiness, confidence, a loving nature, a generous heart, the ability to see everything as beautiful, bright, colorful and breath-taking, money, respect, love from others, freedom from cruelty and abuse– the list goes on.

Suffice it to say, I am one ridiculously happy atheist!

MonZni
United States

I was brought up with a sort of “good-stuff” version of Christianity: heaven, but no hell; Golden Rule, but no rules about homosexuality or masturbation; love, joy, and sweet treats at Christmas AND Easter, but no “original sin” or “he died for your sins.” My mom considered herself a Christian although she didn’t (and doesn’t) toe the line on almost any of Christianity’s teachings, and my dad considered himself an agnostic.

My dad leaned toward a more emphatic version of atheism when my little brother died of cancer while we kids were still in elementary school. Where some parents would turn more firmly to certainty of an afterlife when dealing with this sort of tragedy, I think my dad thought that my sweet little brother’s death was one more piece of evidence that prayer doesn’t work, good deeds buy you no consideration from the universe, and there is no God.

But he didn’t tell us kids that. Many, many people assured us that our little Stanley was up in heaven, with God and Jesus, and very happy. I had comforting dreams about him being up there.

Flash forward to me as a teenager. I was exposed to the hippie version of Jesus. You know, Jesus Christ, Superstar stuff. Jesus with long hair, long robe, and a lot of peace and kindness and acceptance no matter who or what you are. Still a good-stuff version of the religion—and very appealing. I didn’t want to be the kind of hippie that had rampant sex and took a ton drugs, so I became the kind of semi-hippie that sang Christian songs in huge groups of happy-hippy people. Big group hugs and acoustic guitars and circle folk dances and love and peace.

The next step was to actually learn something about the religion I’d adopted. Read the Bible. Find out about apologetics and church history.

At this point, having been a “Jesus freak” for almost two years, I was now in college, enrolled in The Bible As Literature, and part of a Bible study group that met every single night. There was so much appalling stuff in the Bible—I was shocked! Also, even though the kids in my group were really wonderful people, there was an appalling LACK of critical thinking when it came to the Bible and what they thought of as God’s voice (through the gifts of the spirit: prophecy and speaking in tongues and interpretation of such). I met my husband at these Bible study meetings—and we were the only two, often sitting opposite each other, saying, “That doesn’t make sense!” or “That’s a really rotten thing for Jesus to say!” We got together partly because of our shared shock about what Christianity was really all about, and we drifted away from the Christian group for the same reason.

I didn’t stop studying. The more I read about religion, including Christianity, the more I didn’t believe anything like that stuff. The more I turned away from Christianity and religion, the more I was interested in what science said about deep mysteries and complicated issues. It took a while for me to self-identify as an atheist—but really, about three quarters of the way through my freshman year of college, I became an atheist.

C. Earle
United States

This is a bit of a tricky one, since there’s no one particular moment. Instead it’s been a gradual unfolding, a gradual freeing from the need for a god-construct and spirituality itself. I was raised Catholic, and in my own kiddy way, was pretty observant. But I recall questioning certain edicts early on, especially those against non-procreative sexuality or sensual pleasure itself (stick a horny kid in a room filled with naked paintings and tell them that sex is wrong…yeah, sure). However, the real first crack in the base was linked with money and class-consciousness.

We were the only “poor” family in our middle class town. We couldn’t make tuition every month at the parochial schools I went to, so we relied on extra work at functions, scholarships, and sometimes the kindness of donors. We were also on assistance for many years, and while we still went to church each Sunday, Mom made a point out of bringing me to every office and explaining every procedure, and showing me firsthand the bureaucratic circus and the pain of stigma. This financial “slump” we could never seem to get out of was the crucible for not only my adult politics but my religious views. Let me explain: growing up without a lot of cash and shaky support networks (even with certain advantages*) exposes a kid early to the damage done to social and political institutions by faith. Take, for instance, the weird link between wealth and religion – that if you’re rich, God must like you, and all the rest can get bent.

This sort of bullshit influenced the policies (and social stigmas) that ruled our lives for much of my childhood (late 80s**, early 90s). It’s still around, present in the miserable treatment many people receive today if they have the “temerity” to not only not be wealthy, but to not “have faith” God (or the whims of the market) will shower them with riches. Even as a kid, I found a direct link between the mind-shutdown faith requires and the kind of thinking that leads people to approve of wealth-worshipping “I got mine, fuck you” behaviors. This was strike one.

I fiddled around with the ideas of religion itself, not necessarily belief. In adolescence I started hanging around with my Mom’s Trekker buddies myself, which is probably the best thing a young teen can do. That scene was and remains fairly diverse, the people I encountered talked to me like I had a brain. There was, at least in this particular group, a widespread sense of “investigate, debate, relate”; investigate what you don’t know, debate stuff you think you do, but always try to relate with someone different. There were exceptions to this, but that’s my takeaway. This was far different from accepting canned responses and handing over a few bucks each week in tithes. Strike two.

At this time, I started drifting towards more neo-Paganism, preferring its more diverse, gender-equitable and sex-positive attitudes, as well as its ecological awareness and interest in history. We were always a pretty matriarchal family, and I was raised on myth and folklore, so this was a natural progression. I tried various flavors of Wicca for a while, but decided it wasn’t for me. I felt silly, even if I did like dressing like Stevie Nicks and keeping track of moon phases.*** I will say this, though – it felt more genuine to me at that stage in my life than Catholicism did, and I’m still fond of the original ideas that attracted me (much like my remaining fondness for the Corporal Works of Mercy). Strike three.

Even my Mom joined in on this venture. I remember one day we were sitting in our kitchen, mutually “coming out” to one another about being dissatisfied with the Church, with the short shrift women got, and with the hypocrisy of it all. For the rest of her life, Mom had a patchwork Catholic/Pagan thing going on, eschewing Mass attendance, hierarchy, and the gender/class stratification that always comes along with organized religions even as she kept her saints and rosaries. This seemed to help her get by, but I still didn’t feel quite happy with it, although it took me a while to come to terms with that.

The last pit stop on my story here, the big one, also revolves around my mother. She passed away in early 2005 after years of illness. In the last stage of her ordeal, she was in a coma, with all function above the brain stem gone. I came to resent the perkiness of the staff, even as I understood why they may have used it as a professional tool or their own coping mechanism. I also resented sunny platitudes of “oh, God is good!”, “the Lord moves in mysterious ways!”, all of that. No higher brain function – it was as devastating and simple as that. I couldn’t take another prayer.

This coma lasted a couple of months, and midway through she was moved to a nursing home. At that facility, there was one particular nurse that inspired my unspoken wrath, even though she was great at her job and probably is a wonderful human being. She seemed to take a shine to my mother, as much as Mom could have been said to be there. She’d join my family and sing and pray, pat my Mom’s head and call her pet names, call on God to wake her up. Now, I was hardly in my right mind, but I found this one of the most obscene things I’ve ever seen. I’m grateful for the care this nurse gave, but I wish I had the wherewithal to gently tell her to stop, that Mom had passed away, and we were keeping a vigil by her body. To wave belief around in my face, after what I’d been looking at for weeks,well, a punch to the gut would have been preferable. Belief itself was an insult at this point.

That crystallized things for me. Questioning the facile non-answers of traditional religion, and the oddities of non-traditional religions were actually a piece of cake. As I continued along, however, I started to feel more strongly that it was more immoral to chalk things up to a god or gods. I had increasingly difficulty in justifying the impulse to blindly “trust” in something one could never see, never speak with, and never guess its whims. And in the last few years, watching what’s been going on in the US and the Catholic Church – I am more firm in my refusal to sign back up to that. This is far from the cold and lonely stereotype some believers have of atheists and secularists – this was an absolute joy, a feeling of expansion. While I can still understand – but not approve of – why people would cling to a religion or a spiritual framework, it’s not for me. As Joyce said through Stephen Dedalus – non serviam!

*Those advantages are twofold. First, there is race: I am Caucasian and the recipient of many benefits based solely on my skin – unfair as that is, I acknowledge it and try to subvert it when possible or at least make a big noise about its nefarious nature. The second is the kind of education I received: for all the Catholic stuff, those schools did do a pretty good job otherwise, and I’m well on my way to being the first woman in my immediate family to receive a MA!

**I like to joke that I came into the world just in time to see Reagan rip off the White House’s solar panels. Yay, me.

*** Which is still fun, but for secular reasons :)

Liz Damnit
United States