I am an atheist because I read.

I was raised in Rome Italy by a vaguely Catholic mother in a pretty Catholic country. However, since I was not forced to go to church outside of Christmas and Easter, I didn’t take my first communion until I was 11 (and even then I studied my catechism with an extremely liberal nun) and my upbringing was never based on the rules and guilt-trips that are typical of the Catholic faith I did not immediately question the existence of God or the church itself. I just was not exposed to anything that was so explicitly divorced from reality from the perspective of a child. The first thing that I realized was that prayer was just not working out for me. This lead me to thinking, am I doing it right? What does being a Catholic even mean? What am I attesting to when I label myself at one? At the age of 12 I picked up the Bible and actually started to read it.

I am an atheist because I’ve experimented.

By age 13 I was studying ancient Roman history as is to be expected given the city in which I grew up. It struck me that the content of the Bible was no less fantastical than the wonderful stories I was learning about the gods that the Romans believed in. I came to the conclusion that all religions must be equally true. As my upbringing very much encouraged the belief in the superstitious and magic, as my mother is still a strong believer in everything from faith healings to fairies, I had now become a polytheist, I laid flower offerings at Minerva’s temple in the Roman forum, I practiced Wicca and dabbled in pretty much any forgotten religion I could get my hands on.

I am an atheist because I reasoned.

Although I remained a pagan until the age of 17 when I first went to college, it had become more of a ritual than a true belief. I enjoyed keeping holidays like All Hallow’s Eve, I used my prayers as a source of comfort being in a strange new country where I had to adjust. I didn’t submit my faith to the sort of scrutiny I eventually knew it deserved. It was simply something to fall back on, something to keep me company, but never something I openly shared or overly contemplated. I began to transition out of feelings of faith as I made new friends, as I realized that if I was ashamed to share with others my beliefs, it must mean that they are completely ridiculous. I had now become an agnostic.

I am an atheist because I was honest with myself.

I did not identify myself as an atheist until I was 20. By then I was in my third year in college and had fully understood the scientific method. I had shied away from the term “atheist” because I was under the misguided notion that being an atheist meant being absolutely certain that there was no God. To me, this seemed as obtuse and arrogant as being absolutely 100% certain that there is a God. However once I began to fully appreciate the scientific method I realized that this was not the case. There is nothing in this life that we can really be absolutely 100% certain about, but I began to see my lack of belief like a null hypothesis.

I am an atheist because there has been no reason for me to believe in any God. I have not been presented with nor come across a single miraculous or inexplicable event that contradicts my assumption that no God exists. However, this does not mean that such an event could never happen. The day I experience something that would give credence to a God I am perfectly happy to refute my null hypothesis, but until that day comes, it holds strong.

Crys
Italy

I am a long time reader of your blog. It has introduced me to many new concepts regarding feminism and atheism and has helped me greatly to shape the way I view my atheism today as well as my political/social stance and support for feminism. Thank you for these insights and for the time you take to run this blog. As part of my thanks, I have provided my story below for how and why I became an atheist.

I was raised in a Lutheran family in Winona, Mn. Our family attended church every Sunday, but we never talked about our religion around the house. A few years before my confirmation classes commenced I decided to read the bible. I found it obtuse, abstruse, ambiguous, contradictory, unnecessarily repetitive, and with a tendency to prattle on over irrelevant details. When I was 13 and attending confirmation, I started asking some serious questions. None of my confirmation teachers answered my questions to my satisfaction and it became pretty clear to me that our confirmation courses were less about exploration of our faith and more about indoctrination.

I started to have my doubts about religion and I didn’t know how to take my family’s silence on the matter. Was their silence an affirmation that religion was highly suspect, or was religion just too personal of a subject to broach? I sensed that I would not get clear answers at home.

For me, high school history, anthropology, and sociology were the first courses and sources of knowledge to expose religion as a sham. At the time I never even considered science as a path for leaving religion or that religion and science were naturally opposed to each other. By the time I was 16, I considered myself an atheist and really had no doubts about the matter. But the strangest thing was occurring; as I explored the subject with my closest friends, the people whom I believed thought most like myself, I found that they considered themselves believers. I was floored. Why was I alone in thinking that religion was a hoax?

In college I studied Physics and, although I do not work in a laboratory, I consider myself a scientist. In college I started to learn how science and religion are not compatible and I finally started to meet some atheist friends. Since leaving college it has been harder to come across other atheists. Coming out, on some occasions, has been costly and painful. I even had one boss tell me that my problem was that I was, “…a goddamn atheist”. I don’t think he recognized his own irony.

My family found out about my atheism by accident and I know that they are uncomfortable with it. It turns out their silence was not an affirmation of religion’s ludicrousness. I now have my own children. I try to let them know that we can talk about any subject in the house (sex, religion, politics, sexual orientation, etc.) at any level they desire. I don’t want them to spend years wondering what their parents think. Even more importantly, I encourage them to read, study and investigate so they can form their own, informed opinions over such matters.

The online atheist community has been a great source of comfort to me. It has offered me an opportunity to be introspective about my atheism and has helped my perspective on the matter to grow and evolve. I no longer feel so isolated. Your blog, and the works of others from Richard Dawkins to Rebecca Watson, is important to atheists out there like me who have been unable to find support in our local communities.

Chad Brown
United States

It’s been an interesting change in perspective for my mother. She was raised Church of England (Protestant) in High Wycombe, England, and remembers, as a child, the first time she met someone who didn’t believe in god. The initial response was to cry. The secondary response was to think: “Convert!”. My Dad was an altar boy as a kid, but his family were not as devout as my mother’s. Irregardless they met, grew up, got married, and then immigrated to Canada.

I was born a couple of years later. By this time my parents, particularly my mother, were no longer as devout as my grandparents and other relatives, and going to church was not a regular part of our lives. However there was a large brass crucifix on the wall of our bedroom hall, I was sent to Sunday School for a while, and remember doing some praying by myself before I went to bed.

I figured out a quite a young age that Santa Claus didn’t make sense, and applaud my parents for being honest with me when I asked. I was also an early reader, thanks to my mother’s efforts, and not long afterward someone (I don’t remember, probably a relative) gave me a large, thick, illustrated, children’s bible. I read the whole thing, cover to cover. It was certainly an entertaining read, but my mother now proudly relates that after I finished reading it, that I concluded the whole thing was nonsense and told her so.

From then on I was an atheist, and so were my parents and younger siblings. In high school we covered the Greek/Roman gods, and read “Inherit the Wind”, which gave me ample opportunity to express my opinions. A female student made my day when her essay was read in class. It included a discussion on Mary and Joseph: “An angel makes Mary pregnant. What kind of excuse is that!? If I came home and told my mother that an angel made me pregnant…”

While studying at UBC in Vancouver, I attended the annual “Does god exist?” debates sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ. Usually I was disappointed in the debating abilities of the Con side, and wished that I was a better debater myself. I even heard about David Suzuki attending one and getting angrier and angrier at how the Pro side was misrepresenting science.

Years later I read about Richard Dawkins in Discover magazine, did some research, and started collecting books. Consequently I’m a much better debater and look forward to JW’s knocking on my door so that I can refine my skills. As I Science/Math teacher in high school, I also encourage my students to think for themselves, and not accept things as true because an authority figure – including myself – tells them that it is true without evidence.

Now my parents, particularly my mother, and I enjoy reading Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, and discussing the ridiculous and irritating things the religious do around the world.

Michael Glenister
Canada

I grew up in a rural area of Finland and went to a tiny school of about thirty pupils. As such, I now suppose their education methods could get away with being less than mainstream. Being only about seven to eight years old, we were taught Biblical stories as though they were the truth of what happened.

I was a personality that would find the thought of a perfect, just, omnipotent authority appealing. Being an obedient, yet ingratiating child I strove to act polite and hide my flaws from God in an effort to appease him. All in a very similar manner to my faith in Santa Claus. However, I also had a very absolute sense of morality. Since the Christian stories that I had heard taught that even a malicious thought is a sin, I figured that I was not in control of my own sinfulness. A person would be sent to either Heaven or Hell according to their sins. This made me panic, since I would have to live my entire life in constant fear of a divine punishment that might not even be fair. Normally, I would disguise my misdeeds and pretend to be nothing but pure of thought… but how could I even attempt to disguise and pretend in front of an omnipotent, omniscient God?

One day, I finally broke in tears due to this sense of insecurity. My father asked what was wrong, and I opened up to him. What he said to me afterwards was nothing short of comforting as hell. Something along the lines of “There are thousands of religions on this planet, many of which promise eternal comfort and threaten with eternal agony. And everybody believes theirs is the right one. Christianity just happens to be dominant in this particular country, so take it easy, you are not bound to anything.” This did not make me truly atheist, though. I just mentally told God, “Well, it seems that despite all your greatness, you haven’t provided me with any proof that you exist. So I’ll continue to live my life without you. No hard feelings, but you can’t expect me to have faith in you when you don’t give me a proper reason to do so.”

There was a subsequent chapter of my life where I was, in fact, fundamentalist… in a very special way. Although it is rather hilarious and would make this story much more entertaining, it’s also so incredibly embarrassing that I don’t quite feel ready to disclose it, even anonymously. Let’s just say that I was extremely devoted and routinely exercised some serious fact-bending to justify my brand of religion.

Since having gotten over that phase, I was a live and let live -style nontheist. I figured that since there are so many people who are fervent believers in God, they must all have very good reasoning. As an outsider I couldn’t possibly know enough about their beliefs to criticize them. This changed when I started frequenting a certain forum on the Internet where certain posters in particular, who had received “orthodox upbringings”, were very vocal about what their religions ordered and forbade them to do. This opened my mind to the possibility that… maybe the human mind really can be so willfully illogical as to endlessly defend a mindset that has some serious flaws in it? After all, I had been through this too.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The End of Faith by Sam Harris upon skimming through a selection of books in an online library. At first, I thought the writer must have been some sort of radical. Yet his arguments, backed up by statistics as opposed to meandering pseudo-philosophy, were such a refreshing treat that I became a “radical” myself in my stance to religion. Eventually, my sister found my copy and mentioned that she had read a similar book too, by Richard Dawkins. And so on.

Krio Gnosz
Finland

I was a devout Catholic. I believed. I believed in literal transubstantiation, I belived in Hell, I believed in the Virgin Mary, I believed in Adam and Bloody Eve and the damned Deluge! I was, I suppose, a victim of the phenomenon put forward by Dawkins in which adults tell you, in a serious voice, that something is literally true and you have a tendency to believe them.
When the priest said “let us pray” I really did, and a friend of mine in the pew next to me used to pray with an incredible intensity that made me envious. So what happened? Very basically I left my childhood.

The questioning that is customary in one’s teenage years led to me to realise the absurdity of some of the propositions. For instance the creation story was completely incompatible with evolution which living in England was considered science and not some infernal little secret. But the one thing that really led me to seriously question my pre-pubescent faith was the utter ridiculousness of the notion of an all loving, all forgiving father who would let you burn forever if you didn’t believe. I began to be exposed to the mental gymnastics of Catholic theologians who attempted to explain away quandaries like “what about people who never heard of Jesus?” and “what about babies who die before they get baptised?”. It was also revealing to me that the age of your confirmation at which you declare, before the Church, that you as an adult of sound mind accept the teachings of the Catholic faith and are baptised again as a permanent member of the Church began to diminish from fourteen (!) to eight (!!). What sort of eight year old could possibly be ready to declare their eternity? The cynic in me might suggest that this rewinding age of responsibility might go some way to explain the disgusting scandals that have plagued the church in recent years.

For years I struggled with faith (the imagery of eternal damnation is horrible enough to resonate with a young adult and I’m not ashamed to admit that the main motivation of my flirtation with Catholicism in my older years was fear) eventually settling on what I thought was a reasonable position of agnosticism. Then I read The God Delusion. Dawkins’ description of himself on his scale of belief seemed to gel perfectly with what I was. I didn’t believe and hadn’t for decades! I was a de-facto atheist, and because of stupid religious apologism I never realised it.

To put this in perspective the bulk of my catholic teaching came from my public Catholic school. My family were fairly liberal. My dad is a nominal Anglican protestent to whom Sundays were an excellent opportunity to sleep in. My mother describes herself as Catholic but her statement on belief is “I think that there’s something….”. Her mother was the daughter of Irish catholics and while being very devout she indicated she did believe in reincarnation. I think the liberal nature of my family’s beliefs can be summed up in the female members’ reaction to one of my cousin’s neighbours, a gay couple:

“It’s such a shame that those to are gay isn’t it? They’re both GORGEOUS!”

Imagine then the struggles facing an atheist brought up in a truly devout or dare I say fanatical household. I had it easy.

Tony Moss
United Kingdom

Because there is no reason to not be it.

Diego Rosato
Italy

At some point in my teens I became rather disenchanted with being Catholic. Well, not with all of Catholicism. Mainly I was disappointed over the sacrament of Confirmation. All my life my parents and elders told me God was real and that Confirmation (“bierzmowanie” as they call it in Polish) was going to prove it to me. The Great Catholic Bishop James Timlin traveled all the way down from Scranton to anoint my fellow Catholics and me with the Sacred Chrism and make me a man in the eyes of God. We were all going to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Finally the moment came. One by one were brought before His Excellency, The Bishop.

He made his rounds to all us who spent the last decade learning and preparing for this second baptism. While I waited, I imagined what it would be like to finally meet YHWH in person. I pictured lots of singing and soft lights. Those around me straighted up as His Excellency approached. At last, it was finally my turn. He said some words of prayer. I responded. I closed my eyes and I was ready to faint and receive the gifts of the Almighty. “Be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit.” I felt a greasy thumb smear a rough triangle across my brow. I closed my eyes tighter, waiting for the Holy Spirit to make himself known. I took several slow deep breathes in anticipation. The bishop moved on to the person next to me and the cycle repeated. I looked to the left. I glanced to the right. Everyone had shiny, sticky foreheads that fittingly smelled like church. Just prior to the mass, all everyone was talking about was how much cash they were getting from their relatives for being confirmed. Cash was nice, but I felt no Holy Spirit and I was let down. Maybe the Bishop was just bad at anointing. Maybe I didn’t say the words sincerely enough. Whatever the reason, it didn’t happen to me. I must have dropped the Gift of the Holy Spirit or something.

A girl from school invited me to go to her Wesleyan youth group several times and I got to see how Christians discuss the Bible. Catholics don’t discuss the Bible. The Catholic Brothers and Fathers tell you what the stories are and what they mean. It was nice to have an interactive forum for a change. However, they never discussed the parts of the Bible where the morally questionable stuff happened– like the part where Lot is seduced by his daughters (Genesis 19:30-36) or where bald Elijah gets Yahweh to send two bears to kill the youth that mock his lack of hair (2 Kings 23-25). I didn’t know about these stories either so selective teaching is alive in well not just in Catholicism..

A pivotal test of faith for me came when I saw an TV ad for a debate about God in 2007. It was to be on ABC’s Nightline. Martin Bashir was going to moderate a debate over whether God exists.

It featured the somewhat famous actor Kirk Cameron and YouTuber Ray Comfort proclaiming that they would demonstrate evidence that God exists. The other debate team was two people named Brian and Kelly from some obscure organization called the “Rational Response Squad”. Who were these damned dirty atheists claiming there was no YHWH? Those fuckers– how dare they challenge the evidence of God! I genuinely was excited to finally see evidence, at long last. I wanted once and for all know whether my mom and dad’s religion had something to it. I wanted to be a better Catholic and this was the incentive for me to finally grow up and be responsible for my sins and fell the power of the Holy Spirit.

The promos of the debate promised that Ray and Kirk were going to prove God exists without invoking scripture. I was finally going to see this for myself. I missed the original broadcast of Nightline because of my work schedule, so I caught the debate as clips posted to YouTube. The opening statement from Ray left me aghast. His claim was that “using eyes that see and a brain that works” we can see that we are standing on God’s creation. A creation needs a creator. Therefore, YHWH exists. Creationism. Plus he threw in a sermon about sinning while invoking the ten commandments (from scripture). The same shit I heard all my life. The bit about buildings needing builders and paintings needing painters, was trumped in grade school science class when we learned the Earth’s creation is plausibly explained by the process of accretion. No YHWH required.

Brian and Kelly didn’t even need to say a word. To me, they already won. Kirk and Ray were the best that religion had to offer on national television? Brian and Kelly went on to point out the philosophical and logical flaws in Ray’s and Kirk’s arguments. Atheism trounced the foundations of YHWH so soundly, I could not ever go back to believing in that bat shit craziness anymore. Only then did it make obvious sense why the Holy Spirit didn’t visit me at Confirmation. For the first time I saw truly rational people telling the religious, to their faces, that they were not only full of shit, but that their burden of proof is not met by a self-contradicting bronze age tome cobbled together by a committee who performed the miracle of turning monotheism into polytheism by inventing the Trinity™, a concept which oddly is never hinted at in said tome.

In the years since then I’ve enjoyed watching guys like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens debate creationists and apologists in the dozens of YouTube clips available on the subject. Not once has any of the religious put forth anything credible to show the existence of their deity. The burden of proof has always been on theism and their burden is no longer mine.

Tom J
United States

The first reason for me is that church was boring. We had an old, nice man for a pastor who I distinctly remember recycling the same sermon at least three times (“Humble yourself and you will be exalted, exalt yourself and you will be humbled” – clear enough, right? But no, we need a half hour sermon relating this to some crap in the bible). There weren’t any fun activities that were church-related. I hated the boring old hymns and the old geezers I had to stand next to and listen to them sing awfully. My dad once made a joke about communion – “You get a little snack today, kids.” But it was actually a slight motivating factor – the communion bread was tasty. Little did dad know it really was the only thing my brother and I had to look forward to in church at times. Apart from the normal angst at having to get up early, I really hated having to dress up. For what? They say god loves you no matter what, so why the hell do I need to wear a nice sweater to impress him? Oh, it is not about impressing god, it is about impressing everyone else.

I remember a sunday where the ususal reverend couldn’t make it so they had some fire-and-brimstone asshole get up and run the show for a day. He told the men not to “look with lust” on women, for that was adultery. For some reason the phrase stuck with me, and when going through puberty I started noticing breasts on women of all ages, but at the same time feeling ashamed about it. I eventually got over that but it sure was annoying.

The only thing that made church tolerable in high school was the fact that they filmed the services, and I learned how to run the camera. This paid off in college when I easily got a job with the A/V department at minimum wage. Thanks religion!

In late elementary school, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was on PBS. Now that show filled me with awe and wonder, and explained a lot of stuff that church glossed over or ignored. My jaw dropped at the sophisticated animation (for 1980 or so) of polymerase spiraling up some DNA, grabbing nucleotides, and building an exact copy of the split molecule on both sides. So that’s how it works! Awesome! I want to learn more about genetics! There were many other moments on that show that made things clear and inspired me to learn more. I brought it up in science class in 5th grade, “When I was watching Cosmos the other night, they explained that” and all the other students would roll their eyes, because they’d heard that line before.

In 8th grade I actually read almost all of my chemistry textbook over one weekend, again captivated by how the world actually works, with protons and electrons that have opposite charges, and how the charges seek to neutralize each other in chemical reactions. It explained why salt is a cube, why plastic is durable, and why metal conducts electricity, all at once. You never get this in church.

I had a close friend in high school. We were both extreme science nerds, and took three years of Latin as well, just because it was hard. But my friend went the way of creationism in 12th grade, believing the earth was 6000 years old and that Jesus was coming back after the rapture. At one point I went with him to some church where they had a ventriloquist/puppet operator who told christian jokes, bringing on the awkwardness of feeling obligated to laugh. I was still wavering at that point, and may have come close to making the circular connection in my brain that makes christians feel warm and fuzzy all the time, which they call “being saved.”

But later, I didn’t buy any of my friend’s arguments. He said it all came down to your assumptions, which I have heard other creationists retreat towards since that time. I saw him once after graduating high school, I think, and then pretty much didn’t bother tracking him after that. He was the poster boy of a wasted mind to me for two decades.

College was of course eye-opening. I took genetics, biogeography, anatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology, and started reading Richard Dawkins’s books. I took a lot of anthropology, and I have to say it was more of a distraction than anything, but it did lead to some good times and interesting experiences. I learned about cultural relativism, which is the belief that cultures need to be understood on their own terms and that all are worthy of preservation and respect. I don’t buy that so much any more, given knowledge of people living under Sharia law, for example. But I did learn about archaeology which is about empirical evidence of past events. I worked as an archaeologist (“field tech”) for a few years after college.

I also took some geology in college, although somewhat late in my Junior year. Had there been enough time, I would have changed majors. The field trips taught me to see things in hills and along roads that my eye had glossed over before. The earth was clearly very old for such complexity to be present, no doubt about it, and I had only seen a very small portion of it. I started reading Steven Jay Gould’s books about that time.

I also had a good friend in college that was as nerdy as me and like-minded about a lack of a benevolent or even interactive god. We used call up christian hotlines and harrass the racist/sexist idiots at the other end with questions about morality that they gave extremely bad advice about. My friend asked if it was okay to have a freind that was a muslim who was gay. The answer was no, of course. I used to go off about design flaws in anatomy at them, such as the fact that the esophagus and trachea cross making it easy for humans to choke, to see if they had any sensible reply, and they never did.

Somewhere in early college I learned about Richard Feynman too. It is hard not to agree with that guy.

And I got into Rush – listen to Permanent Waves sometime.

I should mention a lapse into irrationality I had for a few years. This is embarrassing, but I read Whitley Streiber’s ‘Communion’ and its sequels, and I believed a lot of it, and was scared by it to the point that some nights I couldn’t sleep for fear of aliens hiding in the closet. But who do I have to thank for clearing my head of such nonsense? Carl Sagan. I read ‘The Demon-haunted World’ and was cured.

I got to grad school after my stint as a field archaeologist, and majored in geology. It mostly solidified my well-established atheism, through better understanding of the complexity of the geologic record and deep time required for it. Creationists have no adequate answer for the geologic record – they run away from it, or lie about it.

And of course, most recently I’ve been reading Pharyngula.

I saw my creationist friend from high school at the 20-year reunion, and things were amicable enough. I’m a geologist now, and guess what he is – an accountant. No science for him.

James Stuby
United States

I am an atheist.

I guess i became an atheist when i was still in primary school (for the non-Brits out there, thats ages 5 to 11). I used to be christian. My parents had helped re-open a run down Church of England church and my family and a few others became the first parishioners there. I carried a big candle during mass, wore a robe and had a wooden crucifix on a leather cord and generally helped out with the little chores during the service along with a bunch of other kids. Its safe to say that i had absolutely no understanding of the religion of which i actively partook. To me Jesus was a lovely man with a beard who nice dead people went to live with. God was a kindly father figure. All of the atheist arguements and objections to faith with which I am now very familiar were utterly unknown to me. I was perhaps aware of a place called hell but that was reserved for murderers and Hitler.

I can no longer remember my exact age or my exact reasons but one day i decided that i should read the bible. That pretty much did in any faith I once held. I had foolishly neglected to get a recommended list of chapters from my priest and had started at the start. The first thing that struck my mind was that the bible was clearly wrong. Even back then i knew the universe was some 14 billion years old and the earth some 4.5 billion. My paltry science education was wildly at odds with God doing the whole thing in seven days and breathing life into clay men. But what really got me was how poorly written it was. Have you ever tried to read the bible sequentially, start to finish? Its incredibly dull.

I’m blessed (lol) in that i have fantastic parents who encouraged me from a very young age to read. I devoured books with a pace that put my classmates to shame and although i was hardly a critic, i could very rapidly spot that this book was crap. During primary school I read the Hobbit many times and even the Lord of the Rings and those I found to be good books. The bible could not hold a candle to them. It was clearly the same genre, there were wizards and monsters, magic and battles, heroes and villains (more on them in a second), all it really lacked was a likeable character to emphasise with, through whom we could enjoy the story (C3PO or a hobbit for instance). It clearly wasn’t real. More than that, it struck me that some of the passages i was reading really made God out to be somewhat of an arsehole.

Example: In church and from snippets of conversation here and there I was aware that Moses led the Jews out of Egypt and that Pharaoh did not agree with this and chased the fleeing Jews. God foiled nasty ol’ Pharaoh by allowing the jews to escape though the red sea, parting it before them and crushing the pursuing Egyptians. That was exodus as far as i was concerned. What the bible actually says is that when Moses asks Pharaoh to let his people go, Pharaoh actually agrees! But then God changes his mind. Why? Why would a sane person do that? Wasn’t that exactly what God had asked Moses to do? Why change Pharaohs mind when you just got what you wanted? It just got worse from there. God acts like a spoilt bully, demanding obedience and frequently making the lives of his followers miserable with arbitrary rules or freak punishments. I realised that not only did i no longer like god, i also recognised him as a poorly written villain.

I’ve always been a nerd and into my fantasy and sci-fi. I know how heroes and villains act in literature. Heroes protect the weak, fight evil, sacrifice themselves to protect others and try to make the world a better place. Villains demand loyalty, punish failure harshly and brutalise their foes. After reading the bible, it was clear to me. God was nothing but a fantasy setting villain. Even Jesus doesn’t cut the hero grade (although he might make a suitable naive sidekick for a real hero). Dying on the cross seems like little sacrifice when you are the son of god and know that you’ll be ending up in paradise as a god just as soon as you shed your mortal flesh. Hell, i’d be willing to suffer six hours of crucifixion for super powers, let alone full godhood. Only 6 hours too. Crucifixion was supposed to be a long drawn out death from thirst, heat or starvation, sometimes lasting days. He got off a bit light.
No, it was clear to me. Gandalf and Aragorn were far superior heroes to God and Christ. And all of them were fiction.

After losing my faith i pretty much ignored religion until university. It’s easy to do here in the UK. At university i began to look around for a religion, i wasn’t really looking for big answers. Science had pretty much beaten religion to them for me. I just wanted to see if any of the faiths out there actually made sense to me. I looked at Christianity again very briefly, then paganism, Satanism (of the Anton Le Vay type), various occult groups (OTO, etc) and Buddhism. All of it transparent claptrap. One day i found transhumanism and realised that this was it. This was what i already believed, this made sense to me. This is what i was.
The great thing about Transhumanism is that its not a faith. Its a philosophy. Basically it couples humanism with an urge to improve the human condition. Because it isn’t a faith it has all kinds of viewpoints within it. You have your Kurzweilian singularitarians sure, but even in that group, you have a huge range of opinion on when, to what degree, how, where, etc. Its a conversation, rather than a commandment.

I’ve since found skepticism and joined the Greater Manchester Skeptics. Skeptism i see as a filter to my transhumanism. One keeps me inspired, the other keeps me grounded in reality. My atheism now is very much a side effect of the skepticism and Transhumanism. My skeptic side tells me there is no good evidence for a god, that there are thousands of gods from all kinds of cultures and that the big faiths got big from very real world reasons (Roman empire adopting christianity, incredibly muslim military successes, etc). My transhumanism tells me that gods are old news. An antiquated way of looking at the world and something that holds mankind back from being better than it is and should hence be removed.

Atheism is not enough. It is a necessary state, but not the end of the journey by any means.

Gribble the Munchkin
United Kingdom