As best as I can remember, I was eight or nine years old, and I was looking through one of my parents’ books that I liked. It was almost an accidental find, or at least I don’t remember anyone showing it to me. I had discovered it on my own. I occasionally went through the large bookshelf my parents had, looking for something that didn’t look terminally boring. On one such occasion I had discovered a Time-Life science book, titled simply “The Stars”. The first time I ever looked at it, it was of course largely over my head, but every now and then I returned to it, and found more and more of it comprehensible, and more and more of it interesting. This early-sixties era Time-Life book introduced me to such marvels as galaxies, globular clusters and supernovae. (In later years it taught me about the Main Sequence, the carbon fusion chain, and the predicted fate of our own sun.)

One day, after admiring the artist’s conception of colliding galaxies near the back, I was paging through it looking for more to read about, and I hit upon a two-page spread that described the early formation of the solar system. It showed a cloud of interstellar dust slowly collapsing from its own gravity, spinning faster as it became denser, until there was enough matter crammed into the center to be a sun, at which point it started to heat up. When pretty much everything had collapsed into a single ball, it was spinning fast enough that it threw off a bunch of extra matter at the equator, where the speeds were fastest (and gravitational attraction was weakest). The ejected matter began repeating the original process in miniature, with several different areas forming their own local balls of matter that eventually drew in everything nearby. Many of them even repeated the part where at the point of maximum rotational speed they threw off a bit of matter from the equator before stabilizing, which in turn eventually collapsed into other balls. Voila: sun, planets, and moons, with the last straggling bits of matter winding up as asteroids or comets.

Pretty typical as explanations go at that age, in that it seemed to raise a bunch of really obvious followup questions, like for example if it just formed out of a bunch of preexisting matter then where the heck did THAT come from? Still, it was very likely easier to explain where a formless cloud of dust came from than a fully formed solar system, so even at that age I could see where this explanation was helpful. It wasn’t trying to do everything, but was just one piece of the puzzle.

I had read these pages before, of course, but on this one day something struck me about it. A light bulb went on within my head. I reread the text to make sure, even though I already knew full well there was no mistake. Here was a description of the formation of the solar system (complete, for the part that it described) that made no reference to God. None. Not even to suggest that God had nudged the cloud into position, or had given some chunk of matter a bit of a backspin in order to get things started, or even that he had carefully watched over it without interfering.

Not even to apologize for not mentioning God. It was that irrelevant.

There were people, I realized, who didn’t believe in God.

There were holes in my logic, I saw (if not immediately, then not long after). Just because these people contradicted the first chapter of Genesis didn’t mean they didn’t believe in God. They might still believe other parts of the Bible were right. Or they might believe that God created the interstellar dust, knowing that it would lead to the solar system and human beings. They might believe in a God I wasn’t familiar with.

But none of those objections really mattered, I realized. This explanation for the formation of the solar system was printed in a regular book, after all, and meant for kids to read. Clearly it wasn’t the work of a handful of lunatics trying to push their wild-eyed beliefs onto children before they were old enough to know better. No, this theory of the solar system’s formation had to be pretty widely accepted. Or even if it wasn’t, they at least were comfortable with the idea that it wasn’t God just stepping in and doing it by hand. And I knew that, even if all those people actually still believed that God existed, they couldn’t speak for everybody. I mean, taking this idea to its logical conclusion was simply too obvious, too compelling. If you could come up with a plausible notion of how the solar system formed just by leaving a bunch of interstellar dust alone for millions of years, then surely the formation of everything else could be explained similarly. So even if everyone who worked on this book believed in God, there were definitely other people out there who didn’t.

And if it truly turned out that there weren’t any other such people, well, there was one now.

If it had turned out that every adult I ever met believed in the Bible, then I wasn’t about to rebel against that. Those are long odds, stupid odds. But something within me, even at that age, didn’t find the Bible stories particularly compelling. They were just too strangely skewed while at the same time trying to be too pat. (Pat in a way that real explanations never seemed to succeed in being.) All I had needed was reassurance that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

The moment I deduced the existence of atheists, I knew that I was one too.

Brian Raiter
United States

I remember growing up and the folks were Catholic (see? I still capitalize it…) and sent me to Catholic school from 2nd-through-8th grade, and then an all-boys Catholic high school (yes, pity me). Good education from that, surely, but with it came a price: learning created doubts. I still remember being 7 years old, being told the Genesis story in religion class and thinking, even at that young age, that God had set-up Adam and Eve; He supposedly was omnicient, so supposedly knew all things, which meant He had set the stage of Eden so man would fall and get original sin. What a shit! (But my young mind, having been filled with the dread of hellfire by the nuns, didn’t express it that way you can be sure).

By the time I left high school, I was sick of Catholicism…but unfortunately still had that foundational brainwashing which made me think there was a God and, since that was coupled with the whole load of Catholic guilt-trip, I was pretty sure that hell was where I’d end up. Over time, I consoled myself with the idea that if God really did know everything, He’d know the background and motivations behind whatever I did and, therefore, would understand and, like a loving parent, forgive me for my mistakes.

Fast forward to my late 40’s by which time I’d become an alcoholic and ended up in Alcoholics Anonymous…going to meetings at least 3 times a week, working those twelve steps, etc. But the one thing they read at the start of every AA meeting says: “Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest” So, yeah, if I wanted to stay sober, they told me I had to be rigorously honest…and find some kind of ‘higher power’ (though they capitalized that as Higher Power…you know, the God thing, a ‘spiritual’ way of life and all that). So, I set out to figure out what my own ‘Higher Power’ is.

And, in the process, my sister gifted me with a ‘Recovery Bible’. Essentially, this is a regular bible where the verses are on one page with a recovery interpretation on the facing page, telling you how each verse pertains to a person’s recovery. However, in reading through the bible (ugh! that was a chore reading the whole thing), that rigorous honesty thing was part of it. And, I had to be honest with myself: it was a load of made-up crap! Not just mythology, but LOUSY mythology. I’ve read better mythology in my Dungeons & Dragons books (which, I think, many years ago helped soften me up for non-belief).

After this, I got a book from the library called “Who Wrote the Bible?”. I highly recommend this scholorly look at who the probable authors were, since it certainly wasn’t Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the more books I read, searching for the ‘right’ spirituality, one that would work for me as my ‘Higher Power’, the more dishonest the whole thing was turning out to be. And, remember, my AA program said I’d only recover and stay sober IF I remained rigorously honest.

My honest and open-minded assessment of ALL gods is: they don’t exist, because IF any did, there’d be some evidence — and there is NONE. Same for the ‘spiritual’, ghosts, afterlife, and any and all kinds of woo. Sure, they ‘exist’, but only in a person’s mind.

So, for me, the cute thing is that getting into that AA ‘spiritual’ program is really what turned me into an atheist. Yep, the truth does set you free.

Rikitiki
United States

Fish paste sandwiches.

Not the kind of answer to the question that you were expecting, I suspect. Also, it’s a more-than-slightly facetious answer and not entirely true, but it’s not entirely untrue either…

My earliest memories of religion are much like those of many others: sitting in a cold and draughty church with my grandparents, getting bored and fidgety, the feel of the hard pew and the dusty smell of my grandmother’s “Sunday best” coat. Or going to Sunday School in the church hall, with pictures on the walls of lions and camels and all the exciting and exotic bits of the bible, such as are wont to capture the imagination of a four-year old. And of bright and shining people telling stories in tones of wonder, and trying to relate their awe at miracles to the experiences of children too young to really have any.

But they were wrong. I’d had experience of stories. I knew that stories told of things that weren’t real, that couldn’t happen, that didn’t now or hadn’t ever been. My bible in those days involved a bear of little brain and a piglet who went hunting heffalumps. I knew that people made these stories up, sometimes to entertain themselves or for their friends, and sometimes just because they didn’t know the answers, and a story is more fun than just a shrug and “I dunno.” I knew that people sometimes made up stories to teach lessons, or what else could be the point of Sunday School?

But Aesop taught that being kind to others would repay in not being eaten by a lion, which is a most important lesson to a four-year-old. Had he but known, the ancient Greek could have given his tale more impact with an allosaur, and I always did prefer a stripy tiger to a lazy lion, but even then I knew you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. If lions were the best he had, at least they made the point.

And what of Christ? What lessons were there here for me to learn? I learned that he could walk on water, and that he cast his nets upon the sea and filled them full of fish. But I didn’t like fish much. I learned that he could heal the sick and make the lame to walk. Well, that I didn’t even think about – I walked because I had my operations and my surgeons and my callipers to wear.

If I did what I was told, would I be able to heal others? Would I have superpowers?

“In a minute,” was the answer. “When you’re older,” or “we’ll see,” the bible says. “Not just now, but maybe later, if you’re good.” It doesn’t take the brightest child to figure out by the age of four just what these phrases mean. They mean “don’t bother me just now, and behave.” They mean “I’m too busy to explain.” They mean “no”.

So the stories had a most unsatisfying ending. Yet these people, with their shining cheerfulness, kept insisting they were true. They told me that he fed a multitude with three loaves of bread and just two fishes, and when he finished there were baskets full of scraps. “But how?” I longed to know. “How did that work?” I tried to understand*.

No-one told me, so I filed it, like so much of what I learned in early years, in a big box in my head labelled “things that grown-ups tell you that aren’t really true, and in time you’ll figure out the reasons why,” and didn’t worry. When they brought out food for us (which was a treat, you understand, and not a thing that happened every week), my stomach over-rode my brain as often happens when you’re four. And I took a bite of sandwich, and I chewed and

FISH PASTE!

YUCK!!!

Postscript/Authors note:
No, the betrayal of a fish paste sandwich masquerading as a meat paste sandwich (which I did like) wasn’t what killed all of religion for me (although I never did forgive Sunday School for it). You see, there really wasn’t ever anything there to kill. It was pretty much always just stories, and not very good or believable ones. I only stopped attending services regularly when I stopped attending a youth group for which regular church-going was a necessary condition of membership, about a decade after the events recounted above. For all of this time, religious observance was always something I thought could only be a social observance for the vast majority of attendees. I mean, any child could see that man had made god in his own image, and that the supernatural was just a way of explaining the natural-but-yet-to-be-understood. To believe otherwise required a level of wilful stupidity which I, in my sheltered naivety, thought had to be really quite rare.

The fish paste sandwich does make a nice metaphor for when I found myself disabused of that notion, though.

*And also, “What did they do with all those scraps? Did they take them into town and feed the poor,” I thought. “Shouldn’t that be the moral of the tale? They’ve left it all half-finished!”

T.E.P.
A Secret Base Under an Antarctic Volcano. (I don’t think I believe that)

My conversion to atheism was less of a de-conversion from religion as it was a personal realisation of what being an atheist represented. In my life I was not surrounded by religion nor was I compelled to find it by family or friends. However, even this is not a guarantee that someone will become an atheist – one only needs look at the numerous conspiracy-theorists in the world today to see how easily irrationality can take root in one’s mind.

So, the beginning of my conversion began with the simple realisation that after reading about the awesome-ness of the T-Rexs, Tricerotops, Great White Sharks and Killer Whales I found the stories of Joshua and Noah to be no more interesting or entertaining than the fairy tales I had been brought up on. Thus at around the age of 8 or 9 I simply decided I had enough with the bible and its silliness and promptly told my mother I wouldn’t be going to Sunday School any more.

But this did not make me an atheist. Rather I began to refer to myself as agnostic (once I learnt what the word meant of course! I was still young) – loudly proclaiming that I believed in a greater power, a personal God, but that this was a God not trapped in any book. A God that existed beyond us – but always there to guide and assist. Indeed, I still prayed every night to this God and I felt he listened. I left school, completed university and entered into work – sinning and fornicating along the way – and still I felt that this personal God was there with me. I could not perceive of a world without a greater power above us nor could I bear to associate myself with the now ingrained view I had of an atheist, that they were arrogant, nihilistic and dismissive by virtue of their disbelief.

And so it was that I found Richard Dawkins The God Delusion one day, in an airport on my way to Johannesburg. And it was within its pages that I started to recognise a deeper appreciation for the world – a world based on rationality and logic. And within its pages I also recognised myself. For here I was clinging to the idea of a personal God despite no evidence to its existence and all the while dismissing the superstition so prevalent in my society – giggling at stories of the ‘tokoloshe’, expressing shared disgust at ‘muti’-killings as well as mocking creationists. I was a hypocrite and it was all there for me to see.

And so it was that one evening, I just refused to pray. I had seen that to be an atheist was not to be closed minded, nor cynical. Rather it was to finally recognise what had begun when I first refused to return to Sunday School – that on looking at the evidence for religion, and finding it to be insufficient, the only honest outcome was atheism.

Breton Vandenberg
South Africa

PS Unless you are South African I doubt you would be familiar with the terms ‘tokoloshe’ and ‘muti’-killings. It is for this reason Google is there for you – I’m sure there are better and clearer definitions out there then I could provide!

My story dates back to 4 years ago during when I was in 6th grade.

We started having our science course in our newly built lab. Our science teacher, who was in her 30s, was a firm believer. Outside the school she was wearing headscarf¹. During a lecture, I realized a framed poster on the floor. I went to the teacher’s desk at the end of the class and said “Something has fallen off here ma’am”. With a sharp voice she replied back “Oh that, they found it among the old lab stuff, I didn’t want to confuse you by hanging stuff like that on the wall.” When I took the poster and started to examine it, she warned me to put it in the trash and walked out of the classroom. As you can guess, there was a detailed description of the tree (evolution) of life on the poster. I didn’t know much about the tree of life or evolution until that day but I pretty much figured that my teacher was irritated of the poster because of her religious beliefs. When I came home I immediately set out to make a research about evolution on the internet and examined the basic written and visual sources on evolution and natural selection for hours. And that day, for the first time in my life, I questioned the all mighty creator on whose existence I didn’t have the tiniest doubt before.

The more I read about evolution, which gives much more humane (and universal) answers to the questions like how we exist than intelligent design does and stands on sound evidence, the more I reasoned, questioned and got curious. All the prevarication of my teacher when I asked her questions about these issues together with the pervasive moralist pressure of the conservationist society all around me, stimulated me to inquire a lot more and drove me to explore further. With time, being skeptical also helped me to get rid of my other stupid supernatural fears and thus made me sleep more peacefully and take more confident steps in life. Besides, as it has always bothered me that the god was holding men dearer and commanding only to women to cover themselves, I questioned more. It was not very difficult for me to come up with the conclusion that this whole religion and belief systems were nothing more than sick dreams of a patriarchal society.

As time went by, with all these thoughts on my mind, I got rid of my ignorant superstitions, and I am finished with feeling guilty about being a woman and with being treated like a second-class person. I am much more aware that I’m holding the rights to speak about my life and my body, and I think I am much more peaceful and confident than if I were a religious person. This is why I’ve been an atheist for three years now.

Gülşah Ökmen
Turkey

¹Translator’s note: it is not allowed to teach with headscarfs in public schools in Turkey.

(Gülşah Ökmen was the winner of a coming out essay contest held in Turkey on this Turkish atheist blog.)

I have had the unfortunate opportunity to watch my grandmother mentally and physically decline over the past few years. I will always remember her as the strong and independent woman who helped me grow into the man I am today. The reality is that she is no longer that person, she suffers from dementia as well as various physical ailments. All that is left is the shell. She remembers no one, cannot feed or toilet herself, blankly stares at the wall all day and requires the assistance of 2 nurses just to get out of bed.

Watching this occur over the course of several years caused me to start questioning my faith. Why would my loving and caring God allow this to happen? What purpose could this possibly serve? Of course, asking church folks got me the same generic answer that it was all part of God’s plan. But I could not accept that, I felt that if this was his plan then his plan sucks. I started to feel uneasy at church, watching people praise the man who was responsible for my grandmothers demise made me angry.

At this point my faith was shaky but I was looking for reasons to hang on. I attended a bible reading group and for the first time listened to the bible objectively and literally. There was no way that I could buy what was being sold in that book.(It still amazes and embarrasses me that for 30 years I never questioned anything from that book.) As I brought up my thoughts and feelings I was pretty much told that you can’t be a believer if you question the bible. That is when it hit me…..I did not believe any of this crap.I felt a sense of relief because the world began to make more sense when viewed from a secular perspective. Things like cancer, hurricanes, terrorists and my grandmothers dementia were easier to deal with when accepted for what they were….shit that just happens in a random world.

I feel as though this revelation has left me even more appreciative of life. The randomness of everything and the improbable odds of me even being here overwhelm and inspire me.

Thanks for the forum to tell my story, I cannot be as upfront about my beliefs, or lack there of, as I would like due to negative impacts it could potentially have on my employment situation. Blogs like this do a great service in helping me feel connected with other like minded individuals.

Chris J
United States

I am an atheist because I’m queer, specifically a pansexual transgirl. While I was in denial over my true self, I prayed to God nightly to just “Make these feelings go away, and make me a normal boy”, or “Please, take this pain away…just make me a normal girl…”. All I ever got in response was silence. When I almost took my life over it, I finally admitted that there was no god, and I was a girl. And when I came out to my parents, then they threw me out, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of “loving God” would make a childs parents declare them “disgusting” and an “abomination”.

That’s why I’m an atheist.

Alexandria Schneider
United States

As a child I was a devout Lutheran. I studied my catechism lessons and the Bible. We had good pastors who explained that Genesis should not be taken literally, and that science and the Bible were completely compatible.

Then I got to high school. It was the late ’60s and the church started taking back what it had taught me. It was OK to kill. Wealth meant God loved you. Women were only deserving of respect if they played their roles and didn’t make a fuss. Ditto minorities.

Leaving the church made me stronger, and the church weaker.

The church is very weak now, yet I’ve never felt better.

I don’t miss God at all. Any of them.

Mark Gisleson
United States

My parents found God (He’s lost a lot for an omnipresent being, wouldn’t you say?) when I was around 14. Seeing how important this was for them, I tried to foster that “perfect” family image by taking God into my life. For 8-and-some years I was part of youth group, and later baptized (by choice) as an Evangelical Christian. I did all of this with a deluded belief (not only the God one) that being part of this would bring my family closer. Only a teenager could think that healthy relationships could be built on lies…

In that time I never stopped asking questions; enough questions to attract the attention of the Youth Group Leader, a minister’s wife with a touch for making delicious chocolate-chip cookies. I think she always knew I’d end up on the dark side, far from her cookies. She was determined on showing me the life stories of men and women, atheists them all, that had found (again, His Almighty Ass is lost) God and repented from their sinful ways. I thank God (figure of speech, people) for attending this group though. Out of the 13 teens that attended, 7 are now strong atheists. I’m pretty sure our conversations led to this in one way or another.

My parents have become more and more involved with church, and I’ve grown farther apart from it. They hold prayers before every event, church group on Thursdays at home; my dad has even been invited to give sermons at church. It’s not that sweet a deal for me, you’d say. We grow further apart in our ideologies, but thankfully our relationship as a family has grown somewhat stronger. I’ve yet to tell them my (dis)belief because it’s what they stand for. God easily makes up for half of what they do on a daily basis. My brothers and I have had talks, but not blunt ones. Little by little I do away with their blind faith, in a soft-spoken manner, like when the dentist tells you gently that something’s not going to hurt. They look up to my parents a lot, so confrontation is in my interest, just not at this stage in their lives. But it’s coming quite soon.

My country’s another obstacle for free thought. There are some small communities that foster this kind of thinking, but as a whole the Dominican Republic is made of devout Catholics. You might not be a church-goer, and there’d be nothing wrong with that, but as soon as you express your atheism clearly, you’re an outcast of the (theoretically) healthy community.

I could give a hundred reasons for my atheism, but they’d all boil down to basic curiosity. Asking enough of the right questions will, in my opinion, eventually lead you down to atheism’s (or at the very least, agnosticism’s) door. Why do the good die young? Why is there poverty? How does Fox News still continue to exist? 42?

I wish, from the bottom of my heart that this war, one of attrition, between rationality and irrationality (and not that good vs evil crap) would be over. My atheism is one part of me and it doesn’t entirely define who I am; my way of thinking brought me to atheism, not the other way around.

Thing is, I hate being angry because some loud-mouthed evangelical is riding a 60-feet-tall “high horse” and judging people as if they were God. I hate being angry at basic civil and human rights being discarded for groups that are object of God’s wrath in the years before electricity. I hate listening to religious folk forgive, in theory, those who cross them, but then turning around and siccing God upon their enemies as if He were their very own, private avenger. I hate being angry at the stupidity that surrounds me, but until it’s dealt with I don’t think I’ve got much of a choice.

And these people are sometimes funny to watch (in a Crocodile-Dundee-wild-animals-let-loose kind of way).

Elias Ahmed Serulle
Dominican Republic

I am an atheist because I cannot see any logical reason to be otherwise.

I was raised new age/pagan and used karma to explain why my life was such a mess as I became a heavy drug user and drinker.

I always enjoyed laughing at silly Christian beliefs, but once I gave up drugs and cleared my mind I started to turn that same skeptical eye on to my own beliefs, and found them just as laughable, if not more so.

Despite the 12 step program telling the world the only way to get clean is through god, I found that without drugs clouding my senses god became irrelevant.

Leela Moses
New Zealand