Why I am an atheist – Daz

I’ve tried to put this into words a couple or three times before, always talking about why I’m an Atheist, and never with any great deal of success. Partly that’s because the socio-political aspects are so often stated by so many people (most of them much better writers than me, to boot) that it’s hard to really say anything new, but also partly, I think, because I never became an atheist. Apart from a brief period in my early teens of wondering vaguely, and I have to say rather casually, whether there might be some form of deist ‘first-cause’ sort of god, I’ve been an atheist all my life. It’s kinda hard to do a deconversion story without the deconversion! The question for me is, rather, how did I become an Atheist with a capital ‘A’? You know, strident, shrill; a nasty horrible persecutor of Christians and all that jazz. The answer—or this attempt at it—is likely to be a bit rambling, I’m afraid.

Let’s start with Santa.

I can’t actually recall believing in Santa. As far back as I remember, he seemed like a shared joke between my parents and I. Their pretence seemed knowingly transparent, and I went along with it as part of what I assumed was the joke. I’ve no idea if they realised that’s the way I saw it, but it’s how it looked from my perspective.

I also don’t remember ever not being able to read, and as with most kids, ‘reading,’ to me, meant ‘stories.’ Fiction, and lots of it.

Thirdly, to round off what we might call my early scepticism, I also remember being exposed to Bible stories for the first time (in Caen primary school, Braunton, Devon, if you’re interested). It’s not that I ever, to my recollection, thought they were silly or illogical as stories. I just didn’t think they were supposed to be real. I’d already come across the idea of fables, via Æsop (read to me by my mum I should imagine. I doubt I was advanced enough to be reading them for myself), and knew them to be basically fiction. Anyway, the Biblical tales were mostly presented as fables, and though it was explained to us that such tales had morals, the fiction side of things was much more weighted in my mind than moralising. They really didn’t do much for me, though Jonah and the whale was diverting for a while, until the frankly boring whale inexplicably failed to converse with Jonah. Æsop would’ve made it much more interesting!

Anyway—before this turns into misty-eyed nostalgia—I quite simply thought of the Bible stories as just the same kind of in-joke between teachers and kids that Santa was between my parents and I. After all, miracles and magic and all that stuff, was stories! No one would actually believe them, surely. And to be frank, that’s how it still seems to me, to this day. I really don’t understand at a gut level (intellectually, yes: ‘give me the child until he is seven,’ and all that, but not at a gut level) how an even slightly educated adult can possibly see all that talk of invisible all-powerful beings, their angel attendants and so forth as anything but ‘made-up stuff.’ But then, I can’t in all honesty claim to have seen through it myself, given that my earliest memories of it are of not even realising it was meant to be real. You could say I was too simplistically-minded to be gullible.

Sometime between then and the age of about nine, it must have occurred to me that some people actually believed the tales, because I can remember being quite shocked at my grandfather’s hurt expression when I mentioned him surely not believing in ‘God and all that.’ Not that my grandparents were that religious, mind—they weren’t regular churchgoers, even. What shocked me was that I had formed an assumption (I think it was a case of what writers often call ‘the arrogance of youth’) that only, erm… people of lesser intelligence, shall we say, would believe such things. And believer or not, Granddad was most certainly not of lesser intelligence. Ruminations on which fact, I suppose, were what led to my brief half-hearted flirtation with deism, a few years later. Fortunately, I also discovered other, much more interesting kinds of flirtation, and the semi-mystical bullshit really didn’t seem to matter anymore.

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