Why I am an atheist – Jim

I had been wondering for a while whether I should join the masses and add my own answer (and story) to the question “why are you an atheist?”. The new year brought with it a sense of “why the hell not?”.

Reading the answers of others, i’ve seen it often helps to give some basic background first. Don’t worry, most of it is relevent to the actual answer. I’m a person of the male persuasion in my early 20s, living in the pleasant (if you like mud) countryside of the east of England. I’m pretty much the stereotype of a geek/gamer (without the “fat, no sense of personal hygiene and glasses” parts). I grew up a basic countryside-dwelling family (as an only child), complete with the usual passive conservatism and Christianity – passive in the sense that it’s just “there”, everyone expects everyone else thinks the same as they do, so the subjects rarely come up. This is hardly perfect, but a lot better than being bombarded with it every day. But in other ways, it’s a lot more insidious.

The few friends I have in my immediate area (geek stereotypes ahoy) all buy into the aforementioned passive conservatism/Christianity purely through unquestioning acceptance. True, they may somehow still believe these things if they actually thought about it, but I think it’s more likely that they’re just a product of their environment. They also all suffer from the things that come with this; the pervasive and disgusting, but not overt homophobia, misogyny, and racism. I’ve never really been comfortable with this outlook, even though there was a time when I suffered from the trappings of homophobia and misogyny like many young people of the “straight, white and/or male” persuasions. Around the start of my trip into atheism and humanism, I began to see this wasn’t a viable worldview in any way, shape or form.

Now for the actual answer.

My own path to atheism brings to mind someone wandering backwards and blindfolded through a cloud of fog. For me, becoming an atheist wasn’t a straight line through questioning faith, to skepticism (yes, i’m a Brit who prefers a ‘k’ in the spelling), to unbelief. Sometimes I wonder how I even ended up questioning everything coming from the background I did, where things were rarely discussed and are just simply accepted (the “blindfolded” part of the above analogy). In the back of my mind, I think i’ve always questioned whether the weak Christianity I was presented with (and as it was never discussed this was presented, effectively, as the only option) was correct. I don’t even know if I ever really believed in anything other than some form of deism rather than Christianity; to me, there was a god, but Jesus and all the rest never entered into it. I believed in a powerful being, and I prayed when I was upset or depressed for things to be magically be made better, but always to a random “god” being and never to “Jesus”.

I do remember back when I was a kid (possibly a little while before my teenage years), saying to my parents on the eve of an upcoming wedding or funeral of some distant relation that “I don’t want to go, it means nothing to me” (which, as a side note, was accepted as an answer and I wasn’t forced to go). Hating dressing up, the hard seats, the hymns, the boring vicar and all the sad people (which in turn made me sad) probably also had something to do with it. Rebellion may also have played its part. Of course, like a lot of kids that age, the concept of “atheism” wasn’t in my sphere of existence. This was the earliest actual expression of my atheism (or the beginning of it) that I can remember, but then again I have a terrible memory.

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