Why I am an atheist – Julia

For the first twelve years of my life, my mother frantically tried to bring me up in her Baptist church. She was elated that one of the first words I learnt to spell was “Jesus” at age 2. My father (who I found out to be an atheist last year) is a pilot and would conveniently bring me on fishing trips every few Sundays. It struck me as odd that he never had to go to church, but I didn’t really ask about it.

It wasn’t very long until I started questioning. When I was 5, my Sunday School teacher “disproved” the big bang by throwing a bunch of hard plastic animal toys into a plastic bag and shaking them up together. “See?” he said. “Everything is the exact same as when it went into the bag. This means that the only way the universe could have started was through god!”

Well, I was 5. It was the ’90s. I was irrevocably in love with Bill Nye. I told my Sunday School teacher that actually, no, he had done nothing to increase the entropy inside the bag, and how on earth can you perform nuclear changes by banging a bunch of polymers together?!

This would mark the first time I embarrassed my mother in church. I’m sure it wasn’t the last. There was so much they taught that just never made sense to me—How can everyone in heaven be happy if they know people they love are in hell? Why didn’t this all-powerful god hint to my aunt who died of rare duodenal cancer that she should get an endoscopy earlier? Moreso, why is this god such a jerk in general? Why is every religion “right”? What if religion is a farce and I waste my entire life—all that I have to live—following obscene rules instead of doing what I want? Why do these people say that without god, they would just be out raping and murdering all day? And why on earth do my Sunday School teachers keep telling me I’m going to burn in hell for listening to Queen?

By the time I was about 12, I didn’t have to go to church anymore. Whether news of my questions reached my mother and she decided I was too much of an embarrassment, or she decided that if church and years of bible camp couldn’t sway my mind, nothing would, I don’t know. I’m now involved in an atheist club in my university where I’m studying biochemistry—a combination she’s not pleased with, but has learned to accept.

So, why am I an atheist? Bill Nye helped me how to think and introduced me to science before my anyone else did. My childhood curiosity refused to take “Goddidit” as an answer. My amazement for the universe and how it works grows each year, and I refuse to stop at such superficial answers and instead look for the elegance of what truly goes on. I’m an atheist because I’ve always been an atheist, and can’t imagine being limited by believing in magical sky fairies.

Julia
Canada

Watts wrote a check he couldn’t cash

That wacky climate change denier and radio weather broadcaster Anthony Watts took a brave step a while back, and I commend him for it. He was enthused about an independent research project, the Berkeley Earth Project, that would measure the planet’s temperature over the last centuries and compare it to the work of NOAA and NASA on earth’s temperature — he apparently expected that it would show that NASA and NOAA had been inflating the data. He was so confident that he went on the record saying:

I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.

Excellent! That’s a good scientific attitude.

So the results have been published, and they look like this:

Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove

You can probably see the NASA/NOAA data wiggling beneath the dark bold line of new data from the Berkeley Earth Project. They’re rather…close. Intimate, even.

What do you think Anthony Watts’ response was?

I consider the paper fatally flawed as it now stands, and thus I recommend it be removed from publication consideration by JGR until such time that it can be reworked.

Yep. Didn’t give the results he wanted. Therefore, the experiment is bad.

(Also on FtB)

Stereotypes

I grew up in a family that, on my mother’s side, was rather strongly Scandinavian, and throughout my childhood, I vaguely sensed some strain between the various nationalities, a tension between the Norwegians and the Swedes (we had nothing to do with those Danes, and the Finns — completely beyond the pale). Now, at last, the stereotypes are illustrated for me in this strange webcomic, Scandinavia and the World.

Teresa at Making Light explains it well.

Basically, it’s about national stereotypes as seen from Denmark, with lots of explanatory comments and a fair amount of yaoi action. Iceland is sparkly and conceited. Finland is a semi-mute knife-wielding depressive in a Jayne hat. Germany lives in a funk of perpetual guilt. Denmark is laid back, constantly horny, a clueless racist, and phobic about nature, and has a beer bottle glued to one hand. Netherlands is much like Denmark — tolerant, easygoing, polymorphously perverse, and crazy about bicycles — but has a joint rather than a beer bottle. The Baltic States are like the Bronte Sisters on a really bad day. The United States is clueless, bullying, and wears Canada as a hat. And so forth.

I read a bunch of the strips tonight, and now I’m feeling like a traitor: I identified with the cartoon Finn the most.

Also, the one about the fish reminds me of Christmas.

Why I am an atheist – Erin Breda

I can distinctly remember kneeling in the darkened family room of my aunt and uncle’s house in Florida. With my eyes closed and my hands clasped reverentially in front of me, I recited the words that every Christian parent longs to hear from the lips of their children: “Dear Lord Jesus, please come into my heart and forgive my sins. I accept you as my Lord and savior.” I was four years old.

My mother was raised in a missionary family, living in various places throughout Central America. Her parents were (and are) Southern Baptist missionaries, and she did not return to the United States until age 17. After graduating high school early, she enrolled at Columbia Bible College, where she met my father. My father was also raised in a deeply religious protestant family, so after their marriage, it seemed the natural course that they prepare for entrance into the mission field. When I was born, my family was living in a small apartment above a church in my father’s home town in Pennsylvania, where he was the youth pastor. After my brother was born three years later, our family began traveling around the country raising support to send us to South America. My childhood was spent moving from state to state, staying in whatever lodging could be lent to us by the host church, while my parents preached and performed to receive donations toward our mission. The final period of their training was completed at a “mission institute” in Missouri, where my family spent six months learning how to make sock puppets and crafts to teach children about Jesus.

It was around this time, at seven years old, that I was baptized by my maternal grandfather in his church, south of Atlanta, Georgia. I don’t remember much of the ceremony, but I can easily recall the feedback I received from family and strangers alike. Everyone I met was delighted at my outward profession of faith. An elderly woman at the restaurant where we had retired to celebrate even gave me five dollars to congratulate me when she learned of my accomplishment. All of this went quite well with my temperament, as I’ve always thrived on attention and praise.

Though my parents divorced not long after we left the mission institute and then settled in Indiana, my happy coexistence with religion as a way to be rewarded continued into adolescence. Beginning somewhere around age 13, however, and blossoming as I advanced through my teenage years, the very healthy sexual appetite that my current husband so appreciates began to assert itself. I play-acted sexual encounters in the dark of my bedroom at night, and in high school I found ample opportunity to explore this arena with other hormone-addled teenagers, both boys and girls. It was at this time that I found a conflict with the happy “Jesus Loves You” message that had been repeated to me throughout childhood. The rules taught in church had always seemed so easy to follow. Of course I would never steal or kill anyone! But now every Sunday the youth pastor repeated the peril of expressing this hormonal urge that came so naturally to me. Feeling ashamed, as being “in trouble” is still one of my greatest fears, I internalized my guilt, but couldn’t deny the pull of temptation.

I lost my virginity at 17 to another virgin, who was likewise the child of evangelical parents. The next day, he was aghast at our transgression and swore we would never commit this crime again until our marriage. After a year of dating, the situation had so deteriorated in the home where I lived with my father and stepmother (who would later be diagnosed with a variety of mental disorders) that I moved in with my boyfriend’s parents. At first I was moved by their warm charity in welcoming me into their home. But from the moment I entered it, I soon discovered that every movement my boyfriend and I made was being scrutinized for signs of sexual behavior. Even though he slept in a separate room, accusations were constantly flung about. Feeling I had nowhere else to turn, after months of overwhelming pressure and condemnation, I agreed to legitimize our relationship through marriage. I was married on the morning of my senior prom in his parents’ living room, after which we returned to school on Monday as if nothing had happened.
After graduation, my new husband and I ventured into the wider world of university together, where we lived in married-student housing. It wasn’t long before I learned, at our school of 35,000, that there are vastly different kinds of people in the world, all holding fascinatingly diverse opinions, and almost all of these people seemed infinitely more attractive than the man I had married. Within the semester I began an affair with a brilliant and witty, if cynical, classmate during a field trip to Chicago. This would shortly end in discovery, anger, violence, and tearful apologies. Terrified of venturing out on my own, I agreed to move back in with our in-laws and begin my penance. I read the bible daily, was not allowed out alone, and was even forced to accompany my husband during his delivery runs. But through all of this, I could not be genuinely penitent because that brilliant and witty if cynical young student had opened my eyes. I learned that all of the guilt and shame I felt had really been self-inflicted. There is no Jesus to be disappointed in me when I break rules recorded thousands of years ago in a scattered collection of parchment. Once lifted of this irrational burden, I was free to exercise my own considerable rational faculties in further testing the religion I had always known. Everywhere I poked, I found the fabric of arguments I’d always accepted to be thin as tissue paper. I would continue my sentence a few more months before gathering enough courage to leave my husband for good. I moved in with my mother until the new semester started and then returned to my studies at university. There I took a minor in Women’s Studies, learning a great deal about sexuality, gender, and how humans have felt and expressed the same stirrings in myriad ways for thousands of years. After graduation, I moved to Boston, where I am now married to a wonderful man who shares my open-minded, voracious curiosity, and together we vet the various claims of the world based on sound, logical principles.

It took a while to let go of what had been so ingrained in me from childhood. Even long after I had mentally reconciled the lack of a supreme being, I still occasionally caught myself offering a silent prayer of thanks to the heavens when something fortuitous happened. I will always bear the scars of guilt and repression from my childhood in an evangelical protestant family. However I can now firmly state that there is no god, and that sex between consenting adults is most often a beautiful and wonderful thing, regardless of what your pastor says. Now, supported by my loving husband, I look forward to bringing children into the world who will grow up in an environment where their actions are judged not by adherence to an archaic code, but by the good or harm they cause themselves and those around them.

Erin Breda
Massachusetts, United States

Polling the obvious

The Florida public school principal who declared that he was going to push prayer in his school — he even declared “The First Amendment was for Christianity, not other religions” — now gets his own poll. Only it’s a really stupidly worded poll.

Should optional prayer services be allowed on public school property?

Yes (88.8%)

No (11.2%)

Optional prayer services aren’t a problem and are allowed even now — go ahead, kids, you feel like praying over your school lunch? You can! The problem here is prayer led by or even promoted by school officials.