Why I am an atheist – Matthew Donica


I was born into a Christian home, and sent to a fundamentalist Christian church. I never even thought to question Christianity until I was about 14, I just accepted every Christian premise I heard without question. When I was about 14, a deacon at the Southern Baptist church I was a member of, filled in for the youth pastor who was out sick. He asserted that the world was only 6000 years old, and that dinosaur bones were planted in the ground by Satan to trick scientists into leading people away from Yahweh. The first thing that shook me up, was the fact that he was not some random guy who just attended church sometimes. He was a deacon and a pretty high ranking guy in the church. I quickly turned the same rational eye that I had on his arguments onto my own beliefs and realized that they were just as silly. I told the regular youth pastor that when he got back. He challenged me to read the Bible cover-to-cover. I read it over the course of about ten days.

One day, I was taking a shower after returning home from a church service. While I was cleaning myself, I formed sort of a mental Venn Diagram of everything I had read in the Bible. I realized that almost everything in the Bible fit into a set of things which were horrible, or a set of things which were nonsense, and that most of it fit into the intersection of those sets. When I got out of the shower, I came to the conclusion that Yahweh did not exist, the Bible was a useless book of nonsense and that every Christian premise or argument I had ever heard was false.

A little later, I encountered Kent Hovind videos and a now famous Youtuber named VenomFangX. This was back when he only had about a thousand subscribers, and would respond to people’s private messages to him. I pointed out some of the flaws in one of his videos to him, and he replied with something to the effect of “Nu-uh, magic”. I refuted that argument, and he blocked me. While reading through the comments on another one of his videos (or maybe a Kent Hovind video), I found a link to the Skeptics Annotated Bible. The SAB (Wonderful resource when debating Christians) helped to solidify my conclusions about Christianity.

My explicit rejection of all other religions came after reading The Iliad. I enjoyed the book, and realized that it was pretty much the same thing as the Bible. A chain of events, some probably based in history, others completely fabricated with arbitrary deities from the region it was written inserted throughout. Reading it caused me to view religion on a more global scale and realize that every religion I knew of was pretty much isomorphic to Christianity, which I had already established a solid basis for rejecting.

I don’t think I have to justify my rejection of the sort of “New age” spirituality stuff. Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a mental deficient.

tl;dr: Some Christian beliefs crazier than the Christian beliefs I held, got me to look at religion rationally.

Matthew Donica
United States

Comments

  1. says

    I don’t think I have to justify my rejection of the sort of “New age” spirituality stuff. Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a mental deficient.

    Well, that was an incredibly obnoxious and arrogant remark. Not to mention untrue. Intelligent people can persuade themselves to believe all kinds of odd things.

    (Disclaimer: I’ve never bought into “New Age spirituality” myself. But I certainly don’t think everyone who does so is a “mental deficient”.)

  2. says

    So, according to your Venn’s diagram the bible is mostly horrible nonsense?
    since I haven’t read it, I will have to trust in your definition. Seems pretty accurate.

  3. says

    You read the Bible in about ten days? Wow, I’ve tried time and again over the years, but I could never read more than a couple of pages before I had to throw it down in utter confusion.
    I would like to see your Venn diagram if you ever have the inclination to make it real. I bet if you had a squid in the background PZ would post it here.
    Walton @ 2 – While what you say is true, did you really have to say Matthew’s remark was “incredibly obnoxious and arrogant”?
    I’m just sayin’…

  4. says

    “(Disclaimer: I’ve never bought into “New Age spirituality” myself. But I certainly don’t think everyone who does so is a “mental deficient”.)”

    Maybe not, but you, Walton, it’s very obvious what you are. You’re a stupid asshole, and I can’t stress the words stupid and asshole strongly enough to describe your problem.

  5. Zinc Avenger says

    @ chimango, 3:

    Read it. Everyone should. It is the single greatest argument for atheism a christian can read. There is a reason why it is dispensed from the pulpit a sentence at a time. Any more and its nature is obvious.

  6. ManOutOfTime says

    Xtianity is a crock, New Ageism is for fools … why, I’d be lost without my lucky astrology mood watch. Seriously, though, yours is not an uncommon story but it is not common enough. It is evidence of why the charlatans and carnival barkers who call themselves “clergy” – why they are suspicious of skepticism and free thought: they suspect jt will expose their game and jeopardize their cash flow. And they are right!

  7. Geoff says

    Heh heh, I have to admit I thought your dismissal of New Age nonsense was a little too harsh – we all start out ignorant and I have to admit that some of those crazy ideas did actually appeal to me for a while.

  8. Dhorvath, OM says

    Well count me as a stupid asshole too then. People believe stupid shit because our brains, virtually every single person’s, are easily tricked. Yes I want better for people, I want some reflection and incision, I want reality to mean something, but I think it more effective to do so by looking at what is rather than what I want to see.

  9. KG says

    Human Ape,

    normally I never bother to address you, becuase you’re just not worth it. I think just about all the regulars here loathe you, and none want your support or value your contributions. Unlike Walton (and I must agree with his comment), you are completely impervious to learning, as well as being a fine example of many of the worst stereotypes the religious hold about atheists.

  10. den1s says

    “Intelligent people can persuade themselves to believe all kinds of odd things.”

    yes Walton, which turns them from being intelligent people into certified fucking whackaloons.

  11. Carlie says

    Whoa, why all the vile towards Walton? If the author had written that he thought that “Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a retard”, I would hope that everyone would jump on that as being a real asshole thing to say. He’s displayed the same attitude, with just the word retard substituted with mental deficient. And honestly? “A mental deficient”? Just about the only way to keep that language and be more insulting than saying a person is mentally deficient is changing it to a noun and calling them “A mental deficient”. It was exactly an obnoxious and arrogant remark.

  12. Beatrice, anormalement indécente says

    I don’t think I have to justify my rejection of the sort of “New age” spirituality stuff. Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a mental deficient.

    Someone who hasn’t been brought up in Christianity could be tempted to say the same about Christianity. I tend to have a short temper when dealing with outrageously silly New Age beliefs, but you and me both should probably be aware of the fact that most Christian beliefs are no less silly. And yet, it took us some time to get rid of that particular garbage in our lives (more precisely, I was dealing with Catholic garbage). Would you call yourself mentally deficient? I’m guessing no. So, try to hold in some of the arrogance.

  13. ikesolem says

    Actually, astrology (as an example of New Age spirituality) is based on the pre-Copernican Church-endorsed earth-centric model of the universe. When an astrologers say “Mars is in retrograde,” they’re referring to the old epicycle model of Ptolemy.

    The Pope’s Astrologer didn’t like being told it was all nonsense, and the Pope didn’t like being unseated from the center of the universe. Scientific discoveries that don’t agree with the agenda of authoritarian power-mongers are not greeted with joy, but this issue is not limited to religious states.

    For example, the atheist communist Soviet state refused to accept modern genetics during the Lysenko period. Today, the fossil-fuel dependent nations refuse to accept climate science, the chemical industry refuses to accept biochemical and medical science on carcinogens and hormone disruption, the extractive industries (fishing, logging, mining, etc.) say that species extinction isn’t happening, etc.

    The ideologies involved in the modern world, communism or free market worship, are indistinguishable from religious belief systems, in that they are fantasies created by the human imagination, and their faithful followers refuse to accept any results of experiment and observation which do not agree with their preconceived notions.

    The solution is to abandon belief systems – because once you start believing something is absolutely true, it’s like a hardening of the arteries – what was flexible becomes inflexible, and the end result is an inability to process new information.

    Note that from this perspective, fantasies created by human imagination are really not a problem, as long as you recognize that stories such as the Lord of the Rings or the Bible are not meant to be taken as literal fact – they’re just invented stories.

  14. says

    Can’t say I agree that new age thinking makes someone dumb or lacking in intelligence. We all go through a process in coming out of religious deception. Some come to their senses rather quickly, others do not.

    For me, it was a journey from extreme cultism (Armstrongism)to final atheism with many stops along the way and decades of questioning and erasing old mental tapes. New ageism had an influence along the way and these people are often quite intelligent individuals.

    I’m not condemning here. I, too, have had my moments of frustrated condemnatory attitudes and have had to alter my thinking many times and learn to be compassionate and understanding about where individuals are on their personal journey.

  15. says

    He asserted that the world was only 6000 years old, and that dinosaur bones were planted in the ground by Satan to trick scientists into leading people away from Yahweh.

    I don’t know why they don’t stick with the good old nonsense, since none of the later rot improves on “Satan buried the fossils”.

    Actually, “God designed life to look evolved” is just about the same thing, if not explicitly stated, with God in the place of the ol’ Debbil (& Designer of P. falciparum). So ID might even be more stupid, fundamentally.

    Glen Davidson

  16. maqui says

    @2 “Intelligent people can persuade themselves to believe all kinds of odd things”

    I find it hard to see why the term “mental deficit” is “incredibly obnoxious and arrogant”. English is not my first language, so I’m apparently missing some of the connotations.

    delusion = a false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact:
    Is the adherence to a belief system, despite evidence to the contrary, i.e. a delusion, not exactly this: a mental deficit? “Mental deficit” seems a pretty harmless label for many kinds of religious and political self-delusions, conspiracy theories and rejection of facts that may threaten one’s hardened worldview, whether Quetzalcoatl, St. Karl (Marx), St. Deepak (Chopra), rubbing stones or homeopathy.
    A test: If not New Age mantras, but Ken Ham’s or Kent Hovind’s belief systems had been labeled “mentally deficient”, would you yell “incredibly obnoxious”, too? I suppose that the piglet rapist and the inmate have IQs close to 100, or else they would have been challenged to pass their high school exams and reap that much cash from the sheeple, and just have persuaded themselves to believe some odd kinds of things. Still, I would not hesitate to attest Ham and Hovind mental deficits in their perception and interpretation of reality. Deepak: not sure if he believes in his own gobbledegook or just stages it for the sake of the rubes – but I would even attest a “mental deficit” to an accomplished professional liar: an asocial attitude.
    While neurologists would almost certainly not use the term “mental deficient” in the cases of Ham, Hovind, Chopra and most New-Age disciples, I surmise that Matthew did not use the word in any medical sense.

  17. Ricardo says

    Ikesolem, yours was a great summary of an important issue, that of a belief system. But the solution (not having them) is irrealistic. Belief system can get replaced, or evolve, but one cannot intelectually function without a belief system…

  18. says

    Walton is getting far too much hate for his comment. Rightly pointing out that Matthew’s remark was obnoxious and arrogant is not the same as calling Matthew obnoxious and arrogant.

    Great essay Matthew, despite the blip at the end

  19. says

    Walton is getting far too much hate for his comment. Rightly pointing out that Matthew’s remark was obnoxious and arrogant is not the same as calling Matthew obnoxious and arrogant.

    Great essay Matthew, despite the blip at the end

    Sastra, for instance. I mean, obviously it could be taken as obnoxious to some whom we know.

    Arrogant, though? Probably not, just not especially aware of the circumstances that might mean that a smart person doesn’t immediately recognize how poor New Age “thinking” is.

    I think Walton’s remark showed some arrogance and should have been more diplomatic. But yeah, there doesn’t seem to be enough in it to justify the attacks, and I wonder what context I’m missing.

    Glen Davidson

  20. Phere says

    I also don’t understand why Walton is getting all the verbal lashing. I chalked it up to being on the outside of an inside joke…there is something of a personal nature going on, and Walton’s comments weren’t taken objectively, but personally. So from an objective viewpoint, he is just giving the author a taste of his own medicine. From a personal viewpoint…who knows?

    On the topic of New Agism, like many here, I took a brief detour into New Age Land on my road to skepticism and atheism. I wasn’t raised religious, but I was raised being told that “open-minded” is a good thing. Which is true for many of life’s circumstances, but where science has valid and ample evidence in place of mystery, it’s just deluding yourself to ignore that evidence. At 20, I believed strongly in alien visitations, ghosts, spiritual energy, past lives, etc. But you know what? I was the most open-minded and curious person I could possibly be and I never ever experienced anything even slightly supernatural. If all these people were seeing ghosts and aliens and having out of body experiences, why wasn’t I? Was something wrong with me? Or was everyone else just making shit up? The latter possibility became more and more likely over the next few years in my life. I had always had a strong interest in the natural world, and as I learned more, I realised I had a decision to make. Either stick with what felt good and what I wanted to be true, or go with the evidence. So I went with the evidence and have never looked back. But it took time.

  21. Ze Madmax says

    maqui @ #19:

    Is the adherence to a belief system, despite evidence to the contrary, i.e. a delusion, not exactly this: a mental deficit? “Mental deficit” seems a pretty harmless label for many kinds of religious and political self-delusions, conspiracy theories and rejection of facts that may threaten one’s hardened worldview, whether Quetzalcoatl, St. Karl (Marx), St. Deepak (Chopra), rubbing stones or homeopathy.

    No, it isn’t. There are multiple mental processes that facilitate retention of information that is congruent with a person’s beliefs (e.g., confirmation bias). The claim that a person who holds a belief system that is not congruent with reality is “mentally deficient” is not only offensive, but also factually wrong.

    A test: If not New Age mantras, but Ken Ham’s or Kent Hovind’s belief systems had been labeled “mentally deficient”, would you yell “incredibly obnoxious”, too?

    Yes, I would. Not only because it’s offensive and inaccurate, but also because it’s a poisonous framework. You’re claiming that anybody who holds any beliefs that are not 100% grounded on empirical data is somehow deficient. But the problem is not that the person is deficient, but rather the beliefs they hold are deficient.

  22. nazani14 says

    – but tiny mollusc shells were planted in certain strata to lead paleontologists who work for oil companies to know where to prospect for oil. Does that mean that oil is satanic?

  23. Pierce R. Butler says

    When I got out of the shower, I came to the conclusion that Yahweh did not exist…

    Cleanliness is all over ungodliness.

  24. raven says

    and that dinosaur bones were planted in the ground by Satan to trick scientists into leading people away from Yahweh.

    That guy was an idiot and nearly a heretic.

    The standard dogma is that the fossils are planted by god itself. Being a god is boring some days. I suppose the holy ghost and jesus help, seeing as how they are all joined together somehow.

    Giving that job to satan makes satan look too powerful. If god can’t even control one of his own creations, satan, then he isn’t very omnipotent. So then, why call it god?

  25. raven says

    One of venomfangX’s xian followers is famous for murdering his ex-girlfriend and then killing himself.

    People who are loony one way are occasionally loony in other ways.

  26. clarysage says

    Regardless of whether readers find the ending “obnoxious and arrogant,” the piece is well written EXCEPT the last two paragraphs. They appear to be tacked on merely to rankle others and appear to be a poor attempt at making the author feel better that he wasn’t the dumbest dupe during his Christian era.

  27. maqui says

    @25:
    maqui: “A test: If not New Age mantras, but Ken Ham’s or Kent Hovind’s belief systems had been labeled “mentally deficient”, would you yell “incredibly obnoxious”, too?

    Ze Madmax: “Yes, I would. Not only because it’s offensive and inaccurate, but also because it’s a poisonous framework. You’re claiming that anybody who holds any beliefs that are not 100% grounded on empirical data is somehow deficient. But the problem is not that the person is deficient, but rather the beliefs they hold are deficient.”

    Did you read my paragraph when you cited it: I did not label Ham & Hovind mentally deficient, but their belief systems. You, too, state that the “beliefs they hold are deficient”. So what’s your point again?

    Ze Madmax: “You’re claiming that anybody who holds any beliefs that are not 100% grounded on empirical data is somehow deficient.”
    No, I don’t. Did you actually read what I wrote? I’m claiming that holding on to a belief system that is in flat contradiction to evidence is a mental deficit. How to express it differently: a reality-perception-and-interpretation deficit? That’s a bit of a mouthful.
    Some would call such a denial of reality a delusion, e.g. Dawkins. Mental deficit seems to be a much weaker and more polite term than delusion. Do you belong to those apologetics who accuse Dawkings of being strident, obnoxious and arrogant for using the term The God Delusion? Or is “delusion” a more politically correct term than “mental deficit” for reality denial?

  28. John Morales says

    [meta]

    Walton:

    I don’t think I have to justify my rejection of the sort of “New age” spirituality stuff. Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a mental deficient.

    Well, that was an incredibly obnoxious and arrogant remark. Not to mention untrue. Intelligent people can persuade themselves to believe all kinds of odd things.

    I think you’ve just assumed that, by ‘mental deficient’, Matthew meant ‘unintelligent’ — and I consider that unwarranted, particularly since he could’ve used ‘stupid’ or similar, instead.

    Tsk.

    (I also think you should get out of your habit of employing superlatives so facilely just for the sake of emphasis)

  29. walton says

    I think Walton’s remark showed some arrogance and should have been more diplomatic.

    The author himself clearly had no interest in being diplomatic – labelling the adherents of a whole belief system as “mental deficients” is hardly diplomatic, by anyone’s standards – so I adopted the same approach, and spoke my mind. To adopt a colloquialism, those who dish out insults ought to be able to take them.

    I think you’ve just assumed that, by ‘mental deficient’, Matthew meant ‘unintelligent’ — and I consider that unwarranted, particularly since he could’ve used ‘stupid’ or similar, instead.

    Of course there are a range of tenable interpretations of the words “mental deficient”, but on none of them is his statement an accurate or constructive one. (Indeed, I can’t think of any context in which labelling someone “a mental deficient” would ever be helpful or constructive.)

    A test: If not New Age mantras, but Ken Ham’s or Kent Hovind’s belief systems had been labeled “mentally deficient”, would you yell “incredibly obnoxious”, too?

    You’re paraphrasing inaccurately. The author didn’t label New Age mantras as mentally deficient. He said:

    I don’t think I have to justify my rejection of the sort of “New age” spirituality stuff. Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a mental deficient.

    He didn’t limit himself to labelling New Age beliefs as “mentally deficient”. Rather, he labelled an entire class of people – both those who believe in New Age spirituality, and those who no longer believe in New Age spirituality but once took it seriously – as “mental deficients”. That’s arrogant, it’s needlessly insulting, and – most importantly – it’s simply wrong.

    To answer the substance of your question: if the author had said:

    I don’t think I have to justify my rejection of [young earth creationism]. Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a mental deficient.

    …then yes, I would equally identify that statement as arrogant and wrong. It would not be accurate to label everyone who believes in creationism, or who once believed in creationism but no longer does, as “a mental deficient”. As I said, plenty of intelligent and entirely-sane people are capable of reasoning themselves into accepting falsehoods. I’ve believed plenty of things in my life which turned out to be wrong; so has almost everyone I know. (So, for that matter, has the author, according to his own account.)

  30. bennysbeats29 says

    Hello All,
    So I am new to the site and blog and wanted to leave my own post on why I am an atheist but cant figure out where to go to do so… Any help would be greatly accepted!
    Thx

  31. Therrin says

    bennysbeats29,

    Email the boss and wait in line, he’s got around two years’ worth at the moment.

  32. Agent Smith says

    I used to believe in astrology and ESP. In my defence, I was about ten years old.

    While the OP’s most-quoted comment is a little too harsh, “new-age” concepts do rely on exploiting deficiencies in a person’s reasoning process. The most intelligent of people can have such deficiencies, and many of us, including me, remember a time when we didn’t quite have all our cracks sealed.

  33. Cesar Hechler says

    Maybe Matthew’s method would work on all Christians. Keep on finding beliefs some sect believes in that are even crazier than the ones of the person you’re talking to. At some point the person would have to, at the very least, have the slightest tinge of epiphany that the crazy line may have started at the front door rather than in the hall where their own beliefs lie.

  34. atheist says

    One day, I was taking a shower after returning home from a church service. While I was cleaning myself, I formed sort of a mental Venn Diagram of everything I had read in the Bible. I realized that almost everything in the Bible fit into a set of things which were horrible, or a set of things which were nonsense, and that most of it fit into the intersection of those sets. When I got out of the shower, I came to the conclusion that Yahweh did not exist, the Bible was a useless book of nonsense and that every Christian premise or argument I had ever heard was false.

    The Jungian in me finds this detail interesting. You baptized yourself into atheism.

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