I’m afraid my history of unbelief is uneventful and boring compared to others. There was no blinding moment of insight; no dramatic discarding of the chains of superstition; no wild and passionate confrontations with theistic family or friends. I was born and raised in picturesque British Columbia, Canada, which bears the proud statistic of being the most godless state or province in North America. My father comes from a fairly devout Roman Catholic family; my mother from a United Church of Canada family. Neither were believers in any real sense. Our family never attended church besides occasional accompanying my Roman Catholic grandparents when we visited them in Ontario (by the way, my Catholic grandparents were saints, who never forced their beliefs on us as children, and were always supportive of our life decisions). Curiously, my family retained the habit of saying grace before dinner; a mere rote of “Bless us, O Lord, for these thy gifts, for which we are about to receive, amen”. There was never any faith behind it; it was like saying “Bless you” after a sneeze.

(As an interesting aside, one of my distant relatives (great-great-grandmother, I believe) was one of the people reportedly “healed” by the recently canonized Saint Andre of Quebec. If true, this marks the first and last time that God bestowed any gifts on me or my family.)

As a child, I loved learning about science and nature, particularly Astronomy. I read, re-read, and re-re-ad infinitum-read books on Astronomy. I was utterly enamoured by the cosmos; the silent grandiosity of galaxies, the terrifying power of supernovae, and the majestic constellations that grace our night sky. One book I had compared and contrasted the Big Bang theory of the universe’s origin with the biblical Genesis. Though I was still young, and I did not fully grasp the scientific method yet, I remember thinking “How do they know the Bible is true? How can they back up the Genesis story with facts?”. Thus, I recognized early that the Bible, and religious ideology in general, was an empty promise; a mere story told to the gullible and the fearful.

Unfortunately, my skill (or lack thereof) with mathematics made a career in astronomy exceedingly unlikely. As a youngster, I also displayed aptitude for music, thanks to early piano lessons and the like. In high school, I was a part of virtually every musical group that my school offered. It was in high school music that I started having confrontations with religious classmates. Many had come from church choirs and the like, and wanted/demanded that we as a group pray before a performance. This irked me, and I would often reply with a snarky “shouldn’t we be praying to Dionsyus, the Greek God of wine, music and partying, instead of God?”. Or when someone tried to sell me the idea that Christianity is a religion of love, I would reply if it’s the same religion of love that murdered millions during the Crusades and Dark Ages. At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I was a new atheist before I had any idea that such a thing existed.

After high school, I was left adrift. My confidence in my music skills was at an all-time low; I didn’t think I could make a career out of music. At my mother’s behest, I enrolled in night school, to add some courses that I had elected to skip earlier. It was here that I fell in love with Biology, and the sciences in general. I aced just about everything thrown at me (although I continued to struggle with Math). To cut a long story short, I went on to attain a diploma in Biotechnology, a BSc in the same, and an MSc in Microbiology. Today I work as a researcher in a local biotech/pharmaceutical company. I still enjoy music and play piano and guitar recreationally. Only recently (last 2 years or so) have I come to identify myself as a new atheist, and have started to read the works of the movement. I don’t do much in the community…as mentioned above, B.C. is a godless haven, and the religious have little influence on our society. But I fully support my brothers and sisters who, by accident of birth, are forced to live in areas where religious influence is strong.

Matt Waldbrook
Canada

I am an atheist probably since I was 10. I guess it was an inevitable gradual process that comes to be by learning about science and plain old common sense.

A few events I remember that shaped my skeptic mind went on like this:

While learning about the origin of the Universe in the 4th grade, a teacher made the ridiculous mistake of putting in the same level the Big Bang, the Steady State, and none other than the “God done it” hypothesis. I was 9 but even then I knew one definitely didn’t belong there. And while there already was definitive evidence for the Big Bang and the Steady State was long gone, the teacher didn’t seem to know this – nor did she know the answer to my sincere but apparently unconfortable question – If God made it, then who made God?. She was religious as most people in Colombia are (we used to be officially catholic until 1991) and she brought her ideas into the classroom despite them not being on the textbook. Unfortunately I was the only one taken aback by this.

Anyway, she didn’t like me very much and was constantly bothering me about my long hair.

Another thing that happened was realising how much in common the local indigenous myths and other folk tales had with this other story everyone- including myself – seemed to take more seriously. Everybody was just obviously making stuff up to explain what they didn’t or couldn’t know. Once I learned about this and about the other myths and legends from everywhere around the world I asked myself “What if we were colonised by the chinese or some other culture?.

It became evident that any people will create and postulate what they need in order to make sense of what they can’t undestand. In that moment I knew that religions must all be man made.

Finally, I learned about Evolution and really understood what it meant for our supposed “special place in the cosmos”. My biology teacher insisted that while it’s true that we’ve evolved, we are somehow appart from the rest of all species. I knew this was rubbish, I’m an ape and so are you – deal with it.

Somehow feeling at the same level than a snake, a gorilla, a fish, or all those bugs that creeped the hell out of me back then, made me realise how incredibly fortunate I was to exist along them, and have the joy of sharing this precious time in this incredible world with the company of my family and friends, and to not waste my time with superstitious nonsense.

This, among many other things, is what lead me to the conclusion that reality is all there is and matters, so learn and appreciate all you can about it. And that’s why I’m an Atheist.

…and also not an astrologer, not a witchcraftist, a vicious antihomeopath, also not a ufologist, well… you get the point.

Thinking Shogun
Colombia

I rumbled Santa and religion before I was 6 and I really thought until I got to high school that everyone knew both were tosh but just Yes, Virginia pretended for kids.

I thank my parents for *never* mentioning *anything* to do with religion. I think they had faith of some sort but they were determined that I should make up my own mind.

I have no idea if *any* of my teachers were religious and I thank them for their profound professionalism. It honestly never occurred to me that people really believed any of that stuff when the things in my school and local library books were so much cooler.

I am atheist because I was allowed to make up my own mind. This was one of the many advantages of growing up during the 70’s in New Zealand.

Doug Mackie
New Zealand

Humanity, despite existing in discrete units (which we call people), is really one grander entity which breathes and behaves in peculiar manners. The casual modern anthropologist can easily witness the human machine’s idiosyncrasies, though often these details go unnoticed for being too ingrained into the quotidian lifestyle. Why most subway-car riders, for instance, deign not to speak nor make eye contact, or why these creatures by the thousands prolong internal discomfort by withholding offensive gaseous emissions can be understood as an adaptive response to living in close, interactive proximity with one another and living to certain established social standards which evolve over time. Without consciously considering why or how these responses came to be as they are, many millions passively act them out on autopilot.

The human autopilot transcends actions and delves into thoughts and beliefs. I have wanted to perform an experiment whereby a handful of assorted passers-by would be propositioned to agree or disagree on the statement that consumption of sugar causes hyperactivity. Without a doubt the response would be a staggering ‘yes’, and my experiment would demonstrate a general understanding of this concept in the populace. The interesting quirk of this exercise is that in truth, this understanding is unfounded, and is instead the result of many generations of hearsay and anecdotal evidence. Why, then, is this non-truth so prevalent?

How does the singular human machine operate? It has up-time and down-time, ill days and well days, nutritional needs, waste removal systems, mood swings, shaving needs, clipping needs, washing needs, and dirty deeds. On the molecular level, its nuance surpasses anything Steve Jobs could have dreamed of, and it always hangs in a tenuous balance between health and death. Naturally, the ways of sustaining the singular human machine must be conservative; that is, whatever worked the day before could and should work again today. One foot in front of the other, and so on, leads man to his mate and home, and puts bread in his mouth, and allows him to breathe through the night to see the next day. He cannot afford to dramatically alter his schedule lest he neglect his body’s urgent requirements for refreshment.

By understanding that the autopilot which guides man through his living-chores also guides his assumptions and understandings, one can see the main reason for why I am an atheist. The gods are the giddiness of children after they eat too many cookies; the gods are understanding that illness is due to humour imbalance; the gods are knowing that the left-handed are evil. Without evidence to sustain it, the god-concept is the co-pilot to the autopilot of the human machine – it was there yesterday, and is therefore true today, all things coming from god, post hoc ergo procter hoc. I do not believe in gods because the concept is a human response to a lack of information about our bodies.

What I suspect sustains the non-truth concept of god or gods is a shared quasi- understanding of similar yet distinct psychosomatic phenomena. Another way, it can be understood as such: two parties who can at least minimally agree on having experienced some similar conscious feeling can more easily misappropriate the cause of that feeling to an external agent than can either of them alone. A thousand parties who can at least minimally agree on having experienced the same phenomena increases the apparent truth even more. Through generations of snowballing, the assumptions which underlie the god-concept have been taken as granted without warrant, and the result is the rainbow of devotions that exist today. They are the product of (and targeted at) mens’ minds, in order to make sense of shared sensations and feelings. Cognitive psychology and an emerging neuroscience will expose nuances of the human condition that gods once were so useful to explain.

Steven Ahern
United States