Religion didn’t seem to be very important in my earliest years. We didn’t pray or go to church except for maybe twice a year and then whenever someone died or got married. Strangely, I ended up in Catechism in preparation for First Communion. Somehow I botched that up and didn’t attend when I was expected but I got another chance at it when I hit 4th grade. That was the year I started to attend Catholic School. It was totally voluntary. I wanted to go because my neighborhood friends went there. I made it through First Communion that year being very skeptical about the whole body and blood thing. We were taught that “amen” means “I believe” and that when you receive Communion you are expected to reply “amen”. What bothered me more would have been being the only student who didn’t go through with this. Everyone else did it and believed. I must have been doing something wrong.

Sixth grade brought my third year of being an alter boy and also a heavy dose of science. This increased the amount of conflict I had in dealing with a resurrection, miracles, and the existence of God. Again, I went along with the duality because there’s no way that a bunch of adults could be wrong about this. For a short while, we had an occasional visit from Father John on Wednesdays. It was our opportunity to talk with him about God. I didn’t say much; I didn’t have to. The class asked every question that I had. It was like we had discussed what to ask him just moments before he walked in. He was calm and pleasant as ever, but I noticed something peculiar about his responses. The answers were a bit to the side. There was little that was a very direct from him.

I left Catholic school for 7th grade and returned back again for 8th because my naivety got me in trouble. I went through with Confirmation with the same result as Communion. I knew things were “all in His timing” so I just waited patiently afterward. I thought this was supposed to be a big deal, big enough that I should notice something happening but I didn’t.

High school came and went without any religious influence and I started getting caught up on all the secular things of which I had been unaware. When I finally left home at 20 I bounced around from church to church, from non-denominational to evangelical. I did some soul searching. I was convinced I was doing it wrong and really wanted to know Him. I asked Jesus into my heart. I cried. Nothing.

My wife and I got married at Silverwood Mennonite Chuch in 2000. We were both believers, and very minimal at that, but certainly not Mennonite. That was from her side of the family. I would probably still be a minimalist believer in the Christian god if it were not for another dose of evangelism. Some members of her family were a bit extreme. Religion wasn’t just a part of them, it was them. This created conflict. I never liked being unsure about things that should be so important, so I was forced to try it again. The exception this time is that I took a different approach. My research started with understanding the meaning of words, ones that i taken for granted such as belief and knowledge. The internet proved to be a wonderful tool for finally getting some objective answers. I was fascinated with the amount of knowledge out there. The more knowledge I gained, the less I believed in God. After a hard year of digging, my conflict was resolved. I came to the realization that I did not believe. I was atheist and I found it to be reasonable.

Rod Chlebek

After careful thought and consideration, I decide I would write in as to why I am an atheist. Up until about six years ago, until I was 22, I was a believer in fairy tales. I believed that when you blessed yourself and made the sign of the cross that it would be as though it was a “direct telephone line” to God and that whatever I said would go straight to his ears. During mass I would count the number of times I blessed myself to make sure I “hung up” so that in case I thought of something bad it would not go straight to him.

I used to have a rosary and miraculous medals with me at all times, and even carried a scapular and small figures of Mary and Jesus in my purse. After tenth grade I stopped going to church mainly because I hated the parish I went to and detested the monsignor there, who always seemed to be the one officiating. But I still carried those trinkets with me wherever I went. Even though I no longer believe, I still cannot bring myself to throw them away, for sentimental values (gifts from my parents and grandparents).

As far as science goes, I was taught evolution in school and it was not until high school that I learned that people actually thought the world was six thousand years old. Needless to say, those girls were terribly misinformed then as they are now. I am at least thankful that I never believed in that nonsense. The Big Bang makes more sense than creationist stories about how the earth was formed. I love physics and engineering, and am going back to school to learn more about it and to get my degree in mechanical engineering (I know, big leap from fashion design, but I always want to know how things work and why and now that I am 28, I realized what I wanted to be when I was 18 is not what I want to be now that I am no longer a teenager).

The biggest thing that caused me to question and ultimately read about religion more than anything was the child abuse scandal and when the Catholic Church decided there was going to be no more Limbo, which goes back to my constant need to understand things and why it is done that way. I could not believe that no one would come forward for these kids and how dare the priest cover for themselves. It disgusted me that basically the entire hierarchy of the Catholic Church cared more about the pedophile priests than they did for the children whose lives were ruined because of them. Additionally when the Catholic Church announced a few years ago that despite the fact that they are infallible, they made a mistake for a few millennia and that unbaptized babies no longer go to limbo they are in heaven. My grandmother had a stillborn baby some fifty odd years ago and she spent every day until her death ten years ago thinking that she would never see her baby in heaven because the Catholic Church told her it was in Limbo with no chance to be with her.

It was because of this anger that led me to start reading about Catholicism and its history, which led to reading about Protestants and finally other Abrahamic religions and a little of the other world religions. I read why Jews didn’t accept Christ because he did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. I read about how there is no evidence for Jesus aside from the Bible. I started to realize that if I grew up in India and raised Hindu, I would believe Hinduism is the only way, or if I grew up in Saudi Arabia I would be Muslim and Islam would be the only way. I started to question why would God only allow his religion to be given to only a few select people. I then started to realize that it was all crap. It was all man made and it all boils down to this one thing: people are afraid to die and are afraid that there is nothing after our time on this earth is over.

Through time and reasoning I came to the conclusion that all religion is false and that I now pity people who believe in it and base their whole lives on pleasing an invisible man in the sky. My family is now what we joke as being on the “Dark Side”, and my mother is pretty much an agnostic now. My siblings are also atheists as well and my dad is a strong agnostic too. I am not going to go back to believing in fairy tales ever again. If only the rest of the world would too.

Anne Marie
United States

When I was four (or thereabouts) I was taken by an elderly “aunt” (I think she was a friend of my maternal grandparents) to a church in Manhattan to “see the animals in the stone”. Now I had previously been taken to the American Museum of Natural History and had seen the mounted dinosaur skeletons, etc., and I was eager to see more – especially those which were not yet extracted for the rock.

So I eagerly accompanied her to a church which was lined with marble. To my dismay there were no animal skeletons embedded in the stone: some vague shapes which, if you stretched your imagination a whole lot, could be interpreted as a rabbit, or a squirrl, or a bird, or something else.

After waxing lyrical about the “animals in the stone” my “aunt” then proceeded to start talking about Jesus and God and Heaven.

The first part of her discourse – about the animals in the stone – was obviously blown out of her ass – although I didn’t think in those terms at that time. So I took the second part, about God and Jesus, etc., as just more of the same.

That experience inoculated me: Sunday school, Bible lessons, etc. etc. etc. – you name it – rang false false false from then on.

As I matured, of course, I became more sophisticated in my reasoning, which is only to be expected. But no matter how bullet-proof an argument for God apparently was, I KNEW, from the start, that it was bogus, and I just had to poke and pry at it some more to find the catch – the unstated and erroneous assumption, the false premise.

It has been more than 6 decades, now, and I grow weary of the lies the proselytizers spew with unfailing energy.

Neel Ode

I’m sure you are more than flooded with posts to this category, and probably still being flooded more and more each day. As a sociology student, I absolutely love reading the various ways people came into atheism in our religious soaked culture. After some mulling it over, I decided I wanted to send mine is as well. I don’t know if it will ever get posted, but I still wanted to add my story to the pile. You should consider compiling all of these into a book. I know I would read it!

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household, in a small yet deeply religious town, in the heart of Oklahoma. Obviously, Christianity was presented to me as the only possible way. But, I was lucky. During my childhood I had an uncle who doted on me, having no children of his own, and often stepped in to provide babysitting and care when other family members were busy. My uncle never made noise about his beliefs, mostly, I believe, because that would have cut him out of the family and community. Whatever he believed, I’ll never know. What I do know is that he loved planting seeds of doubt, oh so subtly, in my head. He had two loves in his life, science and history, and he took every moment to go off on long-winded rants about both, usually in ways that would cause me to doubt the myths I had heard without causing suspicion from the believers.

I remember one beautiful starry night, in mid-December, he woke me up in the middle of the night to pull out the telescope and gaze up into the sky. He told me about the constellations, who they were named for, and what they had done to deserve such a special place. As we talked about ancient myths and the cultures of those myths, he threw out a jewel. Sometimes women got pregnant outside of marriage, but that could have been very dangerous for them. Wouldn’t it be safer to simply say “God did it”, whomever that God was, then to risk death? With the story of the virgin-birth of Jesus around me at that time, he managed to put doubt into my head without actually bringing up Mary or Jesus. It was sneaky, and beautiful.

When I was finally old enough to toss off Christianity, I flung myself into paganism. My reasoning, as cloudy as it was, made sense to a young girl who was trying to escape. One, the brand of Christianity I was raised in was very, devoutly anti-women. At my church, women and girls were to sit in the back of the church and be silent, rising shortly before the men to assemble in the kitchen area and prepare the after service meal while the men and boys got to hear the just-for-them sermon. Suddenly coming across a religion, as fuzzy as that term might be, where I wasn’t seen as chattel was breathtaking. Finally, I was an equal person! Secondly, my uncle had tempted me into looking at the history of Christianity, and a lot of what I read showed me that they took a lot of their ideas/beliefs/traditions from pagan religions at that time. To me, if Christianity had to steal these from the pagans, the early Christians must have known that these pagan religions were more true, more right. They wouldn’t have stolen from them if they were not superior in some way. (In my defense, I wasn’t a wand waving, spell casting pagan. I looked down at those types as ignorant. I was more of a history book reading pagan, believing there was some “greater power” that didn’t need our worship and was more concerned with the big picture than our puny, little selves.)

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself a young mother who was desperate to give my kids the education I felt I had missed out on. In order to teach them better about the world, I knew I had to understand it better. So I threw myself into the subject that was glossed over so much when I was a kid: science. Again, I was lucky to have an uncle that secretly brought me books and pirated videos of Sagan and Hawking when I was a teen, but I wanted my kids to be exposed to these types of ideas at a younger age, to not have to overcome a decade of religious brainwashing first. As I began to look more into these areas in order to break them down for my kids, I started to understand something. I held on to paganism because I needed a Why. I needed something bigger than myself, bigger than the whole of humanity, bigger than the universe, to give meaning to it all. I conceded that such a power might exist in such a way that our current scientific abilities were not able to detect it, but I still felt that it was there. Because it had to be there. Because there had to be a why.

As soon as I realized that was the reason I held on to some belief, I felt foolish. There doesn’t have to be a why, random things happen all the time for no reason. Finally getting that let me toss of what was left of my beliefs and accept that I’m an atheist. I think my uncle would be proud.

Summer
United States

I am an atheist by necessity, only because religious superstition exists in the world.

I would be delighted if, upon one happy day in the future, that priority sank to the level of historical novelty and I could devote my energies exclusively to more pleasant and constructive and progressive pursuits that do not resemble the burdensome toils of janitorial maintenance.

Helping to clear the world of the pestilence of religious tyranny is a duty I do not shirk and I am proud of what modest help I can bring to the effort. I remain ever vigilant to find ways of increasing the effectiveness of my activism, but I would gladly part with the “atheist” identification if religion and superstition disappeared and rationality and critical thinking became the default attitude in the world.

As long as superstition enslaves people and makes life miserable if not unbearable, I must be an atheist, but I’d much rather be, simply, an artist and educator, and be able to build upon the foundation of knowledge already established, introducing the marvels of natural reality to young people and those who sincerely value their curiosity of the real world without having to give my time to religion for ANYTHING, including the reason for being an “atheist”.

Unfortunately, we don’t yet live in such a world (far from it) but my idealism doesn’t trump my practical realism either, and so I must be an “atheist”. So be it. Let the conflict roil on and evolve inevitably into one or another outcome.

Meanwhile, I will continue to remain optimistic for the prospect of a superstition-free world as long as I see light on the horizon and can cherish an entirely HUMAN hope for a better future, virtues which the grubby, greedy hands of religious authority cannot take from me, let alone assume credit for.

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