At age 14, I was sitting in the St. Pius the 10th Catholic Church, and it occurred to me that the apostolic succession and pretty much all of Catholicism could really be founded on a game of telephone.

We all know of the game of telephone: an original message is passed on from person to person, mutating in amusing ways both accidentally and deliberately. Stories of Jesus could have started false (You should have seen the miracle he worked in the previous town!) or could mutate and optimize to most effectively dazzle audiences, even during JC’s lifetime. Not to mention the decades after until they were written down.

And now, 40+ years later, I realize (thanks to Pharyngula) that “provenance” is the word I have needed to describe my path through skepticism and atheism (or agnosticism.)

From 14 to 24, I didn’t encounter any skeptical or atheist literature. I argued vigorously with quite a number of creationists online, and thought that as an evolutionary biology student that I was pretty hot stuff. Until eventually some creationist (with more than the standard two neurons to rub together) claimed I was making up evolutionary just-so stories based on my authority and nothing else. And galling as it was, I had to admit it to myself. I had a provenance problem. But the bright side was that I looked at Creationists, and saw that their provenance problem was much worse and incurable. I could drop a few of my made-up arguments, limit myself to published science and identifying creationist fallacies, and I was fine.

One of the more noisome religious arguments I encountered was the accusation that science was due to pride, while religious believers were humble. I developed my own response based on provenance. Scientists, I would say, are the humble ones. Because not only must they restrict their claims to those based on evidence, but it must also be evidence that anyone else can confirm. The religious are the prideful ones: claiming that their prophets are the only ones with access to the truth. It’s a very common trick to accuse your opponent of your own sins, and thus one of the first we should expect from the religious.

Provenance also calls most philosophy into question. 99%+ of it is crap, for the simple reason that the provenance of its assumptions is unsupportable. A priori knowledge indeed! You don’t have to look far for “gut feelings” a la Steven Colbert. My favorite recent example of appeal to gut feelings is the first clause of the first sentence of the preface to Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”: “Individuals have rights….” That’s straight from his gut, an assumption of Natural Rights. He might as well be saying that individuals have souls for all the evidence he lacks. Some more modern philosophy, such as that of Daniel Dennett, does better by starting with reasoning based on the sciences, especially the biological sciences.

I used to think I was scientific and rational. Now that I know a little more about where my knowledge comes from, I know that I cannot depend on it without confirmation. When we start learning, we accept uncritically. After a while, we do start to test our knowledge for inconsistency and coherence with our own observations. But there is such a huge welter of knowledge that we cannot take the time to test it all, nor to re-derive it for ourselves. Imagine having to re-derive all the mathematics you learn in school. Mathematics that took the efforts of hundreds of mathematicians over thousands of years to create. So the vast majority of our knowledge is accepted on faith. What sense of “rational” is that? Rational turns out to be a Humpty-Dumpty word: it means whatever we want it to when we want to bash somebody else for not being rational. Is scientific any better? Maybe. Scientific provenance has to do with intersubjective confirmation of observations and how they match models or theories. At various times I have confused this with tribal loyalty to scientific knowledge. But very little of my life is actually concerned with doing science: usually I tend to use science as a censor for claims that I judge “unscientific”, such as homeopathy. Why do I trust science to be correct for such use? Not because I have confirmed all of the science I have learned, but because when ever I have tested scientific knowledge, it has stood the test of intersubjectivity. I have recapitulated the origins of the knowledge, the provenance, on occasion. So if I want to characterize myself as scientific or rational, it is at best relative to someone who is less so in a particular field.

Questioning the provenance of knowledge is perilous. After you discard the baby falsehoods such as gods and the rest of the supernatural and fictional crud, you quickly discover that pretty much everything else is also built on a foundation of sand. There is no ultimate truth or reality that we can’t question. We are left without even a foundation of sand: we are floating. What is left is reliable knowledge: knowledge that we can confirm intersubjectively, such as science. We can assemble that knowledge into a consilient raft without a foundation. That’s plenty to construct glorious social concepts of reality. We don’t need illusory anchors such as gods or religious beliefs: fictional whimseys can be enjoyable, but we don’t need to take them seriously to deal with the real world.

Mike Huben
United States

I’m an atheist because I don’t need what religions are selling. It’s all about death, really. No one wants to die. Scientists are working on extending lifespans and religious people are working on eternal life, reincarnation, etc. Isn’t one life enough? Sure, it sounds great to live forever, but it would get boring I’m sure. Everyone loves the idea of heaven because no one really thinks about it. I see this life as heaven. Heaven shouldn’t last forever. I equate it with a trip to Disney World. Would you really like to stay at Disney World for a year? A month? All expenses paid? It sounds great! But even little kids would be crying to go home before too long. It would lose its charm.

Now that I’ve had kids I look forward to that day (hopefully far away) when I can rest and look back on my tiny contribution to this special world. A world that happened to settle into a spot that was conducive to it creating life. How fantastic! And it will be enough just to say I was here. That I got to be born. That I got to live when billions of others didn’t even make it out of the womb. And that my genes (through evolution) will eventually be in every human on earth, just like our genes contain bits of ancient Egyptians and other Africans. No one thinks about heaven, but at the same time it’s all they want. But only if their lives don’t feel like heaven. I have what I need in this life. And it’s enough. And now I get to experience things all over again through my children. What better gift? But I’ll have had enough when I’m old. If I spent my entire life wondering where I was going when I died, I’d forget to live.

Thomas Lawson
Canada

I suspect that the story of my turn to atheism is less interesting than many. I did not have the dramatic crisis of faith that is so often described in the turn away from theism. This must stem from the fact that I began down this road as a small child.

My early experience with the church was much like the experience of most of the people I know. Sundays were a day where I was forced to wear uncomfortable clothes and go to a big place that smelled funny. It was full of old people who got very bent out of shape if you did not sit absolutely quietly for a whole hour! Then this other old guy in funny clothes would stand up in the front and drone on and on about whatever was on his mind. It was torture. The big payoff, though, was that if you behaved, you got to go out to eat afterward.

Despite myself, I still managed to pick up the basics. There was this guy who was really really powerful up in the sky somewhere who really really cared what you spent your time doing. There were all these stories about him, or more usually, about people interacting with him, that were just like the fairy tales my dad would tell when I was going to sleep. Stories about animals on a big boat and guys riding around in whale stomachs. For some reason, though, people seemed very concerned that you take these stories seriously and not the fairy stories–even though, I confess, I liked the fairy stories better. I was also aware that there were other kinds of people who believed the exact same stories but were not to be associated with if possible. They were called Baptists. Somehow, they believed the stories TOO much.

The turn didn’t come until one day in about the second or third grade. I was at the library in my school looking for a nice little book to hold me for the weekend. Usually, I would be on the lookout for some nice Garfield comics or perhaps some Clifford the Big Red Dog. That day, however, I found a story of creation that the Indians told. Honestly, I don’t remember the story or from which tribe it originated. It had to do with the Sun and the Moon getting together and making the Earth as their child… or something like that. It was a long time ago. In any case, what I remember most of all was my reaction to it. I thought, “How could anybody possibly believe that?!” That thought made me pause. “Wait a moment,” I pondered, “if that story sounds ridiculous, then what rational can I give to the story in the Bible? Why does everyone take THAT story so seriously?” I should point out that I grew up in the deep south. I had never met anyone who did not take the Bible seriously.

From there, it was a slow spiral into inevitability. From Christians, I got my first taste of what a horrible argument sounded like. I was in high school then. I said to some of the kids in Sunday school, “But you can’t really KNOW that the stories in the Bible are true.” I don’t remember what this was in response to, but they seemed shocked. Their reply was, “Yes, you can. It says so in the Bible. You just have to have faith!” I was shocked that anyone could say something so inane.

I remember sitting in church again, later on. I was bored. So, I decided to actually take a look at what all of the fuss was about. So, I picked up the Bible. They were liberally sprinkled about, after all. I suspected that this was to encourage us to read them. I started at the beginning. Genesis started out okay. I knew this story, after all. Then I came across one I hadn’t heard. It was about these two brothers named Cain and Able. They were the sons of Adam and Eve. Somehow, they had managed to get wives from somewhere. It didn’t really go into where exactly these females came from. I suspected I wasn’t supposed to ask. Anyway, they got together to buy presents for God. Able got something really nice that God liked. Cain gave something kind of mediocre. God was a bad liar and hurt Cain’s feelings, so Cain got all jealous and killed Able! WHOA!!! WHAT THE… Who reacts like THAT?! Talk about Christmas from hell! Anyway, the rest of the people (what other people?) were upset and figured they ought to punish Cain, but God said not to and gave him a NoNo mark instead. I guess that was supposed to have been sufficient, or maybe there weren’t enough people back then to start offing people for transgressions. I had thought this was supposed to be a GOOD book. It’s really not. I guess you could argue that it has really good parts, but then you don’t say it is a good book. You say it is a book that has its moments. Doesn’t really have the same ring to it. “The It-Has-Its-Moments Book.”

My senior year in high school, I decided that the only rational position to take on the whole affair, considering the sheer number of available religious beliefs and the unknowabilities of their various faith claims, was one of “I don’t know what the truth is, so I’ll just have to find out when I get there.” I was prepared to wait for death to take me so that I might find out the truth. The truth, I decided, was more important than wishful thinking. I later found out that this was called agnosticism, so that’s what I called myself.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I discovered the atheist community on YouTube. I read the books. I listened to the arguments. I reasoned that I was being unfair in my beliefs. I wasn’t really agnostic on the issue of whether or not Zeus or Thor were real. I didn’t believe for a minute that the Cargo Cults were a representation of reality. It was just the religion of my childhood that I was holding up a candle for. So, I abandoned it.

I am an atheist, because I recognize the value of the truth over faith. I recognize that the truth is not something that is landed on one day and held to vigorously. There is great value in bringing it slowly into focus as the facts come in. What you BELIEVE is the truth on one day may not in fact BE the truth. Evidence is the key.

I am an atheist, because I can find no reason not to be.

Nathaniel Logee

It’s not that I’m an atheist, it’s that god doesn’t exist.

Efilzeo
Italy

I’m a female of the species Homo sapiens on the eastern coast of the United States who was brought up in a sometimes vaguely deistic, sometimes atheistic, sometimes anti-theistic family.

It just depended on who you asked.

I’m the oldest child and was born in a major city on the northeastern coast of the United States. My father was brought up Catholic in Ireland, while my mother was brought up in the southeastern United States in a non-churchgoing family. I think she is a deist or agnostic-it was just never discussed. Both of my siblings are too young to have formulated any opinion on religion yet-they’ve not been brainwashed, so I think they’ll be agnostic at very least, but I’m not entirely certain.

My father was very different. He worked from a young age to make sure I knew that it was wise to stay away from the clergy, particularly Catholics. He instilled from a young age that talking to any priest or parishioner was a bad idea. I’m almost entirely certain that was from his rough upbringing with devout Catholic parents and nuns and priests at the schools.

Because of an unfortunate circumstance, my father lost his job while I was young and was forced to journey away to find work. Since then he’s had to take jobs that left him little time at home and what he had was usually spent sleeping. That meant that he didn’t have any time to discuss his atheistic beliefs with me and my mother has permanently refused to discuss hers with the family.

I eventually became a vague deist after I picked up ideas from my peers. There had to be somebody up there, right? While I was still in elementary school, I had a friend that, trying to be just like her preacher and her parents (who were active in the pursuit of converting people to their particular Lutheran strain of Christianity), converted me to a vague form of Christian-esque deism. I prayed in my bed at night to God (who, I would learn later, was also known as Jehovah), I learned about the Nativity and believed it, and I learned about Heaven and a diluted form of Hell. Bad people would go to timeout, good people would be happy.

I didn’t ever go to any church, I never really read the Bible until I was a lot older, I didn’t realize the exact qualifications to go to Heaven, I didn’t know that the God of the Abrahamic trifecta was a childish tyrant, I had barely any knowledge of the crucifixion and resurrection, I just had no idea. I guess I wasn’t ever really a Christian. I did believe in God in my own childish way, but it was filtered. I proudly told people (outside of my family) that I was a Christian.

It took me a few more years to realize that I didn’t know what I was getting into.

My converting friend had long since vanished into the past. At the time, I was taking piano lessons with a Southern Baptist woman who is (to put it mildly) extremely devout and committed-she had played the organ for her congregation since she was a teenager. She’d gone to a Christian college and converted people for some time. She knew my parents were non-theistic and I was a Christian, though I’d asked her not to say anything to my parents and I’d tell them when I was older and knew how to articulate my beliefs to them.

I had just finished a song and was looking for a new one. As I flipped through a book of pop songs of the last 50 years or so, I chanced upon a simplification of “Imagine” by John Lennon. I knew of the Beatles’ music and enjoyed it, though I hadn’t yet heard that particular song. Recognizing the name, I said, “Ooh, John Lennon.”

She replied, with a sort of satisfaction, “No, we don’t play that here. He wasn’t a Christian, but he learned his lesson in the end.”

At the time, the comment confused me, but I let it go without continuing the conversation. We drifted elsewhere, but I didn’t forget the comment. I thought that maybe he’d eventually converted.

I got home and searched for “Imagine” and for “John Lennon” on Google.

While listening to “Imagine” and reading John Lennon’s Wikipedia biography, I chanced upon the fact that he’d been shot and killed at a fairly young age, but he’d never converted. After I’d listened to “Imagine” twice, I made the connection in a stroke of brilliance.

She thought that John Lennon’s death was a judgment from God for writing that song.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to be a Christian anymore.

Now, she’s generally a nice woman, though obviously she holds no sympathy for atheists (or homosexuals, or Muslims) and she watches Fox News.

But this hate, I found as I finally read the Bible, was supported openly. The Old Testament was just a compilation of the evil of Jehovah-the New just a contradictory set of tales of the purveyor of an immoral doctrine that was supposedly simultaneously the son of Jehovah and Jehovah.

It was terrifying and laughable at the same time. But I also realized that the idea of this God, the idea of Hell, of original sin, of resurrection, of believing an old story book, of trusting the nonsensical and often contradictory doctrines of Christianity was just absurd, ludicrous, preposterous!

But, for some reason, I stopped there. I didn’t renounce deism, though I realized that an interventionist God was also absurd. I became something of a Ben Franklin-like deist; it (whatever it was) existed but it didn’t do anything.

Eventually, through a rather strange route, I started watching Dara O’Briain’s standup comedy. I laughed and laughed until I reached the part where he said he’d take psychics, homeopaths and priests and put them all in a sack and hit them with sticks. The psychics and priests I could emphasize with, but I didn’t know what homeopaths were.

The next stop was to James Randi’s YouTube channel.

I found Thunderf00t on YouTube shortly afterward.

After that, I stumbled across the Atheist Community of Austin and the Atheist Experience, followed shortly thereafter by the Non-Prophets.

And then I found Pharyngula.

From there, the whole world of atheism and anti-theism opened up.

Since then, I’ve been commenting on the intertubes, I’ve been joining chatrooms and I’ve been reading and educating myself about evolution, about religion, about society in general and anything else I can get my hands on. I’ve just gotten into one of my first written debates with a theistic friend of mine (verbal sparring has been going on for a while) and I’m having a blast.

Once I started educating myself and enjoying it…everything fell into place. I finally understood why I found the Bible so absolutely absurd. I finally figured out why my father was so anti-theistic. I finally figured out why people were protesting church-state separation violation. I finally figured out why calling Jesus a madman or something worse was justified. I finally figured out why the line between what is comforting to believe and what is true is so important.

I’m going to end with one of the only quotes in the Bible, otherwise known as the Big Book of Multiple Choice, that has ever held any significance for me. Predictably, it does not come from the Old Testament (though Ecclesiastes is interesting at very least) nor does it come from the supposed sayings of Christ. Instead, it is from Paul. Also predictably, I had to take it (somewhat) out of context.

1 Corinthians, 13:11-When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (KJV)

Fitting then, now that I am no longer a child, that I put away the childish god of Abraham, the childish reliance on imaginary friends, and the brutal yet still childish threat of pain that are all mainstays of the destructive and infantile organizations we call religions.

Xios the Fifth
United States