Why I am an atheist – Natasha Krasle

I suppose my journey to atheism started with spirituality. When I was a kid, I attended a Unitarian Universalist church in Seattle. We had both a Solstice and a Christmas pageant, celebrated Easter and the Equinox. My parents sought not to force an ideology upon me, but to expose me to many traditions so that I could piece together my own collage of beliefs. I remember one day, standing in my living room, when someone inquired as to my religion. Bewildered, I said “I don’t know…” and turned to my mother, who replied “Good.” When my sisters were born, though, our house and traditions were suddenly too small.

We moved to a cohousing community about half an hour away when I was nine or ten, and my father moved back to Seattle soon afterward. He was and is a very scientifically minded person, fascinated with the acquisition of any kind of knowledge he can get his hands on, and I believe his transition to atheism came soon after my parents split. I began attending a New Thought church with my mother (and later my stepfather). In this place, I was taught that god is just a word for some spiritual thingy that makes up everything, a person’s natural state is perfection, that our thoughts affect what happens to us, and that heaven and hell are merely states of mind. After a while, though, I became disenchanted with that fat box of joy. They started asking people to tithe after every service. They acquired a new TV spot, associated themselves with Deepak Chopra, and built a new “celebration hall” with the money they constantly milked their audience for…. The average wealth of the people attending rose visibly, and not because the church was making anyone richer. Our old holding-hands-during songs tradition was abolished without a word. Not to mention the fact that we were building ugly new buildings instead of, say, helping people through devastating world crises. Attached to my previous participation in the music program and to the friends I’d made there, I dangled on for a little while before I gave up.

As I began my college career last year, I discovered my fascination with anthropology and psychology; the reasons people are how we are, and how we perceive the world around us. And in the light of my recent split from the New Thought movement, and the insight I was being given into humanity, I turned my questioning nature upon my own beliefs. I’d read Pharyngula before, and was already better versed in biology and the scientific method than most people my age, but had held tightly to my vague, earthy spirituality. Under closer scrutiny, I was shocked at my conclusion:

None of the important values I was holding onto and associated with spirituality- self-fulfilling prophecy (a well-known psychological phenomenon), respect for life, empathy, getting to know oneself- needed to be assigned to any sort of supernatural being or force. There was just no reason I had to believe something quite frankly silly to be a whole, happy person living on a fascinating speck in a vast and astounding universe.

So I did. And now I’m an atheist.

Natasha Krasle
United States

How not to make an 1100 person convention welcome

Most of the businesses in Springfield, Missouri that we godless attendees of Skepticon frequented seemed glad of our business, and even gave us a 10% convention discount. There were exceptions. Mio Gelato is owned by a bigot — and this was a place just one block away from the Gillioz Theater, where the convention was held.

Skepticon is NOT welcomed to my Christian business

One other unwelcoming thing: the Gillioz Theater did not mention Skepticon on their marquee, or in any of their advertising. I guess they were just annoyed enough about our existence to be ashamed of hosting us, but not bigoted enough to refuse our money. Progress!

There exists an apology.

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

They deserved to die

It was a rather depressing trip to the Creation Ministries of the Ozarks yesterday. It’s a cheesy little place which slavishly follows the dogma of Answers in Genesis — the first people I talked to there parroted the Ham Party Line. It was all presuppositionalism, worldviews, “we’re just interpreting the same facts that you do, only through a biblical lens,” all that relativistic bullshit that they use as an excuse to avoid facing the fact that they deny almost all the evidence. I did get the one guy to admit that their method is to accept the Bible as truth and then glean through the scientific evidence to find the bits that fit their predispositions, but even that minor triumph was hollow: he thought it was a virtue of creationism!

They generally seemed like very nice people, who were pleased to have this crowd packing their little place. They offered us cookies and juice. I think we made their month.

I was dismayed at one bit of conversation with Dr Rod Butterworth, head of the place. He was trying to explain how the bloody god of the Old Testament really wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.

“You don’t understand: all those people he had to kill, were horrible people. They deserved to be killed!”

To which I replied, “But that’s exactly the excuse Hitler used to murder the Jews!”

“No…” He seemed slightly nonplussed.

One of Mattir’s spawn was there, and she explained to him that it was true, that Jews were accused of blood libel, and the Nazis claimed they used Jesus’ blood in evil rituals.

“Oh, well, there probably were Jews who did that, who hated Christianity, and those Jews would have deserved it.”

You could have knocked me flat with a feather.

I pointed out that his god, according to his myth, exterminated the entire population of the planet, except for 8 people. Was he really arguing that all of those people, even the babies, were all so wretchedly evil that they deserved death?

He replied that yes, they did, because they refused to worship god, and god as their creator had every right to do with them as he will.

I chose not to mention that his “museum” was full of people who refuse to worship his tyrannical god, and considered those acts immoral, no matter whether they were done by a creator.

Maybe they weren’t such nice people after all. I didn’t want to give him an excuse to commit justifiable homicide.

Why I am an atheist – Heather V

Jesus led me to become an atheist.

Being raised in the Catholic Church, I attended years of CCD (what
they called Catechism before that and call something else now) but
never made it to confirmation. Like all teenagers, by High School I
believed I knew better than adults and told my mom I didn’t believe in
God or that Jesus was his son. This pissed off my mother, but then I
was only just getting started with finding things with which to piss
her off. I believed religion was a crutch and religious people were
nutcases. My teenage self would be horrified at some of my later
religious phases.

A year or so after High School, and much family drama, I found myself
without friends or family and in the Army. My solitude, my need, and a
book I found in the library called Drawing Down the Moon led me into
Wicca. It, and the Mists of Avalon, had me convinced that all the time
I’d been praying to the Virgin Mary the one who I really should be
worshiping was the Goddess.

You know how hard that is to admit? It’s like getting caught singing
into the hairbrush in front of the mirror.

Wicca was cool and I could see all kinds of parallels between the
rituals from the Catholic Church and the rituals practiced in spells.
I learned that Magik is really all about focusing your positive energy
to influence the world around you (not much different than the woo
peddled in “The Secret” or “What the Bleep”.) It made me feel
incredibly cool and gothic and special. And I totally missed the point
that I was estranged from my mother and was now replacing her with a
Goddess.

Then I fell in love with a Baptist who feared that I and my heathen
ways were going to Hell because I hadn’t accepted Jesus as my personal
Savior. First I went along with it because I wanted him and wanted him
to marry me, and then I got sucked into it completely. I helped in my
own brainwashing. I went to Bible study. I listened to Christian
radio. I was led to be “Born Again” and was baptized with a full
dunking in a Baptist Church because my Catholic baptism as a child
“didn’t count.” My Baptist in-laws were so happy. Wow, I finally had
parents who were proud of me.

When my marriage was failing, I bought the Praying Wife and stuck with
it. Eventually the day finally came, six years later, that I couldn’t
stick with it anymore.

Without him I didn’t go to Baptist Church anymore but, instead, I
started going to Catholic Church again because I missed the ritual and
non-Catholic Churches don’t feel like “real” churches. But the
Catholic Church was lacking in the “motivational speaking” I’d come to
depend on from the Baptist side. So I retained my brain washing and
listened to Christian Radio and read the Left Behind Series. Because
of that, I almost dumped my
said-he-was-Catholic-but-didn’t-really-believe-in-it-but-believed-in-something
boyfriend because, according to my Left Behind saturated mind, he was
damned and going to Hell.

This time when love won out over everything else it luckily turned out
to be the right decision.

My now husband, who has a phobia about shaking hands with strangers,
wouldn’t go to church with me because of this (or so he claims) and I
wanted to have a more “spiritual marriage.” Because I felt he wasn’t
enough of a believer, went looking for things that would convince him
to become one. This led to some very stimulating discussions that
didn’t have the effect either of us were looking for. I started to
think that if only I could get back to what the Catholic Church was
before it was corrupted by mankind I’d be on the right track. I
thought if I could just learn more I’d be able to reach certainty and
not feel like I was deluding myself.

And then one day, I was watching one of the many documentaries they
have on the History or Discovery Channel about the history of the
Bible or the Christians, and it mentioned very casually, as an aside,
that there was doubt as to whether Jesus ever existed.

What… wait a minute…WHAT? I thought that the existence of Jesus wasn’t
in doubt. That couldn’t be true. There had to at least have been a guy
that at one time was a leader and maybe later on his message was
distorted. There had to have been someone who was the Martin Luther
King of his day, right?

And much like described in the movie “The God Who Wasn’t There”, the
more I looked for a historical Jesus, the more, or rather less, I
found of him. This was the beginning of the domino chain that led to
my Atheism.

Now I listen to podcasts and read blogs about Humanism, Science,
Atheism and Skepticism. I now ask myself questions like “What do I
believe and why do I believe it?” My husband and I enjoy trips
together to science lectures (where he doesn’t have to shake anyone’s
hand) and a visit to the planetarium will give me that goose bump
feeling of wonder that a good sermon used to.

Heather V
United States

‘Tis a good day to #creozerg

I’m in Springfield, Missouri, and today at noon I’ll be joining a mob of skeptics and atheists at the Gillioz Theater to prepare to hit the Creation Ministries of the Ozarks. We shall descend upon them as a horde and sweep through their “museum”, documenting the foolishness and mocking the silly. You’re all welcome to join, but if you do show up, there are a few rules to follow:

  • Be polite and nondisruptive. This is their property and you are a visitor.

  • Remember: the Christians running this show, and the Christian attendees, are the delusional victims here. Feel some pity for them.

  • Do not, however, forget that this is an institution dedicated to promoting lies and ignorance. Do not pull a Michael Ruse and start admiring what they’ve accomplished.

  • Do not loudly insult the gift shop, if they have one. They hate that — that was the one thing that made the goons at our last #creozerg snap.

  • Do not have gay sex on the exhibits.

  • Document. Take notes and photographs. Your goal is to come away from this with a better understanding of what the promulgators of ignorance are teaching, and to spread the word about their folly afterwards.

  • Converse. One of the cool things about these trips is that you’re in a large group of critical thinkers, many of whom may have expertise on the subjects being mangled by the exhibits. Ask questions. Learn stuff.

  • Just to be on the safe side, you probably shouldn’t have heterosexual sex on the exhibits, either.

  • Be in the right frame of mind: you are not a gang of hooligans planning to vandalize the place, you are skeptical anthropologists there to observe the peculiar and pathological folkways of a backwards, intellectually impoverished people.

  • Have fun.

I’ll try to throw a few comments on twitter, hashtag #creozerg, as we pass through the halls of unlearning. Don’t expect a lot, though; this is a small, rinky-tink local creation “museum”, unlike that monument to idiocy built by the notorious leech, Ken Ham. We’ll probably race through it fairly fast, just because there won’t be a heck of a lot to see.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Blattafrax

God and religion were not a part of my upbringing, my parents are agnostic/disinterested. School Christmas plays and religious instruction at a young age passed over my head – I never questioned the story of the Noachian flood, but recall being worried about the amount of mud there’d be afterwards. It was only at the age of about 16 that I realised there were religious people out there and they had an impact on my life. My AD&D group fell apart under pressure; I actually listened to the occasional sermon I had to attend; friends’ parents imposing biblical rules on their children.

So having realised there was something to worry about, I did. The Gideons gave me a bible (thank you) and I read it – didn’t do much. At about the same time, my brother was ‘born again’ and I spoke with his friends. They told me how wonderful it was, if only you made the leap of faith (and held on to it). I tried in my head – nothing.

Then university and a girlfriend who tried her hardest to help me understand. I loved her. I wanted to share her experience. We went to church together. We talked about Christ and how important he was to her. I could see how happy it made her. Still nothing clicked inside.

An attack of utter exhaustion alone on a mountainside made me pray seriously for the only time in my life. Give me strength, I need to be able to move. Please. Nothing. Gradually with the rest, I regained enough energy to walk the last few kilometres to the mountain hut. No vision or burning bush led me there – only me.

Sex, drugs, rock & roll, education, politics, friends, enemies, enthusiasm, laziness, joy, hurt, desire, love all had an impact on me then and still do to this day. Influences were and are everywhere. They all have a memory, an effect, a cause. God on the other hand – nothing.

That was over 20 years ago now. There’s never going to be a sign is there?

Since then Richard Dawkins & Pharyngula showed how agnosticism has no basis and led me to understand why that is important. Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond and a scientific education taught me some of the things that can be explained rationally. Talk.origins revealed the opposing forces of imbecility. Intellectually, I am an atheist because there is no god necessary to explain anything. Emotionally, I am an atheist because there was no god to give me the revelation I looked for as a young adult. I am an atheist because there is no god.

Blattafrax
Switzerland

#NudePhotoRevolutionary

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, and Egyptian secularist, has done something striking: to protest against repressive Islamic culture, she has taken her clothes off, and posted photographs of herself on her blog

The 20-year-old wrote on her blog that the photos, which show her naked apart from stockings, are her “screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy”. Her blog has received 1.5 million hits since her photos were posted earlier this week.

This has had an expected result — the conservative and religious elements (but I am redundand) are outraged — and another, subtler, annoying aspect: even the liberals are whining. The comments on her blog, those few that are in English that I can read, are revealing. Among the comments praising her bravery, there are a few craven, well-meaning people urging cowardice, like this one.

With all respect to you – what good will it do the world if men and women in the Middle East take their clothes off?

It would be more accurate to say that it is a freedom, and we should be willing to fight to keep. Personal freedom? what this concept means in Egyptian society?

Personal freedom had limits and this kind of personal freedom – nude male and female art – is unknown in our society.You misunderstand the concept!

I have no problem with nudity.If you wish for people to be more understanding about nude photography you need to understand and deal with negative comments.

Yes,Nude does NOT equal sexual and nudity is artistic expression,but that doesn’t mean that it is acceptable in the society where we live in. As much as I want to believe being open minded about nudity,It would be great if we could get to a place where nudity was just a person with no clothes on. I think that will take a very long time though!

I hope this clears things up for you.

It doesn’t. What a muddle. So yes, you should be free to take your clothes off, but that isn’t “acceptable in the society where we live in,” and maybe you shouldn’t do it. You’re free, but you’re only free to do the things that the puritans in charge will allow you to do.

I think the problem is that this person is using the word “freedom”, but he doesn’t know what it actually means. That’s OK, we Americans act like we invented the word, but most of us seem perfectly willing to throw it away for a little imaginary security, or for the privilege of feeling sanctimoniously superior to our neighbors, or just to conform.

I’ll just say…bravo, Ms Elmahdy. I hope the reactionary haters in your country don’t do you harm, and I hope the tepid semi-liberals don’t applaud while they try.

(via Maryam Namazie.)

Why I am an atheist – Gary Hill

Last night I had a dream. In this dream I had reason to believe that a room in my house was inhabited by a poltergeist. I couldn’t actually see the entity but I had good reason to believe it was there because inanimate objects were constantly being moved from where I had left them. Of course I also could have been mistaken as to where I had put them. So I conducted an experiment. I left a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor and out loud, informed the poltergeist that “I have left a pair of shoes in the middle of the room and I am now going to leave the room, close the door, and return in 10 minutes. If you want me to believe in your existence I want you to move the shoes to somewhere else in the room”. Then I left. On returning, sure enough, the shoes were neatly placed on the table. In my dream I repeated the procedure several times and each time the shoes ended up on the table.

I imagine I have dreams like this because as a young teen I discovered science fiction and avidly read the entire contents of my high school library. Stalwarts such as John Wyndham, Lester Del Rey and later, the ‘new wave’ of science fiction authors such as Bradbury, Ballard and Ellison became my sustenance. From there it was an easy step into the decidely dodgy world of ESP, ley lines, the mathematical profundity of the pyramids, Erich von Daniken and Lobsang Rampa. You name it, I’ve probably read it.

Looking back on this period, now armed with a PhD in cognitive psychology, I wonder whether reading these books acted as a type of partial wish fulfillment. We all wish the world were different to how it actually is. In my case this was characterised by such thoughts as wouldn’t it be great if telepathy were real? Imagine being able to privately communicate with someone at a great distance without having to worry about dialing codes or whether the battery has enough charge. Excellent! Talking to dead relatives and close friends? Cool! Visitors from outer space in saucer shaped craft? Fantastic! Being able to move objects at a distance? Wow! Curing any emotional ill simply by talking through your feelings, guided by a simple, universal template of human psychological structure? Awesome!

An omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent entity that created the universe (and us, to look just like him!) and responds to all your needs…….

But let’s be honest here. There is no such thing as ESP, telekinesis, reliably effective Freudian analysis, flying saucers etc. How do we know this? Well we’ve observed and experimented, and crunched the numbers. And observed and experimented and crunched the numbers again. And again. And not only formally, in laboratories, but informally, in the field, in our everday observations and thoughts. And as for that omnsicient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent being, or even an omniscient entity of any sort, well again, the numbers, whether from philosphical or empirical investigation, simply don’t add up.

So, in the best tradition of personality psychology in categorising human beings, I observe a psychological continuum between those who perceive the world in terms of wish-fulfillment (believers) and those who perceive the world in terms of evidence (rationalists). Or, in other words, a continuum based on an individual’s existential honesty.

Using my dream as analogy, whether the shoes had moved or not, the rationalist would simply accept the state of things as found and the scientific world-view would be amended accordingly in that the poltergeist hypothesis would gain some support. If the shoes had not moved, however, the poltergeist believer would have their world-view threatened and likely be trying to convince us that the shoes really had moved. Substitute god for poltergeist, and the shoes would have moved in the spiritual dimension, or actually would have moved, if god was willing, or their remains the possibility that the shoes will move, if only we had more faith….

That is why I am an atheist. I simply aspire to perceive the universe in as true a way as possible; which entails being honest about my psychological makeup, i.e., my own wants and wishes, no matter what the data is telling me. It’s not that I don’t believe in god. I simply have yet to see any convincing data (or philosophical argument, for that matter) that the hypothesis is true. Belief just doesn’t come into it.

Gary Hill
United Kingdom