Why I am an atheist – Kristen G

When I was 13 years old and still interested in being a good
Presbyterian, I came across a few issues with my Bible that no one was
willing to discuss with me. I kept finding lines telling me that I was
inferior to men, that I should submit to their instructions and
desires, that I should accept and learn from my father’s or my
husband’s punishments, like a child should from its parents and a
slave should from its master. I told my youth group leader I could
never tolerate that, that no man would ever be the boss of me and
would certainly never punish me. If I ever got married it would be as
an equal partner in a loving, mutually-respectful pairing, and I would
file for divorce at the first inkling that my husband thought our
family had a hierarchy. He tried to pull the same old bullshit that
you hear again and again–yes, wives are to submit to their husbands
and men are the default heads of households, but husbands are required
to love their wives as Jesus loved the church, so see, it’s all fair.
Moreover, in the rearing of children it is necessary for someone to
have the final say in any decision, so see, you need your husband to
be in charge. I refused to accept that–I would never worship my
husband as the church worshipped Jesus, and didn’t think having a
willy justified the overturning of my own decisions–particularly if
my decision was better. I was eventually told “well too bad, that’s
God’s will,” to which I retorted “well I’m terribly sorry but God is
wrong.”

The realization that many religious rules were written for the express
purpose of repressing me unclouded my vision regarding the church.
After the credibility of their central text collapsed it was then
really only a matter of time before the rest of my mind found peace
and sense in atheism. I was doused in religion from infancy, and a
good deal of the bullshit regarding omniscient beings reading my every
thought had already taken hold. It was hard to shake free of this
Thoughtcrime training, and led me to feeling unhinged for many years.
I’m sure many would-be rationalists have eventually caved under the
nagging sensation that Santa Claus is reading along and does not
approve of what you’re thinking. Religion is brain damage, a type of
forced schizophrenia–church leaders carefully insert another voice in
your head to constantly judge you against their bizarre rubric. A
voice which can be difficult to silence until you learn that it is not
your conscience or the voice of God–it is a result of brainwashing,
and it should be a crime.

I met with plenty of resistance on my way out of religion–from
screaming matches with my mother to physical abuse from my father to
other children shunning me for my views on evolution, women’s rights
and contraception (this was South Carolina in the 90’s, after all). I
had always been an astronomy geek, and when I pointed out in school
that the mere existence of other galaxies pretty much debunked the
whole “our group of our species on our planet was created specially by
the master of the whole universe in his image” bupkis, I discovered
just what it feels like to be alone.

Even now, getting toward twenty years later, relations with my family
are strained. I moved to London in 2009, after spending an Erasmus
year in Canterbury in 2004 and discovering just how happy and sane
secular British society is compared to where I grew up. I’m engaged to
a man who never had to fight his way out of theism, something I’ve
always envied. He wasn’t rebelling or atheistic to be cool, as there
was no familial or cultural precedent for him to rebel against. The
issue just never came up. In his company (and country) I stopped
hearing the garbage, stopped having to fight for quiet from the
hate-based tribalism that chokes rational thought and prevents peace
among cultures. When my fiancé’s aunt asked if there were any nice
halls or historic buildings in our borough for us to get married in I
felt positively dizzy with happiness–no one assumed we were going to
a church, and no one expected us to do it “just to keep up
appearances”. For the first time, here in the UK, I’m not living a
lie.

I am free and it feels wonderful.

Ms. Kristen G
England

Lavender becomes us

Minnesota Atheists are highlighted in Lavender magazine. The reason? Gays and atheists often find themselves fighting on the same side in battles against the Religious Righteous, and Minnesota Atheists recently filed a friend of the court brief in a pending argument against the odious “Defense of Marriage Act”.

The amicus brief filed by Minnesota Atheists supports the couples in their effort to get rid of the law and argues the unconstitutionality of DOMA, noting the law’s theological basis.

The Minnesota State Constitution, with clauses guaranteeing freedom of conscious and freedom of religion, and the U.S. Constitution, which establishes freedom of religion in the First Amendment and equal protection for all in the Fourteenth Amendment, are violated by DOMA, according to the brief.

Berkshire said the religious roots of the law are grounded in “conservative Christian” views and leave those who have differing beliefs out in the cold.

“[DOMA is] a religious law that’s not just a difference of opinion,” Berkshire said. “It’s a religious law that’s harming people.” The amicus brief gives several sectarian arguments why same-sex marriage is considered unacceptable by some religious institutions, but says there is no secular reason to bar same-sex couples from opportunities given to heterosexual couples.

There those atheists go, making the world more tolerant and wiser one step at a time.

Why I am an atheist – Julia

For the first twelve years of my life, my mother frantically tried to bring me up in her Baptist church. She was elated that one of the first words I learnt to spell was “Jesus” at age 2. My father (who I found out to be an atheist last year) is a pilot and would conveniently bring me on fishing trips every few Sundays. It struck me as odd that he never had to go to church, but I didn’t really ask about it.

It wasn’t very long until I started questioning. When I was 5, my Sunday School teacher “disproved” the big bang by throwing a bunch of hard plastic animal toys into a plastic bag and shaking them up together. “See?” he said. “Everything is the exact same as when it went into the bag. This means that the only way the universe could have started was through god!”

Well, I was 5. It was the ’90s. I was irrevocably in love with Bill Nye. I told my Sunday School teacher that actually, no, he had done nothing to increase the entropy inside the bag, and how on earth can you perform nuclear changes by banging a bunch of polymers together?!

This would mark the first time I embarrassed my mother in church. I’m sure it wasn’t the last. There was so much they taught that just never made sense to me—How can everyone in heaven be happy if they know people they love are in hell? Why didn’t this all-powerful god hint to my aunt who died of rare duodenal cancer that she should get an endoscopy earlier? Moreso, why is this god such a jerk in general? Why is every religion “right”? What if religion is a farce and I waste my entire life—all that I have to live—following obscene rules instead of doing what I want? Why do these people say that without god, they would just be out raping and murdering all day? And why on earth do my Sunday School teachers keep telling me I’m going to burn in hell for listening to Queen?

By the time I was about 12, I didn’t have to go to church anymore. Whether news of my questions reached my mother and she decided I was too much of an embarrassment, or she decided that if church and years of bible camp couldn’t sway my mind, nothing would, I don’t know. I’m now involved in an atheist club in my university where I’m studying biochemistry—a combination she’s not pleased with, but has learned to accept.

So, why am I an atheist? Bill Nye helped me how to think and introduced me to science before my anyone else did. My childhood curiosity refused to take “Goddidit” as an answer. My amazement for the universe and how it works grows each year, and I refuse to stop at such superficial answers and instead look for the elegance of what truly goes on. I’m an atheist because I’ve always been an atheist, and can’t imagine being limited by believing in magical sky fairies.

Julia
Canada

Why I am an atheist – Erin Breda

I can distinctly remember kneeling in the darkened family room of my aunt and uncle’s house in Florida. With my eyes closed and my hands clasped reverentially in front of me, I recited the words that every Christian parent longs to hear from the lips of their children: “Dear Lord Jesus, please come into my heart and forgive my sins. I accept you as my Lord and savior.” I was four years old.

My mother was raised in a missionary family, living in various places throughout Central America. Her parents were (and are) Southern Baptist missionaries, and she did not return to the United States until age 17. After graduating high school early, she enrolled at Columbia Bible College, where she met my father. My father was also raised in a deeply religious protestant family, so after their marriage, it seemed the natural course that they prepare for entrance into the mission field. When I was born, my family was living in a small apartment above a church in my father’s home town in Pennsylvania, where he was the youth pastor. After my brother was born three years later, our family began traveling around the country raising support to send us to South America. My childhood was spent moving from state to state, staying in whatever lodging could be lent to us by the host church, while my parents preached and performed to receive donations toward our mission. The final period of their training was completed at a “mission institute” in Missouri, where my family spent six months learning how to make sock puppets and crafts to teach children about Jesus.

It was around this time, at seven years old, that I was baptized by my maternal grandfather in his church, south of Atlanta, Georgia. I don’t remember much of the ceremony, but I can easily recall the feedback I received from family and strangers alike. Everyone I met was delighted at my outward profession of faith. An elderly woman at the restaurant where we had retired to celebrate even gave me five dollars to congratulate me when she learned of my accomplishment. All of this went quite well with my temperament, as I’ve always thrived on attention and praise.

Though my parents divorced not long after we left the mission institute and then settled in Indiana, my happy coexistence with religion as a way to be rewarded continued into adolescence. Beginning somewhere around age 13, however, and blossoming as I advanced through my teenage years, the very healthy sexual appetite that my current husband so appreciates began to assert itself. I play-acted sexual encounters in the dark of my bedroom at night, and in high school I found ample opportunity to explore this arena with other hormone-addled teenagers, both boys and girls. It was at this time that I found a conflict with the happy “Jesus Loves You” message that had been repeated to me throughout childhood. The rules taught in church had always seemed so easy to follow. Of course I would never steal or kill anyone! But now every Sunday the youth pastor repeated the peril of expressing this hormonal urge that came so naturally to me. Feeling ashamed, as being “in trouble” is still one of my greatest fears, I internalized my guilt, but couldn’t deny the pull of temptation.

I lost my virginity at 17 to another virgin, who was likewise the child of evangelical parents. The next day, he was aghast at our transgression and swore we would never commit this crime again until our marriage. After a year of dating, the situation had so deteriorated in the home where I lived with my father and stepmother (who would later be diagnosed with a variety of mental disorders) that I moved in with my boyfriend’s parents. At first I was moved by their warm charity in welcoming me into their home. But from the moment I entered it, I soon discovered that every movement my boyfriend and I made was being scrutinized for signs of sexual behavior. Even though he slept in a separate room, accusations were constantly flung about. Feeling I had nowhere else to turn, after months of overwhelming pressure and condemnation, I agreed to legitimize our relationship through marriage. I was married on the morning of my senior prom in his parents’ living room, after which we returned to school on Monday as if nothing had happened.
After graduation, my new husband and I ventured into the wider world of university together, where we lived in married-student housing. It wasn’t long before I learned, at our school of 35,000, that there are vastly different kinds of people in the world, all holding fascinatingly diverse opinions, and almost all of these people seemed infinitely more attractive than the man I had married. Within the semester I began an affair with a brilliant and witty, if cynical, classmate during a field trip to Chicago. This would shortly end in discovery, anger, violence, and tearful apologies. Terrified of venturing out on my own, I agreed to move back in with our in-laws and begin my penance. I read the bible daily, was not allowed out alone, and was even forced to accompany my husband during his delivery runs. But through all of this, I could not be genuinely penitent because that brilliant and witty if cynical young student had opened my eyes. I learned that all of the guilt and shame I felt had really been self-inflicted. There is no Jesus to be disappointed in me when I break rules recorded thousands of years ago in a scattered collection of parchment. Once lifted of this irrational burden, I was free to exercise my own considerable rational faculties in further testing the religion I had always known. Everywhere I poked, I found the fabric of arguments I’d always accepted to be thin as tissue paper. I would continue my sentence a few more months before gathering enough courage to leave my husband for good. I moved in with my mother until the new semester started and then returned to my studies at university. There I took a minor in Women’s Studies, learning a great deal about sexuality, gender, and how humans have felt and expressed the same stirrings in myriad ways for thousands of years. After graduation, I moved to Boston, where I am now married to a wonderful man who shares my open-minded, voracious curiosity, and together we vet the various claims of the world based on sound, logical principles.

It took a while to let go of what had been so ingrained in me from childhood. Even long after I had mentally reconciled the lack of a supreme being, I still occasionally caught myself offering a silent prayer of thanks to the heavens when something fortuitous happened. I will always bear the scars of guilt and repression from my childhood in an evangelical protestant family. However I can now firmly state that there is no god, and that sex between consenting adults is most often a beautiful and wonderful thing, regardless of what your pastor says. Now, supported by my loving husband, I look forward to bringing children into the world who will grow up in an environment where their actions are judged not by adherence to an archaic code, but by the good or harm they cause themselves and those around them.

Erin Breda
Massachusetts, United States

Why I am an atheist – Cody Feldman

I grew up in a town in southeastern Idaho. Where Mormons outnumber the “real Christians”. I was raised a Methodist, and we always made fun of the Mormons but I never looked at my own beliefs to think that maybe they are as unwarranted as the Mormons. At the age of 19 my father died of esophageal cancer and I still believed. I believed that God was real and Jesus was real but he didn’t do anything to help. His days of miracles were over.

I went away to a community college in Kansas and friends there were believers. I wanted to know what they knew so I tried to wash away my beliefs and start fresh. I started listening to other people’s beliefs and enrolled in a class titled “Biblical Archeology”. Hoping that it would help solidify my beliefs in the historical accuracy of the bible and then I could start to accept the words of the bible.

I am not the outspoken person I am today, another benefit of my atheism. So I sat in class and listened. I tried to take it all in even though 99% of everything the instructor said made no sense. I wanted the class to show me what was found in the archeological records and then show how that is related to the bible. Instead the class showed what the bible said and then desperately searched for something that could possibly be related to it. The final straw was a piece of wood found in China that was said to be part of the Ark. A quick internet search showed it to be a forgery.

Out went the bible and in came a flood of authors. Hitchens, Dawkins, Krauss, Coyne, and soon to be P. Zed. I am going back to school and majoring in Ecology. Thanks to just a little bit of critical thinking and a nudge from the god believers themselves. And I thank every atheist author and blogger that always had things for me read or listen to so that I didn’t have to use more than reason to figure out what was going on in the world.

Cody Feldman
Idaho, United States

Pluggin’

Tomorrow, I’ll be on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles around 10am, on The Michael Slate Show. We’re going to be talking about various things, but one thing in particular: we’ll be plugging The Magic of Reality. Slate had a very good one-on-one interview with Dawkins earlier this week, and I think we all agree — getting more copies of that book into people’s heads would be an excellent idea.

While I’m recommending books, I also just finished Sean Faircloth’s Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All-—and What We Can Do About It. It’s about how the religious right is corrupting the United States, with a nice collection of concrete examples of the idiocy these bozos — who keep getting elected! — represent. If you’re reading this blog, you know what I’m talking about, and it’s a safe bet you’d appreciate this book.

So get readin’. You can listen to the radio while you’re working your way through the books.

How not to examine the evolution of proteins

The Discovery Institute has me on a mailing list for their newsletter, Nota Bene. That’s probably unwise: usually I just glance at it, see another ignorant bit of fluff from Luskin or Nelson or one of the other usual suspects, and I snigger and hit ‘delete’, but sometimes they brag about how they’re really doing science, and I look a little closer. And then I might feel motivated to take a slap at them.

The latest issue contains an article by Ann Gauger, babbling about her recent publication disproving Darwinism, written with her colleague Douglas Axe, published in their tame ‘science’ journal, Bio-complexity, and edited by Michael Behe. It’s not work that could survive in a real journal, I’m afraid.

[Read more…]

Standing up to William Lane Craig

Lately, William Lane Craig has been demanding that Richard Dawkins debate him, and has gotten quite insistent lately as he tours England. I don’t see the point in anyone debating Craig: he’s a nobody who has contributed nothing to the intellectual world; he’s a professional debater and apologist, a rhetorical gunslinger for Christ, and there’s no purpose to enaging him (I know Hitchens took him on…but Hitchens has been our rhetorical gunslinger). Dawkins is a top-flight evolutionary biologist and a masterful craftsman of the English language. I don’t think there’s even anything interesting to discuss with Craig. So Richard Dawkins has taken the time to explain why he refuses to debate William Lane Craig. It’s a terrific put-down. I’m going to have to steal from it next time that importuning dweeb Vox Day starts pestering me to debate him.

I was pleased to see that one of Dawkins’ points was one that is not made often enough: William Lane Craig is a nasty, amoral excuse for a human being.

Why I am an atheist – Samyogita Hardikar

Up till I was 19 I had been dwelling into the murky waters of faith, mainly switching between a haphazard belief in some sort of higher power if not god per se and agnosticism of the ‘If there had been a god, then surely he wouldn’t have allowed all this cruelty and suffering?’ persuasion. Now I really don’t think there is a god. The reasons are many and most of them are obvious to and shared by most other atheists: no real evidence for the existence of god/ gods, a respect for and inclination towards a humanitarian and human-centric idea of morality, too many vulgar disputes amongst the believers themselves about who exactly this ‘one true god’ person that they all keep banging on about might be, to name a few of the top ones. But I vividly remember the moment I started thinking of myself as an out-and-out atheist and it wasn’t any kind of anger or frustration or hardcore empirical analysis that made it happen. It happened when I heard Douglas Adams speculating about the origin of god.

He says that the idea of god probably came into existence because after looking about and seeing what a well oiled machine this world was, we humans made the foolish mistake of asking the most ridiculous, naive and treacherous question: ‘So who made this then?’ ‘This’ being the world, of course. ‘Someone must’ve made it, you know? Like we make stuff?’
And from there we just went on improvising and thinking that since we’re the only ones who ever actually make anything, it must’ve been someone very like us, much more sizable and capable than us, and much more invisible, obviously.

I completely buy that theory and it may seem trivial but if we are to move on from all this violence and disharmony that happens in the name of god, we have to see the whole notion for the triviality that it is. Let’s not- for a moment- try to answer that absurd question with the first thing that comes to your mind and we’ll be fine.

To put forth a simple if slightly cheap analogy, the idea of god is a bit like non-degradable plastic. It’s man-made. It’s not found in nature. It was created by throwing a whole bunch of random stuff together. It’s a relatively recent invention considering how long we’ve been around and even if it may look like it at first glance, our lives do not depend on it. It’s a quick, immediate gratification based solution for an eternal problem which is why it’s dangerous. It seemed like a very good idea at the beginning and most people still think it’s pretty handy but now that we have it, we don’t seem to be able to get rid of it and it’s all beginning to get a bit out of hand. And lastly, living things are suffering and dying horrible deaths because of it. Atheism on the other hand is way more ego-friendly.

Samyogita Hardikar
India