Some days, I question how different my path to atheism differs from other people’s paths. About a year before my bar mitzvah, I began asking what the point was of religion, but I can’t honestly say I did any real follow-through on that question at the time.
I am an atheist because God if God exists, he could tell me what the best Steven Spielberg movie is.
I had been wondering for a while whether I should join the masses and add my own answer (and story) to the question “why are you an atheist?”. The new year brought with it a sense of “why the hell not?”.
Reading the answers of others, i’ve seen it often helps to give some basic background first. Don’t worry, most of it is relevent to the actual answer. I’m a person of the male persuasion in my early 20s, living in the pleasant (if you like mud) countryside of the east of England. I’m pretty much the stereotype of a geek/gamer (without the “fat, no sense of personal hygiene and glasses” parts). I grew up a basic countryside-dwelling family (as an only child), complete with the usual passive conservatism and Christianity – passive in the sense that it’s just “there”, everyone expects everyone else thinks the same as they do, so the subjects rarely come up. This is hardly perfect, but a lot better than being bombarded with it every day. But in other ways, it’s a lot more insidious.
It took me a long time to jettison the religious beliefs that had been instilled in me from my early youth. While my father, an ordained deacon, was almost silent on religious matters while at home, my mother made certain that I knew of her beliefs every day. She taught sunday school to teenage girls in our local Baptist church, and pressed my brother and me into attendance whether we liked it or not.
As a child, Christianity never made sense and seemed unfair and rather limiting. After learning about mythology and how people believed the Gods to be real and the source of phenomena that can now be scientifically explained, I made the connection that the same could be said for Christianity. My parents weren’t non-believers, but they had no interest in religion. And when I felt the inevitable social pressure to go to church, my dad flat out said “No, church is for people who need it. They go in on Sundays and act holy, but the rest of the week they are assholes.” And after witnessing numerous examples of such behaviour over the years, I decided he had a point.
I am an atheist because I was born that way.
I grew up in a Catholic family. Not crazy fundamentalist Catholic or anything. We were a liberal family, but we went to church every Sunday, said grace at dinner, and all of the other calendar related business that I can barely remember. Outside of weddings and funerals I haven’t attended a church in over twenty-five years, so the rituals are fuzzy.
I was raised alternately in general Protestant and Lutheran churches, and my parents can’t be blamed for a lack of trying. I can’t claim ignorance, so I’m among the worst of the damned in the eyes of some. I started out believing, right up until I got a less than satisfactory answer to the doctrine of ignorance and original sin and salvation. I came from an abusive home, and obsessed over fairness since punishment in my home was often disproportionate and arbitrary. It was at that moment I recognised God as he’d been described as an abusive parent. I could not believe that such a being as my stepfather ran the universe, or rather one so apparently powerless as my mother stood by and allowed suffering and death. I was eight. This was the beginning of my doubts. I realized that the people claiming to know God’s will were like me claiming to know when I’d be yanked out of bed over a dirty dish, or yelled at for literally doing nothing. Whatever there was, they had no idea when it would act or why.
As a child, I was brought up in a vaguely Christian way – my mother was raised Lutheran and my father Methodist, but neither held too closely to tradition. They read me Bible stories, the non-threatening ones meant for children, and prayed with me at night; I learned to think of God as a benign watcher who would save me from bad dreams. The only times we entered a church were weddings and funerals.I grew older, and made friends with girls who went to VBS and AWANA at the Baptist church, so I of course wanted to go too. This was allowed, and I excelled at AWANA because of my great skill at memorizing Biblical verses (I am good at memorizing in general, it’s my one talent). The father of one of my close friends became more deeply involved in the church, and by the time he went to seminary school she was all covered up even in the summer and her mother listened to Christian radio all day. She had to grow her hair and it wasn’t long before I wasn’t allowed to be her friend anymore. Nobody put it that starkly, but there was a serious sense of disapproval from her parents and I got to see her less and less. It was confusing, since I was only 11 and didn’t think I had done anything wrong. It was years before I understood that I actually hadn’t.
I was born and raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and grew up in rural Canada. It wasn’t all bad- I learned how to speak in public, and a lot of basic teaching skills which have helped me in the workplace. But I was queer. This was problematic. This lead to night after night of terror, of frantically asking “what if it happens tomorrow?” Reading the book called “Revelation: It’s grand climax is at hand!” did not help much. The witnesses have a gleefully terrifying picture of the impending end of the world…
I was born into a Texan Catholic family. Growing up outside of Washington, D.C. I was raised to believe in God, but no real emphasis was placed on attendance of church, nor on the catechism. Despite my parents’ backgrounds they were very rational people, and encouraged my love of science from a young age. My father studied Chemical Engineering at university before changing tack when he realised that he preferred Law, but he always held out hope that I would go into the sciences when I was old enough to choose for myself. I recall a conversation I had with him when I was very young wherein he casually explained that he had been browbeaten into an engineering discipline in lieu of a pure (and I am not using this as a value term, purely as a demarcation) science, and had he gone into Chemistry or Physics he would probably still be in one of those fields today.
