Skip to main content

My (de)conversion to atheism

By A ~

Why am I an atheist?

This question requires a fairly lengthy explanation and some background. I was born into a Christian family. While we were less fundamental or fanatical than some, we were very active in our church, our family life focused on Christianity, and we were brought up to believe that the Biblical God is the truth, and that following Jesus was the only way to happiness in life and to an afterlife in heaven.

[I should pause here and explain my etiquette when using the term "god". To me, the word god is not generally capitalized because it refers to an improper noun like any other item in our lives: table, cat, car, banana, etc. But, occasionally I need to capitalize the word when it refers to a specific proper noun, the Biblical god who Christians often think is named God. In fact this god's name is Yahweh, though one could make the case that the god has evolved over time to actually be quite distinct in personality from Yahweh, so perhaps he does deserve an individual identity and the name God after all. However, if it seems like I am inconsistent in my use of the terms god and God, please remember that they each have very specific and different meanings.]

As a child, there was no doubt in my mind that God existed and that I had a personal relationship with him and his son Jesus. I believed that this man, who was also God, had lived on earth as described in the Bible, had been executed by the Romans, and then had risen from the dead as part of a divine plan for human salvation from eternal death. It is likely safe to assume that most who read this will be familiar with the sorts of things I believed. My actual belief in the existence of God went on for a very long time, well into adulthood. But even as early as my teens I started to have big problems with the way Christianity was presented to me. For one, I was embarrassed about Christianity. (In retrospect, of course, this likely reflects my sub-conscious disbelief. After all, why would someone be embarrassed to believe something that they know is true). In any case, questions started to arise. Difficult questions for which I had no answers. In addition to that, once I was an adult and responsible for my own life, I stopped attending church on a regular basis, which likely provided me with the distance from Christianity that I believe is necessary for anyone to make the move away from their religious upbringing. Christians often view this sort of thing as a weakness of faith, or a drifting away due to apathy, and in my experience they tend to guard against it fervently and shun those who explore outside the faith. This is the very reason it is so difficult to leave a religion behind, because most people don't ever give their mind time and space enough to consider their religion objectively.

But, for many years as an adult, even though I no longer attended church, even though my friends were all non-religious, I still actually believed in all the pillars of Christianity that I grew up with. And I often worried about my future death and the chance that I would spend an eternity in hell if I didn't get my spiritual act together. Occasionally, usually when I was with family, I felt guilty about my lack of religious zeal and made some sort of half-hearted self promise to change. This went on for some years in my early adulthood.

Not much changed for quite some time in my religious beliefs, and it is possible that I could have drifted along like that for the rest of my life. But some factors in my life precipitated further change.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I think I have an inquisitive mind. I want to know the truth. I am not satisfied just telling myself that no one really knows the answers to certain questions such as the existence of god. I think that, ultimately, anyone who is very inquisitive (and honest with themselves) must in the end have a problem with their religion. I found that Christianity demanded that I ignore a number of difficult questions. Or, if not outright ignore them, eventually come to an acceptance that the answer to them might entail some sort of magic, handily taken care of by our God. In any case, this natural curiosity spurred on a number of questions about my religion that I had difficulty answering logically. A major question I had was why were Christians (and people of many other religions as well) not encouraged to really examine their beliefs objectively? Why not "step outside" of Christianity and look at it rationally? Surely any truth will stand up to rigorous examination, so what are Christian authorities afraid of? Why were we as Christian children taught that to even question our faith could be considered sinful and therefore deserving of death? Surely if god did exist, he would want followers who had examined their belief in him carefully. Yet Christian (and other religious) doctrine is full of suggestions that weak faith (really another term for questioning things) came from the devil. One should guard against it and stand firm when those doubts (questions) arose. Another difficult question was the one of the afterlife. If we were to "go" to heaven or hell, then there would have to be some part of us that actually survived death in order to be there. So, which part of us would that be? Much of our personality is mapped out through neuroscience. Indeed people's personalities do sometimes change as a result of brain trauma, indicating that our very persona is only an expression of the physical structure of the brain. Our ability to feel pleasure or pain depends on the physical existence of a nervous system. So then, isn't the description of who we are dependant on our physical existence? Wouldn't god have to magically re-create us physically in order for us to exist, with some recognizable facets of our current persona, to be able to exist in an afterlife? Sure, a magical god could do that, but that model was neither logical nor rational. As soon as I permitted my god to be a non-rational being, then ANYTHING was possible. Why, the world could have been created yesterday by a god who uploaded all our memories. Wasn't that just as rational and likely as a god who would re-create us after death (rather than leaving us non-existent for eternity of course) just so we could either enjoy heaven or suffer in hell?

Like a child taking the butterfly wings off for the first time in the deep end of the swimming pool and realizing that it can indeed float without them, I considered that the world might work just fine without a god.Secondly, I studied science in university. During many years of university scientific education, I was forced to look at the world more and more rationally. I was trained to try to put aside my biases, to examine the evidence around me and then to draw a conclusion based on the observed evidence, rather than to start with a conclusion (or even a pet theory) and try to examine the evidence in light of that conclusion (or try to make the evidence fit the pre-conceived conclusion). More and more I realized that this was the process that allowed humans to gradually leave behind superstition, and examine the world objectively and actually understand the reason for natural phenomena. This seemed to be in complete contrast to the religious indoctrination I had received as a child. In that case I was encouraged to hold strong to my faith no matter what evidence came to light. If it appeared from time to time that god had abandoned me, then that was only a test of my faith. I should stubbornly hold firm in my beliefs, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and I would eventually be rewarded. Imagine where we would be scientifically if scientists practiced that way.

Thirdly, I started to encounter more and more Christians who believed all of the Bible literally. Though I grew up in a religious environment that was fully supportive of the authority of the Bible, much of it was taken figuratively. But now I started to engage with people who actually believed that the earth was created in six days less than 10,000 years ago, and who believed that a global flood to the height of Mount Everest happened within the past few thousand years. I knew this things to be untrue, given the scientific evidence to the contrary, and I've never been tempted to take those parts of the Bible literally. But, for the first time I started to ask myself why some of the Bible should be taken seriously if other parts of it were clearly complete fabrications? Why should I believe the parts of the New Testament that were critical to the Christian faith if much of the rest of the Bible could be discarded as allegory? Could it be that the whole thing was just fictional writing very loosely based on some events that bore little resemblance to the Biblical descriptions of them?

Fourthly, I began to read a number of books that looked at religion in a different way than I was used to. I read all the usual atheist-written best sellers such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, Sam Harris' The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. In addition I read In Defense of Atheism by Michel Onfray and Why God Won't Go Away by Newberg, D'Aquili, and Rause. All of these books helped me examine the religion of my upbringing much more objectively. But a couple of other books had the most profound effect on my religious thinking. Jared Diamond has written a couple of books called Guns, Germs, and Steel, and The Third Chimpanzee which are relatively scientific examinations of the history of the human species. In these books Diamond describes some of the processes of human evolution and development that lead to differences in agricultural and technological advancement that occured in different places around the globe. By examining human history so carefully, one is forced to either reject the science outright and cling to the creation story in Genesis, or to accept that no god played any sort of role in human development over the past few tens of thousands of years. This, of course, doesn't rule out gods altogether, but it does very much weaken the meddling, prayer-answering god of the Bible. I also read a book called Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. The book basically follows two stories: a general history of Mormonism and a specific case of murder in the 1980s by two Mormons who believed they were instructed by God to perform the murders. I knew virtually nothing of Mormonism prior to reading the book, but it served as a striking example of how religion can cause people to believe the unbelievable. The religion is clearly a fabrication from 19th century America, with roots that are distinctly American in culture. Yet, there are millions of followers around the world, in what I can only understand as blind faith. The book illustrated the strength of religious influence, and how humans clearly yearn for some meaning to their life, which often seems to be filled by instructions and commands by a person in power – or a religion. I had met a few Mormons, and they seemed as convinced that their religions was true as any other religious person, including the Christians I had grown up with. Yet there was no doubt in my mind that the entire religion was a fabrication. If a religion could essentially be constructed by one man in the relatively modern times of the 19th Century to a point that millions of people worldwide were followers, how much more possible was it that a religion could have developed 2,000 years ago in a time when the availability of information was incomparably lower than in the modern era? (Literacy was lower, formal education was rare, books (at least as we know them now) and newspapers were non-existent).

Eventually I began to consider the possibility that there was no god. Though I had of course considered the question before, I had never really opened myself up to the possibility and considered the consequences. Like a child taking the butterfly wings off for the first time in the deep end of the swimming pool and realizing that it can indeed float without them, I considered that the world might work just fine without a god. Julia Sweeney has described a similar experience in her book Letting Go of God:

"…as I was walking from my office in my backyard into my house, I realized there was this little teeny-weenie voice whispering in my head. I’m not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. It whispered, ‘There is no god.’

And I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. ‘There is no god. There is no god. Oh my god, there is no god.’…

And I shuddered. I felt I was slipping off the raft.

And then I thought, ‘But I can’t. I don’t know if I can not believe in God. I need God. I mean, we have a history’…

‘But I don’t know how to not believe in God. I don’t know how you do it. How do you get up, how do you get through the day?’ I felt unbalanced…

I thought, ‘Okay, calm down. Let’s just try on not-believing-in-God glasses for a moment, just for a second. Just put on the no-God glasses and take a quick look around and then immediately throw them off.’ And I put them on and looked around.
I’m embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the thought, ‘Well, how does the Earth stay up in the sky? You mean, we’re just hurtling through space? That’s so vulnerable!’ I wanted to run out and catch the Earth as it fell out of space into my hands.

And then I remembered, ‘Oh yeah, gravity and angular momentum is gonna keep us revolving around the sun for probably a long, long time.'"

I can relate to some of this description quite well. In addition to what she describes, my situation was complicated by the fear that I might die while I had the not-believing-in-God glasses on and go to hell for eternity just because I happened to die while I was trying out atheism for 30 minutes. It was a bit like coming up to a train track and thinking, ‘I need to cross the tracks, but what if the train comes along out of nowhere and mows me down just at the moment that I step across?’ When I finally overcame my fear of being annihilated in a moment of fury like an Efrafan rabbit, and stepped gingerly onto the tracks, my whole perspective changed. Instead of looking up the track in fear of an oncoming train, I looked down at the tracks in detail for the first time and realized they were decrepit and could not possibly bear a train. No train would ever be coming along those tracks and I could linger as long as I like quite safely. Once that was established, the opportunity to really open up my mind to some serious questions availed itself and it was not long before the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Indeed, once I had my Julia Sweeney moment, the whole ordeal was over in a matter of minutes. I was through with God instantly as I realized that the whole game was a farce. There was no desire at all to cling to a false god for comfort. I simply set god aside and moved on.

It is probably hard for someone who has never believed in god to understand this defining moment for a new atheist. Ironically it is very much like the term that Christians use to describe their own conversion experiences: like being born again. Born into life again, only this time recognizing the world that you are born into for what it is. When I look back now on the years that I actually believed a god was there listening to prayers, intervening in human lives, meddling with nature and so on, I almost feel embarrassed that it took me so long to overcome. Yet, the relief that I haven't gone through my whole life that way is overwhelming. How close I came to wasting the only life I will ever have. The reasons why religion is so very difficult to overcome for someone who has been properly indoctrinated are very interesting and belong elsewhere in another post.

Ultimately I have come to a point where my position towards religion is that the onus is firmly on religion to show evidence of its truth. Now that I have recognized that personal experience is not evidence, and that there really is no objective, verifiable evidence for god, there is simply no reason to try to believe in any religion anymore. Reason is the the key word in that statement. Religion for me has become wholly unreasonable. And this has been confirmed in conversation after conversation with Christians who try to convince that their religion is true, yet often stretch the boundaries of reason to do so. Most (not all) Christians that I now encounter seem less interested in really finding out the truth, but rather in defending their faith no matter the cost. Even if the cost is reasonable, rational, logical thought.

I have chosen, so far, not to share my position of atheism with my family. It might seem strange not to be completely open about it, but there are a number of reasons I have done so. Firstly, I feel no obligation to inform people in my family what my religious position is. If they assume that I hold the religious beliefs of our childhood, then that is their assumption and a wrong one at that. I feel no obligation to correct assumptions about myself. Secondly, I feel that it would be futile to discuss the issue with people in my family as it would likely only lead to endless conversations and attempts to procure my reconversion to Christianity. Thirdly, I am a bit afraid of hurting some members of my family, such as my parents. They would be quite devastated to discover I am an atheist and, since they are quite old, I prefer not to cause them that stress. Occasionally I feel a bit dishonest not sharing the fact that I have left the religion of my upbringing, but then I remind myself that I also make no major attempt to hide it. If people make assumptions based on what I believed (or more correctly was indoctrinated with) as a child, then so be it.

It would be easy to be bitter at my parents for the years of my life they essentially took from me by indoctrinating me with false beliefs. And indeed, I do resent the religion as a whole if I am honest with myself. I resent the institution of Christianity for the horrific things it does to innocent childrens' minds. But, I also recognize that my own parents were acting in the way they thought was best for me. I can make amends by teaching my own children to question everything, especially the things I teach them. The truth will always stand up to their questions.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~  A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins  Accepting Christ as Savior  Frequently reading the Bible  Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules)  Attending church services  Partaking of the Lord’s Supper  Tithing  Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc.  Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro

I can fix ignorance; I can't fix stupid!

By Bob O ~ I 'm an atheist and a 52-year veteran of public education. I need not tell anyone the problems associated with having to "duck" the "Which church do you belong to?" with my students and their parents. Once told by a parent that they would rather have a queer for their sons' teacher than an atheist! Spent HOURS going to the restroom right when prayers were performed: before assemblies, sports banquets, "Christmas Programs", awards assemblies, etc... Told everyone that I had a bladder problem. And "yes" it was a copout to many of you, but the old adage (yes, it's religious) accept what you can't change, change that which you can and accept the strength to know the difference! No need arguing that which you will never change. Enough of that. What I'd like to impart is my simple family chemistry. My wife is a Baptist - raised in a Baptist Orphanage (whole stories there) and is a believer. She did not know my religi