Hello everyone! It’s a great honor and a pleasure to be among such talent in the atheist community. Due to the fact that I am not nearly as well known as my co-bloggers I thought I’d use this first post to tell you about why I am an atheist and the path that lead me to this viewpoint. It seems this is a question that’s often asked of atheists so I thought it a good idea to start with this.
I was never raised in a religious home. I was never indoctrinated by my parents, though my mother when I was younger would often try to get my father and I to go to church; for what reasons I’m not sure. But my father would have none of it. As it turns out he was (and still is) an atheist and that’s why he didn’t care to go. As for my mother, I do not know what her beliefs were when I was a child, but at this point in her life she considers herself an agnostic.
I have very few memories about any religious instruction. Most of it comes from a day care I attended as a child for a few years that was run in a church. I recall being forced to attend church services once or twice a week, but that didn’t affect me. I mostly thought it was boring and didn’t pay any attention. All the children who attended the day care, however, were (from what I recall) told to practice for a small concert that was being put on by the church and we all had to rehearse. I recall the woman leading the practices asking me and several others if were going to make the performance that night. I told her I wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t like practicing and I had no desire to be up on a stage singing those songs.
Other than that, I recall asking my mother when I was younger “what we were” referring to religious belief and she told me that we were “Christians, because we believe in god.” I also remember my mother telling me that when I die I would be rejoined with my foot (more on this later) I had lost when I was a child (I’m assuming she was imparting the belief that once you die you will get a new body in heaven).
I remember being very confused as a child about who god was. Was Jesus god, or were there two gods, even though I would always hear there was only one god.
I did believe in god as a child and would occasionally pray for something. Once I found an insect (maybe a grasshopper) that looked injured to me and I tried to help it stand up since it was laying on its back wiggling its legs. After several attempts it seemed to me that it was helpless so I decided to “put it out of its misery.” I stomped on it and killed it, but before doing so said a prayer before killing it.
I also believed that god knew and saw all that you did, both in action and thought and sometimes that would bother me. I do not recall exactly why.
One last memory I have, and I cannot recall where it occurred (maybe the day care I spoke of earlier), I was sitting in a group with other children and a woman was holding up a picture of Jesus standing by a door with no doorknob. Since it happened so long ago that may even be the very same picture used. It looks very familiar, though I’ve also seen it since. I recall her explaining to the children and myself how we have to let Jesus in. He wants to be a part of our lives; we just have to realize that he is at the door asking to be let in and all we have to do is let him in.
Fast forward to my teenage years.
So what I’m about to say all makes sense I think it’s best to explain that I am an amputee and have been since early childhood. I was a very well-adjusted child. I didn’t care what others thought of my leg. I recall one faint memory when I took off my prosthetic leg for my classmates for a kind of show-and-tell. But things changed when I entered middle school.
When I began my three years in middle school (from sixth grade to eighth grade) that is when most children begin to find themselves and begin their journey to adulthood and try to fit in with their peers. It was this period of time when I first realized that I was different from other children. Prior to middle school I had always been raised like any other child. I ran and played, did my best to do what other kids did, despite my prosthetic leg.
In trying to fit in I realized that a lot of people seemed to dislike me; they would avoid me or act as if they didn’t like me. I sometimes wonder if since I was on the bottom rungs of the popularity ladder if some people just pretended to not like me for fear of being teased because they befriended someone who was unpopular.
I did have several good friends who did not care about the prosthetic leg, and that got me through middle and high school. But despite my friends helping me out during tough times, some people can be too cruel for words.
One time in a music appreciation class this group of kids every day would harass me. For weeks this went on. One day one of them asked if I had termites. The group laughed loudly. He was obviously asking this because this idiot thought my prosthetic was made of wood. They haven’t been made like that since before I was born at least. Another time this girl who was friendly to me at first out of nowhere became one of my worst antagonists. One day the teacher decided to create assigned seating alphabetically by each students’ last name. As it so happened she was supposed to sit right next to me. When her seat was given to her she got furious and refused to sit in the seat next to me. She yelled out, “I ain’t sitting by no cripple!” I cannot describe how small I felt. I looked over in the other direction at one of my friends who was sitting next to me. I can still remember the immense sympathetic look in his eyes as he watched how this girl was reacting.
One experience that truly made me depressed happened in middle school and cemented my belief that it was my prosthetic leg that caused people to dislike me. At first it was just a belief I had; perhaps I was just being paranoid or wrongly feeling discriminated against, but one day I got confirmation that my belief was true, which caused me to feel even more depressed. I had liked a girl in a class but she had a boyfriend at the time. We were still friends anyway. Once during a class I overheard her talking with another girl who asked her, “Would you go out with him?” And the girl I had a little crush on replied, “Yeah,” to which the other girl responded with some shock, “But he’s only got one leg” as they whispered back and forth to each other. Of course, obviously not quiet enough. After which the girl I liked retorted, “It’s not what’s on the outside, what matters is what’s on the inside” and the other girl said, “Yeah, but…” and I think they glanced over at me and saw I had heard them so the rest of the conversation I did not hear because they lowered their voices even more.
These and many other unfortunate experiences drove my self-esteem to near non-existence. In the summer of 1997 I pretty much hit rock bottom from all the teasing I had endured over the years. I was a sophomore in high school at the time. I remember countless times asking god to take the sadness away; asking god why he let me live. When I was a baby I was premature and almost died and was not expected to live. I wondered why god would save me only to make my life hell later on. Was this his plan for me? Why didn’t god answer my prayers? These and many other questions and thoughts raced through my mind.
After so long of living in despair and not having my prayers answered I basically gave god ‘the finger’ and I finally realized that I had to help myself. And that’s what I did. I read books on philosophy, Buddhism, psychology, etc. and just sat and thought about my life, trying to figure out answers about why I was feeling the way I was and how to fix those issues.
It was at this point I would call myself an agnostic. Looking back I cannot recall my feelings exactly; if I still believed in god or just didn’t give a shit about him because of his negligence. Because of Buddhism and a lot of self-diagnosis and pondering I cured my depression and my self-esteem began to rise again.
It was after this period in my life that I didn’t give god, or religion in general, much thought until about 2005 when I was visiting friends out of state. I didn’t know it at the time but they were Christians and cared about my salvation. One of my friends asked about my religious beliefs and I told him that I didn’t really know one way or the other; that I liked a lot of the teachings of Buddhism because it’s teachings about living in the present moment was probably the single thing that helped me the most. I would torture myself by replaying all of the horrible things people would do and say to me over the years. Through Buddhism I learned to stop this destructive cycle so I could begin healing.
He then preceded to make fun of Buddha by referencing something (I can’t recall now exactly) about his weight. It was then that I was officially introduced to the process of witnessing. My friend takes out a book titled The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God, by Lee Strobel, and quotes the book about the (with my current knowledge of these arguments I know it was the) first cause argument. At the time it sounded convincing, but I am not one to just take someone’s word for it, so it was after I got back home from my trip that I bought that book along with several others, including God: The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, by Patrick Glynn and searched the internet for answers.
For about six months of reading these books, searching the internet and reading what both sides had to say I slowly began to make up my mind about who was right. I read about the Discovery Institute’s goals of sneaking religion into schools, the many lies by historical revisionists who claim America is a “Christian Nation,” and the many claims by Intelligent Design advocates about the alleged flaws of evolution. I looked at what both sides had to say and eventually sided with the non-believers and science. The reason the arguments of the non-believers and scientists swayed me was because they made the most sense to me and in many cases I researched the truth for myself. By researching many of these topics on my own it was clear there was some deception coming from the side of the theists and intelligent design advocates. Many of the statements and claims made by the Intelligent Design proponents did not stand up to the facts we knew about the world. If a group must feel they can’t be honest in order to make their case then that seriously harms their credibility and this made me doubt their claims.
It was at this point that I truly began to doubt the reality of god. After several more months of searching and learning I finally had made up my mind. I was a confirmed atheist.
I have been continually researching and learning ever since and the more I learn the more I doubt the existence of god (not to mention all the other claims of the supernatural) and believe that, at least this point in time, it seems that science will continue to poke holes in the fantasy so many people love to fool themselves with. But only time will tell.
