Name: Tim Finnegan

Born: 1998

Location: Pleasant Hill, California

Label: Atheist, Secularist, Skeptic

Former Religious Affiliation: Catholicism

Your Story:

I was born and raised in the general Martinez-Pleasant Hill area of California, near the San Francisco Bay. My father had been raised to be a devote Catholic. He went to Catholic school all the way until his graduation day. Naturally, when me and my siblings were born, he and my grandparents (my mother wasn’t too big on religion) began to fit me with what Seth Andrews calls “God Glasses”, which is simply another way of saying that they began to indoctrinate me with all of the religious ideals and ways of thinking that any good Christian must have.

Did I see anything wrong with what they were telling me? Not at the time. They were my family, and I trusted them with every ounce of my being. I wasn’t a devote Christian, and I wasn’t too fond of going to Church, but I went anyways. For most of my life, the Christian belief system seemed to fit perfectly into the world’s creation story.

It wasn’t until about the 5th Grade that I truely became interested in history and science. Having outgrown most of the cartoons that I had been watching most of my life, I began to watch documentaries … and alot of them. I spent a great deal of my free time going to the “On Demand” feature of my television and diving into the Nature and History sections in the hopes of finding a new documentary to watch. I’m sure I’ve finished hundreds, and I continue to find interest in them today. As well as these documentaries, I often stopped to read some of the scientific or archaelogical news that I could find as I surfed the web.

I pushed “God” out of the spotlight during this time, but despite all of the information that had become available to me, I still believed. I think this was mainly contributed to by what I was taught in church. One of my most prominent memories from the masses was the pastor saying “You are not to believe in Christ based on evidence, but on faith.” This may not have been what he said exactly, but I’m sure you get the general idea. I think this is what kept me in line.

It took a childish conversation with another student to finally get me re-thinking my beliefs. One day, me and another student were having a rather light-hearted conversation. It was a simple one, and we were laughing all the while. I don’t fully remember the contents of our conversation, but for one reason or another, at its end he began to playfully say, “You’re going to hell.” He did so several times, and after a while it began to grow annoying. I’m not sure what came across me at that moment, but in order to shut him up, I blurted out to him “I don’t believe in God.” I didn’t believe my own words at the time, nor did I realize the gravity that single sentence would have on my life.

Though he didn’t particularly condemn me for it, a look of disbelief crossed his face and he simply repeated my statement back to me in the form of a question. Realizing that I had entangled myself in a lie, I panicked and decided to go with it. I replied with a simple no, hoping I could walk away and the conversation would end there.

Things didn’t go so smoothly for me, however. Another student, one that I had known most of my life, had overheard the conversation and approached me moments later. His actions mirrored the former student’s actions almost exactly, and so I simply echoed my reply and walked off. Whereas the first classmate had dropped the subject, the other had decided to go off and spread the word to several of my dearest of friends. They reacted to it in a way that I would have never imagined. Several of them simply began to ignore me, and others turned around and began to torment me. Unlike most cases, they didn’t claim that I was “Satanic” or a “Spawn of the Devil” (though one did accuse me of worshipping Albert Einstein). Instead, they just piled upon me all of the insults and hate that they could muster. I was called vile things such as a “Faggot” (nothing against homosexuals; the word itself just has somewhat of a negative air to it.)

Eventually all of this hatred began to warp me. I fell into a deep depression and generally stopped being social. It seemed as if everyone that approached me either intended to continue my torment, and because of this, I formed a bubble around me. I found my own little corner to sit in at lunch, and I often found myself barking at anyone whom came too close. I became this irritable and hateful being, somethng quite the contrary to what I was before. As well as emotional changes, I had several physical changes as well. I dropped sports entirely, and began to eat a great deal, even when I wasn’t hungry. As a result, I began putting on massive amounts of weight. In the span of a single year, I went from being small and skinny at about 90-100 pounds to a larger guy at about 190-200 pounds. I spent two and a half years living much the same. I hadn’t had so much as one friend.

Despite all of these changes, my thirst for knowledge had not been quelled. I continued to explore the realms of science and history, and through this and my solitude, I can honestly say that during this period, I finally began to -THINK FREELY-. In my exploration of the Universe and the world around me, I began to examine my own world views. The more I looked at them, the more that little white lie began to become the truth. A couple of months after my initial revelation, I could finally say with honesty, “I am an Atheist”.

My ideals had never reached my family during this period, however. I was intending on keeping it a secret to them until I was truely ready for whatever reaction they may have had. To this day, I still think I should have told them sooner.

Before I took my chance to tell them, the very same student that made my beliefs known to the entire school made it known to his mother … and his mother to my step mother. As I came home from school that day, I heard the one question from my mother that I hadn’t expected to hear until I made the revelation. “Tim, … you don’t believe in God?” Though my ability to tell them on my own time had been taken, I faired much better with my family than I did with my classmates. Though they began to send me to a religious education program once a week, and church about three times as much as I had before, they made it clear that they held no ill-will towards me, and that they accepted me.

I was still deeply depressed for most of the time leading up until very recently, when I discovered a podcast called “The Thinking Atheist.” When I first began to listen, I expected to hear bits and pieces of several scientists and philosophers debating about religion and science. To my surprise, it was something much, different. Through Seth Andrews and the callers to the podcast, I began to hear the stories of dozens of other Atheists. Some of them had things better off than me, and others much, much worse … But regardless, their stories inspired me. Slowly a familiar feeling that I hadn’t felt for most of my time in Jr. High began to creep through me. I began to realize that, put simply,

-I AM NOT ALONE-

After listening to several broadcasts, I hopped onto their forums, and my depression began to fade away. For the first time since refuting God and the Bible, I was able to speak to fellow nonbelievers. What seemed to be a minority consisting of me and a handful of old men squabbling over science and religion, no longer seemed to be so much of a minority any more.

My final year of middle school ends in two weeks … And I feel that in high school, things can only go up from where I am now.

It’s Ok to be an Atheist, and it’s something you should be proud of.

Hopefully, my children will have a much easier time than I’m having now. Though it’s a slow change, America is slowly beginning to match up to our founding fathers’ wishes for a Nation accepting of any form of belief system.

Original Article

Name: Bailey Lang
Born: 1992
Location: Orlando Florida
Lable: Truth-ist (if there is such a thing)
Former religion: Protestant-Christian

Yes, you did read that right, I could’ve been considered an atheist at the young age of 8 because at that young age I believed that the stories they kept telling us were just stories, nothing more then a magical answer to questions no-one at the time could answer, but I can’t say that it was by myself that I came to that conclusion. I believe that it was mostly because of my dad (a knowledgeable and wise man in the carpentry trade who lived in a fairly wealthy and humble family in his youth) but my mother on the other hand, was raised in a big, christian family, gathering together every holliday and praying over every meal, forcing all of us (my family) to go to church meetings, events, religion-based child-care (me and my sister at least) , and just about everything from playing the parts in drive-through scenes to giving food to the homeless, and sheltering me to the point that I didn’t know there were other religions until late in middle school.

But as to my ‘comming out’ as an atheist, I can’t really put a date or anything like that on it, it was a gradual phase as I started to gather information, reading things like the Bible, the Koran, all sorts of science books and history books, Darwin’s notes,  the Greek stories (including the actual story of Hercules nothing like the Disney version) , the story of Buddha (you shoud really read a manga (comic book) called “Buddha” because it’s really fastinating and enlightening (ironicly though, it was to me)), some Hindu religious things (I couldn’t really get into it too much for a number of  reasons) , and the ancient Mediterranean religions (like the Egyptian religion) where I was able to find what all of those were meaning when they said what they said and why they were saying it.

So where am I now? I’m still learning, this world, this universe, and even this multi-verse has an unimaginable number of things to teach us. It’s only a matter of closing the books you don’t honestly read and look to find the truth.  That’s what science is: an attempt to find the truth and accepting it even if it contradicts what we want to believe.  I believe fully on two things. One, if there is a god and he governs all of us, he must care more for the attempt to appreciate and understand his gift, without the desire to overcome or topple him over, than to blindly follow like lambs to the slaughter. That is the really religious standpoint and not what I believe. I’m trying to give them the benifit of the doubt. Secondly, I believe that if all of humanity lost its memory and history was not preserved, in place of religion there would be a new god, a new prophet, a new book, a new form of worship, a new philosophy, and a whole new religion all together. It would be as different as any religion now is to each other. Even with a lack of scientific knowledge, we would still slowly regain our knowledge of a majority of what we know today, with little difference more than units and names.

Original Article

Name: Pat Kugel

Born: 1965

Location: Ontario, Canada

 Label: Anti-theist

Former Religious Affiliation: Roman Catholic

My Story: 

Part 1: History

I start out with a story much the same as many others: I was born and raised a Catholic, went to a Catholic grade school, attended mass at least once a week (Sundays), and even served as an altar boy; my mother was Catholic and my father converted to Catholicism before they were married. That is pretty much the definition of a domesticated Catholic and screams urban religious-moderate westerner.

Problem was, as a child, I was just doing what I was told by parents and priest. I felt nothing doing it other than boredom. I felt no rush or relief for the love of god, etc. Nothing!  As I got older and began to understand “religion” as an ideal or concept, I came to realize that right from day one I never believed or accepted any of it. I would ask questions like, Hhow can someone blindly follow a 3000 year old story that does not even have a conceptual relation to the modern world?”

Eventually as I reached young adulthood, my parents, like they had done with all my older siblings, gave me the choice to decide for myself if I wished to continue attending mass, etc. That was the last time till my father’s passing that I stepped foot in a church.

When my father passed, my mother insisted on a religious funeral. I together with my brother had to make the arrangements for the service. Entering the parish pastors house to discuss the arrangements actually creeped me out.  All I could think of was, “How can you trust a person that has so fully devoted their life to an obvious lie?” Well, that and “how many boys does he have stashed around here?”

I attended the funeral as was [expected], but to this day I believe I made a mistake. Funerals are a religious ceremony designed for the living; the dead are incapable of caring one wit about the entire fallacy! As was my mother’s desire, it was a strongly religious event, and, like times passed, I realized I was just doing what I was told?!? But more to the point, by this time in my life I realized I was becoming an anti-theist strongly believing that religion does more harm than good – so, was I not betraying myself in succumbing to this ridiculous ceremony? I was being the religious hypocrite I so despised!

As years passed and wisdom gained, I reaffirmed my non-belief through authors like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, etc, but also in a stronger understanding of the universe itself. I am a strong proponent in the thought that the best way to put religion to the background is through science and education – I truly do not see how one can be deeply religious and strongly scientific in the same breath. I have said it before: “When one looks at the universe from the microsphere to the macrosphere and truly sees the world and universe for what it is, one realizes there just is no room for a deity.”

Eventually as is the lot of all us animals, my mother passed away. Again, plans were made for a religious ceremony, etc. (not by me), however, this time I did not attend. In doing so I would have again betrayed my values. I do not regret missing the funeral, after all, it is a ritual for the living not the deceased. As such, let those living that would get something out of it attend. As thinking, emotional beings, we each deal with loss internally, within the privacy of our minds first before externalizing it - I grieve the loss in my own way with no need for formal ritural.

Part 2: The Here and Now

I am not afraid to admit I am an anti-theist, I feel no embarrassment over it, and I do not apologize for it. Quite the contrary, I know atheists in general have a much brighter view of the world since they are not viewing it as through a frosted pane of glass whose religion only allows site to what it approves.  I also believe we hold life to a much higher value than a devout ever could simply because we see this as *it*; this being the only shot at this universe we will ever get, and once we step beyond oblivion’s veil we are gone forever, no redo’s, second chances, ever.

I value the atheist as the more morally honest; when the atheist steps up to help their fellow man, [generally] it is because it is the morally right thing to do; however when a devout does the same there’s always the nagging question, “is it because they [have] to?”

What, you may ask, is the fundamental difference?  The fundamental difference is in the willingness to accept morality as a set of basic human tenets granted us all vs. concepts learned and earned via beliefs that can be waived at a moment’s notice. The one that acts on the moral weight of an action alone does so out of honest belief in those morals; the devout that acts on the guidance of an ideal or concept no matter how “moral” it teaches, acts on the strength of those ideals alone, not the moral appropriateness of the resultant actions. As such, the actions themselves need not even be morally acceptable so long as the teachings the devout believes teach it’s moral correctness.  This is how religious persecution throughout history has justified countless heinous acts; when a suicide bomber straps on the bomb, it is not the moral appropriateness of the actions they weigh, but the religiously taught ideas. Here morality and religion take a giant leap apart, and yet the fanatic’s beliefs are grounded and insolvent. Were the suicide bomber to evaluate their actions purely on a humanistic moral view, they would surely chuck the bomb asking, “What the hell am I doing?”  This is where religion is dangerous: it does not teach morality, it teaches morality by its doctrine, regardless of the acceptability of that doctrine at a basic human level vis-a-vis the morality innate to us all, and its morality is fluid, subject to the same fluctuations as the teachings themselves.

Original Article

Name: Max West

Born: 1981

Location: Franklin, NC

Label: Atheist

Former Religious Affiliation: None! I was born this way!

My Story:

I don’t believe in god. I am an Atheist. This isn’t really news. I was raised as an Atheist. My parents are Atheists, my sister is an Atheist, my wife is an Atheist (formerly fundamentalist pentecostal), and our daughter is an Atheist.

As such, I don’t have one of the tales of struggling within my family that so many here have shared. To those of you who have shared such stories, I want you to know that I commend you and I am proud of you. It takes a lot of courage and fortitude to not only question and change your own beliefs, but in doing so to go against the beliefs and norms of your family and community. I also want to say thank you. Thank you for helping me realise how truly lucky I am to have grown up in a home where questioning my own and other’s beliefs was not only simply allowed or tolerated, but rather encouraged and respected.

I grew up in Houston, Texas. I grew up next door to a church and about a block away from a Buddhist monastery and never attended either. I had friends who were Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Atheist and probably others that I wasn’t aware of. Amazingly, religion was never really an issue; most people around me just knew that I didn’t believe in god and it didn’t seem to matter. I’ve only been inside a church a few times in my life. I had been once when I was rather young while visiting with my grandmother and even at that young age found it to be total nonsense. Another time I went because of a girl. Driven by hormones and free food I found myself in the middle of a youth group watching some movie about the rapture. I was amazed at how scared some of the other kids were, some were crying, while I sat there eating pizza and thinking how silly it all was. At one point in the evening the other girl who had brought us asked me if “I was saved?” I had no idea what she was talking about. When she explained it I laughed at her and said “no.”

When I was a teenager my family moved to the rural mountains of North Carolina, where we continue to live. There is quite literally a church on every corner. When I first got here and met new people they asked two questions, “What is your name?” and “What church do you go to?” When I would tell someone that I didn’t go to church, people here would get this confused look on their face and ask “Oh, but you believe in god, right?” After hearing that I didn’t believe in god either, some started preaching at me, some would look at me earnestly and tell me that they would pray for me, and some just backed away slowly. My father worked in construction and found the job sites so hostile that he started telling people he was Jewish. I guess people thought that if he wasn’t a Christian that being a Jewish carpenter was the next best thing. He really kept the charade up, one time chastising my mother’s boss at a barbecue “What do you mean that was pork? I can’t eat pork, I’m Jewish!” My mother teaches elementary school. Once while teaching a science lesson on lifespans a student proudly declared that he knew someone who lived over 900 years.When my mother quizzed him as to who, he said it was Abraham. She dryly replied “You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”

In the area where I live, it is pervasive. In the few miles between my house and town they are a couple of religious billboards and a particularly garish electronic church sign always spewing on about god and Jesus. Far too many local businesses have bible verses, pictures of Jesus or the ten commandments posted. When I was a teenager I went to traffic court once and the ten commandments were posted in the courtroom near the judge, though thankfully they have since been removed. Voting for my precinct is held in a church, I usually vote at the courthouse because of it but when I have voted at the church there have been bible verses posted above the voting booths. My state constitution lists two things that disqualify a person from office, the first is if you would “deny the being of Almighty God” and the second is being a convicted felon or have been impeached.

When my daughter was born I knew for certain (not that there had really been any question before) that god, particularly the christian god, did not exist. When I held my daughter I experienced the complete, unconditional love that a parent has for their child. I understood what my father meant when he told me that there was nothing I could do that would make him not love me, that I could stab him in the back and he would love me as I pushed the knife in. I knew that if god was the father of all humanity, and if he loved everyone as his children, and if he was omnipotent, that he wouldn’t allow any of his children to suffer in hell for eternity or even for a single second. I understood how great a lie it all was, and how harmful and insidious.

My tale isn’t one with an obvious message of “it gets better.” Going from, what at the time was, a fairly progressive city to deep into the Bible Belt, from my completely Atheist family to the community I lived in was somewhat of a struggle, but one that is well worth it. It demands that I stand up for my right to not have religion imposed on me at every turn. And though it is a struggle, and sometimes an outright fight, I do it because I can, and so hopefully others, like my daughter, won’t have to fight quite as hard.

Original Article

Name: Mo Taylor-Boggan

Location: Beaumont, TX

Organization affiliation: Golden Triangle Freethinkers Organization

Label: Atheist

Former Religious Affiliation: Protestant Christian (Baptist)

With Reason: One Woman’s Journey to Atheism

I was reading an article the other night and the topic was about how Christians, or even those of other faiths, always have an “aha” moment that is usually very emotional, but as atheists, typically our metamorphosis usually isn’t quite that simple. The article hit home for me because my journey was a very long one, and there was not really a single moment I could pinpoint and say, “it happened right there,” but instead there were a series of events leading me eventually to atheism.

I had several moments, starting when I was in my early teens, maybe even pre-teens, but fear kept me from exploring those feelings. I would read about the origins of religion, from historical perspectives, and then stop because it was uncomfortable. It wasn’t until sometime in 2010, following the most devout period of my life, that I really began to let myself study the information I had been scared to consider. Coincidentally, this same time frame was when I decided to change my life in many other ways to live as authentic a life as possible (became vegetarian, cut-off all my hair, etc.,) and this transition would not allow me to deny or continue to compartmentalize faith, history, and science, so these conflicting beliefs could exist within the same person. Thus, I began to allow myself to slowly pull away from the indoctrination.

Keep in mind, I’ve always accepted and been a huge proponent of science. I have never doubted the Theory of Evolution, The Big Bang, or any other scientific discovery, but I simply did not allow myself to compare those understandings of the world to what faith would have us believe. I feel that many people live with this cognitive dissonance or separation within their own brains to allow themselves the study of scientific theories whose existence directly contradict their faith-based beliefs. This dissonance became a burden I was no longer willing to bear.

However, it wasn’t until fall of last year when I made the decision to share these feelings, and at that point I was already a non-believer. Maybe not in a god just yet, but most certainly in this European image of Jesus, and as an African American woman, it never made sense to me that blacks would have willingly traded in their own customs from Africa in exchange for a forced savior.  Of the limited historical substantiation for this Jesus, at best he was a Jewish preacher.  The deification was entirely man-made along with all the other pieces of Christianity and every other religion for that matter … but back to me.

In the end, it came down to my children really. There was a woman at a church I attended, and she wrote a children’s book about Noah and his ark explaining why there were no dinosaurs today. Before I even looked at the text, I knew this woman would say dinosaurs were extinct because Noah could not fit them on the ark. Groan. My daughter, Daileigh, says she wants to be a physician. I could not look her in the eye and lie to her about the origins of the universe, and other things we have discovered through science, and have her enter a world of scientific inquiry ill prepared.

In the dark ages, before the dawn of science, man was scared and didn’t understand the world around him and these fables made him feel better in the midst of a thunderstorm or typhoon. Now science has explained many things previously not understood but people continue to believe in the fables. I choose not to accept things for which we now have scientific explanations for in place of this fiction. Does the fiction feel good? Yes, but this does not make it true. The real world is beautiful and magical (in the poetic sense) because it is … naturally.

I respect everyone’s right to believe as they choose; I just encourage others to study all information available to them before making a choice. You don’t have to be a believer by default, and if you are coming out of your own indoctrination, you are not alone. I suffered in silence, but now I’m happy I did because I wasn’t under the influence of any person but within my own thoughts, synthesizing information into my own understanding of the world, and for me the only logical, reasonable choice is atheism.

Was it an easy choice? No. It has been one of the most difficult, but liberating choices I have made. There were many, many tears in the process, along with intense thought all the way, and there isn’t a theological question I have not pondered in my journey. Initially I couldn’t even utter the word “atheist”, or accept it as a label, but now I embrace it proudly. Why proudly?

This is an excerpt from a response I wrote encouraging my friend to stand strong against those disapproving of her transition to atheism:

“I have been fortunate to have friends, at least, that although they may not agree with my position, have not disowned me. I wish the same could be said for some of my family. I have family members who will not interact with me in any capacity at this point. But I’ve decided that is okay.

It seems so contrite at this point, but the saying is true, “Those who mind, don’t matter, and those who matter, won’t mind.” I find it is the people the most unsure of their own faith who have struggles with yours. It is equally difficult for them to realize that the beautiful, smart, funny, talented person you have always been is still there … even without god, and it goes against everything they’ve believed all this time. What if you’re right? They are thinking it, even if they aren’t saying it.

I can’t put into words how it warms my heart to know that by speaking up I am encouraging others to do the same. I know it isn’t easy, but when it seems difficult think of the world you will leave to your babies because of your boldness, more tolerant, more rational, more loving.”

These are the reasons I feel it necessary to speak up.

So here I am, a working divorced mother, raising my four children, a full-time college student, living in Texas, and yes I am an atheist. I’m also a friend, a sister, an aunt, a daughter, an advisor, a confidant. I’m still the strong, feisty, compassionate, and bubbly woman I have always been, and I am all of those things because I am…not because some external force created me this way. I love and appreciate everyone in my life now more than ever, especially those who accept me for who I am, unconditionally.

Love is love!

Original Article

NAME:  Kevin R. “Vin” Rohm
BORN: 1955
LOCATION:  Milton, WA
ORGANIZATION AFFILIATION: MAAF, AA.
LABEL:  Atheist
FORMER AFFILIATION:  Missouri Mormon (RLDS)

MY STORY:

Mom was a very religious woman.  She told my siblings and me that she would rather we were dead than to leave the church.  I was such a disappointment to the poor woman.  My doubts began when I was in my teens.  I guess it began with judgment of homosexuals.  I knew my uncle was gay and I just couldn’t see how that made him an abomination.  He was pretty cool; just four years older than me.  It just didn’t make sense I guess that good people like him were condemned to hell while horrible people who just happen to be straight and Christian get to go to heaven.  Heaven must be a really sucky place.

When I was 26 and going to school in Texarkana, Arkansas, the trial dubbed “Scopes II” was being fought.  I hadn’t paid much attention to the Book of Genesis, but the trial made me read it for the first time in light of the science of cosmology and evolution I had been taught in high school.  It became pretty clear very quickly that “God” knew nothing about creation.

Reading the Bible for the first time was such an eye-opener.  Noah’s flood was such a ridiculous story.  A “world-wide flood” that left no spot on the geological record; it could not explain the marsupial population of animals on Australia, nor could it explain the animals that were unique to the American Continent.  Never mind the fact that there just isn’t enough water in the world, liquid and ice, to raise the sea level enough to cover the Appalachians, let alone Ararat.  Clearly this book was a collection of mythologies and had nothing to do with historic reality.

Even the story of Jesus was laughable at times for its mythological elements.  I had already read the mythologies of Horus and Mithras and had noted their similar story lines to that told of Jesus.  Common sense told me that there was more to this than mere coincidence.  Clearly, the authors of the gospels knew the stories of Horus and Mithras, both much older than the gospels, and fashioned their story of Jesus with these same themes and legendary acts and occurrences. It didn’t take me long to realize that this story was just as impossible and fictional as those other mythologies.

By now I had shed my Christian skin and had become something of a modern day Deist.  The internet was now the rage, and I often engaged Christians in debate in on line chat rooms and bulletin boards.  As I was dismissing a Christian for his lack of belief in the gods of other religions, pointing out that his own god had no more proof for “his” existence than any of those others, it occurred to me that I too was making the same error.  I had no more proof that my impersonal god of creation existed than my Christian friend, or our other friends who believed in other gods.

How can I believe in my god and not believe in these others when I have no more proof of mine than they of theirs?  It was in that moment that I came to the realization that I didn’t have sufficient evidence to sustain a belief in god….in any gods.  God was just a word, an invented place mark for what we do not know about the universe.  And in that moment I became an atheist.

Original Article

Name: Diane Fadden
Born:  1962
Location: Everett, Washington
Label: Atheist
Previous Religious Affiliation: Born again Christian 30+ years

My Story: 

I’m 50 this year and still trying to find myself, after living most of my life for other people or … being what I thought I had to be in order to be loved.  I became a Christian for that reason, in my early 20’s, at the Billy Graham Crusade here in Seattle.  It was all about winning points and my mother’s love.  But always I had questions I had to ignore to just believe.  It’s like I had corners of my brain I had to shut off.  I am also an amateur paleontologist.  Or rather I was.  Because the bible contradicted science, I had to use my own faculties to merge what the bible said with what I knew, what I had learned from not only reading a lot but holding fossils I personally recovered, in my hands.

I guess the bottom line is, I don’t believe a god would make human beings flawed, which he obviously did, and then say here’s the repair kit, guys, and if you don’t accept it, I’m going to torture you forever.  How can that make sense?   I guess also when I started questioning what bits of the bible were true versus what couldn’t be, that’s when the questions got louder in my head and there just weren’t any answers coming.  How can an omniscient being make mistakes or have regrets, and yet the biblical god did this all the time.  He made his own enemy, he made Lucifer, knowing ahead of time he was doing so.  He made humans naive and clueless, put a forbidden tree of knowledge in close proximity to those humans knowing ahead of time those clueless naive humans would succumb to his enemy’s trick—and then he punished humans when they did exactly what he knew they would do, and made them anyway because it was part of his plan.

I guess that’s the part I couldn’t wrap my mind around and finally it unraveled me, or rather my “faith.”  The idea that god knew ahead of time the consequences of making humans ignorant, ie. vulnerable to “Satan,” and then putting them in close proximity to Satan like … or as if, he wanted it all to happen just as it did … and then when it did getting angry and punishing those humans for it, and all humanity afterward for it.

This is not the actions of a loving anything, and certainly not an all knowing, all powerful, omniscient deity.  In fact it seems to me more the actions of a sadistic scientist who enjoys torturing little animals.

Anyway, I realized after all this pondering … none of it makes sense.  And it was really hard to walk away.  After 30 years of being a Christian, coming to the realization it is all made up and there is no god after all, was scary. All of a sudden I realized I am alone. But since I did come to realize this—I have only hungered for more knowledge, more understanding, more reality.  And what’s funny is, the more reality I embrace, the happier I am with being all alone, and not being watched or constantly judged for everything I say, do or think.

Original Article

Name: Zal Cleminson
Born: Glasgow, Scotland
Location: Barnsley, England, S70 4PQ
Label: Antitheist

My Story:

It was in the month of May during the post-war working class austerity of Glasgow in Scotland, I was born the son of an army Sergeant and a shop worker, into a close-knit, loving, loveable and modest Presbyterian home. Brought up within a consanguineous household I wanted for little. Responsive and energetic, I had a happy unblemished childhood, brought up to feel the unease of wrong-doing. Still too young perhaps to form, in the back of one’s mind, the uncertain outlines of an excuse.

Aged seven I sailed with my family from Tilbury, London on the long voyage to Adelaide, Australia together with 1,100 other eager immigrants. I celebrated my eighth birthday crossing the Tropic of Capricorn. Three and a half years later I would experience a secondary alienation on returning to Glasgow due to my mother’s susceptibility to the excessive summer heat of South Australia.

The colossal voyage was notable, I later came to realise, for a complete circumnavigation of the continent of Africa as the outward journey was detoured around Cape Hope due to the closure of the Suez Canal in 1957, though subsequently re-opened on our return trip in 1961. From London, we sailed for the Canaries then on to Cape Town and Durban, crossing the Indian Ocean to Freemantle and finally arriving in Adelaide. The return journey was via Colombo, Bombay, Aden, Port Said and Marseille.

On the open sea only the passage of the sun and moon over the ocean accompanied the rise and fall of the ship. This feeling of being connected without barriers to the ocean gave me a huge new feeling of space. An unexpected gap of time had opened up suddenly in everyone’s life. It was this epic voyage, together with growing up in and around Adelaide’s great adventurous ‘toxic’ hinterland, that reminds me to this day of an extraordinary and vivid time in my life. An experience of the world gained from an intense fascination for the mysteries of my surroundings, seeing through the eyes of a youthful explorer all the thrills and challenges of a pioneering age. A time when one meets those moments which appeal forcibly to an expanding imagination. As a result, and together with the many wondrous places I have visited since, the world was made not small but greater in the rich diversity of cultures I have encountered as both child and adult. During this childhood adventure when I witnessed the vast gulf between rich and poor, privilege and destitution, I was nevertheless innocent of the geo-political whys or wherefores of empire, domination and subordination. Whilst those early images are still clear in my mind, I now have alongside them, as I have grown older, an increased understanding of the value of life and a deep belief in freedom from repression and discrimination in all its forms.

Much of my early childhood was often subdued by a sense of wonderment which, with a growing habit of day-dreaming, often rendered me silent. It prompted my mother to announce, “Our Alistair’s a quiet one; you’re a thinker, aren’t ye son?” At times I have felt this to be a matter for congratulation. Confirmation of that can be found in the exemplary sentence ‘Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.’ I was therefore happy in the assumption that Mothers always know best, the maternal voice that keeps you on the straight and narrow. Perhaps the reason I shied away from serious trouble, or refused to be enticed into membership of any of the ‘tooled-up’ gangs that swaggered around Glasgow’s notorious streets and housing schemes.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve dreamed of brawling with lunatics, replaying the encounter in my mind time after time, imagining the perfect response – the perfect right hook, the perfect double-leg takedown, the perfect head-butt. I, nevertheless, managed to ‘body-swerve’ the serious, mad-eyed lunatics, and evade the allegedly mean city hard men, the scarred losers with razors in their neatly tailored pockets and a lifetime of defeat to avenge, with a wise combination of wit and discretion.

More the case, my pals and I were akin to a ‘lively bunch’, a spin-off from sporting endeavours and many of our harmless exploits took place after a hearty family teatime meal and a game of football. As it fell dark, now and then, we would daringly descend to a wild rampage through strangers back gardens, leaping fences and kicking over bins, being careful not to garrotte yourself on a clothes-line. Occasionally, in moments of extreme revolt, we swore loudly or gestured rudely at passing traffic. This was the extent of our rebellious ‘bunch’.

Not all my friends were Presbyterian; some I knew were of a different faith because they went to a different denominational school – they were Roman Catholic – for a Protestant schoolboy the nearest thing to one’s enemy. Whilst many of my friends were themselves Catholic, the awareness of the religious intolerance and bigotry running through the fabric of our city never hindered nor marred those friendships. As a member of the Boys’ Brigade, I attended church service regularly, a place I imagined to be some form of friendship club for family and close neighbours or friends, a simple if select social gathering where the telling of unusual and often sensational stories gained the imagination. Never once questioning my inclusion into this association, I was a willing participant believing the adults who were instructing me neither had reason to tell me lies nor in their innocence sought to do so. I wore a smart uniform; I studied in bible class, formed friendships through football, table tennis, Indian club exercise and gym. I never once recall being wilfully disobedient and certainly not to God, having an idea it would make him angry and for this I should and would be severely punished. I remember being told every time I stupidly hurt myself, that it was God punishing me.

My wavering suspicions, however, were finally confirmed when the toxic ingredients of religion arose from the seeds of my faith and met with the dry, stony face of occult immortality and how submitting to the totalitarian authority of an unknown presence so to claim an everlasting peace came from a collection of falsehoods nestling under a host of horrifying provisions. The malign teachings were craftily understated. Yet here I was in church, a church of Christ, where I realised the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk, and the dead certainly stay that way. It was here too, whilst sitting innocently beneath the fashionable gaze of Christ that somehow I had unwittingly and mysteriously inherited the abysmal stain of a sinner. It was by this arbitrary authority that I should regard myself as depraved, rather than evolved. I later came to realise how someone of vague divine authority, perfectly indistinguishable from any other mortal human other than defining themselves ‘holy’, had come up with the incomprehensible notion that sin is your birthright, whether you accept it or not. It was a fearful concept. A fear without any thrill. It was the first time in my life I had felt personally threatened and not in the merest sense. This was a threat which came from out of the unknown and carried with it such an utterly malevolent, tenacious terror it was beyond rational knowledge – here, in the presence of everyone who loved me, came the fear of eternal damnation!

Thankfully from out of all of this, over time, I realised, axiomatically, life goes on with or without God. The time had come to begin to live without the neurotic relics contained in religion, to accept that faith is a simple euphemism for gullibility and that religion can only betray you in the end, a harmful man-made stop gap between life and death. If there is a need to take a stand at some point to establish an epistemological truth about the events of nature, why should our aggregate knowledge and critical intelligence of such events remain stubbornly and irrevocably rooted in a monopoly of so-called ‘wisdom’, hidden in the squalid candlelight of mythical revelation, and gained through the infantile philosophy and morality of Bronze Age goat-herders? Must this be where our endeavour to the truth begins and ends? Thus, it is my firm belief that all children should be educated without the ill-conceived dogma of such archaic philosophy. However, the most important element in the ‘psychic inventory’ of a civilisation happens to be religion.

Part of our archaic heritage is the assumption that nature dominates man and seems to threaten humanity with hostile events – earthquakes, floods and storms, illness and death itself. Religious ideas offer a way of coping with this situation by suggesting that these happenings occur perhaps to punish men for wrongdoings, and that the gods who cause these events can be placated by worship and sacrifices. It is the feeling of helplessness which gives rise to religious ideas and practices which in turn offer comfort and some protection, partly by giving men/women confidence. This feeling of helplessness has been experienced before, ontogenetically, during the person’s own babyhood and childhood, and phylogenetically, when human society began to evolve. The gods, and later the one God, come to be like parents. First, goddesses offer comfort, just as the infant’s mother did; then the male gods, or God, offer protection against external reality, as a father does for a child. Gods are also dangerous figures, again like the father. This is perhaps because the infant’s relation with its mother is disturbed when the child begins to perceive its father as another figure in the family. These ambivalent feelings are transferred to the gods.

Religion is, therefore, an ‘illusion’, an idea, or belief, based on wishes. Delusions are based on wishes too, but they are in contradiction to reality. An illusion is not necessarily false nor contradictory. For example, a girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This could happen; but it is based on a wish. That a Messiah will come and establish a New Age is a belief based on a wish too, and it might happen. It is either an illusion, or a delusion, depending upon how realistic one thinks the belief to be. The appeal of religion is not based on evidence, for there is very little, nor on reason, for the reasons offered for faith are unconvincing, but on illusions – ‘fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind’. Let me ask: would you fly in a faith-based plane? If you wouldn’t fly in a faith-based plane, why would you want to formulate a social institution based on faith? Has anyone, in the whole history of human evolution provided good evidence that faith really is a reliable guide to reality? No! These adulterated wishes concern the need for protection through love from a parent; the need for relief from the feeling of helplessness which adults retain from their babyhood; and the desire to see justice fulfilled, which is met by positing another, future, life. Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation and in doing so we disregard its relation to reality, just as the illusion sets no store by verification.

Hence, belief is not the same as knowledge, and believing is not the same as knowing. Shouldn’t our first instinct therefore be one of suspicion? If you have seen God then fine, go ahead and live in comfort with that belief, but I’d rather be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite. To feel love, hate, anger, compassion, grief without any intervention from a supernatural God reveals an instinctive facet of our genetic ancestry; other animals safely do outwith indoctrination of the supernatural display all such attributes. Should we therefore allow for any human feelings or emotions that haven’t yet been fully explained be treated as inexplicable and therefore supernatural? If we cannot feel love, hate, anger, compassion, grief or indeed experience death without the intervention of a supernatural entity, then I’m compelled to ask what it is that’s lacking in our conception of human instinct and the material value of reality. We cannot recognize the existence of something unless we have a direct knowledge of it. Biblical graffiti may endorse the image of a supernatural realm, in the same way that pictures of fairies invite us to provide evidence for their existence. Alas, we have absolute proof of neither. Religion is like any other snorting, injecting addiction. It has its growers and suppliers and its dealers, and once it’s in your blood it takes over without authority, with the very same persistence and insidiousness of any lethal drug.

So where do we go from here? Without a doubt, religion has played an important part in the human story. It once provided answers to questions about the world we live in and purported to reveal the meaning of life. As science ebbs ever closer to answering the crucial facts of existence, believers will continue to be challenged to let go of the ramblings of a bygone era.

Later in life, mired in his deepening depression, I watched my father become a virtual recluse and succumb to old age and death with a haunted, dreamless look of resignation. He had no time for God, unlike my mother, and saw his death approaching with all the stoicism of an agnostic. Fourteen years later when my mother lay close to death, her murmuring whispers recanting mythical sins to a fictitious redeemer, I was thankful the age of her growing confusion and personal humiliation was coming to an end. Death may be the end but it is not a curtailment of everlasting, loving memories. I am happy when I look back at childhood photographs from the ’50s where my parents retain all the glamour and poise of film stars.

To these events I’ve given a particular emphasis not in any vain attempt to outrun my own genetic viruses of the mind but to admit when they both died I struggled to conceive I would never see them again. It was an understandable and instinctive anguish, a selfish regard to a hopeless fantasy. I was demanding of ‘Death’ my own form of self-delusion as relevant to a child, looking down on the dead body of one’s parent, and hearing for the first time a brassy yet silent voice inwardly proclaiming: That is a dead body; and in course of time that is what you will become.

By the time my own children and grandchildren were born, together with that unprecedented moment of joyful adoration, I was well aware that birth occurs without any transcendental or numinous entity to intervene upon these little miracles of Nature, simply by chance of evolution they had come into this world.

Some day we will all, thankfully, concede to our mortality. Many will succumb without fear, while others earnestly wish for that fateful alliance, guilty or otherwise, but sadly most will pass from this life having dreamed of little beyond the obedience of their fateful circumstances. Dreams end where conscious thought begins, and my dreams have ended here in a kaleidoscope of thoughts from a mind laid bare which, in time, will eventually fade and hide amidst the dust and silence of the upper shelf. It is my wish to humbly pass on to the reader an aspiration which has excited my imagination since adulthood. It may serve also as a latent attempt to unravel much I have puzzled over my entire adult life.

The bare act of being is an outrageous improbability, a sense of continual astonishment. After years of worthless brooding, I find, in this matter, I still hover somewhat on an air of general humility in line with fluctuating waves of enigma. Nevertheless aiming, I hope, at turning my unsociable remoteness into something positive. Thinking I have brought myself not so much to an opinion as a stance. Forthwith I am always to be conscientious, meticulous and explicit whenever possible. After all, when one’s life is a matter of individual conscience, content with memories of one level of intensity or another, memories of moments of absolute conviction, we alone remain responsible for all we might think, and say and believe in. Truth and belief may be subjective edicts and prejudices we are expected to defend. But rational justification is where truth and belief are exposed. To myself in particular I offer this humble piece of advice – ensure you have the uncompromising and affirming depth of belief, the equivalent solemn intensity as one’s ‘enemy’, slavishly rejoicing in falsehoods, before the battle gets under way.

In the presence of such feelings and all that has been revealed to me since, I can say with positive satisfaction I am an avowed antitheist and unless someone opens that heavy door to heaven and introduces to me a God beyond doubt I shall resolutely remain so.

Original Article

Name: Kris Leeds

Born: 1978

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Organization affiliation: GSHM, UAA, WAA

Label: Atheist, Antitheist, Humanist, Secularist, Constitutionalist (Yes, I just made that up, feel free to ask me about it).

Former Religious Affiliation: I’ve been Catholic, Protestant, Presbyterian, and Methodist (None of them made sense).

Letting Go of God

Original Article

Name: Cody Robinson

DOB: 1985

Location: Denver, CO

Label: Atheist

Former Religious Affiliation: Protestant Christian (Non-Denominational)

Original Article