Where Is Your God?

This post is going to be a personal one but in it I hope to bring to light how it was that I came to atheism. I didn’t wake up one day and decide that I would abandon the idea of god and reject the bible’s teachings. It was a long, arduous process throughout which I felt torn apart, confused, frightened and filled with inner turmoil. There was nothing simple or rushed in this transformation. But in the end I gained more than I could have ever thought possible.

I was born in October of 1984 and raised in a Christian family. It wasn’t a very strict family and though we did goto church it wasn’t all that often. The times I did goto church and/or Sunday school I was taught about the history of creation and what was right or wrong. Though I cannot personally remember, relatives have said that I used to imitate preachers and pray when I was just a kid.

Move ahead to when I was fourteen. I started to hang out with people who for the most part were Christian but a few of my friends were either agnostic or atheist. I would lecture them on denying their creator and would feel genuine sadness over what I thought would be their ill-fate when they would finally meet their maker. I had even gone to a bible camp for a few days once and I can honestly tell you that at the time I felt like Jesus or god or something had touched me. I know now what I felt was adrenaline and the rush of being with so many like-minded individuals.

Skipping ahead to seventeen years of age, I was in high school and had taken quite a liking to science, especially astronomy. This was when the first seeds of doubt had begun to form in my mind. I don’t know what exactly separates the believer from the non-believer but I do think one personality trait really benefits: skepticism. This is not to say you need to argue over everything but if you can question what you think and what you ‘know’ then you have started your first few steps away from the shackles of ignorance.

I was that type of person. I questioned myself and what I thought in other areas, not just religion. I remember once someone had challenged my belief in god and I immediately began to refute what they had said. I realized right at that moment that I was not answering their question from any logical perspective but was doing it in almost a reflexive way. That person’s question did not even enter the logic area of my brain but instead, just like in a cartoon where the character changes the train’s destination by pulling a lever, went down the emotional track and was answered in a purely emotional fashion.

I had to come to grips with my new found revelation later that day. I had literally almost felt my brain being retarded. Couple that with my new appreciation of science and I had a problem that I felt I needed to come to terms with.

I started to feel a sort of intangible kinship with science. Here I was questioning myself and what I believed only to realize that science behaved much in the same way. Science is set up to question itself, to challenge itself and it’s understanding of the universe. You have an innumerable amount of people that do nothing but dedicate themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. They question themselves, they question current theories, they question past theories. Many times they are right but many times they are wrong. And that ability to re-factor, rethink and re-examine concepts and ideas you have held true, regardless if it meant you were wrong, drew me to it like nothing before.

This left me at odds with myself, and prompted what was probably the most difficult step. I couldn’t believe in science and believe in god. No matter how the religious try to swing it, the two are incompatible. But I wasn’t ready to become atheist. I even felt real fear at calling myself agnostic. All the years of believing with every fiber in my being that god would strike me down and send me to hell affected me. Indoctrinating children at a young age will brainwash a child’s mind and to say otherwise is sheer and utter ignorance.

By the time I was eighteen I was a full fledged agnostic. Still not ready to go at it 100% and call myself atheist but I was on the band wagon and loving it. There were two main reasons why I couldn’t go all the way. One was what I said earlier: Afraid that if I was wrong god would punish me. But secondly, and this is why I have this site, I had no community. There wasn’t an “atheist church”. No place to meet with fellow skeptics and share our knowledge and experiences, or at least none that I knew of. Plus I was afraid of how my family would feel about me. Would they judge me? Would they disown me? (They didn’t by the way, much to my satisfaction)

When I was about twenty-one I read a book: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I was immediately changed. I mean, here was a guy that understood me. It was ok to be atheist, it was ok to doubt myself and question what I believed and there were plenty of other people who felt the same. After I read that book I went on a crusade if you will; reading anything I could get my hands on. Watching debates all day, everyday, with people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

It wasn’t long after that I was able to call myself atheist with pride. No more feeling guilty about doubting god or challenging the Christian belief system. It was a change in me that was epic in scale and reward. I take the philosophy of science and reason and use it in all aspects of my life today. My only hope with this site is to help people in similar situations. I know what it’s like to believe in god and feel like everyone who questions that is ridiculous. I understand Christians and empathize with them. The only words of wisdom I hope I can convey to you is that you need to question. Always question yourself and your surroundings. Ask your self why? Why do you believe in what you believe. Try and step back as far away as you can from yourself, away from any emotional bias and figure it out.

Hopefully this helps answer any questions people might have of why I dedicate such a large portion of my life to this cause. And I say that without any embarrassment because this is a cause. Religion affects so many facets of our lives from individual rights to politics to how we even think as human beings that I couldn’t live with myself not trying to make some dent, however small it may be, in this world. If I only save one person from a life of ignorance then that will have made all of this worthwhile. Thanks everyone.

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