I was raised to
be Christian by Christian parents. I don't recall which denomination we
were, only that when I asked, my mom told me we were "the right one".
Good enough for me. It would be years before I started examining my
beliefs.
My mother has
unshakable faith. She has been witness to several miracles throughout
her life. We were poor back when my brother, my sister, and I were
little. My neighbor, who I have the fondest memories of, somehow always
knew when there wasn't going to be any food on the table that night. By
"somehow", I mean God always told her when we needed help, and she
would call on me to take a small amount of money to my mother to get us
through the day. The way she always knew was nothing short of
miraculous, my mom and I both knew that. There was something else about
a friend or a family member who once was terrified for some reason, and
when she looked down from her bedroom window, she saw an angel sitting
on each of the gate pillars surrounding the house, holding up lanterns.
My mom didn't actually witness this herself; I'm sure she just heard
about it as I heard about it from her. But its just as well. I never
questioned the validity of the testimony, nor did I ever question the
existence of angels after hearing the story. It was like I had seen it
for myself.
This is what my faith was based on. Church and the Bible had little to do with it. God's work was apparent in our lives.
I think we
may have started out as weekly church goers. I have a single memory of
the first time I attended Sunday school, but other than that all I
recall from my younger years was the donut stand outside the church.
That memory is especially familiar, which makes me think we visited
that donut stand/church on a weekly basis. As we grew older though, mom
started a new tradition of only taking us to church on Easter. That's
the way it was for years until my older brother and sister took an
interest in the high school youth group. Church every Sunday morning
and bible study every Wednesday evening. Though I was too young for the
group, I tagged along. Knowing my brother, I'd say its fairly safe to
assume he told me I'd go to hell if I didn't.
My faith never
grew stronger or weaker throughout the years. I believed every word was
true and never doubted any of it. Sometimes I'd worry more about the
fate of my soul (what if I died right now and didn't have a chance to
ask forgiveness for my latest sin?); sometimes it would slip my mind
that my soul was in constant danger. It wasn't until I got to college
that I questioned any of it at all.
I started dating
a boy who I quickly fell in love with. One day, he nonchalantly
mentioned that he was an atheist. An ATHEIST! An image of the word
burned into my mind. I'd see the letters in red, set in flames. It
haunted me. I loved him and he was the only person I had ever known who
was definitely going to burn in hell. I couldn't understand it. It
didn't make sense. I tried to calm down and think about it logically.
If I were wrong about God and he didn't really exist, then I would have
lived a good moral life and there would be no consequence for being
wrong when it was over. If he ended up being wrong, he was going to
burn in hell for all eternity. Even if there wasn't a God-- a thought I
had never before entertained-- I was going to play it safe.
My faith escaped
the nonbeliever unscathed, thanks to my variation of Pascal's Wager and
my willingness to not really think it all the way through. It was
something else that called the Good Book into question. It was my own
sense of morality. I held all the usual Christian convictions, the most
relevant at the time being that premarital sex is a sin and
homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord. In college, I met these
sinners and realized something: they weren't bad people. They weren't
even good people doing bad things. I had to acknowledge to myself that
what I truly believed-- not what I had been taught to believe, but what
my own sense of morality was telling me-- was that there was nothing
inherently wrong about having sex or being gay.
This posed a
problem. I wasn't quite sure what it was yet. Did I think God was
wrong? Or did I think the bible was wrong about God? For the first
time, I took an interest in what the bible really had to say. I started
reading it for myself. I took a college course called The Bible as
Literature, which would offer a different perspective on the text than
I had gotten in bible study, which presented the bible in only one
fashion: as truth.
My deconversion
was a slow process that I wasn't entirely aware of. It was a lot of
little things over a long course of time that eventually made the
entire concept of Christianity come tumbling down. As I read the Bible,
I couldn't help but notice the God in the Old Testament wasn't anything
like the God in the New. I realized on another day how absurd it was to
believe God took a personal interest in our lives, when it was apparent
in so many parts of the world that no interest was taken at all. On yet
another day, I considered the probability of any one religion having it
right, in light of how many religions man had created throughout
history. By time I asked myself whether I still believed in
Christianity, the religion had already come crashing down without my
noticing. It was like asking myself if I believed in the tooth fairy;
there was nothing to decide.
Abandoning my
religion was one thing. Embracing atheism was another. I feared that
ultimately I could burn in hell for it. I know, it doesn't make sense
to fear being thrown into a fiery pit by the Christian god when you
don't believe in the Christian god. Here's the thing. Fears aren't
always rational. I know that the spider on the wall doesn't stand a
chance against me, but my whole body still shakes as I flush it down
the toilet. And I know that squishing it did the trick and that I
really didn't need to flush it to ensure that it wouldn't come back and
get me, but the fear compels me. Just as my fear of spiders is
completely irrational, so was my fear of hell. I knew full well that
hell didn't exist, but that alone wasn't enough. Not after being taught
to hold this fear by those in my life who I trusted the most, and
having the concept reinforced by my community for the next 20 years.
I am an atheist.
Identifying myself as such doesn't hold any meaning or significance. I
embrace this now because I strive to be honest with myself regarding
every aspect of my life, no matter how scary it is. Being an atheist
doesn't fulfill me, certainly not the way believing in a higher power
that created me and loves me did. But it is a good feeling knowing I
have the courage to face reality. And the reality is, I have no reason
to believe that story about angels was really true. No reason to
believe my neighbor's attentiveness to our plight was due to anything
more than the kindness of her heart. No reason to believe the stories
in a really old book about a diety that once intervened in the lives of
primitive men has any truth or bearing on my life.
As nice as it is
to think that we can miraculously survive death and live on for all
eternity, there's no evidence to suggest there's anything waiting for
us beyond the grave. The only life I know for certain that I have is
this one and so I'm going to live it like its the only one I have.
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this testimonial