Hey everybody! So I was raised as a little evangelical boy with what they call a "fire" for god. I actually wanted to become an evangelical preacher at some point. Now I loved Science and Logic, but I also had this thing where I trusted the conclusions of my mother to the extent that I chiefly followed her "wisdom". She was a single mother and a great influence on my childhood. But as I started to pursue logic and the ideals of science, I become so engrossed in it all that I was in fact able to pull myself out of the dogmatic mindset of my upbringing and seriously question what I believed.
I remember when I was 14 years old and just starting high school the questioning of my faith had grown to such an extent that my beliefs had simply slipped out of my hands, so to speak. I seemed to have no control over it. I remember sitting in a church pew thinking "How could this be happening to me? Am I really right now becoming an atheist?" I remember the exact moment, almost the exact location in a building where I lost my faith. Of course the reasoning I used then to rationalize my atheism wouldn't make sense to me today, but at least it had freed me from the shackles of evangelical creationism.
As I investigated and explored the wide, wide world of freethought, instead of just automatically criticizing it because my "mommy" approved, I began to discover that there were many other like me out there and that I wasn't alone. It took me nine months, shortly after I turned 15, to admit to anyone that I was an atheist. That first person was of course my mother, perhaps the biggest person in my life that I had to face up to. My brother was already an atheist, and frankly a source of interest in the subject area prior to my "deconversion". The second I told my mom, she nearly threw up she was so sick of the idea of her youngest child becoming an atheist. By that time I was also a secular humanist which complicated things.
So for a number of months she tried with all her might to re-convert me back to christianity, often having to fend off both me and my brother, two very intelligent people. But she simply ran out of energy and stopped trying, only intermittently here and there throughout the years trying her hand once more.
So here I am today, at age 18, an atheist with much more developed reasons than I originally set out with. I am free, I am happy, and I'm a humanist. No more shackles for me.
I remember when I was 14 years old and just starting high school the questioning of my faith had grown to such an extent that my beliefs had simply slipped out of my hands, so to speak. I seemed to have no control over it. I remember sitting in a church pew thinking "How could this be happening to me? Am I really right now becoming an atheist?" I remember the exact moment, almost the exact location in a building where I lost my faith. Of course the reasoning I used then to rationalize my atheism wouldn't make sense to me today, but at least it had freed me from the shackles of evangelical creationism.
As I investigated and explored the wide, wide world of freethought, instead of just automatically criticizing it because my "mommy" approved, I began to discover that there were many other like me out there and that I wasn't alone. It took me nine months, shortly after I turned 15, to admit to anyone that I was an atheist. That first person was of course my mother, perhaps the biggest person in my life that I had to face up to. My brother was already an atheist, and frankly a source of interest in the subject area prior to my "deconversion". The second I told my mom, she nearly threw up she was so sick of the idea of her youngest child becoming an atheist. By that time I was also a secular humanist which complicated things.
So for a number of months she tried with all her might to re-convert me back to christianity, often having to fend off both me and my brother, two very intelligent people. But she simply ran out of energy and stopped trying, only intermittently here and there throughout the years trying her hand once more.
So here I am today, at age 18, an atheist with much more developed reasons than I originally set out with. I am free, I am happy, and I'm a humanist. No more shackles for me.
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." -Carl Sagan
