RE: When, Where, How and Why did you become Atheist?
October 6, 2015 at 12:19 pm
(This post was last modified: October 6, 2015 at 12:24 pm by TheRocketSurgeon.
Edit Reason: Removed Bambi's quote, as it was irrelevant to this reply.
)
(October 6, 2015 at 11:28 am)abaris Wrote: What church are we talking about exactly?
My parents banned television (not the TV set, just "television", which came from The World™, as in anything other than what our church taught was okay) when I was five. We were allowed to check out books and movies from the library, with parental approval, of course. Though my parents cited the evangelist whose sermon convinced them to throw our cable out, as a way of "keeping Satan and The World™ out of the home", it apparently backfired, because I developed a love of mythological/fantasy literature and science fiction. The former showed me just how silly religious beliefs can be, or rather, how transparent; the latter showed me what my own culture looks like when looked back on from a distant future. Neither was flattering to my own carefully-cultured belief structure. Yet I went on believing... the others have rightly pointed to the term "cognitive dissonance", isolating the Believer parts of my brain from the "actually know things" parts of my brain.
Unfortunately for my parents' beloved religion, I also developed a deep love of encyclopedias and technical/science books, chemistry sets, and observing things/creatures in nature, during my roam-abouts on the island where I grew up. Eventually, this would lead to a degree in biology/chemistry and a career in environmental science/field biology.
What actually torpedoed my religion was twofold: 1) because I was so bright, my church "selected" me for training in Christian Apologetics (or as I like to call it, ChrAp), specifically with an eye toward "disproving" the beliefs of other sects of not-fundamentalist-enough Christians, such as Catholics, but also applying ChrAp to "wrong" faiths, like Judaism and Islam, and 2) my increasing knowledge about science was increasingly at odds with the dissonant parts of my religious upbringing, though I managed for a surprising amount of time to maintain the dynamic tension.
Finally, when another evangelist-preacher came to visit our church and began to teach us Why Evolution Is Wrong™, his sermon was filled with so many completely, astoundingly wrong ideas about the actual claims of science that a well-read 17 year old could easily spot them. At that moment, I had the shocking realization that not everything I learn in church is factual. By the end of that afternoon, I had begun the process of examining my belifs, ironically now using the very ChrAp model I had so long used to "disprove" other sects on my own religious ideology, and was effectively an agnostic by that evening.
It took me another five years of comfortable agnosticism before I began to encounter Creationists again, on my college campus, about the time I was getting ready to graduate with my degree in evolutionary biology. As I studied their methods in preparation to assist one of our professors in the debate to which he had been challenged, I was appalled at how bad their misrepresentations actually are, in a way I could never have realized with only an amateur's knowledge, at age 17. This began a series of conversations with my girlfriend (and debate team partner) that culminated with me realizing that I am not only an agnostic by philosophy, I am an atheist by opinion.
The fingerprints of mankind are all over every religion, as plain as day to anyone who really looks. And yet, each of those sects will look you in the face and swear that all those other faiths are wrong, but theirs is the One True Faith™. For all the science I could show you to prove that the Bronze Age tribal sheepherder/warrior priests didn't know a damned thing about the world in which they lived, while writing down "the revealed truth" from the Creator of All™, the main evidence I have against religion is that everyone else is wrong except the faith of the religious fanatic to whom I am speaking, no matter which sort (s)he is. Religion is manmade, if only people had the courage to admit that their own faith is as silly to everyone else as everyone else's faith is to them.
In the words of Robert A. Heinlein, "One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh."
A Christian told me: if you were saved you cant lose your salvation. you're sealed with the Holy Ghost
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
