What made you become an atheist?

[Gwaithmir]

I grew up in a Catholic household. My religious indoctrination began even before I was old enough to attend school. I can still recall how my mother taught me to say simple prayers and that the world was created by God from nothing. I was skeptical of this outrageous claim, even at the tender age of four or five years.

I attended three Catholic schools during my youth. Each class featured about 40 minutes of daily prayers and anywhere from an hour to three hours of religious instruction and study. Students were literally smothered in a miasma of religion. Walls were festooned with religious imagery and there were statues of Jesus, Mary and the saints everywhere. Only the restrooms were free of this nonsense. Every book, regardless of subject, contained religious imagery. I can still recall how most of the geography books I had to study featured articles on churches, missions and famous saints in each country around the world. History books concentrated more on the history of the Church than that of the world.

Fear was an essential element of my indoctrination. Nuns were especially fond of scaring their students with tales of the horrors of Hell. These stories were frequently supplemented by horrific imageries of Hell, guaranteed to traumatize young minds. Physical abuse was also an acceptable teaching tool. Slow learners were apt to have their hair pulled and their faces slapped, not to mention being struck with rulers and oaken rods. My 8th grade nun's favorite method of abuse, which she carried out with great frequency and relish, was to seize a boy by the cheeks or hair and repeatedly bash his head against a wall. This happened at a time in which a public school teacher would have gone to jail for similar behavior.

My first serious cracks in my faith occurred when I had to study the Bible. Even the bowdlerized Catholic version I had to read revealed a God who was anything but loving and benevolent, but rather an insecure, malevolent, egotistical tyrant. The Book of Job, in particular, turned my stomach.

My senior religion classes included learning proofs of God’s existence. Students weren’t supposed to discuss and critique them, however. We were required to memorize and accept them as true. Being an amateur student of astronomy, I debunked the Kalam Cosmological Argument as it had been interpreted by St. Thomas Aquinas.

I attended a secular college after high school, which turned out to be a breath of fresh air. I was able to discuss science and religion with many students of other faiths, although I can’t recall meeting any atheists at this time. I still identified myself as Roman Catholic, but my faith was pretty weak by then and I was neglecting to attend Sunday services with increasing frequency.

Following my service in Vietnam, and having witnessed some of the horrors of war, I identified myself as an agnostic. I read a number of books on religion and comparative religious study over the next decade. Some time in the late 1970’s I saw Madalyn Murray-O’Hair on the Phil Donahue Show and was quite impressed with her arguments against religion. I decided to subscribe to her magazine THE AMERICAN ATHEIST. The October, 1982 issue featured an article titled The Agnostic’s Dilemma, which was an epiphany for me. From that moment onward, I knew that I was an atheist and probably had been one for some time without realizing it.