On Becoming an Atheist III

I was reading a story of deconversion on "converts corner" on Richard Dawkins' site www.richarddawkins.net and also received a comment from a friend on a previous blog and have decided to write my own version of deconversion.

I was raised in the Lutheran Church. Everyone was pretty liberal with their Christianity, but they still attended church, sang in the choir, and sent their children to Catechism in 7th and 8th grades. Catechism was where I began to have my doubts. We were taught that Christians were God's chosen ones who would be admitted to heaven and that all others were pretty much screwed. At that point, I was very troubled. I thought to myself that since heaven was the most wonderful place imaginable, that there had to be a fair way to get into heaven and that it wasn't fair for the people of other faiths. These people of other faiths were brought up to have that different faith and being brought up in a faith was the way you came by having a particular faith. It just wasn't fair and I just refused to believe that all of these other people were going to hell just for believing something different. I even asked our pastor about it during one of our classes. I don't remember what he said, but I feel sure he most likely just shrugged his shoulders. At that point I decided that I was still Christian, but that as long as you believed in just one God, you could still get into heaven. I even asked my Mom about it and she agreed that it wasn't fair and that belief in God was sufficient. I remained "Christian" throughout high school.

I then went off to college and decided on Biology for my major. At one point I changed my major to dance, but eventually found my way back to Biology. At some point early in my scientific study in college I decided that I just couldn't believe in the "Jesus Story" anymore. We were taught about the scientific method and shown how so many miracles could be explained by science and it just became impossible for me to know all this and still believe that the miracles surrounding Jesus were true. I remained in this agnostic purgatory for the next couple of years and neither accepted nor rejected any of the other tenets of faith besides the "Jesus Story".

I then was finally forced to take history as a required core class. This class changed my life. The course covered pre-history up until the Roman Empire. I had a most wonderful professor who was head of the history department and just knew so much about history. I drank every word he spoke and never missed a single class (well, except on a test day during the Nutcracker performance which I told my professor about in advance). I wrote down EVERYTHING and the more I learned the more apparent it was that all of the religions in the world fed off of each other and were founded in similar places and beliefs and that none of them were true. Each was just as mythical as the next.

Somewhere during this time I returned to thinking about heaven and hell and decided that I just couldn't believe in either. I decided that no God that I believed in would be so childish as to send someone to hell for a minor "sin" (as I had no other word for it, I suppose you could call it a moral indiscretion) and that the only way you could go to hell was to commit a major "sin" (i.e. murder, rape, etc.). The problem arose when thinking about that because I thought that the only people who had the capacity to commit such heinous sins were people who had true mental imbalances and God certainly wouldn't send someone to hell for a mental imbalance that the person had no control over and was a biological condition. I also thought that the amount of suffering that some of these people went through that caused their mental imbalances should more than make up for their random heinous acts. It has been shown that many people who turn out to be murderers and rapists are horribly abused as children and such grief can trigger a mental condition, such as schizophrenia, that might lead them to commit a heinous "sin". Others, who weren't subjected to abuse, but still committed the sins were psychopaths who have no conscience and are suffering from a mental imbalance as well. Therefore, I just didn't believe that there was a hell, because I ruled out all of the people who could be sent there. I then decided that there was no method to the madness, so to speak, and that if there were no hell, then there wasn't a heaven, either.

Some of my friends used to say jokingly that I was Jewish since I didn't believe that Jesus really existed, but after my history class and decision about heaven and hell, I decided that I couldn't believe a single word from the Bible (Old Testament or New Testament) and after all the science I'd had, a Messiah coming to Earth seemed no more likely now than it did during Jesus's time. The only thing I hadn't dismissed was the idea of God.

Dismissing the idea of God only came to me more recently. I teeter-tottered for a while between believing in God and believing that there was no way to tell, so no reason to believe one way or another. I then decided to read Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell. It was in reading about the universe, that I had never really studied about before, that I found that, for me, there was just no room for God in the fabric of the universe. I have since decided that I am an atheist. I think I had lingered around it for a while, but I was afraid because the word carries such a negative connotation. I now know, though, that you can be an atheist and still be a very moral, honest person and lead a very fulfilled life by helping others. I am not scared of death because I know that by the time I die I will have done enough to be satisfied with myself. I have also been reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and find that there are many other ideas that comfort me. I don't really think that there is a God, but I won't dismiss it 100% and I feel certain that since I have led a pretty decent life and intend on helping and have helped others, that if there is a God he/she/it would still accept me because of my good deeds and rational thinking.

I'll leave you with a quote from the deconversion story I was reading about what the author would like to ask God if he decided to reveal himself:


I'd want to ask him: "Why did you wait so long to make your existence
indisputable, to display your awesome powers, and to deal definitively with the
problems of disease, disaster and suffering to the solution of which compassionate
mortals have dedicated their lives through the centuries?"