At the insistence of my girlfriend, I’ve decided to start my own blog. Although I do occasionally enjoy writing, it’s usually in the form of poetry, and so writing a structured blog is a little bit different for me. I knew to keep my interest levels up, I would need to pick a topic that I feel passionate about. This is why I’ve chosen to focus most of my blog entries on Atheism. I’m well aware that there are countless atheism blogs scattered around the internet, but hopefully I can provide a slightly different, and interesting view on some things.
While I plan to focus most of my blog entries on the subject of atheism, I won’t completely restrict myself to the topic. I’m sure there will be times when I feel the need to write about another subject but I will attempt to keep any other blog topics just as interesting and thought-provoking. This may also be a good time to point out that I fully encourage any of my readers to share their thoughts and comments about all of my posts. Whether you agree or disagree though, please try to be as respectful as you can towards others; I won’t tolerate abusive comments towards other readers. If you must be abusive in your comments, please just direct them towards me. I don’t mind and will probably even get a good laugh out of it. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff. I thought long and hard about what the topic of my first atheist blog should be, and I decided that I should start at the beginning: Why I became an atheist.
I grew up in a family of six with three brothers (two older and one younger) in addition to my mother and father. My father came from a fairly strict catholic upbringing, but thankfully, never pushed any kind of catholic views onto our family; we were never required to attend church (with the rare exception of a special occasion) and we never had to pray before meals or anything like that. In fact, I’m not even sure that my father considers himself to be catholic at all. Even so, as a child, I never doubted the existence of God. I was told by my parents (and grandparents) that there’s God and then there’s the Devil. I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it, that’s just how it was.
Although I was never educated on all the details and “facts” of the bible when I was a child, I knew enough to see that some of these other claims didn’t add up either. I mean, there’s Jesus, who is the son of God but is also God himself, and he sacrifices himself to himself to save man from the punishment that was going to be brought forth by him to begin with? Even as a kid, this made absolutely no sense. I couldn’t begin to imagine how full grown and even well-educated adults could take this in with no problem.
So needless to say, the idea of organized religion was pretty much lost on me from a young age. All was not lost though; I still had my own version of faith. I looked at it kind of like an AA meeting: take what you like and leave what you don’t. I liked the idea of a loving and caring God who has a plan for all of us and was waiting up in Heaven when we all died. I didn’t like the idea of an intolerant and jealous God who shunned certain people and wouldn’t accept people who didn’t act as he believed fit. So I just more or less believed in my own version of God and religion because that’s what sounded good to me at the time. Despite the fact that I knew organized religion was B.S., believing in a higher power still brought comfort to my life, and so I continued to believe late into my teens and even for a little bit in my early 20s. I’m not sure what exactly changed that blissfully ignorant mindset I had of a perfect God who had his plan for all of us. Perhaps it was the furthering of my education that set it off, or maybe I was simply maturing and realizing that even my idea of God had some gaping holes that couldn’t be ignored. Whatever the reason was, I started coming to my senses slowly but surely. It no longer made any sense to believe in something just because it sounded good and was comforting to me. Where were the facts? Where was the evidence? The more I searched, the more I realized that there simply isn’t any real evidence for a higher power of any kind. Any kind of “evidence” that any person of faith has is no more than biased interpretations of chance events, or religious scripture written by men (not God) who were not even around to see the supposed things that they wrote about.
So is that it? Am I 100% positive that there is no higher power somewhere out there? No. But until I see any sort of evidence to the contrary, I have to hold the belief that there isn’t a God or any other supernatural man in the clouds watching over us.
How did you come to believe in what you believe in? Were you raised that way? Did it come later in life? Tell me your story!
