I grew up in an extremely religious home, attended an ultra conservative school and college, worked in the ministry for several years, and now I’m an atheist. Why? I hear this question from almost every person who find out that I no longer believe like I used to. And here are several examples of their reasons: I am angry or hurt. I am running away from their god. I just want to do my own thing. Something horrible happened. I’ve never had a close walk with their god like they do. I’m demon-possessed. And my favorite – I know deep inside that THEY are right. All these statements are 100% wrong. And this note is to explain my reasons for this drastic ‘change of mind’.

For as long as I can remember I’ve gone to a church, heard the bible stories, read the bible and prayed, and participated fully in all of the church functions, always believing that I was doing the right thing. I never questioned. I never wondered. I never for a second considered that what I believed could be anything but 100% true. I always considered myself very fortunate(or blessed) to be one of the few who knew the truth! Not the Muslims, not the Jehovah’s witnesses, the Mormons, the Buddhists, but ME! How arrogant I was!

Then one day I was faced with the possibility that I could have been misled, that everything I’ve known and loved for all of my life thus far could perhaps be wrong. This was the very first step to seeing things with an open mind, without preconceived ideas, and without having already made up my mind.

First it was the bible. I had never for a minute doubted the bible. I always believed (assumed) that it was the inerrant word of a god. I dismissed any claims of contradictions and inaccuracy. Of course I wasn’t exposed to much of it since I was told to never read anything that was not written by like-minded people. When I finally opened my eyes and read the bible for what it was, I found that there were errors. There were contradictions. There were barbarisms that I had just simply dismissed before.The bible no longer seemed like the perfect word of a god, but a collection of stories, myths, and history from ancient people. A simple google search would be all that it would take to find the contradictions and irregularities. Of course the biblical scholars try to explain them all away, but sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer. The bible is an ancient religious writings of the people who lived 2-3000 years ago. There’s wisdom there to be found, just like any other ancient texts, and there are also errors, mythology, and ancient customs like other ancient texts.

So there went the bible, and I no longer had a leg to stand on. After all, in the sect that I grew up, the bible was the ultimate authority. When that authority fell, everything was up for questions and scrutiny.

Next in question was prayer. All the answers to prayers that I’ve gotten through the years. All the ‘miracles’ that I’ve seen. All the countless hours I’ve spent on my knees or walking in the woods at college talking to this god. All the times I’ve ‘felt’ his presence. They all came to be nothing but my imagination. There were no miracles. Only coincidences. There were no answers to prayer because he didn’t need to answer anything. If everything turned out the way I wanted it to, then this god answered my prayers. If it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to, then it wasn’t his will. He couldn’t possibly go wrong! Then of course I realized that we NEVER pray for things that only a GOD would be able to do.

We pray for the car to start, not for a flat tire to re-inflate itself. We pray for the cancer to go to remission, not for the amputee’s leg to grow back. All the times I thought I felt his presence, I realized it was my wishful imagination. I also realized that there was no holy spirit guiding me. It seemed odd that so many christians, claiming to be inspired by the holy spirit, can’t even agree on simple biblical doctrines. If the holy spirit was real, he was definitely doing a poor job of communicating with his followers.

So there’s no god. Then how did we get here? Why are we here? Someone had to create us, after all, everything we see has an origin some place, a creator, a designer. Then it was science’s turn to enlighten me. I, having grown up in church all my life, believed that the earth was 6000 years old, almost everything was destroyed in Noah’s flood, and evolution is nothing but lies of the devil. Scientists all over the world would laugh at me for believing that. The proof of the earth’s billions of years of history is everywhere. There’s no evidence whatsoever of a world-wide flood, and evolution is accepted by most scientists as a fact.

The proofs are everywhere when I opened my eyes & looked at it, instead of completely dismissing it before I even looked at the evidences. So there went my need for a creator. Science can explain why and how we got here without there needing to be an all-powerful god. And if there was a god, how did HE get here anyways? Who created him?

This was the death of my faith in the god of the bible. There was no tragic event in my life that caused me to be bitter or angry toward this god. There was no selfish desire to do my own thing. I was not running away from this god because he does not exist. I had ‘felt’ this god’s presence, like a person might ‘feel’ the presence of ghosts or evil spirits, all a product of the imagination. And I know deep inside that I AM right because I did not come to this conclusion by having been brain-washed, but by examining the evidences and coming to the inevitable conclusion. I did not choose to become an atheist. It was just an outcome of my search for truth.

I really hope this clarifies some of the whys that you may ask. This has been a very tough year for me, basically starting my life all over again. There have been some friends who simply stopped talking to me because of my ‘change’. But I’ve also made many new friends who accepted me for who I am and gave me tremendous support. I realize now more than ever how precious my life is. It has become much more important that I live this life the best way I know how, enjoying my family and friends, helping others, making this world a better place, and living life to its fullest!

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If there are still more questions, please feel free to ask!

What evidence do religious believers have for their beliefs?

And when they’re asked what evidence they have, how do believers respond?

In my conversations with religious believers, I’ll often ask, “Why do you think God or the supernatural exists? What makes you think this is true? What evidence do you have for this belief?” Partly I’m just curious; I want to know why people believe what they do. Plus I think it’s a valid question: it’s certainly one I’d ask about any other claim or opinion. And if I’m wrong about my atheism — if there’s good evidence for religion that I haven’t seen yet — I want to know. I’m game. Show me the money.

But when I ask these questions, I almost never get a straight answer.

What I typically get is a startling assortment of conversational gambits deflecting the question.

I get excuses for why believers shouldn’t have to provide evidence. Vague references to other people who supposedly have evidence, without actually pointing to said evidence. Irrelevant tirades about mean atheists. Venomous anger at how disrespectful and intolerant I am to even ask the question.

1. Do I truly believe that everyone has the right to their own beliefs or lack thereof?
2. Can I respect the person, even though I may not respect their ideas?
3. Do I have the capacity to recognize my own fallacies?
4. Will it kill me if I were wrong?
5. Am I able to hold what I believe is truth lightly in the interest of dialog?
6. Can I overlook and maybe even appreciate the idiosyncrasies of others in order to hear what they have to say?
7. Am I willing to discern the deeper currents rather than being distracted by the surface ripples?
8. Can everyone play? In other words, will I not ostracize someone because of their beliefs or lack thereof?
9. Is personal harm to others the only prohibition I am willing to make?
10. Do I love all beings, and if not, am I willing?

New Age beliefs are the Creationism of the Progressives. I move in circles where most people would find it absurd to believe that humans didn’t evolve from prehistoric ancestors, yet many of these same people quite happily believe in astrology, psychics, reincarnation, the Tarot deck, the i Ching, and sooth-saying. Palmistry and phrenology have pretty much blown over.

If you were attending a dinner party of community leaders in Dallas, Atlanta, Omaha or Colorado Springs and the conversation turned to religion, a chill might fall on the room if you confessed yourself an atheist. Yet at a dinner party of the nicest and brightest in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and (especially) Los Angeles, if the hostess began to confide about past lives, her Sign and yours, and her healing crystals, it might not go over so well if you confessed you thought she was full of it.

New Age beliefs have largely stolen the stage from traditional religion in progressive circles. At dinner in my environs I rarely hear anyone share that they have been born again in Jesus. They may well have been, but they keep it to themselves.

They were raised to avoid religion and politics at dinner parties with strangers. Yet they assure everyone they are “a typical Gemini,” were royalty in a previous lifetime, have a personal spirit guide, and have been told they will develop a serious disease but will recover from it. I rarely hear anyone share that they were a toilet cleaner in a previous lifetime and have a year to live at the most.

That said… the evangelical/fundamentalists—and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious Right as it informed U.S. policy through the then dominant Republican Party—are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge and vindication. This End Times death wish is built on a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Too bad.

This weird book was the last to be included in the New Testament. It was included as canonical only relatively late in the process after a heated dispute. The historic Churches East and West remain so suspicious of Revelation that to this day it has never been included as part of the cyclical public readings of scripture in Orthodox services. The book of Revelation is read in Roman and Anglican Churches only during Advent. But both Rome and the East were highly suspicious of the book. The West included the book in the lectionary late and sparingly. In other words, the book of the Bible that the historical Church found most problematic is the one that American evangelicals latched on to like flies on you know what.

Given that Revelation is now being hyped as the literal—even desired—roadmap to Armageddon, it’s worth pausing to note that it’s nothing more than a bizarre pastoral letter that was addressed to seven specific churches in Asia at the end of the first century by someone (maybe John or maybe not) who appears to have been far from well when he wrote it. In any case, the letter was not intended for use outside of its liturgical context, not to mention that it reads like Jesus on acid.

The evangelical/fundamentalist literalistic “interpretation” of Revelation is symptomatic of a larger problem: make-it-up-asyou-go-along biblical interpretation suited to hyping whatever the evangelical/fundamentalist flavor of the moment is, in a desperate effort to keep religion relevant. But taken out of the context of being part of a worship cycle, the Bible became something like an extremely sharp butcher knife in the hands of children running around a garden. There’s nothing wrong with the knife per se, but context is everything. Enter semiliterate American evangelical/fundamentalist rubes armed with multiple “kitchen knives” and imbued with a frontier “no bishops or kings!” suspicion of any tradition, scholarship, or hierarchy that might moderate their wild-eyed personal “interpretations” of scripture and their burning desire to make a buck.

Now, I know that the Washington Times’ op-ed page is no bastion of open-minded rationalism, but a piece it ran by Cal Thomas may just take the cake of uninformed, anti-intellectual, paranoid wingnuttery. Wait, it doesn’t just take the cake. It seizes the cake, mashes it between its fingers, smears it on the walls, and cackles uncontrollably while singing “Happy Birthday to Me!!!”

Thomas takes the health care debate, already rife with demagogues who are ginning up the credulous and xenophobic to lash out with froth and bile, and uses it as a jumping-off point to attack the “Secular Left” for being allegedly without morals and seeing no inherent value to human life. Does that sound like a lot of secularists or liberals that you know? You know, those secularists and liberals who want to help the poor, speak up for the working class, stop wars, protect the freedom of speech (and religion), end atrocities and genocide around the world, and educate children regardless of their economic status? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

But along we go for Thomas’s mad ride. There’s no sense in doing a point-by-point refutation of something that is itself devoid of sense. In fact, it’s not at all news that there are those who demonize secularists in the vitriolic way that Thomas does. What’s so disturbing is that the Washington Times (owned by a man who recently had himself crowned as the messiah in a ceremony attended by Members of Congress) thought this was a good thing to put front and center on their op-ed page as a worthy contribution to public debate.

Read the rest here.

A Guide for Doubting Theists

Shortly after I became a Christian, I saw a book about Jesus at the library. I couldn’t get enough of Jesus, so I brought it home and began reading. Excitement turned to horror as I realized it was arguing there was hardly any evidence that Jesus even lived, much less was a miracle-working god who rose from the dead. I was appalled. But I was also a little shaken. I never realized someone could question the existence of Jesus. Could my new found belief be wrong?

After much prayer and counsel, I decided to stop reading the book. I was convinced it was Satan trying to attack my faith, and I took that as evidence my beliefs were correct — if Satan was trying to convince me I was wrong, then I must be right!

I didn’t have any doubts about Jesus for another decade.

I was a fool.

Great advice:

6) Pray to your god for a week. Then choose another and try again.

You probably have some doubts about prayer. Fortunately, there is a way for you to know if your God answers prayers or not. Follow these directions:

1. Pray to your god for a week. Make your requests specific and something that could only come about through supernatural intervention. I’m not talking about getting a front row parking spot, which happens to us all every now and then. I’m talking about regrowing limbs, people coming back from the dead, walking on water — things that are impossible on our own.
2. Keep a record of all your requests and mark the ones that were answered (if any).
3. Next week, pray just as fervently to a different god (like Baal or Zeus) and keep track of your requests.
4. Then the week after, don’t pray at all — but still write down your requests.

Does prayer to your deity really work? The evidence (or lack there of) will be before you.

7) Read your holy book.

Yes, read your holy book, but also look at it from a viewpoint of an outsider. Then read up on the history of the book from secular scholars. Ask yourself if this book is really written by God, when history shows it to be written by mere men.

Have you read any other holy books? If not, now is the time to learn about them. Every religion has millions of followers who believe it is the only true religion, and that their holy book(s) are inspired by God. What makes yours any different?

He says:

1. Know where to look
2. Try the dating websites
3. Be social. But don’t pounce
4. Looking like this (Hugh Laurie or Neil deGrasse Tyson) scores you bonus points [er... really?]
5. Have something to talk about other than atheism
6. When not at an atheist gathering, it helps to carry around a New Atheist book
7. It may be useful to accurately gauge the woman’s degree of atheism
8. Just because she is an atheist, do not assume you know what she thinks about everything else
9. Do not automatically discount a non-atheist

This one has GOT to be my favorite:

10. Be ready to have a duel with the atheist who is already dating her. If you meet the woman of your dreams, you’ll find out quickly that she’s already seeing somebody. In this case, you must be prepared to do battle. I suggest becoming a fencing or jousting expert.

1. Explain why your god’s only son had to die so we can go to magic happy land when we croak.

4. Explain why your sect (whether Catholic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox) pursued, tortured, and killed people who were not Christian.

5. Explain why your sect (whether Catholic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox) pursued, tortured, and killed people who were not members of your particular sect.

7. Explain why, when racism is clearly wrong, Jesus was clearly a racist (see Mark 7:25-29). NOTE: under no circumstances will I believe that racism is morally acceptable.

8. Explain why, when discrimination against women is clearly wrong, the Bible clearly supports the oppression of women. Answering this question entails refuting 1 Cor 11 and 1 Tim 2:11-15. NOTE: under no circumstances will I believe that discrimination against women solely on the basis of sex is morally acceptable.

9. Explain why, when slavery is clearly wrong, the Bible clearly supports slavery. Answering this question entails refuting 1 Peter 2:18. NOTE: under no circumstances will I believe that slavery is an acceptable way to structure an economy.

10. Explain why children should submit to their parents’ decisions even when those decisions are clearly evil. Answering this question entails refuting Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Proverbs 13:24, and Hebrews 12:7-8.

11. Explain why, if your god loves us all, more than half of us are going to Hell after we die. Specifically, refute or explain the following words of Christ, as presented in the New Testament: “Many are called but few are chosen,” and “Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way that leadeth unto salvation, and few there be that find it.” If your god loves all of us, couldn’t he find a better way?

12. Explain what type of offense could possibly justify eternal, unbearable torture in Hell; if your sect does not believe in Hell, then refute every passage in the Old and New Testaments which describes Hell (such as 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 and Revelation 20:15). (Do not exceed 100 words.)

13. Explain how your god can be both just and merciful, when these terms apparently contradict each other.

14. Explain why possession by demons and/or other evil spirits was common during the time of Jesus, but hardly mentioned at all in the Old Testament, and apparently has been explained completely away today by things such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.

15. Explain why, if the personality resides in the soul, things like drugs and brain damage can affect someone’s personality.

21. If your god did not want Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, why did he put the tree in the garden of Eden (and at the center, no less)? Was it for shade? If so, why use something so dangerous as a shade tree? If the purpose of the tree was to tempt Adam and Eve, explain why it’s OK for your god to engage in a practice that our modern-day courts of law refer to as “entrapment.”

22. Explain why sex, potentially one of the most wonderful, beautiful things in human nature, is considered “bad” by your particular sect. If your sect does not consider sex to be “bad,” then refute Matthew 19:12, 1 Corinthians 7 (particularly verses 1 and 9), Galatians 5:17, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, James 1:14-15, Matthew 24:38, Luke 17:27, and Revelation 14:4.

23. Explain why, if Jesus was perfect, he thought that the end of the world was coming soon, when it has clearly not come yet. (See Matthew 16:27-28.)

In some black communities it’s akin to donning a white sheet and a Confederate flag. In others, it’s ostensibly tolerated yet whispered about, branded culturally incorrect and bad form, if not outright sacrilege.

For black atheists like myself, proclaiming one’s non-belief amidst genial wishes to “have a blessed day” is never easy in the seemingly innocuous context of casual chit chat between black folk.

Yet, according to The New York Times, a small but growing segment of the American population, galvanized by the hyper-evangelical climate of the Republican Pleistocene, have begun organizing nationwide and becoming more vocal about their atheism.

Although African Americans are not visible in the “movement,” some are easing away from religion. For black atheists, actively breaking with religious tradition is an even graver rejection than that of white intellectuals electrified by the “pew-storming” rhetoric of atheist gurus such as Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.

This is partly due to the fact that the history of African American civil and human rights resistance is heavily steeped in Judeo-Christian religious dogma.

Despite the White Anglo Saxon Protestant religious justification for slavery and domestic terrorism, African Americans converted to Christianity and utilized it as a source of succor, community and spiritual redemption.

No matter one’s actual deeds, life path or personal mores, to be unquestioningly religious in some quarters is to be inoculated from criticism. Noting this historical irony in his blog “The Black Atheist,” Wrath James White states, “In these (black) communities you find more tolerance towards gang-bangers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, who pray to God for forgiveness than for honest productive citizens who deny the existence of God. This, for me, is one of the most embarrassing elements of Black culture, our zealous embrace of the God of our kidnappers, murderers, slave masters and oppressors.”

While there have been critical appraisals of African American adoption of Christianity within the context of European conquest and racial slavery, few propose atheism as a corrective. Indeed, atheism would seem to fly in the face of a cultural ethos that frames earthly pain and suffering as a crucible for achieving rewards in the afterlife.

In the midst of extreme brutality, religious faith can either be seen as a means to mental health, or, as Karl Marx put it more bluntly, an opiate.

— Skikvu Hutchinson

Read the rest at L.A. Watts Times