I’ve been thinking about trying to compile an accurate chronology of how I lost my faith in not just the Christian God, but any version of any deity. This desire could be the personal manifestation of the very common and perhaps universal desire to have one’s story told; however, certainly behind my want to proclaim my tale, and perhaps behind everyone else’s, is the personal goal of having an accurate history of oneself. I want to be sure that the story I tell is accurate, and so in this effort of trying to tell it to other people, I will try to make it as consistent as possible to what actually occurred.
To begin, we should get to the root of the matter. Common among atheists is the refrain, “I was that kid who always asked questions.” A small confirmation bias might arise from hearing so many others tell these stories, such that I too believe myself to have been the questioning child while going through religious education. However, to my recollection, I was more of the type to reject or ignore the nastier elements of my catholic faith in favor my innate humanistic moral tendencies. I remember distinctly in my first year of full time catholic school getting in trouble for vehemently denying the hateful portions of the old testament in an argument with a more traditionalist classmate, and for my controversial statements, I was quietly told by a sympathetic teacher that I really shouldn’t say that kind of thing in a catholic school. Despite these particular objections to certain moral teachings, I still created for myself very convoluted apologist arguments for continuing to believe in a creator and active Deity whose son was Jesus Christ as described in the Gospels.
One element missing from my belief that I recognized even then was a true conviction that I had a personal relationship with my creator and master. This lack of faith in the divinity’s interest in my life was not due to any argument of opposition but merely that I never felt any benevolent presence in my life. A small affirmation of my faith came when I was just a freshman in Catholic high school, when I lost my grandfather. His death was the first real personal death I had ever experienced (and thankfully the only). In my time of loss, I turned to the idea that he was in a “better place” to try to numb the pain that his life had ended. At the time, I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that his consciousness ceased to be; his mind had to continue beyond this “natural” life, and there had to be the opportunity for me join him. In a corollary to that, there also was the ever-present threat of an eternal punishment for being in any state of sin whenever death met me. This fear kept me in line for many years, developing into my adoption of the superficially beautiful Pascal’s Wager.
Aside from these very basic fearful Theistic beliefs, I played very loosely with my Christian beliefs. I was never a creationist, either in the earth’s age or the diversification of life on earth via evolution. After considering the impossibility of the flood as described biblically, I rationalized that it was an exaggeration of a flood that happened somewhere in the middle east ages ago. I was conscious of the revisions that the bible had gone through, thanks to History channel specials. The things I did still hold true to were the divinity of Jesus and the intelligent design of the universe.
The fatal flaw in my faith was perhaps the rejection of abstinence when I, in a beautiful moment of animalistic decision making, engaged in vaginal intercourse for the first time literally a week after I got out of high school. But really, an unfettered access to the internet, a penchant for clicking on youtube videos with pretty girls in the thumbnail, and a merry disdain for young earth creationists would lead to the final nail in my catholicism, my christianity, my theism, my deism, and even my willingness to consider the hypothesis of the supernatural.
From what I remember, I clicked on this video by Thunderf00t sometime during my freshman year of college. Perhaps it wasn’t that one, but one similar. In any case, I watched damn near every single video in the Why Do People Laugh At Creationists series. I was subscribed to his channel when he put out this video, in March of 2009. I disclaim that I am still unsure of the solidity of this narrative, and perhaps my faith was weakened by watching these videos, but I remember still having enough faith such that this video was the final blow to whatever faith I had left. After watching that video, I was convinced that I could not hold a double standard between the natural world and the “supernatural;” if I had not seen compelling evidence other than a “what if” argument for any hypothesis, I must logically reject that hypothesis. I then rejected the divine hand in the creation of the universe and the divinity of Jesus, having only ever believed in those two tenets on faith. Also among beliefs I discarded were my pet beliefs in the paranormal and a pastime of cryptozoology. This was a serious overhaul of my belief system which had developed since childhood.
It took me a while to come to get over the fear of hell. I still have not gotten over the fear of death, but I suppose that is a much more natural and healthy fear to have, as it follows the biological urge of self-preservation. However, the freeing of my moral code from archaic things allowed me to return to the humanistic ideals I had cultivated during my years of public schooling. These ideals basically boil down to, “Do what thou will, but do no harm.” Also, I was free to let my liberal flag fly without having to worry about pro-life hard liners trying to guilt me whenever I voted for the more important catholic social justice ideals that could actually be put into government policy without threatening the autonomy of the individual.
Further along in my development, I eventually came to “strong” atheism, wherein I not only believe that there is no god, but within our universe at least no such hypothesis could ever be feasible. It occurred to me that one of the last refuges of the apologist was to say that God was “outside of space and time, outside of energy of matter.” That might be nice to say in an attempt to dodge a question, but at that point of definition of one’s deity, does it not make the deity worthless? No, the point of the divine and present creator god is that they are able to intervene in the universe they created, whether at the beginning of time or continuing to this day. To paraphrase another video maker integral in my development as an Atheist, Aronra, if that god reaches down into the universe to act, we should see its arm pulling out, dripping in physics. To this current day, I and many other of my ilk have not seen any convincing evidence for divine intervention that could not be otherwise explained further in the future by a rigorous application of the scientific method. I further contend that anything that ever interacts with the observable universe should be able to be comprehensively defined such that we can see that the phenomenon, whatever it is, has a consistent and predictable impact on the observable universe in detailed and specified situations. If one wants to define a deity such that it never has an observable impact on reality that is any different from a reality in which that deity never existed, then I will never consider that hypothesis. I will not waste my time considering hypotheses that will never have an impact on anything worthwhile at all.
And these considerations and mental travels are how I came to be an atheist. Certainly there are many other arguments that feedback to reinforce my beliefs, such as the terribly nasty God of the Old Testament, the unlikely nature that an all powerful divine being could ever get their message so fucked up with several warring religions and mythologies, the philosophical problems of evil and free will, and so on. But the main points I detailed above are the primary reasons I came to lose my faith.
