How I Became an Atheist

I was raised in a very Christian home. Our denomination was Church of Christ and we attended church regularly. As early as 10 years old I began having questions about my religion. Learning about dinosaurs in school caused quite a bit of confusion. This clearly seemed to contradict the Bible since the dinosaurs were here so much longer and earlier than Adam and Eve. I repeatedly asked questions of my minister and received answers. However, they didn't quite add up.

As I grew older I was always encouraged to study my Bible. So I did. The more I read the more confused I became. I cannot remember all the questions I had or what specific issues confused me, but I can remember some:

    Adam and Eve
    Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel, then left and got married. Where did this wife come from? How did all of the races come from two Jewish people? How did all of the people on Earth come from only two people? The inbreeding would have been disastrous.
    Noah's Ark
    The questions regarding the legend of Noah's Ark simply overwhelmed me. How had the polar bears survived the heat of the Middle East? And how did they get there? How would the elephants fit on a boat? And why didn't the lions eat everyone else? In fact the questions regarding Noah's Ark became to numerous to even begin to cover here. (See Noah's Ark for a more complete coverage of the topic.) It simply didn't make sense.
    Gandhi
    If only Christians go to heaven, what about Gandhi? It seemed quite unfair that a man who dedicated his life to freeing his people and died doing so would go to hell, but I would go to heaven. That seemed vastly unfair. Who was I, what had I done? I was just a peon who had never done anything for anyone, never been willing to die for anything.

    Life as a test
    If life is a test why do some people have such a hard test and mine is so easy? As I looked around me I saw people livilng very hard lives. Some suffered horribly from diseases. Some became so desperate they even committed suicide. What kind of a test was this?

    St. Jude's Hospital
    How could a compassionate God allow those children to suffer like that? I'm only a human. Yet if I had the power to stop the suffering I would. Am I more compassionate than God?

    What is the purpose of children dying of cancer? If this life is a test, do children who die at three months old pass or fail? What is the purpose of bringing a life into this world for only three months only to die? And to have to spend all of those three months suffering horribly from cancer before dying. What is the purpose in this? And what did this child's soul get from this experience?

    Reincarnation
    By comparison, reincarnation made much more sense than the Heaven or Hell schema. If a soul can be born into a body once why not a hundred times? And if they were reborn again, perhaps there was a lesson in the suffering. Life as a type of "school" for souls began to seem more feasible. If someone inflicted a lot of pain on others in a previous life, then perhaps suffering in this one would make them more sympathetic to the pain of others. If someone were a glutton in a previous life, then perhaps they would learn from starvation in a concentration camp.
    God as Father
    How could a parent condemn a child to everlasting Hell for being mistaken? How could he never forgive? Even human parents were more compassionate than that.
These are just a few of the questions that came up. The more I studied to learn about my religion, the more it came apart. I learned that many of the teachings of Jesus were actually taught several hundreds of years earlier in the East.
Treat others as you would have them treat you.
Confucius 500 BCE

I also learned that Yahweh was only one of many gods. He and his wife, Asherah, were worshipped side by side and were only two of several gods of the Elohim, or godhead, of the ancient Israelites.

I then learned that the Torah had not been written by Moses, but by several different people. Nor were the Gospels written by the apostles. In fact, with the exception of a few letters by Paul we have no idea who wrote the New Testament.

The final blow was when I found that there were conflicting stories of how Jesus lived and died. The Bible says he was crucified by the Romans. But the Torah gives a quite different account. This source describes the life of Jesus from his birth to a hairdresser named Mary and a roman soldier named Pandera to his execution by hanging for sedition and practicing sorcery. Reading the apocryphal texts, especially the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, dealt the final blows to this mythology with which I was raised.

The more I studied, the more I found that practically nothing I had been taught was true. The Bible was not the inerrant word of God and the story of Christ was not an historical fact.

I went on to study other religions and their philosophies, but it became more and more apparent to me that there was no intelligent higher power running this world. It also became apparent that there was no evidence of souls or afterlives. What started out as a quest for the truth led me to where I am today - an atheist.

 

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