Hello,

I am an atheist and am quite sure that I am surrounded by people who have bad reasons for believing in the things they do. I decided to make an account on here in order to share with other atheists, or perhaps the questioning theist, the religious experiences I have had. This series of posts is meant to be mostly autobiographical. I have quite a collection of personal stories due to my rural, “small-town USA” background. Some are more extreme than others. I doubt any of my experiences will be entirely unheard of, and I’m sure most people on this forum can relate to what I share. You can expect stories of childhood indoctrination, a trip to “Jesus Camp”, exorcisms, miraculous healing salts, outrageous hypocrisy, social rejection, and sightings of demonic spirits (just to name a few). I may also occasionally throw in a lecture, debate, excerpt from an apologist’s website, or a second-hand story with my thoughts.

My goals for this project:

• Catharsis for myself and others alienated from social groups or frustrated by logical fallacies which believers use in their attempts to justify their dogma.
• Stir philosophical conversation and epistemological analysis.
• Help build the atheist community that has been so beneficial to me. The bigger we build our community, the greater the chance that questioning believers will see that there are other life paths.

All of my posts will be called Stories of Theism (Part x): (Title of Story). I don’t know how regularly I will post. It will probably be sporadic and as my work schedule allows. I am new to this forum and apologize in advance if I break any community rules.

The Last Couple of Years

A couple of years ago I became very serious about deciding what I do and don’t believe and, in turn, what I influence others to believe. I started reading the Bible, I studied science, I watched/listened to religious shows with apologists, and I listened to rebuttals to their apologetics. I did all of this with the pure intention of finding out what was true. After all, wouldn’t it be great to live forever in a magical place for all eternity? Isn’t the ultimate promise of almost all religion that of immortality? Immortality?! How could I sit by and ignore this if I had a chance to acquire something so marvelous? If I could convince myself to believe in some supernatural force perhaps it would even help me be more successful in life, handle stress better, and be more of an extrovert. During this time, I finished my undergraduate degree, I started working at a job that allowed me to watch debates and lectures, listen to audiobooks, and occasionally read. I maintained a consistent level of curiosity and tried to put honest inquiry above any sort of personal bias. I went out and bought a fancy Bible after spending a week or two researching the history of the book, its various translations, controversies, and editions. I was astounded by how offended some religious people were by Christians using the “wrong editions”, particularly the “King James Only” crowd.

I had hope when I started this process that I would find something or someone that would give me a good reason to believe. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, I was amazed at how poor even the most famous, celebrated apologists were at defending their religion. William Lane Craig comes to mind. I don’t know if I have ever seen someone so skilled at wrapping up terribly flawed, at times childish arguments in flowery, sophisticated, language and passing it along as something deep and filled with more substance than it actually contains. I believe his success is due primarily to his manipulative demagoguery, passionate vocal inflections, and a tall, conservative, professorial appearance. I also discovered apologists who sounded so ridiculous I thought they might just be trolling. I came to understand that no one could accept what these apologists were saying, no matter how intellectual they looked and sounded, without astonishing confirmation bias.

Speaking of confirmation bias, have you ever tried to give daily occurrences a supernatural context or fit them to some prayer you made recently? It is extraordinarily easy. I experimented with prayer/appeals to the supernatural over the past couple of years. It didn’t matter who or what I appealed to. I could always find a few examples of ‘answered prayer’.

Examples:

• I asked for an email from an old college professor I hadn’t heard from in a while (My prayer was answered!).
• I was looking down at my phone while I was walking and the streetlight flickered, causing me to look up so I didn’t run into the person walking the other way (Amazing!).
• I was accepted into multiple competitive graduate programs, including one at an extremely selective school. (Its not like all the hard work and success I’ve had over the past 5 years would make any difference. Must be god!)

Let’s put aside the sarcasm for a moment and pretend that all of these things were signs from the Christian god who was trying to reach out and save me from the eternal torture of hell. Believers claim that god wants to save us and be in heaven with him, right? Isn’t that nice of him, attempting to reach me like this? No. In fact, even if it were true, I think it is twisted. When god gives “signs” to his followers, they are never clear, falsifiable, or even that unique. They are always explainable by natural, earthly happenstance. What is the apologist’s response to this? It might be, “God can’t actually reveal himself to you or you wouldn’t have the free will to follow or turn away from him.” Bullshit. Wasn’t Satan aware of god’s existence and didn’t he still decide to turn away? What if I have problems with the god of the Bible and he doesn’t seem like the type of leader I would be interested in? He seems to be a petty, jealous, supernatural dictator, ruling on fear and threats of death and torture, only rewarding those who bow down before him without question and who ignore rational, honest inquiry into other worldviews. Is he so powerful that I wouldn’t be able to resist swearing my allegiance to him? Is he not capable of letting a person decide? I thought he was capable of everything. It is amazing how much you can concede to believers and still withhold acceptance of their belief system. I have found that if there are seven rungs to an apologist’s ladder, you can usually concede the first six (or even all seven) and still see all kinds of holes in the conclusion.

At this point I am comfortable with calling myself an (agnostic) atheist, which I should have been comfortable with years ago, had I known what the word actually meant. I never would have thought about writing something like this a few years ago, but I have heard some pretty bad stories regarding religion recently: kids thrown out of their homes for not going to church, people rejected by their friends/family for not believing in a talking snake, an elderly lady in distress because of her Christian sister’s beliefs about a literal hell. And I don’t think religion is harmful just because of incidents like these. It is dangerous on principle. It gives people an extraordinarily subjective, unreliable pathway to what they think is truth, and that pathway may affect their ability to reason and positively influence the world around them. After all, with logic like this, what conclusions can't you arrive at?

Next Chapter

The next chapter in this project will include a little bit of a backstory as to where I’m from, my earliest experiences with religion, and a general outline of the environment I found myself in during the first decade or so of my life. I'm posting this on a Friday. Perhaps I will aim for next Friday for Part 2.