I stumbled over this post today by The Age Of Reason, which is soliciting stories of how people became atheists, and thought I would share my own story, which follows after the jump.
I grew up in what was essentially a non-religious household. Even though we put up our porcelein Nativity scene every Christmas, there was no explicit mention of religion that I can remember. We did live a mere block away from a fairly big church, and at some point, my elementary school best friend invited me to attend Sunday School there with her. I don’t in fact think that she or her family was religious, either- it was just something she went to. I went, and somehow or another, she stopped going, but I continued. It was at that point in time that my mom decided we should all go to church, presumably to teach us good morals. And so the entire family was now unwillingly dragged to services on Sunday (my dad included, though he simply shrugged and went with the flow, as he is wont to do).
I don’t remember all that much about it, except that I loved singing in Sunday school (I still recall fun diddies like “God told Noah to build him an arky-arky!”), that sermons were boring, that much like now, prayer was a time to bow your head, close your eyes, and just think about random stuff while someone else talked, and that Esaus’ soup looked really yummy in my illustrated kid’s Bible.
Looking back on it, though, I was already pretty damn skeptical of organized, Judeo-Christian religion as a kid. I remember still being in elementary school when I concluded that morality was something separate from God. As my then-logic went: we can’t just adhere to God’s rules because they’re God’s rules, since, after all, that would mean that tribes that practiced cannibalism or ritual sacrifice would technically be okay because their gods endorsed that behavior! No, the rules of the Ten Commandments, say, were good because they made sense. (Also, apparently in my mind, the main gist of the Ten Commandments were things I agreed with, like not murdering, stealing, and lying … I don’t think I had much sense of false idols, names in vain, and worshiping other gods). I also recall thinking that original sin was really, really unfair- it didn’t make any sense to me, and I was not the type of child to ask and meekly accept the paltry answers (well, perhaps on the outside, but on the inside, I absolutely rebelled against those Christian tenets with which I didn’t agree- already demonstrating my preference for a pick-‘n’-choose style of religion).
And then, abruptly, we stopped going to church. Their office had for years been basically taking advantage of my mom’s accounting skills without compensation and she was fed up, and their lying to my parents about their Habitat for Humanity building project in our neighborhood was the final straw. Ironically enough, the Habitat For Humanity homes that my parents so opposed would come to house my bestest friend in the whole wide world, so I am utterly happy that they were built … but nonetheless, it didn’t excuse the pastors’ lying. I recall the pastor and his wife unexpectedly, awkwardly visiting the house to talk to them about it and presumably try to bring them back into the fold. It didn’t work, and only a little bit later our family bought a sailboat that we took out every weekend, and wouldn’t you know that for the longest time we verbally celebrated our freedom- no more Sunday church! Now we can spend all weekend sailing and actually having fun! (Also, I am so grateful for it. Compared to those trips, church was an isolated experience, where you sat quietly and were talked at … unlike being on a small boat with your family, where all there is to do is talk and listen to stories and help things run smoothly, basically build up the blocks of what, in my opinion, is far more integral to goodness and happiness than religion’s lessons: love, connection, trust, hard work, cooperation).
But simply ceasing church attendance didn’t stop religion for me. I was nearing the last couple of years of elementary school and for whatever reason, I and all of my schoolmates were interested in witchcraft. Jezebel has an excellent article about how typical such a thing is in young girls, or maybe “The Craft” was influencing us, but we loved nothing more than calling ourselves a coven and gathering under a circle of pine trees on the school-ground. I can’t imagine we did much of anything, really, though I do remember always anxiously checking the “witchcraft/spells” shelf of the library (which was, and still is, almost always empty of any of the better or newer books on the subject) and devouring Silver Ravenwolf’s “Teen Witch”. (Definitely appealing, too, I think, was how much emphasis that book put on being different and being true to yourself even when family and school might not understand or be okay with it … even if I didn’t explicitly voice it then, I had already claimed an identity as and especially an affinity/empathy for being an outsider, a minority, an alternative to the mainstream).
I transferred to junior high school and found myself a bunch of casual friends who were also interested in witchcraft. Three of us sat together in the back of Spanish class and we read a book that was miles away from Silver Ravenwolf- Latin (or otherwise foreign and ancient-appearing) spells, talk of using chicken hearts. I know even then I found it silly. Ravenwolf and other similar library books had a modern sensibility that I enjoyed- the idea that being a witch/Wiccan was no different, fundamentally, than being any other religion, and that it was something good. The dark, old sort of aesthetic of the book felt at best pretentious to me and at worst utterly ridiculous, a parody embodying all the stereotypes of satanic, Halloween-esque magic. My inability to take it seriously would eventually cause problems, but that comes later. In the interim, I made rosemary oil at home and brought it to school, and I literally annointed my crush’s forehead (all in the back of Spanish class, still amazes me … where the hell was the teacher?). I also tried out my first spell, one for wealth/prosperity/money. It involved studding an orange with cloves, wrapping silver and green ribbon (the colors of coin and cash, clearly!), and of course speaking/chanting your intent, then hanging it in the window (or perhaps I hung it to hide it from my parents … I’m not clear on the specifics). And lo and behold, I received money from a friend- I can’t recall if she loaned me some cash, or asked me to hold it for her, or what, but there it was. I didn’t make any connection, however, until after I had thrown away the [by now rotting and a bit moldy] orange and she came back demanding her money (which I had somehow managed to lose) that I connected the two and decided the spell had been a success. I was frightened by its efficacy and unpredictability and, just like that, swore off doing any more. I felt I was being too casual with it, and so I declared myself a “non-practicing Wiccan”.
It was around that time that I ran into the aforementioned problem. I was only just beginning to see that these folks I was hanging around with weren’t great people- I was already a goody two-shoes in comparison and a secret I had told in confidence had been spilled without, apparently, any remorse. Plain old junior-high drama, really. But then I made the mistake of jokingly reading aloud one of the curses from that silly book to my friend, and instead of laughing along, she completely flipped her lid. Perhaps she truly believed she was now cursed, but more than likely she saw an opportunity to take offense, star as the victim, and stir up drama. Whatever it was, despite my pleading that I didn’t mean it, I was suddenly the focus of a mean-spirited campaign of de-friending and having to walk past a bunch of people coldly staring at me with angry, accusing faces.
Thankfully my friendship with my Habitat-For-Humanity-house-dwelling best friend (going on twelve years strong now!) was just starting to establish its roots and I gratefully invested my time and energy there, letting my old “friends” fall by the wayside. Interest in religion of any sort also petered off. It would bob up every now and again throughout high-school and college- reading a book, or posting on an online forum might spark it- but for the most part, it was more of a theoretical, academic interest. Indeed, one of the most telling recollections might be when I brought my grandma the library copy of Denise Linn’s Sacred Space (which I had adored and, for some reason, thought I should share with her). As she sat reading the first few pages, I was surprised to see her making a motion, and asked her what she was doing. It turns out she was spiritually cleansing her hands, something this book that I loved discussed in great detail and gave explicit instructions for- yet I had never done, nor, apparently, ever considered that someone else might do it. Even though I didn’t think much of it at the time, looking back, I think that might be one of the moments that defines an atheist- when as a secular person, you have to ask yourself why you’re identifying as religious or spiritual when your actions don’t reflect that at all. If you don’t believe, you don’t believe, and that’s fine, but there’s something fishy about saying you believe but living your life as if you were an atheist. (Although, to be fair, that was within my personal definition of god- a force to which one could make appeals and have intervention, and at the same time that could be ignored without any care or repercussion).
Another insight into my state of mind might have been how fascinated I was by the [pseudo] scientific explanation that Phyllis Curott offered in her memoir Book Of Shadows. I still adore the book for a lot of reasons (its lyricism, its beauty as a tale of self-discovery, its being one of the first books that struck a yet-unexplored feminist chord within me, etc.), but the bit that stuck with me over time was when she talked about quantum physics and how science was unraveling the mysteries of how they worked and influenced our world. Of course, her discussion was meant to push forward the idea that science had validated magic- that we were on the brink of realizing that spells worked, that intention and actions could literally change reality. (Of course, that didn’t explain where the idea of supplications to/honorings of the Goddess and the elements fit in, but y’know, I wasn’t quite *there* yet). But I was clearly interested less in the mysterious supernatural, and more in the knowable, logical, natural world.
Towards the end of high school, I read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and started identifying as an Objectivist, subscribing wholly to her wide-reaching philosophy and particularly her intense respect for logic and reason. And even though I intellectually agreed with her passionate atheism, I struggled to use that identifier. Indeed, on the Atlasphere dating website, I called myself “spiritual”- it was not so much that I vehemently asserted the existence of supernatural forces, but rather that it felt dishonest, disingenuous to call myself an atheist when I still was very interested in Wicca and pagan traditions, when I still liked reading about them, and fantasizing about someday practicing them. The belief wasn’t there, really, but the vague desire to believe still seemed to be, though even now I can’t really say why. So I branded myself “atheist-sympathetic”- that I couldn’t be an atheist, but that I felt like we agreed upon and shared so many views.
I was slowly starting to become aware of fundamentalism and right-wing Christianity around then. My cousin had started to attend a church with a friend and for some reason my family found ourselves dragged along to a production of “Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames”. I instantly saw it for pure propaganda (and boring and overly long, to boot!), but the final straw was the tale of a lady who was ultimately sent to hell because she didn’t regularly attend to church (being too busy and overwhelmed), even though she believed in the tenets of Christianity, lived a moral life, and did good deeds. I’m still pissed off about that, in fact. If my childhood view of organized Judeo-Christian religion had been that it was contradictory and illogical, then my post-adolescent view was beginning to see that it was manipulative and shady.
After I slowly shook off the Objectivism (funnily enough, the two things in her philosophy that initially threw me for a loop and had me struggling- reproductive rights and atheism- are the ones that I now embrace joyfully. Her views on fiscal policy and government, which I readily embraced, would be the ones I eventually grew out of), which has been fairly recent, things just started to fall into place. There was no epiphany, no defining moment. The ball had already been rolling for a while- from rejecting organized religion’s (and hence God’s) authority and setting out on a buffet-style view of religion, to identifying as a non-practicioner of religion (and really, what is that but an atheist?), to becoming more and more interested in logic and reason, and finally to saying “I’m atheist-sympathetic” … well, I was basically already there and just in denial. Maybe Bill Maher’s “Religulous” catapulted me over the line I had been so curiously toeing; I’m not sure.
It still feels funny in my mouth, and it still feels strange to talk about with my wonderful Christian best friend, because even though I don’t want it to be, every occasion of me saying that I’m an atheist feels like I’m challenging her very existence and life. To clarify, it feels that way to me, not to her, or at least, I hope not. (And I suppose that’s what it is- you can choose to politely skirt its ramifications, but being openly atheist is kind of a challenge to the implicit or explicit premise of theism). Without a doubt, it felt a lot more comfortable for me when I was identifying as “secular”, which has the opposite effect- a graceful opt-out of the system instead of a bold assertion.
Nevertheless, I am an atheist- there’s simply no other way to describe me. And that is the very long-winded version of how I arrived there. I wouldn’t blame ya if you tl;dr’d it.
