When I First Lost Religion
When I was in High School I was struggling against the mild religious indoctrination that I had experienced growing up. Religion and God wasn't something my family spend a great deal of time discussing and my only real experiences with religion were mostly from relatives who would take me to church and teach their religion. We'd go to Christian gatherings and we'd have great fun playing games in a kind of camp like atmosphere and at the end of the day there would be a lesson on religion. I'd go to church every once in awhile (usually months or even years apart from each other) and suffer through tedious religious instruction. And yet, I still believed.
But when I was in High School I began to doubt what I had been coyly taught through my childhood. I was struggling with it because it didn't seem to make any sense at all. So I began to read. Luckily I was completely unfamiliar with the concept of atheism being a bad thing and somehow I cam across some arguments against the concept of a God. It made very good sense to me, but still there was a bit of resistance in me.
I recall an especially vivid memory walking between classes during passing period, thinking to myself, "All of this might not make sense, but there still has to be a god. There just has to be." I thoughts were rushed with the possibility of a meaningless existence, of the fear of there being nothing after death. These were scary thoughts which I struggled with.
I continued reading however, and eventually I came to the conclusion that these were not as scary as they seemed to be at first, and that in the end I would just have to accept what there was evidence for. But I still was reluctant to "come out of the closet" so to speak.
I remember that one day, while sitting outside of my Health class, waiting for it to start I was talking to my friend. And rather out of the blue he asked me, "Do you believe in god?" I paused for a second and took a deep breath and said, "no." To my great surprise, he said he didn't either. Suddenly I didn't feel so alone and that possibly I had been fooled that this god thing was a common occurrence. After all, it seemed sensible that if my friend had similar feelings than there must be lots of people like us.
But that feeling would be quickly shattered for that same day, in Health class no less, my teacher was talking about accepting other people for their beliefs (It wasn't really part of the class, but then again some of the most valuable things you learn in school isn't). God came up and he said that lots of people didn't even believe in a god at all, and that they were perfectly fine people for doing so. He asked, rather carefully (saying that you didn't have to answer if you didn't want to) if anybody in the room didn't believe in god. Me and my friend raised our hands, and since we were sitting in the front of the room I didn't realize at first that nobody else was raising their hand. It was only us.
Suddenly I felt like and island again, and I realized the seriousness of the conclusion I had come to. I felt very alone and quite frazzled. I was shocked and confused. Was there something wrong with me? So I began to read more, and more, and more. And the more I read the more I had to reject the idea of a god because when I looked at the arguments for and against, the arguments against made the most clear sense.
Looking back, it's amazing how culture infuses a person with beliefs. I hardly had any religious schooling at all. The idea that there is a god wasn't particularly beaten into my head, but it was firmly there. I fear, even today, for those who do not have the freedom of their own thoughts. It shakes me to my bones.
I now know there there are millions of atheists in the world, but we are a sheltered group, especially if we're growing up in an isolated island of religion. There was no one for me to discuss these ideas and I think if there hadn't been the internet, the wonderful thing that it is, I would've never had the opportunity to question them or search for other answers. How many other young people grow up in this situation, I wonder? I fear for them, I really do.
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For me, it was college, when I started to understand the concepts behind the scientific method and read some Bertrand Russell - Don't believe something unless you have a reason to do so. It seemed like a simple concept.
My "island" moment happened in a psychology class, talking about the difference between materialism and free will. Materialists believe that all decisions a person makes are based on things in the physical world - their genetics, their environment, their upbringing, etc. Free will believes there is something in a person that makes decisions that are somehow independent of the outside world (like what, flipping a coin?). To me, the concept of free will independent of the physical world sounds too much like positing the existence of a soul, for which there is no evidence. The professor asked who was a materialist and who believed in free will, and I was the only one that raised my hand for the materialist side. I then had to defend my decision to the entire class.