I wasn’t born an atheist. As much as I can recall, I wasn’t particularly concerned with religion as a child nor was my family. About the age 10 or so I started becoming interested in going to church and attended mostly on holidays or special events.
As a teenager, I become much more interested in attending regularly and went to Youth Groups at a local Baptist church. I read the Bible, listened to sermons, and began to notice the “spirit” didn’t hit me as it did some of my peers. That is, despite accepting Christ and attempting to follow his teachings, I really didn’t feel passionate about it or particularly interested any longer. At 17, I was done with attending church, unimpressed with a God that seemed absent. It didn’t help that the pastor of the church went out of his way often to condemn homosexuals, some of my closest friends were either homosexual or queer.
Despite this, I really didn’t want to give up on any import the Bible might have and began a synoptic study of the Gospels. I read them closely and compared them, ending up with more questions than answers and, once again, curious at to how this book had inspired so many and commanded such devotion. By 18, I was not going to be a Christian. In a quest for some “higher” meaning, I read and searched broadly. Kabbalah, Akashic records, Witchcraft, Satanism, Buddhism, and read many religious texts. I atttended various gatherings for some of these, again never really feeling as my peers did. Inside, I suspected my peers of also feeling similarly, despite outward appearances.
Heading into college, I chose to major in philosophy and history of religion. I studied languages to examine texts in the original languages and obtaining a few degrees. As I studied, I learned that people in SE Asia pray to certain gods for a healthy rice crop, saw the shifting gender of a Buddhist god as it traversed the Himalayas over time, and acquired a solid grasp of how humans across the globe found rudimentary understanding of their place in the world through myth and religion. Gods seemed to be obvious constructions of the human mind.
I never hit a switch and became an atheist. It was a slow evolution and deprogramming that eventually freed me from the fear of mythical hells and from the promises of any heaven or reincarnation. I learned so much about humanity’s various traditions to not see their gods as anything but ways to understand and cope with the unknown and unknowable.
I’m not an atheist because I’m angry or because I want to live in sin (another construct that morphs as you travel the globe). I’m an atheist because after years of sincere search and exhaustive study I’ve concluded that there are likely no spirits of the forests, guardian angels, and no gods.
** thanks for reading this far. It’s not particularly well-written, but I did say I would write this in August and want to try to keep my word.
