My Path to Atheism, Part 2
Thinking for Myself
This is the second installment of a multiple article series on my personal path to atheism. It might be beneficial to read the first article My Path to Atheism Part 1: Indoctrination into Christianity before this one if you haven’t already. In this next article I discuss starting to think for myself and questioning my christian faith as a teenager.
Pursuit of Knowledge
As a child and a young teen my mind was a sponge. I read everything I could get my hands on. Nothing was too boring. If I came across a word or something I didn’t know I was taught where and how to look the information up. This love of reading and skill at using reference material was instilled in me by my mother who has been a librarian and teacher for almost forty years.
Now that I think back on it, I impress myself on the wide variety of topics and genres I read on my own. Not only classic novels but history books, books on science and how things work. When my parents bought something new like an Apple IIe I would read the owners manual so I knew how it operated, every detail of its functionality. My favorite things to read were mysteries and science ficion series like the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, And the Hardy Boys. I attribute my early development of critical thinking and reasoning skills to novels like this because they show people using rational thought to solve problems and understand the truth of the world.
The importance of truth is what I learned at the private school I attended that emphasized the liberal arts. Through authors like Thoreua, Emerson, Locke and so many others I realized how everything in life ultimately boils down to the pursuit of discovering what is true. I discovered many philosophies on how to uncover truth but by far the best and what made the most sense to me was logic and rational thought.
Logic had always made sense to me and is probably why I had a talent for mathematics and science. I did well in all subjects throughout school but math and science always came naturally to me and I enjoyed learning all aspects of them. Of the branches of science I learned about in school my favorite was physics. It ties in so wonderfully with math and is the persuit of discovering the truth of reality and how everything that exists works and behaves from the subatomic level to galaxies and the universe as a whole. Physics is considered the fundamental science and is the bedrock for ourunderstanding of how the natural world functions. This love of physics and mathematics is why a I persued a degree in engineering and work as one now.
This hunger for learning and the love of math and science I had and continue to have, is the result me never quit asking “why?”. I wanted to know why things worked the way they did. I would not simply accept the answer “This does this because of this”. I wanted to know why it does that because of that, for what reason or for what purpose. This questioning and delving deeper allowed me to be able to take an answer or piece of information and evaluate it. I could see if an idea or concept matched up and fit with what I had already learned.
Questioning my christian Beliefs
The more I questioned and learned about the natural world, the more at odds and less sense the supernatual one began to make to me. At some point I turned my questioning to the christian beliefs I was raised to blindly accept as true.
First I wanted to learn more about these beliefs so around the age of twelve I read the Bible front to back, every word of it. As I read I soon realized that god was not the loving supreme being I had always been taught. Looking at the book as a whole he seemed to have very human qualities that most would dislike and seemed very petty and almost childish at times. I felt as if I hadn’t been given the whole story, only the happy, feel-good parts where something beneficial and amazing happened. when I came across these stories in the bible I found what I had been told before was highly dramatized and not near as bland as what was really in the bible. Reading the bible changed the ideas I had been told as a child about the greatness of god and planted the seeds of my doubt in christianity.
As I progressed through school I found enjoyment in world history and social studies. I learned of past cultures and their customs such as the greeks and their mythology. I learned of how ideas came and went with time really based on how peoples understanding of the natural world progressed. As my history lessons entered into more modern times, I learned of how cultures’ conflicting beliefs were the root cause of conflict and wars throughout the world. I learned how the roman catholic church influenced and dominated Europe,islam the east as well as buddhism, hinduism and taoism. I even took a holocaust class that first emphasized learning the history of the jews and their cultural roots.
As I learned more about the world and humanity’s past I came to realize the christian beliefs I had were no more special or relevant than any other culture’s past or present. If anything, christianity had caused more problems and conflict in history than any other.
Wanting to know more of the origins of christianity I researched the formation of the early church and the truth of the bible compared to known history. I was shocked to find that there was really not much historical evidence for any of it other than the bible itself. Then as I learned of how the canon developed and it seemed almost a joke that anyone could take the bible as literal truth.
Deciding I was Agnostic
At some point around the age of 17 I took a hard look at myself. Using everything I had learned of history, other cultures, of science and the natural world, I realized there was no evidence for what I believed in. The only reason I had accepted any of itas true up until that point is because it was taught to me as a child and I grew up in an social enviroment that supported those ideas. To continue to hold onto my christian beliefs with no evidence I knew was irrational and wouldn’t be me having faith, it would be me lying to myself. I was no longer a christian.
Even though I had shed the religious dogma that came with christianity I was still left wondering the existence of god. Even though there was no evidence for god this idea was harder to let go and was a concept shared by many other cultures in the world.
I pondered the existence of god for a while but with some logical reasoning and a good knowledge of math I knew it was highly improbable there was one. However, since god’s existence could neither be proven nor disproven there was no way to know either way, I felt that it really didn’t matter so I took up the label of agnostic.
Agnosticism seemed like the best description for me at the time. I knew the existence of god was unprovable and therefore really irrelevant unless some evidence came along so I decided no longer to trouble myself thinking about it. I would rarely discuss religion or my agnosticism openly. This would change however when I came to see the widespread implications religious dogma and how it effected my life as a nonbeliever.
This article sums up how I learned to think for myself and about what I believed and came to the conclusion that I was no longer a christian. In the next installement, My Path to Atheism Part 3: Realizing I’m an Atheist I discuss how and why I decided I was an atheist.
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