Why I Am An Atheist - Part 2

Okay, so tomorrow ended up being a very relative term when it came to the deadline for this post, but it's here now. Also, I ended up having way more thoughts than should be put in this post, so there will be a third part to all of this, which WILL be posted tomorrow. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, I had just explained how specific events in my childhood had led me to question the nature of God and religion as it had been taught to me in church, at school, and at home. My mind was open to an understanding of religious faith, and I was not afraid to question my beliefs, but it took a long time for me to even consider questioning the existence of God or any other higher power. I realize here that saying that it took a "long time" may be misleading - long is a relative term when one is young. I had accepted that there were very few hard facts about religious belief by the time I was twelve, but it took me that many years again before coming to the conclusion that God himself did not exist. If I look back on that period of time from my fifties, it will probably seem like a very short span of time, but looking back on it from my twenties, as I am now, it has taken almost half my life to sort through and decide where I stood on one specific idea about the world. And it was both a long, slow process and a lighting bolt of revelation at the same time.

To be fair, most of my teenage years were spent not thinking very much either way about religion or the existence of God. I was still growing up within a family, a community, and a larger society that took the existence of God as a fact, so while I questioned the details of religion or aspects of God from time to time, and debated those details with others, the reality of a moderate religious childhood is that religion rarely touches many aspects of your life outside of Sunday mornings. I grew up with more religion than most because of my Catholic school upbringing, but once I entered public high school, it became almost a non-issue against the backdrop of my education and my social life. Looking back, I see a thousand tiny events that have influenced me in one way or another, but the big change did not come until I left home for the first time and moved to college.

College is the place, I am sure, where many children brought up in a religion begin to question their beliefs. Not only are they on their own in the world, without their parents looking over their shoulder any more, they are also being exposed to a whole new level and style of education that is not present within primary and secondary schooling. In college, in order to fully learn and understand one's chosen field, students are encouraged to ask questions, to do research, and to develop their own way of viewing and interacting with the world. They learn not only facts, but they learn how to add new knowledge and information to what we already know. In college, I was encouraged to develop my critical thinking skills, to understand why the things I was taught were true, and that asking questions about the world was the only way to find real answers. But that was not what changed everything, because I had already been willing to do all those things when examining religion.

What changed everything, my entire way of looking at the world, was the fact that I woke up one morning, less than a month after moving away from home for the first time, to watch the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City. The events of September 11, 2001, turned my world upside down. I was away from home, in a big city without any family or close friends around, and I had just seen an act so evil that it was completely out of the realm of my understanding. I didn't know why it had happened, or who could have done such a thing, and I had to find answers. Delving into the investigation, and the realization that it had been committed by an extremist religious group for religiously-motivated reasons opened my eyes to an aspect of religious belief that I had never seen - or even knew existed.


I had prided myself on my understanding of different faiths. I had studied many other religions - I knew their similarities and differences to Christianity, their principle beliefs, and how they practiced and expressed their faith. Or at least I thought I did, until I was introduced to the idea of religious extremism. And not just Islamic extremism, but the extremism of all faiths. Before leaving home for college, I had very little exposure to the reality of events in the outside world. I did not have reliable access to the internet, I did not read newspapers or watch the news on television, and I was more or less oblivious to the amount of hatred and violence that went on in the world. When I went to college, I suddenly had free and ever-present access to information about the world, and the wake-up call that led me to start looking at that world with open eyes was only the beginning of the horror I felt when I saw that religious belief was more complex and more invasive than I had imagined.

Once again, I don't want you to get the impression that it was the evil I saw religious people doing that "pushed me away from God," because it wasn't. I recognized then, as I still do now, that people have done both great good and great evil in the name of religion. The same is true for many other philosophies. But recognizing that religion does drive people to do horrible things - to hate, to murder, to terrorize their fellow man - it has to make one question the all-good, all-knowing, all-loving God that in whose name those people hate, murder, and terrorize. Gaining an adult perspective on the world finally gave me the means to start asking the hard questions: If God is all-loving, then why is there evil in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are people of drastically differing faiths, or no faith at all, just as good or as bad as anyone else, if only God can show you how to live a good and moral life? And why do some people believe that committing obviously immoral acts are good if done in the name of religion?

The news media gave me a full view of everything that was going on in the world, and the internet gave me access to the entire world's opinion about every event, significant and trivial. I was exposed to the true diversity of life, of human experience, and I realized that the world was darker and more complex than I could have ever imagined. And as I slowly began to question everything I had thought to be self-evident, the lightning struck.