I Didn’t Choose Atheism, It Chose Me.
2009 July 19
I have heard a million times from religious folks that we atheists made a willing choice to be disbelievers in deities, gods, etc.
I can assure all of you that I was never a god-believer, even though I had been indoctrinated by rigid and controlled Fundamentalist Christian brainwashing. And no, I am not an atheist because of rebellion. I didn’t believe the ridiculous fairy tales in the Bible back when I was seven years old. Nor did I ever submit to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the monster in the closet or the Tooth Fairy. Are you offended by my comments? Good! At least, you’re thinking now.
I did not choose Atheism but:
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I was a religious believer for a long time. As was the case with many other believers who have discarded their superstitions, giving up religion was not a choice, nor was it easy. Giving up religion is hard. It hurts like hell. Consequently, I deeply resent people who glibly say that I “chose” not to believe. I fought hard to retain my beliefs, but my need to be intellectually honest was stronger than my need to believe, regardless of how comfortable those beliefs had been.
“Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again. Draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
-From Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
It was really a wrenching thing for me when I lost my faith, but I’m happier now that I approach the world with an eye for the way it really works, without needing to postulate unnecessary entities—if I may paraphrase William of Occam.
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Every argument for Atheism involves the X-tian god. I don’t believe in myths either. That doesn’t make me an Atheist, it makes me rational. To choose Atheism over religion is not really Atheism. To believe something came from nothing is a bit extreme too, ya know? I don’t advocate any belief or doctrine, I wear no labels, and I’m not here to argue. I’m just saying… Dig deeper. Quantum physics, Deism, or anything but religion, or don’t. It’s too easy to debunk myths. To debate ‘god’ we need to agree to a definition, and I’ve heard definitions beyond the religious ones that you’re ignoring. God doesn’t have to be an entity. I agree with this argument against X-tianity btw.
Be what you want to be, but I am an atheist. I do not believe in any god(s) and I’m certain that none exist..
Atheism chose me too. I came from a diverse religous background. I have family who are Christians, Hindus, Muslims etc. But for as long as I could remember, I just found it somewhat difficult to accept mono-theistic concepts that they were trying to drill into me from an early age.
i was born atheist!
it wasnt until i was about 7 or 8 that i began to realize that many religions if not all religions were full of crap, especially their bible tales with threats of eternal hell
unfortunately i had parents that insisted that gong to catholic school was better than public school, needless to say me and catholic school didnt get along ,especially church every morning, but rather than get my ass beat i dealt with it and accepted it as my fate for 12 years
but once that @hit was over …that was the end of any religion in my life
fortunately before i went to catholic school my parents had instilled in me the need to think for myself and to question everything…even religion, my parents, school…you name it i questioned it lol…did i choose atheism? sorry but it wasnt a choice, and if any sane human being would practice some critical thinking and reasoning they would “choose” never to join any religion!
There is a natural law which says two things can’t occupy the same space. There is an economic law called ‘opportunity cost’ which means when you select, use, or practice one thing…you do so at the expense of selecting, using, or practicing another object or thing. It is impossible to ‘not choose.’ We are intelligent…decision making…actionary and reactionary beings. EVERY act we perform is predecided in our brain….then instructions go to the muscles in each part of the body necessary to perform the act. The body acts only as instructed by the invisible man (brain, intellect, spirit, and so forth). Being an atheist is fine if that’s what you purpose to do. But if being an atheist is only about disconnect with any religion…and not rebellion against the God so many of us ‘know’ to be real…why bother to ridicule the belief of others by calling it ‘ridiculous fairy tales and fables’? I truly am not ‘offended’ at you. The’ truth bigger than we’….gave us the ability to think, live, speak, perform, associate, lead, follow, interact, influence, build up, tear down, participate, not participate, learn, increase, decrease, and…altogether…do exactly as we please…within the realm of man’s law…which is based in natural law….for the good of the whole of society. Leaving God as Creator aside….EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS HAS AN ORDER OR PRESTRUCTURED FUNCTION. Even ‘chaos’ has been found to have structure e.g. clouds, smoke rings, and so forth. The Science of Chaos claims to mathematically predict formations e.g. clouds and smoke rings….whose formations were once thought to be totally random. If a ‘big bang’ did all that…there HAS to be an intelligent force involved. Science makes it even easier for me to believe in God. Things like genetics, seasons, cycles of life, food chain….and especially life/death. If we ‘just happened’….how incredibly odd that the human body ages from its conception. So does the universe. The human body grows to adulthood. The universe continues to expand because it is dying. Everything follows the same patters of life and death….exactly as explained in the Bible. Even the reasons why are told there. I agree…so many professing Christians are not very nice to be around. They are without knowledge , judgemental, and downright ‘contrary’ and offensive. But that doesn’t mean God is not real and loving. Again, please believe that I am not offended at your beliefs. I am so very secure in my beliefs that I am never threatened or frustrated at the beliefs of others. People get offended when they feel their belief system is threatened. No person has power over me. I’m my own machine, in the mortal sense, as are we all. We can be whomever we choose. But EVERY choice INCLUDES a consequence. EVERY behavior INCLUDES a consequence or outcome or afffect. Every outcome has a ripple effect on objects of beings near us. Be, believe, and live however you will….but do it with full knowledge it consequences and outcomes. They will be magnanimous (smile..is that a word?).
Interesting post.
internetelias.wordpress.com
“EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS HAS AN ORDER OR PRESTRUCTURED FUNCTION”
This is as much a belief as anything else. It doesn’t derive from any observations of nature – it derives from your belief in God. If you didn’t believe in God you couldn’t believe this yourself.
In fact, most of the rest of your post is belief-based as well.
The basic premise of this article is right on the nail. How can anyone possibly believe something that they know for a fact isn’t true? It appears that there are some who achieve this feat of mental acrobatics but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they must have something wrong with their brain.
Losing my religion was never a big deal for me. My parents were methodists but I think that the brainwashing wasn’t thorough enough to take. Once I didn’t have to go to chapel anymore, I just stopped thinking about it and what passed for my religious belief just faded away.
Thinking back I never really thought that any of it made sense. After the 911 thing I started to express my utter contempt for religion and came close to a serious falling out with my mother. Now I avoid talking about it with my family.
They’re needy. They need to believe in something besides themselves because there is a total lack of independent thinking and doing in our society.
God is like santa claus….what did your parents threaten you with while you were little? “be good or else santa wont come to your house”, when you were 5 or 6 years old santa was as real as your mother and father. Sometime around the age of 9 or 10 i found out it was all fake and that my mother and father were “santa”. ok so hear me out, all these people are BRAINWASHED into beleiving in “god” for FEAR…who ever started this bullshit wanted to install FEAR in peoples hearts so they would fear “sin” and live an honest life. this myth also makes death easier for some people to i guess and it sounds good going to a place with white clouds and seeing everyone you lost but its just not REALITY!!!! someone wrote to us OPEN YOUR EYES…no no no i think you god beleivers need to open YOUR eyes. he is santa and im telling you he doesn’t exist. I am not a scientist but i have a pretty good idea how everything started…ok so as we explore all these other plantes what are we looking for??? anyone???? water…very good. What 2/3 of our plant??? yessss water your doing great…what are the needs for life??? come on….water & oxegen….we have plenty of both…we started out as small organisms and addapted from there…the earth is something like 49 billions years old…what were humans 49 BILLION YEARS AGO??????? a spec in water…i mean its not what you know and what you dont know its COMMON FUCKING SENCE PEOPLE!!!!!!!! IT IS WHAT IT IS AND THATS IT!!!!!! NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS…WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET….WHAT YOU GET IS WHAT YOU MAKE!!!! YOU WANT TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE THEN MORE POWER TO YOU…HELP PEOPLE…DO GOOD THINGS…YOU DONT NEED GOD TO DO THAT…YOU WANNA BE A MURDERER THEN GO AHEAD DO IT….THE PAIN IS WITHIN NOT IN THE “AFTERLIFE”…THIS ISN’T ROCKET SCIENCE PEOPLE
As the late Carl Sagan once said, “I don’t want to believe. I want to know.”
Same for me.
My atheism arises from my unwillingness to believe in things that have to be taken on blind faith. Thus, atheism arises out of reason. We don’t choose it. We choose to reason and then at some point we realize we’re atheists.
And I don’t make any distinction between beliefs. I see believing in God as no different from believing in astrology or angels.
So what’s the difference between believing that Jesus rose from the dead and believing that aliens are abducting people? The only difference is that one of these is culturally acceptible and the other one isn’t. That’s all.
I was a Christian for 3 years – raised as a Hindhu since childhood before that. I can honestly say that when it came down to it, atheism wasn’t ‘a choice’ for me, in that it would have been dishonest, realising the fault and irrationality of blind faith, to carry on living as though my understanding of reality had completely changed. I would truly have been pretending, and completely aware of my pretense, had I remained a Christian – a Christian in name. When it comes down to that, though I had always struggled with irrationality of faith and the lack of evidence for the things I was ’supposed’ to live my life in accordance to – once I realised the absurdity and unlikelihood of any of it being unmistakeably true, atheism wasn’t a ‘choice’ for me. It was the inevitable result of engaging critical thinking and a deep desire to be honest to myself and live a life seeking truth.
Just wrote out a whole comment that seems not to have been published. Here we go: I was a Christian for 3 years, and raised as a Hindhu before then since childhood. When I became an atheist, it wasn’t a ‘choice’ so much as the inevitable result of critical thinking and a deep desire for self-integrity and truth. To not be an atheist, for me, considering all that I had learned and become aware of, would be asking me to pretend to believe the unbelievable and do so knowingly, not just ‘in denial’. It was a speedy journey from theism to atheism for me once I became aware of my inability to believe the lies, fantasies and myths I had been taught, or I had convinced myself of.
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Rayjs..Love your icon. Too cute! And you may be right. My observations may be colored by my belief in the Creator God. I stay so in absolute awe at the infinite complexity of EVERYTHING around me. For example, here in the south we have this super-duper fire ant problem. About 70 years ago they came to us on board ships from Africa…maybe it was…not sure where exactly. In the last couple of years, agriculture folks have brought over the fire ant’s natural preditor since no pestisides really work on the ants. The Phoric fly lives only three days but before he goes he lays thousands of eggs on thousands of fire ants’ heads. Then he dies. The eggs become pupa…enter the head of the fire ant and feed on the ants ‘juices.’ Needless to say, the busy little ant…isn’t busy any more. Gross…huh? That’s Life at its cyclist best. Point being…that when agriculture folks released the flies…they observed the interaction as the flies approached fire ant hills. Now these American born and bred fire ants have never seen a Phoric fly . But…as these flies approached….the fireants literally ‘ran for their lives!’ I think that’s awesome! How did they inately ‘know’ the danger from this natural preditor? I see things in nature…all the time that just ‘blow my mind!’ And I seriously want to ‘KNOW’ why. So I look very closely….and I consider deeply…and I do observe many, many things. And maybe it’s the ‘looking so closely’ that allows me to see the ’structure’ I spoke about. And listen…I’m not your ordinary believer. I see it pretty much the way you do concerning ‘churchianity.’ The contemporary Christian should reflect the LOVE of God. How is LOVE reflected when the church flock holds the pastor as their shepherd…in the place of Christ? How is God’s LOVE reflected when hundreds of thousands of dollars in ‘tithes’ go to nice buildings in which to ‘worship,’ salaries of pastors, music directors, youth leaders, and so forth…while the truly ‘needy’ can only sit back and watch the affluency of these church leaders. And it’s wrong. And God is more offended by it than we are! You are justified in being disgusted at the level of religious piety seen in the world today….and it’s always been that way. Again, there is another place I see ’structure.’ I see it in the predictability of hypocracy. The Bible is ‘dead on’ in its predictions concerning the behaviors of man over thousands of years. The majority of professing Christians are everything contrary to what the ‘real’ Christian is. Real Christians who do have the LOVE from the heart of God….are NOT the ones you see out there carrying crosses and protesting against gay marriage, abortion, and so forth. The ‘real’ ones are too busy truly caring for others more than for themselves. You don’t see them because they aren’t for show. They’re in the background, they are quiet, they don’t argue, they have the humility to know that they can’t even judge their own hearts….so how could they judge another.
Oh..well. Nuff thinking in script. Have a great day!
internetelias.wordpress.com
The phenomenon you’re referring to (w.r.t. the fire ants) is a common one in biology (which I forget the name for) but it’s a great example of how natural selection can hard-wire a response into a species even though the living representatives of the species haven’t seen the predator before.
BTW, what is the “love” of God and how will I recognize it when I see it? I’m thinking here of all of the nasty things that happen to people as a result of all of the nasty things that God supposedly created that get under our skin and eat us from the inside (watch Animal Planet’s Nature’s Vampires some time).
Mark, I really like this post. I’d like to put it on my site, but I can’t find a way to contact You about this, so I do it through this comment. I run an atheist site (in croatian language) so I wanted to take Your article and translate it to croatian. I’d also would like to put a link to Your blog on my site. I’d appreciate if You reply. Thanks.
Imaš moje dopuštenje da se moj blog članak na Vašoj web lokaciji, kao i moja adresa. Hvala vam za zaustavljanje by!
~Mark
I did not choose atheism, it was just what was left at the end of the day.
I did not start out disliking organized religion nor was I even against religion, I just did not understand its purpose. If you believe in god(s) that is OK but why go to a church/temple/mosque to pray? If god(s) are all knowing then they can answer your prayers from anywhere, but when I expressed my confusion over where you should pray I was told that you have to go to church. This did not seem reasonable so I started to question religion (not that I was religious to begin with) but I was not getting reasonable answers. The more I asked the less I liked organized religion.
After many years of this and using every synonym for atheism I realized that I was an atheist.