A painless deconversion, but a story that I don't get to tell.

My descent (if you’ll pardon the term) into atheism was relatively painless. There was no huge loss of identity or purpose, no single event that shook my foundation. I had been atheistic in my motives and actions for years before I would synthesize the whole thing. Perhaps this story will benefit from some history.

I was never a zealous Catholic. Church was just what we did on Sunday, and if it left any impact on me through the week, it was only to “be nice to others” and so on. In fact, I went to a Catholic grade school from grades K-7. I was an altar boy, even! I just…have a secular mind, I guess. There was a place in my brain for religion, and that door could be shut fairly easily when religion class or mass was over. Ironically, thanks to a series of truly excellent teachers (something I am beginning to understand that I was exceedingly lucky to have), I have been in love with science and scientific thought since the second grade.

Between 7th and 8th grade, my family moved and I joined a public school, where I continued to have wonderful science teachers (I must thank them some time). The biggest change for me at the time? I could wear *whatever I wanted* to class! No uniforms! Kickass. I joined the youth group at our new (much, much larger) parish. I wasn’t super invested, but I hung around long enough to be confirmed in my sophomore year of high school. By simple coincidence, my de-conversion began in earnest shortly thereafter. By freshman year of college, god was dead. I tell you all this to frame the four events that shaped my eventual atheism.

Event one is perhaps the most important, especially because it happened when I was quite young (let’s say 10-12ish). My dad is actually behind it, but I don’t know if he’s aware of it. At the time, his brother (my uncle) was going through a really annoying born-again phase. You know the type: “Be born again with Jesus or suffer eternally”. My dad disagreed, and used logic to dismantle the position. The arguments are probably familiar to you: “What about a boy on an isolated island with his own religion? What about a dying infant?” My uncle eventually conceded the point and moved back to a more ‘reasonable’ Christian stance. One day, my dad explained the argument to me. At the end, I remember concluding that the important thing was to be a good person regardless of your beliefs. Our family had chosen to frame our ethics with Catholicism, and others would use other religions/ideologies. I independently developed the concept of being ‘good without God’ while in a Catholic middle school! I’m kinda proud of past-me. That kid was cool.

For event two, we need to skip forward to youth group in high school. One week, we discussed in passing how foolish the Jewish elders were for not recognizing Jesus as the son of God. Several weeks later, the focus was on false prophets who claimed to be the second coming of Christ. I recognized the hypocrisy and thought about pointing it out, but I remained silent. I was left with the questions, though. “How is our treatment of these ‘nutjobs’ any different? Does no one at least investigate them?” and perhaps more seriously “What makes them different from Jesus? Is it just that we think he was telling the truth? Could…could we just be another nutjob cult?” It wasn’t much of a crisis, to be honest, and I let the questions go, but I became more perceptive to some of the doublespeak and entitlement inherent in religious thinking. I just wasn’t informed enough yet about the magnitude of these issues.

Event three is where I become a functional atheist (although it will be around a year or two before I identify as such) and I discard the biblical God as ridiculous and unjust – a being unworthy of worship even if he existed. In senior year of high school, I took an Anatomy & Physiology class from yet another excellent teacher. The class he taught was wonderful, he was a great mentor, he ran the science/ecology club, and he was a Buddhist. He was among the nicest and wisest people I’d ever met. And my God said he would burn in hell? *Forever?* No. This simply will not do. No just and all-loving God would punish Mr. Ewing. The Bible is not literal truth. I revisited a conversation with my dad that I had nearly forgotten about (as described above) and decided that judgment was based on your actions, not your beliefs.

Event four is ongoing. To finally break with theism, I had to learn more. In college I majored in Biology and minored in Chemistry. I watched various YouTube videos highlighting hypocrisies and contradictions in faith and arguments for atheism (AronRa and Thunderf00t come to mind). I was sort of a deist (or would at least concede that deism was an acceptable position)for a few years before deciding that a god that did nothing was as good as no god at all. The part I held onto longest was belief in an afterlife, but I abandoned that as well. I came to realize that an eternity of *anything* was just about the most torturous thing I could imagine, and suddenly I was okay with the idea of going into an endless, dreamless sleep.

So that’s it. I will say that I am kinder and happier now that I am an atheist. And if anything, the world is ever more glorious. Simply thinking for a moment on the immense complexity of all of the natural laws from evolution to gravity to electromagnetics that come together to make this funny little thing called man? That is a thought more beautiful in its profundity than anything any religion has ever offered me.

Thanks for listening. This is only the second time I've had the opportunity to tell this story. Feels good man.