Intro

When I first described my journey from religion to reason, I mistakenly assumed I came to my viewpoints without outside help, but in hindsight I realize this isn’t the case. Yes, much of my journey did occur when I was alone with my thoughts, but there is no question that I was helped along the way by several factors, some of them people.

 

Science Fiction

Perhaps the first was science fiction, primarily the older books I read as a teen — like those by Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

Heinlein was raised Methodist and claimed that as late as 1954, but was otherwise private about his religion. In his books, though, his characters often had strong opinions. Here are some of them, from several different books:

“History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.”

“Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful — just stupid.)”

“Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there.”

“Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.”

“I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith — it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.”

Asimov, on the other hand, was a scientist and atheist, and only a science fiction writer because it was easy for him. He was open about his atheism, and I remember reading with shock something he wrote which overtly preached evolution, a universe without God, and anti-religion. I don’t have access to that exact text, but here are some of Asimov’s quotes:

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”

“[Creationists] make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.”

“I prefer [the term] rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.”

“If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don’t believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God? I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.”

“I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”

At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to this. I was concerned with the worlds their stories described, the human interactions, and of course the really cool gadgets. But it had to have affected me on some level. The stories often portrayed atheists as learned, scientific, and unencumbered by superstition. When a religious character appeared, which wasn’t often, he tended to be malicious, especially Heinlein’s character Nehemiah Scudder who appeared in several stories. Or they had been duped by the Scudder types — sincere enough people who followed the creed that their leaders handed down.

At the time I read these stories, my ideological tendencies were becoming more solidly fundamentalist Christian. But I remained interested in science, math, cosmology, and so on, and therefore continued to read science fiction. There can be no question that the thoughts introduced by these writers rolled around in my brain for years, eventually coming to light.

 

Greg U. — ‘The Great Atheist’

Greg (last name withheld) was a classmate of mine in high school; I knew him for about six years in the 1980s. My journal once mentioned him as the “great atheist” (the quotation marks are in my journal).

In my memory, he was the first avowed atheist with whom I came in contact. I remember discussing various proofs of God’s existence with him. He was the first person in my life who wasn’t just a lackadaisical Christian that needed a little nudging, but an actual non-believer. Though I didn’t think much of it at the time, this had to have affected me as well, since for the first time I was considering actual “proofs” about deity, and how a logical person who didn’t previously believe couldn’t possibly be swayed by them.

 

Matt L.

Matt (last name withheld) was my friend the last two years of high school. He was a self-described ex-Christian agnostic. His father had been a Methodist minister before becoming an abusive alcoholic. Matt and I shared interests — music, silliness, philosophy. We talked much about religion, but rarely in a personal sense.

His influence on me came during our Study Hall, when he and I and another student named Dallas invented a religion purely by accident. We weren’t allowed to talk during Study Hall, but we passed notes. It began with a discussion of fast-food service and how to get a fresh burger. Before we knew it, we were deep into creating a new theology, in which a Pickle was the primary deity, the Avocado was the enemy — but also Father and Mother of the Pickle.

We used phrases like “Praise the Pickle” around school, enough that other people would ask us about it and we would pass along the Good News. Within a week, nearly a dozen acquaintances were using Pickle-derived phrases and suggesting new tidbits to add to our growing scriptures.

The point isn’t how silly it was (very), but that it happened organically and without really even thinking about it. In later years, when someone would suggest that Christianity was — like all other religions — invented, I almost always thought back to The Great Pickle and how it could easily have grown into a viable religion had we actually pursued it.

(After many years of believing those “Pickle” documents to be permanently lost, I found them in 2016, and published them online.)

 

Ms. M. — Senior English Teacher

Ms. M. (first name unknown, surname withheld) was the first authority figure I ever knew who professed to be an atheist. At the time, I made it my mission to get under her skin and ensured many of my assignments had a religious angle, including my research paper Is There Really An Afterlife?, a fictional short story The Fourth Man, and my poem The Evolutionists — I was careful to fit each within the given parameters of the assignment and Ms. M was careful to grade me fairly.

Had she been the epitome of a godless heathen that my Bible had warned me all atheists must be, I likely would not have been surprised, or given it much thought. Instead, she was a normal enough adult who was competent in her job, fair, polite, and had a better sense of humor than many other teachers. She also was (fortunately) mature enough to handle my constant passive-aggressive barbs on the topic of religion.

It was this — her normality, her complete lack of depravity — that stuck with me over the years.

 

Keith L. — supervisor

Keith (surname withheld) was the first “out” gay man I ever met. He was one of several assistant front-end supervisors at a supermarket where I worked on and off from 1989 through 1994. He was also an out and proud atheist — the third person I ever met whom I knew to be an outright unbeliever. He was witty, smart, and responsible.

At slow points in our shifts, while he “supervised” (stood around) and I cleaned registers or restocked bags, we often chatted about various topics. He challenged me on religion and belief, but only in a “just asking questions” kind of way. He went to bat for me when I requested days off for church activities and regularly wondered why I wasn’t a “worthless jackoff” like the other employees my age.

I can’t say with any certainty today what influence (if any) he had on my journey, but I would be surprised if it was zero.

 

Dr. D.O. — College Professor

Dr. D.O. (name withheld) was one of my professors at Bible college, and later became director of a Ph.D. program for “Biblical Interpretation and Theology” at a theological seminary. He’s also one of many translators for two English versions of the Bible. He is a highly educated and thoroughly religious Christian man.

It was he who challenged my fundamentalist, literalist belief that Noah’s Ark could indeed fit all of the animals necessary. I still remember the daring expression on his face as he asserted that perhaps I should do the math myself instead of depending on the “study” I had cited. It was also from him that I first heard of several fallacies in reasoning, including “circular reasoning”.

 

Movies

Though cinema was strongly discouraged in my religious sect, and outrighted prohibited while I attended Bible college, I did manage to see a few — and after college I watched hundreds, both new and old.

One film that likely influenced me as a child was A New Hope (Star Wars, Episode 4). All the talk about good and evil, balance, “the Force”, and other mystical lines were decried at my church as a bad influence on children. At the time, I couldn’t understand what they were worried about — it was a fictional movie. Years later, I recalled that friends and I had tested to see if the Force was real. We would set a toy on the kitchen table, concentrate on it, and see if we could move it like the Jedi characters in the movies. Of course, it never worked. Perhaps this is what the preachers at my church were worried about, that we children would eventually make the connection that religion is fictional too, and could be tested for veracity.

I’m not sure when, but I watched Monte Python’s Life Of Brian at some point in the mid- or late 1990s.

Movies that probably influenced me later (mid-'90s through 2000s) include From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Dogma (1999). In the former, there’s a scene in a diner early in the film in which Kate (Juliette Lewis) asks her father Jacob (Harvey Keitel), a former pastor, “Don’t you believe in god anymore?”, and he answers, “Not enough to be a pastor.” Of course, when I saw this film, I was only one year removed from studying to be a pastor, and had given up, so the line hit me hard. Then, a few lines later, Jacob adds: “Yes, I do believe in Jesus. Yes, I do believe in God. But do I love them? No.” That so closely reflected my own thoughts at the time that it was comforting somehow, perhaps because I felt slightly less lonely knowing that someone else (if only the script writer) had thought similarly to me.

Despite some of the main characters in Dogma being angels, and even God (Alanis Morrisette), the movie itself was decidedly anti-religion. At the time, it was shocking for me. But it was funny at the same time, which made it easier to accept. There was a scene where an angel claims to be an atheist and convinces a nun to leave her work. There are two angels complaining that God isn’t fair for kicking them out of heaven (for an act of mercy on their part), and trying to get back in. It pointed out that rules of sin change over the centuries (“How can you even be sure what incurs the Lord’s wrath these days? Times change. I remember when eating meat on a Friday was supposed to be a Hell-worthy trespass.”) They were talking about things that I wanted to think about but had been afraid to approach.

• The Invention Of Lying (2009)

Though I had long dispensed with religion by 2009, I still held on to some deistic tendencies and wondered about Providence. The Invention Of Lying pushed me a little further. The movie supposes a world where no one has ever thought to lie. In such a world, no one would have invented fiction, most types of advertising, and — of course — religion. When one guy suddenly develops the ability to lie, he comforts his dying mother by telling her fibs about a comfortable afterlife.

There are surely others, which I will feel free to add here (or start a separate page) as I think of them.

 

Songs

(I was reminded to add this section upon reading Neil Carter’s blog entry Songs Of My Deconversion)

Until about 1995, I listened almost exclusively to “Christian“ music — commercial artists as well as the hundreds of choruses and hymns sung at church, youth functions, and camps. There were minor exceptions during high school when I would hear a song played by a friend.

During Bible college, I heard All These Questions (audio, lyrics), by nominally Christian band Mad At The World, and it hit home. The song, unsurprisingly given the title, asks questions — the kind that a doubting Christian might ask of God — and then “answers” them with the line: “but my faith in your love is the answer to all of these questions”. Over time, what stuck with me was the questions, and the “answer” seemed more and more like a cop-out. Take these questions from the song:

“Is the light of Heaven shining bright or slightly fading?
Say it to me once again; I can’t hear what you're saying
Jesus, can you hear me when I’m on my knees and praying? ...

Did you see me searching everywhere to know your leading?
Is it sad to see me cry or watch me as I’m bleeding?
Can you hear those desperate cries of dying people pleading?”

“My faith in your love” isn’t a legitimate answer to any of these questions, and that became more apparent as I grew older. If I was going to keep believing in God, I needed a better answer than “just believe”. I needed an answer like “Here I am. Here is a stack of proof that I even exist. Here is an explanation for why I don’t help starving children.” Those answers never came.

Additionally, the lyrics of the song — in printed form — made much more sense artistically if you removed the “answer” lines. The song reminded me of several poems I’d written where the entire thing was sad and God-denying, but then I went back days later and added hopeful “solution” lines. Examples of these include Wasted Years, Wasted Tears, MLASP, and Untitled. I wondered if the writer of All These Questions had gone through a similar process — writing questioning lyrics at first and then later trying to force in a happy ending.

After Bible college, I quickly began listening to the music of “the world” (“secular music”, we called it), and there is no question that it quickly had an impact on me. I will likely eventually spin this section off into a separate page, but for now, here are a few of the songs that stick out in my memory:

• U2, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (audio), from The Joshua Tree (1987)

• Hokus Pick, God For A Day (audio), from Snappy (1997)

Though God For A Day was written by a Christian band, and though it ends with “I know God has a plan”, this song of frustration echoes some things I began to wonder after leaving Bible College. “If I was God for just one day, I’d stop the wars... I’d prove that I was real...” Buried in these lines are some concepts that believers and non-believers alike have wrestled with for untold generations. It’s also a noticeably slow and mournful track on an otherwise peppy, happy album (with songs like I’m So Happy), so it sticks out.

• Nine Inch Nails, Closer (lyrics), from Downward Spiral (1994)

I didn’t hear this one until 1996 or so, and it’s not about religion per se, but there are phrases in it that stuck out to me during that time: “I’ve got no soul to sell... my absence of faith... you get me closer to God... help me tear down my reason...” The entire song expressed, weirdly, much of what I was feeling at the time — lost and confused and disjointed.

• John Lennon, Imagine (lyrics), from Imagine (1971)

I had probably heard Imagine when I was younger, but didn’t really know the lyrics until the late 1990s. It was a stark reminder to me of the artificial divisions caused by religion. I reasoned that no just and/or loving God would want entire wars fought in his name. It led me to wonder whether each religion had a grain of the original truth buried somewhere in their dogma. It was also some time during this period that I began to formulate the thought: They can’t all be right; but they could all be wrong.

Another thing that happened was that I caught all the preachers, youth pastors, and other Christian speakers in their lies. For many years, they’d told us how secular music was from Satan, how the makers of the music worshipped evil and black magic and the dark lord himself, and how there were hidden secret messages on many tracks. But as I kept branching out and listening to more and more of this ungodly music, I found none of that. I found only men and women expressing themselves through art. Yes, many were deeply flawed, addicted to a variety of substances, and caught up in a corporate game of making moeny, but none of them were holding black masses or passing out Satanic literature in their concerts — as we’d been told. I found that most of the songs were about love — lost loves, yearning for future loves, and enjoying current loves. Others were about politics or various fun or not-so-fun times. Many seemed to be simply generic lyrics spun to a catchy tune designed to get airplay and sell records.

 

TV

I have been aware of very few sympathetic atheist characters in U.S. television shows in my lifetime. When an atheist does show up, he’s often treated with disregard and very often is written in such a way as to deserve this disregard. However, a few worthwhile on-screen representations did occur, and I think it’s worth noting the ones I watched — which very well might have influenced my acceptance of the term for myself.

The only ones I can think of right now, all viewed by me some time during the ‘00s, are Dr. Richard House (House), Brian Griffin (Family Guy), and Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory). None of them are presented as the paramount of awesomeness — each has obvious flaws, especially difficultly dealing with other people (which is perhaps why I somewhat identified with each one) — but they are typically presented as the smartest, most rational characters on their respective shows.

People better versed in pop culture might try to point out here that there were atheists on TV before this — most likely Spock, for example, from Star Trek. To which I would reply: this isn’t a list of atheists on TV; it’s a discussion of characters who might have influenced me, in my journey to atheism. When I was a child, we sometimes went years without a TV, and when we did have one, it was almost never on. TV time was strictly limited in my household and we never had cable. For example, apparently a character named “Meat Head” was an atheist on All In The Family, but I never heard of that show until I was grown up.

Interestingly, when I search out these characters now, their descriptions are often accompanied by: “portrayed by real-life atheist...” The voice of Brian Griffin is Seth MacFarlane (atheist). The actor portraying Dr. House is Hugh Laurie (outspoken atheist). This isn’t always true, but it made me wonder if a religious person would have a difficult time accurately portraying an atheist. For example, when Kevin Sorbo (devoutly religious and a TAINTUS supporter) attempted to portray an atheist professor in an absurd movie called God’s Not Dead, the effect was hilarious and mind-twisting — and it turned out that the character wasn’t really an atheist anyway; he was just “mad at God”, a common Christian trope to explain away nonbelief.

 

The Internet

Like anyone my age, the advent of adulthood coincided with the internet becoming commonplace and accessible to most. And because I was never extremely comfortable in social situations, it was natural that I would develop online friendships in place of in-person social circles. Like many people, I felt more comfortable expressing certain opinions online than I did in person. And of course, this gave me access to friends I would not have met in person, partly because of where I lived — the Bible Belt. Yes, there are atheists and thinkers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, etc., but they’re often not very vocal about it. Online, you can cast your net more widely.

So in my early days on the internet, I ran into a number of non-Christians, including Wiccans, agnostics, and atheists, not to mention Muslims and adherents of other religions. The comfort and familiarity that characterized these interactions was eye-opening. Further, the sheer number of these people was heartening as I continued to question my own beliefs.

 

Richard Barron

I hesitate to list Richard here, because by the time I met him and learned he was an atheist, I was already most of the way through my journey. Perhaps it would not be correct to list him as an influence on my actual beliefs, but his openness and thoughtfulness were certainly an encouragement to me when I began thinking about writing these pages. (And he is one of a very small group of people who got to see these pages before I published them.)

 

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Back to: My Journey Out Of Christianity

Next: Selected Quotes From My Writings

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Edits

• Edit, 2015.03.17: Added The Internet section.

• Edit, 2016.01.14: Added link to original version of this page. Added internal anchors to each section, including this edits section. Added internal links to the ••• menu. Modernized the html code (not visible to readers). Reworded intro to reflect that I actually did think at first there had been no influences. Added a final sentence to the science fiction section. Reworded first sentence of Dr. D.O. section, to remove the “currently” part that would have to be regularly updated. Added the word “literalist”. Added Movies section.

• EDIT, 2017.07.22: Added meta header code (to change page’s appearance on mobile browsers). Added parenthetical to one of Asimov’s quotations. Added link to Pickle documents. Added links to newly discovered old files of mine, and shortened the final paragraph of the Ms. M section. Added a final sentence to the Movies section. Added the Songs section.

• EDIT, 2018.04.10: Expanded Songs section. Added link to Songs section in internal navigation menu. Changed page title to be more inclusive of the topics. Added navigation breadcrumbs.

• EDIT, 2018.09.17: Updated html header. Moved this “edits” section below bottom navigation module. Tweaked navigation links. Minor edits to page content for clarity and brevity. Added section on Keith L.

• EDIT, 2018.11.18: Tweaked background code.

• EDIT, 2019.01.24: Added TV section.

• EDIT, 2019.01.27: Reworded Intro and Sci-Fi sections. Minor tweaks throughout.

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