In this way, I hope you can see how religion doesn't really make anyone's life easier - religion only makes it easier to avoid facing up to uncomfortable truths. If we wish to deal honestly with reality, then we must do so on reality's terms, not on our own. Trying to deal with reality on our own terms (especially on things where we think reality isn't "fair") makes for wishful thinking and self-deception, fertile ground indeed for superstitious delusion.

Or, put differently, religion is like a crutch that some people lean on their entire lives. They think the crutch is good because they like leaning on it, and they don't feel strong enough to stand on their own power. If that crutch is suddenly taken away, then of course the person will be unable to stand alone right away, since the person is used to leaning on the crutch. But if the person enters a routine of physical therapy, building up the muscles and the coordination necessary to walk and stand without a crutch, then and only then can the crutch be tossed with a minimum of fuss - but even then, some crutch-havers will get their shorts in a twist because they think everyone needs a crutch to walk properly and get along in life, which just ain't so.

My parents came from mixed Catholic and Episcopalian backgrounds, reared their household in the Episcopal church, then jumped ship to the Methodist church after discovering the local Episcopal vestry was an Oliver North fan club. Religion was a matter I was born into, and initially took at face value. When I was young, I assumed the notion of attending church services and Sunday school and believing whatever people said in the bargain was simply what people did as a matter of course. Why? Presumably, because that was the way things were and no other option existed.

I was, however, born with a critical mind...a mind that eventually began to quietly critique the memes of the church. Never once did I not doubt the efficacy of prayer. It became apparent to me from an early age that our church denomination was simply one of many religions extant in the world...that in spite of their apparent similiarities, remained mutually-incompatible to the point where people were reduced to elimination and bloodshed in the bargain. The last point shocked me when I first started reading up on history and world affairs, as I had assumed to that point that religion was a benign characteristic as unimportant as a shoe brand. People really didn't take it that seriously, did they?

It wasn't until I consciously tried to be religious, however; attempting to make sense of the madness, that I really began to see cracks in the façade. I started thinking over the various aspects of Christianity and attempted to reconcile their implications: "Is the Bible true? If so, how much of it is literal and how much is figurative?" "If it is figurative, why do so many people think otherwise?" "Why does the Bible consist of what it does? Why does our church leave out the Apocrypha?" "Is it commendable to adopt idealistic viewpoints in the pursuit of religion? Is it even sensible?" "What if hell exists? If it does, how does one go about averting such a fate?" "Am I already too far gone, just because I haven't been praying and looking forward to church every day of my life?"

The more I thought about religion, the less I liked it. The presentation of the Bible as an infallable reference proved to be one stumbling block: Even if I gave it the overwhelming benefit of the doubt, the book came across as being unverifiable, factually-inaccurate, glaringly inconsistent, and at times morally-reprehensible at best. Moreover, I was disturbed by what I saw being justified in the name of God, Christianity, and religion as a whole every day: Scientific research and theory being stifled in laboratories and shunned from classrooms; the deprivation of gay and lesbian people of civil rights; women being forced to give birth against their will. In all cases, religiously-inspired ideals tended to be at polar odds with empirical evidence and logical analysis. I lived in rural West Virginia at the time, and got to see many of these abuses firsthand. Before I knew it, the religious fire that I had been seeking to fan had been extinguished like a wet match, and God had slowly but concretely followed Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as the next illusion to fall. I don't consciously remember the day I had this realization, but it had to have been when I was about eleven years old.

When the dust cleared, it felt like nothing short of a revelation: A mask was thrown off, and a hundred-pound weight was lifted from my body. All sorts of issues that had dwelled on my mind, held up by the difficult task of being reconciled with ancient dogma and doctrine, began to promptly snap into place. I began sensing an urge to enjoy life to the fullest and appreciate the natural world for what it was, without being constantly worried about invisible entities and trivial issues in the bargain.

My parents are acceptably tolerant of my beliefs, although at times I sense that they don't understand them. ("I know you don't believe in God and am opposed to everything organized religion stands for, but I still don't understand...why don't you like going to church?") I do feel angry from time to time about the various issues and challenges atheists face in society. And while my intensity of opinion has waxed and waned several times over in the years since, my beliefs have remained constant and I wouldn't dream of retrenching into the darkness of religion for anything in the world.

Slowly, however, I came to see the glaring hypocrisy found in the Bible, in Christians' attitudes towards others, and towards life in general. I started to read the Bible seriously and it seemed to contradict itself in not a few places. When I went to college, my beliefs were formally challenged by many professors which at first caused a sort of knee jerk reaction on my part, but began to have an influence on me. I became interested in philosophy and started reading the works of Ingersoll, Russell, Nietzsche, B.C. Johnson, Dennett, Dawkins and a slew of others and pretty much had an awakening. I realized that Christianity tries to keep its adherents from questioning and that lack of faith in the doctrines is the supreme sin of all sins. I abandoned Christianity about 10 years ago or so and have never looked back. Indeed, the more I look around, the more I am convinced that Christianity and belief in the supernatural in general is the cause of much needless suffering.

So I was never a true believer, and alas, don't have a real deconversion story to tell. But I am enjoying reading those of others, and I hope you all appreciate how tremendously important these stories are to our understanding of the "psychology of the other." Its zeroing in on those chinks in the armor, those cracks in the shield, that will someday put the lie to the whole religion business. And I'm glad to hear one guy say that arguing with atheists in Internet chat rooms had an effect (and no that's not lame!). It gratifies me to think that it might have been me you chatted with (back when I had nothing better to do than to sharpen my fangs on unsuspecting fundies that wandered through my chatroom).

I don't recall ever really believing. this made childhood very... interesting when it came to church. my family took me to methodist church from a young age, telling bible stories and going to sunday school and singing in the choir. the thing was, when i was little i just thought it was stories, like disney movies or fairy tales. i imitated what i saw people in church doing - ok they go up and take the little snack, and sit with your head bowed for a bit. when they explained prayer it just seemed kind of silly to think about talking to someone who wasn't there so i just day dreamed instead. i remember having a moment of epiphany- that people actually believed these things were real. i remember it was an argument i was having with my nanny's kid, who went to catholic school - one of those "well my something-something is bigger than your something-something" competitions. "mine's as big as the planet" she said. "well mine is as big as the galaxy!" i said. "well GOD is bigger than EVERYTHING" she said. i was maybe 8 years old, and it was silly and embarrassing to think about... and i didn't know who to talk to it about. so i kept doing what was expected of me by family and church friends. this trend continued through high school - I was confirmed, and continued to sing in the choir and go to youth group, all the while not really believing any of it. at the same time, it was kind of "popular" to say you were an atheist among my friends... i wasn't comfortable enough to talk to family but with my friends i jumped on this idea, even though i didn't give it a lot of thought. so to my friends i called myself an atheist, but to my family i was a good little christian.

it wasn't until college, when i could escape the expectations of going to church every week, and met new people to talk to that i really started to embrace my atheism. i started discussing faith with christians and found i was able to rationally argue my views. i was able to defend my atheism, largely because i began thinking about how happy i was with my life WITHOUT belief. but that was just the start of it - i was learning about science and loving it. and when i finally found other people who had embraced atheism and had gone through a similar gradual awakening, then i was really comfortable enough with myself to be truly open. i am still not necessarily completely comfortable discussing my lack of faith with my family, but it is getting there.

None of the indoctrination ever really took hold. I think that part of it might be genetic--just not wired for it, my dad was the same way as a kid, so I found out much later--but the big thing for me was unicorns.

Yes, unicorns.

I believed in the existence of unicorns. I'm not going to be too ashamed of that, because I was six (though it lasted until about third grade)! But I had decided that I really and truly believed that unicorns were real and would totally appear before those who believed in them and maybe even grant wishes. I drew unicorns and wrote story after story about unicorns. Sometimes my stories even had threats about what might happen to those wretches who dared to deny them.

So everyone's concerned, because apparently believing in a magic Jewish zombie is all right, but believing in unicorns is just crazy-talk. I get all this crap from everyone (all of them part of this devoutly Catholic community, mind you, as well as my parents who seemed to see Christianity as a healthy cult to be indoctrinated into, but found my childhood Unicornism alarming) about all the scientific, logical, and historical reasons that unicorns don't exist and never have, and if I keep believing in them I must be insane.

So eventually I asked (in all innocence, I assure you) for the scientific, logical, and historical reasons that all this much crazier crap in the bible is true. I figured that if my beliefs can be shot down for lack of evidence, then they must have some amazing evidence, especially since they claim so often that they alone know the truth about everything. So I asked an honest question.

What did I get from them? "Well, we don't need evidence because we're right, and we already know that we're right, so that's the end of the argument." All I could think was "so, you're right because you're right, and I'm wrong because you already called it, yah, makes total sense." I was incredibly peeved at them for that. So the fact that you "know" you're right makes your lack of evidence meaningless, but lack of evidence makes all other beliefs meaningless? I "knew" that unicorns were real just as much as they "knew", and I saw no reason that the lack of evidence that disproved my beliefs somehow didn't disprove theirs. I outgrew the unicorn thing, but I think that my hatred of hypocrisy might have started with that. Was I ever disgusted with their arrogance!

And I think it was all downhill from there for Christianity, though I would latch onto the whole Cayce/Seth Speaks/ghost/psyhic thing for a while and still believed in some vague "something" of a universal intelligence. My hatred of hypocrisy eventually did that in too, as I would enjoy questioning orgainzed faiths--especially Christianity--but would studiously avoid looking at any criticism of the paranormal. Even then, I couldn't escape the fact that no ghost or psychic research conducted with real scientific rigor never seemed to cut the mustard, nor could I escape that subconcious realization that I was being hypocritical with the way I applied my standards of evidence. Between that and my introduction to the atheist communties on the internet, I lost my faith in all things supernatural. I believed in that much more deeply than I'd ever believed in Jesus, but even my deconversion to a materialistic atheism never approached the level of trauma that I've read in many other deconversion stories.

Of course, I had been pretty big on Seth Speaks, and if anything ever turned out to be true I would bet on that. I don't believe it, I just think it has more potential to eventually have enough evidence to be plausible. But it was heavy into reincarnation, the rejection of any personal gods, the lack of necessity of religious-type belief, and morality being not just about how you treat other people but how you actually regard them. I know, I'm sure there are forms of Buddhism that are like this too, but this is what I was exposed to. A lifetime of being surrounded by the devoutly faithful, who were uglier and more hateful than anyone I had ever met, had shown me that religous faith is not only not a source of morality but seemed to be a barrier to it in many ways. And when I went onto those atheist forums, I saw some incredibly well-adjusted and wonderful people who could be incredibly moral without any religous faith at all. According to my Sethian beliefs, the atheists were far more "spiritually mature" than any religious people I had ever met.

I started thinking that perhaps the only way to really be a moral, decent person was to drop all assumptions about the way the universe worked (particularly those involving the afterlife, which can never be more than speculation) and start using one's logic and reason in conjunction with one's basic human empathy. That moved into sort of a reverse Pascal's wager--that if I'm right about Seth then I'm set, but if I'm wrong, it's no loss because I've tried to live a productive and ethical life, which is still a plus. One thing just kind of flowed into the other without a lot of resistence, and from this point it just eased right into atheism. One day I realized I was referring to myself as an atheist, and that was that.

Amusingly enough, I read the Cayce and Seth because my mother gave them to me in the hopes that they would "restore" my faith in Christ, as they had for her when she was doubting in her own youth. She still can't imagine why the books didn't have an identical effect on me, but then she also thought I had any faith in Christ to "restore" in the first place. (That also came as a shock to her. I had to explain to Corporal Punishment Annie that just because you force a kid to dress up and sing a song about how much they love Jesus doesn't make them mean it. Perhaps I just didn't want to be hit for expressing doubt, since I'd been hit enthusiastically for much less, and this church thing seemed to be much more serious to them. Yet another reason not to hit your kids--at least, not if you want them to feel they can confide in you about the really important things.)

As a side affect, I learned in detail about the pantheons of the Norse, Greek, Ancient Egyptian, and many others. By comparison, Judaism and it's spinoffs were boring.

I got high on science and math, from cosmology to quantum physics to topology, or at least as much of it I could actually grasp. It taught me burden of proof, and I've been godproof since.

RF

I was subjugated to a steady flow of all this foolishness that my parents had bought into all the way. God was apparently too busy enriching Ken Copeland and his ilk though while we slid into financial ruin thanks to the oil bust of the early 80's that took the Houston economy out. We lived with several friends and relatives over the course of 1-2 years and watched a good friend of my parent's wife die of complications due to her chronic diabetes. They were also fellow charismatics. I then got to move away from all my friends and community of 6 years just two weeks prior to my freshman year in high school. We moved 60 miles south of Houston and we did manage to stay there for my entire 4 years until my graduation.

During those tumultuous teen years, we were part of a local full gospel church so the weirdness continued, and I accepted it and lived like a good christian teen should by not dating (can't date those ungodly girls after all!), going to church, and the like. For the most part this is not about the people we interacted with from the church, they were generally good folks who helped my family get through some pretty tough financial times. It is about the belief system that bound them all together, and helped make my teen years not all they could have been (though on the flip side I did avoid some things that would probably not have been too great for me no matter what my beliefs had been....)

Moved on to college and became involved with the Baptist Student Ministry and eventually did do some of that elusive dating and met my wife of 19 years now during that time. She was a Southern Baptist and I settled back into that mode of christian existence as I was backing off the more fringe beliefs of my parents. We dated for over a year and were then engaged for 8 mos. before getting married while still in school - don't worry, we both finished :). I spent my 20's dealing with all the "crazy" theological stuff I had been indoctrinated with growing up and settled into a mid-range evangelical fundamentalism. We worked with teenagers as well as other functions in the church. We had been married for eight years when our first daughter came along and our second came along 2-1/2 years later. By that time, I was past all my struggles with childhood beliefs and was shaping my theological worldview and stance (as in any make believe club, there is a wide range of opinion even within the same group). I did come to be an old-earth creationist though (Ala, Hugh Ross) as I just could not ignore all the evidence that this rock we live on seemed real old. I was not informed enough on the biological sciences though to really consider evolution seriously. My exposure was just to the church's mis-characterizations of the science.

Fast forward to age 37, we are in the Sunday School class of a nice guy with a great family. The guy is an oil geophysicist but a rabid young earth-er with the full charts of Bishop Ussher from the 1500's. At one class he was gone and left a video for our consumption - a real gem straight from the ICR. By the time I walked out of that class, I could not believe that I was even associated with idiots like the one on the film doing nothing but ad-hoc observation and what amounted to personal attacks on those scientists in the film - via edited sound bites and quote mining nonetheless.

I revisited my Hugh Ross material and really started seeing the holes in his logic as well. I turned to the internet to research and decided I needed to read the opposition in their own words. I found Ebon's site here almost out of the gate;and well, it had contained pretty much all the information necessary in one spot for me to make the leap from believer to non-believer in 4 months or so (and what it didn't have, the Secular Web did). I did a lot of other reading also and covered all the topics as my favorite apologist arguments were utterly destroyed by facts and reason. I do not mean to imply that I did not struggle with this because I did. It blew away the foundation of my whole life practically, but it all made sense. I was just tired of struggling to rationalize things that I now see are just mythology as fitting into the real world. I think my wife was a little shocked when he said that to quote "was not necessarily surprising as I have seen several people from within who just couldn't make it all add up anymore" and communicated that he would be glad to talk with me some if I wanted to - something I have not felt any need to do.

To me, that statement said that he realizes that he would have little chance of parting me from my newly found sense of freedom and oddly enough peace. It is a lot easier pickings to find those folks at work or of acquaintance who might be having a hard time or be in an emotionally vulnerable state to work your religious magic out on. A little harder to consider somebody who worked it from the inside out to reach their conclusions (not that I am the smartest guy around or anything like that - quite the contrary).

Unfortunately, I was "in the closet" during this time period and after I had made my decision. I was quite worried about how my wife was going to deal with this and I had two young kids to deal with also. I actually went from mid-2006 to late last year under the radar before I admitted to my wife how I had changed as to my beliefs. She confirmed that she had sensed something was going on but did not realize the extent of the change. She was very upset, more so about thinking I might pack up and head out than anything else. I reassured her that this was not the case, that this was about me and how I thought but not her (though I know it does involve and affect her obviously). I was not on a mission to leave or to convince her out of her beliefs. She was initially of the mind that "I had read all that bad stuff, but did I read the responses". Well, I have spent a lifetime reading all the McDowell, Lewis, Giesler, Platinga, and others that you could shake a stick at and it didn't matter. The arguments are built on something that is not real, so they don't stack up. She also thought if I talked to someone it might have swayed me from this path, but I again told her that looking back on it all, those things would not have made a difference in the ultimate outcome of events.

I am not a real emotions driven person and live in a more pragmatic world. Like uhclem above, I was not completely immersed in the social network of the church having something more like a large network of acquaintances unlike my wife who derives her social needs outside of family from her church circle. Other than her, I have not really come out from the shadows other than not being at church - which hasn't raised a lot of issues since my wife assists with teenagers once again and then attends a service (it is a large church). As a kicker, she did need to confide in someone, and I said that that would be fine so she did have some conversations with a close friend of hers as well as the SS teacher whose video started the ball rolling. I did not know what his response would be, both guns blazing full-on apologetic attack or what, but that was not the case. I think that my wife was a little shocked when he told her quote "that is not necessarily surprising and I have seen several people who just could not make it add up anymore" and then communicated that he would be glad to talk to me if I wanted to. Something I have felt no need for to date.

So here I am about to turn 41 enjoying my life and family. Preparing for the soon to come day when I will need to talk to my daughters about what I believe and why and communicate to them that they will be free to choose and live their life and beliefs as they choose. I just do not want them to live a life that was thrust on them by dogma without full knowledge of the alternative freedom available. Perhaps my wife will move one day toward this thinking but I am not counting or expecting that. I may attempt to officially communicate my stance to those we are acquainted with in the church or not. I have not really decided on that front. As far as my wife, I pointed out that from her point of view, I was covered according to Paul who says in 1st Corinthians:

“If any brother has a wife who does not believe, and she is willing to live with him, let him not divorce her. And a woman who has a husband who does not believe, if he is willing to live with her, let her not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband; otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy. But if the unbeliever departs, let him depart; a brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases. But God has called us to peace. For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife?”

This is one of those catch-22 areas in the Bible because there it is in black and white - as long as somebody believes you're golden. Hard to argue from the evangelical, literal standpoint against that. Of course the theologically-minded will twitter on about sanctified vs. salvation, etc..., etc..., but I think that verse helped keep the peace through the situation better. I am just glad to be done with that minutia and am enjoying reading all the good literature as well as studying up on evolution and other topics (not to mention getting to see the pregame show during football season!).

Thanks ebon, for all the information you so lucidly put together and originated. I may not always agree with everything said here on all topics, but this is surely a treasure trove of thought and reason.

RF

I wonder how much of the difference between the two is due to the social pressures influencing the stories? Conversion stories are usually put out as a 'witness,' to convince other people of the glories of their particular god; although there's a lot of talking about how bad their life was before finding god, they want to emphasize how great everything is now that they've converted. Stories about slow, painful conversions full of doubt don't sell.

OTOH, atheists are usually trying to reach out to people who are going through a painful process (losing their social and philosophical support) and want to show other people that they aren't alone, so they talk about how tough it is. 'Meh, no big deal' doesn't sell.

Of course, not everyone feels like they have to frame their stories to fit the need, but the response to stories does set up a kind of expectation.