This is basically (what I can remember anyways!) my trip from religion to atheism. It's by no means spectacular and I spared you all the sciency crap, if you are curious look it up like I did!
I was born into the Irish Catholic religion. When I was old enough, my father sent me off to CCD (essentially bible study for kids, it fricken SUCKED!!! They held it on Saturday morning!!!!) I went there for 4 years every Saturday during the school year. I got my first communion (eating of the Jezit! Tastes like styrofoam or a stale rice cake.) We had to memorize prayers, we were recanted the tales of the Bible as true, yadda, yadda , yadda.
Why am I telling you this? Well to give you a bit of background. I was parietal immersed in as a child. I was taken to church every Sunday or Saturday, depending. Eventually my Father stopped going, not exactly sure why but I finally had my Saturdays and Sundays free. No more St. Benadict's for me!
Through all this I still believed in Adam and Eve, Noah, the flood and Jesus. I mean I was told this from childhood, we even had one of the them fancy Jesus stable things at Christmas, we were pretty typical for lapsed Catholics at the end. I never really thought about evolution, even though I had a love of dinosaurs when I was younger. Everything had it's place and I questioned none of it… Until 9th grade History.
In our first week of High School our 9th grad World History teacher had us watch some old movies (on the reel!) about the evolution of humans. I was HOOKED. I loved it. The Leaky's, Lucy, Turkana boy, Neandertals!!!! But there was a problem… these things didn't look like modern humans and they were older, FAR older than we were taught in CCD. Hmmmm… what to do? Well I sort of switched Adam and Eve to these more primitive models, Lucky=Eve, but what about evolution? Well, that's just how god worked, obviously. Problem solved. This how I proceeded for the next 4 years until college and a good bit after. When I started working for Wildstorm, I first heard the term Atheist and found out what the heck it ment (I grew up pretty sheltered obviously!) How could someone NOT believe in god? It sort of bothered me because even though I wasn't a practicing Christian I still believed, I sort of relegated the Genesis stuff to old fairy tales but the rest was true, wasn't it? I think I sort of became a deist after that. I pictured god sort of starting things off and then walking away and coming back to check up on us every now and then. I never really thought about Jesus anymore, if we were all gods children why was he so special? Should he love us just as much?
At this point I was picking up LOTS of dinosaur and history like books, Jurassic Park had just come out and there were TONS of these things. I read a bunch. But it wasn't until 1997 or so that I was reading this human evolution book that I finally just couldn't keep buying into religion. The more books and things I read the more it just didn't make any sense. Evolution was true we had testable methods, we had direct evidence, transitional forms, DNA! But what about god? Was there room for him? I sort of became and agnostic at that point, but that was short lived. The more research I did on religion the more it just seemed ridiculous and actually pretty evil. I didn't really believe any of it anymore and that seemed to make sense. It was all lies that we were told as children to get us to behave, to control us, to take away our freedom ( you must say that in a Scottish accent!) But the final nail in the coffin goes to Steve Miller. He's the guy you can thank for me 'outing' myself as an Atheist. Thanks Steve!
I had started posting something about evolution on our website message boards and Steve came out of the woodwork with the CRAZIEST stuff I ever heard! I still think he was trying to pull my leg with it! Homo eructs was really just an old human! The bible says people lived to be 900 back then! Lightning changes the dates on fossils! In that heated 'debate' I think I first said there was no god. and I haven't really looked back since! Science and basic reasoning skills showed me that just because something is old (traditional even!) that that doesn't mean it's true. As the years go by I see more and more evidence that there is no god, no religion is true, that people are simply just wasting their time for nothing. It's a bit sad, but it is their time, we can't all be super cool Atheists! ( Only the cool kids, even Stephan Hawking agrees!))
That's it for this week.
Brett