IDoNotGetIt

Were you ever a Christian before you became an atheist?

Absolutely!  I laugh now at all the arguments I had (and lost) with other atheist back then.  Of course, at that time, I didn’t see it as losing the argument.  I just said to myself: “they don’t have faith” and moved on.  Thankfully, I didn’t stay ignorant, I got educated and the rest happened naturally.

When I think back about how I slowly started seeing the truth and became less and less of a believer, I sincerely believe that this will occur throughout society.  Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first, of course.  We as a people have a natural curiosity, it was this curiosity that created religion in the first place, to answer the questions that we couldn’t answer otherwise at that time.  And it is this same curiosity that will slowly erode away at religious dogma until it is nothing more than a field of study for historians.  I don’t expect it to happen quickly, it may take many hundreds of years more before it is completely gone but science has answers, real, tangible answers.  Religion attempts to fill in the blanks but the blanks are getting smaller and smaller all the time.  There will be a time when religion has no further purpose in our society as an answers provider.  This, I believe, is why the religious authorities are waging such a fierce battle against science now.  They know that science is a religion nullifier.  But people like the real and tangible answers that science provides.  They like the medicine that makes them live longer and they like the technologies that make their lives easier and more fun.  Science is the reason they have these things and religion can’t replace them.  Science will prevail, I’m just glad I’m on the right side and I know this because knowledge beats faith every time.

What is your atheist testimony?

I’ve never really thought of having a testimony.  Since it is something you provide when you are trying to prove something to someone, i.e. prove something to a jury in a court of law.  And I’ve never really tried to prove to anyone that atheism is truth.  I don’t even think of atheism that way.  Atheism isn’t a way of life.  It isn’t something you believe and think about.  I don’t think “atheist thoughts”, I do think about theism and note its flaws and inconsistencies but I don’t think about atheism and think “now they have the right idea”.  Atheism isn’t something, it is a name given to nothing.  You don’t believe in atheism, you are simply an atheist when you are not a theist.  A theist is something you have to have beliefs to be, an atheist is not.  I don’t need to prove atheism is correct or right, I just have to prove that theism is not correct.  It shows a great lack of understanding of what it means to be atheist just to ask for such a thing as “atheist testimony”.  The easiest way I can think to explain this is with this analogy, lets substitute believer for theist and non-believer for atheist.  Now if someone tells you a story about unicorns and says they exist somewhere in this universe, you can either believe them or not, if you do, you are a believer and if not, you are a non-believer.  Now you might ask the person for their testimony to prove that there are unicorns somewhere in the universe but you wouldn’t expect the non-believer to provide proof that there are not unicorns somewhere in this universe, no testimony is required of the non-believer, only the believer has the burden of proof.

What life experiences did you have to make you believe there is no god?

I’ll answer this question twice; the first is the answer to the question that is asked.  The second is the answer to the question that is implied.

The simple answer to this question is education.  The one and only life experience that I would attribute to my disbelief in god is getting an education.  My philosophy, logic and science classes were the keys to unlocking my mind.  They were like the Rosetta stone that decoded all the questions that I had but didn’t think had answers.  They made me question the beliefs that I had always taken for granted.  I stopped thinking “the answer doesn’t matter, God did it”, and started finding answers to my questions.

I think many theists find it very difficult to understand what makes a person disbelieve and they assume it has to be some kind of act of retaliation or retribution against god for some perceived wrong done on his part.  I can say, unequivocally, that I am not in some state of denial and I’m not retaliating against god because I don’t believe he has given me something I believe I deserve.  Now after the fact, after I realized that there is no god, I did start to admit to some things that happened in my life that I don’t see a just and good god causing or even allowing happening, but they have nothing to do with the reason I don’t believe in god.  In fact, there were a few life experiences that I believed were proof positive that there was a god, when I was a believer.  Now I realize that it is much more reasonable to assume that they were a coincidence, not even that unlikely of a coincidence for that matter.  In short, none of these life experiences, whether negative or positive, had any bearing on my rational belief that there is no god.