My story

[RedFox]

My story starts when I was a kid and is about how I got into and out of religion.

 

Why I am Not a Christian: The History and End of my Religious Life

 

I am an exchristian who was born into a Catholic family in a rural area. My family has Catholic ancestors from Ireland on both sides. I was baptized as an infant, but didn't go to church much early in my life. One time, my mother took me to church when I was young. We sat far from the front so the priests looked small. I thought that they were just walking around the altar, sitting and standing around.

 

Later, my mother and godmother got some children's religion books. I think that my godmother was a religious teacher because I remember my mother saying something about that. There were also many copies of one book, enough for a small class. One of the books was about the story of Adam and Eve in Eden. I don't remember that book saying anything about the Fall, but that is to be expected for a little kid's book. They cut out the more distressing parts and showed only the good parts. Another book was about things like Heaven and what happened to people after they died. It also cut out the distressing parts by mentioning only Earth and Heaven, and nothing about Hell. Using simple modernist art, it said that people had souls that would leave Earth and go to Heaven after death and that Jesus would still be in your heart. Oddly enough, one picture showed a soul leaving Earth and another picture showed a heart with Jesus in it buried underground. This may have been one of the first examples of a contradiction in religious material that I have seen. Then it said that Heaven was a place of peace with no wars or other bad things. Nothing about Hell was mentioned. This looked like a good way to pull kids in religion by hiding the more distressing parts until the kids are trapped. The book also just told its readers about those things without showing any evidence. The only differences between that book and other storybooks were that it was in second person and that there were people who actually took such things seriously.

 

Another book that I got was a little book about church and Jesus. It had children's versions of the more gentle New Testament stories and some pictures to go with them. It also had a section on how church services were held. One of the stories involved money and my mother said that we gave money to church like the people in the story did. So she gave me coins to put in the collection basket at church. Another thing I did was make the sign of the cross with the holy water. I needed to be lifted up to do that because I was too short to reach it. I did it because I saw other people do it.

 

A few years later, a second grade elementary school teacher who my parents knew retired and gave lots of children's books to us. There were many story books and all sorts of science books. They taught me that there is a lot to learn by observing the world because I could see the things described in the books in the real world. For example, there was a book with the word why in its title. It answered questions about the world. I also borrowed many books from the school library. One was a big book about biology. From how it was colored, I'd say that the book was from the 50's or 60's. But it still taught a lot. I also borrowed an old astronomy book from the time when it was thought that Mercury rotated in the same time it took to orbit the sun. My grandmother also used to be a biology teacher and we got some old biology books from her. They were from the time when biologists placed living things into three kingdoms. This enabled me to compare old and new books such as those from the local library. This allowed me to see how scientific knowledge and understanding had progressed over time.

 

Another book I borrowed from the elementary school library and later borrowed from the local library was a book about constellations and the Greek myths connected to them. This gave me exposure to other belief systems. In 6th grade, our social studies book had a section about Christianity. Even through it only told things that Christians would accept, it talked about Christians in the third person. I found it interesting that it didn't say we or us, but Christians and they. Some other students wondered why that material was in the book and the teacher said that we needed to know about it because of Christians living in the world now. The same book was also the first place where I read about Muslims. Before that, I didn't even know that Islam existed. I didn't really know who the Jews were until I learned about the Holocaust in the 5th or 6th grade. I didn't even know what Hitler looked like. Yes, I saw pictures of him before, but I didn't recognize them as pictures of Hitler.

 

I was surprised about the textbook because I thought that everybody were Christians. One time in 6th grade, I even brought a children's Bible to school and read some of it without thinking that anyone else would notice. At the end of the day, we went out to wait for our buses. I realized that I forget the Bible and ran back to get it. The people back at the classroom noticed that, but I didn't think much of it. At least that Bible had pictures of a Jesus without a beard and different hair from the usual pictures. That showed me that there were other opinions on what Jesus looked like. One time, I read a newspaper article about a play about Jesus. The actor who played Jesus was black. Some church school groups were going to see the play and when they found that the Jesus actor was black, they cancelled their trips. I thought that was narrow minded.

 

In class, we were talking about cooking pork and the teacher said that the Jews didn't eat pork because they didn't know how to cook it and it was easier for the priests to tell people that God didn't want them to eat pork than it was to explain the actual reasons. That showed me that just because something was written in a religious document doesn't mean that a god commanded it.

 

In 7th grade, we did a fun archeology project where we were set up with funds that we used to buy pieces of paper representing plots of land from the teacher to inspect them and learn about the Hopi people who lived on the land. People came up with different interpretations of the same objects. The teacher told us that was usual with such things. This is unlike Christianity where each sect believes that its interpretation of the scriptures is the only valid one and condemns the other sects and everybody of other religions and nonbelievers to eternal torture in hell. Many sets of data can be interpreted in different ways, especially those from distant past. We have multiple interpretations of the fossil evidence and other evidence for evolution. The question is not if evolution happened because the evidence already supports that. It is which interpretations are the more likely ones. Christians think in absolute terms and do not want to wait for research to be done because they think that Jesus might come any time now, so they think it is okay to profess one and only one interpretation of everything, ignoring the rest or attributing them to the devil.

 

We didn't go to church much during my elementary school years. I did try reading the Bible a few times. One time, I tried to start reading it from front to back, but it got boring after a few chapters. Another time when I read it, I read the part with Hebrew laws. Their customs were unlike ours, so I read it as an account of the laws of another people. The Bible I read had comments in it and there was a comment about one verse that said that it was a fragment that was attached to something else in older texts. That showed that the Bible's text wasn't static from the moment of its creation and had changed. Another time, I focused on Revelation because the comments about the symbolism in it were interesting. This showed that there were other options besides a literal interpretation.

 

But when I was in the 6th grade, my mother and I went to church again. That day's Gospel happened to be the story about the king and the servant with the king rewarding the ones who invested money left in their care and punishing the one who just buried it. I found it interesting because the commentary that followed was about not burying our talents. My mother asked me if I was interested in the service and I said yes. Soon, I joined a church school class that met on Sundays at the local Catholic school. Since I was deaf, my mother interpreted for me. We did things like read Bible stories and talk about them and watch movie versions of them. Each class started with an Our Father's prayer, but I didn't know the prayer so I just sat there while the others prayed.

 

One time, church school inferred with my school work. I was to make two pictures using points with x and y coordinates so we could exchange our list of points with other students and see what pictures others had made. I easily made one of the Hubble telescope, but the other one was a picture of a deformed moon and I could not finish it because it had over 200 points and because I went to church school and therefore had less time to do my work. The next day, the student who made my Hubble picture was pleased and lucky; the teacher bought my story about only one list of points being completed.

 

One time, I went to a service with the other people in the church school. The parents sat at a different place from the students so I was alone, but my mother told me not to get Communion. I didn't know why so I wondered why others could eat little pieces of bread when I couldn't. I had this happen to me before that when I went to a service with some relatives and they told me not to get Communion. Again, I wondered why.

 

In 7th grade, I joined another class at a different local Catholic school with my sister and two deaf friends of ours with a teacher who could sign. I learned prayers such as Our Father and Hail Mary and about Bible stories. We studied to prepare for our first confessions. We were told that we would need to tell the priest what sins we committed and that the priest would have us say prayers then God would forgive us. I asked what if we did some sins but forget that we did them. They told me that God would forgive all of them anyway. As confession day approached, I thought of a list of sins, but on the day of confession as I was going to the church, I could remember only one thing and felt guilty about not remembering the others. Now I don't buy it because someone who killed millions of people could confess a little silly thing and be forgiven of everything, including millions of murders.

 

About the time of our first confessions, a reporter for a religious newspaper visited our class and took pictures that were included in the newspaper with an article about our class. One picture was of me sitting on a chair reading something and the teacher kneeling on the floor and signing to me. The other picture was of all four students standing and holding up the certificates we got for doing our first confessions. I was the only one in the picture with a big smile. I wonder what the readers of the newspaper thought when they saw that picture and what they would think if they knew my present position.

 

The confession was part of the preparation for my first Communion. We learned about the bread and wine changing into the Body and Blood of Christ. We even had practice communions to show the younger students what would happen. I played the role of the priest by donning a robe, collecting play money and serving pieces of crackers and grape juice. When I was breaking the crackers, the teacher and my mother said that it didn't matter how small the pieces were because Jesus would still be in each and every piece. One of the students was concerned about drinking blood. A few years later, when the same teacher was teaching us about symbols, she used the bread and wine as examples.

 

Then the sexual abuse scandals started and we found out that one of the priests at our church was transferred there because he was an abuser somewhere else. A pastor who was at the church for less than a year just left one day and left a letter for us that didn't say why he left. So we had a Christmas with no pastor.

 

One time, in Sunday school, we were talking about that story where Jesus healed the lepers. I thought that the word "leper" could be replaced with things like "gay man" and my mom and the teacher told me that older people would not approve of such things because they were more narrow minded. I didn't really want to be associated with such people.

 

I went to church only once at university. It was on campus at the interfaith center so the priest said that God had chosen to have us go to the university. That came across as somewhat odd because I didn't remember any magic stuff happening to cause me to choose RIT (Rochester Institue of Technology. It was the obvious choice because it was not that far away, had plenty of services for deaf people and I was good enough to get into the college of engineering. The others there looked serious and I was the only one who smiled, so I wondered why. Some people there went to the front to be honored because they went on a religious outing at a camp somewhere. I tried asking them what was so special about them going to the front and they didn't tell me. I didn't figure out that it was a religious outing they went to until later.

 

My first roommate said that he was a Christian and went to church. Once, I was laughing about something and he thought that I was insane and asked me if I was a Christian. I said yes because that was what I thought I was when I was growing up. I was surprised that someone would raise the possibility of me not being a Christian.

 

There are three general membership Christian groups at RIT, which are BASIC (Brothers and Sisters in Christ), IVCF (Intervarsity Christian Fellowship) and CCC (Campus Crusade for Christ) as well as other more specific groups. I had a professor who was a member of BASIC, but I didn't get involved in that group. I had two roommates during my freshman year and the second one was involved with IVCF and CCC. He introduced me to those groups and we went to larger IVCF gatherings sometimes. I liked the IVCF gatherings because they were informal compared to masses. The roommate went to CCC gatherings only once in a while. I did go to a few of their game nights. Once or twice, someone mentioned a very large gathering of Christians that would happen in May to grow and pray. He made me feel like going, although he told me that I didn't have to go.

 

The second roommate also introduced me to the Brick Testament. Some of the stories made me feel sick, especially the Old Testament ones involving geoicide.

 

One time, I was feeling bad about something and decided to go to an IVCF gathering. But that only distracted me from my problems, which ended up making me feel suicidical. I also had problems in one lab because I was taking three labs at once and that was too much work. When I couldn't figure out things, my mind would start begging to God to help me, which only distracted me. I withdrew from that class and lab and took it again after I had deconverted. I did better because I felt more confident, but some of the religious programming still surfaced and made me think of God when I got stuck. But I resisted that to get myself more completely deprogrammed. I told this to a Christian, but she thought I was doing it wrong. But the impulses to think these thoughts about God came up involuntary and made things worse, so I wasn't choosing to do things the wrong way. I guess that what they would see as the right way would be deciding that God would be letting God's will be done. But I wasn't about to think that my life was in the reins of an invisible being. Instead, I decided to trust my abilities and use them with whatever came along in the universe.

 

Later on, not having religion to worry about so much took enough off of my mind to figure out that I wanted to change my major from computer engineering to imaging science and an astronomy minor.

 

On August 18, 2003, I found a link to a site that listed and discussed the dark stuff in the bible. After reading what was in the bible and finding atheist web sites, I decided that I didn't want to be in a religion with a god like the Old Testament Christian god, who was a mass murderer. I also read about the self contradictionary characteristics of the omnimax god. I got grossed out by the Old Testament god to where I wasn't emotionally attached to it anymore. Then I could be more rational about religion.

 

I had considered pantheism and deism before, but calling the universe god just added another label to it and the deist god could be cut away with Occam's razor. It would be simpler to think that the universe just existed instead of having a god that just existed and created an universe and let it run. Then what would have made the god? Then the same thing could be said about any god makers and makers of those makers. Occam's razor cut off those extraneous makers and left the universe because they weren't really needed to explain the universe. So I ditched pantheism and deism and decided that I was an atheist after reading about the variou meanings of the word. After reading about what agnostism meant, I decided that I was an agonistic atheist.

 

When I was a Christian, I would be afraid to sleep in the dark without pulling my blanket over my head because I thought I saw demons floating around. I did it even in the summer when I would get cooked under the blankets. After I deconverted, I felt less afraid and could sleep without blankets in the summer, althrough the fear involuntary came back sometimes. That became less frequent with time. Along with the fear of demons, I feared that Christianity may have scarred me in ways I haven't yet recognized.

 

I deconverted at about the time I started talking to my third roommate online. He was a Pentecostal Christian who was a small groups leader for a Bible study. I went to many of his Bible studies to see what the Christians said about what they were reading. I also had some interesting discussions with him.

 

At school, I found Russell's book Why I am Not a Christian in the used book bin. I bought and read it. One time, somebody saw me with it in the laundry room, looked surprised and pointed it out to his friends. One of his friends told him to ignore it as if it didn't matter.

 

Next year, I had two roommates. The first didn't care about my religion and the second one was a Christian who knew my second and third roommates. One time, he asked me if I was a Christian. I was embarrassed to tell him that I wasn't. He said it was okay and he respected my opinions. I still went to IVCF with him and the two former roommates sometimes to have fun on game nights and to see what they talked about.

 

One time, I needed to go to an art museum for a final project for an art history class. Someone in the class was unable to drive me there, so I asked my roommate if he could drive me there. I told him that we could go to the bible study and church he went to and then go to the museum afterwards. I didn't want him to make two trips.

 

First, we went to the bible study at a Baptist church. It was interesting to see what they said. Then we had a worship service. I was near the front, where the interpreters were, and in front of my roommate and his friends. It felt odd to be in church. Lots of people were wearing nice clothes. The college people were dressed like me in jeans. I went along with the service so they won't think I was too strange.

 

It was interesting to compare the Baptist service to Catholic masses because I haven't been to anything other than Catholic ones before. They had some people sing songs as if they valued individual performences. They said interesting and scary things like all nonbelievers being fated to go to hell. I guess they didn't know I was one.

 

After the service, I talked with the roommate and his friends. My first roommate was there and I introduced him to my fifth, then present, roommate. They were from the same state. Then we went to a Chinese buffet. The teacher from the bible study were there and herded us to tables in the buffet and said that we were sheep. So I guess I was a cat in middle of the sheep. There, we also met some other people who were also from IVCF.

 

After the buffet, my roommate and I went to the museum. The Egyptian exhabit there impressed me, so I wrote my final project on it.

[Loren]

On August 18, 2003, I found a link to a site that listed and discussed the dark stuff in the bible. After reading what was in the bible and finding atheist web sites, I decided that I didn't want to be in a religion with a god like the Old Testament Christian god, who was a mass murderer. I also read about the self contradictionary characteristics of the omnimax god. I got grossed out by the Old Testament god to where I wasn't emotionally attached to it anymore. Then I could be more rational about religion.

Welcome, RedFox!

The vicious brutality of the OT god is one of the most common "wake up" points for Christians who later leave the faith. After all, with all that horrible nastiness and mean-spiritedness, it gets increasingly difficult for the believer to keep falling back on that tired old doctrinal line that tells us that since God is completely good by definition, if He did something horrible, (let alone a long list of horrible things) it must have actually been a "good" thing, and we just don't understand it. "His ways are higher than our ways," etc.

 

It becomes increasingly clear to the OT student that such paltry excuses for God's bad behavior are very thin and very frayed shoestrings indeed.

 

Again, welcome! Enjoy the fora!

 

 

Loren

[Onyx]

HI, Red Fox. I'm a 16 year old Deaf atheist who leaved Charismatic and other sects. At last a fellow pioneer Deaf atheist. Anyway, my leaving is a looooong story.

 

So, WELCOME to the House of Satire and debates, I'm the local satirist here.

 

Some satires of mine to get started on:

 

Ten commandants according to A T Thunderbird

 

A Picky Critic

 

Harry Potter is EVIL!

 

Exodus 34 according to A T

 

My most well known satire:

 

Killing Infidels for Christ forums

[RedFox]

HI, Red Fox. I'm a 16 year old Deaf atheist who leaved Charismatic and other sects. At last a fellow pioneer Deaf atheist. Anyway, my leaving is a looooong story.

 

So, WELCOME to the House of Satire and debates, I'm the local satirist here.

 

Hi, I read some of your writing and they're funny.

[Onyx]

Thanks, I've started a looong time ago. Even into the early 90s in the form of cartoons.