Why I Am an Atheist

I am an unusual person in at least one respect: I am an atheist, which in the US makes me part of a very small minority (less than 2% of the population are atheists).

In the US, there is also significant prejudice against atheists: surveys have shown that nearly half of Americans would not want their child to marry an atheist; the Boy Scouts do not allow atheists to be members; more than half of Americans would not vote for an atheist president; and seven states' constitutions do not allow atheists to hold public office (although these laws haven't been enforced since the nineteenth century: on the other hand, the issue probably hasn't come up much, since so many people wouldn't elect an atheist to start with). For this reason, I don't usually tell people that I am an atheist. Instead, I go with the less controversial "not religious".

I was raised by atheist parents in one of the least religious parts of the country (the Bay Area). My mother was also raised by atheists; my father's parents were lukewarm Methodists, but he lost his faith as a young teenager after hearing about a nearby fire which killed several children. I went to private schools where the only visibly religious people were Jewish: while most of the other children adhered to some sort of religion, it was not an important part of their lives at all.

I was 14 before I met someone who actually believed in a real Hell and Satan. When she told me this, I laughed because I thought she was kidding. Who could believe something so ridiculous? This frightened her and she told me not to laugh, I suppose because Satan would come get me. I found it profoundly shocking that someone could believe that a supposedly good Supreme Being would condemn a large percentage of the population to eternal torment.

There are different types of atheists: ones who hate religion (often they were raised religious and hate it with the fervour of a convert), ones who find religion basically illogical (usually the highly educated), and ones who are indifferent to religion, as they have no interest in spirituality. My parents were mostly indifferent, although my mother has said she wishes she could believe in religion, since it seems like a nice idea, and she likes the art and music. My father is interested in the historical Jesus and has read several books on this topic. They never discussed anything relating to religion, spirituality, God, etc. with me or my sister, either to condemn or praise. Occasionally I went to church with my grandmother, which I found dull (although I loved putting money in the collection plate). Later, when my sister briefly became Protestant in a sort of teenage rebellion, my parents drove her twice a week to church, paid for her to attend several church trips, and even attended services with her occasionally. They had no investment in my religious feelings one way or the other.

When I became a teenager, I developed an interest in religion. It was so important to the broader world (although not the world I moved in). Also, I was very interested in being a good, moral person and thought that perhaps religion could provide some assistance in this direction. As a result, I read the entire Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Bhavagad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, St. Augustine, and all of CS Lewis' essays/books/Christian apologetics, in addition to several histories of religion and of religious figures. (Later I found out that most religious people do not bother to read even their own texts or philosophers, but that is a separate issue.) Some of the books were great, some were somewhat interesting, and some were really pretty badly written. But none of them inspired me with any feelings of faith.

The closest I got to that was by reading CS Lewis, who at least had an explanation for the existence of Hell (in The Great Divorce) that I found convincing. But I just couldn't buy the idea of a Supreme Being impregnating a virgin and having a son who ended up crucified by the Romans in a rather pointless (and unpublicized) way. I know this is where Faith is supposed to come in, which allows you to ignore logic and common sense: but it never did for me (I actually think you need to be indoctrinated as a young child for this to work; since virtually everyone is raised religious, even people who claim to be former atheists--like CS Lewis himself).

However, perhaps I could have convinced myself of some religion or other, given enough time, reading material, and exposure to fellow believers. The real stumbling block was the religious.

My parents, despite being atheists, are very moral people, who don't tell lies, cheat on their taxes, or fail to keep their promises. In fact, none of these things would even occur to them as a possibility, let alone more glaring "sins" like uncontrolled sexual behavior, stealing, or attacking others. So my standard was rather high.

Nonetheless, since the whole point of religion is to make you into a better person, I expected that religious people would 1. be very interested in this process and 2. on the whole, be better people (of course some would not be, due to starting at a lower level, as CS Lewis explains in one of his essays). This seemed great, and I was excited to learn more. On both counts, religion failed miserably.

The religious are (on average) poorer, less educated, and stupider than atheists/agnostics/doubters. A well-documented phenomenon is that the more educated someone becomes, the less likely they are to be religious. As a result, the intellectual elite (college professors, for example) are very unlikely to be religious. For example, a 1998 study found only 7% of leading scientists have a personal belief in God. In other words, the more deeply someone has thought about the very topics important in religion (the nature of life, the limits of humanity, humans' place in the world), and the more capable they are of doing so, the less likely they are to actually be religious.

I certainly found this to be true by personal experience: religious people tend to be incurious and uninterested in general self-improvement. I don't think this is because they are religious; rather, it's because they are ignorant and uneducated, and the two tend to go together. But it's depressing, to see so many people wasting their human potential, drowning their minds in horrible media ("Christian" music/books/movies etc. are almost all really really really bad), destroying their bodies with overeating and a lack of exercise, and choosing to ignore large areas of history and current events because otherwise they might have to rethink their faith. If you really believed that you were created in the image of God, and that you were put on earth to become the best person possible, it's hard to understand how you could behave in such a way.

I also found religious people to be on average less moral than the atheists I was familiar with. At the schools I went to, it would be unthinkable to have a child as a unmarried teenager; very few of my classmates were even having sex in high school. I myself have only had sex with one person (my husband). For example, over half of Harvard students had one or zero sexual partners during their four years of college. On the other hand, it is very common for the fervently religious, despite strongly condemning premarital sex, to do it anyway (see: Bristol Palin; or for that matter, my mother's very religious coworker, whose 22 year old daughter now has two illegitimate children by two fathers). Again, this has to do with the effects of social class and education, not religion per se: but it shows how unimportant religion can be in actually regulating people's behavior.

In other aspects of behavior, the religious did no better. Two of my classmates were Mormon (and thus, unusually, held religion in an important role in their lives): one was a dweeby, scrawny and bullied guy, who wasn't a bad person; the other (whose father had some very high-ranking position in the church) was a complete jerk, who regularly made racist comments and treated all the girls with contemptuous arrogance. He hit me in the head with a football once and didn't even apologize. He also said that his father regularly beat all the children in the family (including him, even though he was 16 at the time) with a belt and other implements, which probably explains a lot.

In college and later, this pattern continued. At best, the religious were just average; at worst, their religious beliefs had a malign influence on their behavior, giving them a license to feel smug (after all, they are going to heaven and you are not), a justification for their prejudices (women should be silent: it says so in the Bible!), or a way to bully and intimidate others (God said you are a sinner!).

What appalled me in particular was that religious people claimed to be more moral, even as they failed at this. The hypocrisy was off-putting: and mind-boggling, because if you believe in God, won't he know? The argument that religious people sometimes make against atheism, that without religion we will all revert to bestial behavior, just shows how low their moral fiber is: after all, the reason to do the right thing is not for any reward (or to avoid any punishment), but for your own satisfaction and because you must follow your moral compass. The right thing to do remains the right thing, regardless of God's existence (or nonexistence). If you can only do the right thing under compulsion, your morality doesn't count for much.

So over time my interest in religion withered, to be replaced first by a firm agnosticism, then by atheist leanings, and finally by definitely held atheism, to the point where now I wish everyone could be atheist, which would improve people's lives at both the individual and societal level. Think of how much humanity could be benefited, if the resources now directed at church buildings, religious workers' salaries and evangelizing were reallocated to providing clean drinking water, immunizations, healthy food, and an education to the world's poor.

I still find the bankruptcy of religion and its works to be disappointing though. Like Communism, it's a beautiful idea in theory and I wish it actually worked.