Greetings, reader. My name is Justin Bird, and as should be
obvious, I am an atheist. While I highly doubt anyone other than the
people I hand this link out to will ever stumble across this blog, I
shall nevertheless provide an explanation of my reasons for writing this
blog, as well as my background that has led me to this. Let’s get the
background out of the way first, as a common question asked by theists
always seems to be why an atheist is an atheist. If you wish to skip my
background and get straight to the introduction, just read the last
paragraph.
I was born with multiple heart defects which required me to have three surgeries during the first couple years of my life. After the last surgery, which happened the same week I turned two, I was a bit traumatized, and according to my mother, I wasn’t the same happy kid that I used to be until quite a long after afterwards. Shortly after my release from the hospital, my parents and I were at church one Sunday. I, being just a little kid, was mumbling to myself, and apparently a priest felt that I was being disruptive, and asked my father to take me outside until I quieted down. My father got rather mad that I was essentially getting kicked out of the church (albeit momentarily) when a place like this should be praising Yahweh that I survived my heart defect, not booting us out. My father’s response to this was to leave the church with me and my mom and never come back. This thankfully freed me from ever having to be brought up with church as a tradition, though of course my parents were still Christian, though by no means extremest or fundamentalist. My mother would read a children’s Bible to me and my brother, I vaguely recall grace being spoken at a select few special meals, and God and Jesus were talked about in passing. Nothing too extreme, but I did have a Christian upbringing.
The summer than I turned eight, we moved to a new city. I know that my brother started middle school that very next school year, and that it was some time during middle school that he started to question religion, so I would have been between the ages of eight and ten during this time. At first, he came to a sort of deistic view, describing his idea of a god as essentially an all-powerful toddler, who much like a child playing with building blocks, constructed the universe, but with no particular purpose. He shared this idea with me, and it kind of just stayed in the back of my head. This was the first time that I had ever heard any idea of God that wasn’t the god of the Bible. This was the first time that it ever even occurred to me that there was the possibility hat the Bible wasn’t truth. I had been raised to believe it was, and before that point I used to think everyone was a Christian. While the idea did stay in my mind, at the time I simply dismissed it as random musing on my brother’s part. I didn’t realize at the time that he was questioning religion.
Fast forward to the summer that I turned twelve. This was when I first started to use the internet (my parents were paranoid about viruses and didn’t let us on the computer unsupervised. I guess they eventually got over it.), and it certainly opened up my eyes. I stumbled across a conversation between a Muslim and a Christian. At first I thought this was some sort of cult, a very small false religion, surely. That is how my mind tried to justify this. But then I looked it up. I found not only that this religion had hundreds of millions of followers, but that there were thousands of other religions across the world. This was the first time I ever learned that there were actual fully-formed religions other than Christianity. Before this point I had known about cults and ancient mythologies, but I had never really heard about other modern religions. It was in that moment that my religion shattered, and in that moment that I became an atheist. I realized that there was no evidence at all that Christianity was true. If there was, surely these other religions wouldn’t exist and that everyone would be a Christian. I could see no reason to believe that only one of these thousands of religions was true. It seemed much more likely that this was mass delusion. None of them were true. Even if there was a god out there somewhere, it surely couldn’t be any of these gods, else there would be evidence to support it, and it would surely be common knowledge. While of course I still recognized that a deistic god could exist, there was no reason to believe it. Over the course of the next year, I researched. I found scientific studies that disproved claims made the Bible, and this gave me the confidence to be more vocal. I would openly tell people at school that I was an atheist when they brought up God, and the vast majority of the time it got them angry at me, even causing one girl to punch me simply because she overheard me talking to my friend about why I was an atheist.
As vocal as I was at school, however, I never told my parents. By the time I was in middle school, there was no more Bible reading and references to God were so few and far between that it hardly seemed worth mentioning… until my brother came out to them as an atheist. My mother was shocked, and when I also stepped in to say I was atheist as well, she acted like she failed as a parent, exclaiming that she doesn’t know how she possibly could have raised two atheists, and of course the typical “Where did I go wrong?”. For a while I was angry with her that she would have this view on it. I had always thought of her as a fantastic mother. She didn’t do anything wrong. She always encouraged me and my brother to read and think critically. We were simply doing as she taught us, and our critical thinking is what had brought us to atheism. Eventually, however, she came to accept it, and has since then actually abandoned Christianity and adopted a deistic view on the universe. She still insists on being spiritual, and for now I consider this to be a very large step, so for now I’m not going to question her beliefs.
I am unsure of exactly what my father believes. I know he is still a theist of some sort, but his views also seem to be evolving. He used to be against homosexuality because of the Bible, but now says he doesn’t care, and that everyone should be free to marry whoever they want. He knows I am an atheist and he has said in regards to it that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, so since he isn’t pushing anything on me, I won’t bring it up. I think he may need the promise of an afterlife.
Now, as to what this blog is and why I am making it. I have never read the entire Bible, or even one book from start to finish. I have only read passages. I will begin reading the Bible (King James translation), from Genesis to Revelation upon finishing this entry. Every Friday I will make a post detailing my thoughts and critiques of what I have read that week. As for the reason, it’s rather simple. Theists often claim that certain passages are taken out of context as fuel for an argument, or that since a person hasn’t read the entire Bible they don’t know what they’re talking about, or best of all, if we read the Bible, we’ll be Christians. So, I shall read the entire Bible. Nothing can be taken out of context if I read the entire thing, I most certainly will know what I am talking about, and… well I guess only time will tell on that last claim, haha.
I was born with multiple heart defects which required me to have three surgeries during the first couple years of my life. After the last surgery, which happened the same week I turned two, I was a bit traumatized, and according to my mother, I wasn’t the same happy kid that I used to be until quite a long after afterwards. Shortly after my release from the hospital, my parents and I were at church one Sunday. I, being just a little kid, was mumbling to myself, and apparently a priest felt that I was being disruptive, and asked my father to take me outside until I quieted down. My father got rather mad that I was essentially getting kicked out of the church (albeit momentarily) when a place like this should be praising Yahweh that I survived my heart defect, not booting us out. My father’s response to this was to leave the church with me and my mom and never come back. This thankfully freed me from ever having to be brought up with church as a tradition, though of course my parents were still Christian, though by no means extremest or fundamentalist. My mother would read a children’s Bible to me and my brother, I vaguely recall grace being spoken at a select few special meals, and God and Jesus were talked about in passing. Nothing too extreme, but I did have a Christian upbringing.
The summer than I turned eight, we moved to a new city. I know that my brother started middle school that very next school year, and that it was some time during middle school that he started to question religion, so I would have been between the ages of eight and ten during this time. At first, he came to a sort of deistic view, describing his idea of a god as essentially an all-powerful toddler, who much like a child playing with building blocks, constructed the universe, but with no particular purpose. He shared this idea with me, and it kind of just stayed in the back of my head. This was the first time that I had ever heard any idea of God that wasn’t the god of the Bible. This was the first time that it ever even occurred to me that there was the possibility hat the Bible wasn’t truth. I had been raised to believe it was, and before that point I used to think everyone was a Christian. While the idea did stay in my mind, at the time I simply dismissed it as random musing on my brother’s part. I didn’t realize at the time that he was questioning religion.
Fast forward to the summer that I turned twelve. This was when I first started to use the internet (my parents were paranoid about viruses and didn’t let us on the computer unsupervised. I guess they eventually got over it.), and it certainly opened up my eyes. I stumbled across a conversation between a Muslim and a Christian. At first I thought this was some sort of cult, a very small false religion, surely. That is how my mind tried to justify this. But then I looked it up. I found not only that this religion had hundreds of millions of followers, but that there were thousands of other religions across the world. This was the first time I ever learned that there were actual fully-formed religions other than Christianity. Before this point I had known about cults and ancient mythologies, but I had never really heard about other modern religions. It was in that moment that my religion shattered, and in that moment that I became an atheist. I realized that there was no evidence at all that Christianity was true. If there was, surely these other religions wouldn’t exist and that everyone would be a Christian. I could see no reason to believe that only one of these thousands of religions was true. It seemed much more likely that this was mass delusion. None of them were true. Even if there was a god out there somewhere, it surely couldn’t be any of these gods, else there would be evidence to support it, and it would surely be common knowledge. While of course I still recognized that a deistic god could exist, there was no reason to believe it. Over the course of the next year, I researched. I found scientific studies that disproved claims made the Bible, and this gave me the confidence to be more vocal. I would openly tell people at school that I was an atheist when they brought up God, and the vast majority of the time it got them angry at me, even causing one girl to punch me simply because she overheard me talking to my friend about why I was an atheist.
As vocal as I was at school, however, I never told my parents. By the time I was in middle school, there was no more Bible reading and references to God were so few and far between that it hardly seemed worth mentioning… until my brother came out to them as an atheist. My mother was shocked, and when I also stepped in to say I was atheist as well, she acted like she failed as a parent, exclaiming that she doesn’t know how she possibly could have raised two atheists, and of course the typical “Where did I go wrong?”. For a while I was angry with her that she would have this view on it. I had always thought of her as a fantastic mother. She didn’t do anything wrong. She always encouraged me and my brother to read and think critically. We were simply doing as she taught us, and our critical thinking is what had brought us to atheism. Eventually, however, she came to accept it, and has since then actually abandoned Christianity and adopted a deistic view on the universe. She still insists on being spiritual, and for now I consider this to be a very large step, so for now I’m not going to question her beliefs.
I am unsure of exactly what my father believes. I know he is still a theist of some sort, but his views also seem to be evolving. He used to be against homosexuality because of the Bible, but now says he doesn’t care, and that everyone should be free to marry whoever they want. He knows I am an atheist and he has said in regards to it that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, so since he isn’t pushing anything on me, I won’t bring it up. I think he may need the promise of an afterlife.
Now, as to what this blog is and why I am making it. I have never read the entire Bible, or even one book from start to finish. I have only read passages. I will begin reading the Bible (King James translation), from Genesis to Revelation upon finishing this entry. Every Friday I will make a post detailing my thoughts and critiques of what I have read that week. As for the reason, it’s rather simple. Theists often claim that certain passages are taken out of context as fuel for an argument, or that since a person hasn’t read the entire Bible they don’t know what they’re talking about, or best of all, if we read the Bible, we’ll be Christians. So, I shall read the entire Bible. Nothing can be taken out of context if I read the entire thing, I most certainly will know what I am talking about, and… well I guess only time will tell on that last claim, haha.
No comments:
Post a Comment