Growing up in a Christian family, I became a Christian at a young age. I attended church every Sunday and went to a private Christian school K-12th and then attended a Christian College. Bible classes were mandatory throughout my 16 years of education and combine that with church every Sunday, I was very confident in my knowledge of the Bible. However, like most Christians, I still had questions about God, but I accepted I was not going to understand everything and that I needed to just put my faith in Him.
After a few years of being out of school, I found a church I really enjoyed going to. It was a young church and had an incredible worship band. It was like going to a Christian Coldplay concert every Sunday. The music was so powerful it gave me chills, and would reconfirm any doubts I had about God because of how it made me feel.
A few months after discovering this church, I stumbled upon a debate between a Christian and an atheist on YouTube. I decided to watch it and remember thinking to myself, “this should be interesting; how is this atheist going to possibly debate God doesn’t exist.” I was excited to see how the Christian would tear apart the atheist arguments. However, this never happened, turned out the atheist made better arguments than the Christian. He mentioned verses in the Bible I had never heard of before and they clearly did not fit it with my knowledge of who God is. The verses were about God giving rules for slavery; I had never come across these verses in my many years of studying the Bible. These were damaging verses, if God was moral, how could he condone these actions?
(Here are just a few of those verses: Lev 25:44-46, Deut 20:10-15, 1 Cor 14:34, 1 Tim 2:9-15, Duet 22:23-24, Duet 22:28-29, Exodus 21:7-11)
I was really confused about what I had just witnessed, but thought to myself it must have been a fluke; maybe the Christian was not an experienced debater. I was torn, should I just mark it down as a fluke and forget about it, or should I continue watching more debates? If I continue to question this I may not like what I find, was I willing to accept the results even if it meant I discovered I was wrong? I realized I rather know the truth rather than believe what makes me feel good, and if Christianity is right than I will know more about God than I did before and it will only strengthen my relationship with Him going forward. So I decided to watch more debates along with researching the verses that atheist were bringing up.
During this process I discovered a cable access television show called the Atheist Experience, where anyone can call in to discuss or debate why they believe what they do whether they are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu etc. Out of the hundreds of episodes I watched within a span of a few months, not once did I feel the theist caller won an argument. I had never thought about it before but I realized why there aren’t Christian shows where viewers could call in to debate. If Christianity was correct, a show like that would help convert more to Christianity, but I realized it was because Christians didn’t have valid reasons for their beliefs and when challenged they didn’t have much to stand on. Christianity makes sense when the pastor can cherry pick the verses he preaches about and ignore those that are contradictory. It started to resemble more of a cult to me. Pastors I talked to seemed very interested in discussing these issues with me, however once we reached a certain point they were no longer available to continue the conversation. I realized I had to come to the conclusion that my beliefs were not valid.
Was I depressed after realizing that heaven was no longer in my future or that God was no longer going to be a part of my life? Yes, but only for a minute. Sixty seconds later, I realized I never had a chance to go to a place called heaven and God was never influencing my life in the first place. It was just an illusion. After realizing that, I was thankful I discovered this now so that I could live the rest of my life delusion free.
It was a hard but rewarding process of getting to the point where I knew my beliefs were false, but the hardest part was yet to come. I had many friends and family that were Christian and knowing what I did I didn’t want them to continue living a delusion either, so I started telling them about the verses I had discovered and wanted to discuss the issues with them. I even wrote a 15 page paper on why I came to this conclusion to help get the conversations started. I thought they would be thankful I was exposing these issues and showing them that Christianity wasn’t true. I was wrong! I didn’t realized how emotionally attached people were to their beliefs; I was emotionally attached but I didn’t let emotion overcome reason. I thought people followed their religion because they felt they had valid reasons for believing not because they were emotionally attached. I knew that not everyone I talked to about this would lose their faith, but I thought maybe a few would. Still to this day, no one has lost their faith due to me and that’s fine. But I was amazed at how strong of a hold emotions have on people’s beliefs, and realized this is how we can live in a world full of numerous religions yet everyone still claim theirs is correct. Discovering this was much harder for me than discovering that God didn’t exist.
Losing my faith has made it awkward at times between friends and family, but I much rather live in reality than fantasy and this has made me a stronger person. I no longer pray for things to improve, I try to improve them myself. I see the world and life now for what it is and it is even more valuable to me now than before. I no longer see things as good and evil, but as rational and irrational. I wouldn’t say I now follow atheism, as that makes it sound like atheism is its own religion; I actually don’t like the word atheism because it doesn’t mean anything. I am atheist and now free from religion and can make decisions for myself based on logic, reason, and compassion. I am able to think for myself more now than I did before and for that I am very thankful.