Friday, May 30, 2014

How I became an Atheist.

Why am I an Atheist?   Some of my friends and family have asked me that.  Let me start by saying that my becoming an atheist was a gradual process.  It did not happen overnight.  I did not just wake up one day and decided to be an atheist.  It took years of soul searching, questioning, learning and discovery.  If I have to describe it chronologically, it would go something like this.


-  I was never brought up by religious parents.  We did not go to church and I did not go to a catholic school either.  So my education on christianity was meager at best.  In a way I am glad that I was not indoctrinated by the christian belief.  Otherwise, I would probably still be struggling internally on what I believe it.

-  As I got older, I become more and more cognizant of the evil some of these so called religious people do.  I saw that religion / christianity was not all that "good" as it crack up to be.  Many of these so called religious christians are bigoted and full of hypocrisy that they even go against the teachings of christianity.  I have seen that people will use the bible as an excuse to be mean, unjust and evil.  One good example is the use of bible by christians to stifle civil rights of the GLBT community.  It is even worse for the muslims.  They kill GLBT people in some part of the middle east.

- As I learnt more about history, I learned that people from different religions have used their religion to commit murder and war against others that are different.  The beheading of anybody who question the church during the middle ages, the holy war that the christians waged, the spanish inquisition and even today the Jihad by the radical muslims are just a few example from the history page book.   People committed all these heinous acts in the name of their god.

- As I become more educated in science, I found religion to be illogical.  The more I learnt about earth science, geology, astronomy, biology, physics and chemistry, the more I see how flawed the creation theory staunchly defended by the main Abrahamic religions.  The claims of these creationist just do not add up when all the scientific evidence are presented by science.  

- Through learning about the history of christianity, I realized that what we know now about christianity are so full of biases and randomness set forth by men during the infancy of the faith.  So many inconsistencies on the events from different gospels, so many teachings left out in the new testiment, a very long time has passed ( 4 centuries) since the death of Jesus before the faith was organized in the Roman empire, and so many of the pagan Roman practices were incorporated into christianity.  It just seems so random and man made to me.  It became evident that it was men who made all those decisions back then of what we know now as christianity.  It was not as if Jesus himself wrote what was in the bible.   The gospel that we know now were stories handed down by men.  And these stories were not immune to alterations and embellishments.

- As I learned more about the different religions around the world and the different ancient religions, it dawned on me that there are so many different beliefs because it is all man made.  How can a true god allow many people to believe in many religion?  If this god is all powerful and omnipotent as many religions claimed to be, this god would have the power to make every human being in the world believe in him/her. It also dawned on me that these religions came to be because men did not have answers to everything.  So it was easier, specially for the ancients, to create a god as an all encompassing being to cause all these worldly events they can not explain.  Now we have science to answer many of these events that was once attributed to a god.  Lightning is not done by zeus, earthquakes does not happen because the gods are angry, eclipse does not happen because a god did it, shooting stars are not heavenly signs from the gods, etc.  We know better.  There are still questions unanswered by science but it does not have to be of divine intervention.

So what gradually started for me as anger to organized religion became true questioning of beliefs many of us not even dare question.  I dared to question and I got answers from history and science.  The answer for me was that a god is not real. 

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