How I Became a Secular Humanist/Atheist - Improved Formatting
Recently I was thinking about how I became a secular humanist and an atheist. When I was growing up, I never went to church, but my mom always told me to say my prayers before I went to sleep (“Now I lay me down to sleep…”). I always had a fascination with science, and I still love to watch shows like NOVA and The Universe. Eventually, as I was watching the shows regarding the earth’s formation and human evolution, I began to wonder, “Where does Jesus come into all this? It doesn’t look like he was necessary at all.” In school, I was always fascinated by other religions, and one day I asked my dad, “How is Christianity any better than other religions?” He replied, “It isn’t”. As I grew older, I learned that my dad had been a nonbeliever since he was a teenager. I did my research, and every time I found some website trying to say how Christianity is the only true religion, I was never convinced. The most common explanation was how Jesus fulfilled so many prophecies as predicted prior to his appearance in the Bible. I found a pretty good counterargument that stated that Jesus would have been well-versed in the old testament, and may have made it so that everything he did was in line with the supposed prophecies.
One of the other factors that I never understood was “sin”. I came to realize that the God that I prayed to at my bedside was not at all how the God of the Bible is. I later found out that the type of God that I believed in was more in line with Deism, in which God was simply the prime mover that sparked the Big Bang, after which everything according to science (including the formation of earth and biological evolution over billions of years) took place. When I found out that the entire idea of Jesus Christ being a “savior” was because Adam and Eve had eaten from a magical tree of knowledge and brought death (real and spiritual) to the world, I thought to myself, “wait a minute”. There was no such thing as two humans being created directly by God; man evolved from lower species over a very long time. It was at this point that I found out that many Christians thought that the world was only 6,000 years old, as opposed to 4.6 billion, which I had always known to be true. I felt really sick at this point, and I began a period of mass research into creationism, watching several debates between evolutionists and creationists; and every time the creationist would be defeated, and I realized that while scientists work with an open mind and skeptical behavior, creationists are simply attempting to further their religious beliefs and don’t care about evidence or real knowledge. My acceptance of biologial evolution and of the age of the earth was reaffirmed and strengthened, and though I have seen many attempts to disprove both, none have ever been convincing, and never stand up to scrutiny from the scientific community.
While I was studying the scientific nature of the Christian concept of God, I was simultaneously studying the moral aspects of it. What I realized was that the God of the Bible was a monster. The initial realization came while reading about the Noachian Flood. Here is an omniscient, omnipotent God that knows everything past, present, and future. Here is a God who knew that the pre-Flood peoples would become “wicked” before he created them, and who knew that they were all (all: as in, every man, woman, and infant child) going to painfully and terrifyingly die by drowning, and yet he created them anyway. Just to have them all wiped out. Among other stories was the tale of the plagues of Egypt. As the tenth plague, rather than punishing the pharaoh himself, he kills the pharaoh’s child, who had himself done nothing wrong to the Hebrews. And not only does God kill the pharaoh’s child, but every single firstborn in ALL of Egypt. Children. God killed innocent children who had themselves done nothing wrong, and who could not understand in their youth what was going on with the Hebrews. Undoubtedly some of those firstborn children were infants. God was an infanticidal maniac. He could have done anything to convince the pharaoh, and yet he decided to kill his little boy. Finally, again I realized that here was an omniscient, omnipotent God who knows everything that is going to happen before it happens, and who creates all souls, and yet he made the children of Egypt knowing fully well that they were going to die.
To go even farther back, God created the Egyptians knowing that they would eventually no longer worship him, and would therefore be punished. Even after the Hebrews are free, God is still monstrous to even his own “chosen people”. After the Israelites become doubtful of Moses’ return from Mt. Sinai after going to receive the Ten Commandments, they build a Golden Calf as an idol to worship. God is omniscient and omnipotent, and knows they are going to do this. When God tells Moses to have all who are loyal to him (God) to stand by Moses, only the Levites come to Moses’ side. Then God commands for all the other Hebrews to be killed. The vast majority of God’s chosen people were put to death, and even before God led them out of Egypt, he knew that they were going to betray him, he knew they would not come back to him, and he knew that they would all suffer painful deaths…and he created them anyway. Just to be exterminated. But the most horrific realization came to me when I considered the billions of people on Earth who didn’t believe in God and Jesus, and instead had different beliefs. According to the Bible, all people have souls created by God, including those of other faiths. I then realized that God has created billions of souls throughout history who have defied him or never believed in Him, and therefore are sent to exist forever in eternal damnation. All those people, who God knew would never worship him, and would therefore suffer forever, and yet he created them anyway, knowing the unimaginable horrors that they would face as a result of their defiance towards him, which he was aware would happen from the start. I nearly cried at the idea of such a cruel being as Yahweh, and I was glad that I realized that he doesn’t exist.
Sometime later, I had stopped praying when I went to bed at night, knowing that I was just talking to myself. I declared myself to be a humanist, though I had pretty much been one before in all but name. I must note that I am an atheist in the sense that Richard Dawkins is. I don’t know for absolute certainty but I think any God is very improbable, and I live my life with the idea that he is not there; the same way I live my life on the assumption that the magical dancing leprechaun that only my little brother can see when he looks out the window towards my backyard at 3:32 A.M. sharp, is not there. I developed a greater appreciation for life and for the wonders of the universe, and through reading the scientific works of people like Carl Sagan, I felt a greater sense of fulfillment and happiness in me then I could have ever imagined with any form of religion. I am as important to the Universe as a single quark in a single atom in a single grain of sand on a beach the size of a blue giant sun, and yet I couldn’t be more content. This speck of dust likes what he sees when he looks up in the sky, knowing that he is made of star stuff, and is, in a sense, a way for the universe to observe itself. I know that when I die, my body will remain and its matter will transform, but “I” (the electro pulses in my brain that make up my mind) will be forever gone. That doesn’t bother me. I am just happy of the opportunity I have to learn so many things about existence. The universe truly is a beautiful place, and I only wish more people understood the grandeur of reality. For me, just like for Carl Sagan, “It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
Thank you for reading my memoir. If you have any similar experiences, please do tell in the response section. I hope you all have wonderful, fulfilling lives.
Sincerely Yours,
Geddy Claypool Burton
