There you have it folks, I am officially an atheist.

It’s taken me a long time of bouncing between this and agnosticism. The thing is, the proper term for what I believe does not exist. It’s between the two. I am fully aware of the fallacy of being certain of something I cannot possibly know – on a philosophical level it is very weak to close my ears to all unknowns. However, for all intents and purposes, the term best expresses my beliefs to the Everyman. I mean to convey that I do not believe in any deity man has ever come up with or heard of, and think that the possibility of any God can only be attributed to man’s imagination, and is therefore a load of bollocks.

Before anyone pounces on me, please understand that I could never justify this way of thinking in one sitting. It’s doable, but a long haul. This has not been a snap decision nor a lazy one.

That said, I have no idea what caused the creation of our universe, I have no idea what caused the Big Bang. Nonetheless, I think that the impossibility of disproving God, the reason why I’m told agnosticism is the way to go, is the same as the impossibility of disproving the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Russell’s Teapot. or Zeus for that matter. Therefore I am now comfortable with my new religious standing.

Simply put: I’m an atheist to any God anybody is likely to be referring to in any conversation I’ll be having within my lifetime.

I grew up a Catholic.  I went to Church with my mother and sister nearly every Sunday.  I went to catechism, did my first communion and was confirmed in grade 7.  I was pretty comfortable believing what I did.  I remember sometimes crying at church, the good kind, from feeling that sense of awe at the thought of a loving supreme God taking care of me.  I was terrified yet lovingly submissive to God at the same time.  I also remember, late in high school, being angry with my sister who stopped going to mass with mom and I.  Around that point, I found the Church itself pretty much useless, other than being a medium for worshipers to gather.  I found it to be a waste when we could/should all just worship on our own, in our own personal relationship with God.  But it really hurt my mother to hear me say that, so I’d still go with her.

Come our high school graduation, I carried the cross to the altar for our special graduation mass.  At this time I was asking myself things like: “Is Satan really bad?  If he’s bad, then why is he the one in charge for punishing the bad people in Hell?”  I’m sure any aspiring theologian out there can answer questions like these, given the complexity of scripture (and rightfully so), but suffice to say that I was questioning some things, whether right or wrong.

Come university, I was really starting to rebel against the Church itself, as an establishment.  I was learning of the atrocities caused by decisions at the Vatican (late to learn, I know), and found myself to call bull on a lot of local priests.  I was still a believer in God though.  I went off on a “personal relationship with Him” path.  To me this was the obvious choice, but I only had one argument:  The love I feel for others, the sadness I experience, life and consciousness, the beauty and perfection of our existence, the fact that anything existed in the first place, was reason enough to believe in God.  For me that was good enough.  I respected people of all faiths, figuring that God was benevolent enough to understand that we were born in different cultures, in different traditions, and the He would see we still loved Him, though we gave Him different names.

From here onward, I am fuzzy on dates.  I’d say that the next thing that happened to me was when I first took part in an evolution/creation debate.  I had never believed in creation.  I just figured God was responsible for the Big Bang, and that He put it it differently in scripture so that the people of yesteryear would be able to digest it (try telling someone who thinks the world is flat about cosmic microwave background radiation, good luck).  During these evolution debates, I found that many atheists and religious people, Christians in most cases, to be so one-sided in their arguments.  A typical discussion I’d overhear:

Atheist: We’ve evolved from monkeys.

Christian: No we haven’t!  God created the world 6000 years ago!

Atheist: That’s ridiculous, you are obviously retarded.  There’s evidence to support my claim.

Christian: It’s so obvious!  God is right in front of you and you refuse to see Him!  Besides, I know of some biologists who believe in creation as stated in the Bible.

Atheist: You’re a total moron.

Christian:  Your loss.  At least I’m not going to burn in Hell.

Frankly, I was annoyed by this.  These people I was overhearing were giving both sides of the argument bad names.  It was like watching kids cover their ears and scream “LALALALALA!”.  It was here that I started noticing that the people around me, like my parents, friends and peers were just passing along what they were told, and could very well be wrong.  I was calling bullshit on people close to me for the first time of my life…

I stopped going to Church altogether by this time, to my mother’s disappointment.  I felt guilty, too.  I think the next big part was when I moved to Lloydminster in the summer of 2006.  I had no idea what I was in for, but it all started when my housemate, Amie, shouted to Alana, who was somewhere else in the house: “Alana! Have you seen my Bible?”

All I could think of was “Your what!?”  I was stunned to hear her say this.  I had never, never heard of anyone searching for their Bible for casual use, let alone a girl my age.  She saw this in my stunned face (I was a bad poker player then, too), smiled at me and went off to…Bible Study!?

So began my introduction to a version of Christianity I never thought really existed.  I thought most church-goers nowadays were just like me.  Wrong.  I remember having long conversations with my housemates about religion, sex, marriage, society, evolution and pretty much anything else.  I found them to be so…old fashioned?  I had a hard time, at first, believing that none of these people in their mid-to-late twenties had never had sex before.  When we spoke of more religious stuff, I found myself to really disagree with them, or not understand their explanations.  For example, I ask about the “Free Will vs. God is omniscient” thing.  Their explanation sounded fair at first – it’s like being a parent and telling your kid to wear a helmet when he’s out on his bicycle, but you know he won’t wear it.  But then I’d go and ask why God made Eve, because he would have known that she would eat the apple long before There Was Light.  Was this some kind of sick joke so God could entertain himself?  Then they’d just laugh off my ‘foolish’ statement and carry on.  But this was important!  I had just found something that should shake their entire belief and they just laughed at me!  What about the millions more people who pray and still get slaughtered in wars?  I wanted answers!

This is when I started noticing social patterns, how we are products of our environments, how our parents raise us, etc.  Soon I would think that most people believe in God because they were either 1) Afraid of death/infinity 2) Surrounded by their religion while growing up and never allowed their faith to be adequately challenged.  I noticed how people hated to stray from their biases, including myself.

I went to church with them once in a while and I spoke to the pastors a couple of times.  I remember one conversation I had with the pastor in the church I went to in Edmonton.  I briefly gave him my background and told him how much I wanted to believe in God, but that my faith was really being shook up.  I was looking hard.  Because I’ll admit to you right now that my greatest fear is death; and if this was my ticket to a happy eternal afterlife, I wanted in.

I asked about the circular reasoning in the Bible (Bible says God created everything – God inspired the Bible).  His response was that I needed faith.  Well frig, that’s quite the leap.  For me to believe in something that easily, I may as well have faith that the moon was made of cheese.  Again, I’m sure a theologian would be chiming in here at any moment explaining it all, only to be countered my some militant atheist.  I learned that no matter what side of the argument, you’ll have experts who dedicated their lives to the study their side (which is cool).

But this whole staving off of my questions was getting to me.  Therefore, I was slowly trickling into agnosticism.  I had much more, pardon the term, faith, in the scientific method then the answers presented to me up to then.  I was pretty much screaming to the world:  “Will someone PLEASE prove to me that God is real?  I really friggin’ want to believe in Him!”.  So I did that for about a year.  I started to really question how people had come to believe whatever they did, and noticed that nobody challenged what they were used to knowing.  Nobody asked “why?”, nobody questioned authority.  This is when I first started writing my blog.  I’m sure you’ll find interesting things if you go to the first few posts.

This is when I met Déborah.  Wow, right in the middle of my “questioning everything” phase, I met this wonderful, cheerful, intelligent and beautiful girl who just so happened to be a Baptist, who’s father is a pastor, no less!  I fell head over heels for this girl, and was very OK with her faith, knowing full well that there would probably be no sex whatsoever.  I didn’t care.  It didn’t take long, however, before her parents had a lunch meeting with her and I, telling me about their concerns of their daughter dating a non-Christian.  I told them how I stood (searching for God/Open to His existence but not yet convinced).  They seemed to be okay with it.  By this time I was going to Church with Deb on a regular basis.  I’d find myself hearing some things the pastor would say, and fight off urges to scream “thats not true!”.  I didn’t want to be like the people I saw arguing at university, so I’d make a conscious effort to put my bias aside.

After a few months, I had decided that I disagreed with mostly everything Deb believed in.  This was *really* tough, because she really loved God, yet we both really wanted to be together.  I’ll be honest, after hearing a guest speaker at her church shun gays and tout creationism saying “…and you have these scientists…they say they have a ‘Ph.D.’  Who cares?!  A doctorate is worthless in God’s eyes!”  I remember looking to the side and watching Deb nod in agreement with him.  I think this was more of a reflex on her part, because I know she is more of a theistic evolutionist than anything else.  I would recall when she’d tell me about her summer jobs at a Bible camp, building an obstacle course for the kids, and calling the game “Running away from persecution”.  Well that just took the fucking cake.  This is when we (first) ended things.

She had been the single most influential person in my life when it comes to making me want to believe in God.  I loved her and wanted it to work out between us.  Predictably, our polarized groundings split us up.  Since then, we’ve modified our own opinions on matters of faith.  She’s become more open to the possibility of questioning things, and I have come to accept that I should not judge people for their beliefs.   To this day, she is still one of my best friends.

By then I had lost most hope for God’s existence, choosing to believe that religious people are doing nothing less than upholding tradition, doing what’s comfortable for themselves, and warping their world view in order to accommodate God – instead of doing it the other way around.  I decided to extend this to all major religions.  I was officially an agnostic, citing that I didn’t know anything, but that nobody else did either.  For some reason, I still believed in the strong possibility of a human-type figure, with love and compassion possibly creating everything.  I obviously hadn’t heard of Occam’s Razor by then.  I was convinced that consciousness and emotion was little more than dopamine and various other molecules milling about in my brain.

Then came a second summer in Lloydminster.  My beliefs were pretty much solidified then, but only then did I ponder the statistical probabilities of God.  This is when I discovered  Russell’s Teapot, and started to really read up on atheism.  I think the toughest part of all this was trying to maintain a level of open-mindedness while becoming more and more certain of my beliefs.  I had made up my mind, yet remained open to any new facts that would change it.

Also, my interest in astronomy has impacted me a lot.  I’m realizing that I can’t even come close to being close to being able to imagine the complexity of our universe…let alone our galaxy or even my teeny tiny planet.  Taking my cue from Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’, I’m realizing how insignificant we are, and that daring to suppose knowledge of how the entire universe was created is not only extremely naïve, it’s just extremely ignorant.  I think this is my greatest argument for my belief in the improbability of anything that man has come up with.

So here I am, now making the quantum leap to de facto atheism.  I really wish I could share all the conversations I’ve had, all the good/bad things I’ve read (there are just as many dumb atheists as smart ones).  I wish I could enumerate all the questions that are still inadequately answered.  I think this is a fair introduction to where I now stand.  Please understand that this is but only a small part of why I think the way I do, and that it would take me much, much longer to justify each of my opinions.

If you’ve read this far, you are one brave soul. It’s been a great blog, and it’s been fun to try to recount what I’ve been through.  Thank you for reading.