(Via Mark)
My name is Mark and I am an atheist.
I was born and raised in the rural area of Missouri just around 30-40 miles west of St. Louis, back in the 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. was conducting peace marches all over the South. I remember mumbling the words of the Pledge of Allegiance during class in elementary school, but most of it never meant much to me except the phrase “under God”. I was around eleven years old then. I kept that particular phrase in mind and mulled over it for several years. The rest of the pledge seemed appropriate, but “under God” made no sense to me at all. It just “didn’t sit right” with my views of what the United States was all about. I became a fan of American history at an early age and the U.S. Constitution was of interest to me, so I scoured the law of our nation, but I could not find the word, “God” or “Jesus” or “Bible” mentioned.
During my preteen and teenage years I was required to attend Sunday School, Sunday morning worship, Sunday evening worship and Wednesday night prayer meeting at a local Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) Church. It wasn’t all bad. I had friends there like most kids would, but I never could fully participate in the rituals of prayer, baptism or speaking in tongues. I truly thought there was something wrong with me because of my involuntary lack of understanding and faith. I tried to be like everyone that attended and attempted to be a part of those rituals, but it made no sense to me, making me feel extremely pretentious and illegitimate. A sense of self-betrayal haunted me.
During my childhood, I learned much about the Bible and like many other books I had read, I found “the good, the bad and the ugly” within its cover. “The good” was in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s a good moral story, but the same type of moral content can be found in other writings as well. “The bad” was in the way God often punished or murdered his so-called “creations”. How can God do this if he loved us? “The ugly” was the unbelievable happenings of virgin births, Jonah living inside the stomach of a great fish and other outright lies. To me, lying to sway someone is very immoral. “The bad” and “the ugly” outweighed “the good”.
It wasn’t just the Bible that I found to be fictitious, but also the idea of “God”. At around the age of sixteen, I realized that I did not believe in God or any god for that matter. I felt that the existence of the Abrahamic God is no more valid than the gods of Roman, Greek and Norse mythology.
Yes, I suppose sixteen years old may be rather young for someone to assume they do not believe in deities and such, but that is what I knew at the time. I knew I was an atheist as much as I knew I did not believe in Santa Claus. That was thirty-four years ago and I am still an atheist.
December 6th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Sorry to hear that you were subjected to such bs as an atheist. I was fortunate enough to have an atheist upbringing. Thanks for hanging in there