I was 5 years old the first time the Witnesses came to my home and spoke to my parents. I don’t remember how many times they came back, but it seemed all to quickly that my mother suddenly threw out all of our holiday decorations and I was told I couldn’t have birthdays anymore. Suddenly I had to take strange pamphlets with me to school to explain to my teachers what I was. I didn’t get to participate in any holiday activities. I was made to go to these boring meetings and day long conventions and sit and listen to things I didn’t understand. I felt so left out of everything. I wasn’t permitted to have birthdays, or to go to any parties. When I was 10 my mom allowed me to play on a soccer team at school, but I was instructed to keep it a secret. As I approached my teens I became very frightened about how good I was being, and I was so afraid of upsetting Jehovah and going to hell that I tried to do extra good, and became obsessive about my actions. I was terrified, never sure if I was being good enough. I was told when the new paradise came that all of my memories of former friends and relatives who weren’t witnesses would be completely erased. Upon reaching the age of 15, and in the middle of reading “The Crucible” in school, I realized the witnesses for what they truly are. I refused to go to any more meetings and have since set out on my own spiritual path. I am much happier now. I wish my parents had never been witnesses, and I will never put my children through such trauma.

I was raised a good Christian in a place where religion was a way of life. I lived in the province of Quebec which, at the time, was almost a theocracy. The laws of the province prevented the dissemination of birth control information and divorce was not possible. As a result Quebec had the highest birth rate in Canada. I was a member of a small minority of people who spoke English and were Protestant. I never understood why French speaking Catholics hated us as a group and I had to defend myself from attacks both physical and verbal.

I was as fervent a believer in God and Christianity as anyone. I loved the idea that there was a being who loved me and protected me from harm. I felt safe as long as I knew God was on my side and I tried hard to behave in a proper Christian manner.

Around the age of 9 I started to notice things that didn’t make sense to me. The people who were teaching me to be a good Christian didn’t seem to follow their own rules. I was not treated especially well by any of them. I thought they must be either very stupid or insane. How could anyone risk an eternity in Hell by not following the rules that God made? Since I was much younger and probably not as smart as any of the ministers or Sunday school teachers I reasoned that something else must be happening.

After a year or so of trying to figure out why the people in my church didn’t practice what they preached, the reason struck me one day. They didn’t want me to treat them the way they treated me. Then it started to make some sense. The threats of eternal damnation were their protection from evil.

Over the next 5 years or so I noticed more and more things in all religions that made no sense. I had the privilege of attending school with children from many countries who belonged to many different religions. That gave me a perfect opportunity to make comparisons. I had a few friends who were very interested in religion and we spent a lot of time reading the Bible. We stumbled on many passages that nobody in church ever mentioned. That made me even more suspicious of religious teachings.

By the time I was 15 I had become absolutely convinced that no religion had any basis for its beliefs. I rejected any supernatural explanations for what we see in the universe.

During my last year of high school I went to live with my older sister and her family. My sister’s family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and tried hard to convert me. We had regular debates on many subjects and I had to do a lot of research to defend my beliefs. As a result my atheist position became increasingly solid as one religious argument after another was shown to be false. I have continued looking into religions and to this day I have not found a good reason to believe the teachings of any one of them.

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!” typed my Baptist friend during a computer chat when I confessed to her that I had stopped believing in the claims of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the main organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses), but “worse” than that, stopped believing the claims of the Bible itself. I haven’t had a conversation with her since. She was pleased I had left the Watchtower nonsense behind, but disappointed I had chosen to “throw it all away.” I find this attitude in a lot of Christians. Not all of them, but definitely a majority. Their reactions to my complete rejection of all religion range from casual acceptance to morose and sadness. They usually assume I’m an atheist because my experience in the organization caused emotional scarring so deep that I just cannot be close to their god. Atheism, they conclude, isn’t a conscious choice I made after spending a great deal of time thinking, it’s an emotional reaction to “spiritual abuse.”

Here’s the kicker. I don’t feel “abused” by the Watchtower, spiritually or otherwise. I don’t have an amazing and fantastic story to tell, filled with exciting revelations and whisper-worthy closet skeletons. I was never molested by an elder. I was never emotionally traumatized because I couldn’t celebrate my birthday. I never knew anyone who died from not receiving a blood transfusion. Sure, I experienced my fair share of difficult people in the organization, but I never, even to this day, felt that their behavior affects the truthfulness of what the organization teaches. My life as a Jehovah’s Witness could be summed up in a single word: uneventful. I apologize in advance for not being a more exciting apostate.

So if I’m not an atheist because of trauma inflicted by the Watchtower Society, why did I embark on a religion-free lifestyle? The main factor in leading me to my eventual decision was interaction with other people via the internet. I was and still am a fan of social news sites like Digg and Reddit, and both had a very robust atheist community. Like most Jehovah’s Witnesses and I venture to say most Christians, I never really thought deeply about why I believed in god. God was just something everybody believed in, because to not believe in God was to believe everything came about by blind chance. At least, that’s what I was told. And because I never actually had a conversation with an atheist for the first few decades of my life (aside from the occasional encounter when knocking on doors, which never resulted in anything more than superficial pleasantries as they asked me to leave), I assumed it was true. Atheists were this interesting subculture that seemed almost mythical to me. All I knew about them was what believers told me about them. Since there was no internet back then, hearing their point of view and their arguments was extremely difficult if not impossible. They seemed to be simply a collection of stuffy old college professors who had bought into the Darwin religion that was evolution. It seemed so sad. If only they could see the beauty of creation, the complexity of life, surely they would abandon their atheist ways, so I thought.

I never really sought religious discussions when I was online. By the time I started to have regular exposure to the web (late 1990′s), the warnings from the Watchtower organization were already coming about this potentially dangerous new technology. I was told of people who had left “the truth” (what Witnesses call their religion) because they had typed “Jehovah’s Witnesses” into a search engine and had read apostate literature. I was never once tempted to do so. Although I had a borderline technology addiction, I was devoted to my god and my church. I had gotten baptized at the age of 15, making a lifelong commitment to the Watchtower Society, and I never once thought of myself being outside the organization. I never had the desire to go out to bars or associate with non-witnesses anyway. I had been treated poorly enough by them during grade school. College was a lot better, but my public school experience hindered my social progress for years afterward. I never wanted to have a birthday party because to me a birthday party meant it was time to ostracize myself from my peers. So naturally I preferred the company of those who didn’t celebrate their birthdays, or any other holiday. People talk about what a boring place the world would be if everybody had the same opinions about everything, but in a way I disagree. Being in that “us versus them” environment really solidified the bonds I had with my Jehovah’s Witness friends, sort of like being part of military unit. It doesn’t matter what personality quirks the other people have, you all have a mission to accomplish, you are all part of a team. That’s not to say there weren’t cliques in some Kingdom Halls, there were, but once I started traveling to surrounding halls and making friends there (The Watchtower calls this “widening out”), I noticed that behavior less and less.

In my late teens I moved out on my own, living in various places in Michigan. I never stopped surfing the web and never saw myself as having a problem. It wasn’t disrupting my life or anything, but my family was extremely concerned…until I got cable internet. With dial-up, they would call me and if the line was busy they knew I was online. With cable, it didn’t matter. Still, it wasn’t until a few years ago when I really started looking into this atheism thing.

As I wrote above, I first noticed atheists when I was on Digg or Reddit. For a while I didn’t really pay attention, rarely getting involved with arguments between them and theists. So often, their arguments would address something I didn’t believe anyway, such as hellfire or the immortal soul, so it felt like a “safe” environment for my faith. As I read, I became more and more sympathetic to the atheist side. Their arguments made sense to me, but I still felt like my faith wasn’t being challenged.

But it was. As I kept reading, my thinking process began to change. I realized that I had been approaching the issue regarding the existence of God with a presuppositionalist mentality. I had approached every question with the conclusion already determined. For every verse in the Bible that seemed barbaric, contradictory, or just downright wrong, I had laid out only two possibilities: the verse is either literal or figurative. My religious upbringing prevented me initially from considering the third possibility: the verse is incorrect. Because the verse couldn’t possibly be incorrect. It was correct, its meaning just needed to be understood in the correct way. The burdensome and sometimes cruel regulations enforced by the organization that I didn’t understand were simply waved away. I assumed they must have a good explanation. God must have a reason for requiring two witnesses to disfellowship someone for child molestation. God must have a reason for not allowing people to have a blood transfusion. After a while, I realized that I never really thought about why I thought there was a God to have a reason to begin with. I had just always assumed that there was. What if all this stuff in the Bible really was just a bunch of disjointed writings of various desert tribesman over the span of several centuries? It seemed to be a much simpler explanation for things like the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter or the general evil behavior of the Old Testament god. I started to read the Bible as if I had never heard it before, and every so often I’d ask myself “if I had never heard of the Bible before, never heard of Christianity before, would I find any of this stuff convincing?” The only answer I could muster was “no.” There really was no good reason to believe any of this stuff.

That was when I realized I had become an atheist. It tore me apart. I knew I was going to lose everything. But now that I didn’t believe what the society was teaching, could I fake it? I tried, but failed miserably. At first I almost became a believer again after spending time with some friends still in the organization, feeling that I couldn’t possibly give up such good relationship, but eventually, it became too hard to compartmentalize my disagreements. It’s one thing when you’re with people you call “brother” and “sister” who agree with you on almost every religious subject, but when you’re on the outside, it becomes very, very hard to be comfortable in that environment. I spent less and less time with Jehovah’s Witnesses, and when the September 2007 issue of Our Kingdom Ministry was released, containing an article that admonished Witnesses not to study the Bible independently or study Hebrew and Greek to confirm the accuracy of the New World Translation, I made my final decision never to return.

I don’t hate the organization or those in it. Religious organizations are like viruses. They propagate and grow, even when there is no clear beneficiary. The men who make up the ruling council of the Society–known as the “Governing Body”–aren’t living in mansions and spending their summers on yachts, but they do rely on the organization because in a very literal sense there is nowhere else for them to go. The primary beneficiary of the organization’s activities is the organization itself. The machine exists solely to feed itself.

I see a lot of talk about how so many Jehovah’s Witnesses are becoming atheists. To many Christians and other theists, these ex-JW atheists are seen as pity cases. They’re weaklings, emotionally damaged, and lost. For many Christians, I suspect the very existence of atheists is insulting. So many of us grew up and lived our adult lives thinking that everybody believes in God, and if you don’t, there must be something wrong with you. That’s what I thought. If you look at the Watchtower’s canned response in the field manual Reasoning From the Scriptures, the chapter that covers Atheists works from the assumption that the householder is an atheist because he/she was slighted by a religious authority in some way. But not all of us are damaged goods. We don’t believe because we are unconvinced of the reasons put before us for the existence of god.

What I find funny about religion is that the vast majority of them work from the same premise a dubious “snake oil” product does, namely that you are inherently deficient in some way, and only with Belief X/Product Y can you cure yourself of this deficiency. And like most dubious “cure-all” products, the pitch is complete horseshit. Very few people actually need vitamin supplements, and very few people actually need religion. I am not deficient. I do not have a longing for something to “fill the hole” religion used to occupy. I am not “spiritually malnourished.” I still have an active imagination. I still love life, my friends, and family. I still have an excited sense of awe and wonder when I think about the universe. I only believe in what can be reliably demonstrated to me, and take nothing based solely on that cognitive totalitarianism known as “faith.”