What’s Always Included in Your “Atheist Testimonial”?

I can be very literal sometimes so my response is “Well, I’m an atheists because I don’t believe in gods” to which I inevitably receive the reply of “Why not?”. There really are so many reasons why I don’t find belief in gods to be useful or even interesting but really it boils down to never having heard a compelling argument for faith.

That is all I’d need to convert as well. A compelling reason to believe. I’ve been at this a while and I’m convinced that there isn’t a good reason, just lots of bad reasons.

My explanation is always: “Why not?” I can’t see any reason to be any other way.

As a former fundamentalist, I hate the word testimonial. Christians giving their testimonials wallow in narcissistic self loathing. Even as a Christian, I hated listening to them.

The simple answer to the question, of course, is “Why shouldn’t I be an atheist?”

What I don’t believe is that any version of revealed truth is accurate and without revealed truth it is irrelevant whether or not their are gods. Without revealed truth we have to rely on ourselves and the wisdom of others to figure out how best to live our lives.

I just boil it down to “There’s nothing supernatural.” Someone can try to use apologetics to get around most other claims, but that takes a little more work.

My answer is essentially identical to Tom’s. As a child in a non-religious household I was never expected to believe in anything supernatural. So when I read the childrens Bible I took it at face value: As a storybook no different from Gullivers Travels. I was only vaguely aware that some people actually believed this stuff was true.

As I got older and had more intellectual tools at my disposal the childhood fairytales, like all childhood fairytales, became less, not more, credible.

I was raised as a Southern Baptist. In my youth I did what was required and had a period of 2-3 years in high school and just after where I really got into it. I then essentially quit and spent the next 18 or so years as an agnostic, i.e. ‘there’s probably something out there but I’m not going to focus any attention on it’.

My final conversion (when I finally admitted I am an atheist) was only a few years ago. My daughter was diagnosed with leukemia at 2 1/2 years old. The immediate response might be ‘you don’t believe in God because how could God do something like this to your child’. In fact, it was more subtle than that.

We discovered early on that my daughter’s survival likelihood was 95%. I did some research and realized that the survival rate when I was a child in the 70’s was about 10-15%.

Even beyond that, before leukemia was even categorized as a disease, imagine a child in the 19th century who is perfectly healthy and in a span of 6 weeks is dead for no apparent reason.

I started thinking about this quite a bit and wondered if there is a personal God why would he arbitrarily choose that if you lived in the 70s and got leukemia you would probably die, but if you live now, most likely you will not. It seems clear to me that it is actually the march of science and medicine that determined the change in these ratios, not some god who controls everything.

My daughter got leukemia because of bad luck, not god. Stuff just happens. She is cured because of medicine and science, not god.

Ergo, I am now publically an atheist.

I’m sure there are probably some logical fallacies in my reasoning, but that was my tipping point.

Before I answer their question, I always ask, “What do you mean by ‘God?’ Please describe or define what this is for you.”

This models everything else I’m going to do with the person: Not assuming meanings, making them be crystal clear about their terms and claims, not persisting in assuming the truth of any claim without supporting evidence, the burden of that evidence is on the claimant, etc.

This tends to filter out those people who are not prepared for a conversation where they will have to work at least as hard as me. I’m not going to perform for them while they just sit and listen. They’re going to have to defend the premise of their question before I even begin to defend my answer.

This is probably why I hardly ever have these conversations.

My answer’s always straight forward, perhaps considered mean, and a bit rude. However, I find the question, “Why are you an atheist?” to be rude, so it’s not a problem for me to fire right back. Interestingly I never hear follow up questions after my answer.

My answer:

I grew up a devoted Catholic, but I’m just too old for imaginary friends now.

Science. Finding out the lies I was taught regarding evolution made me ask myself what else might be false.

It turns out everything else. I am a happy outspoken atheist today.

I tell them that I am an atheist because I have read the Bible.

Usually I can leave it at that but if pressed, I continue.

Having found it totally unsatisfactory I read the Koran — then the Book of Mormon — then the Talmud and Hadith. I read the Buddhist Canon, Hindu Vedas, what qualifies as Wiccan canon.

Having read it all I found them all of equal parts useless, illogical, and broken reason. Some had large swaths of immorality and cruelty.

All in all and individually they make for wretched sources of morality, even worse records of human and natural history, and totally worthless in explaining current and past phenomena.

“extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” The question is not “why not believe?” but “Why believe?” I don’t believe in any magic man with a white beard because there isn’t anything that suggests he’s real.

I say it as concisely as possible “Its a choice i made very early in life when i realized religion wasnt something i believed in or made any sense to me and after many decades of living with that choice i stand by it and its not up for discussion past that”

I started after a while adding the part about it not being up for discussion cause i got so sick of religious folk wanting to force their beliefs on me and trying to convert me.

Honestly though most times i want to say something like “Well im an athiest because anyone with half a brain would quickly realize that religion is a total load of shit meant to control the weak minded masses and im not one of them. There is a reason your called sheep at your church and not cause your being shepparded by a priest to the holy land, its cause your docile with faith and can be lead to believe anything your told”

Since it was the turning point in my deconversion, I always include the part about the PDF document that I saw that explained why Jesus is not the Messiah. (Unfortunately, I am never able to show the PDF in question. I really need to find it, but I have no idea where it is.

If they ask why I “became” an atheist, I reply that I didn’t. I am as I was born, without belief in any given supernatural “god”. Quite a long story – 37 years ago, my biological father got my mother pregnant then decided to romp off with another woman and got her preggers too. My mum’s dad was a miner/deep sea fisherman. The other woman’s was a farmer. Therefore, her father had a shotgun. My biological father married the other woman.

Now the story would end there, had I not been born as early in the year and in the village I was. In the village I was born, the first born male is placed in a cradle in the local church and rocked. It is a tradition going back centuries. I was the first born. But not the first born to a married couple. Hence, the fact that my mother had had a baby out of wedlock became wide, public knowledge in a time when that shit actually mattered for some reason.

So for obvious reasons, she never bothered with the whole church thing after experiencing the church’s pettines first hand.

I was also once told that atheists “don’t exist” by a Portuguese Catholic which led to a hillarious conversation.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

Ah, the Socratic Method.

As a recent deconvert surrounded by caring Christians who are confused by my recent changes, I find the honest, “I reached a point where I was no longer confident that I knew anything about God, not even whether or not He exists.” If I am pressed past that, I tend to respond as Richard Wade does above, asking what they mean by “God” and where they get that definition from.

I vividly remember being 8 years old and realizing that the god of the old testament was a horrible monster. When I was old enough to understand what morality and personal ethics REALLY meant, I decided to reject that god, even though I still believed. Until I finally rejected the stories entirely, I used to wake up each morning and think, “Fuck you, God.” That is the only part of belief that I miss – being able to sincerely curse that evil bastard.

I was not conditioned to believe as a small child, therefore, as an adult,I find atheism to be completely natural and the “default” human condition.

Of course, I realize that religious people who were conditioned to believe in childhood consider belief to be the “default” condition.

Science fiction!
At an early age.

Theism just doesn’t make sense.

Usually I don’t get an answer to that.

I was born a atheist and nobody in my family tried to change that. As I grew older I could find no reason to believe in fairy tales and the rest of the nonsense spewed out by the churches.

I got honest with myself and realized that I simply wanted to believe the story so much that I had convinced myself that it was true.

I got honest with myself and realized that I had never had anything that I would consider to be acknowledgement from god.

I got honest with myself and realized that I had been fooling myself.

I like to tell me that that just like them I don’t believe in most of the bible. Except for me I don’t believe in the parts about our past or any of the supernatural parts.

This sometimes gets people to shut up since they know they don’t believe in much of the bible either. Or they may argue this fact since they have never actually read the bible themselves. I’ve encountered people that the only thing they know is to have Jesus in your heart and that he died for our sins. Everything else comes from their pastor.