Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  Still trying to find my place, during my freshman year of college I went to a local youth group called the Red Cedar Christian Fellowship. Their national affiliate is the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Having just moved to East Lansing to attend Michigan State University, I didn’t have many friends and was trying to build my social network. As I attended more and more sermons, it continued to be harder and harder to believe. One of my closest friends who often came with me to these services told me that he could tell I was conflicted about something as I sat through the sermons. There were meetings throughout the semester at which I could meet with the group leader to discuss “personal spiritual growth.” During one of these personal growth sessions, I tried to talk to the leader about the conflict I was feeling. He more or less tried to downplay my concerns. Shortly after that, I stopped going to the church group and started seeking other routes. After I left the youth group, many of the people I had previously been friends with no longer made an attempt to reach out to me. It felt like I had become a pariah because of my doubts.

  As I continued seeking and struggling, I began to have a full-fledged falling out with religion and God. I discovered an Objectivist group on campus, though I found little satisfaction with their belief system. My second year of college was a difficult and formative time in my life. I lived on a floor in the dorms with a very religious RA and a bunch of his like-minded colleagues. He was a part of Cru, Campus Crusade for Christ. He was in charge of creating the decorative name tags that all students living in the dorms had on their doors. He used a crest of arms that had a phrase in Latin on it. One day while I was researching religion, I found out that the crest on my door had religious significance; it was a Christian Dominionist symbol. When I found out, I tore it off my door and decorated it with Darwin fish.

  That was a really hard time in my life, particularly because I was concerned about how my changing worldview might impact my family. I was really worried about my atheism. Specifically, I was worried about upsetting my grandmother because of how close we are. She helped raise me while my parents were at work and when my mom went back to pharmacy school. I didn’t want her to find out that I had left religion because I didn’t want it to affect our relationship. I love her a lot. To this day, she still doesn’t know about my atheism.

  Gradually, things began to get better in my life. I met a fellow student who was the first atheist I had ever met. We joined a small group on campus called the Freethinkers Alliance. I started going to their meetings. It was largely a philosophy club. I enjoyed it for the intellectual stimulation. I took on a leadership position on the board after attending for a year, and we built a successful group. At our apex, 50 people attended each of our meetings. We were very proud of that. The internet also really helped in that it pointed me toward books that would end up having a profound influence on me. I discovered Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Their writings helped me throw off religion and embrace science and philosophy.

  Given the change that’s occurred within me, I can’t say that my values have changed much. I’ve always felt like I have a fairly strong moral compass, which, in reality, is probably the result of my secular upbringing. I sometimes jokingly say that my dad indoctrinated me in the ways of the Founding Fathers. He had me memorizing U.S. Presidents at the age of two, and he always encouraged me to seek the truth.

  I remember first learning about the scientific method and evolution while I was in high school, still going to church. At the time, I didn’t really know what I believed. People at the churches I attended, particularly the right-wing church, would openly proclaim that they were anti-evolution. I’ve become more educated about evolution since then. It’s my personal belief that people shouldn’t ignore facts about the world, but rather that they should integrate them into it. I simply can’t reconcile evolution by natural selection and a belief in a personal, caring God.

  Now that I have a firm naturalistic worldview, I feel very liberated. I have a large secular community now. Almost everyone knows that I’m an atheist. I feel like my self-confidence is actually a lot better now than it used to be. When I was religious, I had lingering questions. I wondered, “Am I doing something bad? Would God approve of this? Is God looking over my shoulder right now?” I really tried to fit in and didn’t want to rock the boat. The prescriptions that I was given from organized religion for being good are different from those that I now believe are necessary for truly being good. While I’m sure my worldview isn’t entirely consistent, it’s more consistent than it was. I feel a lot better, like I’m in control of my decisions, like I’m more of my own person.

  VII.

  ______________

  Rachael-Dawn Craig: Freedom from Fear

  “Reason can wrestle with terrors — and overthrow them.”

  — Euripides

  Oregon megachurch minister Mary Manin Morrissey is credited with the following quote: “You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.” Rachael-Dawn Craig has had plenty of experience with both fear and faith, and as her story reveals, the two often merged. Raised with censored television, she saw what she believed to be faith healings, holy laughter, and an exorcism at Rock Church in Nova Scotia, Canada. Rachael recalls her childhood as one dominated by guilt and terror. She was scared of demons, taught to view any sexual impulse as a sign of impurity, and feared that by displaying a lack of religious devotion, she would allow her non-evangelical friends to burn in hell.

  While she was quick to criticize science and defend her Christian faith during her early teens, Rachael’s curiosity eventually led her toward open religious skepticism. Because of her atheism, her mother kicked her and her brother out of their home when Rachael was 18, believing that they had become Satanic. She now, despite her upbringing, considers herself free from the fear of her childhood. As she says, “It’s nice not to be afraid all the time.”

  My entire extended family is quite Christian, but the majority of my religious experiences come from my nuclear family when we were involved with an evangelical Southern U.S.-style church in Nova Scotia, Canada. My family — I have two siblings, a brother and a sister, along with a mother and father — moved to Nova Scotia when I was four years old. My parents were moderately religious before we started attending Rock Church.

  My mom went to Bible college. My dad’s a mechanic and had gone to trade school. I think they liked that the church community took them in. There were different programs at the church in which my brother, sister, and I could participate. My father really liked the idea that he was going to be a part of miracles and believed that good things were going to come his way because of his participation in the church. It had a lot of Pentecostal elements to it, and my parents probably found that interesting and exciting.

  The worship sessions were like rock shows. There was a lot of drama. My parents’ friends all went to this church as well; it was not long after we starting going there that we were going to church Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Tuesday night, and Wednesday night.

  Church was quite intense. Speaking in tongues was a part of every sermon. Toward the end of each sermon, people would begin shaking and passing out. I was a child when I witnessed these things, and they had a significant impact on me. I thought I was seeing magic, seeing miracles. I went to lots of faith healings where people appeared to be healed by faith. The whole church would scream “Hallelujah!” and get really excited. I once witnessed an exorcism where a lot people were surrounding a woman, pushing her down, and rebuking her, calling the devil out of her. I also saw holy laughter, during which the entire congregation would erupt in dramatic laughing, spreading throughout the 2,000-person church.

  We were pushed to give a lot of money to the church. My dad ended up losing a lot of his own personal finances. At one point, he was unemployed, and we lost our home. My parents couldn’t afford groceries. My dad spent the last money he had on a donation to a televangelist.

  I don’t think
my parents were able to realize how much that environment impacted my brother, sister, and me. The youngest memory I have of that church, and my brother and sister would say the same, is of my mind being dominated by fear. The messages of the church were always putting me down, making me feel guilty, making me feel afraid. One of the things that was really hammered into all of us at every age level, right from the time we were little, was the evangelical notion “Why didn’t you tell me about Jesus?” There was this strong idea in the church that we needed to constantly tell our friends about Jesus, trying to get them to more than just believe. Because if they were Catholic, that wasn’t good enough. The Catholics were going to hell. The Baptists were lukewarm. We were trained to be little evangelical missionaries.

  I had a dream when I was six years old that friends of mine from grade school were burning in hell. In the dream, they called to me, asking, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I also dreamt about the Apocalypse and worried about the Rapture. At any given point during our childhood, if my brother, sister, or I couldn’t find other members of the family, we would worry that the Rapture had happened and we had been left behind because we weren’t good enough Christians.

  Leaders in our church often talked about how, if we were real Christians, not only did we need to be telling everybody about Jesus, but we also needed to be ready to be tortured and killed for our faith. If somebody were to, hypothetically, put a gun to our head, we would need to say that we believed in Christ. That was really traumatizing, particularly as a small child.

  Our church put on “Heaven’s Gate and Hell’s Flames” every year. That’s an evangelistic drama, a series of skits where different characters in it are unexpectedly killed. It’s a good example of how fear and guilt permeated the culture within the church. One of the scenes that I remember the most, which fit in perfectly with the dogma of the church, highlighted the evils of abortion. In the skit, there’s a girl who goes to a clinic to get an abortion. She is strapped down while she screams, yelling, “No! I don’t want an abortion anymore!” Doctors would then rip the baby from her womb as she screamed horribly. The character playing the devil would dance around and talk about how he loved killing little babies. The girl dies as a result of a complication with the procedure and is cast into hell. In another scene, there’s an atheist who dies, and when that character is pulled into hell, the whole church would roar with laughter. A hatred of atheism was commonplace in the church. I believe people there really accepted these scenes as truth. The church is still putting on these skits, with children watching.

  I assume that my parents didn’t realize just how bad those experiences were for my siblings and me. I fully believed, for example, that demons were real. We frequently talked in church about demonic possession and demons coming into your house and attacking you in the night. My father reinforced this idea. He had what I believe now to be a hypnagogic episode where he felt that a demon was attacking him. I prayed to Jesus to protect me at night, and my brother and sister did the same. I was quite influenced by one particular Bible passage, Revelations 3:16, “So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” This drove my evangelism.

  I think my church was also damaging to me regarding my sexuality. Their teachings were especially hard on women. We were told that we couldn’t hold hands with men. One of the things that was touched on in church, especially in youth group and Sunday school, is the idea that a girl’s body is a perfectly wrapped package for her future husband. That metaphor was used a lot. If you held hands, you were pulling the ribbon. If you kissed somebody, you were tattering the paper. Even seemingly innocent sexual acts were, in fact, acts that were sullying yourself for your future partner, and who would want that? Who would want a gift with the bow removed and the paper tattered? Nobody.

  Human sexuality was never discussed in a positive light. If anyone began to behave sexually, we were taught, their actions would lead them on a downward slope that would lead to wanting more and more and more. Such behavior would lead to pornography, which might lead to murder. Not only did I have to be pure, but I was told that if I was sexual at all, there was a chance that I would end up raping children. That was pretty damaging for us as kids, so much so that my brother has made art about it as a way to try to work through what he had been taught. He has had to try to deconstruct ideas in his head so that he can try to have a normal human sex life. I was 24 before I got over a lot of that, and I think many of my peers in the church had similar experiences. It takes a lot to stop feeling shame and fear for perfectly healthy behavior.

  Still, during my youth, I did always feel like I had a relationship with God. I felt like He was listening to my every thought. Did I love it? I probably would have said that I did at the time, but I also didn’t know a different life. There was a degree of love. I think the philosopher Daniel Dennett is right that religions are human systems that are designed to provide love and attachment to sustain membership and group cohesion. I didn’t understand how there could be a world with love or beauty without God. I am, however, a curious person, which is eventually what began my break from the church.

  Losing my faith was unique in that it happened suddenly. One of the aspects of being a teenager in my church was attending training sessions to prep for having evolution taught in school. At the time, I believed that the Earth was less than 10,000 years old. I believed that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark. I had been given pseudoscientific explanations for these beliefs. The literature that I read was always Christian, and I thought it came from authority. I decided not to take biology in high school because I thought biologists were stupid. I did, however, take a class on ancient history. We briefly covered evolution. I argued with my teacher, and every now and then, he said things that I hadn’t heard about. I wanted to have really good arguments to disprove the theory of evolution, so I would go online to see what evolutionists were arguing to defend their position. I wanted to come up with even better arguments. I found some websites written by secular humanists and atheists that debunked creationism; they were persuasive. I didn’t understand all of the specifics right away, but I soon realized that I had a problem because some of what I had taught at church wasn’t true.

  I was shocked, and my beliefs changed almost immediately. Many people claim that you choose what you believe, and sometimes that’s true, but that’s not always the case. I had a philosophy professor in university who, as an example, showed us quarter and put it in his pocket and asked, “Does anyone not believe that I have a quarter in my pocket?” It was very hard to believe that he didn’t. I think that’s very similar to how my beliefs about religion and God changed. There was simply no denying that I had been grossly misinformed. I had many cascading problems from the way I had understood God and the authority of my church.

  At the same time, I was also reading a lot of Paul in the Bible because I was reading daily devotionals. I was having a difficult time with how hard Paul is on women. For example in 1st Timothy 2:12, he says, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” A lot of the misogynistic lines in the Bible, in the New Testament, come from Paul. Doubts began as I started to learn about evolution, and Paul only added to that doubt. I was really scared, too scared to tell anyone.

  I stopped talking to people. My parents mentioned that I had become very quiet. I stopped going to baptismal classes, and I didn’t tell anybody why. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was going through because I didn’t want to shake anyone else’s faith. I was hoping to find a way around my doubts. Finally, I talked with my brother. We’re good friends and have gone through a lot together. Within a year, we both became atheists.

  We concealed our atheism from our parents for many months. Eventually, my brother outed both of us. He bluntly told them, “Rachael and I are atheists.” Eventually, my mom snapped, and we were kicked out of our home. Our getting kicked out was the culmination of many arguments. For months, we had been regu
larly challenging them on their faith. My mom had the police come to our house, and she accused us of being Satanic. The police actually felt quite badly for my brother and me, but there wasn’t a lot they could do because my parents owned the house, and I was 18 years old.

  At first, my brother and I left and stayed with different people. We got an apartment in Halifax and realized that life was a lot better once we no longer needed to spend most of our day getting into family fights. In time, my brother and I had talked with our parents. Our disagreements with them pushed a lot of conversations that ended up being really productive. As tough as they were, they began to listen to us. In time, I know my mom in particular felt really stupid, and I suppose my dad did at times as well. We were able to lay religious arguments out for them and show them that what the church was teaching didn’t add up.

  Since that time, my mom has mellowed out. She now has a spiritual but nonreligious take on life. My dad is still fairly Christian but has become less intense as well. Their atheist stereotypes are gone. Originally, when my mom found out that my brother and I had become atheists, she thought that we must be sex-crazy, into drugs, that we would become alcoholics. She was worried about us being gay and that we would find no meaning in life. She now understands that my brother and I are good people and that we still care deeply about others.

  Prior to us coming out as atheists, my mom felt that it was impossible not to believe in God. In her mind, as she was taught, everyone who says that they don’t believe in God is angry, hiding something, or immoral. There is, the church said, no such thing as a real atheist. We have shown our parents that that’s not true. While she still goes to church sometimes, when people now bash atheists and talk about them being immoral or dishonest, she’ll actually take them to task and ask, “Do you know any atheists? Because all three children of mine are.” I’m proud that she can stand up to people in her church, as well as to our extended family. I’m proud of her for coming that far. I think my parents are much healthier people now. I think that’s pretty cool.