Atheism and Me

In my formative years I was pretty apathetic towards religion, though my family was off-again/on-again JWs. Then in my twenties I became part of a protestant-fundamentalist-YEC-strongly Religious Right college church (I had a few issues). It was one of the churches where people talk about 'feeling the presence of God' and such-which I never did. I saw wonder and beauty and often questioned whether people were confusing that with God. I [i]wanted[/i] the transcendent experience. For years I beat myself up over not feeling it, and during that time I raged at both myself for not having enough faith and at God for hiding from me. So in a way that period of time was certainly a love/hate relationship with God.

Later on I became somewhat of a pariah when I told someone how I felt and it spread through the congregation like wildfire. I stopped going and eventually stopped caring about God. At some point I realized that I have very little capacity for believing in any sort of supernatural anything, so I'm an atheist by default.:D I actually realized my atheism after working for a time with a conspiracy believer. One day after talking about UFO abductions he asked me if I believed in the soul, in a manner that indicated that he expected to base his next argument on my saying 'yes.' However, after thinking for a moment I said that I didn't and gave my reason. He then asked about God, and for the first time I realized that not only did I doubt God's existence, but I didn't really care and in fact rather hoped that He didn't.

Over the next few years I began to really discover who I was. For a time I blamed my old church, and by extension Christianity in general for the misery I had felt, but eventually I got over it. I don't think that religion is good, but I don't believe that it is evil either. I believe that it simply reflects its own subculture.