"So wait, if I'm engaged to 'the one' and we're scheduled to get married in two months we still can't have sex until after the ceremony?" This was the conversation in my 14 year old, hormone saturated brain as I contemplated the idea of celibacy before marriage. I couldn't make sense of what I was being told. What was it about the ceremony that transformed the act of intercourse from sin to blessing? Wasn't the important part that I had found someone to commit my life to and that she (never he of course) agreed to the same? What if we were stranded on desert island with no minister? What if a plague killed off all people but the two of us? Now that I think about that, didn't Adam and Eve commit incest with their kids? If they didn't, at least their kids did, right? Who married them, God? Why did God delegate marriage to humans instead of continuing the tradition with the first people? Isn't he omniscient and all powerful? That brings up another thing, if God is all powerful why didn't he stop slavery? Why did he allow all those horrible things to happen to my people? Why did he let my grandpa get killed when my dad was 6? Why does he let people be poor? Why does he let babies die? Do those babies go to hell if they don't accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior? Do they have to remain babies in heaven forever or do they grow up? Do old people stay old in heaven forever or do they get to chose the body they live in for all of eternity? Eternity! Never ending existence?! Fuck, that's about the most terrifying thing I can imagine!
It would be six more years before I had the opportunity to commit the sin of premarital sex and by then I still had no satisfying answers to any of the above questions. That is, I hadn't found any satisfying answers within the religious practice I was raised in. My mother had cried with grief when I told her that I didn't believe in God. It was a bad moment. To this day I've never seen such grief on my mother's face. Not when her mother, my grandmother, died; not when her step-daughter, my sister, died at the age of 47; not when I told her told her I wanted to marry my emotionally disturbed and manipulative college girlfriend; not when I told her I had gotten my graduate school girlfriend pregnant; not when she told me that she and my dad were getting divorced after 40+ years of marriage. Me telling my mother that I didn't believe in God remains the second worst emotional experience of my life. The worst moment being my 5 minute old daughter needing to be resuscitated after she stopped breathing. I almost went insane in that moment. Fortunately, none of the aforementioned situations have resulted in lasting grief save my sister's death. And that brings me to my next watershed moment on the path to atheism.
Shortly after my musings about premarital sex, having spent years wrestling with the philosophy and logic behind what I was taught was proper Christian practice/belief, I decided to run an experiment that continues today. I decided to stop praying and see if my life went sideways the way my parents, church family, pastor, and deacons explicitly and implicitly told me it most certainly would. Why did I decide to run this experiment? Quite frankly I was tired of asking a being that supposedly knew my thoughts before I thought them what I wanted, every, single, night. Couldn't I simply ask for blessings for the people of loved, and my enemies of course, from now on into the future? Couldn't I ask for God's will be done from now until forever more? Wasn't that happening already? Why should I pray for the sick and shut in when God knew they were sick before I did? What more could I, the doctors, their family do besides what we were already going to do? Wait, why would God allow people to get sick in the first place? Why not just call them home or ease their suffering while he used them for good? Wait, why would God cause suffering just to teach a lesson? Okay, you get the point, this prayer stuff didn't make sense to me and I needed to ease my troublin mind. Enter deductive reasoning. If I stopped praying and my life went to shit then that would be the clear signal that I needed to such it up and do what I was told was good for me.
So how'd it go? Since I stopped talking to God in 1998 I've earned a BS and PhD without school debt, I've landed a job as a professor at a major public university, I got married to a woman whom I'm deeply compatible with, I have two young children who are happy and healthy, I've traveled and visited places in four continents all the while suffering only minor unpleasantries. On balance my life has been something that most people less fortunate/oppressed than me would literally kill for, which makes me both proud of overcoming my fear of abandoning religion and mildly anxious the universe will balance out my good fortune. So why am I an atheist? It makes more sense to believe in my own sense of what makes sense than to trust that the blatant contradictions of formal Christianity, contradictions I find untenable, are leading me in the right direction. It's that simple.
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