If prayer can be what people need it to be...

by Luther Reads

After a deliciously satisfying Thanksgiving dinner, I sat mostly quiet as my Christian family discussed the role or prayer in their lives. Every single person had a different idea about how to pray and what those prayers actually do. To my understanding, the nature of prayer hasn't changed for thousands of years and it's one of the most talked about aspects of the Christian walk, so I was baffled by the disagreement.

I asked if this lack of consensus or clarity was problematic to anyone, but they all just respected each other's perspective. There was a genuine sense that each person has to view prayer in the way that works best for them, and I realized that perhaps the lack of widespread dogma about prayer is what makes it so powerful. Hmmm...

Christians also disagree about the Bible, prophecy, miracles, and all the other ingredients of Christianity. And by-and-large, this is all... okay. Even the very nature of God hasn't been nailed down (see what I did there?). Each Christian is entitled to believe about God what they need, and outside of the most intolerant corrodoors of Christendom, again, this is... okay.

So, I too have accepted a belief about the nature of God, based on who I am and what I need God to be in my life: nonexistent.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads marked himself safe from 2020

Where did my sister go?

 My sister died on January 19, 2007, but before she did, most of who she was left her body. I don't remember getting the call from my father that Lisa had gotten sick, had a heart attack, and been dead for 8 minutes before doctors brought her back, but remember the utter despair in his voice when he called me 3 months later to tell me that she had finally passed on. I never ever want to hear that kind of grief in another person's voice again, but I'm sure I will at some point again in my life. That's just life.

But, where did my sister actually go when she left, came back, and left for good again? I don't believe in heaven, so I don't think she is there. My father and nephews believe that's where she is, so I try hard to not bring the issue up with them. I don't think Lisa is in heaven, but I also don't think she no longer exists. Certainly she lives on in the people who remember her, but I think there's more to her now that she's dead than just memories.

For a long time after her death I believed and was scared she'd show up in some tangible capacity. Seeing my dead sister would be an incredible joy, until I realized that seeing a dead person meant that spiritual world did in fact exist and logically contained all the nightmarish things humans can conceive. There's comfort in this kind of intangible ambiguity.

Will I ever see/recognize my sister again? I see her in my children at times, my dad as well, but it's never even close to her whole self. I often times wonder what restrictions on communing with the living might there be on the other side? What are the dead allowed to know about the living? What understanding do we gain being dead that might compel us to leave loved ones behind and never speak with them as we used to again?

I just want an explanation that satisfies, which, I know, is an incredibly petulant thing to want. But for fuck's sake, my sister died suddenly and way too early in life. I miss her so much that I get triggered into wracking sobs when a young Black woman dies of an illness in almost any movie. Thirteen years later I'm still just as devastated by the loss of the relationship we were building once the 23 years that separated us was beginning to erode. I got a legit beef with the universe.

So where did Lisa go? Why did she leave a small fraction of herself behind before taking it with her? What does it mean to be reduced to just your basic software as a human and why is witnessing that part 1000x worse than burying a loved one? I miss you so much Lisa that I'm crying as I write this. I hope you're well wherever you are. Drop me a line if you can, but only if all the scary shit we living think exists  in the spiritual world doesn't actually exist. I love you more than I ever told you when you were alive.  

Extraordinary Claims

by Luther Reads

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

The priest claims to own one car, and the bartender believes him. The minister claims to own four cars, but the bartender is skeptical until the minister brandishes a photograph of himself standing in front of a house and four cars. The rabbi then pulls out a photograph of himself standing in front of 400 cars and claims to own them all, but the bartender says, "You're gonna need more than a picture of yourself with 400 cars to convince me that they're all yours."

If you're expecting a punch line, there isn't one. So in a way, the joke's on you :)

The story is instead a parable meant to illustrate that extraordinary claims warrant extraordinary proof. Believing that a person owns one car requires almost no proof because it's an ordinary claim. But owning 400 cars is an extraordinary claim that warrants a far different level of proof.

I was told two extraordinary claims in my youth.

1. The Earth rotates around the sun, a belief known as heliocentrism. This is such a ridiculous claim because I can literally see the sun moving through the sky every day. The sun appears to move, not us. But yet I was told otherwise.

2. Two thousand years ago, the creator of the universe was born to a virgin, with himself as the father, and the subsequent brutal murder of this offspring allowed him to invite those of us who believe this story to come live with him for eternity with no more death or sadness.

Now what if, in a shocking twist, the bartender then claims to own four million cars, and all the other customers in the bar attest to it. And so do all the people walking down the street in front of the bar, and all the people in all the other bars along that street.

This is what it's like to be raised as a heliocentric Christian. Everyone around me believed that the Earth rotates around the sun, and that Jesus was born of a virgin and died for our sins. So as a child, I accepted both ideas.

But I also did something even more harmful, and this is the role of indoctrination. After hearing these claims so many times from so many people that I loved and trusted, I accepted the claims as being... ordinary. And ordinary claims only warrant ordinary proof.

But heliocentrism and Christianity are both very, very, very extraordinary claims. And I've found extraordinary proof for one but not the other.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads is a poet who's never actually written a poem.

Should Black People Forgive Amy Cooper for Calling 9-1-1 on a Black Man Who Told Her To Leash Her Dog?

by Luther Reads

Nah.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads agrees with the definition for "forgive" that G**gle displayed, which was "to stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offense, flaw, or mistake." And no, I don't have a good reason for not naming G**gle directly. Fuck 'em! That's why.

Metaphorically Speaking

by Luther Reads

"When I was a kid, I thought quicksand would be a much bigger problem."

That's the text of a meme that comically rings true to me and so many others who grew up in the 80s and 90s. It was the TV shows, right? Quicksand was everywhere, and I watched with great concern, hoping to learn what to do and what not to do in preparation for the inevitable day when I would have to be rescued, or rescue someone else, from quicksand.

Fast forward 30 years, and I haven't come across any quicksand. Sadly, I probably never will. But I now accept that the quicksand was a metaphor for the very real struggles that we face in life. Quicksand can come out of nowhere, just like so many of life's problems. You need help from a friend to get out of quicksand. Need I say more?

These are just some of the many lessons that quicksand, as a metaphor, can help us to understand.

Oh, the stories in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible are also metaphors.

*cue the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song*

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About the Author:

Luther Reads doesn't like long walks on the beach. He likes swimming in the fucking ocean that's literally right there!

Atheists, Christians, Foxholes, and Pandemics

by Luther Reads

Let me set the scene:

It's March 2020, and we're in the middle of a global pandemic. Apparently, somebody in Wuhan, China got too close to an animal carrying something called a "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" virus, and two months later we're all at risk of getting Dat Rona virus.

The NBA has canceled its season over concerns about spreading the coronavirus. Colleges and universities have cancelled classes. Governors have closed public schools for weeks. Travel bans are being put in place. Cruise ships are not being allowed to dock. Self quarantining is a thing. People are emptying grocery stores of Lysol wipes and, oddly enough, toilet paper.

Churches are even closing their doors. Remember all those old sayings about "corporate" prayer and forsaking not the gathering of the saints? I guess they didn't mean during a pandemic. The Catholic church is abandoning the use of holy water. Yes, the holy water that priests pray over. Yes, the holy water that symbolizes the protection of Jesus Christ. I guess it can't protect against a pandemic.

But you know what isn't closing and what isn't canceled? The science labs that are working on cures, vaccines, and tests for the coronavirus. I used to hear that there are no Atheists in a foxhole. The assertion being that when bullets are flying, everybody prays to someone. Well, I wonder if there are any Christians during a global pandemic. The assertion being that... well, you get it.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads builds robots. He doesn't want his robots to take anyone's job, but he knows this is unavoidable. Yet he toils on. He is very human in this regard -- a walking contradiction.

"I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual"

by Luther Reads

A few years ago, church goers openly mocked the non church goers who said, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." The church goers thought that phrase was an excuse to be lazy and stay home from church. But now the phrase isn't being ridiculed because so many people finally realize that churches are problematic for a lot of people.

More and more people see the deep flaws baked into the church hierarchy and structure, so much so that calling a Christian "religious" is like cursing them out. The rampant pettiness, cliquishness, legalism, and judgementalism among religious people has become too much. People backstabbing each other for positions, mismanagement of funds, abuse of power, misinterpretation of scripture, false spiritualism, etc, etc, and another etc. A thousand et ceteras, actually. Church folk be trippin!

A pastor friend of mine once defended this kind of behavior by saying that churches are still full of humans. He said, "People accept that kind of behavior at their job, but are shocked and disappointed to see it at church even though we're all still human." I thought the purpose of Christianity, and therefore church, is to make better humans out of us. So if church folk don't behave any better than the people at my job, I'd say that's a poor advertisement for attending church. But I digress.

Here's what I don't understand about the "spiritual" people, because many of them still read the Bible and pray to Jesus. Who do they think wrote the Bible? Who do they think compiled the Old and New Testament? Who do they think controlled the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus for thousands of years? The church! The religious people. The backstabbers, abusers, and misinterpretors. If the church's hierarchy is problematic now, then it was problematic back then. Ain't nothing changed. Jewish leadership compiled the Old Testament, and Catholic leadership compiled the New Testament.

"But God!" they say. Most Bible readers believe that God intervened in the development of scripture to keep it free from humanity's foolishness. Okay, so is God still doing that? Because I can write my own interpretation of the Bible, sell it on Amazon, and God won't stop me. The Quran and Book of Mormon are both attributed to God and he didn't stop them. Christians believe that free will was given to all humans, even the religious people who wrote and translated Bibles, and shaped the story of Jesus. Any biases, selfishness, and pettiness that they harbored went right into the Bible.

But don't take my word for it, read the book for yourself. From rampant chauvinism and patriarchy to the burning alive of non believers, it's all in there and it's quite messy. But above all else, it's predictably very human.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads has recently come to terms with the staying power of the Oxford comma.

As a Father and a Scientist...

by Luther Reads

The comedian Chris Rock once memorably (although not hilariously, to me) suggested that his primary role as a father of daughters is to ensure that they don't end up on the pole... the stripper pole.

As a scientist, my primary role as a father is to keep my kids out of cults. That's my nightmare, as it would be the source of my eternal shame.

My parents and most of my family practice a very moderate and loving iteration of Christianity, but buried under layers of warm hugs and family worships are some very dangerous ideas:

• We will not always understand why we do certain things.
• We believe things even when faced with evidence to the contrary.
• We will receive our reward in the afterlife.

You know who else speaks this way? Cult leaders!!! So fast forward 15 years from now, and one of my daughters tells me that she's dropping out of school or selling all her stuff to join a fellowship of believers led by some clown in a toga. If all her life I've praised the virtues of relying on faith and ignoring evidence, what recourse do I have? If she doesn't understand the value of evidence in comparison to faith, I might as well kiss her goodbye.

Christianity isn't just a way of life, but it's also a way of thinking about evidence, facts, and our feelings. It would be awesome if we could trust our faith and our feelings to protect us from harmful cults and ridiculous beliefs, but we have enough, uhhh... evidence... to know that isn't true. People fall for dumb ass doctrines all the time, but not my daughters dammit! They will learn that evidence, logic and reason can help us to overcome our biases and narrow perspective of the world.

These tools force us to reconcile what feels true with what is known about the world as observed through more objective lenses. And if they understand that, they can work all the poles they want.


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About the Author:

Luther Reads is a scientist. Well, he's actually an engineer, but they're also scientists, right? *draws Venn diagram*

Everything happens for a reason

... and that reason is usually Physics.

by Luther Reads

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About the Author:

Luther Reads is a down-to-earth thousandaire who puts his pants on one leg of a time just like everybody else.

I Couldn't Have Been More Wrong About Atheists

by Luther Reads

I came into Atheism believing certain myths about this group of non believers. I rise today to dispel just a few of these misrepresentations.

• All Atheists do NOT embrace the idea that our beliefs should be guided by evidence. Hell no! Many atheists believe in a shit ton of ridiculous, fallacious, and poorly reasoned arguments.

• All Atheists do NOT reject the idea of arbitrarily dividing humanity by birthplace or birthright. Jesus no! Many atheists are racist, sexist, and xenophobic douche bags.

• All Atheists do NOT approach their own understanding of the world with humility. God no! Many atheists are arrogant assholes who have no sense of the historical progression of knowledge, which will ultimately disprove some of the things we now believe to be true.

• All Atheists do NOT think critically, being careful not to blindly follow a charismatic leader. Lord no! Many sheep-like Atheists worship at the church of one or more famous Atheists, no matter how short-sighted or mean-spirited their claims are.

• All Atheists do NOT reject supernatural explanations for unexplainable phenomenons. Heavens no! Many atheists believe in ghosts, spirits, and karma. This has by far been the most baffling to me. BY FAR!!!! What in the entire fuck?!?

• All Atheists do NOT reject the idea that humans have dominion over plants and animals. Mary Mother of Jesus no! Many Atheists believe that humans have an innate right to dominate and abuse the living organisms we share the Earth with, and even the Earth itself.

• All Atheists do NOT even reject the idea of God. Christ no! Many so-called Atheists are just mad at their god for something bad that happened in their lives, but yet never considered all the other far worse shit that has been going on in the world for tens of thousands of years.

Crazy right? That's what I say each and every time I realize a new truth about Atheists. And I'm sure there are more -- many many more.



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About the Author:

Luther Reads found audio books two years ago, and his life has been forever changed.

Why Science Can't Kill the Christian God

by Luther Reads

Remember the horror film "Child's Play" about a possessed children's doll named Chucky? And then Child's Play 2, and 3, and Bride of Chucky, and Seed of Chucky? That damn doll just wouldn't die. They stabbed it, burned it, shot it in the heart and blew up it's head. But still, he lived.

The Christian god is like Chucky in that he just won't die. The Greek gods are dead. The Egyptian gods are mostly dead. The Hindu gods, well, they're still around. But the Christian god is one of the most resilient gods of all time. Science was supposed to be the magic bullet, with its insistence on objectivity and verifiable claims. The Christian god was supposed to cower into a corner, afraid for his very existence, but that isn't about to happen any time soon.

First, the Christian god is a shape shifter. Remember the Prototype Series 1000 Terminator in Judgment Day? He had the liquid metal body and could take on whatever shape he wanted. That's what Christians have done to their god, so much so that it's difficult to pin down exactly who or what this god is. When there was one mother church which told everyone what God said and did, maybe Science stood a chance. But now that every Christian is empowered to make this god into whatever they want, whenever they want, Science is nothing more than a 6-shooter pistol in a Terminator fight.

I have Christian friends and relatives who aren't quite sure what God is doing, although they continue to pray for traveling mercies and blessings over their food, and they always thank him for the good in their lives. One friend even attends church regularly with her family, but doesn't believe that Jesus was the literal son of God. And if we accept that homosapiens all originated from a single region, then all other gods both past and present can also be thought of as shape shifted variations of the same mystical presence that humans so often feel. Science doesn't stand a chance!

The second reason that Science won't kill God is that scientists have murked the good name of Science by involving it in all sorts of stupid shit like racism, sexism, and cigarettes. For centuries, scientists have claimed that Whites are objectively the most superior race, and that men are better suited for certain [important] jobs. And Scientists spent decades telling the world that cigarettes aren't really that harmful.

This is all the ammunition that religiously-minded folks needs to disparage anything that scientists say. Hell, I'm one of Science's biggest fanboys and I don't even believe half the shit that scientists come up with. Let me be perfectly clear though, the Earth is a sphere; it is not flat. As Christians have manufactured their god to validate their own beliefs, scientists have manipulated data to do the exact same thing. Intellect is now so mistrusted that I've actually been told by Christians that I'm thinking about it too much, or that I'm too smart for my own good.

So how does it end? Do you remember how the T1000 Terminator was finally killed? He was thrown into a pit of fire, which ironically sounds a lot like hell. *insert 1000 face palm emojis*




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About the Author:

For the 15th consecutive year, Luther Reads has decided that next year will be the year that he starts piano lessons. Huzzah!

Why I am a Goddammed Atheist

by Luther Reads

I would not waste two minutes of my precious time on Earth writing about why I don't believe in the tooth fairy, unless of course I found myself surrounded by friends and family who do, and if I myself had once believed in this fairy well into adulthood. That is the situation I find myself in with the Christian god, and so here I am, writing about why I'm an Atheist.

This might surprise you, but I make no claim about the existence or non-existence of God, so in this regard I am an agnostic. But I do not pray to the Christian god, I do not seek the Bible for moral guidance, and I do not pursue a relationship with him using the enigmatic process provided by Christianity. So in this regard, I am an atheist.

A friend of mine once told me that he heard God talking to him in his car. I actually believe that he heard a voice, but I also believe that there was no voice. I now recognize that our vision, hearing, imagination, feelings, hopes and memories can alter our perception of an experience to fit a preconceived narrative, such as the superiority of a certain race or the presence of a certain god. Any Christian who thinks this isn't possible expresses a fundamental misunderstanding about how the human mind works, and must explain the experiences of billions of people, both past and present, who have interacted with non-Christian gods.

If we agree that the mind can play these kinds of tricks, even on large groups of people, then Christianity needs to teach believers how to differentiate between what is imagined and what is indeed supernaturally sourced. When praying, what process can be used to determine when God is speaking, and when our own subconscious and imagination are at work? Which Bible interpretations have been influenced by biases and traditions, and which haven't? What tool did the Biblical authors use to separate their own biases, desires and imagination from what they claimed to have been told by God? In my last days as a Christian, I asked pastors, friends and relatives about their own communication with God, and found neither consistency nor clarity. Everyone's process and understanding was different, and all seemed based on ambiguous feelings.

Without a reliable tool or process, I lost confidence in my own ability to distinguish between what I imagined that God would say, and what God may actually have been saying. I lost confidence in everyone's ability to do this correctly. When the preacher says, "God told me to tell you...," I found it necessary to first be convinced of how he heard from God before I could accept what he heard.

Prayer and Bible study are the primary ways that Christians hear from their god, and I was taught that the Bible must be read with real-time interpretive guidance from God in spirit form. If this is God's plan, to communicate with us telepathically while never being seen or heard in an evident way, and if he didn't give us a reliable tool of discernment, then the vast number of God-believing and Bible-based churches in disagreement with each other should have been fully expected. Suicidal cults are inevitable, men will continue to strap bombs to themselves and blow up buildings, the sick will continue flocking to unscrupulous faith healers, church goers will continue "sowing a seed" by putting their rent money in the offering plate, homosexuals will continue to get shunned by their own parents -- all based on what people believe in their heart to be the voice of God. If there is no way to decipher what is God and what is not God, those who are gullible and impressionable do not stand a chance. And guess what... allllllll of us are gullible and impressionable.

Truth cannot be reliably discerned through this process, facts cannot be verified, and disagreements cannot be settled between two individuals who both claim to have heard from God. If this nebulous plan is the best that a omnipotent and omniscient God can do, then I'm not interested in him, even if he is real. I would rather put my trust and belief in things that can be collectively seen and verified. I would rather derive my hope, joy, peace of mind, and purpose from what is evident to people, regardless of their ethnic or cultural background, religious upbringing or beliefs.

Oh, and I really like saying goddamit!




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About the Author:

Luther Reads is not the most interesting man in the world, but he is one of the most curious.

Richard Dawkins is an Asshole

He’s also wrong about god. 

Ever since I realized that I didn’t believe in the god of Abraham, something Dawkins and I agree on, I’ve struggled with categorizing my rejection of religion. Am I an agnostic, a non-believer, an atheist, a non-theist, something else, or at times am I all of those things? I know I don’t believe in heaven or hell, that a single, omnipresent, omniscient, entirely benevolent, male entity far beyond human comprehension created the universe. I just don’t buy that; too contradictory. At the same time, I’m not even remotely intellectually equipped or knowledgeable of the hundreds of thousands of human cultures that have conceived of nonhuman intelligence to make the claim Richard Dawkins is famous for; that no gods exist anywhere. That claim is as contradictory as it is overly confident as it is utterly soaking wet with willful ignorance. 

But I suppose we would expect nothing less from a highly educated and academically conscious white man raised in an imperialist culture, during a time when intellectual whiteness advanced largely unchallenged within the mainstream. From the very moment of little Dickey's birth he has been socialized to believe that white men like him, especially Englishmen, invented and perfected the one true way of knowing, science. Dawkins would almost certainly deny this claim (I'm sure he has many times over), asserting his firm grasp on a white scientists' favorite binky, objectivity. Then again, white people, especially white men, are not known for having much of an understanding of what problematic subconscious voices they're listening to. And it's precisely this lack of understanding and/or acknowledgement of the influence of one's socialization, particularly the racist socialization that the English and many a scientist dead and alive are famous for ignoring. In Dawkins we have yet another such character declaring an absolute truth having never tested his ideas beyond the horizon of his problematic cultural preconceptions. This is what Dickey D is saying when he claims there's never been any evidence of a god or the gods: 1) "The bandwidth of my understanding of the evidence for gods is large enough to speak for all human knowledge"; 2) "I have reviewed all relevant evidence for gods"; 3) "Any evidence that I haven't reviewed is irrelevant."; 4)"No, my entire argument is based on a cultural superiority complex disguised as an obvious tautology! How dare you question my superior intellect! I'm  he is saying no other human culture living or dead - and by the way, I have almost no understanding of the role white supremacy played in annihilating countless cultures - has ever correctly conceived of a spiritual realm or the principles that might govern such a realm. The ideas and evidence for god/gods, even the evidence I can never examine, are all incorrect and I know this to be true because it's impossible for me to conceive of such a thing. See what I mean? That’s a fuck boi thing to claim.

But I do agree with Dick that the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are too rife with contradictions to be believed based on logic. And I also get the frustration and anger nonbelievers feel when faced with the many heinous things people do in the name of religion. It’s horrifying to review the ways in which people cause harm when, if they’d simply stop and seriously question the foundations of their belief system (or simply heed that nagging feeling most humans get when we intentionally cause harm to others), would not likely commit. Fair enough. But what you never hear ‘ol Dicky Dawk talk at length about is the role white supremacy, both religiously powered and non religiously powered, has had in undermining our collective ability to understand our species and the cultural diversity white people in the name of whiteness have been erasing at a breakneck pace over the last centuries. And that issue, or rather the failure to integrate that issue into atheist discourse, is relevant because we are losing ways of knowing, ways of perceiving the world. We talk about the tragedy of losing unknown cures for diseases in rain forests in favor of rangeland and timber (and I bet you Dawkins, if he ever reads this, will do so seated in a rainforest wood chair eating some fine Brazilian steak), but fail to recognize the tragic loss of perspective and knowledge that comes from human beings shaped by a specific biogeography. But, again, this type of failure to draw obvious parallels between seemingly disparate issues is the hallmark of western white supremacist science. We've drawn lines around the boundaries of what we care to explore and declared everything outside of such boundaries irrelevant.

So where does that leave my brand of atheism, which, believe it or not, was the point of this entry. Nothing I’ve read or experienced leaves me to believe that the explanations of the realm beyond my physical existence are correct. I find the abrahamic belief system tree confusing at best and soul crushing at worst. I don’t think Hinduism is right for me and I don’t know enough about Buddhism or other such ways of knowing that have been around for only 15,000 to subscribe to. But, and this is where I get close to blowing up my argument that Dickens is a moron (but he is, he really really is), I’m highly skeptical of any religion that was formed out of the conceptions of humans living in agricultural-based civilizations. Why? I’ll leave the answer for that in my next post, with this teaser; domestication of life as a means of subsistence fundamentally changes the human perception of the world and her/his relationship to it. Don't believe me? Talk to and/or engage with indigenous stories and writings discussing the conflict between them and those who came to civilize them.

When I’m asked to reveal my religious status I usually tell people I’m an atheist, but not a Richard Dawkins atheist. I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe that humans are fundamentally flawed and that part of our purpose is to spend our lives atoning for a flaw in our design. That idea is so clearly, to me at least, the product of the guilt of a people trying to convince their victims and themselves that the horrible things they do are somehow justified, the same way a serial abuser rationalizes their terror to themselves and their victims. Naw playa, fuck that. I’m not perfect by any means, but I’m not fundamentally broken, not by virtue of being born. And without that belief, none of the rest of a belief in the gods of civilization makes sense. Like the Janelle Monáe says, "I'm a free-ass mutherfucker", or, at least, I'm trying to be. 

Why I'm an Atheist

"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.