I have not believed in God since I was in my mid-teens. It began, normally enough, with confusion over certain issues. So many questions are not adequately answered by religion. The ultimate question, of course, being, "Where did we come from?"
The Christian faith I was raised in assured me that we were created by God. But it failed to explain where God came from. "He has always existed," I was told. This made no sense to me then, and makes no sense to me now. If something can "always" exist, like God, then why couldn't the Universe "always" have existed?
Everything must have a beginning, I'm told by many. Everything except God, evidently.
Well, I'm sorry... But if you're going to lay down a law, you can't have something be outside that law. That seems pretty simple to me, but many religious folks can't seem to understand that.
At any rate, as time went on, I began to question more about the Christian system of beliefs. It's an impressive system. The Christian dogma is very well put together. Tight as a drum. Oh, the "facts" supporting the faith are all too easy to poke holes in. But the dogma itself holds a parry for any ideological thrust one can muster. Because "God" is omnipotent, you see.
I went through a phase of feeling that religion was "silly." I mean, let's be real. The whole concept just reeks of the inane. But then it started to bother me. I read more about Christianity, and other religions, and started to feel the amusement give way to disgust.
Religion, I soon realized, is the ultimate "thought police." What you think may be held against you in the court of God. Or lesser courts, as many have discovered. Galileo was imprisoned and tortured by the Church for proclaiming that the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the other way around. Disbelievers everywhere are condemned to "eternal damnation" if they don't change their way of thinking. And of course, all those lovely religious wars over the centuries. Convert or die... and then suffer "eternal damnation."
But you can't prove that there's no God, say my theistic and agnostic friends. No, I can't. But why should I? The burden of proof is not on me to provide evidence for the non-existence of something. No one else can give any evidence whatsoever of the existence of God, no matter what they believe in their hearts.
The thing that gets me is that many people seem to automatically assume that there is a possibility for a God to exist. This strikes me as wacky. As I've said: God, as presented in the Christian religion, is something that sits outside the realm of all natural laws that we know of. It is not rational in the least to accept that as a possible reality. Belief in such a creature must therefore begin with an irrational hypothesis. Sorry. I can't do that.
One particularly dear friend of mine considers himself to be an agnostic. Because he doesn't know whether there's a God or not, cannot prove it one way or another. I hate to break this to him, but that makes him an atheist.
All agnostics are atheists.
If you do not believe in a God, then you are, by definition, an atheist. So many people seem to think that "agnostic" is not as offensive, not as cut-and-dried, as "atheist." Well, few things in life are cut-and-dried. Atheist, as a label, has as many variants as anything else. There are those who simply do not believe in a God. And there are those who vehemently deny the existence of a God. There are those who almost never discuss the subject, and there are those who virtually proselytize their disbelief. All sorts of variations.
I am somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I do not preach to people and try to convert them to my way of thinking. But I cannot sit idly by and watch religious people do that, either. In this late 20th Century, there are still those who feel they must thrust their belief systems onto others. America is experiencing a lot of this right now, with the likes of the Christian Coalition and other groups running amok, trying to force faith on the children in our public schools and other reprehensible acts. I support the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization devoted to maintaining the wall between Church and State.
I am an atheist, and perfectly happy to be one, thank you very much.