This isn’t a new story, but with new beginnings comes setting the stage. Therefore, I wanted to describe how I left Christianity and became an outspoken atheist. If I can do it, so can you. So can anyone. You just have to have a brain in your head and care if what you believe is actually true.

So let’s get started.

I grew up in a very religious family and of all of them, I was the most religious of all. We belonged to a Missouri Synod Lutheran church and I went to religious schools all the way through the end of high school. Why? Because it was a better education than the typical public school, I will agree with that, but to get a decent education, you had to face an endless barrage of religious stupidity. I guess it was a trade-off.

I went to church a lot, of my own volition. There was a Sunday early service and a late service, separated by Sunday School and I attended them all growing up. I got to church about 8am and left at noon every single week. Sometimes later because people hung out in front of the church drinking coffee and eating donuts and I sometimes stayed for that, especially as I got older.

There was also a Wednesday night service that I attended, as well as a weekly youth group meeting on that night. There was a small room up in the bell tower that had gotten commandeered and that’s where we met, just below the bells. It was an old-school manual bell ringing mechanism, where you had to push down on various levers to make the different bells ring and you could play music on it and I learned how to do that. I was there so much that I learned how to do it, if that tells you anything.

I also carried a Bible around with me almost everywhere I went. Back in those days, I don’t know if there were pocket Bibles or not but I had a small white one that zippered closed. It looked exactly like the one pictured. It went most places with me and I read it regularly. I knew my stuff then and I still do today. I find that most atheists know more about Christianity than Christians do. It’s why we’re atheists. We just know better.

So by now, you might be assuming I was pretty serious about my faith. I hadn’t made up my mind, but I was thinking seriously about a life in the clergy of some kind. By the time I got to high school, I was very serious about my faith. We played D&D in the library with the high school chaplain over lunch every day if you can believe it. That was kind of funny since I also watched a show on TV called The Eagle’s Nest with Pastor Gary Greenwald and he was very much anti-role-playing. I think even back then, I recognized that there was something severely wrong with a lot of big name preachers, but I watched all the same.

Everything was going fine until I got to my junior year in high school. I was the first to speak up in religion classes, I was the first to buy into all of the insane rhetoric that I recognize is so faulty today, I was a true believer. That was until I got into a biology class. Pictured is my teacher, taken from my 1982 school yearbook. If there’s one person most directly to blame for me being an atheist today, that’s him. Thanks, Dr. Hoger.

I had friends that went to public schools and we’d get together after school at various houses and do our homework together. Sometimes, they’d look at my textbooks, which were all hyper-religious and I’d look at theirs. I started to come across references to something I’d never heard of before: evolution. I really had no idea what it was so, I did what curious kids usually do. I asked. That was a mistake.

Dr. Hoger asked if anyone had any questions at the end of class one day and, stupid me, I raised my hand. I said I’d seen something about evolution and I was curious if he could explain what it was. It was done very respectfully, but his reaction was completely out in left field. He got mad. He rushed over to my table, got in my face and demanded that I never bring it up or even think about it ever again. Evolution was sinful. He wouldn’t have anyone even thinking about it in his class.

Yeah, I might have been a Christian, but there was one thing you never did then and still do not do to this day. You never told me not to think about things. As soon as I got out of school, I went straight to the library and checked out every book on evolution I could get and I read them all. This is in the days before the Internet when you had to look physical books if you wanted information. When I had exhausted the public library, I started going to university libraries and using their microfiche readers to print out information. I still have all of that packed away in a giant binder somewhere.

Now I went into it expecting the Bible to be validated and all of the evidence to point to the existence of God, but that’s just not what I found. The more I looked, the less it seemed to me that the Bible and Christianity was actually true. This went on for a number of years, long after I was out of high school and into college, but I never stopped looking. Eventually, I stopped being a Christian and then I stopped being an active theist altogether. I suppose I drifted along for a while being a non-descript believer in something, although I couldn’t really explain what exactly, but eventually, it became clear to me that there was just no rational reason whatsoever to believe that anything about Christianity, and ultimately any religion, was true in any logical or rational way.

And there still isn’t. Close to 40 years later, I have never found any evidence of any kind that supports religion and every bit of the evidence that shows that religion is absurdly nonsensical.  It’s not that I’m against religion automatically, I just refuse to put my beliefs in anything that cannot be independently and objectively proven to be factually correct and religion can’t be. It doesn’t even make a good faith effort. It’s all about emotion and emotion has nothing at all to do with reality.

Maybe the world would be a better place if the religious would just stop feeling and start thinking instead. Maybe that’s what we ought to encourage.