I am an atheist because it just makes sense. As a kid, I loved to read. I read anything that had words. I read street signs and fairy tales and the all of the Bible and those naughty magazines and raunchy novels that the grown-ups thought they hid well. I suppose being so voracious, it was easy for me to associate the Blue Fairy and Santa Claus and Jesus as fictional characters, with the downside being that even the grown-ups believed in Jesus. I mean, catching my dad rolling in our Christmas bicycles solved the “Is Santa real?” question pretty solidly, but going into church and playing Mary holding a little brown baby doll and calling it our Lord for an audience of proud faces was downright confusing. How was it different than playing Wendy of Peter Pan for a school play? It was fun, but no one really believed that you could fly with happy thoughts and fairy dust.
I didn’t get it then. I really didn’t. Most churches had brown haired, blue eyed Saviors pictures on the wall, while our African Methodist Episcopal church hung a dark skinned bushy-haired Jesus picture and they were supposed to be the same? Oh, wait, that wasn’t right. According to my pastor and family, them white folks had it wrong and co-opted Jesus to look like them. We were right. But wait, wasn’t he supposedly born in the Middle East? I learned quickly what questions I was allowed to ask at risk of getting yelled out, threatened with hell or outright punished for being a “smart-mouth.”
Before I even had a name for what I believed, I kept my questions to myself as I learned about dinosaurs (that weren’t mentioned in Noah’s story), and reproduction (that, at least for humans, requires sex), and other things that didn’t quite go with what I was told was the Truth According to God’s Word (and don’t get me started on the stuff that didn’t go well with how I understood reality). To my mind then, it was just adults playing at pretend, so I pretended with them. I pretended devotion at church and joined the kid’s choir and ushered and read scriptures and holiday speeches, my fear of displeasing my family greater than any love I could have for some deity.
I wish I could talk to that little girl and reassure her that someday, it will be okay to ask the questions, and the word you were looking for is “atheist”. I almost wish I had the desire to have children of my own so that I could teach them that it’s okay to ask questions, to say “I don’t know”, and to find things out on their own. Also, that I would love them no matter what they believed.
Even if they were little “smart-mouths”.
Niki M.
United States
Niki M. makes these points:
(1) Questions about the conflicts between religion and “common sense” were not allowed.
(2) Some things, e.g. dinosaurs and sex (reality), don’t square with the Bible.
(3) Always thought that adults were playing make-believe, not engaged in actual belief; so she didn’t believe.
Summary: Never believed despite religious upbringing; religious conflicts with common sense led to non-belief.
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