Perhaps because of its religious teachings, my parents were very concerned about what we were learning there. At one point, in fourth grade, they abruptly pulled me out of the Baptist school and sent me to public school for a quarter. They weren’t happy with the public school either, mostly because they were concerned for our safety, so they put us back in the Baptist school.
From an early age, I took religion very seriously. I would often get into arguments with my family and friends because I felt that their lifestyles were terrible, that they were living against God. My parents, for example, listened to rock music. I was taught in school that that was a sin, and that I should preach to my parents when they listened to it.
Needless to say, my school was very conservative and very Christian. It regulated our hairstyles. Girls had to wear dresses below their knees. My teachers were creationists; I was taught that the world was roughly 4,000 years old. My peers and I had a lot of Bible study, and we would memorize one verse every week. It was both expected and required that people would wait until they were married to have sex. We used textbooks from the evangelical Christian college Bob Jones University. History, for example, was taught from a Christian perspective. We were encouraged to attend Bob Jones when we graduated from high school, which, in retrospect, likely would have been a bad career move, considering that that school has had some accreditation issues.
My memory of my childhood is one of pervading guilt. Everything that I did was a sin, always. I believed that if I was saved and really meant it, if I really believed in Jesus, then I would go to heaven. According to my teachers, people of other faiths and other denominations of Christianity would go to hell. I was told that one day I was going to have to face God, and in front of everyone, He would name off all of my sins, even things that I didn’t remember doing. I was told that every day, I should be praying on my knees for God’s forgiveness. It was really intense, and I had a constant fear of hell.
After fifth grade, my family moved to a better district, and I transferred to a good public school. That experience was unbelievably different. For the first time, I found out that there were good people who weren’t Baptists. Quite quickly, I rejected nearly everything that I had been taught about the world. I started calling myself an atheist in seventh grade, and my curiosity only grew. I read about Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism. I immediately determined that they were all the same to me, all equally untrue. I realized that the reason that people believe in God and religion has to do largely with an emotional conviction, a conviction that is similar for everyone from all faiths. I concluded that if there’s nothing that makes any one religion uniquely true, if there’s no reason to believe in one over the others, then there is no reason to believe in any of them.
This newfound independence of thought carried over to my ethical worldview, too. My Baptist education had been incredibly foundational from such a young age. I had been indoctrinated with a specific morality, taught that people needed to be Baptist Christian, not just Christian. I had been told that if someone didn’t believe a specific part of Baptist doctrine, then they would be damned to hell. I had to reject the morality that I had been taught my whole life and reevaluate everything. I started to become a much more tolerant person.
The switch to the public school impacted nearly every facet of my life. When I got out of the private school, I was very socially awkward. My educational environment had been extraordinarily restrictive. There was no bullying, and there were no cool kids, no cliques. In the public school, I was different, so I got made fun of a lot, which made the people who were nice to me all the more important. The people who were nice to me, I found, weren’t Baptist.
I was incredibly naive. I remember one day I was standing at the bus stop and someone talked about smoking a bowl. I didn’t know what that meant. I thought the person had meant smoking an actual cereal bowl. This was my first introduction to recreational drug use. I became friendly with drug dealers. To my surprise, they weren’t crazed people who were raping and pillaging.
Losing my religion was like coming out of a fog or waking up from a dream. Looking back, I think that the only way that I could have possibly maintained a belief in a God is if I had had a constant feedback loop of people telling me over and over that such a being existed, that it was something that I needed to care about, worry about, and consider. Almost as soon as that environment left my life, my interest and belief in that ideology disappeared. I came out of my shelter and found out that the world isn’t how I had been taught. So I changed my views.
My mind was open for the first time. In high school, I started to get really interested in reason and logic, especially when I began to take science classes. Being exposed to theory of evolution had an important impact on me. After I became educated about the subject, I realized that I no longer needed to search for an ultimate purpose or an ultimate meaning to life. We are collections of genes that are geared toward continued existence. We create our own meaning. It’s a happy accident that we are self-aware, intelligent, that we exist in the way that we do. I intend to enjoy my time while I’m alive.
My fascination with these topics continued when I enrolled in college. By the time I saw an e-mail about a secular student group on campus, I was quite interested in atheism. I went to one meeting and was immediately hooked. The smartest and most interesting people on campus were in that group. When I think about my good experiences in college, I’ll always think about them. Those were some of the best times in my life.
Despite the sense of community that I was able to create in college, there are negative things about being an atheist. The worst thing that’s ever happened in my life happened a few years ago. My ex-boyfriend Lawrence and I had been friends for a long time after we broke up, even though he was a very different person than I am. He was crazy. He wanted to live on the edge and do drugs. He said, like Kurt Cobain, that he would “rather burn out than fade away.” He had a fascination with his own death and talked about it often. One day, he was fighting with his girlfriend and took out his gun and put it to his chin. He showed her that it was empty. He put it to his chin and pulled the trigger. She mocked him. She said he would never do it. So he did. He put a bullet in the chamber and fired. That was it.
I found out what happened to Lawrence on my way to a secular student group meeting. I was hysterical. I had tears streaming down my cheeks. I couldn’t speak or form cogent thoughts. I went into the meeting, and there were two religious people there who always crashed our meetings. The people in the group were my closest friends. They felt really badly for me, and they all really wanted to help me. But it was the religious people who came up to me. They hugged me, helped me to the elevator, and told me that I should go home. They asked me if I’d be okay and if I needed a ride. My friends, the atheists, seemed too socially awkward for that kind of warmth. It was probably hard for them to know how to act in that situation.
I’m an adult. I understand that people die. But it’s really, really hard to emotionally understand that fact. I had a great deal of trouble coping with Lawrence’s suicide. I still have nightmares about it. In terms of dealing with death, because I have had to face life’s reality, I understand why believing in an afterlife is worth so much to so many people. Atheists tend to be a certain kind of person, pretty independent. Over time, I started to realize that not everyone is like that. I lost a lot of the anger that I had toward the evils that religion has visited on the world. Even though I still believed that religions were wrong, I started to become more accepting of religious people.