lucky chick
How I arrived at atheism… I was told as a kid by everyone that there was a god, I was from a catholic family but not real church-goers, and I prayed because it was comforting to think someone was listening. But my dog died anyway, animals felt pain, people did bad things, the Yankees lost, no one could explain HOW that guy Lazarus moved that big rock all by himself, Jewish people didn’t seem any different from me, the idea of hell was pretty absurd, as was heaven (again, comforting), and then I started taking biology. I couldn’t build a plane or perform surgery or describe how a computer worked, but someone else understood and could explain these things. No one could explain god. I was supposed to have “faith.” The idea of god went the way of santa claus at about the same time (well, by mean brother spilled the beans about santa a little earlier).
I’m much less generous now – I lament that the leaders of most of the world are silly enough to believe in a god, and a lot of people would condemn me for not. I just want to scream when a president prays or I hear “under god” in the pledge. To me, that’s eliminating the separation of church and state. I sometimes feel like a very lonely reasonable person.