I am in my 60s. For more than half of my life I have identified as an atheist. I do not claim that gods don’t exist. I simply don’t believe gods exist. None of the evidence compels me to believe.
Just before I turned 61 I had a brush with mortality. I had a heart attack and a stroke. They weren’t debilitating or damaging long-term, but the event was certainly scary enough to get me thinking about “what comes next”, which got me thinking about how I became an atheist.
Unlike other atheists who can narrow down or even pinpoint when they started their deconversion story, in retrospect I think I have always been a functional atheist. Even in the context of being raised a middle class white Southerner who went to church pretty much every Sunday during my childhood, I think I have always rejected the assertions of my cultural religious practices.
I distinctly remember a childhood Sunday school class at St. Luke’s Episcopal church about Noah’s Ark when I expressed considerable skepticism about the story. The teacher even shut down my questions about how that was possible by saying, “God can do all things,” an answer that did NOT satisfy a questioning 10 year old.
At some point in my young teen years I heard a sermon from the pulpit that referred to Proverbs 3:5-6:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.
That really rankled me. Here was a man of the cloth telling me that God doesn’t want me to even attempt to understand spiritual matters, and maybe even material matters.
None of this stopped me from becoming an avid born again Christian at 15. I’m pretty sure my primary motivation was so I could start going to a Wednesday night youth group so I could impress a girl who went there.
I thoroughly embraced my conversion. I started Bible study groups. I practiced street evangelism. I was a co-leader of other youth groups. I joined a group to train to be a minister later. I even broke up with a girlfriend because she was ready to have sex!
At some point everything began to fall apart. I genuinely think I started my path to being an honest to Darwin atheist when I saw Bill Moyers Power Of Myth interviews with Joseph Campbell.
While I don’t confidently affirm, “I know there is no god,” I do confidently claim, “I do not believe in any form of gods.”
There is no timeline here because there are no definitive time spots where I became an unbeliever.
I’m still open to believing as long as you can prove it. What do I need for proof? I don’t know, but your deity of choice should know what I would need for proof. Ask your deity for the proof you need to present to me.