My Personal Deconversion Story

Nothing has really stood out at me to post today, and I realized that I haven’t really posted the story of my journey to non-belief. Like most people, it wasn’t instantaneous, but at the same time, I don’t think it was entirely typical. It’s the story of a natural atheist growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family.

I grew up near a very small town (pop 7000) in south Alabama, with very fundamentalist parents from the Southern Baptist denomination. I was indoctrinated into the religion from birth and for a while, never thought to question it. I didn’t even know it was possible not to believe. I had never met any avowed non-believers, and even people like those pesky Jehovah’s Witnesses that came door to door believed in God, even if they didn’t worship him the right way. I fed right into the idea that the only reason to say anything bad about God is if you were a bad person and just wanted to justify doing wrong.

I’ve always been skeptically minded, even though I didn’t realize that’s what it was until recently. I can still remember the first time I had any kind of experience with doubt or absence of faith. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I couldn’t have been older than 7 years old. There was a tornado warning in our county and the predicted path came right toward our community. I was scared and my mother suggested that we pray for God to guide the tornado away from us. Even at that young age, three thoughts immediately went through my head: “if God didn’t want it to hurt us, then why did he make it in the first place”, “if God could stop it from hurting us, then why did he allow anyone to be hurt”, and “if God guided it away from us, then wouldn’t that just put other people in danger?” I can’t recall what I actually said, or if I said anything, but I do remember my mother telling me some anecdote about how we prayed about something when I was younger and I had faith and God came through. My thoughts about that were much the same then as they are right now, but we prayed and my memory of that situation pretty much ends there. I can’t recall ever really thinking much about it until fairly recently, when I was thinking about what brought me to where I am today.

For several more years, I still believed for all of the same reasons I had before. As I got into junior high and started taking more advanced science classes, I started seeing things that didn’t add up; things that just didn’t work under a young-earth view. At first I tried to ignore them, but eventually, when I no longer could, I finally adapted an old-earth view. As I went through high school I started discarding more and more supernatural elements. I was at a point where I wanted to believe. I think it still just didn’t occur to me that it was possible to not believe. At some point, I realized that the followers of every single world religion were just as sure that they were right as the followers of any other religion were sure that they were. Muslims were just as sure they were right as Christians were sure they were. Buddhists knew they had to do everything they could to achieve nirvana just as the Hindu knew they had to work their whole lives to please Vishnu. I knew that they couldn’t all be right, but, I wondered, what if they were all wrong? By the time I was a senior in high school, I was going to church regularly and participating in the youth group, but I knew I didn’t believe any of it, I just wouldn’t admit it to myself. Around the time I started college I had a major epiphany: it’s okay not to believe.

Looking back now, I realize one thing clearly: I never really did believe. My parents believed and when I was a child with no life experiences of my own, I was simply a parrot of my parents. As I did start gaining my own life experiences, every experience I had showed me that we didn’t need a god to explain the world. Everything we know works by predictable natural laws. Nothing I’ve ever observed violates them. So, little by little, my own personality replaced the one manufactured by my parents, and the less I needed God. I no longer needed that crutch, and realizing that was the single most liberating experience of my life.

That was about 10 years ago, and now, here I am thinking back over the whole experience with retrospective eyes and I’m proud. I’m proud I realized the things I did when I did or I may never have been able to break free. I’m proud I had the courage to explore reality. I’m proud I’m able to share this with the world, and I hope that just one believer can read this and realize that atheists aren’t animals; we’re just people who can’t bear to allow fear and superstition to rule over our lives.