My Personal Experience with Religion/Atheism

By Heather Campbell

The following is from an interview conducted with me by a local PhD student who was researching atheist's life stories.

Interviewer: Tell the story of your personal experience with religion/atheism. Start the story as far back as you can remember religion/atheism being a part of your life and end the story with your present situation/beliefs/values around atheism. Please include how and why you became an atheist.

Heather: My background is Protestant but my parents were not particularly religious. My father's family had been Seventh-Day Baptists (going to church on Saturday) for generations, but were not fanatics. They brought us kids to church about once a month; I think we all looked at it as a kind of social duty in our small southern town.

I remember one day, as a young child, I was pondering the power of God. The question popped in to my head "If God controls everything and everyone in the world, then why does he make bad people do bad things?" And with that thought I just hit a mental wall and my pondering imploded, in much the same way as an infinite loop will crash a computer.

As a teenager, I cleaned house for a fundamentalist Christian woman; she gave me some cassette tapes of sermons. The preachers on the tapes emphasized the psychological and even material rewards that being Christian would bring, and of course happiness and peace sounded so soothing to someone in her emotionally turbulent teenage years. I was even inspired to get down on my knees and pray to get saved. I didn't feel anything. Zero. I knew in my heart I didn't really have faith, but I guess that didn't bother me too much - after that attempt I just sort of forgot about religion.

When I went to college my view of religion became quite nonspecific - I figured that there was at least a deity and an afterlife of some sort because all religions did agree on that point. I even started going to Quaker meetings off and on after college. I didn't feel the Quaker way was the one true way; I just knew that it appealed to me. I like to do the right thing, and spirituality was one of those things liberals feel that we should get in touch with. I did identify with the New Age movement, but mostly vegetarianism; I never got caught up in past life regressions and all that.

I do remember attending a forum at SDSU in my late twenties. The topic was something along the lines of "has science found god?" I was enthusiastic at the prospect that cold, impersonal, corporation-serving science had finally come around to recognizing the spirit in the material.

One speaker mentioned some amazing creature like a nautilus and stated that blind evolution could not have produced anything so complex. The science speaker countered with mentioning a medical case involving a young girl whose muscle cells were progressively turning into bone cells, causing her indescribable agony. The speaker said that if you posit a creator of the entire universe, you have to acknowledge that it had created the negative along with the positive, and ask yourself about the implications. I remember that his words just made me hit a mental wall and deflated my previous line of thinking. I didn't 'de-convert' at that moment, but I didn't continue to think as I had been thinking.

I began to seriously reconsider religion when my younger sister converted to the Southern Baptists about six or seven years ago. She was going through some emotionally difficult times in her life. I wanted to support her in whatever she needed to do to become whole, but I had this nagging suspicion that the Bible, to which I had not paid much attention, was just too weird.

I started doing some serious reading on Biblical criticism when I came back from Japan and it was quite an eye-opener! But some of the material I read debunked the entire existence of a deity and an afterlife, and I found that 'revelation' rather disturbing. I had never considered myself to be very religious, so I was surprised at how distressed I felt. It makes me so sad to think that my consciousness will end with my death. I guess I can handle a universe without a god, but I don't want to handle the thought of a universe without me!

Much of what I was reading was produced by atheists, and I had to examine my attitudes towards them. I realized that I had some unspoken prejudice that I had absorbed from society - that atheists were troublemakers and just generally mean-spirited. I didn't want to identify with such a group, and even now I don't publicly announce "I'm an atheist". But I joined the local Humanist group, and then the Atheist Coalition as well. I feel that it's important to stand up for what you believe.

Having said that, I haven't really confronted my sister. She doesn't know anything about me being a card-carrying member of the Atheist Coalition. I am sad that our lives are so different, because she had always been there throughout my childhood. She is confident that she will have an afterlife, and I know that I won't be able to live forever the way I want to, so perhaps she is happier than I am. I don't envy her at all because I would rather know the truth, but she has found what is right for her.

One thing I have really enjoyed about reading atheistic material is the intellectual stimulation. Earlier in my life my thinking had been tripped up on religious questions, but now I feel that my mind has been expanded and challenged.

On the other hand, I dread death even more than ever. It seems to me that most atheists care not a whit about the inevitable extinguishing of their existence and they have no fear of death. I'm doing everything I can to prolong my life. I eat only health food washed down with vitamins; I bought a car with all the safety features. I try not to live in a constant state of fear, though. I guess what saddens me the most is the thought of my family members' deaths. We will not meet again "on the other side". However, the thought does force one to live life more fully, and keep in better touch, in the here-and-now!

Interviewer: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Heather: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free! I feel like I've gained an understanding of the universe, and although it may not be exactly what I want, I feel as though I can accept it, and no longer have to ask "why, why, why?".