Testimonial

My parents and their parents used to argue about how we (my brother and I) should be brought up. My dad asserted that we should be free to choose our own religions, and finally the dispute was settled; naturally, my mother's side of the family was convinced I would stray naturally towards their sort of pseudo-mormon christianity. My father's side of the family is a mixture of catholicism and regular christianity, with the exception of my father himself; he's always been a proud atheist. Much to everybody's surprise, I actually looked into a variety of religions, and found them all to be completely foolish. I immediately settled upon atheism. I live in the middle of Canada's biggest bible belt (south Alberta), which is largely inhabited by mormons. There are actually enormous billboards on public buildings which openly endorse one sect or another. Needless to say, I'm a bit of an outcast to this day (just turned 17). My brother (just turned 13) has followed my path so closely it's almost uncanny. Against all odds, I've actually "converted" a few of my friends as well.

One of my main reasons for rejecting religion was reason itself. Here's one of my favorite sayings:
"You say your god is benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient; yet there is suffering in the world. If your god sees the suffering but cannot cure it, he is not omnipotent. If he does not see the suffering, he is not omniscient. If he sees it and has the power to end it, but does not, he is not benevolent. Therefore, something is wrong with your god."

Good old logic.

It's funny how combining almost any two properties of god makes him impossible.

Omniscience + free will = He knows our choices beforehand?

Omnipotence + Omniscience = Can he ask a question he can't answer?

Omnipotence = Can he make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it?

Omnipotence + Omnibenevolence = (Insert problem of evil here)

It's funny, in a way.

I was brought up in the Methodist church thanks to my mother. My father is an atheist, or so I gather. I liked the Methodist church (and still would if not for their official stance on homosexuals). I would hear horror stories of how certain Christians and churches were racist or....caused the crusades, and I liked to tell people my church was different--an all loving and all inclusive church.

I had a lot of questions in Sunday school, and not many of them were easy to answer satisfactorily (lol at one time I thought I would end up being another prophet as Jesus asked lots of questions when he was a kid). However, the older I got the harder it was for my questions to be answered. Early in high school I went to a literal christian church sleep over and had a great time, I even felt that 'warm fuzzy feeling' when praying. I promised myself that night that I would dedicate my life to Jesus and CHANGE THE WORLD.........and that didn't happen (thank God), life just didn't turn out to be that simple.

So my questions continued to grow as I did, and then one day about 4 years ago a guy named Bryan randomly IMd me. He asked me a few questions, like if I was christian (I said yes) and if I believed jesus was the son of god and the savior and etc. (I said yes) and if I had 100% complete faith in my lord Jesus and God and trust in the Holy Spirit (I said: well no, nobody has 100% faith, if you have 100% faith you can never see yourself as wrong and that is called blind stupidity) This spawned a huge "You’re going to hell" sermon in which he, after asking about my mother's faith, determined that she too was going to hell. This, of course, did not sit well with me. I first tried to counter his accusations biblically, for instance in that conversation convinced him that one does not either have 100% faith or no faith because there is the bible verse that says "with the faith of a mustard seed one can move mountains" which implies a small amount as opposed to a large amount, and there is also a story of one of Jesus’s disciples walking on water, but then starting to slowly sink as he lost faith, but I digress) Needless to say, I usually won these religious debates, but the seed of doubt had still been sewn, and I began to question my beliefs.

Furthermore, I could not comprehend Bryan’s views (I had never before met someone so arrogant or hypocritical or ‘righteous’ before.) He believed that no matter how good of a person you are, you CAN NOT go to heaven unless you believe in Jesus and the literal interpretation of the bible (my mother believed we were judged by type of person we were, regardless of religion).

More questions brought me to Bryan’s response that all the native peoples of the world since after the death of Christ went to hell for eternity if they didn't accept Jesus, even if they had never been introduced to Christianity. Therefore the god I loved condemned millions of people to eternal torture without even giving them a chance to be saved. This terrible realization made me question every belief I had, and I found that when one looks at something logically and scraps previous beliefs- one comes out an atheist!

I still talk to Bryan to this day, he's calmed down a bit and I always call upon him when I want to see what a super right-wing conservative literalist Christian thinks about a certain thing or topic--and I have been rewarded with much knowledge of the ‘opposition’. One day he was being particularly hypocritical and hateful, and acting totally in contradiction of WWJD, and I told him truthfully that he was the reason I abandoned Christ, an ultimate irony. But alas, he still won’t let himself believe he was the cause. No surprise there.

In any case, this murderously long tome is drawing to end: I have only where I am today. I find myself to be an existentialist (if one can fit their independently formed philosophy into a single word) and enjoy talking to all sorts of different people about their religion or beliefs or lack there of (I regularly attend my college’s spirituality club.) Currently I am spending much time researching the views of literalist Christians, and I’m still not sure why (if I’m not laughing I’m either cussing or crying). I have a lot to say in regards to my personal philosophy, but I’ll have to save that for another ridiculously long essay to be posted in the future.

....and that’s my religious history in a nutshell....

Well, I'm only thirteen, but I suppose I can tell those thirteen years in a short couple of paragraphs.

My family's religion is an odd one. My mom and dad were divorced when I was two, and so let's cover my biological parents first. My dad has never expressed anything like a religious belief to me, and doesn't go to a church unless it's a wedding or something. Yet, I've never heard him say the word atheist. I suppose he just doesn't think about it. Now my mom--that's a tough nut to crack. Besides being a wonderful woman, my mother has an interesting religion. It's somethingism. She isn't a Christian, but she believes in something. I think that she'd qualify technically as an atheist because she has no god, but not as a naturalist.

I grew up skeptical. I'd hear about things in church and brush it off, thinking to myself for as long as I can remember: "Where's the proof?". At the same time, I thought that everyone had some religion, and that atheism and irreligion were crazy fringe ideas I didn't want to get into. Besides, my stepdad was Southern Baptist (he's not real fanatic though. His mom is a fundie.) and that meant I had to be Christian.

As nerdy as this sounds, I was fully converted on the internet. Oddly, enough, it was a Final Fantasy forum. The thread was a debate about religion in video games, and especially FFX. Somebody was talking about their religion. They said that they were in a heavily Catholic family, but "I looked at it, and I made my decision. I'm an atheist." That sentence made me think, and I realized that that label fit me.

That was two years ago. Now, I'm still not very open about my atheism--I make snide religious comments now and then, and a few know or have guessed (my parents know) but all-in-all, I'm closeted. I am writing this two hours after coming home from church this Wednesday, a practice that I actually enjoy (entertaining somehow).

Final Fantasy 10 was a great shot at all religion. The Al Bhed being condemned, "Sin, "Yevon", and the crazy priests destroying the world. . . what a great game!

Mm-hmmm. Hence the signature. LOVE that quote.

The story of how I became an Atheist is a boring one. My mother died when I was one, and my father has never been.. well, he lost a court battle for custody when my mother died, I'm not sure why and I've never been told about it. Regardless, I have lived with my Grandmother since then. She's one of those old "Christianity is the only way to go" people, despite her never going to church, or anything. I've never even seen her pray. But she still had the gall to call me immoral when I told her I didn't believe in God, and that I full-out supported gay rights (She's asked me twice if I was gay, and she's a racist, I really do hate her in some ways.) and such. I've read the Bible twice, and that only asserted my Atheism more. How could anyone believe that garbage? No sane human being would. I just eventually threw the whole thing out. Once I got the internet, which was about 5 years ago, I started researching it. I wasn't very actively atheist until this year, because the current state of this country pisses me off.

I got lucky with my girlfriend. Her mother is a lesbian (Her girlfriend is a Christian, oddly enough.) and a buddhist, and her father is a science teacher and an atheist.

Ah yes, the typical old-fashioned homophobic racist type. I know them well. Kids are basically brought up that way in Alberta.

1.The presence of moral evil begs the question that a moral good exists. After all, evil is an absence of good and you cannot have something evil without something good first.
2.God has the power to end it, but He won't. Does that mean He is not benevolent? Of course not! Your argument is a hasty generalization. A God who is omnibenevolent has a good purpose for everything. Now from this we can logically deduce that God has a good reason for not ending evil.

Explanation 2: It is impossible to destroy moral evil without removing human free will. If God were to destroy evil, He would destroy free will as well.

Yes He does. Any problem with that? We are the one who still makes the choices. In other words, God knows what we're going to do, but we are the one who actually does it.

1.God created us with free will, we are free beings
2.Free beings can make free choice
3.God looked into the future to see what choices we would make
4.However God DID NOT determine our choices, he simply knew the choices we were going to make with our free will.

For example, let's say that tomorrow I'm going to eat pizza for lunch. God, being omniscient knows this in advance. However we still have our free will in that we are still the ones who actually make the decision to eat the pizza. God does not determine our actions, He knows them. We, having free choice, are the ones who actually determine our actions. Therefore God knows what we are going to do with our free will, but He is not the one who actually makes the decision, we are the ones who do it. To simplify it, God knows what we are going to do but we are the ones who actually do it. God does not make our decisions for us, He simply knows what our decisions will be, yet we are the ones who make the decision, thus preserving our free will. Thus we have proved that God can be absolutely omniscient and yet we can have free will all at the same time.

You view it like this:

1. God determines our actions
2. We must do what God determines

It is actually like this:

1. We have free choice
2. We use our free choice to make our decision
3. God knows in advance what this decision will be, but God did not determine it because we are the ones who determined it.

In a nutshell:

God does not determine our decisions, we do. God looks into the future to see what decisions we made.

Straw man argument. Christians hold that God's omnipotence is limited to His will. This means that God can only do what is intrinsically possible. God cannot make square circles or a married bachelor. Omnipotence is the ability to do what is intrinsically possible.

Well, Unfortunately, no lengthy paragraphs here. I was fortunate enough that we only went to church: Before I was old enough to actually understand what on earth was going on and after I was too old to be easily indoctrinated. So really, I've ALWAYS been an atheist, and simply deluded myself into thinking otherwise. I simply slowly deluded myself less and less (which Ironically made me act more and more heavily Christian in an attempt to compensate) until one day I all of a sudden went... "Wait a second, I don't BELIEVE this..."