I stopped talking to people. My parents mentioned that I had become very quiet. I stopped going to baptismal classes, and I didn’t tell anybody why. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was going through because I didn’t want to shake anyone else’s faith. I was hoping to find a way around my doubts. Finally, I talked with my brother. We’re good friends and have gone through a lot together. Within a year, we both became atheists.
We concealed our atheism from our parents for many months. Eventually, my brother outed both of us. He bluntly told them, “Rachael and I are atheists.” Eventually, my mom snapped, and we were kicked out of our home. Our getting kicked out was the culmination of many arguments. For months, we had been regularly challenging them on their faith. My mom had the police come to our house, and she accused us of being Satanic. The police actually felt quite badly for my brother and me, but there wasn’t a lot they could do because my parents owned the house, and I was 18 years old.
At first, my brother and I left and stayed with different people. We got an apartment in Halifax and realized that life was a lot better once we no longer needed to spend most of our day getting into family fights. In time, my brother and I had talked with our parents. Our disagreements with them pushed a lot of conversations that ended up being really productive. As tough as they were, they began to listen to us. In time, I know my mom in particular felt really stupid, and I suppose my dad did at times as well. We were able to lay religious arguments out for them and show them that what the church was teaching didn’t add up.
Since that time, my mom has mellowed out. She now has a spiritual but nonreligious take on life. My dad is still fairly Christian but has become less intense as well. Their atheist stereotypes are gone. Originally, when my mom found out that my brother and I had become atheists, she thought that we must be sex-crazy, into drugs, that we would become alcoholics. She was worried about us being gay and that we would find no meaning in life. She now understands that my brother and I are good people and that we still care deeply about others.
Prior to us coming out as atheists, my mom felt that it was impossible not to believe in God. In her mind, as she was taught, everyone who says that they don’t believe in God is angry, hiding something, or immoral. There is, the church said, no such thing as a real atheist. We have shown our parents that that’s not true. While she still goes to church sometimes, when people now bash atheists and talk about them being immoral or dishonest, she’ll actually take them to task and ask, “Do you know any atheists? Because all three children of mine are.” I’m proud that she can stand up to people in her church, as well as to our extended family. I’m proud of her for coming that far. I think my parents are much healthier people now. I think that’s pretty cool.
When I became an atheist, I started to talk to other people my age who had grown up in my church. Some of them told me that they had known that what we were being taught wasn’t true. Some people didn’t take the church’s messages with same level of seriousness that I had. In my childhood, TV was censored. I spent most of my time at church, and when I was there, I saw what I believed to be acts of the supernatural. My parents believed it. Their friends believed it. In my mind, that was the whole world. I think it’s basic human psychology to accept what your community tells you when you’re that young.
One of the things that I realized the more I moved away from religion was that I had a huge reduction in anxiety and huge differences in my thoughts and my behavior. I began to realize that I didn’t have to be afraid of the dark. That sounds silly to say now, but my atheism took that fear away. Becoming educated took away the demons, the fear of the Rapture. Now, instead of getting into a hyper-vigilant state and saying, “Who is it?” when I hear a noise in the night, now I look for other causes and realize that it may just be the house settling.
I think most of my personal problems that developed because of my church are now gone. It took a long time, close to 10 years. For me, actually meeting other atheists helped me a lot during my transition. What I found was that the more I was able to express certain ideas out loud, the more I realized that the world wasn’t going to fall apart because I had done so.
Reading also helped. I read Plato and the classics. I also wanted to understand the history of the Christian religion. I read the Epic of Gilgamesh and started to piece together the historical roots of the Bible. I learned about psychology and realized that when my dad thought that he had fought a demon, he was probably experiencing a well-understood psychological episode. I began to realize that perhaps a whole congregation engaging in bizarre laughter isn’t quite as magical as it at first seemed to me.
I was thinking about myself the other day, wondering, “What’s still left? What kind of damage do I still have from this?” I had a long haul, and I think perhaps the only thing that I still have is that I expect to work too hard for little compensation — the “turn the other cheek” idea, a willingness for masochistic sacrifice that I think the church instilled in me. Overall, though, I think it’s cool that I’ve been able to remove so many negative beliefs from my brain.
I think that the atheist movement is highly important, even though now that I’ve come so far, I often feel as though I’ve lost touch with how negatively my religion affected me. I would like to see a lot more focus on critical thinking, including more self-criticism, within this new leaf of atheism. I think it’s really healthy for us to self-criticize as well as support each other and our ideas. I’ve been trying — and I hope that the idea catches on — to reach out to ex-Muslims. Many of them are scared to show up to an atheist meeting. I think others in the movement need to be aware that there are a lot of people who have had much scarier experiences than a lot of us have had. They really need support and people to talk to. That could potentially be important in dealing with some of the problems that we currently face with moderate Islam trying to censor free speech, while simultaneously addressing how intolerant more radical forms of Islam are.
Overall, I’m really glad that we have a strong movement now and that there are a lot of conversations taking place, many of which should advance the human species. I see us helping as humanity begins to explain neuroscience and the biology of morality, something that I think is really important for both atheism and for science. It’s crucial for people to understand that a natural worldview can indeed comment on morality, that we really can have important scientific things to say about ethics and how we ought to live. There’s a lot more to be said, and it’s exciting that a lot of work is happening in that area.
I hope that the atheist movement can contribute to influencing worldwide culture as well. One of the big intellectual problems that people have regarding a global conversations about morality derives from an idea that comes out of multiculturalism, the idea that everything’s relative, that one culture is relative to another culture, that what’s right for one culture is okay and what’s right in another culture is okay as well. I like the quote “It’s not relative because we’re all relatives.” We all fundamentally have the same neurobiology. That fact doesn’t make answering moral questions easy, and it doesn’t mean that humans will ever have a science of morality that will be able to address every conceivable moral question, but I think some things are fairly obvious. For example, most people understand that morality entails doing well for other people as well as for yourself, encouraging human flourishing. If that is true, then we know that empowering women, having women working, having women as an integral, participating force in culture is always better for a society’s overall happiness. If people want to change circumstances in a Third World country where there is a low quality of life, for example, they should educate and empower women. Pretending that that’s a relative statement when faced with so much evidence to the contrary is, I believe, fairly immoral. I don’t think that people will ever be able to say that there’s one best way for all societies and cultures to be organized, but that’s irrelevant as to whether or not we can answer some moral questions. We need to begin speaking about what’s best for a society from, at least in part, a neurobiological and evolutionary perspective.