minister turns atheist dot org

My Early Years

Growing up, I was a typical American kid. I had a brother and a
sister, a loving mom and dad, and we were taught to believe in
Christianity, America's status quo faith. Mom and dad were not
religious fanatics, but they were mild fundamentalists who
believed that Christianity was the only way and that no one could
have the highest morality without belief in the Christian God. I
swallowed this philosophy hook, line, and sinker from day one,
though I didn't become a baptized believer until my eighteenth
birthday.

I was converted for the same reason that many others were -- I
was at a time in my life when I needed emotional and
psychological support. I had fought my own battles with
depression growing up, but when Christianity came along, that
was the end of my singing the blues! Finding something to
believe in is a big part of the psychological make up of the
individual. I had also just fallen out of a relationship with a girl and
this made me begin to "look upward" for help like I'd never done
before. I was a party-goer, by and large, but I knew that
someday, I would have to give up my selfish life and become a
part of what I was taught God told me to do -- to be baptized and
live as a Christian. I remember how it felt to start looking for
answers in the bible and pray like I never had before. I was a
changed man at my conversion one cold February morning in
1994. What I felt Christ did for me was all too apparent in my mind.
I decided to live for him since he gave so much for me, and I was
so thankful that I had escaped the eternal flames of Hell that
awaited me for my former lifestyle's conduct! From then on, my
life would change in ways I never imagined.

During the first year of my conversion, I read the bible through,
bought perhaps 50 apologetic books and Christian evidence
materials, and read them through nearly at the pace of one book
per night. Nothing else seemed important to me anymore except
the study of God's word. I was a living, breathing, scripture
quoting machine. Only a couple of months after my conversion, I
found that I had an easier time memorizing than anyone I knew,
so I put this skill to work. This came in handy as I became a
determined personal evangelist.

From me, no one was safe from an argument on religion! I'd
talked to everyone I knew, beginning with my close family, my
friends, and my acquaintances, and they all knew where I stood
on the issues: Jesus was the way, Genesis is accurate in all its
teachings (and literal too), and only those in the Lord's true
church (the Church of Christ to which I belonged) would be saved
on the last day. I went door to door for multiple blocks, talking to
every soul I could find. I had to save them from the fires of Hell
like I had been saved. I sure made a lot of people mad at me
who didn't want to hear it! I had two college professors walk away
from me after I basically refused to let them leave their
classrooms in arguments from what they said during class. I had
a math professor tell me, "Listen, I'm not going to convert to your
religion, guy!" I remember another teacher saying to me, "I'm
happy with my church. I don't need another!" This little crusade of
mine continued until a year and a half after my conversion when I
decided to enter preaching school and officially prepare myself
for the work I had ahead. Secular college was much too worldly
and "evil" for me, so preaching school shined out as my only real
option.

Let it be clear that the Church of Christ is an ultra-fundamentalist
group, far more conservative than even the most stubborn
protestant churches out there: so conservative, in fact, that
members of my group were constantly withdrawing fellowship
from each other and our sister congregations that disagreed with
us over greater or lesser points. According to our group, an
unscriptural marriage, a second marriage without meeting the
scriptural standards of God, constituted adultery, and therefore,
had to be broken up, even if there were children involved. Of
course, no one could be saved outside of our group and every
detail of the scriptures was the absolute word of God and had to
be true! Using musical instruments during church services was
wrong and sinful and Hell would be the penalty for it if done! The
God of the Church of Christ was a very legally-minded God,
indeed. Even a sincere candidate making his way to the
baptistery out of faith to obey God, should he die, would find
himself in Hell because he had to get immersed to get any
forgiveness (Acts 2:38).

Beginning Ministerial Training

I began attending the Southwest School of Bible Studies in 1995
and graduated in 1997. This well respected, 216 hour preparation
for my preaching work taught me a lot about every area of the
work of the minister. It was a thorough walk-through of every book
and chapter of the bible, preaching protocol, and particularly, the
fact and the how of bible apologetics. That is, the bible needed a
lot of defending. It brood so much controversy and conflict on
every level of thought that it needed scholars at its aide. But my
best arguing experience came from real life, from running into
people with radically different beliefs than mine and learning how
to defend my position over theirs. I ran into the Mormons and
Jehovah Witnesses, the Baptists and Adventists, the Catholics
and Greek Orthodox, the infidels and mystics, the psychics and
the Buddhists, and the typical "unchurched" folk who weren't
interested in religion, one way or the other. To me they all didn't
make sense. With each encounter, I became more and more
confident that my faith was the right one to have. Every debate I
watched or heard, I found that my side seemed to make the
better points and this bothered me a little because I felt that I
didn't understand the opposing side's views well enough. This
demanded yet more study.

In heart, I have always been a bit of a rationalist, even back then.
I felt the need for compelling evidence to back up a claim,
especially in a world of religions where so many flimflam artists
are at work. So it bothered me when I heard others express the
"just have faith" aspect of religion. Others, most people, in fact,
weren't like me. They didn't care like I did if a claim made sense
or not. If their parents said it, if the bible said it, if they had heard it
for a long enough time, then it was true, period. I kept trying to
understand why the faith of most people wasn't as urgent a thing
to them as my faith was to me. This led me to believe even more
so that I was truly converted and most of those around me were
not. But even among my own brethren, so many seemed to not
be as flexible with their views as I thought they should be. Very
few of them would stick their necks out in an argument like I would
and put their faith on the line: "Prove to me that my religion is
wrong and I'll convert to the right one tonight." I didn't see this
attitude very often and this worried me. Throughout my ministry, I
remember watching and reading debates just to prove myself
wrong, though this never happened early on. It seemed I could
never get to a point in my mind where I just accepted I had truth.
My quest for answers was unending.

Preaching life begins

After graduating from seminary in 1997, I held down four
preaching works until my resignation as minister in 2003. In
August of 1997, I began my first work. I didn't end up staying there
long on account of financial reasons. The church couldn't afford
to pay me enough, so after six months, my wife and I headed out
for work number two. I spent two years at this church and learned
a lot about human nature and people's unwillingness to change.

Throughout my Christian life, I always had little doubts that
bothered me from conversion onward. They were small doubts
that made my stomach burn from time to time, but I would study
them away before they became a problem. It was towards the
end of this work (in 1999) that I began to experience doubts a little
harder. This was the time in my life that I began to first question
prayer.

On one occasion, our church diligently prayed that a dear elderly
sister with cancer get better. She seemed to improve as her
cancer went into remission for a while and I considered this a true
evidence of prayer, until a year later when the cancer relapsed
and she died quite suddenly! God was really working there! From
then on, it was as though my mind kept a log of unanswered
prayers and the results always seemed to be 50/50 at best. This
was my beginning of questioning what I believed, though I didn't
acknowledge it altogether. It was just in the back of my mind. I
prided myself on being able to "answer" infidel arguments, but I
would later find that my study of evidence on these issues was
one sided. Up till now, my knowledge pool was theological and
Christian. I had no way to reason outside of the box. I could only
arrive at Christian conclusions because that was my worldview.
So I decided to take a little harder look at the other side.

I began acquiring some other books, this time books on the
natural sciences and freethought. I began with Thomas Paine,
George H. Smith, and Ingersoll (to name just a few), and my
library expanded monthly. Plus, I began to take a closer look at
astronomy, cosmology, geology, and microbiology. I was
beginning to get a different picture of the world than my bible was
giving me. But even now that I was broadening my horizons, my
faith was still not in any danger of being destroyed just yet. I still
readily and fervently opposed, like a true, belligerent fanatic,
anyone (including those in the books I read), who opposed
fundamentalist Christianity. It would take time to see a better way.

2000 rolls around and the doubts worsen

Before I knew it, the summer of 2000 had rolled around. I was at
my third preaching work now and the work of God in the local
church went on as normal. It was a hot night in August as a guest
speaker addressed my congregation in regard to his missionary
work that we were supporting overseas. I had been fighting away
my doubts successfully up until this point, but this was about to
change. Behind him was the screen where he showed us a video
of the work that the brethren were doing in India. The pagans
were pulling apart a bull in a town square in honor of a pagan
god. "It is unfortunate that this sort of pagan worship goes on in
the world today, but it does, and we must remember as Christians
that these souls are lost without the gospel. If people can be
saved without it, then we are wasting our time and money trying to
save souls." It was as though time stopped for me at that
moment. The speaker's words made my heart race like never
before, even though I had preached and heard the same
message a thousand times by now. But unlike before, I was now
actually thinking of the implications of what I believed!

According to my God, these ignorant, bull-slaughtering, heathens
were going to be condemned to eternal fire to burn forever, and
yet so many of them had lived and died under their own wrong
pagan ways and laws for countless generations. It wasn't right for
God to put them in Hell for simply living in ignorance as they had
been taught. I felt like a twerp with my no-other-way-to-salvation
gospel, futilely trying to convert a people who already had a
belief system and a culture to direct their lives. My heart began
pounding and I began to sweat. I was beginning to think for
myself and not just sweep every lost person into a secret
compartment in my mind, never to be thought about again (as I
had been doing). This Hell idea I had been preaching was
starting to seem like a terrible thing. Though I wouldn't have
admitted it, I never could harmonize the concept of hell with the
concept of a merciful God, especially when God could easily
rehabilitate sinners or just blot them out of existence. After all, you
get rid of a sick dog, you don't torture it, right?

But this posed a dilemma; if God could choose to save some
lost souls without the gospel, then he must do the same for
everyone lest he be branded a respecter of persons (Acts
10:34-35), in which case, his word would not always be true (John
10:35). Or, if it is as the bible says, and literally no one can be
saved without the gospel, then you have the uncomfortable and
unjust position of making God a tyrant who condemns helpless
and ignorant pagans who never heard of Jews or Jesus or the
Christian Church (Luke 12:4-5; Mark 16:16; Matthew 7:21-23; John
14:6). There is no way to answer this dilemma and maintain both
the soundness of God's word and the mercy of God. I used to be
content explaining this by saying that since God himself was the
only immutable standard of morality, then he could do whatever
he wanted with souls and his will would be "good" and ours
would be "bad," but this no longer resolved the problem in my
mind. Now the idea of eternal torment started to seem like the
truly malicious thing it was. God was running a "little shop of
horrors" all his own! The more I thought about it, I wasn't so sure I
wanted to serve a monster capable of such cruelty. It would take
time, but this would soon begin to interfere with my evangelism
efforts.

Not a month had passed by until I found myself working late one
night at the church building. I spent all the time I had to prepare
bible classes and sermons, studying out bible discrepancies
and evidences for and against evolution, instead. My doubts,
though not unmanageable, were starting to interfere with my work,
and things would finally reach the breaking point by the next year.
Looking back now, I can see it all clearly. My experience tells me
it's the same with just about everyone; once you begin to think
critically and analyze what you are taught in the bible, faith will
eventually terminate in atheism.

My Last Work

The last church I preached at was my biggest work yet. I loved
preaching the gospel and had given my life to cherish and
defend it. I had so much on my plate with this new work: visitation,
counseling, prison correspondence, bulletin preparation,
preaching and teaching sermons and bible classes, and a
Sunday morning radio program. When I tried to look at this as a
wonderful thing, I still found that most of my time and effort was
being spent in apologetics. I found myself constantly explaining
away bible atrocities, such as the Midianites' extermination at the
hands of Israel (Numbers 31:15-18), and why God allowed bad
things to happen to good people. Answering the problem of evil
and innocent human suffering was a big thing to all churches
because it is a relevant question and every member of every
church worldwide has heard every preacher they know try to
explain it, but they all failed just like I did. The scriptural problems
never would quit coming at me. I was constantly explaining away
bible discrepancies, "patching up" the old book to make it fit a
skeptical, modern world. I was constantly explaining away many
errors in the text.

For instance, one passage says Ahaziah was 22 years old when
he began to reign and another passage says he was forty two (2
Kings 8:26 vs. 2 Chronicles 22:2). One text has Josiah dying in
Megiddo and another has him dying in Jerusalem (2 Kings
23:29-30 vs. 2 Chronicles 35:24). I was taught contradictions like
these were just "scribal errors" from copying mistakes in earlier
manuscripts. However, it didn't sit well with me that God did not
provide us with a spiritual roadmap that could be trusted without
having to go digging through a pile of human-penned
manuscripts to finally stumble upon what God actually intended
to say! It was difficult trying to find scientific truths in God's book,
while explaining away the many unscientific things that bothered
me, like flat earth passages such as Job 9:6 and I Samuel 2:8,
"the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he hath set the world
upon them." The idea that striped rods produce striped offspring
in animals (Genesis 30:35-39), proved very difficult to explain,
and let's not forget the work I had to do in explaining what the
bible really meant when it mentioned those cud chewing rabbits
(Leviticus 11:6)!

I couldn't keep up with all the work I had to do to make Christianity
seem viable. This worsened my doubts and I started realizing
that the issues I was explaining away were valid discrepancies,
indeed, and my way of correcting these problems could be
applied to any false book, making it impossible to find a
contradiction in anything! I was using bad reasoning to find my
way out of erroneous conclusions, brought on by false bible
statements.

The doubts were now so bad I found myself having to take
mini-vacations, usually for a weekend or so, to clear my head
and ask myself where I stood on the issues. The problem was,
the vacations ended and I came right back to my problems! I
decided to use my off time to keep resolving my doubts. I prayed
and cried and stayed up late into the nights looking for those
magic resolutions that would shed light on my problems --
needless to say, they never came! Those feelings of depression
and loneliness, the feelings of fear of an angry God, were quite
troubling. Joe, the once-proud preacher of the gospel, was now
weak in faith and questioned the validity of the most esteemed
message on earth. I was hurting and doubting, and I still had no
evidence or experience with this God at all, yet all these years I
trusted and prayed to him and this seemed to justify my
worldview.

What had happened? Did I sin? Did I not pray sincerely enough?
Did I need to learn patience? Was my God going to burn me for
doubting when I couldn't help it and while I still wanted to continue
with him in full faith? Come to think of it, I couldn't even define this
god! I could tell you traits God had (omnipotence, omniscience,
omnipresence, omni-benevolence) and what God wasn't (a man,
a liar, etc. Numbers 23:19). I could even tell you that God was a
"perfect spirit entity" (John 4:24), but again, I had no experience
with a "spirit" entity. What was that? Was it matter? No. It can't be
matter because matter is a thing of the temporal universe, but
God was eternal, outside and above the universe. Therefore,
whatever God was, he was unknowable because he was outside
of the universe, but now my speech about God was again
rendered unintelligible. I might as well say that God is a
"dagegfqyeulm" or something?! So, I was forced to retreat back
into the safe-haven of illusive, theistic-agnostic jargon by saying
that "God is above our understanding. God is unknowable. We
would have to be God to understand him." Now I was right back
where I started -- with no answers! And if you think defining God is
hard, imagine trying to define a Trinitarian God (Matthew 28:19)!
As a minister, I would explain the trinity as water, steam, and ice --
three components making up one substance. This doesn't apply
very well to individuals, does it? Now I had three uncreated,
perfect, and infinite beings existing forever! This was an even
less intelligible idea!

Like a retard in the mall, I was lost and left to wander aimlessly,
playing the same old guessing game of finding what solution
would solve this problem and what God wanted me to do. My
spiritual world was turned upside down. Like most religious
people, Christians are very theatrical in their thinking, and so was
I. I kept imagining the drama that went on as Satan was before
God telling him I would fail the test, but that God was telling Satan
that I would pass it, just like Job's triumphant journey into greater
faith. I had to stay faithful! But, this disposition could only last so
long. The time comes when you develop the courage to admit to
yourself, "If there is a God, he sure has done a good job at
making a universe where so many like me can't see it." In such
dilemmas, you keep waiting for the right tract or email or book or
conversation from a friend to come along and set you straight,
but it never happens.

When 2002 came around, things were definitely changing. My
preaching work was now showing serious signs of sloppiness
and hurt. I stepped into that pulpit every Sunday and gave my
weekly motivational speeches and forgot about my doubts for
the time -- but they always came back! By mid-2002, I was a
virtual atheist undercover, trying to keep a paycheck coming and
almost resigned to finally accepting that my god had bailed on
me!

As one last measure, I decided to reach out to other ministers for
help. I went to their houses, swore them to secrecy, and unloaded
on them my issues. I had tried this a couple of times before with
no success, but I thought I'd try it again. They didn't understand
and actually attacked me viciously for asking them demanding
questions they only thought they had answers to. They tried to
come back with the same theistic hogwash I once so proudly
peddled, but those words had lost their power. The people I went
to for comfort ended up chiding me for a situation I wished I wasn't
in. Several of them refused to speak to me again. I was hurt and it
didn't take long to realize that I was on my own in this search.

I took any down time I had and investigated other world religions
more clearly than I had in the past. To sum up the matter, not one
of them struck me as divine and all of them seemed at least a
little more credible than the religion I promoted! No one of them
had any of the big answers to the world's problems and no one of
them could explain human suffering. None of the basic
philosophical arguments for God (the cosmological, teleological,
axiological arguments, etc.) were valid, and a thorough
investigation of the roots of Christianity revealed that it was not
unique at all.

Christianity was composed of borrowed components of many
religions. There were a myriad of virgin-born, savior-gods in the
world before Christ's time. Justin Martyr admits this much in his
work Apologia I. I found nothing but dishonesty in my preaching
comrades who showed no real interest in finding (or facing) the
truth. I came to see that all those shelves of creationist books
spoke for not so much as a microscopic part of the scientific
community and that even my preaching brethren with actual
degrees in the natural sciences rejected fully the scientific
consensus of the real experts' opinions on evolution and
cosmology. I had been listening to dishonest crackpots who
knew very little to nothing about what evolution really taught, and
yet they trashed it and taught nonsense just to support the
worldview of an archaic book that told of a six thousand year old
earth, had numerous contradictions, false prophecies, and a
plethora of errors. I was starting to see a bigger world out there
than my limited Christian worldview would allow for, and I was
starting to see that I needed to go back and relearn what little I
was taught about science, knowing that the sources I trusted
before were no good now.

There was no water canopy that surrounded the earth at creation
as I had been taught (Genesis 1:6-8). In an attempt to bolster the
credibility of the Noahic flood account (Genesis 6-8), I had been
told that many flood myths of cultures around the world existed.
This was true, but what I was not told was that a huge portion of
those myths were not stories of universal floods, but local floods
-- natural exaggerations from floods in history which came about
as fall off from our most recent ice age. Exaggerations like this
are to be expected as myths have always developed about
natural disasters. There are plenty of fire myths too. I also
learned that many of these flood sagas had virtually nothing in
common with each other; for instance, some flood legends, like
the Pygmy version of the myth, describe a flood as an act of a
god creating humanity in water. Other accounts, like that of the
Hopi Indians, have an impending flood averted. The Hebrews'
take on the flood was not unique and not original. Many flood
stories predate theirs. The Egyptians have detailed and reliable
records going back a long way, verifying that no flood occurred
some 5,000 years ago or round-abouts.

So, what I once thought supported the Genesis record actually
robbed it of credibility. Different races did not exist because
Noah had three sons that emerged from an ark and repopulated
the world (Genesis 9-11). The earth was not six thousand years
old. Languages did not originate from a mysterious separation of
peoples while building some tower to heaven (Genesis 11:1-9).
The pyramids of different cultures around the world were not built
in similar shapes because their ancestors came from the Tower
of Babel. They were built as pyramids simply because they had
no rebar or similar technology that would allow them to build
straight upward to support their own weight when multiple stories
were added to a structure.

I had been misinformed about the 2nd law of thermodynamics,
which is continually misapplied by creationists everyday. The
second law did not prevent or hinder evolution or an eternal
universe at all. I had been misinformed about DNA and the facts
of taxonomy, mutations, and genetic variants in species. I jumped
at the opportunity to know the truth now. My knowledge pool was
filling, and my worldview that was kept so small before and full of
intolerance and scientific illiteracy, was now growing, and with this
knowledge came peace like the bible only claimed to give me.

Too, I was realizing that morality which I thought was delegated
by a book, had nothing to do with religion. I was stunned to see
many different forms of morality all over my world. Almost all
higher forms of life showed the beginnings of culture, and to one
extent or another, forms of morality. The morality of my people
was a little different from the Head Hunters of Borneo, yet we had
a similar rule that said that it wasn't right to steal. This rule was
never given by a god. It was a result of rationality in species who
understood that stealing could never be allowed in structured
societies. Prides of lions have the same rule. It became apparent
that the greatest morality was not to do right for the bribe of a
reward (Heaven), or because of the threat of punishment (Hell),
but to do right for right's sake. This, to me, sums up higher
morality. Morality comes no more to man from a god than it does
from a god to a baboon to sacrifice himself to the leopard to
preserve the lives of his troop. Once again, I looked around and
saw a bigger, more natural world around me, a world that made
more sense.

The Finality

I never quit getting asked what it was that finally closed my door
of faith forever. If I had to pick a "nail in the coffin" that ended my
theological journey, I don't think I would be able to.
De-conversion takes time and a lot of thinking and rethinking. But
I suppose, if my feet were to the fire and I had to pick the biggest
blow, I would have to say that it came by way of understanding
the basic premise of the law of rationality. I was taught in school,
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid! Look for the simplest answer first
and not the most complex. You've probably heard this too.
Logicians would call this principle, Occam's Razor -- in a
dilemma, pick the simplest answer whenever you can. I was
compelled as a freethinker to draw only those conclusions which
were warranted by the evidence. That meant that if I can explain
design by means of evolution, then I don't need a god. If I can
explain the construction of the bible on natural processes and
that it is of human origin, then I am not warranted to conclude that
a god wrote it. If I can look up at the stars at night, as I so fondly
do, and see a natural explanation for them, then it is pointless to
throw a god into the process somewhere.

Science had been replacing the god notion for centuries. Now
God only existed in the gaps of our knowledge of the world. I had
been holding back the progress of mankind by holding onto a
book that promised the world, but delivered nothing. It was the
very source of some of the problems it claimed to solve. I could
now embrace a more fulfilling and enlightening worldview. I could
now have a glass of wine without fear of eternal damnation and I
could breathe the fresh air of being honest with myself. I do not
expect that everyone can be an atheist. I am convinced that it will
not happen for a good many people because religion is a
psychological thing and many people just aren't ready to make
the leap to a purely material world, but as it was for me, so it will
be the right move for a good many religious thinkers who find no
stopping place short of rejecting theism.

I tried to resign from the ministry quietly, but the ministers I trusted
in made that impossible. September 28, 2003 was the date of my
resignation. I have never regretted that decision for a moment. In
fact, I look back now and wonder how I could ever have believed
in an angry tyrant of a god who brought unimaginable guilt and
fear of eternal torture on his children. It was hard for my wife (who
is still Christian) and my family to adjust to my new views, and it
was very difficult to hunt a new career, but it had to be done. I
don't have a single regret.

After I resigned, I was put on more prayer lists than I could
imagine -- a lot of good they did! I got my share of emotional
phone calls from ministers, friends, and members of the churches
I preached at before, pleading me to "hold on", telling me I was
too good a minister to leave the fold. Generally, I got the usual
thoughts from people who didn't understand my outlook and
made every effort to blame my change on all the wrong reasons:
"You were never really converted." "You were pushed into
preaching too soon." "You just had too strict a church and their
interpretation ruined you to real moderate Christianity." "You were
just frustrated by the brethren." "You are just going through a
phase, a sort of midlife crisis." But when I defended my decision
to leave, I quickly became the flaming heretic without hope of
saving: "You are evil!!" "Do you worship the devil now, Joe?"
"Joe, you have no morality!" "Will you beat me and take my
wallet now that you're an atheist, Joe?" They called me not
knowing what they were in for. It was almost funny to listen as they
got upset and tried to get off the phone as quickly as possible! At
least several preachers and long-time church friends, forbade
me to contact them ever again, and most of them haven't
reached out since, except for one, maybe.

Looking back now, I can remember sitting on my couch shortly
before my resignation and recalling the end of a movie I saw
years earlier, the 1991 movie Drop Dead Fred. It's a silly little flick
that focuses on a troubled girl who has an imaginary friend who
stays with her until this friend feels she has grown up enough to
be on her own. I can remember the emotion that ran through me
as I applied it to my situation. Drop Dead Fred says to her
towards the end of the movie, "I've got to leave you now. You
don't need me anymore." After that, the girl went on about her life
as a normal girl and Fred became some other little girl's
imaginary friend. For me, it was exactly as though my god, my
imaginary friend who was a stepping stone to help me develop
confidence and to reach out towards maturity in life, suddenly
said to me, "I've got to leave you now. You don't need me
anymore." It was sad at first, but I knew all along it was
necessary. I "grew up" in my mind. My imaginary friend was
gone. Santa Claus was dead. There was no ghost in the
machine. Pinocchio's strings had been cut. Cinderella's magic
carriage ran out of gas. My little green dragon I clutched so tightly
in my arms as a small child at bedtime was useless now.

My journey through Christianity and into atheistic freethought was
a journey of finding myself, and now I can say with great
confidence that I have. I am one small link in a long chain, and all
I can do is my little part to make my fellow links feel that much
happier and that much more loved. The standards of peace and
happiness I sought as I believer, I found as an atheist -- Who
would have thought?

What shocked me was that the evidences for materialism were
there all along, right in front of me, only I never noticed them
because of my former, religious delusions. Anyone who wanted
hard facts that would support a natural universe could find a good
number of evidences, if only they were willing to accept what they
saw. I could now aim to live out my life with self honesty and
intellectual dignity. I was never a "sinner" and didn't need a
savior. What I needed was truth and the liberty of enlightenment.

I found that life is not about Joe Holman, or planet earth, or my
wants and desires, or those of my family. Life is about change:
blind, but awesome, disappointing, but surprising, change. Life is
about being born, growing, and dying, for no purpose at all
except for the one we make for ourselves. Life is about the
evolution of all things, great and small, and in the process, it is as
though the universe, through us, developed a way to view itself.
For me, life is not the main event anymore. When my time on
earth is spent, I will enjoy my eternal sleep, the only place where
genuine, lasting tranquility can be obtained. In an eternal
universe, who knows how unthinkably long it will be before
another galaxy sprouts up somewhere someday and another
planet is formed, where another innocent, naive, and zealous Joe
Holman comes around again, asking the same questions and
learning the same lessons. (JH)


* For a little more on my pre-conversion background, click here.