A Memoir of a Lifelong Atheist
I look back on my life as a good one
Submitted by Richard
“Lifelong” might be a slight exaggeration: I abandoned Christianity when I was about fourteen and, while I’m now eighty-six, I am still living. Let’s say that I’ve been a disbeliever long enough to have had a worthwhile experience of atheism.
I grew up in a home that was only slightly religious. My parents rarely went to church, they weren’t members of any denomination, and they neither encouraged nor discouraged me from participating in religion. The exposure that I did get was the result of friends asking me to attend church with them. As a result I was exposed to four different sects: Catholic, Nazarene, Congregational, and a small non-denominational group that met in a house. In each case I attended long enough to get a fairly good idea, as good as a young person could get, of the tenets of those sects.
I was a bookish and thoughtful kid and the conflicts between the beliefs of those four groups sort of rankled me. They all used the same bible and they said that they believed in the same god but not only were they different, they condemned each other. That didn’t make sense to me. As I thought about their different interpretations of the same source of their beliefs, I realized that they couldn’t all be right. The logical…
