Why I'm not a Christian

So this post is in response to Brenton’s big question on how I became an atheist. That was quite some time ago, and I’d like to say that it’s taken me this long because I have been deep in thought for the last 6 months, pondering my entire belief system and even my very existence! However that wasn’t the case… As is so often the case with writing (in my experience anyway), life gets in the way and my blog posts have been the unfortunate victim. That said though, I have put a great deal of thought into the subject and hopefully can shed a little light into my thought processes over my ‘conversion’ to atheism.

In my personal experience I haven’t really believed in anything with too much enthusiasm. No horoscopes, homeopathy, astrology or anything like that, so I have very little point of reference to compare my experience to. I’m going to attempt to put this in a context that everyone may be able to relate to, so I’m going to compare my belief in god to a belief in Santa…

This isn’t meant in any way to trivialise the influence god has on other people’s lives, but merely used as a comparative device to get my thoughts onto paper...

The belief in Santa is instilled from birth, used not only as a device by parents to make children behave in the lead up to Christmas, but also as a means to add a little magic and fantasy into Christmas for children. Neither of these I see as such a bad thing, especially for parents with excitable children. However this is of course based on the premise that all rational adults know that Santa doesn’t exist, and that one day in the foreseeable future their children will also come to this same realisation.

Santa was an easy thing to in believe as a child. All of my peers had the same belief, as did (or so it appeared) every adult I knew, and there was a tangible reward for believing in him under the tree every Christmas morning.

As we started to get older our parents used increasingly elaborate devices to keep the ruse alive. One year Mum ‘ran into’ Santa on a late night toilet run, another year (when we were starting to suspect) while we were at midnight mass our parents had our neighbours come to the house to leave the presents, write a note and even eat some the snack we had left all in the hope of keeping the belief alive.  

However there was no stopping the inevitable…

Once word had gotten around at school that Santa wasn’t real: which firstly introduced the possibility that an alternate truth to what our parents had told us even existed, and secondly shifted popular opinion (in my small world anyway) from one that believed in Santa to one that didn’t, the belief system started to break down. My rational mind started to think of the wondrous, yet unrealistic, things Santa accomplished in one night, and so eventually my belief waned and eventually vanished.

I don’t remember the exact point I stopped believing in Santa, and I’m not sure if there was even an exact point or day where I was told he didn’t exist. But I do know that I no longer believe.

Comparing a belief in religion to a belief in Santa may offend some people, but to me similar thought processes and principles applied, although given that these are on wildly different scales both intellectually and in terms of the time it took me to come to a conclusion.

So here goes with my personal experience of how I became an atheist…

A belief in a Christian God was also instilled in me from birth. I was baptised as a baby, and went to our local Catholic church regularly as a small child. My direct family were all Christian, my Dad’s side of the family devout Roman Catholics and my Mum’s side of the family Christian in what I like to call the traditional Australian sense of the word (a belief in a spiritual God, but without disrupting a BBQ and a good drink on the weekends). We lived in a nice suburb on the outskirts of Perth, Western Australia where religious diversity was about as prevalent as a UFO sighting. I attended a Catholic Primary School (Grade school for all you Americans out there) where we attended mass every Thursday and had a Religious Education class twice a week to learn about the glory of god, the perils of sin and the devil and the importance of living a good Christian life. I took my communion and confirmation with the Catholic Church while at primary school and was even a member of the school choir for a few years. A better Catholic upbringing you couldn’t ask for…

High school was a bit of a different story, Brenton and I went to a secular public school where religion wasn’t the main focus of school life. However my belief wasn’t changed, with so much else happening in life as a typical adolescent there was very little interaction with and almost no emphasis on religion and life moved on as usual. In my early years at high school I attended a few ‘youth group’ nights at the local Baptist church, and while I went mostly because it was what all my friends were doing at the time, when the subject turned to god the discussions only solidified my belief in what I already knew to be true.

Up until this point I had not met (that I can recall) a single person that was not of the Christian faith. No one had challenged my belief, nor did I have any reason to believe that there was a truth other that what the Christian faith had taught me, I was in a world much like the world I was in before the word about Santa got out. Everyone believed the same thing; no one challenged that belief, so there was no reason to believe otherwise.

Around about this time in my life my parents got divorced, which as a 13/14 year old wasn’t as traumatic as many people (including my parents) think it was, however it did result in a few changes in the relationship I had with my parents. One of the products of this was that my Mum and I started making more of an effort of finding things that we could do to spend time together. One of these things turned out to be a 4 week meditation class with a Buddhist monk. I’m not really sure what drew me (or Mum for that matter) to this at the time but I remember being pretty excited to experience the nirvana-like state of a meditation guru like I had read in the newspapers. I of course never got anywhere near this level, but I did pick up a few relaxation techniques that I still use to this day.

The class was as much about the Buddhist belief system as it was about the actual meditation and the monk running the class always held a Q&A session at the end of each class where we could ask him whatever we wanted, either about his religion, meditation or life in general. Now as I took those classes over 10 years and many, many beers ago the exact questions and answers I cannot remember. However what I do remember is always being impressed by the knowledge and wisdom of this guy no matter what the question from the entirely Christian audience. I remember numerous occasions where he was asked a question (and being the awkward teenager I was, none of the questions came from me) and thinking to myself ‘How is he going to get out of this one?’ but he would just take a deep breath and calmly answer whatever was thrown at him in relation to the Buddhist teachings. So here was this perfectly sane human being, albeit in slightly stranger clothes than I was used to, living a happy and fulfilled life with a completely different belief system to the one I held, and the only one I had experienced.

This was of course my first extended interaction with someone of the non-Christian faith, and was somewhat of a revelation to me at the time. These were the first conversations I had ever had about religion that even hinted at the fact that the Christian God wasn’t the only one out there, and it introduced me to the possibility that a belief in Christianity wasn’t a prerequisite to leading a normal life. So, much like when I heard the whispers about Santa around the playground, the cat was out of the bag and while I probably didn’t realise it at the time, this set me on the path to atheism.

Now I didn’t go out and covert to Buddhism the next day and devote my life to the pursuit of eternal enlightenment. I was still a teenager and went about my teenage life with not a whole lot gained from the class except a new found respect for the Buddhism faith, and a few new ways to get myself to sleep if I was anxious over exams. My life continued as I think is the case with most people, regardless of age or religious beliefs: without too much thought on the subject, and no real reason to challenge my existing belief system. I sometimes compare this, somewhat morbidly, to thinking about death. Death scares the shit out of me, and I have no problems admitting it. The thought of not existing is something that if I really think about I find difficult to comprehend. That said, I don’t really think about death all that often and my life will continue to plod along quite happily with me completely ignoring the subject.

So my life, and my belief in Christianity, went along quite happily for a few years without me sparing a thought for religion at all. Being a young male in a secular high school, where we were far more interested in girls, sport and drinking than anything else, discussion of religion rarely came up, and this suited me just fine.

University in Australia was much the same story; I had guys in my degree that were Muslim and Hindu, but studying in the socially inept field of Computing, discussion was hard to come by at all, let alone a discussion about religion. However, in my 3^rd year of University I was accepted on an academic scholarship to go on exchange to the University of Minnesota, Duluth in America. This was the first time I had travelled by myself out of Australia and was somewhat of a coming of age for me.

Before heading up to Minnesota, I met up with Brenton who at the time was studying Theology and Youth Ministry at the University of Saint Marys in Leavenworth, Kansas. Now this was proper Christian country, if ever I needed a place to push me from the brink of atheism surely this was it??

I went to church with Brenton a couple of times, met all Brenton’s (mostly Christian) friends and thoroughly enjoyed my time there with not a bad word to say about the people I met or the experience as a whole. However I was starting to realise that I didn’t really agree with what some of these guys were saying, not just the political aspects of their belief (I vividly recall untoward opinions on homosexuals) but also the fundamental religious belief.

Looking back there are probably a number of things I can attribute to this disillusionment, the first one being that at the time I was studying in a very practical discipline, one where things were either right or wrong, there or not. Being in this mind-set coming to Kansas, with this being really the only other time I had seriously thought about religion since my meditation class, it highlighted to me the fact that the belief in an omniscient, omnipotent being in the sky wasn’t really something I could take seriously. Secondly was the vigour with which Brenton’s friends and their community held their belief. I had come from a culture where religion was pretty much a non-issue, so much so that I hadn’t had a conversation even in passing about religion for a good couple of years, and been thrust into one where it permeated every aspect of life. It was a little overwhelming to say the least.

I went up to Minnesota with a nagging religious doubt in my mind, which was soon overwhelmed by the excitement of being alone in a different country experiencing college life in America. One of the classes that were compulsory for exchange students to take was the Cultural Studies class. It was pretty much a chance for the students at UMD to pick our brains about our cultural differences and those of the different nationalities in the class. While these classes were essentially organised social lubrication, it did again remind me that there were other religions in the world, and there were perfectly sane, normal, happy people practicing them. This solidified the doubt I had when leaving Kansas pushed me further down the path of atheism.

After leaving Minnesota Brenton and I went down to Dallas, Texas for Christmas. Once again I met a bunch of Brenton’s friends and once again I haven’t met nicer people in my life and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. There is however one memory that stands out from that trip: while visiting the church of one of Brenton’s friends I asked about the massive nursery/crèche area for younger children and was promptly quoted statistics of how children are more likely to be ‘saved’ at a younger age than later in life. This really hit home for me and draws some parallels to the Santa rant I started this post with. If a child is introduced to a belief from birth, and that belief is never truly challenged by removing themselves from a closed community where that belief no longer holds true, then what is stopping them from plodding happily through life holding that same belief?

I returned to Australia an atheist.  

Nothing I’ve encountered from that point on has challenged that belief, and I doubt that very much will.

All that said, I think I’ve probably taken up enough of your time now…

I thank you for the patience to read all the way through and hope that I’ve given some insight into how I came to be the way I am.

I also hope that if you are reading this and haven’t seriously thought about your religious orientation, regardless of what it is, please take a minute or two to think about it or discuss it with someone that doesn’t hold the same belief as you. You may be surprised with what you discover…

Comments welcome as always…

Jake