Let it be said, with considerable certainty, that I have never held a particularly strong belief in God, Allah, Jehovah, or whatever it is people refer to their supreme being of choice as these days.
I was raised in a Jewish household, but it was only Jewish in the capacity that there was a half-assed menorah for a little over a week in December. We, as a family, attended Temple only twice during my entire childhood, both times as a favor to a friend of my father's. My best memories of my family's short-lived piety was a moderately entertaining sermon, and then a speaker that bored me to tears. I left both times with no intention of returning for anything but business (I worked at temple as an arts and crafts assistant for a few years – but any real Jew will tell you that money is money).
I remained a borderline Jew for several years. I said my prayers before bed until I was roughly ten; blessing my meals before eating (if I even remembered the correct words in Hebrew) petered out around eleven. As I slacked on my religious obligations, I couldn't help but notice that the threatened repercussions of not honoring God had yet to show themselves. Like a willful toddler testing the limits of a permissive parent, I pushed the envelope.
My first forays into atheism were under the guise of humor. I wrote and drew comics, and in one of my stories, the main characters would burn fifty gasoline-soaked garbage bags, filled with aborted fetuses, on the front lawn of the Vatican (I know, right?). ("We baptize you with FIRE! SOULS FOR THE CHURCH! SOULS FOR THE FUCKING CHURCH!") I penciled the page, inked it, lettered the dialogue in, and sat back to await the impending lightning bolt.
Nothing.
It was at this point that I decided that, if there was indeed a God, he was failing miserably at impressing me... which I imagine would be really a very simple thing if he was all-powerful. He couldn't spare a single precious moment on his infinite calendar to nudge me back onto the Straight and Narrow? Curious. I'm certainly not hard to please; a burning bush on my nightstand would have been more than enough.
My sacrilegious cartooning continued, much to my parents' ire. My mother, most notably, attempted to tear the original pages of one of my more disrespectful works. Beyond that, no repercussions were visited upon me, much to my amusement.
My festering disbelief in God became full-blown upon my graduation from high school and enrollment in college. However, the school I've chosen to attend is occasionally rife with Christian activity. It reached a point with a mostly-unobtrusive, but very unnecessary, older man with a sign reading: “JESUS LOVES YOU!!!!!!!!!!”, or something to that effect. There may have been more exclamation points.
And it makes you wonder... what sort of belief system needs badly-drawn cardboard signs and persistent men insisting that Jesus is your savior? It's absurd. The culture surrounding religion, the restrictions, the mindsets, the intolerance, the unwavering conviction that they are RIGHT – I want no part of that. I want to learn about the universe and all of its histories and possible inconsistencies and not swallow the “shit, man, God went and dunnit” explanation.
Fox News ran a program (contradictorily) titled "Facts, Faith, and Miracles.” The program attempted to explain the talents of great scientists, artists, and composers through "God." As in, their ability was so mind-boggling great that only "God" could be behind it.
My mother happened to be watching it at the time. I told her that the program was an insult to those great achievers and their ability because it was blatantly not giving them credit for their accomplishments, for the brilliance of their minds, and instead insisting, with absolutely no consideration or basis of intelligence, that it all must be attributed to a mysterious, disembodied force that “blessed” them. It sickened me.
I choose to believe in people and their ability to achieve amazing things and come to “moral” (whatever the shifting standard for that may be at the time) decisions not based on fear of an eternal punishment, but on their own thinking and reasoning. (Most) humans are fully capable of this. I do believe that religion is an insult to those who follow. It's an insult to their own independence and their own ability. Very recently someone on my Facebook friends list updated her status: "_____ got an A on her history test and is thanking God for His help!" I can't even begin to understand how that is not insulting one's mind. Your knowledge and your hard work got you that A -- not an invisible "being." It's undermining your own ability by willingly bestowing credit on someone/thing else. Respect yourself, jeeesus.
Sure, these may be slight or even insignificant reasons to fully reject a social paradigm, but trust me, I have countless more reasons for not having faith. It's a matter of listing them all.
*To my religious friends who I might (...probably) have offended: There will be opposition to anything you or I say, always. It hardly matters who says it.
*This might be kind of a circlejerk, yeah.
*P.S. RAmen, his Noodly Appendage.
