Why I don't believe.

I know I have not been updating this blog regularly, but it doesn't matter, since no one reads it. This is yet another worthless page in the sea of crap that is the internet.

Speaking of worthless crap on the internet, Ray Comfort's blog is worth a read. Not because it is a brilliant piece of Christian apologetics, but it is quite the opposite. He’ll argue that dinosaurs were heavier than whales, while in his post giving the weighs of both, showing that the whale is heavier. Then, he won’t admit to being wrong, and blame it on the atheist.

In a recent post, he postulated that all atheists are atheists because they hate god. (I am not sure why he thinks that. If a person really hated god, they wouldn’t be an atheist, just an angry theist.) However, as ill-formed and childish as that post was, it lead me to ask a simple question, “Why am I an atheist?”

Let me start of with a simple contradiction, I have not always been an atheist, but I don’t think I ever really believed in God. I say this because although for the most part of my life I would have considered myself a Christian, but looking back on it now, I never really believed. My lips moved during the psalms, but my heart never moved. No matter how much I tried, and I did try, I could never get myself to swallow the kool aid.

I grew up in a liberal Lutheran church, and I even taught Sunday school. It was the kind of church where for 18 or so years that I can remember, there was never a single sermon on the sins of homosexuality. Not one sermon about the impending apocalypse. I can remember the one sermon I liked the most was when the minister spoke out for the separation of church and state. And I can say with all honesty, it was this liberal theology that kept me a theist for a long time. I wanted to know a God that was forgiving, compassionate and loving.

Even in college, I associated myself with Christians. I went to a Christian student group. I think it was there when I started to become aware that I could never be like them. I was dumb struck the first time some one told me that she believed in creationism. She was a smart woman, and yet she spouted half truth and lies. She thought it was possible that dinosaurs and people lived together. There were others too. Very smart people were saying very stupid things, about abortion, homosexuals and biology. I started looking up the facts and arguments they were making. Flash frozen mammoths, DNA being a code, all gays being pedophiles – all turned out to be lies. Not only lies, but they were lies that have been refuted for ten, twenty, even fifty years. Christians were lying to me in the name of Christ.

I started to notice something else. Conservatives believed that God was conservative and was concerned most about conservative issues, like homosexuality and abortion. Liberals had a liberal God, who cared about the environment and justice. God had a different face for everyone. And yet no where was the hand of God evident. God didn’t close all of the abortion clinics and create loving families for all of the children. Nor did God stop the rain forest from being chopped and burnt to the ground. Everyone said He cared about his or her issues, but God did nothing.

By my senior year, I stopped trying to believe. I slipped back into my natural state. God wasn’t there. I wasn’t actively saying He didn’t exist, but I could no longer believe He did. God was like a friend's Canadian girlfriend. Sure he had pictures and letters, but I knew she wasn't real. It was simply easier to let him believe that I believed.

After college I went on to grad school. I became obsessed with creationist and the religious right. My roommate called me the most devote atheist after she caught me watching a Christian cartoon. It was a fascinating mixture of con artist, idiots and believers. Greedy men like Tom Delay and Trent Lott praised Jesus with one breath and said that tax cuts for the wealthy is exactly what Jesus would have wanted with the next. And people believed them. Not because they offered proof, but because they mentioned Jesus. Time and time again, televangelists and evangelists were cheating on their wives or income taxes. I got to be to the point where I figured the more moral one appeared in public, the slimier one was in person.

Where was God? Why would an omnipotent God, allow people to lie and steal in His name? Nearly every single right wing and left wing Christian that became famous turned out to be a moral hypocrite. How could everyone have there only personal messiah, who cared and loved them so, but was willing to send everyone else to hell? Where was the hand of God? The only logical conclusion was that God either did not intervene because He simply wasn’t there.