Because I never deconverted.
That's the simple answer. The longer, more complicated one is below, if you're interested in it.
I wasn't raised religiously. I was baptized, and I spent my kindergarten year at a Catholic school, and I went to church a few times. But it never took. I never felt the religion was a big deal. There was never pressure on me to believe that God existed. In some ways, I retained the natural atheism that a child who never heard of God would experience. It wasn't important to me, so it didn't matter.
(This is an anecdote that tends to see use when a theist tries to tell me that evidence of God is all around me, and that it's more natural to believe in God than not. I don't, and so if they pursue this line of argument they have to call me blind or unnatural. Most of them aren't willing to do that, so they turn to the "Well, your atheism is just cultural training" line. Yes, I tell them, of course it is. And if your God is real, why does it take cultural training to believe in him? Why doesn't he cross lines and show himself even to those who were raised in a different faith, country, culture, or denomination- or no faith at all?
They tend not to like that line of argument, for some reason).
There are a few specific instances I remember that would have made it hard for me to believe in God even with more intense training than I received. At six, I asked the adults around me who God's parents were. The answer was that God didn't have parents, and the answer to why he didn't have parents was that he was God. In other words, God is somehow different from all other things in the universe, and for no better reason than, "That's the way it is." A pretty strange system, really, if it takes blind faith to answer even a six-year-old's questions.
I also learned to read very early, and favored animals. I looked at pictures of animals in books for years, and never got the idea that they were "designed," or that nature was meant for the glory of God, or all the other neat ideas you're supposed to get from studying nature. I read a book on evolution at seven, and asked my father if he believed that people came from monkeys or Adam and Eve. He turned the question back on me, and I said, "From monkeys, of course!"
(I know that's not precisely true. Humans are more closely related to apes. But, even then, the Biblical creation story didn't make any sense to me, and I find creationists the most puzzling of all theists. It might make them feel good, but they have to close their eyes and plug their ears to ignore all the evidence. Why do so?)
I did receive a Bible at eight, and started reading it. Why not? I read Genesis and Exodus straight through, then started skipping around. Then I ran smack into Obidiah, which said that God would punish the descendants of Esau for, basically, being descendants of Esau.
I was horrified. I hurled the Bible across the room. Even then, I knew I was more moral than the creature depicted and worshipped as God in the Old Testament, if he could condemn thousands of people to death because of something their ancestor had done. Besides, Jacob had tricked Esau; it wasn't as though Esau committed a crime completely on his own. What kind of beast was this God, to not care about that?
I did go flipping through the Gospels later, since people kept mentioning Jesus. Then I found the story of the fig tree. Jesus cursed and withered the fig tree, even though the story itself says that it wasn't the season for figs.
What kind of book is this, where people preach compassion for enemies out of one side of their mouths and curse a helpless tree out of the other? And what kind of people say that the bad parts don't matter, and yet at the same try to assert that Jesus never did anything bad?
One way or the other. You cut them out of the Bible- and once you start doing that, then what's the harm with taking what is good and leaving the rest? What's wrong with an atheist loving his neighbor but not worshipping God? Or if all of the Bible matters, then why ignore the bad parts? They're not going to go away, you know. They're sitting there. Besides, a lot of Christians don't hesitate to use some parts, such as verses against homosexuality, if those parts support their point, even if other Christians think of them as perverse.
Am I glad I'm not a Christian, and bound to love one book above all the rest, and defend it besides!
I started calling myself agnostic at thirteen, when I read of Huxley and how he'd coined the term. It seemed to fit what I believed, though I think now I was much closer to "What does it matter if God exists or not?" than "I don't know if God exists or not." In effect, I've lived like a weak atheist since I was eight.
Sometimes religious people would get in conversations with me and try to convert me. I would nod along, and then tell them I was an agnostic. Most of them didn't know what it meant, and gave up to avoid looking stupid. I didn't have much trouble, other than a few people accusing me of being intolerant because I didn't say I worshipped their God, until the beginning of September 2001.
To me, the Islamic terrorists who crashed those planes into the WTC and the Pentagon were driven by religious fundamentalism and outrage over U.S. activities in their countries, not by some mysterious "evil" that can be located in their countries and faith alone. If Christians had done the same thing, I would consider it as evil. I wouldn't try to excuse them with, "Well, Christians worship the true God!"
I don't believe in an afterlife, or a soul, for lack of evidence (and because no one can define what a soul is to me). Death is the end of life. All those people who died in the WTC and the Pentagon, and on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, died. Completely, forever. There is no second chance.
Can you imagine what it feels like, to hear people proclaiming that it was all right because the dead went to heaven, but the Muslims went to hell? Can you imagine, from an atheist's point of view, how silly it sounds when one religion claims to be the true one and different from the others? So long as a religion has to rely on faith and can't present evidence, I don't believe in it. There is no difference, to me, between a Christain church and a Muslim mosque, between a Jewish synagogue and a Wiccan grove. They all have the same right to worship. And none of them have the right to call the others evil, and declare jihad against them, and tell me that atheists are evil, because none of them are not human.
That is what irritates me most about theism, I think. There is an assumption- widespread even among the tolerant theists- that atheism is somehow wrong. It's all right if you worship something different, to the tolerant theists, as long as you worship something. Atheists are supposed to be communists, or evil, or amoral, or in denial of God.
I am none of those things.
I really wish people would stop telling me I am.
I am tired of people exalting religious faith as if it were some sort of necessary component of a healthy brain, instead of a combination of cultural training, fear of death, delusion, and tradition.
And if the mere expression of these beliefs offends you, think about why. This is one webpage among millions. It happens to express a viewpoint that might be different from the one you're used to, but so what? If you're shocked, offended, shaken to the roots of your soul- why?
What is it about non-belief that demands it be suppressed and ignored?
