Pivot Point: One Thing Did It

The Truth in Embryo

Mel Gabel

The first thing you need to know is that I’m a PK (preacher’s kid). My father was the minister of United Brethren churches in small towns in eastern Colorado. My father firmly believed in the inerrancy of the Bible, and he was most certainly a fundamentalist. In 1945 (I was going into eighth grade), our family had the great fortune to move to Naperville, Illinois. With significant help from my grandparents, my parents bought a house one block away from the main campus of North Central College. My father was employed by a temperance society to give assembly programs at various junior high schools across the western Chicago suburbs. His flip-chart presentations effectively warned of the dangers of addiction to alcohol and street drugs.

Our family (I have three siblings) immediately joined the United Brethren Church in Naperville. Several years later, all United Brethren churches merged with the Methodist churches to become United Methodist churches. By the time I was in high school, I was skeptical of many of the biblical stories, particularly the Virgin Birth and the various miracles. But I would certainly have called myself a Christian. I don’t recall our minister ever warning that “hell was your destination if you did not repent of your sins.” I certainly agreed with his often-expressed themes of love, compassion, and tolerance.

The big question mark in my head had to do with evolution. Both my parents were strongly anti-evolution. How could a person believe in God and believe that humans were closely related to apes? I have always had a strong belief in the sciences. But is evolution truly believable? That brings me to my pivot point.

I was a student at North Central College, and I don’t remember if it was during my sophomore or junior year that I took a class called Comparative Embryology. When you look at an early-stage embryo of a human, it’s dramatically similar to even a pig’s embryo. Suddenly the light turned on. I never again had any doubts about the truth of evolution.

After graduating from college and two years of service in the U.S. Army, I married my college sweetheart. We retained membership in the United Methodist church primarily because she (a very talented musician) was the church’s organist. We found many of our closest friends because of the wonderful social life resulting from church membership. But once my wife retired from being a church organist, we stopped attending church services.

Because the word atheist carries with it a lot of negativity, I prefer to call myself a “post-theist.” And, of course, I am pointedly a secular humanist.


Words of Wisdom

John Van Dixhorn

I had many small pivot points, but for many years avoiding atheism was my sacred priority. My pivot points had to do with, first, realizing that the Bible could not possibly be the “Inerrant Word of God.” I heard the warnings of my fellow clergymen: “Once you question the Bible, you’ll start questioning other important things. It’s a dangerous road that can lead to atheism.” I vowed that would never happen. But I started questioning the Virgin Birth, then miracle claims, and so on. Through it all, I could never become an atheist. I consoled myself that I could still find God in the mythology. After all, an atheist was a deprived and rebellious man.

My successive pivot points led to necessary and difficult professional pivots—from Evangelical pastor to liberal pastor, to hospital chaplain, to psychologist. But never atheism; no, that was not going to happen.

One day, I was presenting a case to my psychoanalytic supervisor about a man in conflict with his faith. The supervisor wanted to explore my countertransference and accused me of being an atheist. Of course, he was not accusing me, but the word atheism triggered judgement. It was still a harsh word, one I could not identify with. I admired my supervisor’s compassion, humility, and basic goodness. I knew he could not be an atheist and was warning me.

I defended myself. “Maybe agnostic, but not an atheist.” Defensively, I turned it on him: “What about you?” His response would be my major pivot point.

He chuckled and said, “Oh, I became an atheist back in medical school. I always thought an agnostic was someone who was afraid to admit he was an atheist.”

It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

In that moment, I knew I was hanging on to meaningless leftovers of my fragile faith, living in a pathetic house of belief that had become uninhabitable. In that moment, I felt my final liberation, and the word atheist took on new meaning. That meaning included me.


The Myth of God

Bjorn H. Lofblad

I lost faith in the god that so many foolishly believe in. My pivotal moment came during my childhood. An object of ridicule and ostracism, I felt different from children other than myself. I have a rare form of Down Syndrome that has no physical or mental manifestations, but because I was in special education nonetheless, other children were sometimes cruel. The bullies were put in their place by those I called my friends. But then I was sexually abused by another older boy. I have never told anybody that until now. This abuse did not affect my sexual orientation, but it did change one thing: my belief in God. I no longer believe in, and cannot understand why anyone could still believe in, a myth created by mankind for millennia. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve debunked it. My own suffering is enough evidence. I’d rather stay outside the breach and within reach of success. At least it was time for a confession of a secret I never thought I’d tell.

Bjorn H. Lofblad was born in Denver and lived there for twelve years. In 1987, his parents divorced and his mother brought him to Illinois. Thirty-three years later, he’s been to community college, had two jobs in food service, and now works at a grocery store, where he’s been for eighteen years.


By Their Shelves Ye Shall Know Them

Howard Feldman

In high school, Brad was the smartest person I knew. One day while I was hanging out at his house, he proudly showed me his Henry Morris cassette tapes.1 I was shocked! How could the smartest person I know be taken in by this obviously false story? The answer was religion. I thought that if religion could so distort one’s ability to see the world as it really is, I wanted no part in it.

  1. Henry Morris (1918–2006) was an influential advocate for young-earth creationism. An engineer by training, he cofounded the Creation Research Society and the Institute for Creation Research, leading exponents of mid-twentieth-century American creationism.

Howard Feldman has a PhD in paleontology from Indiana University and is currently a petroleum geologist in Houston.


From Tertullian and Aquinas to Gibbon and Nietzsche

Patrick Keane

My pivot point came at the age of twenty—ironically enough, while reading the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas at a Catholic university. On the fateful day, I came upon a passage in the Third Part titled “Whether the Blessed in Heaven Will See the Sufferings of the Damned.” The good doctor answered in the affirmative: the saved in heaven will indeed “be allowed to see the sufferings of the damned in order that their bliss may be more delightful to them” (ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat; italics in the original).

More than a half-century later, I can still recall my shock in encountering words that I found morally repellent. To encounter this sadistic passage about the bliss of the blessed being enhanced by delighting in the torments of the damned—coming from, of all people, Catholicism’s central post-Augustinian philosopher-theologian—stunned me. I was disturbed enough to seek out the most eminent Jesuit on campus, who referred me, without further comment, to Tertullian’s late fourth-century text De Spectaculis, (On the Spectacles). There I found the context: the posthumous vengeance by Christian martyrs—now elevated to the good seats—upon the Roman oppressors who had tortured and burnt them in the Colosseum.

Tertullian’s astonishing set-piece, in which emperors and gladiators, pagan poets, and philosophers “liquefy in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians,” helped explain, but hardly justified, the passage in Aquinas that appalled me at the time and still does. I later learned that the spectacle of looking down from heaven with relish on the unspeakable sufferings of the damned was a long-standing Christian idea, an “Abominable Fancy” (so labeled by the nineteenth-century cleric Frederick Farrar) that has inspired hellfire sermons by prominent preachers from Martin Luther to Jonathan Edwards and well beyond.

As I also subsequently discovered, Tertullian’s rhetorical exultation in vengeance, dripping in schadenfreude, was singled out for criticism by Edward Gibbon in The Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire and, later, by Friedrich Nietzsche, who chose it in his Genealogy of Morals as the very epitome of that ressentiment (he always used the French word) that characterized what he called slave morality.

I have read and learned from Nietzsche for half a century without quite becoming a Nietzschean. But with his dissection of ressentiment and the vindictive cruelty it entails, I have no problem. Indeed, the gleefully sadistic—the “abominable”—relishing of hellfire became the pivot point in my own deconversion. In contemplating the prospect of eternal punishment, as well as this temporal world of massive, mostly undeserved suffering, I find no more evidence than did Nietzsche of the existence of a benign deity.


No Mercy for Daughters

W. E. “Bing” Garthright

My pivot point from Mainline Protestantism to secular humanism at age forty-two was Judges, Chapter 11. I have always been devout. First I was a devout Christian, and now I am a devout secular humanist. The backstory is my good fortune to have had a brilliant Lutheran pastor who had taught in college and seminary. He used the Lutheran study series Word and Witness, Understanding the Bible (copyright 1978, Lutheran Church in America). He expanded the study to encompass the critical approach then used in seminaries. Beginning in 1979, I learned what the Bible actually was, and that began a new view of what it meant for a god to reveal truths through his interactions with a people and through his inspiration of the people’s holy texts. The usual cited horrors in the Bible disturbed me greatly, but my pivot point came with the sacrifice by a tribal war leader of his virgin daughter, his only child. That was another instance where a god could have sent an angel to halt the hand of the slaying father but did not. The god spared Abraham’s son, but not the warlord’s daughter, even with a two-month delay for her slaughter. I realized the historicity of this tale was uncertain, but what it said about the people who preserved this tradition, and still preserve it today, was what counted. At that moment, I felt as though a long fuse had been lit.

Some years later, the change was complete. Judges Chapter 11 was my pivot point.

W. E. “Bing” Garthright is a mathematician who came late to science, an almost theologian (lost the Rockefeller Fellowship contest, thank Heaven), and a grateful admirer of Phil Klass, James Randi, and secularist activists and writers.


Yes, This Is All There Is!

Eugene D. “Duke” Mertz

I was honored when my story was the first one selected for “The Faith I Left Behind” series (FI, February/March 2014). In it, I described my pivot point:

One of my friends demanded: “How can anyone imagine a world without God? How can anyone ever conceive that this is all there is?”

… I took him up on that challenge. I tried to imagine that the life we know, the life of everyday experience was indeed the sum total of existence. To my amazement, I succeeded!

This eureka moment is still clear to me, though it happened over fifty years ago.

Eugene D. “Duke” Mertz took early retirement from a career in finance to work with nonprofit organizations and write. He is the author of The Exodus Sect (exodussect.com).


Just the Factions

Timothy Grogan

“Things fall apart; it’s scientific.”1

My pivot point out of evangelical Christianity takes me back to the 1980s during the controversy du jour in evangelicalism over the “Lordship of Christ.” This controversy was about a crucial idea: “How can one be saved through the work of Christ?” Is faith, defined as intellectual assent alone, sufficient or not? I noted that on this topic, noted evangelicals with distinguished credentials completely disagreed with each other.2 I found this strikingly anomalous because the Bible teaches that “When the Holy Spirit comes he will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13). I found it incredible that people who studied the Bible at an academic level for most of their lives could disagree on how to be “saved.” Where the heck was the “Holy Spirit”?

Thinking and studying about the “Lordship” controversy started to make me very skeptical of the epistemological foundations of Evangelicalism and religion in general. The more I searched the Bible, the more it seemed to me a mass of conflicting theologies. With such a contradictory mess, no wonder smart people could not agree on what was going on! My thinking ran along this line: If these scholars with advanced degrees in the New Testament and/or theology don’t agree, then how the hell can I know?

The entire superstructure of Christian belief started collapsing rapidly after this exposure to the “fighting factions” problem in Christianity. Massive, intractable disagreement divides Christians on such concepts as salvation, faith, sacraments, baptism, atonement (its nature and extent), the Trinity, eschatology, church governance, hermeneutics, covenant, dispensations, works, repentance, the Old Testament in relation to the New Testament, and so on.

The erosion of my “Mt. Sinai” of faith was soon complete, and I found myself agreeing with Franz Overbeck: “The history of Christianity is the best school for atheism.”

  1. “Wild Wild Life” by the Talking Heads (1986).
  2. On the “Lordship” side: John Gerstner, K. L. Gentry, James M. Boice, Anthony A. Hoekema, and J. I. Packer. “Non-Lordship” scholars included: Charles Ryrie, Darrell L. Bock, Manfred Kober, Earl Radmacher, and Bob Wilkin.

Science educator and author Timothy Grogan was a born again Christian in the 1970s and had contact with many evangelical apologists, including Robert A Morey, R. J. Rushdoony, R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner, Walter Lang, Greg Bahnsen, and others. Grogan has written or coauthored articles in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, The American Rationalist, and a chapter in Edward T. Babinski, ed., Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists.


Well, a Few Things

Wolfgang Niesielski

F or me there was never one decisive pivotal moment that turned me into an atheist. As a child growing up in the former East Germany, I assumed that going to church was something that old people did, because that’s most of what I saw when I visited a church with my grandma. So, I never really saw religion given emphasis, although, apparently, everyone believed in God.

There was God and Jesus and, of course, Christmas. Christmas was very important in the area I was born, Erzgebirge (ore mountains). Many of the Christmas ornaments you see stem from that region. Long ago, after the mines closed because they became unproductive, many unemployed miners turned to carving wood to eke out a living. The nutcracker, for example, is wearing the uniform of a miner. So, you can make a case that Christmas was actually beneficial, because it saved a lot of people.

As a child, one never really questions the status quo. But the first time my belief in what adults were telling me was shaken occurred when my older sister, an annoying knowit-all, ridiculed me for not realizing that Santa Claus—the one who had visited our home and scared the hell out of me—was not real but in fact had been Dad dressed in weird clothes with a fake beard. Although I pretended that I had known, I wasn’t quite sure.

The second time was when I tried to top my sister in the knowledge that boys have one less rib than girls, because this god in the sky had removed one from the first man to fashion a woman. That was something that I had been taught in Sunday school, which I had visited to please my grandma. Again, I had to surrender to my smart-aleck sister of mine, although I desperately kept counting the ribs on the skeletons I came across in books for a long time to come. Eventually, I conceded that men and women had the same number of ribs. But my faith in what adults had been telling me, which I had assumed so far to be true, had been shaken forever.

My family escaped to West Germany when my sister and I were teenagers. Looking back, my friends and I must have been agnostics. I remember a conversation about careers with a friend whose father was a pastor. He said that although religion was a bunch of nonsense, he would definitely step into his father’s footsteps because the money was good, and he didn’t really have to work a lot.

I suppose the last pivotal moment of really confronting my own beliefs came after I had arrived in California in my early twenties. I lived with a roommate who turned out to be an escapee from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. One time when he wasn’t at home, a member of the cult, who had been dispatched to “rescue” him, turned up.

I sat him down to ask him some questions. He was very patient at first, very confident that he would be able to answer everything a young innocent foreign boy could throw at him. Soon, though, after my question of the “not missing” rib and how it was possible to fit and feed two members of each of the millions of species on a rickety wooden Bronze Age boat for months on end—aside from the problem of retrieving the kangaroos from Australia—he became quite insecure, telling me that he would need to consult with his boss.

I hope I laid the foundation of turning him into an atheist too.

Wolfgang Niesielski is a columnist, author, illustrator, cartoonist, and poet. His humor columns and cartoons have appeared in various newspapers and publications (Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury, Philosophy Now, etc.). Originally from Germany, he now lives in Northern California.


Well, Maybe Two Things

Jesse Gunkel

My pivot point happened sometime in my junior year of high school (in 1998). I realized two things at about the same time:

1) The Christians in my community, almost without exception, did not live by example the religion they claimed to believe in.

2) Also, how could all the adherents of other world religions be wrong?

At that point, I decided they were all flawed and began my journey as an atheist.


My Research Project

Barbar Smoker

I can time to the very minute the pinpoint of my deconversion from devout Catholicism to out-and-out atheism. It was exactly midday on Saturday, November 5, 1949. But it was the culmination of years of brooding, backed by relevant books on both sides of the argument.

The process began sixteen years earlier, when, as a British ten-year-old, I realized that grown-ups had been lying to me about Father Christmas (Santa Claus). Had he been presented to me as fiction, it would have been fine, but he was presented as fact, and I felt a fool for having fallen for such impossibility. To save other children from this indignity, I went around telling them the truth about Father Christmas—and it got me into trouble.

Gradually some of the details of my convent education began to bother my sense of reason, but I managed to suppress any serious religious doubts while I became obsessed with books by Christian apologists. When they refuted named atheists, I felt I had to seek them out, too, through the public library.

My emotional faith was thus pitted against my innate sense of reason, causing mental turmoil in my early twenties. The day came when I felt impelled to reach a decision, and I made my way to the library’s Philosophy/Religion shelves, to re-read particular paragraphs on sticking points. Overwhelmingly, disbelief triumphed.

Suddenly I said to myself “I am no longer a Catholic!” and it made me physically dizzy. Realizing that it was a turning-point in my life, I looked up at the library clock to register the time, which was exactly 12 o’clock.

Two years later, I joined a humanist group and then the National Secular Society, speaking and writing against religious beliefs with the same missionary zeal with which I had spread the word against Father Christmas. My annual election as president of the National Secular Society for twenty-five years opened doors to me for publication as well as radio and television appearances, plus speaking tours of America and India. (I have often wondered whether any of the nuns responsible for my religious education in the 1930s lived to see how I turned out!)

Barbara Smoker (1923–2020) was hands-on president of the National Secular Society (U.K.) for twenty-five years (1971–1996).


World’s Shortest Pivot Point

Joe Jones

My pivot, like so many others, occurred over many years. Decades, actually. The pivot point occurred when I realized that lions eat zebras alive and, therefore, life is harsh—not the fairytale I’d been led to believe.


Madalyn O’Hair Did It for Me

Phillip Meade

I was raised in the Lutheran church. Everything in my life was involved with the church until I graduated from high school, having already joined the U.S. Marine Corps. My service exposed me to many different people and circumstances—especially in Vietnam.

My future wife and I met as pen pals. After I was discharged and Connie graduated from nursing school, we were married in the Methodist church (her background). Connie then joined the Lutheran church, and we attended for a few years. But things had begun to change in our minds.

I was between jobs and caught the Phil Donahue Show with Madalyn Murray O’Hair on it.1 This opened my mind to things I had long been thinking. Connie and I joined American Atheists. This was my pivot point.

Connie had come to her pivot point by working with cancer patients as an oncology nurse.

At age thirty-four, Connie was diagnosed with breast cancer. We did not pray or return to church. (Pivot point holding!) Twenty-six years later, her breast cancer returned. (Pivot point still holding.) Five years later, she died of the disease. I took care of her in at-home hospice.

People around me felt sure I would return to church, but that didn’t happen. We had no funeral for Connie. She was cremated and interred at the National Cemetery as the wife of a veteran. The American Atheists symbol is inscribed on her headstone.

A year and a half later, I was treated for prostate cancer resulting from exposure to chemicals in Vietnam. Still, the pivot point held. In fact, I became a life member of American Atheists and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I also subscribe or belong to several other atheist and humanist organizations and publications, including Free Inquiry.

As we would say, don’t need no stinkin’ religion.

  1. Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919–1995), was the mother of the student plaintiff in Murray v. Curlett. In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court joined that suit with Abington School District v. Schempp and issued an 8–1 ruling abolishing state-sponsored Bible readings in public schools. Capitalizing on the case’s notoriety, O’Hair founded American Atheists in 1963. On November 6, 1967, O’Hair was the guest on the first broadcast of The Phil Donahue Show (later Donahue); she appeared on the program several times thereafter.

Phillip Meade, originally from Sandusky, Ohio, is a Vietnam veteran, having served with the U.S. Marine Corps. He is retired living in Canton, Georgia.


Another Torment of Hell

Gitta Pfahl

I was born and baptized in 1944 in Germany by Catholic parents who were not practicing according to the Church rules. Between the ages of ten and nineteen, I attended the gymnasium. At the end, you receive a degree that will be accepted by the university. Among all the academic subjects was religion, taught twice weekly. For this class we were separated into Protestants and Catholics. My whole knowledge about religion I received in school. My parents, I would say now looking back, were agnostics. The school teaching during my formative years turned me into a practicing Catholic. One of the more important rules was to attend church every Sunday. It was mandatory to obey; if you failed, you were committing what was called a deathly sin. Should you die while guilty of this sin, plainly speaking, you would end up in hell.

By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I had a hard time agreeing with this. Obviously, it followed from my Catholic beliefs that should my whole family die in a car crash (cars had just appeared on the scene), I would end up in heaven and my family would end up in hell. That created great despair in my young life. I was not able to convince my parents to join me in church.

That was my sticking point. The only solution was to start thinking and possibly end up doubting the whole religion.

That was very scary. After all, what might you find out? What conclusion might thinking lead to? To persevere took some strength; I had to fight the sense that my very thinking and doubting constituted another sin. (Give the Catholics credit; they had figured out how to keep their sheep in line.) But to me, there was no other choice but to think. The conclusion came quickly, granting me a freedom I had never felt before. I concluded that any god who would impose these rules and punish with an eternity in hell or grand heaven is not a just entity. No religion that teaches such things could be true.

Doubting helped me to see all these inequities and cruelties. Like an addict, I stopped “cold turkey.” I never looked back, and I never set foot into any other church. I could live in peace without fearing that an unjust god would put my family into hell.

My husband was raised Catholic by very religious parents—the opposite of my experience. Through his academic study getting a PhD in molecular biology—and with the aid of his agnostic wife—he was also able to detonate the shackles of his religious prison. We had a daughter when I was twenty-nine years old. In 1973, my husband accepted a job as a scientist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California. It took just one trip to the great American National Parks the following year to turn me into the atheist I am today.

Meanwhile, at every corner and along the long roads outside the progressive cities, I discovered every church denomination you could imagine. That clinched my belief that there is not one correct Christian religion. In fact, there is no correct religion at all.

On that note, let’s all be kind to each other. Most importantly, let there be no discrimination, whether among religions or between religion and nonreligion.


Touched by an Iconoclast

Jamieson Spencer

I can trace my growth to twin pivots (sorry, Tom). The two thinkers and activists who helped bring me to where I am were Dr. Jack Kevorkian and George Bernard Shaw.

Okay, if Flynn’s a stickler, I’ll meet him half-way. The original pivoting moment came from Kevorkian, an early and daring proponent of assisted suicide. His gruff and unsentimental five-word declaration did it for me: “When you die, you rot.” The rebel in me craves iconoclastic thinkers, and the doctor’s focus on the purely physical and microscopic helped me dismiss any transcendent or cosmic dimensions. It gave me permission to reject the notion not just of an afterlife but—huge leap—of heaven and even of the soul.

That first pivot started me thinking still more deeply. Kevorkian’s iconoclasm reminded me of my admiration for Shaw’s plays, the work of a dramatist (and socialist and agnostic) who brought a devastating wit to his society’s unthoughtful but confident assumptions. It might be a surprise that such a radical thinker would create two deeply religious women as heroes, but he did. His Saint Joan declares that she must rely on herself for wisdom and judgment: “What other judgment can I judge but by my own?” And what she praises God for above all is “my common sense.” Shaw dares to proclaim this quintessential Catholic saint as a proto-Protestant. She is her own pivot point.

In Major Barbara, Shaw has his heroine (another admirably strong woman) forsake her initial commitment to the Salvation Army: “I have got rid of the bribe of bread. I have got rid of the bribe of heaven.” She turns her energies to doing good in the real world. “Let God’s work be done for its own sake”—work that, she realizes, “cannot be done except by living men and women.” Her speech asserts a proud, deeply individual, and daringly assertive relationship with God: “When I die let him be in my debt, not I in his.”

So, nutshell version: Kevorkian’s words led me back to Shaw, and he, in due course, guided me to my current conviction. Here it is: if there is a god, he’s a liberal democrat.

Jamieson Spencer is a retired professor of English and Composition first at the high-school level, then later and longer at the community college level. He took an MA degree in England (U of Sussex), a year that reinforced his growing Anglophilia. It also established three life-long heroes: Dickens (fiction), Elgar (music), and J. S. Mill (eloquent humanist).


A Matter of Dates

Virginia Kerr

I was twelve years old in 1953. On Sunday mornings, my parents sent me to a United Methodist Sunday school. One Sunday morning, my Sunday school teacher, the minister’s wife, told the class that no one knew when Jesus was born; for this reason, a random date of December 25 had been chosen for his birth. It dawned on me that it was all a lie, just as Santa Claus had been. No one could rise from the dead. There was no divine Jesus and no God. It was all a scam designed to rob me of a portion of my weekly allowance.

Virginia Kerr is a retired clinical social worker and child psychoanalyst. Her life has been committed to the enhancement of the well-being of both individuals and society. She is living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.


One Who Learned from History

Ben Plumb

I grew up in the 1950s in a small Southern California congregation that was on the liberal fringes of mainline religious belief. It met in a movie theater and was led by a lanky, kind man who delivered the teachings of Science of Mind author Ernest Holmes in a deep, resonant voice. According to these teachings there was no hell, but a god existed, and we prayed to it. My parents taught Sunday school, and I played hymns on the piano while everybody sang.

Later, on an October evening when I was eighteen, during my second month at Stanford University, I was in a small library reading passages on the history of Judaism and Christianity. Stunned, I turned away and looked at the wall.

“Holy crow,” I said under my breath. “This is all made up. Every bit of it.”

I saw that these religious systems and their deities were elaborate human inventions. God was an imaginary being and did not exist.

Shaken, I closed the book and walked out into the cool night air feeling giddy with possibility.

Ben Plumb graduated from Stanford University, served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Vietnam, and earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School. During his career, he worked in construction, computer technology, and health care. Now retired, Plumb has four children and ten grandchildren.


For Me, It Was Food Stamps

Joseph Murray Gillis

I was a very practical Catholic for thirty-three years and instrumental in bringing two friends into the church. I sponsored the second convert during her Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) classes over twenty-three weeks in 2011–2012.

But then politics invaded our church. Near the end of the program, a very respected lady of our church was teaching the class. Drawing her values from the Republican conservative Tea Party movement, she lambasted government involvement in charity work, especially the Food Stamp program (now called SNAP). At the time, I was a benefits counselor dealing with Food Stamp eligibility.

I had always associated my work with fulfillment of the teachings of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 25: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit and comfort the infirm and those in prison.

The attack on both my faith and my employment was so intense and unexpected that it cut to the quick. I finished the last four weeks of RCIA for the benefit of my friend, but in June 2012 I left the church, whose hypocrisy I finally understood. My church friends gave lip service to the morals of Jesus but not living them out. The lady teaching the class was incensed with what she considered the government takeover of what the church should be doing. As a student of history, I knew that the government intervention was due to the disaster of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the churches could not fulfill their mission.

The first Sunday on which I purposely missed Mass was very disheartening. I began to read Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Roger Williams’s early work on separation of church and state from 1644. I also studied the Bible.

I have read more of the Bible, thanks to Thomas Paine, than ever before. I now know that the Bible embodies the best case for atheism. I am a full-fledged atheist and have revealed my nonbelief to many of my friends.

Joseph Murray Gillis is retired from the Tennessee Department of Human Services. He enjoys reading and traveling around the country and the world. His lifelong interest is researching his family tree.


Missing My Friend

Phil Barbier

At eleven years of age on my first day of fifth grade, I looked around for my friend from the previous year. He was not to be found. I asked a teacher if he had perhaps moved. She replied that apparently, I had not heard that Doug had died during the summer of pneumonia.

That night, I asked my mother if little kids could die of pneumonia. She replied, “Yes, but it usually happens to older people.” After a few phone calls, she revealed to me that apparently Doug’s family were Christian Scientists; they don’t believe in modern medicine or doctors. His family had gathered around his bed and prayed for God to heal him. I said, for an eleven-year-old, what would be the equivalent of “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

After a couple weeks of introspection, I informed my mother that I no longer wished to go to church, and I didn’t believe in God. She replied, “OK.” A couple years later, I learned there was a word for what I’d become: atheist.

Phil Barbier, age eighty, was born and raised in the Bay Area, is a third generation Californian, and has a degree from San Jose State (class of 1962). He spent five years as a USAF pilot, was a participant in the Viet Nam fiasco, and spent thirty-four years as a TWA pilot. He is now retired and living with his wife, five dogs, and two cats in Anthem, Arizona, for the past seventeen years.


You’ve Got to Have Faith

Bob Boland

The beginnings of my pulling away from belief came when I was a little kid. I came home from Sunday school and asked my mother if it was true that children who weren’t baptized or never heard of Jesus were not going to heaven. She said yes. I thought that wasn’t fair. They never had a chance and shouldn’t be punished for being innocent and not knowing. That started filling me with doubts.

My pivot point came after my science education in junior high. I learned that the Bible was written before microscopes and telescopes were invented. It was written before gravity was discovered and before Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was proven right. So, I expressed my doubts about the Bible to my Sunday-school teacher and I asked, “Why did God let Jesus suffer and be crucified?” His response was “You’ve got to have faith.”

That’s just what I didn’t have.

In college I took courses in physics, chemistry, calculus, biology, biochemistry, and philosophy. This reinforced my nonbelief.

Fortunately, as I got older I realized that I wasn’t alone in my nonbelief. I read books by Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and many others that echoed my sentiments. I read Free Inquiry cover-to-cover and still look forward to getting the magazine.

After five-plus decades of nonbelief, I’m not going to get faith. I’m too skeptical.

I’m a profound atheist.

Bob Boland was born in Des Moine, Iowa, earned his BA in biological sciences from the Universiry of Missouri-Columbia, graduated from the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Dentistry in 1980, and is now retired since 2015, living in San Diego with his wife, Margo.


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