From Mennonite to Atheist

Gordon Martin

I was born in 1943 to a Mennonite farm family in Waterloo County, Ontario, home to Canada’s biggest concentration of Mennonites, who moved from Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s. I was third in line after a brother who died at five months old. I remember from very early on being told that I was the answer to Mom and Dad’s prayers, as they had prayed for another son. Because of this, I was told that my life was “dedicated to the Lord.” I remember this story was repeated over and over to anyone who would listen, but it left me very confused. To my very young ears, this “dedicated to the Lord” business meant only two options: I had to be a preacher or a missionary; anything else would be a failure. But that was not what I wanted. I wanted to be an inventor like my heroes Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla. My Dad, who had a brilliant mechanical aptitude, recognized my mechanical interests and kept me supplied with Meccano sets, for which I will always be grateful. In my forties, I was able to start a small manufacturing company, which I thoroughly enjoyed for the rest of my working life. 

One of my earliest memories is of going to two different Mennonite churches on alternate Sundays. There was a major split between the “car people” and the “horse-and-buggy people” at that time, so they alternated churches each Sunday to even out the distances the horse-and-buggy people had to travel. The only acceptable cars were all black with not a trace of chrome.

My father was one of the car people, but he was also a bit of a rebel. Just after the war, he bought a pre-war Chrysler and had it repainted an extremely dark green, almost black, to come close to conforming to the Mennonite rules. The green in itself was a major sin, but he had also left all the chrome bright, and it had yellow wire wheels. Off we went to church in the shiny new automobile, and the “doo-doo” hit the fan. Actually there couldn’t have been a fan, because the church wouldn’t have electricity, but in any case my father was visited by the deacons and told to mend his ways. I believe that he had been looking for an excuse to leave the Mennonites, and this was his way to help persuade Mom, who was definitely not a rebel. When I was about five years old, they left the Mennonites but stayed very religious, joining a more modern church. They had essentially the same beliefs, just nicer cars and clothes. I remember my mother was very pushy with the religion, whereas my father just lived his and trusted you would learn from his example. We had to read the Bible every day, and I think I have probably read it all the way through four or five times. Sports were not played on a Sunday; in fact, to my mother, it was a sin to laugh too loudly on a Sunday. 

When I was about twelve or thirteen, we left the countryside and moved to a small town. A neighbor boy about my age came and invited me to the movies with his family. I asked my mother if it was okay, and she said no: “Movies are sinful; we don’t go to movies.”

The poor kid stood there dumbfounded and said, “But it’s only Walt Disney cartoons.” The answer was still no. 

At that age, I already knew how movies worked technically, so I couldn’t see how there could be sin in that. There might be sinful content, but to call movies sinful categorically did not make sense to me. 

That incident marked me as weird, so it was a bit hard to make friends in the new town. Because the Bible said something about “If thine enemy smite thee, turn the other cheek,” I took an awful lot of bullying in my early teens, until one day I lost it and beat up someone who had been tormenting me. It took about five guys to hold me until I calmed down. Nobody bugged me after that.

Around that time, puberty hit and wet dreams began; then I discovered you could make your own wet dreams. It felt good, so of course it had to be a sin. The Bible said it was a sin to cast your seed upon the earth, and it also said, “If thy member offend thee, cut it off.” For a while I was absolutely convinced that I could not get into heaven unless I cut off my penis. I prayed and prayed to have this horrible temptation taken away, but it never was. I sort of decided to enjoy the sin, suffer the guilt, and hope I would have time to confess and ask forgiveness just before I died.

From about thirteen to fifteen years of age, my social life seemed to center on the organization Youth for Christ. There I faced strong peer pressure to carry a Bible prominently on top of my school books all through high school. You can imagine what that did for one’s popularity in school. My older sister was forbidden to take gym classes because of the short gym uniform required. At around fourteen or fifteen years old, I was sent to a doctor for sinus trouble; in hindsight, I think he was also treating me for depression. He asked me about my home life, knowing the religious pressures I was under. He looked at me intently and said that I was reaching an age where I should learn to trust my own brain and decide for myself what I want to believe. I owe that doctor a lot for waking me up to start to think for myself. I remember questioning the idea that, according to the Bible, you could be a horrible person all your life, but if you got “saved” just before you died you got into heaven, while a good person would go into hellfire for all of eternity if he didn’t get saved. It just didn’t make sense to me. I remember asking my dad why the U.S. evangelists from the southern states, who visited the church once or twice a year, all seemed to drive gold Cadillacs. Dad, who struggled with several jobs to feed his growing family, didn’t have a very good answer to that question. Those who were supporting the evangelists certainly were not driving gold Cadillacs.

At sixteen, I had a summer job with a barn-building contractor who was also a member of the church. He and his wife were the perfect Christian couple: successful, attractive, and teachers of Sunday school classes. One day I was part of a crew assigned to pour a concrete driveway at the owner’s home. We mixed our own concrete in a fairly large mixer on site. We were nearly finished with the job when someone, probably me, forgot to put the cement into the mixer, and we poured out about a cubic yard of wet brown sand and gravel. The owner started into a cussing streak, the likes of which I have never heard before or since. I don’t think he took a breath for about five minutes; his poor wife stood outside the house absolutely stunned. Every third phrase was “You stupid f—-ing c— —–ers” (fellatio practitioners). This is the perfect Christian Sunday school teacher, remember. My memories of the rest of that day are pretty vague, but it certainly registered that these perfect Christians were human after all. 

By this time I was a full-time rebel, complete with a motorcycle, and by seventeen I had left home and joyfully sought out every sin I could find. The next decade was taken up with a much-too-young marriage, two wonderful daughters, and then a divorce. I really regret not being a better father, but they tell me I have made up for it by becoming a good grandfather. Through my thirties and forties my beliefs were a bit vague. Although I thought there might be a “big guy” up there, I assumed he couldn’t be so mean as to put decent people into hellfire for eternity. That just wasn’t logical. At some point, a friend gave me a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, followed by someone else suggesting I read Richard Dawkins. My brain just exploded; I read everything I could find by Dawkins, then Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond, etc. 

Finally it hit me. If you look at this world as the product of a benevolent dictator, it is an “almighty” screw-up by a sadistic, murderous, misogynistic bastard. If you look at this world as a product of evolution, it is awesome beyond belief! It took me some time to abandon the idea that there still had to be a purpose to our existence, but now I am focused on family, friends, and enjoying my little time on earth to the fullest. I’m seventy-seven years old now, and I’m still excited by life. Every minute is precious; I work hard in my hobby machine shop and read voraciously on a wide range of topics, including brain science, evolution, engineering history, economics, and historical fiction. Life is good.

Thank You, John Paul Jones

Paul Keller

My parents raised me to be Roman Catholic. There was very little exposure to other religions. Then some things happened that made me think. In high school, I had a friend who was Lutheran. I went to a Lutheran Mass and noticed some differences from Catholic Mass. That was at about the time the Catholic Mass was changed to English from Latin.

Another experience at about that time was that I read a book about John Paul Jones. He was a captain in the American Navy during the Revolutionary War. One night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and thought I saw him standing at the foot of my bed in his uniform, tricorn hat and all. I got up, put my arm into him, and saw light coming through the window from a streetlight and hitting my arm. I went back to the head of the bed and found I could make him appear when I unfocused my eyes and disappear when I focused my eyes. I decided he was a hallucination. Years later, after I stopped believing, I thought that if it had been a hallucination of God/a god, a believer would have claimed that God/a god appeared to them. The pivot point came when I studied other cultures. The word shaman puzzled me. As I read, I searched for what it meant. Then, there it was, a shaman is a priest. I thought of the garments that priests wear and how they are like the garments shamans wear. Clergy evolved from shamans. The next hour was filled with intense thought. All supernaturalistic religions are structures based on fictional characters and fictional stories. Any story with the supernatural in it never happened. I became a nonbeliever in the space of an hour. That did not mean I claimed the label atheist for nonbelief or understood what nonbelief meant in society. This happened in June 1971 after one year of college. That fall, when I went away to college, I had the label and had begun to figure out what it meant in society.

Now I maintain the position of gnostic (knowledge) atheism. Not knowing that God/gods or any other supernatural being is a fictional character is like not knowing that Spider-Man is a fictional character. It is that obvious. I know by unassailable facts and reason that God/gods and any other supernatural being is a fictional character. Supernatural being is a contradiction in terms, like a three-angled square in Euclidean geometry. The physical equals the real. Nature equals reality.

Paul Keller has a BA with majors in social science, psychology, and philosophy; an AS in electronics engineering technology; and a BS with majors in mathematics and management and minors in philosophy and physics. He is retired from working in management.