I Put My Life on the Line

Margaret Neate

In the 1930s in my country town in Australia, most families professed allegiance to one of the several Protestant churches or the Catholic one. I attended the state primary school, where each class heard Bible stories once a week. We were not taught about non-Christian religions or that it is possible to hold no religious belief at all. I was confirmed into the Anglican church at the usual age of twelve. It did not occur to me to question what I had been taught; religious belief was simply part of life, all around us, like the air we breathed.

When I was about fifteen years old, our town was visited for one week by students from Melbourne who were members of an Evangelical Union who perceived it as their duty to “save” as many of the town’s teenagers as possible. They organized meetings that took advantage of the normal emotional lability of adolescents, who were easily aroused by stirring speeches and stirring music. At the end of the week, the leaders appealed to the audience to stand up if they accepted Christ as their Savior. I am ashamed to admit that I stood: not because I felt any particular commitment but purely under the influence of crowd psychology. Deep down I was starting to feel some embarrassment at all this public huffing and puffing about Jesus, being saved, God, and all that.

Being an idealistic young person, I continued to associate with my fellow victims, attending their prayer meetings and Bible readings until I left school and went away to university. There, free from the  social restrictions of a small town, I could allow my mind to develop in its own way. I concentrated on my studies, and though I had not yet rejected the religious indoctrination of my youth, its tenets no longer influenced my daily life—except that I felt it my duty to pray for any person or cause needing divine help. The prayer list extended gradually, along with perceived personal guilt. Assuming that God knew my every thought, I spent every spare minute silently trying to get other people’s problems sorted out by prayer. In my late twenties, I started to find this constant mental effort exhausting.

Eventually, the pivotal moment arrived. I decided that there was no evidence for my belief in invisible entities. There was an equal lack of evidence that my strenuous intercessions were working. I questioned why the fate of others should depend on me. I decided to risk all, scrapping my entire twenty-nine years of religious acceptance one evening at bedtime, telling myself that if I were wrong, divine wrath would ensure I would not survive the night. 

Waking in good form the next morning, I was relieved to be not only still alive but much more alive, in fact! When freed from the heavy shackles of religious belief fifty-eight years ago, I felt as I imagine a wild animal or bird would feel when released from lifelong imprisonment. It was the beginning of real life.

Having long since passed her use-by date, Margaret Neate lives superfluously in South Australia with two dogs, a harp, a piano, and many useless goods collected over a long life spent trying but failing to improve at art, music, memory retention, kindness, tolerance, cooking, and other matters. She offers free advice on any subject and is available to lead protests against all government decisions.

No One on the Other End

Paul K.

My pivot point occurred when I was sixteen. I was feeling fairly typical teenage angst. I found myself in a Catholic church on an early Saturday afternoon. It was empty. Back then (the 1960s and 1970s), you could walk into many churches at any time.

I knelt down in a pew and started to pray. I had done so many times before. This time, after a few minutes I had the realization that what I called “praying” was actually “just talking to myself.”

This realization did not come without pain. I came from a religious Catholic family. I was an altar boy. I was named after a priest. That priest would later become an archbishop. I thought I would become a priest myself, until just about a year before my pivot point. My father was a biology professor at a Catholic college, and most of his friends were priests.

My mother was a believer as well, but I think she had some doubts. Maybe those doubts transmitted to me. Also, my father was a scientist, so I inherited some skepticism. He often taught about evolution, seeing no conflict between that and religion. However, I think I figured out that God does not exist based on my own research. Just a few years earlier, I had determined there was no Santa Claus. How did he get inside our house, which had no fireplace? Why did Christmas presents have price stickers on them? Why is Christmas so close to the winter solstice? God was similar to Santa Claus. Why is there no evidence of God? Why does religion care so much about sex? Why do bad things happen?

It would take three years (by then, I was a sophomore in college at a Catholic university) before I would admit to myself that I was now an atheist. It would take another ten years before I would declare my atheism to my parents. That event had to do with the birth of my son. My hypocrisy was just hurting me too much, and my parents wanted a christening.

Wisdom of the Commode

Thomas Puszykowski 

I was raised Christian. My dad, in particular, behaved as a Christian: he was devout, humble, and kind to everyone. In high school when I read about an atheist claiming love for his wife, I questioned how he could love anybody without a belief in God.

In college (1968–1973) I majored in science, suitably tutored in reason and scientific methodology. My faith sailed on unchallenged.

But they were heady times, man. I wanted an expanded mind, too. Leary of drugs (so to speak), I sought a literary path. Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, and Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape bonded me to the counterculture. 

More importantly, I dove into romantic poetry and mythology. Myths morphed from silly stories into manifestations of culture and the collective unconscious: ancient, abstract truths, expressive and universal. It blew my mind but not my faith. (Still, I noticed I’d begun to follow my evening Lord’s Prayer with a plea to increase my faith.)

Like bacteria tucked away in isolated pockets of the body, surviving an immune system seeking to expose and destroy them, religious beliefs find pockets of the mind and successfully evade our rational thoughts and innate tendency to value truth, beauty, and goodness, and they manage to avoid exposure and destruction. 

At age twenty-three, I confess, nighttime prayers were an obligation and a task. One night I hit upon an idea: pray while pooping and get it over that way. C’mon, certainly that is sacrilegious. But God sees everything; it couldn’t possibly offend him. During this theological conflagration, I realized I simply did not want to pray, and, moreover, prayer was useless. I’d sat down a Christian; I arose an atheist.

The best part is I felt no regret, no remorse, no anxiety. I felt relief. The desire, the creativity, the tolerance, and the strength and goodness I witnessed in the people of the world had never really jelled with the repression, dependency, dogma, and basic injustice inherent in Christianity. I was free to try through my own efforts to become the better person my philosophy assured me we all can be.

And that’s the thing. Dropping religion requires effort to replace it with something better. I realized I had already developed a philosophy and system of ethics from the best evidence before me. I was now free to live it with an increased sense of strength, anticipation, commitment, and hope: my own wonderful little Sartrean anguish.

A One-Way Conversation

Steve Zilliox

I was born in 1952 into a very religious Roman Catholic family. I was the oldest of six children, with the last born in 1958. My parents were good people, and I received a loving upbringing. The only reality I knew was based on their religion. How could it have been otherwise? As a child, I was immersed in Catholic theology, went to Catholic school, and was an altar boy. My pivot point is obvious when I think back, because before that moment in time I had no questions concerning the nature of the universe we lived in; after, well, questions and doubts rushed into my mind and eventually brought me to where I am today.

I was about eleven years old and had just gone to confession, where I had to make up a list of sins to confess as usual. I was a good kid and seldom did much wrong. The priest gave me a list of “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys” to say for my penance. I was kneeling up in front of the church saying those prayers when it struck me.

This seemed like a one-way conversation.

I was reciting a repetitive litany of prayers, and as usual nary an answer was forthcoming. I got tears in my eyes, looked up at the gilded altar, and pleaded to God to show himself: to show his reality, to answer me in some way. Nothing. Nothing.

I remember being devastated, but the seed of doubt was planted. I was determined to investigate. I was a voracious reader, and books helped me develop a more balanced worldview. I’m particularly indebted to my favorite author, Isaac Asimov.

I kept this all to myself for years, because I was afraid to talk to the adults I knew; I understood what their answers would be. There is no doubt that this experience started me down the long road of throwing off the shackles of religious belief.

To this day, I do not completely understand why I alone among my siblings had this experience that led to my current atheism. I will say that the journey was not easy and was accompanied during my teen years with much guilt, but I am very happy with where I am now: able to view our universe with eyes and intellect wide-open, unaccompanied by gods or demons, which is wonderful and freeing.

Nothing Fails Like Prayer

Jon Guy

Regrettably, I was a sixteen-year-old juvenile delinquent who had just “escaped” from a group home in Visalia, California. It was the day before Mother’s Day. The day before that, I’d had a conversation with my mother about the problems I was having with the home’s administrators. She said she’d speak with them on Monday, but “Don’t let me get a call on Mother’s Day telling me that you’re back in juvenile hall.”

On Saturday, I got into an “altercation” with one of the staff members. Afterward, he picked up the phone, so I ran to my room, grabbed my stash of cash, and ran like hell. I must have spent six hours running through orange fields before ending up in Podunk Ivanhoe. I hitched a ride back to Visalia, where I accidentally stole an SUV (seriously, it was an accident, but I can’t explain that in 500 words!), making it to either Exeter or Porterville before it ran out of gas. I filled the tank, but the vehicle must’ve had OnStar, because the engine refused to turn over. The attendant was giving me suspicious looks, so I abandoned the vehicle and took off running, only narrowly avoiding a small procession of patrol cars.

I took off into another dense field of agricultural delights, not knowing where I was or where I was headed. I saw city lights in the distance and headed in that direction, walking for hours upon hours, stressed to the core. Running away from the group home meant the judge was going to impose the six-year prison sentence she’d promised to give me if I messed up again. I was nervous, anxious, unnerved, and scared. I knew my mom was going to get that call … on Mother’s Day. I didn’t want to face my future, and I didn’t want to live in a world where my mom got that call. So in that field, under the stars, I fell to my knees and prayed in pious genuflection. Through tears of desperation, I looked at the sky and asked God to take my life, to kill me so I didn’t have to continue in this seemingly endless cycle through a justice system where children are things and mothers’ hearts are forever broken.

I prayed and I waited … and waited. Nothing happened. I didn’t die. I didn’t even get a stomach cramp. After resting on my knees for several minutes, I finally stood up, and it struck me that God doesn’t even exist. 

And with that realization came the concomitant realization that I was kneeling in a field in the middle of who-knows-where talking to myself like an idiot. Even with no one around, I felt so stupid.

So I headed for the lights and an unknown future. I decided to take responsibility for my own life. From that point on I would face reality, a reality that wasn’t God’s but my own. Even if that meant calling my mother and breaking her heart—yet again.

Jon Guy is a prisoner-turned-skeptic who spent sixteen years in the Wyoming Department of Corrections. He recently completed his first book (currently seeking publication) Think Straight: Critical Thinking for the Future and Beyond, which aims to teach critical thinking to prisoners and lay audiences.