Pivot Point – One Book Did It

Simon Blackburn, Think

Scott Cullen-Benson

Before I can write about my pivot point, I must say a little about what came before. I was raised a Lutheran (in one of the more liberal synods) in a very small Midwestern town. My experiences were for the most part positive, because my mother emphasized the humanistic aspects of Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Golden Rule, and turning the other cheek were the core values I grew up with. They are what still resonate with me about all that indoctrination. No hellfire or brimstone, no threats, no awful remembrances came my way, and I think it’s important to make that clear. The values given to me in my earlier years have stayed with me, but the attachment to the belief in some mystical force or god has not.

I stopped attending church services as soon as I left for university and have not felt the need to be in a church ever again. The values I acquired have stayed a part of me, but the singing, the mumbo-jumbo rituals, and the camaraderie of a congregation came to seem disconnected from who I am as a person internally. For most of the rest of my life, the need to believe in a god or some mystical force of nature became something I just never really thought much about.

But what took place as I began to increase my knowledge of the world and I got my master’s degree was a greater appreciation for the universal “rules” that seeing the world in an empirical fashion brings to our understanding of it.

I began to see that evidence made for a much more realistic way of encountering the universe. The scientific method seemed to me the best way of reaching for “The Truth,” because it involved accumulating evidence in order gradually to put together a process that allows the possibility of change in the future if differing evidence is gathered.

This always struck me as a more realistic way of looking at evidence, rather than accepting an idea of “The Truth” that came from a book written by humans millennia ago.

About twenty years ago, I decided that I needed to spend some time and read as many viewpoints as I could about this concept of God. One book in particular became my tipping point. Simon Blackburn’s Think had a chapter titled “God” that seemed to speak to me in a way that no other material up until then had. From the time I finished that book until now, I have considered myself an agnostic. If I accept that evidence-based empiricism is the best way of viewing the world around me, then I must be open to the possibility of the evidence of a god. Alas, I have not seen it. So, I consider myself an agnostic who will lean toward atheism until shown evidence otherwise, to which I will always remain open.

Scott Cullen-Benson is a sixty-eight-year-old male, married for forty-two years with three adult sons, two grandsons, and another on the way. He has worked in the behavioral health field all his working career and retired three years ago.


Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

John Forester 

What “did it” for me? Reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (that first edition is still on my bookshelf). Russell’s demonstration that all attempts to prove the existence of God have failed shook me from a school-inspired non-fervent Church of England belief. But for social reasons, I had to continue for years to play the intellectual game of religion. What shook me out of playing that game was the demonstration of how harmful faith could be to those who believed. Specifically, my wife’s belief that God had inflicted our daughter’s fatal illness to punish my wife.


Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

Roy Wampler

I was born in 1927 into a Lutheran family. For my mother, religion was almost the family business; she had several uncles, cousins, and a brother who were clergymen.

I was sent to Sunday school, became a church member through confirmation, and was soon a regular churchgoer.

In 1935, Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess was produced. One of its songs, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” became popular in the following decades, and I observed that the lyrics cast doubt on certain Bible stories, regarding Jonah, David and Goliath, Moses, and Methuselah. “The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible / It ain’t necessarily so.”

As a student at Yale University School of Music in 1949, I often walked past Grove Street Cemetery to go from my residence to the area where classes were held. A massive stone at the entrance of the cemetery bore the inscription: “The Dead Shall Rise Again.” Sometimes I pondered the significance of this declaration. Christians believed such things; citizens of New Haven could believe such things if they wished, but I had my doubts.

In 1954, I left my home in Westminster, Maryland, and moved to Baltimore where I embarked on an accounting job. For several years, I lived in the heart of the city, just a few blocks from the central Pratt Library. In March 1958, I borrowed a book (published in 1957), Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), English mathematician and philosopher.

Reading this book was my pivot-point moment. It changed my life. Russell’s statement “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive” (from the essay “What I Believe”) left a lasting impression on me.

Henceforth I would regard myself as a religious dissenter or as a freethinker. I was no longer a member of the community of faith.

However, I was not inclined to shout my new perceptions from the rooftops. At my own pace I would adjust my behavior in accordance with my revised philosophy of life. The hometown church continued to seek my services as substitute organist, and I continued to enjoy providing the classical music of Bach, Buxtehude, and their ilk.

Not until 1989 did I learn about the newly formed local organization, Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH), which was affiliated with the Council for Secular Humanism. Living nearby at the time, I promptly became a member of this group.

In the interim (that is, since 1958), I had found literature published by Madalyn Murray O’Hair and others (I even attended one of her national conventions), but I had not found a secular group that I wanted to join. That changed when WASH emerged as an oasis in the desert.

It was now time to send my letter of resignation to the church where I was still a nominal member. I had long since tired of reciting a creed that consisted of propositions I no longer believed.


George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case against God

Randy Hilfman

Born in 1950, I grew up in a nominally Jewish household in Washington, Iowa, a town of around 6,000 people in the southeastern part of the state. I think our family and my mother’s parents were the only Jews in town. We had a Christmas tree in our house every year—though with no religious significance attached to it—but we also lit a menorah and celebrated Hanukkah each year as well.

Belief in God and what it meant to be Jewish was never really discussed in our family, so I can’t say categorically that I ever truly believed in God. I’m not sure how long I did this, but I do recall at a pretty young age reciting the “Now I lay me down to sleep …” prayer at bedtime, but I doubt I actually thought much about what those words meant.

We did sometimes go to Iowa City for Passover seders presided over by an aunt and uncle, or to Davenport, where my father was born and his parents lived, for seders presided over by another aunt and uncle. Other times, we would travel to Davenport for Rosh Hashanah and/or Yom Kippur services at Temple Emanuel. My mother thought that if anyone in our family might someday become a rabbi, it would be me. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

I was the only child among my three siblings who even started preparing for a possible bar or bat mitzvah. That process abruptly ended for me when—as the story goes—the rabbi at the Iowa City synagogue we sometimes attended embezzled some money from the congregation and fled to Texas.

I took a comparative religion class at the University of Iowa around 1970 in which we read part of the Bible, which really didn’t speak to me. I think I started to realize I was an atheist when I read George H. Smith’s compelling Atheism: The Case against God, published in 1974 [by Nash Publishing of Los Angeles —eds.]. I thought it was a brilliant book; his arguments were absolutely convincing to me. So that, in retrospect, was my pivot point.

Randy Hilfman, who lives in the Seattle area, is a writer, editor, table tennis enthusiast, and former competitive speller. A lifelong activist, in recent years he has become involved with the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s long-standing efforts to keep religion out of government.


Holmes Hartshorne, The Faith to Doubt

Gary Shugar

In the fall of 1966, I attended a college chosen because it had an excellent premedical program. The college was affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and three courses in religion were required for graduation. All students were required to take Introduction to Religion. This course covered many aspects of religion, including the nature of God and even the existence of God. This was really the first time I had ever heard someone question the existence of God. The required reading on the existence of God included writings by believers and nonbelievers. For the first time in my life, I started to really think about the nature and existence of God in a logical manner.

The turning point was a book that was required reading, The Faith to Doubt written by M. Holmes Hartshorne (a believer). In this book, the author examined the many arguments concerning the existence of God. His final conclusion was there was no way that God’s existence could be proven; it had to be accepted on faith. To my mind, if there was no proof that something exists, despite attempts to prove it for thousands of years, then it probably does not exist.

This was how a required religion course at a Christian-sponsored college put me on the road to becoming an atheist.


Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Randy Hilscher

I am now seventy-five, and for most of my adult life I was a Presbyterian pastor. I left the ministry in 1999. For the past decade, I have been a member of the Clergy Project, a nonprofit that offers peer support to clergypersons who have lost their faith. In about 2004, I picked up Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything, a popular book about science. I am one of those people who reads footnotes in books or articles, and I soon noticed that except for classic works by luminaries such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, all the references were dated after my graduation from college in 1967.

I said to myself, “Randy, you don’t know shit!” And that sent me on a wonderful reading adventure in the fascinating world of science.

The more I read, the more convinced I became that truth lay in science and reason, not in the narrow world of religious thought and belief in which I had been raised. That, I came to believe, is largely superstition grounded in mortal dread, and in that I no longer found any comfort. Once I was able to visualize our little human history in the grand timescale of earth’s history – and the even grander stretch of more than 15 billion years of our universe’s history – it was no longer credible to me that it was all about us humans and a creator god who needs our worship and praise.

It suddenly became much more credible to me that truth lies in science and reason. It lies in the wonder that in the vastness of time here on earth, all life slowly evolved and changed, which surprisingly and purposelessly resulted in us humans with consciousness and meaningful speech. For a little time while the sun warms our earth just within those narrow necessary parameters that sustain life (but not forever!), we can continue to enjoy the wonders of earth, life, relationships, and community as long as we can avoid destroying each other or our fortuitous planet and its fragile ecosystems.

In the years since reading Bryson, I have done a lot of reading about things scientific, and I remain voraciously curious. I have engaged with other secular humanists and enjoy meeting and talking with them. I have read four of Darwin’s works and consider The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species two of the most important and compelling books I have ever read. Most of the world has heard only soundbites about evolution. Reading the original is a mind-blowing experience. Darwin’s may be the most intelligent mind ever evolved! I have also read general books on science, physics, and biology; about quantum mechanics; on the unraveling of the structure of DNA; and by Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, Dawkins, and the late, great, and provocative Christopher Hitchens. I want to read more of Bertrand Russell, Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other freethinkers, secular humanists, agnostics, and atheists. Curious has long been my favorite word.

Born in Texas and raised in Ohio, Randy Hilscher has degrees from Grove City College, two seminaries, and Akron University. A former pastor and later counselor, he and his wife have six children and fifteen grandchildren. A secular humanist, he loves family, friends, cooking, reading, writing, traveling, and facilitating SMART Recovery.


This article is available to subscribers only.
Subscribe now or log in to read this article.