Why are you an atheist?

I grew up in a church. I have spent countless hours at church as a kid and through most of my teenage years. I will never say that people who believe in religion are mentally ill, but the religion I was in fed into mental illnesses that I had as a younger person. Having to constantly relay on a higher being or something else to determine my self worth nearly destroyed me. Spending every Sunday being told who I should be and how I should act drove me to the point of insanity. I learned over time that my beliefs did not line of with logic, but faith and the need to conform. At the end of day, as I read the bible and listened to sermon after sermon, it seemed no one wanted to answer why?

I think too many people use faith to justify the things they believe in. When I think of faith, I think of the song anything goes. And in the real world, that just flat out isn’t the truth. We can’t change the color of the sky, the amount of money we have or create immortally just by saying it’s so. Life just does’t work that way and I’ve learned I’m better off trying to understand hard truths rather then just pretending they don’t exist.

I couldn’t stand the conformity either. I didn’t realize until I left that the entire church was just one enmoruous echo chamber. New ideas were never pitched, it was all the same thing that people have been saying for far to long. No one thought of other possibilities, like past lives, that maybe marriage didn’t really work for everyone, that women deserved respect or that everything we’ve been taught might just be a complete lie. No one wanted to stand against the crowd because doing so would lead to judgement, disrespect, and even in some cases, disownment.

I’ve learned that too many relgions will contradict themselves and I need solid answers. And I don’t like people telling me that their opinion is a fact. The verse, “sex is a gift,” probably doesn’t really seem like it for people who have been sexually assaulted in the past and assuming that everyone enjoys it can be just flat out insulting to those that have experienced that. It’s okay for someone to have a different opinion than me, but don’t force me to share the same one as someone else.

And all of this is on top of the fact that what the bible or anything other religious book says is really just on giant game of telephone through hundreds of years where it was most likely told orally, since during that time period not many people could even read let alone write. Then is was written in several different languages and then rewritten in more modern languages and I’m expected to believe that the english bible is an exact replica of the original. Even people who have english as their first language can’t even understand Shakespeare that well and his work is more recent than pretty much every religious book.

Now, after getting all of that out of the way, a few people might still ask me why I don’t believe in a god. And to that I say there is not enough evidence for me to believe that one exists. And this has probably been said a hundred times before, but I will say it again. I am not making a claim, therefore I do not need a burden of proof. If someone believes in a god they need to have evidence for that. Once again, faith is not even a logical reason.