Religion
In reply to the discussion: Question for atheists. [View all]Goblinmonger
(22,340 posts)During my senior year at the seminary, I was accepted to the university where I ended up going and the priest that was my advisor called me in and asked why I wasn't going to minor seminary, and I'd be a good priest, and yadda yadda. We talked about it and he just asked me if I'd read the whole bible. I told him yes. He asked me to read it again and openly think about coming back to the seminary as I did. I agreed to. And I did. And as I read it again, it just started to seem silly to me as reality and only made more sense as the other fiction I had been reading and loving.
Jump to college. My Freshmen year I was at a rummage sale and saw a book called Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell. After being at a Catholic Seminary for 3 years and going to church daily, I had not been to church while at college. I read it and fell in love with Russell. He was making me think and was building on things I had been thinking. That was probably the point when I really should have understood I was an atheist but I buried it because of Catholic guilt and what I knew my mother would say if she knew.
Then graduated, then marriage, then teaching at a Catholic school, then accepted to grad school. Summer before grad school, my wife and I drove to Colorado for a vacation before the gauntlet of grad school and law school. We went white water rafting. And we came around a bend in the river and it was beautiful and awesome and I knew that I was irrelevant and that everything around me had a perfectly sound reason why it came to be and god played no part in that and that was the moment when I finally admitted to myself that I was an atheist.
And, no, I never told my parents. My mom would have died never talking to me, and I couldn't let that happen.