Daniel Miller
My long trip through deconversion started with one little Jewish boy at Disneyland and ended some 10 or 15 years later, in college, confronting Evangelical Christian proselytizers.
I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school from pre-school to the 9th grade. We were surrounded by Catholics. Everyone I knew was Catholic. All my friends, all our neighbors, everyone in our class. By the time I was eight years old, I was sure that Catholic and Christian meant the same thing, and that the whole of humanity shared the same religion. Finally, one year, when I ws about 9 years old my family went to Disneyworld for Christmas vacation. We went to Disneyland the day after Christmas, and on the trolley going into the park, I struck up a conversation with the young boy sitting in the seat in front of me. “What did you get for Christmas?” I asked. “I don’t celebrate Christmas,” the little boy said, smiling, “I’m a Jewish boy!” I had never met anyone who didn’t celebrate Christmas, and I certainly never met a Jewish boy. I was confused by the whole thing. But he and I just continued to talk, as if it was the most natural thing. It was the first hint that perhaps humanity wasn’t so homogeneous as I thought.
From there, I began to notice religious differences all around me. In my 9th grade religious class, we were taught all the precepts of the major religions. It was fascinating to discover how billions of people around the world, right at that moment, were worshiping in completely “alien” ways, and yet they were absolutely convinced that their religions were the “one true religion.” How could that be? Why didn’t they understand that they were wrong?
The next year, I went to public school for the first time and met Buddhists, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. These groups, labeled “cults” by members of my church, struck me as perfectly normal people. None had any doubt in the truth of their religious belief. None showed signs of being mislead by the devil. They were as sure of the truth of their religion as I was of mine.
After high school I went to college and I became an English tutor to help pay my bills. I came into contact with even more sincere religious people, more Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. I certainly met in the upper hundreds of religious people, all convinced in the rightness of their religion. I also met my first atheists. These people came from China, Hungary, and Vietnam, former Communist countries where atheism was the norm. And they were perfectly, 100% normal and happy and moral. They just did not believe in gods. That was it. They had none of the burden of trying to maintain belief in a religion which seemed to require constant rationalism. The little cracks in belief that required the old “God works in mysterious ways” spackling. They became my closest friends and companions. One would later become my wife.
By then, I had read Mark Twain’s “Letters from the Earth,” Voltaire’s “Candide,” Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World,” Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” and a many other rationalist books. I knew the flaws in my own religion well enough that I would harangue Evangelical proselytizers who came to our college campus to rail against the “liberals, and fornicators, and masturbators.” They tried to rile up the Christian students by selectively quoting passages from the Bible, a book many of them respected as “the word of Gawd,” while Indian Hindu students walked by shaking their heads at how foolish every one of them was to give a rat’s ass what the Bible said.
I was tired of the whole thing. I began to think on Abraham’s Lincoln’s words about the Civil War, “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.” I also thought about Mark Twain’s quote “Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them.” In trying to explain the precepts of Christianity to my atheist companions, they would demolish their illogic with simple questions. “Why would god require the torture and death of his son in order to do away with sin? He’s god, he can do whatever he wants. It makes no sense.” And they were right. Original Sin? Ridiculous. Floods to kill all humanity from an all loving being? Crazy. As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” Being a movie lover, I was familiar with two great concepts: “the plot hole” and ” the suspension of disbelief.” The bible was chock full of the former, and I could no longer achieve the latter. And I knew that all the other religions were as ridiculous to me as mine was to the atheists. There was no need for looking for a replacement. I was also happy. The world actually made sense once god is removed. It is blessedly indifferent. Sure, there is still suffering, none that I had personally experienced, but it is not due to some flaw of humanity. It just is.
In the end, I took my new found lack of faith for one final test spin. I confronted one of Campus Evangelicals after one of their harangues. “I have a friend who is an atheist,” I began, “She was raised in a Communist country, yet she is perfectly moral, is she going to hell?” The Campus Evangelical, looking somewhat sheepish, said, “Yes, she is, because that is what the Bible says.” “Really?” I said, in a tone which I hoped conveyed my complete disdain at the injustice of such a result, and walked away. Months later, I learned from one of the other Evangelicals that this particular Campus Evangelist had quit the work. I’m egotistical enough to think that I had something to do with his decision.
It’s been over a decade, and I’ve never felt the urge to try to “resupend my disbelief.” I’m am happily atheist. So is my wife. So, I hope, will be our child. We live quite ordinary, moral, happy lives. We just do it without a belief in gods.
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