Emilio Lobato
I have been a dedicated atheist since the third grade. My parents are both religious, my mother having been raised Protestant and my father a Catholic, but they never pushed religion onto any of their children growing up. Only when we were old enough to critically think about those topics do I ever recall having a conversation about God with either of my parents, so a great deal of why I am an atheist is thanks to my parents raising me in an environment that fostered active critical analysis of information instead of passive acceptance. This means that prior to the third grade I was still an atheist, but only because I didn’t really know that much about particular views on God or religion or any of those matters.
In third grade, I was like most other boys at that age and had this rivalry with the class girls. They had cooties, so all of the class boys had to be ever vigilant for a chance to show those girls that boys rule. Sometimes this meant getting into an argument and being contrary just for the sake of being contrary. My “birth” as an atheist was a result of one of those moments.
We were allowed some free time during class to kind of goof around. Some of the students played checkers, others drew and others read. As long as we weren’t loud or fighting the teacher was alright with us doing whatever. One day during this free time, I ended up talking to this one girl in class, whose name I think is Lacy (I’ve never been good with names). We were talking about something not really important and we disagreed (naturally), and for some reason another girl interjected that God knew. Well, since a girl said this and obviously boys rule and girls drool, she was wrong and I had to prove it. The boy’s reputation was at stake!
I didn’t think it was a big deal so I just said that, nuh-uh, that wasn’t true because God doesn’t exist. Lacy took it rather personally and shot back quickly that yes-huh God exists. I asked her how does she knew. She said that God exists because if not, where did the universe come from? I replied that if God created the universe, where did God come from? She said that God always existed, and I asked how come God can always have existed but the whole universe couldn’t have always existed. She said that the universe couldn’t have always existed because God created it, so I then asked again who created God. For about 5 or 10 minutes this back and forth between us went on until our free time was over and we had to get back to class work. We never got past the question of what created God because she never gave an answer that made sense.
That was in third grade. I’m 23 now and have heard, read, and been in many conversations and debates about whether or not a deity exists and I have never had a satisfactory answer to the questions I asked in third grade. In fact, every debate and argument over the existence of God sounds to me like two third-graders going back and forth because there aren’t satisfactory answers to those questions that theists can provide. It seems to me that maintaining the belief in the supernatural means that some part, even a really small part, of your mind has to remain stuck at the third-grade level.
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