Ron Schoenberg
I grew up in a Catholic family. I had a Jesuit uncle and cousin, and some nuns somewhere. I attended a parochial school and Jesuit high school. The Jesuit high school was a great experience, four years of Latin, two years of Greek, and courses in theology and philosophy. One of my Jesuit teachers introduced me to Camus and Sartre — in the late 50’s when the Vatican banned them. But that’s not why I’m an atheist. It came a few years later, around 1965, when I read Elaine Pagel’s Dead Sea Scrolls. I realized then how badly the Catholic Church treated women. To me this nullified any claims they had to universality. The Catholic Church had a lot of rules and moral prescriptions, but none about slavery or the oppression of women. It was clearly a child of those ancient times it came from and had no validity in a later time when we understood things better.
I had come to understand a morality based on all people being created equal, and the Church, all religions really, were not part of the development of that moral vision. Just as they were obstacles to a scientific understanding of our world around us, they are just as seriously an obstacle to the kind of moral vision that was important to me, one that didn’t oppress women and minorities. So I came to realize that all religions were fatally flawed, and there was no more reason to believe in a god.
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