The Abraham/Isaac story started me on the road to atheism when I was circa 7-8 years old. My father was almost 50 when I was born & he had more time for me than most fathers. Compared to other families, there was a much stronger than usual bond between us.
I was appalled by the request that Abraham kill his son. I was certain that my father would have considered the source of such a request to be demonic. The more my Sunday school teacher tried to justify the request, the more convinced I was that her views were wrong & that religion was suspect.
For years, I called myself an agnostic. When circa 13-14, I read the following probably from the Reader's Digest.From that time on, I called myself an atheist.
While I consider theists deluded, I envy them for being able to sincerely sayIt took me a while to make peace with my mortality. Their erroneous belief in the after life provides an easy coping mechanism if/when they think about their inevitable death.
I was never an evangelistic atheist. If the subject of religious belief was being discussed, I would mention my POV & defend it if challenged. I never started such discussions.
Atheists are a rare breed & I have encountered few of them. I have often wondered about how others came to such a POV.
I'm a third-generation atheist. I never heard of gods and prayers until I was seven. A little boy in my class started telling me about this fellow named "God" who lives in the sky and can see everything we do and punish us if we don't do it properly. I thought it was just one of those wonderful silly stories children made up and I laughed appreciatively... after all, it was a very good story!
But he didn't seem to appreciate my laughter. When I got home that afternoon I told my mother about it.
She told me that a lot of children believe that story. I said, "But you told me the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny a year ago. When are these children going to be told the truth by their parents? It will be really embarrassing when they're in the third or fourth grade and still believe in silly little babies' stories!"
For some reason this made Momma very sad and it took her a while to respond.
Finally she had to tell me the truth: that many grownups believe in these silly little babies's stories. They never tell their children the truth, because they were never taught the truth themselves.
I said, "But I figured out the truth about the Tooth Fairy all by myself. If you hadn't explained Santa Claus, I would have realized that it was a silly story eventually. Don't these people eventually recognize a fairy tale, even if no one explains it?"
She almost started to cry then. She said that people live their whole lives believing in fairy tales.
And that, my friend, is when I became a cynic.
