Part I:
BUGS IN THE DIRT

I distinctly remember when I realized that I was an atheist. I was a month or two from age six, and while I had no concept of what “atheist” meant, in retrospect I certainly was one.

I used to play in an empty lot next to the apartment building where we lived. One day in the summer of 1974, while driving toy trucks in that dirt, I happened upon a pill bug, a type of woodlouse—a tiny land crustacean with a bunch of legs and body segments. It looks like a miniature armadillo and even rolls up like one when it’s defensive. This one, though, was dead—unrolled on its back, with its many legs unmoving.

For whatever reason, I decided that this bug deserved a proper burial like I’d learned was done when someone died. I dug a little inch-deep hole in the dirt, right next to a tuft of grass, and laid the bug to rest.

The next day, playing again in the same spot, I decided to exhume the bug. Much to my shock, it was gone. I dug the hole larger and deeper, but the carcass was nowhere to be found. Amazed, I ran back home to excitedly tell my mother about this inexplicable event. I really wanted to understand how this had happened, and I asked here where the bug had gone.

“God took him to Heaven,” she explained.

I think that I was just supposed to accept her simple answer, but it troubled me. I returned to the gravesite and dug further around the tuft of grass, still to no avail. I sat there in the dirt pondering this event, and trying to think through what my mother had said.

I understood God and Heaven, as much as a five-year-old could. God was some invisible man who lived in Heaven, which apparently was up in the sky. He had magical powers, and he was in charge of everyone. People went to church to worship him. But with those things in mind, the questions started going through my head.

Why would God care about a bug? Why would he physically take the bug? Did he take the bodies of people who died?

But then my thoughts took a different tack.

Why had my mother immediately assumed that an invisible God took the bug to an invisible Heaven?

It seemed like an astounding leap from more mundane explanations. Why hadn’t she said, “Maybe you’re digging in the wrong place”? After all, there were lots of grass tufts bordering the dirt. What if I’d just been mistaken about the bug’s location? What I’d been in the right spot but had discarded him with the dug-up dirt and hadn’t noticed? What if another bug had come by and dragged him away for food?

And why would my mother jump straight to something that seemed more like the cartoons that I watched on Saturday morning or the fairy-tale books that I read? I was a reasonably bright kid who knew what fiction was and why it wasn’t real. As much as I loved Superman, I knew that people couldn’t really fly nor have bullets bounce off their chests. As much as I loved Star Trek, I knew that there were no transporters to beam people around or warp speed to send starships across the galaxy.

So why was this God guy invisible? And since no one ever actually saw him, why did they believe in him—and the silly claims about what he could do—at all?

In that moment, the idea of the invisible man in the sky seemed absolutely ludicrous, and the notion of basing one’s life around him seemed even sillier.

Those feelings have never waned.

Part II:
COMING OUT

When I was eight or nine, living with my father and stepmother, my three sisters and I began going to church with the neighbors. I enjoyed it only for the pile of free food following the intensely boring service. But Sunday school was where I began to question the details of Christianity.

In Sunday school, I was in a room full of kids who completely believed in the Bible stories that were clearly fiction. They were like the Greek mythology or Grimm’s fairy tales that I enjoyed—full of magic, just as ridiculous, and sometimes even more ridiculous. But they all believed it, including the grown-up who led the class. Why would anyone accept biblical stories as true?

There was the creation story, an unscientific myth about the Earth’s formation. There were two people and their offspring populating the whole planet, which required lots of incest. There was Moses parting the Red Sea. There was the worldwide flood that most of the historical world never noticed, and the ark that could never have fit all of the world’s animals (if they could have traveled to it from the world over in a week anyway). There were the miracles of Jesus, who walked on water, turned water into wine, and was resurrected after death. Angels with swords. Heaven. Hell. The end of the world.

The kids, the teacher, the minister, and the congregants who filled the pews all accepted these bizarre fictions as the truth. Was I the only one who just couldn’t wrap my brain around this?

In high school, I began attending church with a friend who I spent weekends with, and I hated it. I fought the urge to scream out “You’re all idiots!” but instead I sang the hymns, professed my Christianity, and bowed my head in false prayer—because I was afraid that someone might find out that I didn’t believe.

When my mother died from cancer when I was sixteen, I TRIED to believe in God. But I quickly realized that what was happening was that I WANTED to believe in God. I wanted to believe that there was something after we died—that I might see my mother again. I was unable to fool myself.

I was smarter than most kids my age, but I was just as naïve: I actually believed that I was a one in a million case, that rarest of human who wasn’t blinded by this illogical delusion that mesmerized the masses. This was 1986, before the World Wide Web, when you couldn’t get online at home and see that there were millions just like you.

In 1994, my fear over people knowing of my disbelief finally broke. I worked at a home-supply warehouse and often rode with a Christian truck driver. Mark, a Jew who had converted for his attractive Christian wife, wanted to talk about Jesus constantly, and always assumed that I believed as he did. One day, when I had expressed frustration over being unable to get full-time status and benefits at work, he insisted that we pray together. He raised one hand to call out to God—with his eyes closed, while driving a big Mack truck in traffic!—to ask that I get full-time status. He might have had faith that he wouldn’t run into someone, but I didn’t; while he prayed, I grabbed the wheel and got my hand on the air-brake lever.

That weekend, I researched Maine employment law, and then presented my employer with the statute that indicated that, since I had been scheduled for full-time hours for a certain number of consecutive weeks, they had to offer me full-time benefits. I won, but my employer was not happy about being forced into it. They made their disdain for me very clear, so it was a hollow victory. Would they now find a reason to fire me?

I was already grumpy about this when Mark and I hit the road that day. So when he proclaimed that our prayer had worked and that God was responsible for my full-time status and benefits, I snapped. I had worked hard researching and had risked losing my job, so the idea that he would give the credit to his imaginary deity infuriated me.

I blurted out, “I’m an atheist, Mark!”

He was stunned. “What do you mean?” he cried out.

“I don’t believe in God,” I said.

“But… we PRAYED together!” he exclaimed.

“YOU prayed,” I said. “I was making sure we didn’t drive off the road.”

Part III:
JUST BECAUSE I AM

After years of closeted fear, I felt energized from coming out. Later, another truck driver named Ken discovered my lack of religion and constantly tried to debate me. (He’d been born again after shooting a man while robbing his house. Nothing seems to bring one to Jesus more than being caught and locked up for violent crimes.) I’d never heard his arguments, but later learned that they were typical items from fundamentalist Christianity’s playbook. He focused hard on disproving evolution to prove creationism.

Evolution was absurd, he proclaimed, because a hurricane blowing through a junkyard would have a better chance of randomly assembling a 747 than humans evolving. This was a version of Hoyle’s “junkyard tornado” argument against abiogenesis, which only showed that the astronomer Fred Hoyle didn’t understand evolution at all. And Ken argued that his wristwatch was not nearly as complex as a human being, but since it required intelligent design, so must humans. This was a play on William Paley’s analogy, dealt nicely by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker.

After a lifetime of bafflement over how people could live their lives around such myths, now I was learning that at least some would go to great lengths to ignore science and reason to defend those myths. Soon, being online was a daily thing, and I quickly discovered that there were many people like me. I also learned that many who believed were incredibly offended that I didn’t—and they could be ruthless about imposing their religion on others. I came to realize that people like that ran the country and the world, and ultimately the lives of with different beliefs. While I was free to be an open atheist, our system of law was fragile: A majority of angry believers could amend our Constitution and outlaw anything that they considered blasphemous.

I’m atheist because I just am. I knew from age five. Maybe it was intelligence, or maybe strong critical-thinking skills and the capacity to question things. Of course, there are many people who are very smart and have critical-thinking skills but who were raised in deeply religious families where they never questioned the silliness that they were immersed in. Maybe they fooled themselves into believing. Perhaps it just never occurred to them. Or possibly their brains were wired to believe, regardless of whatever else they were able to reason through.

I don’t want to see anyone’s religion controlling the lives of others. But if people want to believe in God or Allah, Thor or Zeus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn, or anything else, they’re welcome to do so. Many people refuse to turn from something they believe in, no matter what science and facts are laid before them, no matter their capacity for logic and reason. If someone truly wants to believe in something irrational, all the science, facts, logic, and reason in the world won’t make a bit of difference.

But what about those for whom they will make a difference? How many believers are just one rational thought away from realizing the absurdity of it all? Dan Barker is a great example of this. Dan earned a degree in religion, was ordained in 1970, and was an evangelical preacher for years. But he began questioning his faith around age 30; about six years later, in 1984, he came out as an atheist. Today, his is co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

There’s a guy who did a complete one-eighty—all because he began to have doubts and dared to explore them. He let his intelligence and reason take charge.

Part IV:
CIVILIZATION VS. BARBARISM

So maybe the real point here isn’t “Why I’m an atheist”; maybe it’s “Why I’m proudly an atheist.” When a religious person professes his faith, we’re all supposed to accept that without question. But when an atheist professes his atheism, it’s often met with disdain by the religious. They think that we cannot be good without religion. They think that we’re immoral, selfish, or evil. They say that we’re criminals, pedophiles, and even murderers. They call us the devil’s servants, or tell us that we’re going to burn in their mythical Hell.

Those are all accusations I’ve had hurled at me, but statistically atheists seem to be decent people. Consider that a 2016 Gallup poll shows 10% of Americans saying that they don’t believe in God, and a 2015 Pew Research Center poll shows 7.1% specifically identify as “atheist” or “agnostic.” But in 2015 only 0.1% of those in U.S. federal prisons identify as atheists –197 out of 191,322 prisoners. One might conclude that we’re actually more moral and honest than religious people. Or maybe we just don’t get caught as often.

There really is a double standard. I had a friend who was Catholic; knowing that I was an atheist, she nevertheless ended every conversation or text-message exchange with “God bless you.” If you know that your friend is an atheist, saying “God bless you” is really rather rude and disrespectful, even if you believe it’s your duty to spread your religion and save the souls of others. But how would she have felt if I had ended every conversation or text exchange with “There are no gods”? The irreligious are socially expected to kowtow to the religious, while our non-belief is not unacceptable and offensive.

I’m proud of my atheism—proud of my intelligence, my capacity for logic and reason, my rational mind, my strength in critical thinking, and my willingness to stand up for that belief without fear. I’m proud of my atheism because I should be: It’s one more aspect of how the human brain has evolved. Evolution has brought us from one-celled organisms to what we are today, and our brains have enabled us to surpass all other life in tremendous ways. We used tools and created agriculture. We developed civilization and spread out across the world. We have invented things that have taken us to other worlds and connected humans around this world. We have made incredible strides, but we’re not done yet—we’re not truly civilized.

People have believed myriad things that science eventually disproved. We need to keep the process going and stop, as a civilization, believing in mythology. Individuals should choose to believe whatever they want, but as a civilization we must not allow those beliefs to run the planet. In the United States, our utterly broken representative democracy lets primitive beliefs install into office those who use their Christian faith to deny science and logic at the peril of others. They ignore climate change. They fight to control a woman’s body. They work to force prayer in schools and keep their god in our government. They legislate to keep people who aren’t like them out of the country. They work to ensure that this nation is one based on their religion.

That’s not civilization. That’s barbarism.

I’m an atheist because I just am. Born that way, maybe.

If you believe in a religion, you too can champion civilization and oppose barbarism. You do it whenever you don’t force your beliefs down someone else’s throat, whenever you don’t vote for an elected official to legislate your religion’s morality, and whenever you don’t feel revulsion at someone whose beliefs differ from yours.

But critical thinking is within all of us. We all have the capacity to use logic and reason, and to accept the facts even if those facts aren’t what we wanted. After all, even the most devout Christian is an atheist for a thousand gods; he doesn’t believe that Zeus threw thunderbolts from Olympus, or that there is a spaghetti monster that flies. He disbelieves those things because he realizes how ridiculous they are and understands that such fictions should not run the world.

That sort of person is just one epiphany away from disbelieving his religion, too. Perhaps one day he’ll start having doubts the way that Dan Barker did and begin questioning things. Maybe he’s one dead pill bug away from making that final leap from disbelieving other religions to disbelieving in them all.

A long time contributor to The Cud, David M. Fitzpatrick is a writer based in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.