07.31.07
Taken from the “Positive Atheism” site
By Algis Kuliukas
My deconversion story might be of some interest to someone.It happened one Sunday when I was eight years old. As usual my Dad (Lithuanian Roman Catholic) sent me to church (although he rarely went himself), to go to Sunday school. At the time I was heavily into the Apollo space program and was fascinated with all aspects of astronomy. James Burke and Partick Moore were my heroes and I was desperate for any more information on the universe and all that black stuff out there.
This particular Sunday we were talking, coincidentally (or probably not – it was probably deemed to be a topical subject as the Apollo missions were big news) about how God in fact had created the universe. The young teacher – she must have been all of 14 – was teaching us from Genesis. I listened really closely, thinking that I might finally find out how the universe had been made. Suddenly there it was. She’d said it and and then it was gone. She’d moved onto the next thing. I’d been waiting all week for this and it was all over already. Now she was talking about creating humans or something. “What did she say? ‘God created the universe’ – was that it?”
Confused, I put my hand up and, pleased to have a question, she let me speak. I nervously asked her “If God created the universe, who created God?”
It wasn’t a smart-aleck question. I was genuinely interested and really thought that I would now find out the detail I’d been hoping for. I really thought she would know. Then she answered “God has always been there.”
You know that let-down feeling you get when you know you’ve been a naïve fool to trust in someone else’s sham authority? Well that was me. It was the first time I can remember feeling cynical and thinking “what a con!”
I went home afterwards and told my dad I never wanted to go to Sunday school again because I don’t believe in God any more.
A few weeks later the priest came round to see me at home. Mum or Dad had obviously decided to ask him round to put me straight. The scary thing is I have absolutely no memory of this at all. My sister told me all about it a couple of months ago. She said that the priest took me into my bedroom and I was in there alone with him for half an hour or more. Eventually, he came out shaking his head saying things like “he thinks we come from monkeys!” My sister told me I came out a few moments later crying my eyes out.
I never did go to Sunday school or church for worship ever again and, to my father’s credit, he never tried to make me, although I have to admit that – to try to impress him – I stupidly went through the farcical debacle of getting myself confirmed as a Catholic at the age of 28 so that I could marry my wife in church. I even had my first two children Christened – such is the power of Catholic guilt!
The strange thing is the impression I had at the time of that Sunday school class was that everyone who was watching the space programmes like me must have also stopped believing in God. I thought that it was only a matter of time before everyone in the world would be like me. I waited and waited but every year in school the assemblies still sent out the same message. Nothing seemed to change. As an adult I couldn’t believe it when I heard about born again Christians. “Eh? people actually starting to believe in God? Are they stupid?” On BBC Radio 4 every day we get “Thought for the Day” – religious propaganda. There seems to be more god-squads around today than I ever remember before.
And now this:A belief in God so strong that it drives men to commit acts like the ones that are now fixed in all of our nightmares. Before 11th September nobody had witnessed such a mass murder, now everybody has. Our naïveté has been raped. How can anybody believe in God now? But they will. One set of people jump for joy, thinking that they have struck a blow at The Great Satan and that their heroes are in heaven, meanwhile thousands of friends and relatives of victims are praying to the same God asking him for guidance. What kind of foolishness is this? Can’t they see that it was religion that was to blame? that it was the logical consequence of a true confidence that there is a heaven? What could devalue real life more than a passionate belief that this sinful life is only a testing ground for the eternal wonderful life to come?
As I got older I successively grew out of fairy stories, God, Father Christmas and belief in ghosts – in that order. I had always assumed that people would be clever enough to work out for themselves that the whole religion thing was pure, man-made lunacy – but now I have to finally accept that that is also a fantasy I must grow out of.
I now think that it is up to atheists, the minority of level-headed, sensible people in the world, to stop turning the other cheek, thinking “well if they want to believe all that stuff, that’s up to them” and start showing a bit of courage. It’s up to us to try to encourage them to think about what they’re saying and what it means. To analyse it. To question it. To doubt it. We have to encourage people to read the brilliant books of Dawkins and others, to teach them the concepts of natural selection, evolution, and memes. Religion, after all, is nothing but a complex meme. A self-replicating idea that, like DNA is neither good nor evil, it just is. We have to become the agents of a better, stronger more virulent meme – the scientific truth.
Of course we might not be able to persuade the most fundamentalist believers but we can start with our local friends and relatives – the ones who are wavering that way a little. “Positive Atheism” is a good name. I think we really have to start getting “active.” Passive atheism will not stop the growth of religious lunacy in the world. We have to try to shake people out of this mass delusion, encourage them to grow up, teach them that the same science they accept and use every day has also unequivocally shown their origin myths to be flawed. We have to do this otherwise I really fear for what kind of a world future generations will have to suffer.
MPJ said,
July 31, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Honestly - I am NOT trying to present only atheists here - just that so far, they have been most generous with their stories! How about some religious people send me a story to put in here!!
Anyway though, Algis here seems to have stumbled onto Stage 3 ideology at eight years old and it seems to have stood him in good stead through whatever age he is now. You can see he is firmly certain of the truth of his convictions. seems to have no need of the type of religion that would serve as a crutch in case of adversity in his life. He sees his stance as having more justice in it than some traditional religions.