Back in the ‘70’s, I went to a good liberal-arts college in East Tennessee, receiving a good general undergraduate education with a major in Bible with a double minor in history and psychology. My goal was to enter the ministry and eventually to enroll in divinity school.
Faith was a struggle for me back then, and the struggle only became more difficult until I eventually realized I didn’t believe in God at all. This admission was an “agonizing reappraisal” because I’d invested so much in the Christian faith.

Following is the short essay I wrote about that realization, comparing the social plight of atheists to that of gays. It’s getting more problematic to discriminate against gays but apparently atheists are still fair game: President Bush even said atheists could not be patriots and should not be citizens. Pretty scary stuff.

I guess I knew all along, but ten years ago, I admitted it to myself. There's something about me that I have basically hidden from some of my closest friends, some family members, and my co-workers for over a decade. I guess I'm afraid people just wouldn't react to me the same way if they knew. It's sort of a taboo topic, though in recent years, more people are living the lifestyle openly.

Even after I embraced the Christian faith in high school, I knew something was wrong. I studied for the ministry in college, receiving a good liberal arts education with a strong emphasis on Bible and church and world history. It was a tough curriculum that would pass for a regular history major in a secular school. I minored in Psychology and took plenty of science classes and philosophy. After graduating, I got married and "moved to Normal" (Normal, Illinois, that is.)
I struggled inside, trying to fit in. I studied hard, attending church and taking part in committees and worship services. I wrote articles and letters. I felt like it was all on borrowed time. No one knew! Occasionally, my wife would suspect.

Finally I admitted it to myself, and came out to one of my best friends from college. It didn't go well. He was grieved and distressed, and so was I. But there was no turning back. It felt like an amputation, to cut off an assumption about myself that had always been there: I no longer believed in God.

The preceding paragraphs suggested I was gay, but I'm not. Gays and atheists have a lot in common, though - we're often lumped together by conservative elements, blamed for every kind of problem in society, even discriminated against. People in both groups learn not to ask, not to tell. And just like a gay person, I have no choice in the way I am. Belief, or disbelief, is compelled by evidence. An honest person cannot choose what to believe.

Leaving Christianity was excruciating for me because I had invested so much in it – a college major, 20+ years of my life, and my own credibility, which I guard as if it were a magic ring. But now I am an atheist, or more specifically, a humanist who does not believe in God.

One dear woman told me, "You ought to be thinking about where you will spend eternity!" There's material for a long article in that statement alone - about volitional versus nonvolitional belief, about good intentions, etc.

Many atheists are angry - you can find any number of websites hotly denouncing religion. I'm not too fond of the religion scenario myself, because it has held the human race back from solving some of its worst problems. But I don't condemn the believer as a fool.

If it turns out they are right, and there is a God, I hope He is truly merciful, because it would be cruel to condemn someone for failure to believe, when belief is impossible. And if God is cruel, then He isn't the god portrayed in the Bible, at all. Or come to think of it, I guess He is.
Of course, the nice woman didn't stop to think, that as a former minister who became an atheist, I had probably thought about eternity a lot more than she has. I have read the Bible closely, several times in different versions, underlining passages and writing comments in the margins. I have studied commentaries and histories. I have translated parts of the New Testament from the original Greek. (I tutored biblical Greek in college.) So lay off on the Bible quotes, OK?

And oh, yes, I prayed.

I was popular in church. I'm good at public speaking. People found me inspirational. When I realized that I did not believe, I had to stop going to church. I don't want to lie about faith, and I don't want to undermine anyone else's faith, either. Losing faith is hard, it's painful, and I wouldn't wish it on good people. All my friends from church are good people. (Yes, I know some bad people in church, but they're not my friends.)

Don't I have an obligation to try to "convert" my Christian friends if I think they believe something that isn't true? No. Evangelism is a Christian imperative, not an atheist one. One person “congratulated” me for “not leading the little ones astray,” but I have to answer, “Don’t get too comfortable, there.” Religion has been the proximate cause of centuries of bloodshed and the convenient excuse for untold volumes in the story of injustice. Maybe I should be making religion work a little harder for its converts.

Some of my Christian friends from college have not heard from me in many years. I thought, "better they think I'm just a jerk than have to deal with my eternal damnation." But they deserve to know and it was dishonest of me to hide it from them for so long. I owe them an apology.

While struggling to figure out a way to tell them, I wrote a fictional story. My sons were quick to inform me that it is not great literature, but it expresses how I feel.
- George Wiman gawiman@ilstu.edu

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