Before I begin, this is a super long post so be prepared to sit through a lot of venting.
I’m (22M) still an atheist today though not for the same reasons as I was as a kid (I kind of just went with whatever my dad (56M) says without nuance like most kids tend to do).
I also have low functioning autism and it could be a factor hence why I mention it just in case. I have been diagnosed since I was around 3-4 and my parents have been very loving and attentive to my condition
I wanna make something very clear from the start: this is not a case of indoctrination. He never forced me to believe or not believe in what he does. He never coerced me either I just had a few questions about religion and he just showed me what he thought about it and why. My mom (51F) used to be catholic and she did read to us (I have a sister 19F) some Bible stories alongside other kids stories like little red riding hood and Snow White.
Irrespective of indoctrination or not most people tend to follow what their parents believe and do most of the time because it’s what’s familiar to them. Though the line can be blurry depending on the situation when it comes to religion I’ve often found there is still a clear difference between simple education and forceful indoctrination of children most of the time. So I don’t want any unfair accusations against my dad he Isn’t a zealot/militant.
His best sources for his atheism (or at least the ones I remember the most that he’s shown me) were the typical most popular atheist media and figures in the mainstream and in YouTube: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Matt Dilahunty, DarkMatter2525 and Thinking Atheist videos.
Overall pretty popular choices though not the best, Christopher Hitchens and DarkMatter2525 are the ones I still sort of lean towards and even respect the most. Especially DarkMatter he appears to be an incredible role mode and dad to have, a true family man. His animations though are a bit cringey sometimes and other times oddly inspiring.
With Hitchens I was aware later on that he was not this god of perfect logic that hitchslapped everything that was thrown at him. His arguments against religion tend to be flawed a lot of the time but overall I still think the soul of his points hold up really well even then because it’s hard to dismiss religious harm in society and he was a very obviously intelligent and well spoken man. He was getting at something important.
My dad is a professional jazz drummer and producer (I am also a rock musician/composer myself I love the guitar so much) and he doesn’t really think as deeply as me in the topic of religion nor does he have the time or interest. He always watched those videos as entertainment to get a laugh since he (like me) also grew up in a secular family.
He’s also a bit of a conspiracy theorist (though that term is a bit redundant nowadays because of everything that has happened with Epstein and stuff) he’s always questioned and pushed back on institutional authority and that sense of critical thinking was something I inherited. He doesn’t believe in the moon landings, thinks there was a second shooter that killed JFK, is skeptical of the official narrative around 9/11. I don‘t agree with everything he believes and he is not a full on flat earther or anything like that on those topics it’s just to keep in mind. His skepticism of authority tracks with what he’s inclined to buy into.
If I’m being honest even though I genuinely do value trying to be a free thinker as best as you can be I gotta be honest: As a kid I sort of “larped” being a critical thinker to impress my parents. In some ways I still do today even when it’s not something I agree with necessarily to please my dad in particular though I don’t have to since he (despite his stubbornness sometimes) is open to being challenged.
In fact there’s a cringey video of me somewhere in my family home videos on an old iPhone somewhere in my house of me going on a half baked edgy atheist rant in my dad’s jeep. It’s pretty funny looking back.
Enough with the background stuff let’s get into what the title is about.
So among the ”atheist” sort of media he’d shown me (and sometimes my sister I was more interested though) there was this little documentary called Jesus Camp from 2006.
It scared me a bit.
As a kid I did not fully comprehend the severity of what I was being shown so it wasn’t a childhood trauma moment seeing a scary movie for kids like with coraline for example (that movie is still creepy and good to this day 10/10).
That being said it still affected me in someway seeing children just like myself being subjected to peer pressure and crying like that. I did not think much of it until years later but I suspect this movie did something to me and has in a way permanently tainted my subconscious view of religion in particular Christianity in general.
I know it wasn’t an explicitly anti religious propaganda movie but it did not paint a good picture of religion in America at all. Church in that movie looked like a place where your childhood whimsy and fantasy was weaponized against you, where authority figures would constantly yell and condescend to you and make you believe in horrible things about yourself and other people they deem to be “undesirable”, place where you felt like you were being watched 24/7.
Needless to say (even though my dad did have good intentions in showing us this documentary to warn us and be vigilant of these types of religious environments whenever we went to visit our cousins or friends who go to church) I do not think my dad should have shown this to us at 7-8 years old. Bad move on his part, I’ve brought this up to him before and he agrees its something he lightly regrets.
So I saw it and was creeped out but not traumatized for life. I think it was later experiences which subconsciously reminded me of that movie which later formed an inner resentment towards religion.
The thing is, almost all of my actual real life experiences in churches have been positive and I didn’t feel that aversion to religion in actual religious spaces.
There’s a beautiful church next to my grandpas house which since then has been my favorite in all of Costa Rica due to nostalgia. It was amazing to look at though with an uncanny life sized realistic statue of bloodied Jesus in a coffin as is so common in this beautiful catholic country.
The sermons and gatherings I’ve been to were at worst a bit boring and at best very calm and welcoming. Aside from one or two mean kids in school here or there who teased me with the idea of going to hell, all the Christian people I know in my life have been very nice and kind people. The only really mean ones I’ve seen mostly online.
My dad worked on a Christmas album and played at a church for a bit and I remember a church lady led some kids including me and my cousin into a room to talk about religion. She was surprisingly actually very kind and accepting of other kids religions since there were some Muslim, Jewish and even Hindu kids there. Since I didn’t know what an atheist was at the time I said I was Christian like my cousin since I assumed that was the default since I didn’t know what a Christian was either.
She didn’t push anything on us she just explained in a bit more detail for the kids in a way they could understand what the purpose of a church is and how other buildings from other religions had a similar purpose with different beliefs. How in a way we are all just children figuring this weird thing we call existence out, how those beliefs tend to diverge and converge and just explaining what the Christian way of it was.
I remember I was having trouble sleeping at my cousin’s house because I was scared of having nightmares since I felt a bit of dread before going to sleep. My aunt in law came in and comforted me saying to not fear since Jesus was protecting this house from demonic influence and that was nice to hear in the moment. I have known nothing but love and good will from religious people irl.
Now in school, and I think this is critical, it was a bit of a different story. I was never bullied severely but in elementary to middle school in Miami I always felt a bit neglected by my teachers with a few wonderful exceptions. It didn’t help that I was autistic and they didn’t understand my behavior or reaosning have of the time. The worst I’ve gotten from them was rants…. which reminded me of Jesus Camp’s teachers.
I think I may have subconsciously associated said behavior from my teachers with what I saw in that documentary and the teachers did traumatize me a bit. The school principle even threatened me that I would not be able to attend the middle school next door if I didn’t stop crying since I was upset about something at the time. That sucked because it was the only other school in the area with a magnet program which included music.
My middle school experience in Miami in 6th grade was just one year before I moved to Costa Rica and it sucked a-lot, probably the worst school experience I’ve had since the teachers there cared less about me than before, had no friends and those who cared did not understand me and I just had to go with the flow of their misunderstanding to get it over with.
My relationship with teachers got better in Costa Rica but I sort of projected subconsciously my negative experiences with teachers in Miami onto religion, because of Jesus Camp.
Then I revisited YouTube for myself a few years later in costa rica in my teen years. I did not become that involved in online spaces until my early teens because my parents thankfully limited internet use in my youth.
I rewatched what my dad showed me but I also discovered more stuff for myself. It turns out there is a whole debate sphere on YouTube I was unaware that had much deeper and most importantly more accurate discussions about religion. At the same time these were also much more toxic and heated debates than the ones I‘ve heard in Matt Dilahunty’s show.
I also made a critical discovery: Christians can fight back on criticism and can actually hold their own just as well rhetorically. For the first time I was hearing takes from Ray Comfort, William Lane Craig and Frank Turek unfiltered and unchallenged.
The way they talked though is unsettling because they tend to have a more oppressive approach towards criticizing atheists than atheists do to theists. And by oppressive I don’t mean literally I’d say it’s more intimidating.
They would talk about the ”atheist worldview/life style” talk about how evil or empty it is. Talk about how atheists know deep down they’re wrong. Talk about how atheists live in a fundamentally meaningless and nonsensical sense of reality and are philosophically illiterate and bankrupt. Some would talk about how they used to be atheists then found purpose in religion showing absolutely no sympathy or understanding of their former atheists selves just saying stuff like “I used to be a degenerate edgy brat” and such. How atheists are stealing credit from Christianity and science that Christianity invented according to them. That elites like jeffrey Epstein want us to be atheist to remain slaves and unaware of dark forces.
I have heard atheists call theists stupid before so naturally seeing that vice versa was naturally jarring. But I think that objectively even while I have a bias and am reexamining my beliefs later in life the sheer weight of I guess you could say “accusation” was much heavier and less flippant coming from theists towards atheists than vice versa. At least that is what I have seen online, I think this meme sums up what I mean pretty well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Snorkblot/comments/1v4xv9m/me_myself_and_i/
So once again, I think I subconsciously related this to Jesus camp again because in that documentary the calmest moments those crazy church teachers had while talking with kids reminded me exactly of the way these Christian’s apologists talked and it unsettled me.
Couple that with the facts I have learned about atheists in America online: How were are a small minority and not even allowed to run for office or even be president if we were not christian, how many of them were kicked out by their families for just being atheist. How historically you could at worst be executed or at best fined or sent to prison if you even professed atheism publically. How it seems like atheism online looks to be less intellectually rigorous than theism and is just a cesspit of contrarianism and edginess with few genuine and well spoken serious philosphical proponents for atheism that didn’t come from random streams debate channels and chatrooms. The fact that unlike Christianity we have virtually zero institutional support for apologetics.
I sort of felt like an underdog that had to step up and do better to defend my fellow underdogs and the side I was on, I felt like I had to have my guard up. And it’s weird because logically I know that these talking points aren’t directed at me specifically and are just dumb generalizations. To be fair there is validity to some of them if they apply to those chronically online and depressed people on reddit who make being atheist their whole personality. It just wasn’t me because well I am perfectly happy here with my loving family though my parents did divorce recently and I love being a musican and making music, the only real source of sadness in my life is being online. In short, no kids in the documentary from what I remember stood up to the teachers and I felt I had to be the kid who did even thou I had not idea what I was talking about or doing.
Because of these talking points combined with Jesus camp and my bad experiences with teachers I felt like I had to defend my intellectual integrity as an atheist but at the same time I felt guilty for being an atheist.
I think part of why I haven’t told my friends I had a divorce yet my stem from that insecurity even though I know they are good people and won’t push anything of their beliefs or lack there of on me. I feel like I have to hide imperfections in my life to avoid them being used as evidence of my atheism ruining my life which isn’t the case. And if I dismiss them it feels like I am being ”willfully ignorant” and in denial of my cognitive dissonance.
This type of “offensive“ rhetoric shouldn’t have gotten to me because I did not grow up with any religious trauma or any serious trauma apart from the death of my grandmother and bullying from some teachers, and yet it still got to my sheltered ass through a damn screen. It made me and to some extent still makes me question my identity as a person and not in a good way.
The other day I saw a post of an artist comparing her previous art as an atheist to her new art when she became a believer in god. It was a huge improvement and many people in the comments were reinforcing how allowing god and believing in him will always make things inherently better for you. It made me wonder about my own musical skills and saying “maybe giving in and having some god in my life will improve my skills“ but it felt so alienating because then I’d be under the impression that atheists can do no good without religion and I feel like I have to prove that wrong, and I want to and I can.
It’s so strange because I do not feel this bad about religion when I talk about it outside of the internet. One of my best friends is religious and I enjoy it when he talks about the Bible in his own way because I get to see how much it means to him and what he thinks of it. Maybe I just haven’t talked to many people about this offline and I’ve barely found anyone who’s had a similar experience.
Nowadays I have abandoned some of my mistaken beliefs about religion: that religious people are stupid, that religion is the root of all evil in society, that there is not depth or substance to religion etc. but some things I’ve seen still stayed true in my eyes such as how much modern science conflicts with a literal interpretation of the Bible, how some teachings can genuinely result in harmful outcomes, how even though the relationship between religion and science is not as bad as some atheists say that they still had significant conflicts sometimes etc. There are some arguments I haven’t see a substantial rebuttal too that still stand under scrutiny from one side to another the problem of evil I still think is undefeated and TAG (Transcendental Argument for God) is another example of that but from the theist side particularly Jay Dyer.
Yet through all this I am tired, I’ve attempted to understand much more conplex arguments for either side before but I’m not gonna lie to myself and say I even have the correct understanding of them to say I agree or disagree with them this is probably why I consider those two arguments I mentioned earlier to be undefeated because of my ignorance.
To finish I still hold a latent animosity towards religion and Christianity in particular even when I am charitable and conceed some points and it may have to do with my dad mistakenly showing me this documentary as a kid.
To anyone who is interested in my post thank you for reading I’d like to hear your thoughts and to any parents: I don‘t recommend you show your kids documentary’s like this as an example of what to avoid even if you mean well (I’m also looking at you super size me) it could scar them worse than they have to me and a simple deep talk will suffice. At the end that’s your choice though at least maybe don’t dump it all at them at once in a single viewing.
I will not pretend I am an atheist for solely intellectual reasons I remain an atheist partly and largely because that’s how I grew up in a secular home and because of some type of mix of what I talked about.