by Erika Tremper

Created on: February 18, 2007   Last Updated: May 18, 2007

I am an atheist mostly because I was raised a Christian, and spent eight years receiving my elementary education in Catholic school. I believed the dogma, bought it allI thought god was watching me, would punish me for original as well as unoriginal sin, and that he was everywhere, taking note of my shortcomings and offenses. As benevolent as I was taught to believe he was, deep inside my mind and heart, I thought "How mean he is, barring innocent children from heaven because they haven't been baptized. How vengeful, how unforgiving of mankind's weaknesses, to make his "children" burn in the eternal flames of hell because of some seemingly minor infraction such as missing church on Sunday. He made us. Why would he be so cruel?" I never voiced these seven and eight and nine-year-old opinions, of course. Thinking them was sinful enough, but I just couldn't help it. Then one day it came to me: there is no god. What a relief, the removal of a canon ball from my belly, to have figured that out in the fifth grade. I no longer stressed the confessions and the penances and the soot on my forehead on Ash Wednesday. I was finally free to see good and evil and compassion and virtue for what I could learn them to be, not because a nun wielding a catechism book deemed it so.

Through the years, I have been quiet about my belief, or lack thereof. For a time in my mid-twenties I struggled to regain some faithI went back to church, to a synagogue, to a Unitarian service, to a Buddhist temple. I thought, and sometimes still think, that it would make life easier to believe in some religion, some higher being. I remember when I was very young being comforted by god and my guardian angel and the simplicity of living by a given set of rules. But again, my intelligent design tells me it isn't so. I don't believe there is a god, any more than I believe there is a Santa Claus, but I do believe in human goodness and compassion and intelligence. I have not spoken up about being an atheist because of the look on the faces of the few co-workers, family members, and friends with whom I did share that information. One would think I told them I dig up bodies in cemeteries and eat them for a midnight snack. They recoiled, and their faces went dark with horror and disbelief. "How dare you say that" one of my friends whisper-shouted, "you are going to hell." I was cowed by that remark, and the silent indictment of other people important to my livelihood and my life. I say this to them now: I am an atheist. Do not pity me, or try to convert me, or belittle me. Try not to hate me. For all the talk of love and tolerance preached in the various religions, I see more faces pinched in red-faced hatred and disgust for people who do not share their views and beliefs.

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