Your faith timeline.

[John Dule]

1-5: I'm not sure how I viewed religion at this point. At the very least, I was aware of the concept of God and who he supposedly is. I watched a lot of Veggie Tales but didn't get the religious themes from it because I didn't know anything about the Bible. I had a really hyperactive imagination as a kid and I'd constantly make up stories; some of them were about God and heaven and where people exist before they're born. However, I just saw these stories as something fun to entertain myself with and did not actually believe what I was saying. If I made up a story involving God, it would not be fundamentally different from how I'd make up stories about Star Wars or Pokemon characters.

5-7: Started asking my parents if God actually exists. My mom was raised in a religious household but was not sure how to answer my questions. To this day she says that she didn't realize how bogus Christianity was until she had to explain it to a kid. This was probably around the time I realized that Santa wasn't real either, so I pretty much just lumped the two together. I didn't really take religion seriously at this point, and I didn't understand that people actually believed in it. I thought they just did it for fun, like how I make up stories for myself.

7-10: Had more conversations about religion, mostly with my mom. She had never been particularly religious, but she stopped being an agnostic at this point and came to the realization that there's no reason to believe that God exists. Sometime around this age we stopped bothering with Christmas trees and started coming up with our own holiday traditions to celebrate the new year. I didn't mind so long as I still got presents. Today my mom is even more anti-theist than I am, which is saying a lot.

10-15: Started talking to my dad about his experiences in Catholic school. He told me about how the nuns would physically abuse students (spanking, hitting their knuckles with rulers) and how they tried to indoctrinate young, vulnerable people with their psychopathic delusions. Learned about the pedophile scandals within the church. At this point I would start to get a little angry whenever I read anything about religion. Whenever I saw religious themes in the Sunday comics or on TV, I'd start to view the person pushing those beliefs as pathetic. I assumed that they were extremely insecure in their beliefs, and so rather than keep those beliefs private, they felt the need to get everyone else in on their delusion so they'd doubt themselves a little less. This is how I still see people who discuss their beliefs in public-- they are plagued by crippling doubt in the back of their mind, and in order to stamp that suspicion down, they distract themselves by evangelizing as loudly and stupidly as possible.

15-18: Read the Bible for the first time, which was a brutal experience for me. The God portrayed in that book reminded me of the worst teachers I'd had as a kid-- people who would order me to do things "Because I said so" rather than explaining to me why I should do them. Aside from being a long-winded justification for authoritarianism, the book was just f**king boring. I began to assume (hope?) that most Christians hadn't actually read the thing, because it pained me to imagine that someone could accept anything in it at face value. Also around this time, I started looking into Islam and Judaism and became more critical of them. I realized that I was focusing most of my anger on Christianity just because it was the most prominent religion in America, but I came to the conclusion that Islam was far worse. I read Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and was impressed by his prescience, especially in comparison to his contemporaries like Fukuyama. I began to view Islam (and religion in general) as the direct threat to Western liberal values that it is.

18-20: Started to study psychology and crowd mentalities in my spare time and in college. Began to realize that almost all religious people are either indoctrinated from birth or brought into the cult at a vulnerable time in their lives. In both of these methods, the cult members take advantage of their prey's fragile emotional state (whether the person is a child or just emotionally unstable), as well as their willingness to believe what others tell them. Read Descartes/Aquinas and their "proofs" of God; found them unconvincing (as most philosophical scholars also do). Read Gustave le Bon's The Crowd and Freud's Group Psychology, both of which I consider foundational to my views on religion today. I also read Ayn Rand at this time, though she didn't really give me many new ideas and mostly just affirmed what I felt I already knew about religion and economics. My favorite philosopher that I read during this time was Hobbes, who (although ostensibly religious) constructed his entire philosophy of law and morality in a secular fashion, which I instantly fell in love with.

20-present: Read the "natural law" doctrines of Plato, Aquinas, Cicero, and Ockham, each of which was less convincing than the last. At this point, I have begun to see connections between all of the philosophies and belief systems that I find antithetical to my worldview-- religion, natural law, socialism, authoritarianism, cults of personality, majoritarianism, communitarianism, etc. I now see them all as methods that people use to avoid making choices and to avoid confronting inconvenient truths about the real world. These ideologies serve as intermediaries between the individual and reality so that they never have to come to terms with facts that are as painful as they are obvious. Authoritarianism is based in the nostalgic wish for a father figure to take care of you; it is designed to avoid confronting the reality that you are ultimately the only one responsible for your life and your choices. Majoritiarianism is the same, though it claims legitimacy through group consensus (as if something is more intrinsically right just because more people agree on it). Socialism and communism are used to avoid confronting the reality of human selfishness; they allow us to imagine ourselves as "naturally good" rather than just "naturally human." And religion-- the worst of them all-- is based in the fear of death, which is the ultimate fear of all people, and the eternity of nothingness and nonbeing that unavoidably and undeniably follows. Because religion is designed to avoid confronting humanity's greatest fear, it has proportionately required our greatest delusion. Religious people who feel the need to convert others subscribe to the majoritarian instinct that if they surround themselves with people who affirm their beliefs, they will feel more emboldened and righteous. If everyone else agrees with them, they will be able to quell their self-doubt and put the fear of death even further from their minds. Reality is a scary place, and harsh truths are difficult to confront-- but after delving into the twisted logic that people use to placate themselves, from the most famous philosophers to average people on internet forums, I have come to the conclusion that I simply cannot put up with belief systems that I consider to be willful self-delusions any longer.

[John Dule]

Reality is a scary place

That's reality's problem.

I thought you Christians were supposed to accept the things you cannot change.

[John Dule]

Socialism and communism are used to avoid confronting the reality of human selfishness; they allow us to imagine ourselves as "naturally good" rather than just "naturally human."

I'm not really sure how "a powerful part of humanity is violently exploiting the rest" is somehow any implication that humans are "naturally" anything.

Which was sort of my point.

And religion-- the worst of them all-- is based in the fear of death, which is the ultimate fear of all people, and the eternity of nothingness and nonbeing that unavoidably and undeniably follows. Because religion is designed to avoid confronting humanity's greatest fear, it has proportionately required our greatest delusion. Religious people who feel the need to convert others subscribe to the majoritarian instinct that if they surround themselves with people who affirm their beliefs, they will feel more emboldened and righteous...

Doesn't seem like you're opposed to religion, here, because religion is by definition not "designed." You can make any argument you'd like about subconscious urge, but the institutions of humankind are what you are criticizing and they are not necessary for humans to continue using religion as vernacular philosophy, just as the majority of humankind has done for millennia. The "religion" you are upset about is a relatively new development in human history.

I don't care about the institutions; I'm focusing here on why individuals choose to believe in religion.

I have come to the conclusion that I simply cannot put up with belief systems that I consider to be willful self-delusions any longer.

Do you realize how self-contradictory this is?

Nope.

I began to view Islam (and religion in general) as the direct threat to Western liberal values that it is

Also, what does this bumper sticker actually mean? I've seen it on a number of Nazis' cars around town, but in my experience everyone who seems to have it is usually so drunk they can't explain it for me when I ask.

Only one religious group threatens people with death when they draw mean cartoons about them. I hate Mormonism, but I don't recall the Mormon Church issuing fatwas against Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

[John Dule]

14-16: Became an atheist. 

Top 10 Anime Betrayals

[John Dule]

I feel like I get more hostile towards religion every day nowadays. There was a time when I could just live and let live, and it didn't bother me so much. I wish I could go back to those days, but it is extremely hard for me to keep quiet and act respectful (as I'm sure anyone on Atlas could attest to).