My story is rather simple, and probably boring, but here it goes.
I live in the US (New York, if it matters, about 1 hour north of the city).
My mother is Episcopalian, my father is either agnostic or atheist – more accurately he doesn’t give damn.
I was, as so many children, forced to go to church/Sunday school as a kid. I still remember even now, how the Bible stories always sounded so much like the other stories I used to read as a kid.
Anyway, I was always (still am) one of those “Oh yeah? Prove it!” types. I started to question the validity of what I was being fed when the ADULTS teaching the classes couldn’t satisfactorily answer the logical questions of an 8 year old (me). When told God made everything, I asked what made God. Even at 8, the “he was always there” sounded to me like bullocks.
I just never got pulled in emotionally (I think, partially due to the fact that I didn’t LIKE anyone in my Sunday School, so I kept my distance), thus I was never forced into cognitive dissonance. When you don’t have emotion clouding your reasoning, the whole thing just seems silly – I became a diehard atheist as an early teen, and never looked back. After happening upon a web site crytozology.com (which has an evolution v/s creation forum too), I was able to get some of the reasons I didn’t believe from the “I’m not sure why, it just doesn’t make sense to me” point to clear, logical-debate friendly format.
Such as the burden of proof is on the one purporting the existence of something….I don’t have to prove there is no God, since you CAN’T prove a negative, rather YOU must prove to me there IS one, or I must logically assume there is not.
I have yet to see any proof….not even any empirical evidence. Therefore I must assume there is not.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Like you, I was forced to attend Sunday School as a child, and I recently posted an entry on my blog about one story that baffled me even then, the story of Cain and Abel:
ReplyDeletehttp://dennishodgson.blogspot.com/2010/02/cain-and-abel.html
I don't know if you would agree with my analysis.
Great blog Dennis, and I agree.
ReplyDelete