Photo by Clinton Steeds |
Atheists are a diverse bunch, and we come to atheism in many different ways. Some are life-long atheists who were never subjected to any form of religious indoctrination; others had to go through a lengthy process of discarding the belief system into which they had been raised. Individual variations aside, there is at least one pattern that I have seen often enough to suspect that there may be something to it.
For many of us who were raised as religious believers and go through a period of questioning our beliefs to eventually recognize that we no longer believe (i.e., we are atheists), something fairly predictable seems to happen. We experience a sensation of being "strangers in a strange land." We look around at our religious neighbors and feel different in many ways. What was once familiar to us now seems quite odd. We turn to one another and ask, "How could anybody still believe this stuff?" We may become obsessed with The Matrix and how we are seeing the world for what it is now that we are no longer plugged in. We become aware of religious privilege, church-state violations, and the countless ways in which religiously-based laws restrict our rights and cause harm in the world.