My road to atheism Part 1

I hadn't really thought about writing my de-conversion story until a couple of readers asked about it. There is not one specific point where I could say I became an atheist. It was an accumulation of life experiences that led to it. So, I'll start from the beginning and go from there. I'll try not to make it too boring, but I also don't want to leave anything out :)

I was raised in a Christian home. My parents started out as Lutherans and baptized me in the Lutheran church when I was a few months old. Three years later my middle sister was born and 13 months after that my baby sister was born. I do not recall them being baptized in the church, but I'm not sure why. We moved around a lot when I was little....I lived in 7 houses by the time I was 8! The only church I actually remember from that period in my life was a little Baptist church in Pinehurst, ID.

My best friend at that time was a girl whose parents were missionaries in Papua New Guinea. My family went to church every Sunday and we were also involved in the youth group at the church. I also remember being a part of the Primroses, a Christian version of Campfire girls :) Church was just a part of life.

When I was eight years old, my family moved back to Spokane. From that point on, we attended a non-denominational church. Basically, the church believed the Bible to be literally true and didn't want to define itself by any denomination. Now, we went to Sunday School, morning church service, sometimes evening church service and AWANA on Wednesday nights. I was up to my neck in church stuff :)

Honestly, I think my mom needed church to get away from things. She was raising three young girls, basically on her own. Our home life was crazy because my dad has schizophrenia. We never knew when he'd have a bad day. I can remember being scared for our lives. Unfortunately, I think the beliefs of our church encouraged my mom to stay with him longer than she should have. Divorce is wrong....god won't give us anything we can't handle...there's always a reason for everything god does....god made dad the way he is, we need to accept that.

I only mention this because my early experiences had a strong influence on my personality. I was angry with my mom for cowering when my dad would hurt her. I wanted her to stand up for herself and fight back. As I became older, I started to stand up to him and tried to protect her. If she wasn't going to stand up for us or herself, then I would. I made some vows to myself at a very young age: 1) I would never feel obligated to marry someone, 2) I would never allow anyone to treat me poorly and 3) I would fight back whenever someone tried to intimidate me.

When I was 14, my mom finally left my dad. He had tried to hurt me and that was the final straw for her. Up until that point, I think I went to church because it was a way for me to get out of the house and go to a place where I was always accepted. I was the little girl who asked everyone at school to go to AWANA with me on Wednesdays. I rarely had friends over to our house and church was the next best place to play with my friends. I memorized my assigned Bible verses and did my devotionals every day. I asked Jesus into my heart whenever it was offered. I think that deep down, I hoped that god would make everything better if only I was good enough.

Once my dad moved out, I became even more religious. Maybe I felt that I owed god something...I'm not sure. I went to church as often as I could and I also met with my Sunday school teacher for a Bible study on Saturday mornings. I had read all the Bible stories that I was told to read and flipped from verse to verse during sermons, always highlighting and making notes in the margins of my Bible. Sometimes, as I was reading, I could feel god talking to me. I'd be overcome with emotion that somebody actually loved me. I decided to get baptized by submersion in front of the whole church to recommit my life to Christ and I felt everything get washed away when I did it. I also started looking at Bible colleges between my freshman and sophomore years and my mom planned an entire spring break vacation around visiting a Bible college in Montana.

But, then I decided to read the Bible from cover to cover. I was about 15 at this point and wanted to know everything about God and the Bible. Groan....I even tried to calculate the age of the earth by using the genealogies in the Old Testament. As I read on, I came across some really terrible things. At first, I'd try to tell myself that God did these terrible things because he had to...he knew what was best. But, eventually I wasn't buying that explanation.

It was also at this time that I started to notice some things about my church that I didn't like.
Observation 1: One of my aunts also attended the church. She had divorced the father of her children many years before because he had cheated on her. When I was 15, she had met someone else and they had become engaged. When they approached our pastor, he refused to marry them because she had been divorced. I guess she wasn't allowed to get married again.

Observation 2: My church had a special showing one night of a movie (I can't remember the name) about the rapture. They encouraged kids to come. So, I went to the movie and it scared the crap out of me! It was terrible! It didn't seem to bother any of the adults around me, though. I was confused because I didn't remember reading some of those details in the Bible....but I was at church, my pastor wouldn't show something unless it he knew it was true. Would he?

Observation 3: My church was constantly asking for money...I swear we'd pass the plate at least 2 times per service. At home, I saw my mom working on her budget stretching every last penny to make ends meet. Yet, the church never offered to help....they were saving to build a new gym. As I thought about this, I realized that the people at church had never offered to help us when my dad was living with us. It was the pink elephant in the room that everybody pretended wasn't there. I came to the conclusion that everyone at church has to pretend to be happy even when they're not.


By this time, I was 16 and had my driver's license. My best friend and I decided that we didn't care for this church anymore and went searching for a new one. We church hopped for awhile, but never found a church that we liked. I wondered why it was so hard to find a good church....

(I had originally intended to make this one post, but it's just getting too long. So, I'm going to break this down into parts.)