My Conversion to Atheism
Offline I used to be a Christian, I used to hate Darwin. Then one day, at an anti-gay rally, Dawkins came up to me and told me about how glorious it was to believe in Darwin. He told me about how my genes had a special plan for me. He told me that each and every one of us has genes in us that have a plan, leading towards a higher ideal! He told me about how even animals have genes that are leading them in the same direction and that eventually even the most primitive life will evolve into humans. Some are even really close like monkeys. Dawkins also told me about how the universe and everything in it evolved from a minuscule chance, without the need for God. Dawkins told me that just by believing in his atheist religion I could have future decedents that have evolved into a state of perfection, and so can you!
Ok, for those who didn't get it, this is my attempt at an atheist conversion story that makes as little sense as the stories posted on fundamentalist websites by people who say they were but clearly were never atheists or evolutionist (otherwise you'd think they'd get at least one thing right).
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I enjoyed this. I have always felt that the single most glaring indicator of ingenuine "testimony" about conversion is when the prosetylizer claims to at one point have hated the supposed being he claims to have not believed in.
Nicely done.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
OK, here is mine:
I was brought up in a proper religious environment. In my case, that meant paying attention in the public schools that I attended and getting good grades. So there never was any question about Darwin. He is every bit as correct as is both Newton and Einstein. Even so, my proper church broke up over all of these really important matters like whether sinners could be priests and serve communion.
So here I am with no church to go to. I tried a bunch of what was around but none of them were any good. Come on here, if you can't figure out that the earth is really freaking old, then who the hell are you to tell me what my cock is for? Eventually, I turned my back on any church that can't figure out how to be a proper religion. Slowly but inevitably, whatever faith I had drained out of me.
After a bunch of years, I found myself on a high performance computing forum. As matters happened, one of the debates senior members was a real professional philosopher with three doctorates. I guess that he saw something in me because he took me under his wing and taught me how to debate on the internet.
I cannot know when I really became an atheist. Probably I already was years before but somehow I crossed the line without realizing it. Actually, my current thought is that given most (if not all) really important topics, there is no line to cross. There is a gradient. In any case, I ended up as a nihilist.
So I certainly can't say that someone big like Dawkins did anything for me. My first introduction to the real world was <p><a href="http://www.isu.edu/english/Faculty/JamesHardy.html">Doctor James Hardy</a></p>. Past that, George Carlin and James Randi were early influences. Doctor Michael Shermer is a later influence. Dawkins and Hitchens are also cool but they needs a couple hundred pages to do their best work. Thunderfoot, theamazingatheist and the rest of the youtube crowd are much better at getting to the point in a few minutes.
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I too was a sinner. I sinned against reason. I sinned against evidential deduction. I sinned against common sense. I even sinned against the bleeding obvious.
Then, one day, a voice in my head told me henceforth to use language with care. Words have meanings, it said, and these meanings are not negotiable, at least not without clarification of why one is bending the meaning. From that moment I have shed myself of semantic obfuscation. I have cast away all the falsity and muddled thinking which plagued me when I was a semantic cripple. I have acquired the sight to clearly detect when such obfuscation is practised against me, and the courage from knowledge to oppose it. I have put the "right" back into "righteous" and the "hal" back into "holy". I have resuscitated meaning trampled to death by hackneyed religious abuse. I have rescued words from their religious torturers and sent them back into the world purified and cleansed of the pollution their tormenters confuse with definition.
I am the one who guards the loaves, the Hlafweard, the fore-runner etymologically of what the religious persist in pronouncing "lord" and ascribing non-bread attributes to. I am the true saviour (the "soter", the "healer" ) of those most downtrodden and abject victims of religious tyranny, words. Come unto me, my double-pluralised children of the logical sign (semantic in semantic terms). I am the weg, the faithful to meaning, the leuk. Cast aside the nonsensical chains the bible has imprisoned you in for far too long. They are the constructs of vatulants (the Sanskrit wind-bags who are our modern "fools" ) who are not worthy enough even to know you, let alone enslave you .
Those who exalt the principle of binding fast, even when one does not understand what one is bound to, and who falsely proclaim abhorrence of negligence (check out what "religion" really means) have had their day. A golden age of reason and truth awaits. Follow me ...
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy