I'm from a Filipino family and like 90+% of Filipinos, my family's Catholic. I can remember my mother audio-taping us as children and from some tape during which I was too young at the time to remember, she's asking me, "Why did you have your fingers in your ears?" "Because I didn't want to hear what he [the priest during a Mass] was saying!" So apparently my main reaction to religion from Day One was boredom.

    But I suppose my skeptical nature first kicked in when my two older sisters began attending elementary school in Munising, Michigan. It seems that the kids were talking about what Santa brought them last year for Christmas, and what they hoped he would give them this year. Although they did celebrate Christmas in the Philippines, they don't partake of any of this Santa Claus business--that's mainly a North American and European past time. So when my sisters asked my parents why hadn't he ever brought us anything, they probably had to go ask their new friends or neighbors for a quick cultural literacy lesson. Suddenly we did begin getting extra presents from Santa on Christmas, but we all couldn't help notice that they didn't come until we had enlightened our parents about him. Plus when you see three different Santas at three different places, all on the same shopping day in December, that pretty much gave the scam away as well. We all had to have known or at least suspected that it was our--and everyone else's--parents all along, which was mighty sweet of them, but still, I couldn't help thinking that they went along with encouraging very young and children to believe in Santa Claus in order to bribe them into good behavior. It wasn't too much of a stretch to think that this whole God business was a similar adult conspiracy. They had so little faith in human nature that they didn't think anyone was capable of doing the right thing without hope of reward or fear of punishment, or perhaps they were just too lazy to give lessons on morality based on altruistic rather than self-serving reasons.

    When I myself began going to elementary school, the Catholic kids at the public school I went to had to walk down a few blocks down to a building where they would be taught catechism lessons--unaccompanied by any adults, no less, and one of my friends was nearly hit by a car once on the way back. So I already began my training into Catholicism knowing that I was part of the minority, although not quite knowing just what it was that the other children's families believed, or how it was really all that different. After all, could I look at one of my fellow students and tell what religion they were just from their appearance? Were they any better or worse behaved on the average than we were? Not particularly.

    My siblings and I were--as far as I can remember--the only non-Caucasians in an entirely white student body, even though our school was supposedly a public school. With no other convenient minority targets to pick on, I was the main recipient of ethnic slurs and occasional violence. I discovered the uselessness of prayer pretty quickly. “Please, God, make me white, or at least make the other kids stop picking on me.” All in vain, of course, so I quickly deduced that even if there was a God, and that was a big “if,“ He certainly couldn’t care less about me, so what was the point in praying to or worshipping Him? I’d have better luck talking to a brick wall.

    Still, my family and many of my friends seemed to sincerely believe the whole routine, so I had to at least pay lip service to it. We lived there long enough for me to receive first communion. I never really did understand or buy into the concept of the host and wine supposedly becoming Jesus’ body and blood, and it was probably for the best that I didn’t think too hard about it, since then I would have probably thought I was a cannibal if I actually believed it. But at the time, I was finally getting to do one of those things that kids only get to do when they reach a certain age, and I got to dress up for it as well (it's pretty much been the only time I've ever gotten to wear a white dress and a veil inside a church), so it was a fairly harmless rite of passage. Alas, one of those other things I had looked forward to--playing an angel or some other role in the school Christmas pageant--never came to be. You only got to participate in that when you were in the 4th grade and up, my family moved while I was halfway through the 3rd grade, and the school I ended up in after the move didn't have such a program. So I resolved myself to the thought that “my being an angel just wasn’t meant to be,” never realizing just how all-encompassing the significance of that concept would eventually be.

    After we moved to my present city, my parents sent us to St. Joseph Elementary and High Schools. Yes, it was nice that no one was likely to tease you for your religion since they all were being taught to share the same one, yet I still felt like I was missing something. Where was the debate, the diversity in such an environment? Not that we students agreed with everything they tried to teach us anyway. Sure we could repeat back any question of which we were asked, "What does the Catholic Church say about...?" But when the teachers weren't around and we discussed the doctrines amongst ourselves, there was nearly 100% dissension between us and the Church's official position when it came to topic like whether priests should be allowed to date or marry, whether they should open up ordination to women, divorce and remarriage, birth control, abortion, etc.

    Even most non-Catholics know about the above doctrines and made fun of us endlessly, which I thought my denomination completely deserved. But there were other rules not as well known among non-Catholics that once I learned about them, really rubbed me the wrong way. For instance, the Church's tendency both in history and even up to the present day to try to censor anything in the mass media--be it a book, movie, or TV show--that disagreed with it or otherwise made it look bad, or when failing in that--to at least forbid its own people from reading/viewing the offending material, which they should have known would only make it that much more enticing, given human nature. I was 14 when the mini-series The Thorn Birds came out, and naturally, the Church condemned it since “It shows a priest committing adultery with another man’s wife,” not mentioning that in the context of the story, the husband only married her for her money, had basically abandoned her after she disappointed him by having a daughter instead of a son, and the woman and priest had been in love for years, and had never really loved anybody else. Naturally it was on the top of my “must-see, must-read” list, and having sex with a priest was on my “to do” list before I died (even had a couple of real-life candidates in mind), back before all the pedophile scandals broke out, and I actually thought it would be a challenge. Now it would seem too easy.

    I was also a fan of the original Star Trek series beginning at that age, and religion as well as the mindset behind it took quite a beating in some of the episodes. In “Who Mourns for Adonais?” they ran into Apollo, and speculated that, sure, if an advanced alien race who could perform some magic tricks (vanish and reappear, telekinesis, etc.) visited earth back when we were nothing but primitive shepherds and such, they might have been able to pass themselves off as gods, but in the time period the show was taking place, man wasn’t quite that gullible anymore. In “The Paradise Syndrome,” Kirk got amnesia while visiting a planet inhabited by Native American type people, and was mistaken for a god when he was able to give a “drowned” boy artificial resuscitation. It was definite “food for thought,” in any case.

    We were also forbidden from going to any other religion’s services, although I didn't know I wasn't supposed to until I had already done it. I had to wonder just what was the Church afraid of? Were its doctrines based on such shaky grounds that it didn't think its flock would continue believing them once exposed to even one contrary opinion? Were they afraid we might like the other religion's services more than our own and wish to convert? (And I’ll definitely give the Protestant’s credit where credit is due. They know when a newcomer is in their midst and go out of their way to welcome them, and they also provide nurseries for the children so they won’t interrupt everyone else’s being able to concentrate on the service, which is more than the Catholic Church ever does.)

    As I've said online before, truth does not discourage investigation. If something is a fact, it can only be proven more true the more one researches it. The only thing that fears a question is a lie or a myth.

    Still, I suppose it could have been worse. Whatever else we were told, we weren't taught that every word of the Bible had to be taken literally (in fact, when Protestants charge us with idolatry for having religious statues in our churches, we charge them with "Bibliolatry" for worshipping a book), and to my knowledge, no Catholic is taught that creationism is a viable alternative to evolutionary theory. We generally accepted the compromise that “God guided the hand of evolution,” though it took a while for the implications of that to sink in. Though it seems to get the job done, evolution is a very brutal process involving predation, starvation, freezing, mass extinctions, etc. It was as if God couldn’t get his species “right” the first time, or he got bored with them, and decided to start over periodically by killing most of the ones alive at the time.

    We weren't specifically taught that all non-Catholics were hell-bound or that we were duty-bound to proselytize every non-Catholic we came across. I could have never handled the last requirement, since I had more than enough trouble trying to swallow most of the doctrines myself, much less trying to foist them on someone else who was probably fine with whatever church they were already in, most of which had beliefs that sounded for more reasonable overall than my own. (“Let me get this straight. It’s a sin for a Catholic to use birth control, eat meat on a Friday during Lent, etc. But if you’re not Catholic, aren’t taught it was wrong, don’t consider it a sin, etc., then it’s okay for you to do it? Well, that sure isn’t fair for us to have all these things that we can’t do that everybody else can!”)

    After graduating from high school, I went to Hendrix College, and also began my first job. They often worked me during Sunday afternoons, so I had an excellent excuse for not attending church anymore, which I never particularly enjoyed in the first place. I always did have to struggle to stay awake through the services since I'd heard all the readings and sermons dozens of times before already.

    While taking a summer class at U.C.A. (the University of Central Arkansas), I was enrolled in an introductory philosophy class in which one of our first assignments was to say whether or not we believed in God, and what reasons we had for whatever we believed. I had never had such a class before, but I instinctively knew that "Yes, 'cause the Bible sez so" wouldn't cut it as an effective argument here. After all, anybody could write a book and SAY that God was speaking to them at the time, but would we believe anyone who made that claim now? Then why should we believe that it ever happened back then either? It's also not the only batch of sacred writings that tried to substantiate its claims with reports of miracles. Christians look at the ones found in ancient mythology, the Koran, the book of Mormon, etc. and say, "Well, anyone could invent a story where some miracle took place. That doesn't mean that it did. I need some proof." Well, couldn't a follower of one of those religions or an atheist say the same thing about our book?

    Apparently there were a few naive students who thought "'Cause the Bible says so" would be sufficient, because when the professor turned our papers back, I was one of only three students out of 50 who wasn’t asked to rewrite my paper. I did argue on the positive side at the time, presenting what I didn't know was the Argument from Natural Design, or the teleological argument. It's the one where the main basis for believing in God's existence was that if the earth had been in such-and-such way--if it didn't have the right amount of water, if it wasn't the right distance from the sun, it its atmosphere wasn't of the composition that it is, if it had been a much larger or smaller planet than it is, etc., life would be impossible. But the earth is the way it is, and life does exist, so perhaps someone was watching out for us. I had the feeling while I was writing this that although it was probably more sophisticated than whatever my fellow students would be presenting as arguments, not only had some brilliant mind already thought of this argument a long time ago (Thomas Aquinas and William Paley, for instance, but I didn't read about them until later), but some even more brilliant mind had probably come along later and demolished this very argument (Immanuel Kant, among others). Even I could see its obvious problems. If God was all-powerful, and was as hungry for followers as he was depicted in the Bible, then he could have made all planets capable of supporting life, or at least one per sun-like star, yet in all our space travel so far, we've never found another celestial body that was. Not exactly my idea of a "perfect" universe. And even though the earth is all we have as far as a planet capable of supporting life, it's not without its flaws. It could have been better in so many ways. If I had the power, would I have made a world where depending on what species you're born into, you may have less than a 1% chance of surviving to maturity without starving or getting eaten by some other creature? Would I have created a world where earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, volcanic eruptions, etc. regularly wreak havoc on everything around them? Or one where wars, criminal mischief, disease, transportation disasters, etc. take such a heavy toll? I thought it better to believe that such things were caused by natural law and human error and evil than to think that there was a God who could prevent them, but did nothing.

    My mother, though she's still an active and devout member of the Catholic Church, wasn't averse to adding books to her collection that disagreed with what we were supposed to believe. Among them were Father James Kavanaugh's "A Modern Priest Looks At His Outdated Church," Sigmund Freud's "The Future of an Illusion," and Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" and his other religious essays (which also included the story of how Christians had blocked his appointment to a teaching position at a university in New York because of how paranoid they were about his irreligious views, even though the subject he would have been teaching was related to mathematics). He took on a subject I hadn't seen addressed before, flaws in Jesus' character as he was portrayed in the New Testament, and taking it at its word, and the analysis was pretty devastating, but accurate.

    I also began reading some Biblical commentary books which pointed out the Biblical atrocities, contradictions, historical/scientific errors, unfulfilled prophecies, etc., that so many Christians miss. The two Creation stories don't even match, and neither did the two flood stories, or the genealogies of Jesus given in Matthew and Luke. I also read Thomas Paine's The Age Of Reason, and was particularly impressed by his commonsense approach to the miracle stories. "If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, -- Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie."

    In any case, I had long realized the obvious fact that had I been born in, for instance, Israel, India, Saudi Arabia, China, etc., I would probably have been born to a Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist family, would have been raised in that religion instead, and would most likely believe many things which Christians would find absurd, and would doubt many things that Christians are supposed to believe to be true. Heck, if I’d have been born into ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc., I probably would have bought into all of their gods as well, at least until my critical thinking skills kicked in. There just comes a point in one’s life when you have to examine your beliefs, understand the degree to which they are influenced by family and culture, try to justify them logically, and I had reached that point. I had to look at my own religion, not from the viewpoint of a lifelong member with a great investment of time and emotion in it, but as a detached observer who belongs to no religion at all and is trying to examine the major claims each one makes to see which might be true, and which ones probably weren‘t. Once I did that, it didn’t take rocket science to realize that not one of the alleged Bible miracles, including such key doctrines as the virgin birth and the resurrection, would stand up under the scientific method or be admissible in a court of law. As Paine put it, they are all hearsay upon hearsay many times over. And also that just because it might be nice if something was true (wouldn‘t it be nice to go to heaven after you die or to have a guardian angel looking out for you?), doesn’t mean that it is true.

    I soon realized "Hey, I'm only Catholic because my parents are, and they only are because somewhere back in my family tree, some greedy Spaniards forced or bribed our ancestors into it. I need better reasons than that, like some facts." But I couldn't find any, other than the fact that throughout its history, the Catholic Church had not been very kind toward members of other religions, or toward its own members who expressed any doubts or contrary beliefs--witness its treatment of Galileo, for instance. But I wasn't inclined toward joining any other church either, because I just wasn't into supernatural beliefs, period. So I just stayed neutral, all the while suspecting that this whole Christianity business and its God were most likely just like another by-product of cultural evolution, and that though it probably wouldn't happen in my lifetime, it would be like any other religion that had it's day, would prosper for a while, but would fall by the wayside once people got smarter, or at least would become irrelevant to the everyday lives of the brightest amongst us.

    I probably got into reading as extensively on the subject as I did because I wanted to be able to defend my viewpoint if I was ever called upon to do so. And if there's such a thing as the first rule for debate, it would be read the arguments from both sides, and not just your own, so that you might learn how best to refute a potential opponent. After all, if you don't know what your opponent has in their arsenal, you won't be very well prepared for it when they throw it at you. You should understand both side’s arguments well enough to be able to play Devil’s Advocate and argue the other side, no matter how much you might personally disagree with it.

    I don't think some of the RTLers and Christians I’ve run into online or IRL truly comprehend the concept of intellectual liberty. They think we "choose" to believe what we do. I can no more “choose” to believe in the Christian God, than I can “choose” to believe in unicorns, or Zeus, or the tooth fairy, not without empirical evidence, and nothing related to religion even comes close. Though you may have read the following from Robert Ingersoll, I'll repeat them because they're so dead on with what I believe about faith.

    "The truth is, that no one can justly be held responsible for his thoughts. The brain thinks without asking our consent. We believe, or we disbelieve, without an effort of the will. Belief is a result. It is the effect of evidence upon the mind. The scales turn in spite of him who watches. There is no opportunity of being honest or dishonest in the formation of an opinion. The conclusion is entire independent of desire. We must believe, or we must doubt, in spite of what we wish. That which must be has the right to be. We think in spite of ourselves. The brain thinks as the heart beats, as the eyes see, as the blood pursues its course in the accustomed way.
    "There is no subject, and can be none, concerning which any human being is under any obligation to believe without evidence.
    "But the church cries, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.' Without this belief, there is no salvation. Salvation is the reward for belief. Belief is, and forever must be, the result of evidence. A promised reward is not evidence. It sheds no intellectual light. It establishes no fact, answers no objection, and dissipates no doubt. "
    "Is it honest to offer a reward for belief? The man who gives money to a judge or juror for a decision or verdict is guilty of a crime. Why? Because he induces the judge, the juror, to decide, not according to the law, to the facts, the right, but according to the bribe."

Miscellaneous Problems I had with Christianity/Theism in general:

    1) Doctrines of Original Sin and Atonement: In one way, I do understood why the fundamentalists were so adamantly against the theory of evolution. Take away the special Creation of Man, and then there’s no Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden, no Temptation, no Fall, no ensuing curse of Original Sin, requiring the sacrifice and vicarious atonement of Jesus. He didn’t need to save us, because there was nothing to be saved from, since we didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Death didn‘t come into the world through Adam & Eve; it has been here for just as long as life has been here, and is a natural and necessary part of it. Without death, there would never have been any room left in the world for those of us who are here now. (Though I kind of like the Crosshatch approach to it: “The first little prototype couple in God's bad science project made one mistake and ‘Mister Love and Mercy’ drove his own ‘children’ out of their home and held a grudge for century after century. His idea of clearing it all up was to climb into a virgin and pop out wearing a baby suit so that he could grow up and get nailed to a Redneck torture machine so he could pay some kind of ‘sin bill’ back to himself before he ‘un-died’ and flew back to sit at the right hand of himself so that whoever believed all this insanity wouldn't have to go to Hell because he loves us all so much.”)

    2) Hell-The idea of torturing people for finite sins with infinite punishment after they’re dead and are beyond the point where they can be reformed, can’t harm anyone anymore, etc. which in effect, makes it strictly punitive offends every concept of justice, where the punishment is supposed to fit the crime. I might actually not be bothered if it was only reserved for some of the thoroughly evil people that have lived and died (i.e., Hitler, Dahmer, McVeigh, etc.), but all too many Christians positively drool over the thought of everyone who isn’t a member of their particular branch of Christianity suffering in hell. Seems like a person has to have quite a vindictive or sadistic streak to actually be glad that there might be a Hell. Good works in this life mean nothing, only faith in the “right” god or religion matters. In fact, if Christian doctrine is to be believed, all the people I just named would still have a shot at heaven so long as they accepted Jesus as their personal savior right before death, while the Jews killed in the Holocaust, all non-Christian casualties of the 9-11 attacks, gays killed by homophobic bigots, etc., would be in hell. That’s how sick their religion and their fictitious God is.

    3) Judeo-Christian God not worthy of worship: Hell is pretty much a New Testament invention, but there’s plenty in the Old Testament to condemn him for as well, whether it be God himself, or his chosen representatives. He cursed all of Adam & Eve’s descendants for a fairly innocuous act that they committed. He supposedly drowned every living thing on earth, with the exception of eight humans and a boatload of animals. He killed all the innocent firstborn of Egypt, to prove a point to their leader. He supported and even ordered human sacrifice. He killed 50,000 people because of a few who looked into the ark. He sent two bears to kill 42 children, just because they’d made fun of a prophet’s baldness. He let Satan wreak havoc with Job’s life, which included killing all 14 of his children, merely to satisfy a wager between them. And the list goes on. One would be challenged to think of any historical figure with a worse track record, including Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan. If the Devil had written the Bible specifically to libel God, He couldn’t have come out looking any worse than He actually does in it. And what kind of being is so insecure that he needs to be worshipped in the first place? If my hamsters and mice could imagine gods, they’d probably think I was one, but can’t imagine I’d be flattered to be worshipped by them as such. I like what Bill Maher said about the whole worshipping God concept. "Let's face it. God has a big ego problem. Why do we always have to worship Him? 'Oh, you're the greatest. You're perfect. We're fuck-ups. You know everything. We're in the dark.' Secure people don't need to hear that all the time."

    4) Suffering in the world-There is nothing going on in the world to indicate that it is being watched over by a benevolent and omnipotent being. Asteroids have struck the earth in the past, leading to mass extinctions of most of the life at the time. Animals are constantly eaten by other animals (including their own parents, or other members of their own species), starve, burn to death in forest fires, die in oil slicks, or are killed by humans for their flesh or coats. We humans ourselves have lived through the Black Death, the influenza epidemic of 1917-18, two world wars, the Holocaust, etc. and we starve by the thousands every day, with no god ever lifting a finger to help out. What progress we have made as far as vaccinations, antibiotics, anesthesia, or anything else to alleviate suffering was concerned, we humans had to find it ourselves, usually with the organized churches fighting each new development every step of the way.

    4) Observation of weakness behind religious mentality. As Jesse Ventura said, "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.” They can’t face life on its own terms, and can only feel comfortable if they can delude themselves into thinking that at least God/Jesus loves them. And of course, when they screw up or do evil, there’s always that copout of “The Devil made me do it,” rather than admit that they freely chose to do it themselves. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point that the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.”

    6) I also recognized the incredible arrogance behind most religion, and this goes well beyond the absurdity an obviously fallible human individual presuming that “Everything I believe to be true, is true, and everyone who disagrees with me is wrong!” The whole idea that man was God’s special creation, and that everything else that’s here was made in deference to man is ridiculous, as is the notion that other animals are just here so we can eat or hunt or amuse ourselves with them--when they were here for millions of years before us--and that the stars are there so we’ll have something pretty to look at in the nighttime sky, or any other kind of egocentric nonsense man has ever cooked up. This, of course, includes the individual arrogance of any person who thinks that everything that happens around them has anything to do with God either rewarding or punishing them. If it rains on prom night, God must be mad at that particular person. If they make the winning touchdown during a football game, He must like that person or at least their school better than their rival. If they got a flat tire on the way to the airport, and then the plane that they missed crashes, “Ooh, aren’t I special? God was looking out for me that day!” No mention of why God didn’t see fit to look out for the other passengers on that plane, since he supposedly is perfectly capable of doing so. Maybe that survivor thinks they’re better than all the people that got burnt to a crisp were. Gag. Give me a break. I have long since realized that even if there was a deity, neither I nor any other given human individual would be important enough to attract his attention, that everything that happens in nature would have happened anyway, and I’m perfectly content to be an invisible grain of sand on a human beach.

    7) Immoral behavior of Christians. Where would I even start? Let’s see, anti-Jewish pogroms, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, right-to-life terrorists. Then there are ones that aren’t actually violent, but just rubbed me the wrong way because of the hypocrisy, such as Republicans who condemned Clinton for his adulterous activities, but who turned out to be doing the same thing themselves, or all the televangelists involved in bilking their followers out of their hard earned savings and spending it on mansions, luxury cars, hookers, and hush money. Or Catholic priests preaching about chastity and the sanctity of life, while molesting altar boys and little girls, and their superiors covering up for them. (“We already have a priest shortage as it is, and who’s to say the child didn’t lead the good Father on? Besides, we have assets to protect.”) If Christians are supposed to be of a superior morality, I certainly haven’t noticed it, and the prison statistics certainly don’t support that belief. Then again, why be good, if you think you’ve already been forgiven for all your sins through Jesus’ death on the cross? As the saying goes, “once saved, always saved” (certain Protestants) or you can sin all you want, as long as you confess it later or get Last Rites before your death (Roman Catholic). Plus their general intolerance toward others. I’ve yet to hear of a Christian whose car was vandalized for having a pro-religious or pro-life bumper sticker on it, or who got death threats on the phone for expressing their beliefs at school or in an editorial letter in the newspaper. But an atheist who takes on a separation of church court case, for instance, will almost always get them from the “loving” Christians. As the saying goes, “To be considered half as good as a man, a woman has to do twice as good a job; luckily this is not difficult.” Well, I’ve always thought, “To be considered half as good/moral as a Christian, an atheist has to be twice as good as a Christian. Luckily this is not difficult.”

    8) Religion’s attempts to make people feel guilty for merely being the imperfect humans that they are. Sure, I’ll buy that we shouldn’t kill, steal, commit adultery, etc., but since when is it so bad just to have those thoughts occasionally, and who can truly claim not to? For instance, take a look at the items that comprise the “seven cardinal/deadly sins”--pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth--and most of them don't even appear to have anything to do with actions one might be committing, and have more to do with ones thoughts or desires, as if we can even control those. The sexual hang-ups of the church particularly irk me. They take this perfectly natural urge that adult men and women have to connect with another human being and to express their feelings to them--without which our species would have died out--and they try to make something shameful and dirty out of it. And where would our country or economy be without greedy or envious businesspeople and consumers alike, wanting more money or material goods than what they presently have? How else would anyone ever be bothered to improve their situation, if you didn't look around, see what your neighbor had, and occasionally wish that they had that, too?