Hello everyone, I am a proud son Ghana and this is my story of how I broke free from religion. And it starts when I was a boy. I grew up in rural Appalachia in the southern US where you can’t drive two blocks without coming across two or three churches. Now I had teachers push evolution to the end of the curriculum and not teach it when there wasn’t time at the end of the semester. In elementary school which was a public school we had missionaries once a week which meant we had this ninety year old woman came in and she played church songs and told bible stories for an hour. The only student who didn’t have to go was the only catholic student who went to my school. And all the other Baptists said “…she’s going to hell …” I always knew in the back of my mind something wasn’t right about that. There were all these other denominations out there, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Church of God, Catholic, Mennonite, Lutheran, Evangelical, Congregational, Church of Christ, Church of Christ Scientists, Amish, Episcopalian, etc, and they all thought the other ones were going to hell and not them. So what did that mean for somebody who worshipped a different god? Now look, I liked my pediatrician who was an old Indian guy who wore a turban, but what did that mean for him? I didn’t want to think about it.
You know, it’s a lot like Santa Claus, I remember one weekend driving with my dad delivering a bunch of baseball equipment to about 10 or 15 different houses. My dad was little league president and got into the shipment of bats and balls and gloves and something for all these different coaches and teams. As we were driving around I remember him saying “…we’re like Santa Claus delivering presents…” And I thought “…wow, you know we’re only taking stuff to 10 houses and its taking all day…” and went like wait, wait, wait, I have 30 kids in my class, there are two other classes in my grade, that’s 90 houses. There are other grades in my school, and there are other schools, other counties, states, countries, and continents. So I asked “…dad, how does Santa get gifts to billions of kids in one night?...” After a long pause he responded by saying “…by magic…” And then I thought more about it. How is it possible to hold all those toys in that one single sleigh? I mean the ToysRUs store needs a whole building. And that’s just toys for my town. Why does Santa Claus not give the poor kids very much? But then see I get back to school and all the others kids who believe in Santa Claus, they reinforce the fact that he does exist. And because a lot of other kids believed it, hey, it must be true.
Then as I got older the religious stuff started to bother me. Why is religion geographical? You can point to a country on the map and you know right away what their religion is. It seemed to me that if the universe is so frikin big, and there is one god who did it all, he’s got this one favorite speck of dust that’s floating out there in little miniscule galaxy. You would think they would all follow him. And then there are dinosaurs. They were around for hundreds of millions of years. There are no dinosaurs in the bible, not one. Yes, I know, in the book of Job there is a mention of a behemoth and a leviathan, but if you have a half a brain and read that you know they are talking about hippopotamus and a crocodile. Look, dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions, hundreds of millions of years. There should be five dinosaurs per page in the bible. If you don’t want to call them dinosaurs you can call them something else but should be able to describe specifically what these things are. Plus there is 65 million years from the last living dinosaur to the first living human. 65 million years. For what? The bible suggests the earth is 6,000 years old. That’s wrong, the earth is 4.6 billion years old. So 6,000 years has happened over 766,666 times.
Why is the god in the Old Testament such a prick? Why did people back then have to sacrifice bulls? Why does everybody think Noah’s Ark is such a great story? Santa’s sleigh again. How could all those animals fit into one Ark? Now remember I was an eight year old thinking this and it’s not easy, my brain could not just accept it. I remember asking my grandmother if Noah had two bears, or two grizzly bears, or two polar bears, two Kodiac bears, two Gobi bears, panda bears, sun bears, brown bears, kermode bears, black bears, spectacled bears, sloth bears, Tibetan blue bears … It was God’s magic she replied. So we’re back to magic again. It seems to me for the rest of my young life every time I had a question about religion I got the “magic” answer. So I slipped into the mindset that stuff in the bible were just morality tales. See that’s a slippery slope, because if one specific story in the bible is not true, then what else is not true? So I went from calling myself a Baptist to a standard Protestant. Then I became non-denominational, then I said I am not into the whole organized religion thing but I am very “spiritual”. By the end of university I was calling myself agnostic, you still couldn’t use the A-word back then.
I think the thing that actually did it for me was just taking the time and sitting down thinking about the concept of hell. It is the most grotesque, insulting, mind-numbing, ridiculous concept that anybody could ever come up with. That is this place, OK, that you don’t follow a certain rule or pray a certain way, to certain god, in a certain manner and say certain things, that you go there and you burn in pain and in agony, for eternity. Now meanwhile, your friends and your family, they may be there with but you won’t know it. Or they may have done the right things and they will be in heaven OK, but what if I did the right things? But my wife and my kids they didn’t and they end up in hell. How am I supposed to enjoy eternity if I know that every second of infinity, my wife and my kids are on fire and being tortured by demons? How could I enjoy eternity knowing that anyone is being tortured forever? Have you ever noticed that hell is not in the Old Testament? Gentle Jesus, meek and mild shows up and its then and there we are threatened with eternal suffering. Indeed.
So I looked back at the whole concept of religion, I knew I was an atheist about Baha’u’llah, I didn’t believe in Shiva and Ganesh and all the other Hindu gods. Zeus, Poseidon, Thor, Ra, they no longer had millions of followers, those gods had long since gone to that mass graveyard we call mythology. So I just went one god more. Yahweh. And I got to tell you it was a great feeling. But it wasn’t a change that came overnight, it was little bits and pieces that happened over the course of several years. And I am a totally happy person. I am a totally moral person. I have a great family, I have a great job, I can write articles like this one every once in a while. I donate to charities, I push my shopping carts back where they are supposed to go in parking lots, and I don’t live my life worrying about what’s going to come next. That’s probably the best thing that came out of all of this. I can enjoy the here and the now. Every moment is great. The universe is going to continue on for billions and billions of years. I only get to be here for a very small part of that. That is great. I am so lucky to be here. I look back at my childhood with a smile and I still every once in a while read the bible. Actually I am pretty very familiar with it, I just look at it as a literature book written by men who were trying to figure out their place in the world, not as a guide as to how to live, not as the end-all-be-all of human of human existence, it’s just a book. It goes on my shelf with other books just as any other book.
kwaku ba, May 2011
Adapted from the narrative of the video “How I Gave Up Religion” by youtuber 43alley
