How I Became an Atheist

 How I Became an Atheist

I was raised Catholic.  I was surrounded by the rituals and the teachings, went through the motions of Mass and confession, and learned the catechism. But even as a young person, I sensed an internal resistance, an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to make that leap of faith. The doctrines felt distant, the stories hard to accept, and the answers to my quiet questions always unsatisfying.

It wasn’t until I was nineteen that the quiet skepticism I’d carried with me began to find its voice. I was reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and his vivid, unrelenting description of hell. Joyce captured the medieval Catholic vision of eternal punishment in agonizing detail, the fire, the torment, the hopelessness of it all, and something clicked in me. Who could have invented such a place? What kind of loving God would consign his own creations to such an infinite fate, all for the finite mistakes of a human lifetime? It wasn’t fear that took hold of me, as it had with Joyce’s protagonist; it was a deep, quiet certainty that none of it made sense. The concept of hell wasn’t divine. It was man-made.

That moment didn’t make me an atheist. But it was the first clear confirmation of something I think I had always known, even as a child in church.

The years that followed were a slow unfolding of that early certainty. I read widely, both in and out of religious thought. I traveled the world, experiencing firsthand the vast diversity of human belief. I stood in temples in Asia, watched prayer rituals in the Middle East, wandered the quiet interiors of grand cathedrals in Europe, and sat in the stillness of Buddhist monasteries. Every culture offered its own answer to the same ancient questions: Why are we here? What happens when we die? How should we live?

And yet, despite the beauty of some of these traditions and the sincerity of the people practicing them, I could never convince myself that any of them were true. They were all humans, shaped by geography, history, politics, and a need to belong. They reflected us, not some higher power.

Now, as I approach seventy, I find I can finally say it plainly: I am an atheist. It’s a quiet admission, not a defiant one. I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I know that I no longer have to pretend to believe in the answers offered by religion. I’ve made peace with uncertainty. I’ve made peace with the finality of life. And in many ways, that peace has brought me more comfort than faith ever could.

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