The answer to why I became an atheist is very simple: I found out God isn’t real.
It wasn’t that I had bad parents.
It wasn’t that I was depressed.
It wasn’t that church treated me bad.
It wasn’t that I was the “wrong” kind of Christian.
It wasn’t that I read the Bible too much (or too little).
It wasn’t that I didn’t pray enough.
It wasn’t that I was “in rebellion.”
I didn’t become a monster when I became an atheist. In fact, I was very much the same person.
I just had found out that God isn’t real.
I didn’t choose to find this out. It just…happened, when I was trying very, very, very hard to prove that God was real.
But it wasn’t trying too hard to prove that God was real that made me an atheist.
God just wasn’t real, and I found out, and ever since I found out I’ve dealt with it in various ways.
People are real, though. And the universe. And time and space. And a load of other things.
They aren’t a dream created by God.
They’re Real.
So, me being an atheist has mostly been a journey of realizing how real these things are, and what it means for them to be more real than God ever was.
As time has gone on, God has gotten less “real.” Insisting on God’s nonexistence, while I do it sometimes, has grown increasingly less important to me.
Humans have gotten more real. And, in a different way, the stories humans tell themselves have become more interesting to me, because I am no longer interested in God’s Big Story. I am interested in the stories real people create every day, and over the past few million years, to help themselves face a Real world.
I am still interested in Dreams. But I do not believe that we are part of God’s dream anymore; God is part of the dream of several human beings. So I am interested in the dreams of the living, just not those of the nonexistent.
You see?
I am still the same person.
I have just found out that God is not real.
But people are.
It may seem complicated. Sometimes it is. But the base of it is simple.
I’m still doing the math of my existence the same way.
I just removed an extraneous variable because I wanted to focus on the ones that are real.