Converts' Corner

Sept 18th 2007 - Richard Dawkins writes: I just received, through the British Humanist Association, the following appeal from Isobel Cook of Channel Four. If any of our readers would like to share their story of how they escaped from religion, please contact Isobel Cook directly, at the e-mail address given.

Richard

I'm a television director developing a documentary for Channel 4. The programme will follow one or more people as they take the brave step of leaving their religion. I'm keen to talk to people who've been through or are going through this difficult process. It would be a very sensitive programme - led by the people who take part - and will, I hope, not only help those involved but be an inspiration to others going through 'deconversion'. I would really like to hear your story. Please be assured that you will be contacting me in complete confidence and by doing so you will in no way be committing yourself to take part in the programme. Please contact me at leavingmyreligion@yahoo.co.uk.

Isobel Cook

“And I thought and thought and thought. But I just didn’t have enough to go on, so I didn’t really come to any resolution. I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn’t know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins’s books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”

Douglas Adams The Salmon of Doubt, p 99.

“Douglas, I miss you. You are my cleverest, funniest, most open-minded, wittiest, tallest, and possibly only convert. I hope this book might have made you laugh – though not as much as you made me. . . Douglas’s conversion by my earlier books – which did not set out to convert anyone – inspired me to dedicate to his memory this book – which does!”

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, p 117

Is Douglas Adams Richard’s only convert? Or is he just the first of many? Please write in to Converts' Corner if you have lost your religion (or have been encouraged to come out of the closet) as a result of reading The God Delusion or other Dawkins books.

Email

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Convert's Corner,
My story is somewhat different than most that I have read on here in that I was a devout Christian all of my life. I am 24, and up until I was about 22, I completely believed that Christianity was true.

I was raised in the Bible Belt, in a very conservative family. My grandfather was a Baptist minister, and we lived right next to him and my grandmother, not even 1/4 of a mile from our church. Christianity was definitely the biggest thing in my family and my community. Everything was centered around it. No one speaks out against Christianity in the Deep South, not even now. I never met anyone of a different faith until I left home and went to college. I did, however, learn that a couple of my friends in middle school were not raised as Christians (they moved in from out of town). They didn't like that I said they were going to Hell, but I didn't care, because, after all, it was their own fault. How could they not understand that I was only trying to help them learn the truth? How could they not be as terrified of Hell as I was?

In the Deep South you learn that the only good people in the world are Christians. Everyone else is on drugs and having orgies or otherwise contributing to the downfall of society (and America, "God's Favorite"). Not only that, but even if they somehow manage to be "good", they're still going to hell for rejecting God. I remember being told many, many times that "there are a lot of good people in Hell." And I completely bought into it, because those people only thought they were being good. They weren't doing what the Bible says. But, I didn't truly believe that there were atheists in the world, only people who were mad at God, or wanted to deny him in order to live a life of sin without guilt. Obviously, they had never thought about their impending death and unavoidable dismissal into Hell. No one could possibly think that they will just go in the ground when they die! (This is why I can't tolerate adults who say this kind of thing about atheists now. They simply have never met an atheist. But, as adults, they should know better.)

These thoughts are reinforced when one reaches high school, the temptations of the flesh kick in, and fellow students that are supposed to be good Christians can be seen partying and succumbing to other tricks of the Devil. It reminds me of what I hear Muslims say now about women acting like whores. I definitely thought that the Christian world was being threatened by the wanton acts of godlessness. I had been warned about people putting pleasure above the Lord, and this is exactly what was happening all around me. Oh, how I despised the idea of premarital sex and the other sins of MTV Spring Break.

I didn't drink, not even after I graduated from high school. But, by that time, I had learned that not everything I had been taught as a child was true. I had stopped being a racist and homophobe, and had begun thinking for myself. But I still "knew" Jesus was the only way to Heaven. I didn't believe in the Garden of Eden anymore, but I think I still believed in Noah's Flood. There are many ways to rationalize Christianity to oneself. It is airtight from the inside, taken at face value (this is how it survived so long). It's obvious that the parts that don't make sense are supposed to be taken allegorically. I never believed in miracles, under the assumption that God doesn't make himself obvious. He can't. That's what faith is about. So, this also took care of all the suffering in the world. It was all man's fault, and against the rules for God to intervene. C. S. Lewis had made this clear. And evolution and DNA were just seen as God's awesome methods.

Eventually enough holes were put in the Bible that I just thought, "Well, most of it has been lost in translation, but the important parts are true. And the message is the important part. Jesus is still the only way into Heaven." I mean, you have to believe that to be a Christian. And I was still a Christian. Eventually, though, I met people of other faiths, and it occurred to me that everyone that had ever believed any religion was absolutely sure that their's was the one true religion. How was I any different? And if God made the rules, why couldn't he have just avoided the whole sin thing altogether? And, hell, I know Adam and Eve just plain never existed, so where did original sin come from to begin with? Uh-oh.

So I became somewhat of a Deist. I started believing in something like Gaia Theory or Einstein's god. But I think I still believed in Jesus. How could I not? I wanted to be a good person. But it was occurring to me that, if I think that all these people are wrong about the specifics of religion, why do I think that, in general, they have the right idea? That's when I first came across Dawkins. I think I saw a talk about him online. The one where the snotty bitch asks "Well, Mr. Dawkins, what if you're wrong?" And his answer blew me away. "What if you're wrong!" Holy crap, we are all atheists when it comes to other gods and it never bothers us one bit! Why is Capital G any different? So I bought "The God Delusion" and he made it clear. The world is the way it is because no one is watching. No one is keeping track.

This was huge to me. My life had been 100% spiritual, and now it was clear to me that there was no reason for it to be. The idea that 'faith is not a virtue' changed my life. No one had dared present that as an option before. Growing up, I had been taught that "I just believe" was one of the strongest and most admirable things you could say. And "The God Delusion" woke me up from that. How naive, how foolish I had been. It's embarrassing.

Now I think about atheism all of the time. This was about two years ago and I have never come across an argument that makes me rethink atheism. It is clear that you can only believe in religion if you make yourself believe it and starve yourself of outside views. People tell themselves it is true for a lot of different reasons, mostly, I think, because they are scared of death. But I have no reason to believe that any religion is true, much less any specific religion.

I won't be telling my family, though. That is why I can't put my name on here. It isn't worth it to cause them the grief. And while I want to believe that, if I can be converted and face the facts, then anyone can, I know they probably would never be able to. They truly aren't smart enough or strong enough to accept the truth. Religion is the only thing they know or think they know. I can't even spend an hour at my parents' house without being inundated with talk of "The Lord" and his grace. When they go on about God's ultimate sacrifice of his son, I don't have the heart to say, "Yeah, but it isn't even his son, it's just him as a person! And he didn't even really die, it was just a glorified coma! How does that, of all things, make evil deeds not matter?"

The fact is that when religion began, no one cared that they were saying that people that didn't believe like them were going to be tortured for eternity. Nor did they know anything about the world or universe. They didn't know any better. But now we do. And I am eternally [sic] grateful to Dawkins for showing me this. So many parts of his book are consciousness-raising. He changed my life and has brought me so much peace, I wish I could repay him.

Thanks, Professor Dawkins.

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Dear Professor Dawkins

Up to 12 months ago I would have considered myself rational, logical and open minded to all topics under debate, and currently studying science and genetics in college it would seem natural that I should be atheist, right? Alas I was not, and I cannot, unfortunately, claim ignorance either. For I was one of those Faith heads you refer to. The ones who believe that lack of proof was even more reason to believe. To my shame I even managed to struggle through Sam Harris's gem, Letters to a Christian nation (because surely I was not one of those Christians, a creationist, so it was okay). I live in Ireland, and two things we hold so close to ourselves, as part of our identities even, is our republicanism and our Catholicism. To the point that many teachers in my growing up would consider it anti-Irish to go against either of these ideals. It was, and still is, in some areas considered the greatest honour to die for these causes. I do not hold this as an excuse, but to say, I do know what it is like to have something like your religion be more than just a personal belief, and I sympathise with anyone trapped in the proverbial closet because of the influence religion has in their society.

As far as conversion, I am now happily an atheist. To Professor Dawkins, who I cannot thank enough, I only hope you continue to teach and enlighten. And to the claim that your book may only covert the 'on the fence' believers, do not lose faith, us Faith heads are not impervious to logic and rational, and you are the master of it.

Yours truly

Lorcan

P.S. – Loved Selfish Gene, Blind Watchmaker etc, and was fascinated by you paper on 'viruses of the mind'

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Dear Professor Dawkins,

I'm a twenty-two year old woman living in the United States, (Utah, to be precise,) but it is not so much for my own story that I am writing, but more for the journey my mother and I have made together. I apologize that this is such a long email, but I don't know how to truly relay both my feelings and my mother's without properly setting up our interwoven 'conversion' stories. I recognize that this will likely be far too long to ever go up on the Converts' Corner on the website, but I couldn't find a way to properly summarize any more than I have without losing the essence of the entire experience. Also, I realize that you, personally, are not likely to read this, as you're a busy man, but I felt the deep desire to reach out, somehow, with my experiences with escaping religion and 'coming out,' and how your book helped both my mother and I with the latter.

My mother was very, very deeply scarred by the child abuse caused by the same religious indoctrination you spoke of in The God Delusion. Her mother, a truly fanatical Baptist, did her best to destroy my mother's intelligence, inquisitiveness and imagination by calling her innocent questions disobedience, and her vibrant imagination a penchant for being a liar. My grandmother clipped every drawing of Jesus out of every religious magazine she had and made a scrapbook, like some sick kind of teenage worship of a rock star. We found the scrapbook after she had died - my mother, who was not yet an atheist, still saw it for the fanaticism it was and threw it away.

My grandmother said throughout my mother's life that her only wish, her only goal in life was to be alive when "Jesus comes back." She spoke of little else. Any time a television evangelist proclaimed the date of the End of Days, she would mark it on her calendar with gleeful celebration, and would tell her tiny children to prepare for the end of the world, and for Judgment. My mother was terrified as my grandmother counted the days with morbid hope. Every time the date circled on the calendar would go by and Christ didn't come, my grandmother fell into the pits of despair. My mother says this happened too often to count, and was a staple in her young life.

When she got a little older, she had a terrible dream that was so real to her that she was convinced she was going to die. In the dream, she fell down on the grass, felt the cool, dewy blades on her skin, and looked up - Jesus appeared to her, and the most horrifying music accompanied his fearful appearance that at first sounded like the angelic voices of Heaven, but soon turned into the terrifying chorus of Hell. She told her mother about this, and the woman was elated. She said it was a vision, and discarded my mother's fearful shaking, the quaver in her voice, the fear in her eyes - these things were good. One should fear a vision of the Almighty. She was blessed. But she didn't feel blessed.

She grew up with a deep fear of Hell, and developed many psychological problems. She developed obsessive compulsive behaviors surrounding ritualized superstition. There were perfectly good shirts she would throw out because they were 'unlucky,' or shirts she'd wear for days because they were seemed to bring luck instead. A broken clock could not have it's hands stuck on threes or sixes - sixes being part of the 'Mark of the Beast,' and threes being associated with unlucky 'thirteen,' and so on and so forth. Her life was completely controlled by horrific guilt over the slightest infraction, ritualized obsessions, and constant, terrible fear. To this day, she has unexplained panic attacks and paranoia. To put it bluntly - religion nearly destroyed an intelligent, capable, sensitive, loving human being, and permanently impaired her mental health.

My mother gave birth to me rather late in her life, in her forties, but due to that she was secure enough in her life that she had time to devote to me, fully. She kept within her a fascination for science, and even named me after a constellation, shortening 'Cassiopeia' to 'Cassi,' in honor of her secret love for Astronomy that she'd never been allowed to explore. She remembered the fear and constrained, loveless atmosphere of her childhood, and chose instead to raise me in a loving, free, safe world full of wonder and imagination. I was not only allowed to use my imagination and to think for myself, I was encouraged! When I asked questions, she didn't call me disobedient, she endeavored to answer, and in answering the questions of a curious child, found that she yearned for the answers, too. Why -was- the sky blue? Why -did- the birds sing? Why -was- the grass green? Through me, she was allowed to learn things she'd never been allowed to before, and through her, I developed early-on a love for learning, and an appreciation of the natural world. Religion was presented, but God was posed as a loving, caring deity, who encouraged questions and loved little children. I wasn't afraid of God, but the questioning nature proliferated by my mother led me to wonder whether he wasn't much like Santa Clause, who's writing on the tags of my presents reading "From, Santa" I'd long ago noticed was exactly the same as the ones reading, "From, Mommy and Daddy." But then came Sunday school - LDS Sunday school.

My mother remembered having been outcast for being a Baptist in a small Mormon town, and so, with the best intentions at heart, she decided to convert us to the LDS church in order to save me from the loneliness of her own youth. The Mormons teach a loving God also, and that sat well with me as a small child. My favorite part of Sunday school was singing the hymns; my favorites included a hymn derived from Jesus' 'new' commandment, "as I have loved you, that you also love one another." ( Though, I find humor in retrospect that the song I always requested was "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree," which had nothing to do with the religion I was being taught, and was just a fun song for a child to sing. At the time, I didn't know the difference. ) But there was something I didn't know as I got older and continued to attend church; something my mother didn't tell me. In church, you aren't allowed to ask too many questions, and you are -certainly- not to be dubious at the answers provided. The answer I received for many questions started the first real shock-waves of doubt within me: "It's just the way it is. You have to have faith that Heavenly Father's plan is perfect, and we can't always understand it. Now stop being disruptive and let me finish the lesson." After being brought up to ask questions, being essentially told that asking questions and understanding the answers was bad really rather annoyed me. I felt an eyebrow raise, and I shut up, but the rest of the lessons began to become meaningless to me after being told this over and over again.

I continued to question inaccuracies, contradictions, and everything else that seemed wrong about Mormonism. My teachers began to see me as a disruption, because often the other students in the class would agree with me and lend their voices to the continually repeated, "But -why-? But -how-?" that I lended to the lessons. Eventually, one of the teachers asked my mother to keep me at home for a few Sundays, and that perhaps she should use that time to teach me how to be more 'reverent' in church. She never made me go back.

Throughout all of this church nonsense, I have fond memories of my mother and I cuddling up on the couch and watching re-runs of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. The answers I got there were far more engaging than anything I learned in church. The universe held a certain awe for me that was absent from Sunday school, and I quickly drifted away from the notion that I needed to go to church to learn anything worthwhile. Soon, I found the Discovery Channel, and I'd sit for hours learning about the natural world, and especially about the behaviors of animals. I didn't know the names for the fields of study at the time, but I was enthralled by Cosmology, Biology, Archaeology, and Physics - all provided to me by television and books. I don't remember watching many cartoons or children's programming. What I do remember is learning about lions on the Sahara, about black holes in outer space, about blue whales in the deep oceans, and how we are all made of 'starstuff.' School provided little sustenance for my curiosity, and I was in fact picked on heavily by the other students for being a 'know it all.' This was due to the fact that I often already knew the answers to the questions asked in class before the lesson was even taught - thanks to Carl Sagan, the Discovery Channel, and my mother's home-tutelage in reading and writing. My third-grade teacher even suggested to my mother that I not use such big words at school so that I could make more friends. My mother fumed. "Absolutely not! What kind of teacher are you? I will -not- tell my daughter to dumb herself down. Help -them- come up to -her- level!" The teacher quickly retracted her statement, but I never forgot that. Though, despite the discouraging atmosphere at school, at home and in the library I continued to fuel my curiosity. I basked in the light of knowledge, and my mother did so along with me.

It wasn't until my teens that I started to -really- doubt God. I had no idea there was such a thing as a deist, so when I sat down at my little electronic typewriter at around twelve or thirteen and typed out my thoughts on what God might be, I thought I was being truly revolutionary. God, I wrote, was the universe. So to understand the universe, was to understand God. Later I added that God didn't directly influence anything, but simply was everything that is - sort of the way we can't influence our cells directly, but they are nonetheless an important parts of our bodies. Us. The cosmos, the earth - every particle was God. I look back and laugh, now - I thought I was about to win a Nobel Prize due to this 'revelation' when I grew up.

I remember you mentioning the woman who simply didn't know not believing was an option, and that was exactly the case with me. I didn't know what an atheist was, but I knew religion was wrong, and that I had to find answers elsewhere. After that I had a short, childish career as a self-taught philosopher. Yet, through all of this 'soul-searching,' I occasionally went to church, mostly at the invitation of friends, but I took everything with a grain of salt. I only kept going thanks to my need to belong. I was socially outcast due to my demonstrative desire to learn, and I wanted so, so desperately to be a part of a community.

I stopped attending services almost entirely, but I continued to go to the 'Young Women's' meetings during the week. They always acted as though they genuinely liked me and wanted me there. So, craving friendship and feeling terribly lonely, I went. I even fell back into belief for a while. I shamefully remember a night at Girl's Camp. ( Girl's Camp is a camping trip held once a year for all the young women of a particular church Stake.) During a 'Testimony Meeting,' I bore my testimony; that I believed the church was true, that Joseph Smith was the true prophet... etc., repeating words verbatim that expressed what I had been told I believed. When I was done, I was dry-eyed. Another girl repeated these words, and in a heartfelt addition, wept about her conviction. I felt left out. Shouldn't I have cried too? My conviction was as strong as hers! So I raised my hand, and asked to give my testimony again, and I cried. I actually cried. Afterwards I was ashamed. I realized I was a hypocrite, and worse, that I'd been utterly brainwashed by a need to belong. During my tearful testimony, I absolutely felt the conviction of my words, but I did not once I was lying quietly in my tent before I fell asleep. I kept going to the camps, but one year I experienced something that left me shaken, and convinced me I was in a cult.

It was a perfectly benign thing, and certainly not something most people would even think of the way I did. They did nothing to hurt me, or anyone else, but there was something... creepy about it. They woke us up one night and led us, bleary-eyed, through the pine trees, and didn't tell us why. We arrived at a clearing, and two sisters with candles wearing white baptismal robes began to read from the scripture. I don't remember the lesson they were trying to teach, but I remember the sick feeling that I recognized this tactic as a kind of brainwashing. I became suddenly afraid, and had the eery idea that suddenly they'd make us all drink poisoned punch, and tell us that Jesus was about to take us up on his holy spaceship to Jupiter. Of course, nothing like that happened. It was completely benevolent, but I never saw the church the same way, and I never went back to the yearly camp after that.

I don't know when the turning point was, but slowly I lost faith in any kind of higher power, save for in the deistic sense. I never shared these doubts with my mother - I knew it would frighten her. It wasn't until the word 'atheist' popped out of my mouth one day that I even knew where my views did lie. It was when I heard a boy I knew from another school was an atheist that the word came out of my mouth in reference to myself for the first time. He was talking about something - hell, I think - and I turned around in my chair despite my profound shyness and boldly said, "Good thing there is no God, right?" He smiled at me and asked, "Wiccan or atheist?"
"Atheist," I replied. He nodded, and we shared a look of understanding. I'd found someone else who didn't believe in any of that rubbish! I wasn't alone! Unfortunately, I didn't know him well, and that was the last time we spoke of it.

After that, determined not to live the lie of calling myself a Mormon, I started calling myself a Buddhist. I did believe in some of the central tenants, and for some reason people accepted it far more easily than that awful, rabble-rousing word, "atheist," and really, I thought, atheism lacks a the beauty of having -some- belief. I'd even begun to dabble into the new-age mysticism that had begun becoming so popular. But then I went to college and read The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, and I started to think differently. I was still far too afraid to announce my views to anyone, however, not even to my understanding mother.

I remembered Carl Sagan from my childhood, and gobbled up his books. I began to view things differently, and he cured me of my brief flirtation with the ridiculous 'pseudo-sciences.' But still, I sensed that Sagan retained if not a reverence, but a kind of respect for religion in some sense, and so did I. I contended that announcing I was an atheist was downright rude, and discussing my views was ruder still. If I walked down the street with one of his books in my hand, I kept the title turned towards my body, afraid of someone wanting to start a conversation with me. 'Let them have their beliefs,' I thought, 'I should respect them. They are as valid as my own.' I kept a personal credo that discussion of atheism was strictly off-limits. It was a person thing, and not suitable for discussion with anyone else.

Shortly after reading these books by Sagan, my mother had confided in me that she had lost faith in religion. She still considered herself a Christian, but she felt no religion had it right. I thought perhaps she was ready to hear the truth, so I told her of my lack of belief (saying I was a Buddhist, though, as I was still afraid to say 'atheist') and handed her The Demon-Haunted World, with some of my notations and thoughts in the margins. She read it, and I waited nervously for her to finish and tell me what she thought. A few days later she called me, and I remember her saying, "My God, Cassi. I've been so blind." The oppressive weight of guilt and fear she'd carried so long were finally tugged off of her in one, fell swoop - she was free. We both cried with happiness for her. I can't help but look back at the fake tears of exaltation I'd shed for the sake of making others believe that I believed, and I compare the two moments now in my head. It's breathtaking to me how far both my mother and I have come.

But still, we had fear of a different kind. We whispered to each other of our newfound knowledge like it was a dirty secret. People in my town still came up to my mother randomly and said, "How is Cassi? She's such a sweet, gentle, spiritual girl. She has such a strong testimony. I always held her up as an example to my child of her age." We did nothing to deny this, but we didn't lie. Her house was the only place we spoke of this new way of thinking, and we still let the Mormon home teachers come in, and still let them think we believed. We both retained respect for religion, and thought society needed it. We thought ourselves a couple of odd, fringe weirdos and avoided people all-together when we could.

This was when a friend I'd been discussing atheism with over the internet told me about The God Delusion. After reading it, I just sat and thought for a few days. My journey towards atheism was a slow process, but The God Delusion hit me like a ton of bricks. Suddenly, I wasn't alone. I'd long thought that most scientists were non-literal theists, and so did my mother. We thought we were weirdos, that we were freaks, but your book assured me that religion had far more to answer for than my gentle non-belief. I remembered the horror-stories of my mother's youth, and felt a bit of, shall we say, righteous anger? I knew, finally, that I did not have to be so respectful of religion, and saw suddenly that the fact that we felt we had to hide as we did was just plain wrong. We simply have a different view of the origin and purpose of the universe! It's a philosophical opinion based on a scientific, logical way of looking at the world - not a dirty secret to be ashamed of. A weight of shame was lifted off of my own shoulders, and I felt proud - proud that I basked in the light of reason while others continued to wallow in the darkness of superstition. Again, I cried, but this time for myself. All my life, I'd thought I was an oddball, an outcast, an intellectual Quasimodo. Finally, finally someone said it was okay, and even good, to think for myself. I realized it is beautiful to be different, because most people today are slaves to ancient mythology. My fascination for science instead of fashion is a virtue, not the trait of a peculiar eccentric. What freedom I felt! I can't help it that, even now as I write this, I feel a lump form in my throat at this realization.

I shared the book with my mother, and she had the same revelation as I. She now clings to it constantly, reading it over and over. It's like armor to her, and truly comforts her. It's heart-warming to see, after the abuse inflicted on her by religion in her childhood. We joked after we both read it that we would like to see the looks on our Mormon neighbors' faces if we set the book out in plain sight for them to see. Then I said, "Why not? Why should we hide it?" And we don't, not anymore.

I can't express to you enough what your book has meant to both of us. The only way I can explain it is thus: Imagine that you're in a small, dark room with a single candle for light and warmth, huddled with one other person, afraid and alone. You know that if your candle should go out, there will be no more light in the room, no chance for survival, and no hope of escape.

Suddenly, someone flicks a switch, and the power comes on. The room you thought was small is revealed to be huge, and the room was actually filled, the entire time, with other people huddled near their own candles. You notice that you only didn't see the others' light because there had been small, cardboard barriers in the way. If only you'd had the courage, you could have easily knocked one down and joined a friend, but fear of the darkness kept you all apart.

Thank you, Professor Dawkins, for flipping on that switch for my mother and I. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Sincerely,

Cassi Hardy (And her mother, Bunny Thompson)

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Michel Rochon
Échantillonneur ASDE Survey Sampler
www.surveysampler.com

I remember very well the day that religion became an illogical fairy tale to me. I was 16, a Roman Catholic desperately searching for God. I was visiting Montreal and was taking in, St Josph Oratory. A friend said to me. ."Notice the marvellous architecture of the Basilica. And don't forget to visit the crypt of miracles. While you are there notice please that thrre are thousands of crutches given by cured people... but please note that there is not a single wooden leg."
It struck mw like a hammeer blow to the forehead. I first ascertained the truth of the statement. then it dawned on me (thia was surely the friend's intention all along) that if God is to intervene in human affairs by changing the laws of nature why not do it seriously. (growing a new leg) rather than in small measure (relieving the need for a crutch).
I never believed in miracles after that, and once miracles are removed faith cannot be far behind.

Michel Rochon

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Now that I have intellectually accepted atheism after 45 years of Catholic indoctrination, I find that I am more willing to express my views about atheism to others than I ever was able to do regarding Catholicism. I believe I always felt uneasy and awkward trying to "spread" the word of God because I was being intellectually dishonest with myself. Now that I have embraced atheism, I no longer feel that conflict and it is much easier for me to express my views regarding my atheism.

Regards,
Bill

Pennsylvania, USA

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The following charts my migration from Lutheran to what I call "D'Souzan"
(after Dinesh D'Souza) to Agnostic to Atheist, the last step, probably the
largest of them, came due to The God Delusion.

When I was a child my family raised me Lutheran in Cincinnati Ohio in the 80s
and 90s. Our pastor was really quite fundamentalist for an ELCA church.
Anyway, I was always fascinated by Christianity by proxy due to my fascination
of evil and the devil. I was not afraid, more fixated on the concept of evil.
The church showed us apocalyptic end-of-days videos (presumably the fore
bearers to the Left Behind series). I loved when they showed us the video
about subliminal messages in rock music. In hindsight thinking of KISS or
Queen as satanic is purely insane. But they taught it to me and they fully
believed it. Also, there were a few Numerology lessons! Thats right, in a
Lutheran church youth group. Even my father (who is very rational actually)
was shocked when I told him that. My dad once cussed out a Scientology
propagandist on the sidewalk one day as a youth, that was awesome.

While I learned non-standard Lutheran teachings at church, my father taught me
how to think (while still taking me to church) and my mother taught me to have
fun. There was never any question in my family about evolution, I was told it
was real and the bible was being metaphorical, so I had that going for me. I
remember the pastor's son who was in my biology class was clearly upset by some
of the science on evolution and would ask backhanded leading questions, but I
had no problem with evolution teaching in school. I totally absorbed
Christianity and I know what its like to be a 100% believer in God but not a
literal believer in the bible. I was the president of my "Luther League" and I
used to do readings and talk in front of the church. One of these readings I
wrote myself. It was the kind of stuff you hear Dinesh D'Souza, whom I did not
know of at the time, talking about today to rationalize his belief. Being
"D'Souzan" as I now call it (someone who uses science somewhat improperly and
logic very improperly, along with a healthy dose of mental acrobatics, to
justify belief in a specific God), acted as a kind of intermediate state
between irrationality and reason. I wonder how Dinesh hangs onto it, it is
such a transient state it seems to me. At this point I didn't really like the
concept of formal church, but was full on self righteous Christian otherwise.

One seed of doubt was planted when I read a passage aloud in my junior year of
high school in AP history (from a Document Based Question on a sample AP test),
and it was one of the first colonial leaders in early American history. Part
way through I came to a part where he was saying that he was so thankful for
Christianity because it helped the poor feel not so bad about their condition,
and kept them from rebelling. That may have been the single most important
thing I read in my lifetime in terms of getting me to think of "the flock" as
victims and religion as a mechanism. I wish I could recall who it was who
wrote that.

Another seed of doubt from my youth was during the "Confirmation" process. I
asked what happened after death to someone in India who perhaps never heard of
Jesus. The answer given was that they are children in Gods eyes, but no
scripture was given. He said that if they had heard the word of Jesus and
rejected it, they were going to burn. That answer was not fulfilling and had
me wondering, essentially, why I was any better than someone who was born into
a non-Christian family in modern times. This may be the key issue in my
conversion to Agnosticism: my humbleness and ability to see that our religion
is mostly determined by a function of who our parents are with infrequent
exceptions. I remember saying "if an innocent person can go to hell because of
where they happened to have been born, then so should I." Now THAT is
humility.

In college I stopped going to church and met a lot of different people. My
concept of evil started to change. No longer did it seem that evil was clear
cut, more abstract and in the eye of the beholder. And as my concept of evil
faded, so did my faith. The thing that sucked me in (evil) was now being
pulled out from under me. In the meantime my knowledge of Physics grew and I
left college as a weak Agnostic with a career in Software and a passion for
Physics.

Over time I felt very comfortable in that mode, and I never understood how one
could confidently call themselves an "Atheist". I didn't (and most don't)
understand the term and what it means. This went on for 8 years until I moved
out to California one year ago and was jobless for a while, so I had time to
think and read. To be honest, It all started because I looked up Richard
Dawkins on wikipedia because of the South Park episode where he gets to "know"
Mrs Garrison biblically!

That lead me to a series of articles which eventually lead me to the Beyond
Belief website! I proceeded to watch the entire Beyond Belief video series,
and was captivated by almost everyone (particularly Mr Dawkins, Rama, and Dan
Dennett's letter) but still needed convincing. I bought the God Delusion and
the argument style and logic was perfect to my tastes. I have some minor
disputes but overall The God Delusion converted me from a weak Agnostic to a
medium-strong Atheist. I think the key was strictly defining what was meant by
"God" right off the bat. Since then I have noticed that conversations
regarding "God" are often hard to follow because sometimes it means something
more abstract than other times. I always define my terms when telling someone
else I am atheist, so they know exactly what I don't believe in.

Since then I have become more of a Dan Dennett style Atheist than Dawkins (not
much difference there, but it exists) and my knowledge of both sides of the
issue has grown immensely. I have watched every debate by Dawkins, Hitchins,
and Harris that I could find. But it was The God Delusion that opened the
door, thank you Mr. Dawkins!

I don't think I have fully come out of the closet with my family. My friends
know without a doubt. I went to church for Christmas this year, and I provided
my family with a scathing critique of the sermon, which I had many issues with
morally, so they may suspect, but I doubt it. Attending a church service is
funny to me now. I look around and watch the other people. My favorite part
is the Nicean Creed. Now that I know what the Council of Nicea and
Constantinople are, this fundamental pledge seems to me to be almost admitting
to the man-made and arbitrary nature of the church! Oh well, at least I see
the light now and I act as a skeptical voice of reason for everyone I know (for
example I just convinced my best friend to stop blindly believing conspiracy
theories, and he now runs them by me first!).

Lets break this spell!
Ryan - San Diego, CA

7

Dear Mr. Dawkins,
I was raised in the baptist church. My mother was and still is very religious (herself raised in the church of the Nazarene) My father was an usher and collection counter every Sunday. (a job which, ironically meant he didn't have to actually sit in on the services. He just sat people and counted the churches money.) We attended church twice on Sunday. Our Sunday began with breakfast at the table (not a bad thing) while watching the likes of Robert Shueller and Billy Ghraham. This was followed by "Sunday School" starting at 9:30 then the regular service at 11:00. We would then go home until the evening service at 6:00. Through the week we attend several other functions of the church which included, a Wednesday youth group, bible studies, and the Saturday evening service. (just to make sure you were ready for Sunday).
It seems that my parents did every thing in their power to raise a good christian, and their efforts were paying off. Even though I always had questions I was totally sold on the idea of god, jesus, heaven, and "h e double hockey sticks". I think my questions were logical ones. Why didn't the bible say any thing about dinosaurs? Where did fossils come from? (I was told that fossils were just creative rock carvings. Or Satan put them there to confuse us). Why was god so mean to some people and so nice to others?
As I grew up I was beginning to notice contradictions and ignorance all around me. I played the electric bass in high school jazz band and I wanted to play in a church band that the youth group was forming. I was told by the music director that I could not play because electric instruments were "of the devil". He told me this with a straight face while wearing a microphone pinned on the lapel of his suit. I am certain, to this day, that he had no idea how ridiculous he sounded.
Fast forward through a life of questions, doubt, guilt, and education ( institutional as well as self prescribed) I married a catholic girl and had two children which we (she) agreed would be raised catholic. I just really didn't care either way. I was already an atheist, I just didn't speak up about it. I was allowing the lie to continue. I was surrounded by religion and to be honest I felt very alone. My oldest child died when he was six years old. I must shamefully admit that I had moments of doubt regarding my position on religion. Most of this had to do with guilt. (maybe god was punishing me for not believing), and the constant barrage of religious sentiment. The christian based condolences that I received from people actually helped me regain my senses. Although I smiled and said thank you for their words. "God works in mysterious ways" or "I'm sure that it all fits into gods plan". Fuck you!!!!!!!! What possible good could come out of god killing a little boy. I had to remind myself that they were just regurgitating the same crap that I was fed when I was young. No god killed my son. A VIRUS killed my son. Thats it. Thats all.
In the months and years that passed I began to see that my wife (soon to be ex-wife) was becoming more and more engrossed in religion and even started going to "spiritualist" for guidance. She was spending money on Silvia Brown and her crap slinging live shows, books, and video tapes. All this, at a time when we were already broke and worried about making our house payment. I do not reflect on this to point a finger at her. I am, however, tying to illustrate how futile and wasteful, both emotionally and financially, religion can be. This was definitely a factor in our divorce.
Even now, I am surrounded by christians (at this point my spell checker is pissing me off because I refuse to capitalize the word christian). I am no longer afraid to tell people, when I am asked, that I am an atheist. My girl friend has kept an open mind and I am very proud of her. However, her entire family is constantly trying to save me. I , at the same time, am trying to convince them that their god is not going to fix their messed up lives. they are the only ones that can do that.
These days, this is not what bothers me the most about religion. What really SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF ME is that it seems that everyone that gets elected to public office has to profess there resounding faith in god. How can we sleep at night while our leaders have one hand on the bible and the other on the launch codes. The world is full of people willing to kill you, me, themselves, and anyone who doesn't think like themselves, and I'm not exclusively talking about radical islamist. I am also talking about "god fearing" people right here in our own bible belt and little towns all over this land. People who are willing to kill a Jew (capitalized because it also denotes ethnicity), bomb an abortion clinic, or go to war.
I am out, I am loud, and I am pissed off. I no longer make excuses for my beliefs and I welcome debate. This is the only way to change the world. I want to do more. I want to make a difference in a logical, moral, and peaceful way.

Peace, Love, and reason
Brad Jacob

8

Growing up in a small town in Indiana, its ridiculously hard to tear away
from "faith".

Nevertheless, I have done so sucessfully.

I was raised to believe absolutely whatever the Bible taught me with a
literal translation. If it were not for the internet, and my parents
thankfully lenien t policy on it, I may still be deluded. I grew up in an
environment where questioning God was grounds for priveleges being taken
away, punishments at school, and ostracization.

I seriously believe I had it about as hard as the majority of homosexuals in
my area (possibly an exaggeration).

Anyway, I just wanted to thank YOU personally for telling me that my
eighteen years of suffering was worth it. I wanted to thank YOU for telling
me I'm not the crazy heretic I was taught to be. I wanted to thank YOU for
telling me that it's ok to come out of the closet. I was moved to tears
reading your book. I, a twenty year old human, was moved to tears at how
unbelievably stupid I had been for the past 17 years of my life.

Quite honestly, I'd follow you to the very gates of "hell" and back. There
is no way in which I can repay you or any of my atheist friends for freeing
me from this petty mental oppression. It would be wrong to say I worship
you, but you will always have my respect, and my word in a false accusation
upon you.

With my regards,

Davidov Christiansen

9

I'm an indonesian atheist. I was born and raised in Indonesia, a country where there is 0% official atheists. You can choose between 5 acknowledged religion, but u can't choose to not choosing. My family and friends is all religious, and most of them fundamentalist. Religion is everything in Indonesia, and people are being judged by their religiosity. Mysticism in our culture is very strong, and merged quite nicely with religion. The lack of education makes it worse. People have almost no sense of what science is, and why we must trust it. Even religious 'thinking', use our feeling more than your rational thinking, is being praised as a very good thing to do.

I'm very fortunate to have a great curiosity since i was a little kid. And a scientist, with research and inventions, is my dream of what i want to be like in the future. Discovery Channel opens my eyes to the great things in science, to evolution and natural selection, that being cursed and demonized in every church that i visit by many person that don't have any clue of what is it. I became liberal, and i'm working by reading a lot of books to find a solution, to unify evolution and religion. That works at first, until i learn much more about science. The pressure is greater and greater, and at some point i really think religion as just abstraction, metaphors, legend, as a goodwill story that tells u how to live your life better. But is it really better?, is it better to let religion controls your life?.

At last, last year, after a lot of self denial, a lot of 'running from the reality', i've realized that i'm not religious anymore, and not a believer at all. I watched every interviews and appearence of Richard Dawkins & Sam Harris, that i knew for the first time from the Beyond Belief conference. And i've learned that: Living as an atheist is not easy, but living as a theist is much much more unbearable. I begin my journey to coming out. To face the reality with open eyes. And my life is much happier & much better after that.

Karl Karnadi.

10

I converted after pretending to believe in the Mormon religion and doing all I could to convince myself of it's validity. But, there was always that "inner voice" saying telling me that this is ludicrous. Of course, religion has an answer for that, "You don't have faith - shame on you!" I looked for validation of the Mormon religion and proved to myself the absurdity of all religions. I have become recently disgusted with religion and the inhumane consequences of it today, particularly in the United States where the immoral majority is such a strong influence. A nation where George Bush can run havoc on the world for 8 years, is a nation in serious moral and intellectual trouble. Richard Dawkins is my hero. May his voice be heard!

Rob Kramer
drrobkramer@mac.com

11

I've just been reading loads of the stories on converts' corner and I feel compelled to tell you how I went from a half-hearted Christian to an agnostic to an atheist.



I'm 18 years old and I wasn't brought up to be excessively religious; my parents had me and my brother Christened and I've since asked them why they did it as neither of them believe in God (my dad's a vehement atheist like myself and my mum is a kind of pantheist, I think.) Apparently they had us christened to follow social convention, with the intention of making our lives easier. We did go to church when I was a kid, and one of my clearest childhood memories is of sitting in church when I was about 8 as the vicar droned on, and looking at the clock. There were 20 minutes to go until the end, and I tried to comfort myself, "That means that, in ten minutes, there will only be ten minutes more left." That was pretty much how I felt about Church. I did used to pray, usually for selfish things I wanted or wanted to happen, because, as a kid still ostensibly believing in God, I suppose I saw him as a kind of benevolent all-year-round Father Christmas. But of course I began realising that I didn't always get what I prayed for, and that furthermore if God really existed and was supposed to listen to and answer my prayers, why the hell was he bothering with them when they were so petty and there were so many genuinely needy people he should be sorting out instead? So, through a gradual process, by the age of about 10 I had decided I was "agnostic", but by the time I was 11 or 13 I was dissatisfied with the fence-sitting refusal to decide that this position entailed, and as I was sure it was more likely God didn't exist, I came down on the side of atheism.



I saw my religious friends doing their religious thing and I kind of felt regretful that I couldn't or wouldn't believe in this God that loved me... so although I was an atheist, I was not exactly a vehement or fulfilled one until I began learning more about religion in GCSE RE. The depths of its flaws and irrationality really shocked me, and the more I became convinced that religion was oppressive and based on nothing of substance, the deeper and happier an atheist I became (as well as an angrier and louder one) and I've never looked back.



Reading the God Delusion was a wonderful and extraordinary experience, a gift in fact, because you seemed to be taking everything that I had in my head as half-formed and inarticulate ideas and turning them into sparkling, beautifully rational, devastating arguments. Your book also coincided with me doing A-Level R.E. (which is more like philosophy really). Studying the arguments for and against God, and the theology of Christianity in depth has really, really reinforced my disbelief in God as well as my abhorrence (a strong word I know, but I mean it) of religion in all its insidious forms. I also discovered that I fall into the category of "Biological Reductionist", and I feel wonderfully liberated and invigorated knowing that this one life is my only life, and it's such an amazing one- I feel lucky and thankful to be alive, more than I ever could if I was religious. I also get very het up about people not thinking things through and refusing to be rational (many a heated debate in RE class has ended with the creationists calling me "evil" for being an atheist, which is infuriating. I've also been told I "shouldn't question God so much" and should "trust the Bible more". I mean, what kind of thinking is that? It isn't thinking.) During the A-Level course, one of my Christian friends has become an atheist, a devout Catholic friend has become a sort of pantheist, and another devout Catholic friend has become an agnostic leaning towards atheism. This makes me really happy, but sad at the same time, because it's really thinking about religion that has allowed them to dismiss it as the rubbish it is, but since most religious people never really think about what they believe, I guess they might stay trapped inside this blinkered worldview forever. Religion scares me, but I get a lot of comfort from coming to these websites and realising how many atheists there are and that we're not going to just get downtrodden or go away. Your book has gone such a long way towards helping me be a happy, fulfilled and proud atheist. Thankyou so much.


Josie, Essex, UK.

12

Dr. Dawkins:

I could tell a detailed testimony of my experiences but I'll cut to the conclusion. I shelved my true, curious nature in exchange for what was explained to me as the "real" truth, God and faith in him. After 7 years of truly believing, seeking, and trying to have a relationship with God, I realized I only had a relationship with my delusions and the suffering that resulted from my temporary separation with reason. It almost seems as if my brain knew I was holding it at religious gunpoint, and it "shouted pleas" if you will, as if begging, "Why isn't your reality matching your belief?"

We as a species learn, adapt, and evolve. I wonder if these same processes have set me free from the self-imposed mental handicap of religious faith. There's much I don't know, but I do know your book played a crucial role in slowing down the irrational merry-go-round of faith that had me dizzy and confused. At first I thought you were quite arrogant to question and disbelieve in my hero at the time, God. Now you, freethinkers, and rationality are my new heroes. I lock arms with all those interested in using reason based methods and tools to advance the human civilization and to promote discovery.

I thought I had eternity to live, but now I don't claim to know what happens at death--if anything more than merely death itself. I appreciate life so much more than I ever did as a Christian; not to mention, I have so much more joy and peace now. In the sincerest form possible, thank you Dr. Dawkins. You and other rational people saved me from wasting my life. Now that I've put a huge chunk of ignorance behind me, I can get to work on disposing more; I have quite the better chance now that I have rationality back.

Eternally, I mean, mortally grateful,
Brett Sanders
(Feel free to post my email - sanders.brett@gmail.com)

13

Mr. Dawkins,

For as long as I can remember I have stood morally opposed to organized religion, as the cons of such establishments far outweigh their pros. Even still i could not bring my self to denounce god. Only after reading "The God Delusion" did I realize that I was only carrying on the facade of belief for two reasons: Firstly so that society wouldn't view me as godless (which I now equate to reasonable and logical) and secondly because of the belief instilled in me (as a result of cultural pressure) that to question this great mystery of life is an unforgivable sin punishable by an eternity in hell. I, like most other people I know, have always let religion slide through my metaphorical netting of reason and logic.

You (and all scientists valiantly seeking truth and answers) have opened my eyes to the magnificence of the world we live in and the lives we lead. I realize now how infinitesimal the chances of life are, and living in this time period where we have answers (if we choose to embrace them) is truly something to appreciate. Why should one spend their lives serving something in which they serve out of fear? Why not dedicate ones existence to knowledge in order to understand where we truly do come from and what really does make us tick instead of accepting what some authority figure told us when we were impressionable children?

Your efforts are valiant Mr. Dawkins, and for humanities sake I hope that you are fondly spoken of many generations from now, for that will mean that we have taken a step in the right direction towards a world without religion. A world of expanded mind, knowledge and technology; all of which are hindered if not halted by religion. Likewise, a world lacking in terrorism, genocide, and hate; all of which are condoned if not encouraged by religion.

Thank you for your efforts.

Robert Meek

14

Dear Dr. Dawkins,

I was raised in a Southern Baptist household and had the fires of hell burned into my mind from a very young age. I first "gave my life to Christ" at about eight or nine because I desperately wanted to avoid eternal suffering and torment. I didn't know much about Christ except that he was "the good guy." Really, it didn't matter who he was; if he could get me out of burning forever, sign me up.

As a teenager, my faith began to waver due to my own habit of self doubting. I would constantly question myself: "Do I believe enough? Do I think about God's constant prescense enough? What about when I'm sitting in class or watching TV at home? If I really believed, surely I should feel and be aware of God at all times?"

And, of course, the most hideous question of all: "Am I really saved?" That was the big one. I still didn't much care for God or his son. In any other book, they would surely have been the villain and heaven didn't really sound that great, either. But hell... I would do almost anything to avoid that.

For three years, I was racked by huge doubts. I went to a revival at the local church and listened to a pastor named Jamie Ragel who told what he claimed was a true story: An athiest on his deathbed at the hospital, snubbing his nose at Ragel who had come to pray for him. And then, as the young pastor left the room, the man began to die. At this point in the sermon, the pastor solemnly, quietly said that he heard the dying man's last words.

And then, with a hideous, bloodcurling shout, Ragel screamed "Oh, God! I feel the burning demon's hands dragging me into hell! Save me!"

I went forward that night again to be "saved," completely terrified that I would end up in hell. I spent hours in Christian chatrooms and groups, debating with sure-minded, asking them if they thought I was saved. Sometimes I would get into heated debates about God's existence at all, and every answer they would provide was never good enough. It wasn't enough to convince me. Eventually they would become exasperated and tell me that they would pray for me, but that clearly my heart wasn't ready for God or that I was willfully turning from him.

I went on to read Christian apologist books by people like Lee Strobel. While momentarily comforting, his arguments for God's existence still weren't quite as convincing as I would have liked.

Finally, about a year and a half ago, I became an agnostic. I don't know how it happened or when, but I do know that I began to seek out books and articles that I would have been terrified to touch when I had feared losing my faith.

Eventually I learned of you.

Tonight, as I type this, I have the God Delusion sitting in my lap. I just bought it several hours ago and have been reading it enthusiastically. I really believe this -- as well as videos of yourself and others on youtube -- have finally pushed me over to the side of the athiest. And... I feel elated! I don't feel the terror and despair I always iimagined I would. I feel somehow more open, like I can finally accept whatever the world has to show me and not worry that it will somehow shake my very being to the core. If the world has something that amazing and exciting to show me, I say bring it on! I don't have to fear that it will destroy my belief in something I already found somewhat unbelievable. I can seek and learn with the kind of wonder that is suppoed to accompany that pursuit.

I think I realized how far I'd come when, just a few moments ago as I was reading your book, I wondered "What would God say if he saw me reading this? Would he be sad? Would he shake his head?" And only then did I notice what a different mindset that was and how I had not been in it for some time. I was momentarily afraid that I would "revert" back to belief, as though it were that easy. But now I know that it's not about just arbitrarily believing something for the sake of it. Now if I am going to believe it, I will look for facts and supporting evidence, and what's more, I won't be AFRAID of that evidence.

I'm sorry, this has been long and rambling. I don't know if you or anyone else will read this, but I do know that it has felt good to let it out. Thank you for your outspoken, inspiring work. I wish I had read the God Delusion during my time of doubt. It would have brought more comfort than any book of Christian apology.

Sincerely
Brandon Parker

15

Dear Sirs/ Madam:

I wanted to write and tell you about my path to atheism. While I was raised roman catholic, I was always a skeptic about religion but never about god. At university, I investigated the usual suspects of "eastern" religious philosophy and found them just as wanting as christianity. But I still couldn't or wouldn't let go of god (apologies to J. Sweeney). I thought I had to keep searching (albeit in a very lackadaisical fashion) for a proper religion to fit my belief in a god. But that all changed in 2007.

On July 10th, 2007, I donated my former left kidney to a stranger who, as of this writing, I have never met. He and I were a perfect match on all levels of compatibility. I had thought about becoming a living donor for sometime and decided I needed to take action before I got too much older (36 at the time). This decision was not made lightly, but I will never regret it. There was a feeling of 'maybe that's really why we're here' after I did this (along with a little pain).

One of the book I read during my convalescence was The God Delusion by Dr. Dawkins. I had started the book before but had lost it in the shuffle of other things I was reading. Now I started again and devoured it. When I reached the part about empathy and genetics, I begun to realize god wasn't necessary. But the end of the book, I was finally ready to part way with this mystical idea and embrace the beauty and responsiblity of a scientific world. Thank you again, Dr. Dawkins.

The person to whom I donated is still doing well. Our transplant coordinator always says there must have been someone special guiding our being paired up. I just smile and think 'it's all in the genes'.

Sincerely,
Dalton R. Pownell

16

Professor Dawkins,

Ive been brought up catholic by my family and the schools i attended. Due to my critical nature i begun to question my beleif around the same period as you did. During my late teens a didnt beleive in god but cared nothing for it - although im now an atheist in category 6, leaning towards 7 just as you are.

Ive been through some rough patches in my life - my best friend is strongly catholic. Ive even occasionally in the past tried to convince myself that he did exist just for the comfort and assurance i would feel.

However, about a year ago after i first found out about you, ive never been so passionately enthusiastic about knowledge and life in general. You know how people after near death experiences say how preciously they value each day from then onwards - Your my "near death experience". It really is a life changing event and am so ever gratefull that a man as your character can so vividly get the message out for so many.

May your good work continue

Matt

17

I'm another "dawkins convert" of sorts, and it was essentially one sentence that did it for me.

To be fair, Sam Harris started the process. I had been reading The End of Faith and was taking prodigious notes in hopes of emailing the author with praise and a detailed explanation of how my religion (Jehovah's Witnesses) was the exception to criticism with which he had lambasted christianity. I had been down this road before; I was a near expert at pointing out the distinction.

I had not yet reached the parts of the book that would defy my distinctions and exceptions when, while browsing in a bookstore, I opened The God Delusion and read only the opening sentence of chapter two:

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser,; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Put simply, I could not defend Jehovah from this lucid and devastating accusation because my brain already knew it to be true. The direct and vituperative statement by Mr. Dawkins demanded an answer. It was like one of the well-crafted questions I had been trained to ask people of other religions. These were designed, often by me, to reside in the mind of their recipient, haunting that one's convictions until my "return visit", whereupon I would ask if they had come up with a sensible reply...

I could neither reply nor circumvent the explications of this sentence.

Thank you, Mr. Dawkins. By your willingness to forego tact where it would clearly have exceeded its utility, you ripped off the warm, protective blanket of my confirmation bias and gave me the key to the prison door that had held me fast for half of my life.

Free at last, free at last.

PS: Mr. Dennett, Mr. Harris, Ms. Hecht, Ms. Armstrong, and the wonderfully irreverent Mr. Hitchens have finished the job.
---------------------------
Don Kennedy
don@donkennedymusic.com

18

I can't remember which I stopped believing in first, god or Santa.

I went to church every Sunday and enjoyed the singing and the picnics, but caused a few too many problems pointing out inconsistencies when I was promoted to the bible class. My mother was encouraged to allow me to play Sunday league football and at 14 I did. I was by then a devout atheist, but I could only explain why I was an atheist by saying that religion simply didn't add up. I couldn't put it in an incontrovertible, simple way until I read The God Delusion.

So thanks, not for altering my beliefs, you didn't, but you gave me a way of explaining it.

I thought that I was well educated but I realised that I was unable to express evolution, so I read The Selfish Gene, which answered my questions, but created some new ones, so The Blind Watchmaker was needed and it did indeed answer these. I also read Climbing Mount Impossible, and The Ancestors Tale, which I very much enjoyed.

Although I say you didn't change my beliefs with The God Delusion, that isn't entirely correct. I used to believe that it was right, that people who were stupid enough to believe this stuff, were allowed to, in fact protected in order to, but I have changed my mind. The damage caused is too great and I now believe it is vital that we rid humanity of religion, and although my confidence level in our ability to do this is low, I hope that yourself and others, and me if I can, may be able to push us slightly in the right direction.

I have heard some great arguments from yourself and others about religion and how it simply doesn't add up, but I have one of my own, sort of, and I would like to share it with you.

When I was in the RAF I was told that the welfare system of the military was the chaplains and although an atheist would have to get my advice from the Chaplin, religion was irrelevant. I said why would I take the advice of a man that believes in the existence of god. Why not he says? I said ok would you expect me to take financial advice from a man that believed in Santa? Maybe I should get contraceptive advice from someone that thinks there are fairies at the bottom of the garden. Its not an argument I've heard, but every time I hear about a great man who happens to be religious, all I can think of is how can this persons opinions be taken seriously.

I just don't get it, and I don't understand why religion is allowed this respect and Santa, who at least gave out presents, only gets it from the under 8s.

David Kivlin

19

Professor Dawkins,



I read the God Delusion and thought it an excellent book and thoroughly well written. Although it did not convert me as I have always been very vary of Religion and its authenticity. I have never really been able to fully believe even as a young child that there is an all powerful being, that controls everything from the most powerful storms to the smallest butterfly. Questions abounded in my mind about the veracity of the claims that religion makes. So I sought other ways of explaining my existence: Physics, biology, chemistry and of course some of the more humanistic sciences like Psychology. This helped me enormously as I finally came to the conclusion that although our lives are comparatively short they are definitely worthwhile and there is no need for a fantastical after life, who really would want to spend eternity with relatives that they don't even like anyway.

My parents although religious themselves did the right thing and gave me the tools to think objectively about religion and anything that seems not really on the level. I thank them and even to this day my father and I can have a heated debate on religion without getting upset or violent. I totally agree with you that converting children is an absolute abomination and should be stopped. How dare anybody take away a child's choice to choose.

I would just like to thank you for the book because although it did not convert it gave me confidence to voice my opinions on religion and fully recognise that I am indeed an atheist and proud of it.

Thank you,
Bjorn - Australia

In every Village there is an extinguisher of Knowledge - the Clergyman and a bringer of knowledge - the teacher (although in some states of the US not so sure anymore :)

20

Dear Professor Dawkins,

My deconversion from Catholicism was a long process. I wasn't baptized when I was born because my mom wasn't religious and my dad was a non-practicing catholic. It wasn't until after my parents divorced and my dad married a catholic that I began attending church every other Sunday with them. Shortly after that, I was enrolled in a catholic elementary school. (I don't blame my mother at all for doing this. The public schools in my town are some of the worst in the country, and the private secular schools are ridiculously expensive. I ended up with a really good education, despite the religious indoctrination.) All the kids in my first grade class were catholic. In the second grade, they were supposed to get their first communions. My teacher talked about it with us in class, and I knew that I hadn't been baptized. My teacher told me that if I didn't get baptized right away, I'd be excluded from all of their preparation activities. As an 8 year old, this was basically a way of saying that I'd be the outcast, and I didn't want that. I begged my mom to let me get baptized. I knew all the motions of church and just wanted to be like everyone else. I got baptized and I got my first communion. For a while, between the ages of 8 and 11, I prayed a lot. I believed in god, and was afraid to doubt. People talk about catholic guilt...I was weighed down by it heavily.

Along my journey through the rest of grade school, it was repeated over and over that gays, divorce, co-habitation, and a litany of other things were bad bad bad! God didn't like those things. I noticed that religion had a way of controlling what people did...and I began to think that my priest and the nuns at my school probably lived depraved, sad lives since they had to obey so many rules. My mom was very liberal and told me that what matters most is that we are good people and don't hurt or kill anyone. That was cool with me. I didn't want to kill anyone, and I didn't want to spend my life micro-managing my actions.

I became agnostic in my pre-teen years and stayed there for almost 10 years. I wanted so badly for someone to either convince me that god was real, or convince me that he wasn't. I hated being in the middle. Last year, when I was 20, I stumbled upon an internet review of The God Delusion, and that's where it started. I specifically remember googling "Richard Dawkins", and finding a person who had been saying what I wanted to hear, and who wasn't just a rebellious kid who wanted to say he was an atheist to make his parents mad. This was a respectable, intelligent, grown man who had thought everything out...I knew then that it was okay for me to let all the fairy tales of my childhood go with the wind. I read the God Delusion, and then in a huge wave, I read the rest of your books. My view of the world has been turned upside down. I can now co-habitate with my boyfriend who I love (and who also doesn't believe in god) without feeling like there's a grumpy old man staring at me from the sky, planning my demise. I feel an overwhelming sense of freedom, and a new appreciation for the world. If it weren't for your books, I'd still be teetering between delusion and reason. I cannot thank you for helping me find the answer.

Ashley W.

21

Professor Dawkins,

On this last day of 2007 I am looking forward to starting the new year without the myth of god. This comes at the end of a 2 1/2 year search for god. I was a cradle catholic, 8 years of seminary, and at 48 finally realized the lunacy of religion. Am married, with 2 girls, which I hope haven't been permanently damaged by my past attempts to "instill" god in their minds. A brief talk with them on this subject proved promising.

My life has been a battle between what was taught by the church/bible and the reality of life itself. At about 23 I had a brief thought that man created god. I dismissed it at the time (if only I had followed it through). Then 2 1/2 years ago I woke up one morning to the feeling there was no god. So I entered the so-called spiritual "buffet line", with all it's different books and beliefs. I found that essentially they were all the same. My default setting kicked in and I surmised then that this was the same god in different incarnations.

The last group I was involved with (A Course In Miracles) explained that this was all a dream and we were still asleep in "heaven" as god's son. Quite the escape from life. A dissenter on line mentioned the Hitchens/DeSousa debate. This led to more investigation and to the current 4 Horseman, yourself obviously included. It's like I was waiting for permission to not believe in god, if that makes sense. The brain-washing is thorough in its application. It has been refreshing to say the least. It's like finding out there is no santa claus. Some stories just take longer to play themselves out.

Thank you from mid-america,
Jim (croatcat)

22

Professor Dawkins,

I have always considered myself an agnostic... I believe in science but have always thought that there must be something else - a case of hope over experience I suppose.

I have just read The God Delusion and your reasoning for coming out loud and proud blew me away... Thank you.

I was reading it on the bus and an elderly lady near me commented to a fellow passenger that she too had read The God Delusion and that it had "changed her life... all those years of going to church and everything she had been brought up to believe... it was [is] a marvellous book and everybody should read it" She went on to say that "how much pain and suffering would be done away with if we got rid of religion?" This lady was 80 if she was a day, had probably been brought up to believe in God, Queen and Country, but you managed to reach her...

If only the leaders of churches were so open minded - wouldn't it be fantastic if the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, Chief Rabbi or Ayatollah stood up and said: "You know what, it's all a big con - we've been having you on for all these years - forget this nonsense, go and spend your time caring for people instead of killing them for 'belief'."

Can we start a campaign to get atheism to be part of the national curriculum? And also a campaign against the likes of Vardy???

Thank you for bringing me off the fence.

Adam Costello
UK

23

Hi Prof. Dawkins,

I am a 23 year old atheist-convert from India. My family has a history of anti-orthodoxy. My grandfather was one of the founders of a Communist party in India!

Before I start, it would be better if I gave a short introduction to the kind of "cross" that religious Hindus have to bear. It does not consist of holding on to mind-numbing beliefs like Christianity or Islam, but mostly consists of mind-numbing rituals and customs. The caste system is largely based on such rituals and customs.

But, it was with a background of relatively free-thought that I was raised and my father greatly encouraged my intellectual development by buying me a lot of books from an early age. My father by the way is an atheist. However, by some miracle or coincidence ( ? ) I was suddenly drawn to Hinduism. Of course, my family was still nominally Hindu and did not follow any rituals or customs.

At around the age of eighteen when I had started to attend engineering college, I discovered at my home a copy of the "sacred" Bhagvad Gita that we had bought at a local Hare Krishna temple. I began reading it and became kind of intoxicated by the sheer irrationality and "purity" of its doctrine (or at least the interpretation as presented by that translation). A life dedicated to Krishna seemed the only way forward. Soon I started worshipping the idols that had stayed in my family. Then I started visiting temples. My relationship with my family also began to suffer since I started to view them as "impure heretics".

Then I discovered Hindutva, the political doctrine that proclaimed the superiority of Hindus over all other Indian peoples. Later I discovered more orthodox Hindu sects and soon had my father perform my "scared thread" ceremony. I then joined a neighborhood "Guru" who taught students of my caste the Vedas and started performing all the Hindu rituals three times a day. This went for a year or so. By then I had finished college and was working in a multinational software company. At that time, I was beginning to lose my faith in the rituals as well as the Vedantic philosophy as well as Hindutva.

I was beginning to become much more liberal in my politics and my beliefs. I soon discovered "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. This was like a reawakening for me. The radical rational ideas presented in the novel went to my soul and I slowly started moving firmly away from Hinduism. Once I discovered you on the net, I saw all your videos. I remember meeting a son of my former Guru in an internet parlor while I was watching one of your videos online! Finally, I ordered "God Delusion" from Amazon with my salary money and officially "converted" to atheism. However, over the past one year, I have been trying to explore other religions like Catholicism, Islam and others. Though these seemed far superior to Hinduism by many counts, I still felt something lacking in their teachings (perhaps, truth?). I slowly drifted away from Ayn Rand and her dogmatic cult as well. Now I am in the US for my masters degree and I feel alienated from my fellow Indian students here who are all devout Hindus, except for a few. I really want to get to know a few American atheists and libertarians to try and cure my loneliness. I welcome anyone of such leanings to contact me by email at freeradical.1984@gmail.com.

Peace,
Abhishek RK

24

Dr. Dawkins,

I'm 19 years old. Until 2 years ago, I thought that God created the universe (with light in motion) in seven glorious days. Then I met a friend and had a late night conversation about religions role in society and blind faith in a man in the sky. Three weeks ago, after much debate with myself, I told my parents that I was an atheist. I hoped that they would understand, because I understood why they believed in God. It was an easier way to deal with things for them, and that was okay. However, my mother cried and my dad yelled. They couldn't understand how I could commit such a heinous crime as turning my back on God. After all, they said, I had believed it all my life (not entirely true). Now they pretend it didn't happen, but I can sometimes here them talk about it - mostly they say that "we have to love the sinner but not the sin" - or scoff when scientists try to find scientific reasons for things in the bible.

I just want to thank you for providing some reason for the rest of the world and explaining how ridiculous and improbable it is to believe that something created nature as it is now instead of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.

It's hard having a family who hates you secretly and thinks you've committed the ultimate crime, but I take comfort in know that I haven't wasted my life believing in something that is improbable when science explains everything in a highly probably way.

Thank you for what you're doing.

-Erik Guetschow, someone who just came out of the religious closet

25

Hi I'm Jeff and I'm a flat out Atheist. I do like the name because it gives me a bit of identity. I was once upon a time catholic but i had always seen it as a bit of a chore and a reason to wake up early on a week-end. Didn't love the complete lack of privacy either. I did have a communion but that's about it. When my parents divorced my mother was practically excommunicated and i went with her so i never took it seriously. I did start going to Sunday school at the urging of my father but it wasn't taken seriously by anyone including the teacher. Eventually i stopped going altogether. And for a while i just put it out of my mind. It didn't help the papal cause when most of my years at catholic school i was bullied by other kids. When i started seeing the church portrayed in a good light like on the Simpsons and in gangs of new york and Rudy i started doing things for lent and attending mass. I'll tell you the first minute i stepped into that place every bad memory i ever had came rushing back. And by this time i had done a bit of research and found out that the bible was about as accurate as Grimm's fairy tales. So one day I'm sitting in a bookstore and i buy a copy of the God Delusion. I bought it mostly for finding out what the fuss was all about. I had heard the conjoining propaganda, Hitler was an Atheist vs pedophile priests. But until i read that book i had never thought there was any real way of existing without god. Around the fourth chapter when i realized the universe is too big for it to have been created by any one person or thing that was it the deity's hold was gone. I read an outline of existentialist philosophy and that gave me a million times more satisfaction than anything i had ever heard in church. My father gave me Francis Collins' book and CS Lewis' Mere Christianity to try and turn me back. I read a few pages and then decided to return them and get Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great. They were Bullshit.

26

Hi Richard,

Thanks for being a beacon for those of us who feel surrounded by religious nonsense. I have struggled for so long with religion, never able to wrap my mind around it, or find what it was that made people believe this stuff when it was so obviously silly or even sick. The story of Abraham sacrificing his son was the most horrific thing I ever came across as a child - and this story was taught to us as proof of his incredible OBEDIENCE to God! That was when I got it - it was all about obedience - not love, charity, morality or any of that - it was all about obedience.

I was raised in a fairly liberal Presbyterian church. There wasn't really any fire and brimstone - a lot of fishing stories maybe, and a little hanky-panky in the church office (one pastor ran away with the church secretary). I could not comprehend how we were being preached to about these crazy stories, how we were being told that losing our virginity before marriage meant we were going to burn in hell (meanwhile you wouldn't believe what was going on with our youth group) and it was all supposed to be this great religious saving experience. I tried, I really tried to believe. I learned the right vocabulary, the right vapid smile to put on my face - but felt nothing but empty inside.

You know what gives me shivers and makes me thankful to be alive? Pictures from the Hubble Telescope. Kisses from my guinea pig. Sunshine through tree branches. The uninhibited joy in a dog's greeting. Not because some great male god made all this stuff for us to be lords over - but because it's miracle enough in this gigantic universe that we can feel and experience such things. That dogs, and sunshine and telescopes exist and the universe does make sense when you truly see what it is - and the more we learn the more amazing it is. To me, evolution is a far more miraculous and inspiring story than Genesis. I also don't need some big authority figure giving me ridiculous rules to follow when I have a very good inner sense of right and wrong and brain and senses that I can rely on to tell me what is going around me. I like being a free-thinking self-reliant adult.

I am glad I don't believe in religious nonsense. I feel more secure knowing that this universe is the great and immense thing that it is - and I have a mind to encompass it. I also feel comforted to know there are others out there who feel and think much like I do.

Thank you for your work. It is deeply appreciated.

Sincerely,

Julia Singh

27

Not actually having been brought up in any religion, except perhaps a bit of C of E nicety, I expected simply to be validated by TGD.

As it turns out, the book changed my life and really did convert me. You see my mother is a compulsive liar - she lies about all sorts of random things, all designed to paint her as a great, benevolent person "saving" those less fortunate than herself.

For instance, when I started smoking weed and moved out of her house when I was 17, she told people I was a heroin addict, but that she was still standing by me.

I knew mum was a liar, and I think I'd always known it, but the family and everyone around her accepted it, took her word for things, no matter how outlandish and damaging to the subject of her lie, and simply got into the habit of living within her reality - she was the dominant person in our family.

On the odd occasions she was challenged about something that had come back to me, she would simply deny having said anything, and I would accept it and try to forget about it,

It was not until I read the memetic theories, cargo cult stories and psychological explanations for religion that I began to see what she had done and break free.

The major survival trait of the Christianity meme is "believe this or you go to hell". I realised that Mum had never been stopped, contradicted or even properly challenged, because her memes had the survival trait "believe this or I'll make your life hell".

She did, and still does, keep to the absolute line that everything she says is true and she never lies (despite having recently been presented with countless cast-iron cases showing the opposite), and uses emotional blackmail ("how can you believe so-and-so and not your own mother") to raise feelings of guilt and fear.

It took me 23 years and TGD for me to realise that I had, after all, been pretty much brought up in a religious cult, even if this particular god was my mother.

I know this might seem trivial in comparison to what other people have been through in actual religious indoctrination, but thanks Richard, you really have changed my life.

Camilla

28

I was brought up as a Catholic (my mother is a strict Catholic). I was Christened, Baptised, Confirmed, and had to go to Church every Sunday. I went to a Catholic primary and secondary school (where I was given "religion education") and even prayed every night like a good little girl should. I was indoctrinated, as were my brother and sister. I was never given the opportunity to doubt the beliefs thrust upon me and my childhood dreams/nightmares were often filled with religious imagery (the result of having to go to Church every Sunday to listen to the bizarre readings and witness bizarre rituals).

I remember the day I felt the first pang of doubt in my mind. I was about 18 and I was playing hymns (on the piano) one Sunday for my local Caltholic Church. The priest talked about women becoming priests and poured scorn and mockery on the Church of England for allowing them to do so. I was shocked (although I had heard such nonsense and bigotry before) and in that instant it was as though the scales had fallen from my eyes. His silly comment somehow fired a synapse in my brain and my "beliefs" started to unravel. I started to read the Bible properly, with fresh eyes and I realised quickly that this could not be the word of God. I read the Dead Sea Scrolls Deception and felt physically sick. When I gave a copy of the book to one of my school friends, his mother (a devout Catholic) took the book away and told him not to read it. (Incidentally, this school friend has recently become a Catholic priest, much to my sadness). I became somewhat bitter about all my lost Sundays and about the religious "education" I had received, from a very young age. I felt incredibly angry at having been taught pure myth as though it were irefutable fact. We were taught very little quality science in my school, something which I am incredibly upset about. We were taught "balanced science" (rather than physics, chemistry and biology) and I do not recollect ever having been taught anything (for example) about evolution or about Einstein's theories. I am now trying to make up for it by devouring as much real science as I can.

For a long time I was the only atheist I knew (and I still do not know many!), however reading Richard Dawkin's books has given me such confidence. Knowledge is power, which is why so many religious people are frightened of science (and which is why, I believe, I had such an impotent scientific education at school). When I have children I am going to make sure they do not go to a religious school and that they are encouraged to embrace science and the joy of learning about the natural world.

29

As a young child, I followed my mother to church every Sunday. I never understood why I had to go but I did, because my mother will punish me for defying her. So I grew up with bible knowledge and never had a relationship with God.

As I went to school to study science, I became very interested in getting knowledge. I wanted to know more. I wanted answers. More importantly, like most of us on Earth, I wanted to know why I'm here.

As I moved into the field of Biology, I was taught about Evolution. As I trace back life's origin, it lead me to the knowledge of single cell organism. I have learnt a lot about evolution. Great books by Richard Dawkins are really inspiring and thought provoking.

So by then, I started to question, is the bible account or the evolutionary process true? The more I read, the more I find it convincing that Evolution is the process of how I'm here. Right then, I threw out every ideas about the Bible.

I spent probably around 7 years knowing that life on Earth is all there is. No God! No Heaven! No Hell! I was probably happy. A very happy intellectual atheist. I love knowledge and I love to know more.

So I study very deep into science and get many views from many scientist. However, here comes my conversion. The more I study, the more I find evolution not feasible. Evolution just doesn't work out. There are too many flaws and many of the theories proposed to cover up the holes takes a great amount of faith to believe.

That's when I realised that life is way too complex for random mutation to produce. Sure, Natural Selection can pick out those who survive, but mutation must be there to form it first. From then on, I started to lose faith and look into other theories that is able to cover up these flaws.

All these theories are so much more feasible, suggesting that a intelligent being bringing and forming everything to existence. As I examine deep into the facts, the more I am convinced evolution won't work and these evidence requires an explanation.

I compared it with the bible account and it matched perfectly, explaining the cause of mutation, the long-age readings of dating methods found, etc...

I know "The God Delusion" book tries to explain how God is a tyrant, but it doesn't mean God does not exist. Whether God is good or the worst liar, is another question in my life. I just wanted to know if such an intelligent being exist.

My intelluectual happiness now is still on the same level as I was as an atheist. But my spiritual happiness is so much stronger.

I love these great books from great people like Richard Dawkins. It's very thought provoking and really questions my faith. I would really recommend such books to my peers, atheist and non-atheist. My faith in God is so much more strengthen because of such great people!

Thank you so much!


Regards
ProFire

30

Dear Professor Dawkins,

I grew up in a Baha'i family in California. Although in college I espoused the faith of my upbringing as my own, I recently converted to 'strong agnosticism' with regard to metaphysics... largely as a result of your work. I will not take up so much space here to highlight details of my spiritual journey, but I will say that the trip has cost me my marriage of two and a half years (although my ex is now doubting too) and possibly my (already shaky) relationship with my father. What is redeeming about this experience is that it is not attended by any regret. I feel liberated to have achieved a new level of understanding in my quest for truth. I now seek, through polite conversation, to reach out to others of my old faith-tradition to question the reasons for their beliefs. I'd like to thank you personally for inspiring me to be open about my doubts, without fear or hesitation.

Sincerely,

Salman B. Oskooi
San Diego, CA, USA

31

Dear Dr. Dawkins,

I've read some of the conversion stories on your website and was a little suprised to see so many people who grew up the same way I did, feeling similarly as well. I was baptized at the age of 2 (I was adopted so who knows! It may have been my second time getting splashed with water!), was enrolled in the Catholic School Board system, had first communion along with all my peers and received confirmation because everybody else was doing it. Ever since I learned how to read, I couldn't stop. I devoured all sorts of books, but especially loved the myths and legends and stories that took place in fantastic other worlds (like the chronicles of narnia) and also, at least at first, to a lesser extent, history. When I was given a copy of the Children's Bible, I thought "hey, cool, another book". As I read the book, I continued to look at it in terms of mythology, legend. Even at Church or at school in religion classes, there was always something that just didn't sit quite right. I even joined the "Youth Ministry" at my local diocese, even though I could tell that every time I prayed aloud with the group, the words rang hollow in my ears. In high school I was taught religion by a plain clothes nun who said that evolution was alright, as long as you gave god the credit in the beginning.

Then I started getting into history, and really getting into the Reformation of the Church. I can thank my gr.11 history teacher for giving our class a list of topics, from which I chose to research "the Reformation of the Church: Spiritual or Material?". At the time, looking at the arguments, basing my opinion on my research and on my own precarious position on Religion, took the stance that it depended on whose position you were looking at. However, these days I cannot look at the Church at all without realizing how material it all is. They talk about the sanctity of the soul, and yet what do they fight over? Material things like who owns what country, who should or shouldn't be able to terminate a pregnancy. The Crusades were horrific, the Inquisition a ghastly piece of work that sometimes is forgotten amongst more recent history. The Christians of the world feel that they are so right, and I've had a discussion with a Korean Christian who argued that only through her church could a person get into heaven. I tried to argue the idea that "hey, if there's a heaven, and a god, wouldn't it be logical that since the world is so large and cultures so varied that there would be more than one path to 'salvation'?" According to her and her priests, not a logical way of thinking at all.

I spent a month in Italy seeing all the spectacular churches and artwork. I've been to the Vatican, heard the last pope speak, saw the Sistine Chapel and felt no overwhelming sense of "faith". No kinship, nothing. I wasn't moved at all, religiously speaking. For awhile, I felt a bit jealous of other people who had faith, even extreme faith, as my education as a Roman Catholic taught me that something must be wrong with me if I didn't believe. After university I came to South Korea to teach English, and have finally, after many years of researching everything from Christianity, Buddhism, Wiccanism, but most importantly, history, come out as an Atheist. I've had the feeling that I was one for quite some time, but felt a bit uncomfortable with the label. However, after reading a few more books, among them a book called The Mythic Past by Thomas L. Thompson, I concluded with certainty to myself that the Bible is indeed a work of fiction, however I differed in Thompson's assertion that just because the Bible could be a work of fiction, did not mean that it was any less true. To me, the Bible being a work of fiction just underscored my opinion that it was all mythology. Your documentary The Root of All Evil was amazing, and completely convinced me of my Atheistic leanings, and now I can proudly say that I am an Atheist, and believe in the Science and natural order of things, and no longer hold even a little bit of doubt that something larger could exist. The world is truly wonderful in and of itself, and I now feel sufficiently free and unburdened to begin to enjoy it for what it is.

Thank you so much,

Amanda Mitro

32

I was a christian from age 7 until I was about 20 years old but I had always had some questions as to the nature of God. When I met John, my husband I was blown away to learn he did not believe. How could that be? But the more discussions we had, the more I began to realize that his way of looking at things was much better than my own limited version as to how the world is and came to be.

Before I fully "converted" I was watching ABC or NBC and though not your book, I saw an article on "A Letter to a Christian Nation" and I began to research and found that my husband and I were not alone, and then I was troweling my local bookstore while waiting for the new Harry Potter book to be released and I stumbled over the Shiny Silver cover of the God Delusion. I began to read and was delighted by the contents though admittedly some of the words you used I had to grab the dictionary for. I purchased the book that night though I couldn't complete my reading of it until I finished J.K. Rowling's masterpiece (sorry).

The contents of your book encouraged me to come out to my family and friends, and honestly most of them had the same reaction I did when I had discovered my husband did not believe. I then took it to the next step. My husband and I started a local group here in none other than Corpus Christi, TX. Thats right, The Body of Christ. So far we have had little success in getting people to attend meetings but we do have about 20 official members signed up. Herding cats.

Recently, 8/10/07, my mother passed away and surprisingly enough I handled it better than most of my family. My atheism gave me a comfort that no one else in my family had. she had made a large impression on many people lives, which meant more to me than being reunited with her one day in heaven. I miss her terribly but when I look at my son, and my nieces and nephew, I see her there. She is a part of me and will never go away, and being an atheist I am able to see that much more clearly. So I thank you Mr. Dawkins for being that voice for encouraging so many to come out of the closet as I now have. Good luck with all future endeavors.

Alicia

33

Professor,

Reading "The God Delusion" was like having the proverbial cartoon light bulb going off above my head! To be honest, I was probably 98% of the way towards being a non-believer before I read what turned out to be the most influential book I have ever laid my hands on. I was raised a Catholic – born in Italy, and all that – and attended several Catholic schools until the age of 11. To be honest it was not a brain-washing experience and I never that I can recall suffered nightmares about roasting in hell for eternity, but for all that I was more agnostic than atheist until I read your book.

The last shreds of doubt disappeared faster than the speed of light. The orbiting china teapot was probably what sealed it for me that a blind belief in the invisible and the plain absurd is untenable. A great book, and you can add me to the list of converts, even if it only required a tiny little push to convert me. I'm now working my way through your excellent collection, "The Devil's Chaplain". Once again, it's an eye-opener.

Thank you, and keep up the good work. Please!!

Kind regards,

One More Happy Non-Believer

34

Hello Richard,

I was raised in Mexico, so I was obviously surrounded by Catholicism and raised accordingly. I'm not sure if I could be called a convert because I spent my entire life questioning Sunday School teachers and getting the typical "just have faith" response. I suppose a never really bought into the whole 'God' thing, but I wanted to very badly, and pretended to 'get it'. My friends were heavily involved in church communities and I was the director of a church choir, although I suppose that was more for the joy of music than for being in church, which I always found so boring. I read the bible (mostly the New Testament; I didn't discover the vengeful Old Testament God until later, like most people) and tried to feel the love of God and Jesus that all these people would talk about, but I never felt it. After a few years I stopped trying and realized I was an agnostic, but without really telling anyone. I became a non-practicing catholic or 'Catholic Light' as they call them in Mexico. It wasn't until I read your book that I realized not only that I am an atheist, but that it's not something to be ashamed of, and even be proud of. Thankfully, I am now living in Finland, one of the least religious countries in the world.
The God Delusion inspired me to read other books on atheism and evolution and finally have that feeling that I'd been looking for for so long. A feeling of understanding and of making sense of the world, without the need for inventing magical creatures.

Thank for inspiring reason and free thought!

Duke

35

Dear Richard,

Thank you very much for writing TGD. Ironically, I got it for "Christmas" 2006. Probably because my wife had no idea what it was about!!

Before reading TGD, I was for a long time an agnostic of the "teapot" variety. Since reading TGD, I have managed to "come out" as an atheist to my wife and some of my friends.

Living in the UK this has not been too hard for me to do, and whilst the wife won't talk about it (she is of the non practicing CofE variety) I have not had a hard time of it. I suspect she has atheistic leanings or certainly agnostic, but will not bring herself around to let go of God. At least she isn't packing her bags and taking the son and dog with her!

To those I have come out to, I think surprise is the biggest reaction. I think, that they think atheists have horns, roast babies on spits and practice pagan fertility dances naked on a Saturday night.

I keep coming to the website several times a week for my dose of rationalism.

I hear you may attempt a children's book - "Go for it". I can imagine the howls of anguish now...... what a beautiful thought!! I loved the letter to your daughter in The Devil's Chaplain, and when he is old enough I will ask my son to read your letter for himself.

Keep up the good work and all the best.

Rob Povey.

36

Dear Professor Dawkins

First of all, I would like to thank you for your work - over many years - to put the case for reason. I only read 'God Delusion' this year - but stepped out of the religious fold four years ago - though of course I was aware of your work, amongst others, well before that.

My story is for the most part typical - joining a church youth group - a growing affiliation to liberal christianity, periods of fluctuating devotion and sometimes of severe doubt. The process of moving away was gradual - over decades, really. All the intellectual reasons seemed to get stronger, but the change to atheism was more to do with being honest with myself, and other people. A major factor holding me back was personal - that other members of my family (wife & younger children) were quite involved in the church - as are my in laws; and many of our friends were through one or other church.

Obviously there is more to say in general, but you may have interest in the association between my public admission of lack of faith and a much more personal and family earthquake, that is, my coming out as gay.

With the benefit (or bias) of hindsight, it seems to me now that, as I struggled with doubts over faith, at times sure, at others agnostic, still others atheist - so too with sexuality. Since adolescence I'd been very worried I was different, was gay. This got mixed up with church (it wasn't the girls that persuaded me to join the youth group), into dalliance with high church theatricality, confessions of my 'problem' which led to an attempted excorcism - even thoughts of a monastic vocation (quite a stretch, as I was then Methodist). I suppose in the last ten years or so I kind of lived with agnosticism on both fronts - not sure how much I believed, nor if I was bi.

So, when I finally accepted that I really was gay, I decided that, as with sexuality, spirituality is a personal affair, no matter what societal pressure I might feel to remain compliant. I had simply run out of excuses to keep up the pretence.

In the end, both my 'liberal faith' and my 'bisexuality' fell down together like a house of cards. After years of wobbling it just got too much - and when parts of the edifices started falling, the rest soon followed.

I still haven't quite worked out how I managed to keep up the pretences so long. I suppose you could say I was just lying - but I don't recall it like that. I kept thinking through my faith, trying to make sense of what I could. Likewise, I tried to reason I couldn't be gay as I was married. (I now wonder if fear - in this case of harm to my children of my coming out - was a factor in stopping me thinking things through: perhaps fear of losing the church paralysed my reason in respect of religious doubts as well).

In the case of sexuality, finding out there were others like me, as well as common sense, proved I was wrong. Wrong to think I couldn't be gay, wrong to think I couldn't be honest. It's perhaps no coincidence I came out to myself on both counts in the summer of 03 - when anglicanism started going through its ridiculous convulsions over gay bishops.

When I accepted I was atheist (and gay), that was it, pretty much. It was a question of when not if I would tell others - stopping church was first, as it seemed (and of course was) by far the easier change to make in my life. To be fair to my family and my ex-church, I have not encountered the rejection that others on this site - and others concerning coming out - have suffered.

I remain intrigued as to what part my personal traits and situations may have shaped all this and if my 'coming out' in terms of sexuality was truly linked to coming out as atheist. I am by nature anxious to avoid conflict, and perhaps part of that is a tendancy to moderate or liberal views. I had a need to be accepted and a reluctance to upset people - e.g., my parents. (How much, I wonder, are people's respective spiritualities linked not so much to the merits of whatever religions they encounter, but to the combination of their circumstances and their personality traits? And what is the psychodynamic, so to speak, of conversion?)

This site is a valuable atheist equivalent of support sites, in other contexts, for those are thinking the unthinkable, and prepared to act on it. In reading other posts, it is clear this is a support at a personal as well as an intellectual level. As I began, I am very grateful for this resource. If you can find a use for any part of this post, please do so.

All the best in your work and kind regards

Steve

37

Dear Mr Dawkins
Having just tonight finished reading your "The God Delusion", and not being able to sleep, I decided to come downstairs and finally take a look through your website, and came across Converts Corner. Reading "The God Delusion" has been for me less of a cathartic experience than a crystallisation of all the debates and searching I've been through in the last 39 years. You have so eloquently outlined all the areas I've spent years thinking about and reading about, and added a few more I'd not gotten around to yet!

Raised a Roman Catholic and detesting the wasted Friday afternoons cooped up in Catechism classes with some religious nutter, I eventually rebelled once I'd left home, and whilst in the Air Force, away from home, came under the influence of one of those happy-clappy sects. Things went well for a while in the aforementioned sect, it was a small, close-knit community, and I'd met a really hot girl. This lead to a few problems as it was really hard keeping my hands off her, which inevitably did not endear me to her "values". I then moved to another similar group, but eventually started growing weary of them, because they just seemed to have this hangup with how evil we were by nature, and how everything we did was evil unless explicitly blessed by God, which mean praying a lot!

Moving back to my home town I started attending the Presbyterian Church that my mother attended, having by now worked out that it was a good place to find hot girls, but not having worked out that it was not going to help as none of them were allowed to acknowledge their sexuality. Having found what I can only term a "spiritual home" (still working on a definition for that!), I found that I liked the flavour of Calvinism being espoused, and decided to become a Minister in the Presbyterian Church. I should at this juncture probably mention that I was born and raised in South Africa during the apartheid years, and only realised in hindsight, once I'd emigrated to the UK, how thoroughly Calvinist the whole regime of the time was! So it was not entirely surprising that the Calvinism of Presbyterianism fitted nicely with my world view at the time, and becoming a Minister was probably just a way of extending my comfort zone. Also, I figured that I liked working with people, liked observing people, and was generally inquisitive about what made them tick, and so was shipped off to University to study Theology.

I majored in, inter alia, New Testament Studies, and did two years of Greek, at the end of which I was reading the New Testament texts in their "original" Greek. That in itself was a *huge* eye opener, and was fundamental in sowing the first seeds of doubt in my mind. Having also done 3 years of Old Testament studies under rigourous tutorship probably only added to the forment, as both courses required students to prepare material for presentation to the class: the lecturers themselves did not lecture, merely set topics, guidance notes and reading lists, and the lectures were researched and presented by the students. In hindsight, once again, I am now convinced my Old Testament Professor was an atheist, looking back on the reading lists and topics, and not having ever seen him attending a single church service.

One of my other majors was Systematic Theology, presented primarily by a wonderful professor. He was a Roman Catholic, having one been a priest, and having served as an advisor at Vatican II. An expert in the writings of Karl Rahner, he was one of the other major influences in my life. It was not so much what he taught me in terms of content. That I have now long discarded. But what he taught me was how to think. His philosophical methodology was fantastic, even though it broke down when it clashed with his religion an beliefs. But it set for me the framework around which I have done all my thinking, and my Old and New Testament studies provided me with the skills to do proper research, and the ability to digest and organise, in my mind, vast amounts of data as I read. The two years of Greek provided me invaluable understanding of the need to contextualise what I was reading, regardless of who it was. And so I spent a lot of time reading about, and researching, the life and the times of the authors I was reading. That too was something I learned in Old and New Testament studies, and has proved invaluable.

Following my formal University training I was posted to a congregation in a Black township just outside one of South Africa's major cities. Once I'd got over the initial culture shock (being pinkish myself!), I was flabbergasted to find that the congregation was nothing more than a social club. The religious overtones were just that, overtones, and the link to any form of "genuine" belief or religion were tenuous at best. That really shook my world, and I eventually found myself wondering why they bothered, until I realised it was just a clever ruse to make the christian missionaries *think* that they had converted them, when in reality all they were doing was what they would have been doing anyway.

Add to this that I was becoming progressively more disillusioned by the Church. It was, unsurprisingly, filled with politics and rivalry that, to my mind, had no place in the christianity it professed to. Being new in the "firm" that was the church, I was firmly put in my place when I tried to be too ambitious and actually *do* something of meaning, and in the end, when the congregation I had been posted to ran out of money and I ended up paying for a lot of stuff out of my meagre stipend, no one was willing to admit they'd made a bad mistake with the posting, and no one was willing to help me out of the pit I'd been cast into. Not one. Once I'd resigned they were all very eager to reclaim the cost of my years at University though!

Fortunately, the University they had sent me to was the first university in South Africa to have a full time permanent leased line connecting us to the precursor of Uninet, and hence to the juvenile Internet. The University also had the enlightened policy of opening its computer labs to the general student populace after hours, and it was here that I emerged myself in the world of Bulletin Board Services (BBS's) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), debating for hours on end with Christian fundamentalists. Even at that point I found myself becoming a literalist as far as my interpretation of biblical writings was concerned, and despite fundamentalism's claim to be literalists, I personally found them to be extremely vague on many points of interpretation. I took the text at face value, spent many hours understanding various parts and strands in the text in their context, and researched the historical situations that influenced the texts for as many hours. Fundamentalism however, had to resort to all kinds of interpretative gymnastics to hold their story together. It is, as you say in your book, their belief that they believe in, and just don't realise it.

All of this eventually had me out of the clutches of Christianity not much more than 10 years after I'd entered the abyss. My years of reading and research, soul searching and thinking, was, looking back, leading me inexorably away from my previous world view. Much water has since passed under the bridge of my life, but I have never stopped reading and researching, albeit significantly more slowly what with a full time job and a family. Ever since leaving the ministry, I have found my "spiritual home", as it were, on the internet. I found structure, sense and beauty in the anarchy; immunity from meddling controls. I've been really lucky to have evolved an understanding of the "geist' of the Internet: what makes it tick, and have become quite proficient in the technologies it uses. None of this would have been possible had I not had the education I had had at the University I had been at, with the lecturers I'd been exposed to. How ironic that it should have been the faculty of Theology that gave me the life skills that has brought me to the point where I can now say that I am, without any doubt, an atheist.

In your book I found many explanations and clarification of things I'd been contemplating for a while: one small example is the enjoyment of classical music. Much of the best classical music I think was written with very obvious religious overtones and for religious purposes, and I really enjoy listening to it, but was struggling philosophically to wrap my head around the apparent disconnect with my atheist leanings! The way you explained it crystallised it for me: they were very talented individuals these composers, it had nothing at all to do with any deity: sheer human endeavour, and to explain it any other way would be a denigration of the achievement of these individuals, which has made my time on this planet so much more beautiful.

As for where I am right now: I must admit to still be struggling to discard all the years of useless baggage of christianity. Wrapping my brain around the fact that there is no afterlife, that this is it, there is nothing more other than that the atoms that currently make me may one day make someone else. In that sense there is an afterlife, but certainly nothing like Christianity espouses. Its just sometimes hard to come to terms with the enormity of the deception and how ingrained it is into the everyday lives of most people, and how hard it is to cleanse oneself of it. But I am more determined than ever to raise my children as thinkers, and not followers. They're strong willed enough that even if I just let them be they will make up their own minds about things, but I will be encouraging that trait for as long as they're under my roof. Hopefully they can sit back in 40 years time and understand what I've done for them. That in itself will be my life's greatest achievement, if I can make that happen. That is one of the reasons we emigrated to the UK: to raise our children in a non-religious environment, to let them travel and experience other people and cultures and understand that no one has a monopoly on the truth, and that they have to work it out for themselves, and keep working it out.

In closing I just want to mentioned how tickled I was by the irony of picking your book up at Gatwick en route to a conference in Dallas. It didn't really sink in until the Sunday morning, when I turned on the television hoping for a news broadcast and a weather forecast that I realised that I was deep in the Bible belt! Every 3rd channel was some televangelist sprouting his or her nonsense, brainwashing innocent men, women and children, reducing them to tears by induced guilt. There was even one woman, rake thin, plastered in make up, talking like a machine gun (I sat there waiting for her to breathe, a whole 3 minutes, because that was all I could take of the drivel she was sprouting, and she didn't breathe, not once!), something about the perfectness of the number 7, and how donating money to her account in multiples of 7 was somehow going to ensure your place in heaven. I was, to use a very British phrase, utterly gobsmacked!

Anyhow, congratulations on a brilliant book, and very useful web site. And many thanks for saying so eloquently what I've been trying to say for years!

Regards

Konrad Michels

38

I have been in church since before I was born, literally. My parents raised, taught, and showed me the love of Jesus Christ, the redeeming Light and Lamb of God. The Vacation Bible Schools, Sunday school lessons, and youth group meetings I've been to are innumerable. And now, at 18, faced with a conflict of faith and the world that surrounds me, I have found higher fulfillment in secular humanism, Atheism. My good actions are no longer predicated by the inane "What Would Jesus Do?" but, "What do other people need?" Selfishness isn't a sin against God, it's a sin against one's self, as humans are social creatures in the vein of primates and geese. Evolution simply favors genes that foster cooperation. Not but a few days ago, I found that I could no longer stand living in a theological lie. I felt unable to function with my convictions concealed. I spoke out.

Declaring my worldview change to both parents and youth pastor has resulted in many tears, exposed anger, and complete frustration with the situation. They all repeatedly challenge me to "saturate myself with the Word," refuse to believe even simple evolution under the fact that "monkeys still exist," and are all utterly convicted of the purpose Christ serves in their lives. Now that I've rejected Christ, and am on my way to Hell, only my mother has shed a tear, everyone else believes that this period of doubt is crucial to my 'walk with Jesus.' They refuse simple eighth grade science; their entire view of history and current eschatology has my mother scared that we are in the 'end times'.
They say "I know what Christ has done for me." I want to explicitly state was Christ has NOT done for ME and BILLIONS of others. The scores of the dead that today's church walks upon speaks volume as to the wanton waste of humanity that God allows. What Christ does is an illusion. Christ is an anomoly of himself. He advocates turning the other cheek, yet tells his followers to trade in their cloaks for swords (a passage of Scripture never mentioned in church). etc. etc.
Lastly, my mother's view of parenting is so fundamentally rooted in Chritianity that she now feels like a failure; no amount of explaining on my part will erase the notion that I now hate my raising and moral instruction (I hate neither). Gee thanks, Jesus.

Sadly, my life has been fully wrapped around my church. If I truly go public, I become a charity chase and an emotional burden to my friends and elders. If I continue playing the game, I'll never live.


Searching for an easier way while knowing the truth,

-LT

39

Hi Richard,

Am a 41 year old teacher, with 4 children. Have done the permanent agnosticism in principle thing for about 22 years now. The ravages of the catholic faith on mine and previous genrations is long documented. I have no need to add to my own tale to the piles of misery that have been heaped up. I was lucky and managed to steer clear of the worst of the roman taliban that stalked my earlier life. I used to fly into fits of rage when arguing against religion when younger, and I really really wish I had been wrong about the abuse. But I was not. 2 parishes I lived in, 2 abusers of boys, my school... another abuser(the head brother). Still the powerful indoctrination of my youth incredibly, continues to seduce me, to forgive and forget, to let it go, to rejoin for that sense of belonging. But like Carl Sagan said, I do not think with my gut. I try to be a good moral father to my children, I used to think that I would pass them on my pure hatred of/ confusion about religion, which has been burning in my head for a long time, an extremely negative computer virus. I loved your elegiac, dispassionate, evisceration of the abrahamic faiths. I have the god delusion(spoken version) on my creative zen. I listen to you coelesce all those thoughts that have been swimming around in my head. I heard you on irish radio debate your book with that most obnoxious of religious bullies David Quinn, all he could offer was The question; who created matter, if science cant explain...it has to be god!!!! How pathetically remedial is that? To think moronic scum like that were let loose on sensitive, impressionable children? That is mortal Sin! Those sad pathetic bastards have had their last sway in my life. I've ignored them, gone with the flow for the sake of peace, but no more. Sorry Sam Harris, but I need to say this loud and proud, I am a good man..I am an Aetheist!

40

For the all of my life (a whole 17 years, albeit), I was raised to believe in God. I was taught that Hell was a place I would go if I doubted God. I always loved science, and would strive to watch all of the science programs I could.

One situation I remember is watching a show about human evolution. I hadn't thought about evolution too much, but my mother was (and still is) staunchly opposed to it. She made numerous "or so they say" references throughout the program. I didn't realize what she meant then, but I now realize she believes evolution is a deliberate lie. During the summer of 2006, I began having many doubts in regards to God and religion. I was shopping in a mall with some friends, and I meandered to a bookstore. I've always been interested in religion, so I had an affinity for the "Religion" section of the store. There, I saw a shiny, silver book, The God Delusion. Reading this marvelous book confirmed my newfound atheism. Reading this book also inspired me to purchase every other book so elegantly written by Professor Dawkins. Thank you very much!

41

Dr. Dawkins,

My name is John, and I an American and a pilot with a engineering bachelor's degree. My parents sent me to a Catholic high school six years ago which was my real exposure to "gloves-off, pull no punches" theology. It was from about that time that I started to view god and any form of religion as less and less of a fulfillment and more and more as a barrier to human potential (laced with circular logic and self-fulfillment which always bugged me).

I was always afraid to tell my parents about this even though I suspected they felt the same way but their staunch upbringing would never let them admit it. My biggest fear involved the fact that I am not particularly adept at debating, and I was afraid I would be lead astray by the loaded, circular questions that- unfortunately- must be answered to "justify" one's apostasy. Your book The God Delusion was an extremely helpful tool because it helped me identify the ridiculousness of hallowed religious rhetoric such as Aquinas' proofs and Pascal's wager (something my parents did use on me which I deftly turned on its ear to prove my point). I am writing to thank you for The God Delusion. The mind of the superstitious and illogical has always stupefied me which made it hard for me to properly articulate my objections to it. The God Delusion helped me gather an understanding of how the religious mind works which gave me the confidence to openly pull away from my parents' religion. Thank you.

I do have one question. I am now open about my atheism which lands me in many similar debates. Several times, I have told someone the reasons why I am an atheist and the problems I have with religion in general only to be countered with a lovely bit of logic. "You are a heathen and therefore there is no need to rebuke you." How does one counter such blatant cowardice and willful ignorance? People who say this are constantly challenging me, but, when it's my turn to speak, they are are essentially putting their fingers in their ears and closing their eyes. Is it possible to penetrate such a twisted logic?

Respectfully,
John C

42

Dear Dr. Dawkins:

I want to relate to you something of my evolution from a "non-believing Christian" to an intellectually satisfied and comfortable atheist. In particular, I want to tell you how your book Unweaving the Rainbow and a particular friend nudged me decisively.

I remember, like it was yesterday, arguing with this friend, let's call him Jack, about religion. Jack is a good friend, with whom I have shared some amazing experiences in diverse parts of the world. I felt we saw the world mostly eye to eye. At the time, I was no longer a religious believer due to my experiences at university and in various parts of the world and due to reading very diversely and extensively. However, I was still suffering from a hangover from my Protestant Christian upbringing: I still wanted to believe in belief.

One day he said something to the effect that religion was superfluous and really not a good idea at all. I remember my "belief in belief" attitude sprang forward and I snapped something at him that I fortunately don't remember. I even pulled out the "you need religion for people to be moral" nonsense. It was one of the most uncomfortable moments between us.

A few years later, I'm sure more on a whim than by plan, Jack, now living in the UK, sent me a beautiful hard-back copy of Unweaving the Rainbow. At the time, amazing to me now, I had never heard of you. In fact, I put off reading it for a long time, in spite of the subtitle, Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, which should have grabbed me immediately.

I remember even better the impact Unweaving the Rainbow had on me when I finally did pick it up. I was blown away by many things, especially the wonderfully clear, concise, and excellent writing (I'm mainly a non-fiction reader), the humanity of your treatment of the subjects, and the impact your essays related to the religious view of the world and the scientific view of the world had on my own worldview.

Your splendid essays began a rapid, complete, and very satisfying conversion from a non-believing former Christian who had a soft spot for religion to a firm and intellectually satisfied atheist. (I am a 6.99 on your scale.) It included buying all of your books (and many others) and reading them through with great interest in rapid succession. I am still particularly moved by Unweaving the Rainbow and The Ancestor's Tale (though I enjoyed all your books and I found The Selfish Gene wonderfully explanatory - I never really understood evolution by natural selection until I read it). I love The God Delusion and it has helped me write down my own thoughts on religion, science, naturalism, and atheism, which has been a very helpful exercise. (I'm trying to take Atul Gawande's advice to write, about something, some of the time, no matter what.) I also found your recent The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing especially useful in directing me to other excellent writers on science.

But I think Unweaving the Rainbow had the greatest impact because it was first, it deals with something that had been bothering me in the back of my mind for a long time (I no longer believed but hadn't completely broken the spell), and, maybe more than anything else, because it deals with the aesthetic pleasures of science and biology. I'm a romantic at heart (despite my insistence on data) and have a large "creative" side in addition to my large "analytic" side. In all of the "personality tests" I've ever taken, I come out all over the map.

So, as you can see, your one book of essays had an enormous positive impact on my life. I truly consider my initial reading of Unweaving the Rainbow to be a life-changing event. Books have very rarely done this. Thank you for your wonderful books, your efforts in promulgating reason, and for the nudge you gave me personally. Please keep it up! I'm anxiously awaiting The Greatest Show on Earth.

J Blilie, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

43

Dr. Dawkins,

Like many before and probably after me, I write to thank you for liberating me. Your book confirmed and elaborated the thoughts that existed within me for the longest time.

Today I am no longer an agnostic, but an atheist. I am glad that I can pursue the rest of my journey for Enlightenment without religion bogging me down.

I come from a Hindu family, and I have never really felt the "pressure" to conform. I doubt I would lose any family members. My mother might give up on me as a too "modern" woman but thats about it. She will not love me any less for it. It is amazing how many people in the United States (my current residence) lose the affections of near and dear ones on becoming an atheist. I never knew this was possible.

I am free and thus I shall stay.

I do not really expect an answer. I am just happy to share this with you.


Regards,
Lopa

44

Thank you from an Alabama Student

Dr. Dawkins,

I want you to know just how radically your writings have altered my life and my worldview. Here is a bit of history first. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family (Southern Baptist) in Alabama. I "received Christ" at the ripe age of 9 and was baptized, but I did not truly claim ownership of my own faith (as opposed to being a "Christian child" simply because of my parents' religion) until I moved to a Wesleyan church during middle school to participate in their local Hispanic outreach ministry. It was through the ministries at the Wesleyan church that I was "born again", and from middle school all the way through my undergraduate studies and subsequent year as a schoolteacher, my God was my life. I led worship as a singer for years at the local Hispanic church, and at the same time taught a children's church class during service and also a weekly youth Bible study. (The price of being a leader in a small church is that one does not have the luxury of specializing in a single ministry area.) I was also actively involved in the Wesleyan church itself, attending Sunday service, running the sound system during the Monday night college/young adult worship service, and occasionally participating in weekly Bible study home-groups.

Summer brought even more ministry opportunities. Several summers I taught Vacation Bible School, a week of crafts, games, and Jesus education for children—always culminating in an emotional "altar call" during the finale service, where many children (and often a few parents) either received Christ for the first time or rededicated their lives to serving the Lord. I also led or participated in 15 one-week mission trips to Mexico, where we built churches, distributed food and clothing, bonded with the children through games and conversation, and (most importantly) held Bible school for the children and services for the parents. (The children were lured by promises of candy and soccer. Interestingly, no one on these trips ever mentioned how suspicious it would seem if a band of strange, foreign Mexicans who barely speak English went door-to-door in our neighborhoods, inviting our children to "Catholic camp". And we thought we had the right to be frustrated that so many of the women were reluctant to send their children with us?) I still look back on these trips with the fondest memories; I think I always will, no matter my current beliefs on religion and the horrors of brainwashing children and taking advantage of the uneducated.

I don't know for certain when I began to honestly question my beliefs. I was plagued by doubts throughout high school, the price of being in the International Baccalaureate Programme with many of the brightest (and most liberal) students in the state. But I saw it as a test of my faith, and I prided myself on my ability to stay strong despite the doubts. (As my former pastor once said, doubts are okay, as long as they don't lead us away from God. I remember responding to that sermon in a private journal entry, asking what the point of doubt was if we must always continue to hold onto our beliefs.) The turning point was my first year as a graduate student in biology, when I took a class on evolution. The professor was also my major advisor (and remains so) and a self-proclaimed agnostic, and we frequently talked outside of class about religion. I had never before had any sort of trusting relationship with a non-Christian, and as such, I began to open up surprisingly quickly to her very rational arguments, and I realized that if I were completely honest with myself, I could no longer believe with unwavering certainty that my God exists. My God, Who I had known my entire life, and with Whom I had had a very powerful relationship for 10 years.

My advisor recommended several books. At the top of the list were your own God Delusion and Devil's Chaplain, in addition to Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation and End of Faith, Hitchens's God is not Great, and Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. I am pleased to say that the more I read, the more I understood the irrationality of my former beliefs and of religious faith in general, and I came to the conclusion that as an intelligent, rational human being, I cannot continue to hold onto my childhood faith when there is absolutely no evidence in support of it—and even much evidence against it, as you and the others clearly describe in your books.

My change of heart (or, more accurately, mind) certainly has not come easily or without pain. I was sitting outside reading at the University one day, very soon after my "dead again" experience (as opposed to "born again"—I believe I came across this catchy word play in one of Ehrman's works, but I am not certain) when it hit me that there probably is no God. At least, not the God I knew. No one to guide my every major life decision. No one to grant my three wishes when I or a loved one is in need. No one to sing praises and lift my hands to. No one to send His angels to wrap around our vans in protection while traveling to Mexico for missions work. Not even anyone to give me a damn parking place on campus in the middle of the day. For the first time in my life, I felt completely, devastatingly alone. And I was terrified. It was the first of many occasions when I had the urge to lock myself in my room and cry until I was too exhausted to continue. Several of those times I have done just that.

A couple of months after my "dead again" experience, in the heat of frustration at myself for continuing to hide my change of heart, I published a note about my beliefs on Facebook, an online network connecting people worldwide. This was an efficient way to tell the majority of my friends all at one time (and without the intense nerves that would come from a more personal face-to-face with any one of them). Had I postponed this rash decision and thought through the potential consequences, I probably would have been more careful. One day after posting the note, I removed it. I had received many messages from friends insisting on maintaining friendships—messages perhaps encouraging at first blush, but somewhat demeaning and patronizing upon further analysis. Messages such as, "Nothing you could ever do would make me not be your friend", "God still loves you and so do I", or "I don't know what made you change, but I still love you!" The underlying sentiment being that even though I don't believe in God, they still want to maintain our relationship. The reason, though, that I took down the note was because of the more intense (and perhaps more honest) responses, such as, "It's not about you or making you comfortable…it's about GOD!!" or "You sound like a very wounded little girl, who is striking out at friends trying to hurt as many as possible, hoping to get attention and help" or "the Bible tells me (and you) that 'the fool says in his heart there is no God.' The things you are saying are foolish" or "I'm so disappointed. I have been praying for you ever since you started college that you wouldn't get so caught up in the intellectual world that you lose your faith."

The stress of the backlash I received from friends and family not only made my transition more difficult emotionally, but it also made me physically sick for several weeks. Fortunately, the intensity eventually subsided, and I have been able to maintain positive relationships with most of my family and numerous Christian friends. Now, a year later, I am once again secure in my beliefs and once again confident in my ability to lead a fulfilling life…this time without God. I recently re-read God Delusion, and I have read many articles in Free Inquiry, including several you authored. These and other works (such as those I previously mentioned) are very encouraging to me. Just knowing there are brilliant people out there who don't believe in God or religion and still lead fulfilling lives has been an enormous support during this otherwise emotionally difficult year. I was inspired to write this note as a thank-you while watching the Four Horsemen discussion. I listened to Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, and you question the worth of your work and whether it has made any positive impact. I am here to tell you it most certainly has. Here in Alabama, I am one of probably very few non-Christians, as you no doubt witnessed during your brief time with radio hosts Rick and Bubba and subsequent "debate" in Birmingham (if you could call your minute of speaking time vs. Lennox's seemingly hours a debate). You have no idea how much I appreciate your dedication to informing the public about the silliness and dangers of religion. Please do not stop now.

Forever grateful,

Catherine E. Newman
M.S. Graduate Student
Evolution and Systematics
Department of Biological Sciences
University of Alabama

45

Dear Mr Dawkins
Having just tonight finished reading your "The God Delusion", and not being able to sleep, I decided to come downstairs and finally take a look through your website, and came across Converts Corner. Reading "The God Delusion" has been for me less of a cathartic experience than a crystallisation of all the debates and searching I've been through in the last 39 years. You have so eloquently outlined all the areas I've spent years thinking about and reading about, and added a few more I'd not gotten around to yet!

Raised a Roman Catholic and detesting the wasted Friday afternoons cooped up in Catechism classes with some religious nutter, I eventually rebelled once I'd left home, and whilst in the Air Force, away from home, came under the influence of one of those happy-clappy sects. Things went well for a while in the aforementioned sect, it was a small, close-knit community, and I'd met a really hot girl. This lead to a few problems as it was really hard keeping my hands off her, which inevitably did not endear me to her "values". I then moved to another similar group, but eventually started growing weary of them, because they just seemed to have this hangup with how evil we were by nature, and how everything we did was evil unless explicitly blessed by God, which mean praying a lot!

Moving back to my home town I started attending the Presbyterian Church that my mother attended, having by now worked out that it was a good place to find hot girls, but not having worked out that it was not going to help as none of them were allowed to acknowledge their sexuality. Having found what I can only term a "spiritual home" (still working on a definition for that!), I found that I liked the flavour of Calvinism being espoused, and decided to become a Minister in the Presbyterian Church. I should at this juncture probably mention that I was born and raised in South Africa during the apartheid years, and only realised in hindsight, once I'd emigrated to the UK, how thoroughly Calvinist the whole regime of the time was! So it was not entirely surprising that the Calvinism of Presbyterianism fitted nicely with my world view at the time, and becoming a Minister was probably just a way of extending my comfort zone. Also, I figured that I liked working with people, liked observing people, and was generally inquisitive about what made them tick, and so was shipped off to University to study Theology.

I majored in, inter alia, New Testament Studies, and did two years of Greek, at the end of which I was reading the New Testament texts in their "original" Greek. That in itself was a *huge* eye opener, and was fundamental in sowing the first seeds of doubt in my mind. Having also done 3 years of Old Testament studies under rigourous tutorship probably only added to the forment, as both courses required students to prepare material for presentation to the class: the lecturers themselves did not lecture, merely set topics, guidance notes and reading lists, and the lectures were researched and presented by the students. In hindsight, once again, I am now convinced my Old Testament Professor was an atheist, looking back on the reading lists and topics, and not having ever seen him attending a single church service.

One of my other majors was Systematic Theology, presented primarily by a wonderful professor. He was a Roman Catholic, having one been a priest, and having served as an advisor at Vatican II. An expert in the writings of Karl Rahner, he was one of the other major influences in my life. It was not so much what he taught me in terms of content. That I have now long discarded. But what he taught me was how to think. His philosophical methodology was fantastic, even though it broke down when it clashed with his religion an beliefs. But it set for me the framework around which I have done all my thinking, and my Old and New Testament studies provided me with the skills to do proper research, and the ability to digest and organise, in my mind, vast amounts of data as I read. The two years of Greek provided me invaluable understanding of the need to contextualise what I was reading, regardless of who it was. And so I spent a lot of time reading about, and researching, the life and the times of the authors I was reading. That too was something I learned in Old and New Testament studies, and has proved invaluable.

Following my formal University training I was posted to a congregation in a Black township just outside one of South Africa's major cities. Once I'd got over the initial culture shock (being pinkish myself!), I was flabbergasted to find that the congregation was nothing more than a social club. The religious overtones were just that, overtones, and the link to any form of "genuine" belief or religion were tenuous at best. That really shook my world, and I eventually found myself wondering why they bothered, until I realised it was just a clever ruse to make the christian missionaries *think* that they had converted them, when in reality all they were doing was what they would have been doing anyway.

Add to this that I was becoming progressively more disillusioned by the Church. It was, unsurprisingly, filled with politics and rivalry that, to my mind, had no place in the christianity it professed to. Being new in the "firm" that was the church, I was firmly put in my place when I tried to be too ambitious and actually *do* something of meaning, and in the end, when the congregation I had been posted to ran out of money and I ended up paying for a lot of stuff out of my meagre stipend, no one was willing to admit they'd made a bad mistake with the posting, and no one was willing to help me out of the pit I'd been cast into. Not one. Once I'd resigned they were all very eager to reclaim the cost of my years at University though!

Fortunately, the University they had sent me to was the first university in South Africa to have a full time permanent leased line connecting us to the precursor of Uninet, and hence to the juvenile Internet. The University also had the enlightened policy of opening its computer labs to the general student populace after hours, and it was here that I emerged myself in the world of Bulletin Board Services (BBS's) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), debating for hours on end with Christian fundamentalists. Even at that point I found myself becoming a literalist as far as my interpretation of biblical writings was concerned, and despite fundamentalism's claim to be literalists, I personally found them to be extremely vague on many points of interpretation. I took the text at face value, spent many hours understanding various parts and strands in the text in their context, and researched the historical situations that influenced the texts for as many hours. Fundamentalism however, had to resort to all kinds of interpretative gymnastics to hold their story together. It is, as you say in your book, their belief that they believe in, and just don't realise it.

All of this eventually had me out of the clutches of Christianity not much more than 10 years after I'd entered the abyss. My years of reading and research, soul searching and thinking, was, looking back, leading me inexorably away from my previous world view. Much water has since passed under the bridge of my life, but I have never stopped reading and researching, albeit significantly more slowly what with a full time job and a family. Ever since leaving the ministry, I have found my "spiritual home", as it were, on the internet. I found structure, sense and beauty in the anarchy; immunity from meddling controls. I've been really lucky to have evolved an understanding of the "geist' of the Internet: what makes it tick, and have become quite proficient in the technologies it uses. None of this would have been possible had I not had the education I had had at the University I had been at, with the lecturers I'd been exposed to. How ironic that it should have been the faculty of Theology that gave me the life skills that has brought me to the point where I can now say that I am, without any doubt, an atheist.

In your book I found many explanations and clarification of things I'd been contemplating for a while: one small example is the enjoyment of classical music. Much of the best classical music I think was written with very obvious religious overtones and for religious purposes, and I really enjoy listening to it, but was struggling philosophically to wrap my head around the apparent disconnect with my atheist leanings! The way you explained it crystallised it for me: they were very talented individuals these composers, it had nothing at all to do with any deity: sheer human endeavour, and to explain it any other way would be a denigration of the achievement of these individuals, which has made my time on this planet so much more beautiful.

As for where I am right now: I must admit to still be struggling to discard all the years of useless baggage of christianity. Wrapping my brain around the fact that there is no afterlife, that this is it, there is nothing more other than that the atoms that currently make me may one day make someone else. In that sense there is an afterlife, but certainly nothing like Christianity espouses. Its just sometimes hard to come to terms with the enormity of the deception and how ingrained it is into the everyday lives of most people, and how hard it is to cleanse oneself of it. But I am more determined than ever to raise my children as thinkers, and not followers. They're strong willed enough that even if I just let them be they will make up their own minds about things, but I will be encouraging that trait for as long as they're under my roof. Hopefully they can sit back in 40 years time and understand what I've done for them. That in itself will be my life's greatest achievement, if I can make that happen. That is one of the reasons we emigrated to the UK: to raise our children in a non-religious environment, to let them travel and experience other people and cultures and understand that no one has a monopoly on the truth, and that they have to work it out for themselves, and keep working it out.

In closing I just want to mentioned how tickled I was by the irony of picking your book up at Gatwick en route to a conference in Dallas. It didn't really sink in until the Sunday morning, when I turned on the television hoping for a news broadcast and a weather forecast that I realised that I was deep in the Bible belt! Every 3rd channel was some televangelist sprouting his or her nonsense, brainwashing innocent men, women and children, reducing them to tears by induced guilt. There was even one woman, rake thin, plastered in make up, talking like a machine gun (I sat there waiting for her to breathe, a whole 3 minutes, because that was all I could take of the drivel she was sprouting, and she didn't breathe, not once!), something about the perfectness of the number 7, and how donating money to her account in multiples of 7 was somehow going to ensure your place in heaven. I was, to use a very British phrase, utterly gobsmacked!

Anyhow, congratulations on a brilliant book, and very useful web site. And many thanks for saying so eloquently what I've been trying to say for years!

Regards

Konrad Michels

46

I have been in church since before I was born, literally. My parents raised, taught, and showed me the love of Jesus Christ, the redeeming Light and Lamb of God. The Vacation Bible Schools, Sunday school lessons, and youth group meetings I've been to are innumerable. And now, at 18, faced with a conflict of faith and the world that surrounds me, I have found higher fulfillment in secular humanism, Atheism. My good actions are no longer predicated by the inane "What Would Jesus Do?" but, "What do other people need?" Selfishness isn't a sin against God, it's a sin against one's self, as humans are social creatures in the vein of primates and geese. Evolution simply favors genes that foster cooperation. Not but a few days ago, I found that I could no longer stand living in a theological lie. I felt unable to function with my convictions concealed. I spoke out.

Declaring my worldview change to both parents and youth pastor has resulted in many tears, exposed anger, and complete frustration with the situation. They all repeatedly challenge me to "saturate myself with the Word," refuse to believe even simple evolution under the fact that "monkeys still exist," and are all utterly convicted of the purpose Christ serves in their lives. Now that I've rejected Christ, and am on my way to Hell, only my mother has shed a tear, everyone else believes that this period of doubt is crucial to my 'walk with Jesus.' They refuse simple eighth grade science; their entire view of history and current eschatology has my mother scared that we are in the 'end times'.
They say "I know what Christ has done for me." I want to explicitly state was Christ has NOT done for ME and BILLIONS of others. The scores of the dead that today's church walks upon speaks volume as to the wanton waste of humanity that God allows. What Christ does is an illusion. Christ is an anomoly of himself. He advocates turning the other cheek, yet tells his followers to trade in their cloaks for swords (a passage of Scripture never mentioned in church). etc. etc.
Lastly, my mother's view of parenting is so fundamentally rooted in Chritianity that she now feels like a failure; no amount of explaining on my part will erase the notion that I now hate my raising and moral instruction (I hate neither). Gee thanks, Jesus.

Sadly, my life has been fully wrapped around my church. If I truly go public, I become a charity chase and an emotional burden to my friends and elders. If I continue playing the game, I'll never live.


Searching for an easier way while knowing the truth,

-LT

47

I read The End of Faith, God Is Not Great and your book The God Delusion. The triangulation of logic from those three books pretty much made me an atheist. Those books made me really understand what an atheist was and wasn't. I always thought that an atheist was someone who didn't believe in god. And of coarse that's pretty much what an atheist is but to me an atheist is more. An atheist is a person that is o.k. with saying "I honestly don't know." That is one of the fundamental qualities of atheism that I admire - Honesty. This situation we find ourselves in is a much more interesting and beautifully mysterious place when you don't pretend to know things that you are, in all honesty, ignorant about. You are making a difference and I believe it's one in the right direction.

Thank you sir,
-shane

48

Hi Richard,

Am a 41 year old teacher, with 4 children. Have done the permanent agnosticism in principle thing for about 22 years now. The ravages of the catholic faith on mine and previous genrations is long documented. I have no need to add to my own tale to the piles of misery that have been heaped up. I was lucky and managed to steer clear of the worst of the roman taliban that stalked my earlier life. I used to fly into fits of rage when arguing against religion when younger, and I really really wish I had been wrong about the abuse. But I was not. 2 parishes I lived in, 2 abusers of boys, my school... another abuser(the head brother). Still the powerful indoctrination of my youth incredibly, continues to seduce me, to forgive and forget, to let it go, to rejoin for that sense of belonging. But like Carl Sagan said, I do not think with my gut. I try to be a good moral father to my children, I used to think that I would pass them on my pure hatred of/ confusion about religion, which has been burning in my head for a long time, an extremely negative computer virus. I loved your elegiac, dispassionate, evisceration of the abrahamic faiths. I have the god delusion(spoken version) on my creative zen. I listen to you coelesce all those thoughts that have been swimming around in my head. I heard you on irish radio debate your book with that most obnoxious of religious bullies David Quinn, all he could offer was The question; who created matter, if science cant explain...it has to be god!!!! How pathetically remedial is that? To think moronic scum like that were let loose on sensitive, impressionable children? That is mortal Sin! Those sad pathetic bastards have had their last sway in my life. I've ignored them, gone with the flow for the sake of peace, but no more. Sorry Sam Harris, but I need to say this loud and proud, I am a good man..I am an Aetheist!

49

For the all of my life (a whole 17 years, albeit), I was raised to believe in God. I was taught that Hell was a place I would go if I doubted God. I always loved science, and would strive to watch all of the science programs I could.

One situation I remember is watching a show about human evolution. I hadn't thought about evolution too much, but my mother was (and still is) staunchly opposed to it. She made numerous "or so they say" references throughout the program. I didn't realize what she meant then, but I now realize she believes evolution is a deliberate lie. During the summer of 2006, I began having many doubts in regards to God and religion. I was shopping in a mall with some friends, and I meandered to a bookstore. I've always been interested in religion, so I had an affinity for the "Religion" section of the store. There, I saw a shiny, silver book, The God Delusion. Reading this marvelous book confirmed my newfound atheism. Reading this book also inspired me to purchase every other book so elegantly written by Professor Dawkins. Thank you very much!

50

Dr. Dawkins,

My name is John, and I an American and a pilot with a engineering bachelor's degree. My parents sent me to a Catholic high school six years ago which was my real exposure to "gloves-off, pull no punches" theology. It was from about that time that I started to view god and any form of religion as less and less of a fulfillment and more and more as a barrier to human potential (laced with circular logic and self-fulfillment which always bugged me).

I was always afraid to tell my parents about this even though I suspected they felt the same way but their staunch upbringing would never let them admit it. My biggest fear involved the fact that I am not particularly adept at debating, and I was afraid I would be lead astray by the loaded, circular questions that- unfortunately- must be answered to "justify" one's apostasy. Your book The God Delusion was an extremely helpful tool because it helped me identify the ridiculousness of hallowed religious rhetoric such as Aquinas' proofs and Pascal's wager (something my parents did use on me which I deftly turned on its ear to prove my point). I am writing to thank you for The God Delusion. The mind of the superstitious and illogical has always stupefied me which made it hard for me to properly articulate my objections to it. The God Delusion helped me gather an understanding of how the religious mind works which gave me the confidence to openly pull away from my parents' religion. Thank you.

I do have one question. I am now open about my atheism which lands me in many similar debates. Several times, I have told someone the reasons why I am an atheist and the problems I have with religion in general only to be countered with a lovely bit of logic. "You are a heathen and therefore there is no need to rebuke you." How does one counter such blatant cowardice and willful ignorance? People who say this are constantly challenging me, but, when it's my turn to speak, they are are essentially putting their fingers in their ears and closing their eyes. Is it possible to penetrate such a twisted logic?

Respectfully,
John C