Atheism

A few days ago the daughter of a friend of mine called and asked if she could come over and hang out for a few hours. She attends college in town and her last class ended at one p.m. Her boyfriend lives about three miles from my house and she had nothing to do until he got off work at five. She lives about forty minutes from our town and did not want to drive all the way home and back. I told her to come on over and hang out.

When she arrived we discussed her school work and how she was doing. Then she told me she had something she felt she needed to tell me. I said you can tell me anything. Very much to my surprise, she told me she was an atheist. I was rather shocked because her parents believed in God, but she was not raised in the church, for they only attended church on special occasions such as Christmas and Easter.

She is only twenty-one years old. I asked her if she really knew what atheism means. She replied that she did not believe in God. Knowing I am a Christian, she was a bit uncomfortable telling me this. I told her that being an atheist meant that she had an absence of belief in the existence of God. She said she realized that. I asked her if it was because she had thought it through and came to this decision by thought process. She said she quit believing in God because when she was younger her family had gone to church and someone stole her Bible. She said “How can you call yourself a Christian and then steal a Bible?” I replied that I did not believe in organized religion, but I was a very Spiritual person.

I related to her the story of helping build a church when I was a teenager and attended the church for several years. One day our family arrived on Sunday morning to find the doors padlocked. We could see people, deacons and other church officials and several families inside the church. A spokesman for the group came outside and told us they had fired the pastor and hired a new pastor. They felt certain families no longer were admitted to the congregation and we were among those families. If you want to read the whole story, check out my article Organized Religion vs. Spirituality. That is when I stopped attending church and I have never returned. I do, however, enjoy a wonderful spiritual life. I told her one incident should not rule over her beliefs. I explained to her that the lack of belief in God is weak atheism and believing that God cannot exist is strong atheism. She seemed confused.

I asked her if she understood the difference and she really did not quite understand. “Well call me an agnostic then,” She said. I told her that was a completely different belief system. An agnostic is someone who is unsure if God exists and believes the question of whether God exists is an unsolvable question in the agnostic mind. At that point she was unsure exactly what to call her belief or non-belief ideas. I pointed out that to truly know what you wish to believe takes into consideration that you must study all points of view before you decide what you truly believe.

I asked her how; having studied many subjects in school related to the creation of the world, could she actually make an informed decision without thinking through every ideal that mankind’s belief systems offer. Personally, I just look at the world we live in, the complexities of every occurrence of nature from a simple blade of grass to the origins of space and the birth of mankind and could not possibly believe there is not a Creator of some sort. At this point, she was completely confused about what she truly believed.

I explained to her that she was still very young and life hold many twist an turns for her in the future and that she may come to find, through a miracle or a disaster that she will need to believe in something. I realize that there are many atheists and agnostics in this world and they have the free will to believe whatever they choose. But, you cannot base your beliefs of such a fundamental yet highly important aspect of your life on a single incident that happened in your youth. I asked her if she saw the person steal the Bible. She said no. I told her perhaps she misplaced it or lost it and simply blamed it on someone at the church. I told her it was not the type of occurrence on which to base an entire belief system. She agreed. Eventually the time came for her to leave. I told her she had the right to believe whatever she wanted, but to at least examine all options before making such an important decision. She left wondering about our talk.

I wanted to share this with whoever reads this article, simply for the fact that perhaps too many people feel the same way and do not at least think these things through, especially the youth that will become the adults of the next generation who live in this world.