Atheist?

Why "Godless Atheist"?

The term has such negative connotations for so many. Why would anyone want to describe themself this way?

Knowing that there may well be family and friends who have some concern over the direction that my immortal soul is headed, I will attempt to explain. For those who don't know me, some background.

I came from a Christian family. My parents were ministers. From the time I was in Kindergarten until I was an adult, I went to church. For the majority of my childhood my parents were also my pastors. I had no reason not to believe what I was taught. I can't honestly say that I was really much of a fan of church. I wasn't always a fan of going to school either and thought of them in the same way. They were necessary but usually not that enjoyable.

I remember tearfully praying that Jesus would forgive my sins and come into my heart at a church service at summer camp in northern British Columbia at about 10 years of age. Looking back with retrospect, I can barely imagine what sins I had to ask forgiveness for. The vast majority of the interesting ones came much later.

I was married and living on my own and still going to church when I started doing, for lack of a better term, some soul searching. Some big events occurred in my life. The most significant life event was that I became a parent for the first time.

Around that time,  I was an employee of my church. I worked for their emergency shelter for men. Before the shelter opened, we toured a Salvation Army facility in the downtown eastside of Vancouver. We were there this particular evening when the facility was opening to serve meals to the many poor and/or homeless people in that neighborhood. I realized once there that the way they operated was they let people in and made them sit through a mandatory church service before they would be fed. This offended me in my most basic integrity but not exactly for the same reasons it bothers me in retrospect. I couldn't see the Jesus that I understood holding food over the heads of hungry people in such a way.  When our shelter opened, I knew I would never force anyone to have to listen to my opinion before providing food or any other necessity to them. My understanding was that my church had made an agreement with the government ministry that funded the shelter that there would be no proselytizing there. I thought at this time that such an agreement went too far and bound me in what I could say to the clients.

I got into a disagreement with the pastor of the church who was also my boss. In this argument, three of my best friends who were also my colleagues there took the same position that I had taken. We were all fired together. It wasn't the same kind of firing that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were supposedly subjected to but because we were standing for what we believed in we looked at it in a similar way.

Not very long after this event, I began to doubt that any of my religion was actually true. The response that seemed appropriate to me was to try to live my life biblically. I had always understood that doubts were a test of my faith. It was a test that I wanted to pass

At that time, my young family and I started attending a fundamentalist Baptist church. They weren't quite Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. I don't think that the pastor of the church I attended would intentionally offend people but I doubt the contrasted beliefs of the two churches would have differed significantly. What appealed to me about the church was that they weren't wishy-washy. If it was in the Bible, they believed that God meant it.

My pastor did me a tremendous service but it did not turn out as he would have intended. He believed that Christians ought to know what was in the Bible if they intended to live their lives by it. That sounded perfectly reasonable to me. The pastor claimed to have read the Bible front to back several times over and I don't see any reason to doubt that he had. I took it upon myself to read it. So I did. My pastor's unintended consequence was introducing me to the book that showed me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christianity was bullshit. If he'd given me a book by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens I doubt that it would have convinced me more completely.

There were so many verses that troubled me. Many verses shocked me with their misogyny, racism, brutality and just about every other negative idea I could possibly conceive of. One verse, in particular, caught my attention. It wasn't even one of the disgusting verses but one of the nicer sounding ones. Matthew 7:11

If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

This got me thinking about what in atheist/apologist arguments would be referred to as "the problem of evil". I had not yet heard of Epicurus or the quote attributed to him


Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God? 

Although I was not aware of the quote, I grappled with the concept.

If God is omniscient and omnipotent as I had been taught to believe, then he simply can't think of us as I think of my children. I don't think that my love for my kids is unique. Not only do I think it's human to love your kids and to want them to be well but it's probably not just humans but almost all animal species who seek to protect their children. I thought about all the attrocities that have happened and continue to happen in the world. Imagine, for instance, watching your child be raped.

Which parent, except the most mentally ill would not intervene? If God is omnipresent he's been witness to every rape which has ever occurred. Every time, in every place. If God were real, then every child who's ever suffered abuse or died in a house fire or starved to death did so while God watched with folded arms.


I simply cannot accept the traditional apologist answer to this question. Supposedly, we just can't understand what God has in his plans for us.When we get to Heaven, the story goes, all will be revealed to us and we will understand God's purpose for allowing such things to happen. I can't accept it because surely an omniscient God would be able to bring about the end result that he wanted without needing to use the unfathomable suffering that has happened over the course of human history. 

Hell, of course, is the ultimate logical conclusion to this objection I have with the concept of Christianity. I would never harm my sons intentionally in even the slightest way. I had to be a parent myself to fully understand what it would have to mean for a loving God to allow his "children" whom he loves to burn. To me, that was the final case closer. I found many other objections to Christianity than that. Some of which I will write about in the future, but that was the big one.

A parent who could lite his child on fire would be, in my estimation, the most contemptible person imaginable. An omnibenevolent God who would do so is an oxymoron and simply cannot exist. That's why I am a godless atheist. I am proud to not worship such an idea. I am glad to be free of the most horrifying concept that I was ever taught.