My Journey to Atheism Story Published by the Freethought Society
I first learned of the Freethought Society via the Thomas Paine Memorial Association, whose cause I fully support. On inquiring about volunteer possibilities, I was invited to write up my own “journey story.” It has been published in the latest newsletter. I’m sharing my original text here for easier access.
Choosing My Own Path
For each of her children, my mother kept both a baby book and a book highlighting our academic progress through high school. A nice feature of the latter is that its pages were pouches that held physical records and keepsakes, along with whatever was written on the corresponding page. My year-end kindergarten report opened with this phrase from my teacher: “Jackie is a sunny child …”
I remember that so well because it’s opposite of most of my memories of childhood. At some point in my early childhood, my siblings and I were forced to attend Sunday School and church with my maternal grandparents. They attended a Southern Baptist church, so my initial exposure to Christianity consisted almost exclusively of hellfire and brimstone courtesy of the god of the Old Testament. It terrified me. I suspect that was the cause of my anxiety attacks and nightmares, which led to me taking “anxiety pills” (hydroxyzine) for a time.
I had tried hard to be a good girl, but that church’s teachings made it seem impossible in their god’s eyes. I was doomed by an event—my birth—that I had no say in. At around age eight or nine, I decided that if god was real, I wanted no part of his universe, becoming an atheist before I knew that was the word for it. Strongly suspecting that my family would not approve, I mostly kept this to myself. Later, being sent to summer “Bible camp” at a different church didn’t change my stance. Watered-down Kool-Aid and macaroni art projects didn’t make its gentler proselytizing any more palatable to me.
But I kept thinking about it and related ideas. Having seen my small, southwestern Ohio hometown harass a Black family out of the school district, I struggled to understand why. What made them so different? What made them so undesirable to have in the community? The only difference I could see was the color of their skin; and having a few interactions with one of the kids (who was my older sister’s age) didn’t reveal anything else. I decided that it was stupid to dislike someone because of some aspect of their identity that they had no control over and couldn’t change, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. So I became a thoroughgoing individualist before I knew that word too.
As I grew older, the topic of religion and church started coming up more among my friends. Most were some Christian denomination, and their church experiences were quite different from mine years before. My exposure to religion could have been skewed, so I was open to—but not seeking—further data. Then, near the end of my sophomore year of high school, I met a boy who dazzled me.
He was smart, good-looking, funny, popular, and ambitious—he wanted to be a doctor. That was my goal too at the time. We started going steady. He told me he was a Christian and asked if I was interested in going to church with his family. They were members of a small nondenominational congregation in a nearby village. I said yes, thinking that if god were real, this sounded like an ideal way to discover him. I attended that church with them for several years. I became “saved,” thinking that would help reveal god to me. But it never came… not even during the Sunday evening services, which were less restrained and often featured people speaking in tongues and other “evidence” of the holy spirit’s presence among us. I never felt a thing.
We married in that church after I graduated college. After that, we didn’t attend any church for years, as our pursuit of advanced education and our jobs took most of our attention and energy. When I started graduate school in experimental and cognitive psychology, a course that included a lot of content on the philosophy of science forced me to start thinking deeply about a lot of issues again. That and my research training led me to realize that I’m incapable of taking anything solely on faith.
If god was real but unwilling to provide the faithful any evidence of his existence, he was not only unworthy of worship, but also a sick fuck. So I was out of religion for good. The only path I could walk with integrity was one that I chose for myself. Ultimately, my rejection of religion and other substantive differences led me to end that marriage after over 15 years together.
During this time, medical technologies were enabling experts to image and study the brain in action, leading me to speculate that each individual’s brain is likely as unique as the rest of one’s body is from one another. Learning more about social psychology for teaching my courses, I realized that in some form or other, most of us need something to believe in. We have a need to belong to some group, to feel part of something that’s bigger and more important than our own existence. Today’s brain-imaging capabilities show that not only is each person’s brain unique, it’s dynamically so—its connections change over the course of one’s lifetime, based on both external and internal influences.
When I returned to school to become a massage therapist, in addition to physiology, kinesiology, etc. courses, we were taught a lot of things that are labeled “woo-woo” by many Western healthcare professionals and laypeople. Examples include: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that relies on meridians, herbal medicines, diet, and exercise; acupuncture (also part of TCM); sound healing; ayurveda; aromatherapy/essential oils; and the use of crystals in healing. I was skeptical of much of this, even as I was experiencing improvements in my own health via some of these practices. Looking more deeply on my own into some of these practices revealed that they have quality research supporting their efficacy.
Many Westerners reject much of it, however, because it doesn’t meet the so-called gold standard of the double-blind, randomized controlled experiment. What many people—including experts—apparently don’t understand or consider is that those criteria are impossible to meet in many areas of research. Not every important variable (sex, age, race, etc.) can be randomly assigned to participants, for example. Lacking the ability to reach this standard means that the research that can be done needs to be carefully designed and executed to be as high quality as possible. Replication is vitally important—repeating a study with different participants and procedures and getting the same results increases confidence that the research and findings are valid and reliable. The topics I researched are building this rigorous support.
In my massage program, I also discovered that research into the placebo effect had advanced our understanding far beyond the medical context, in which a neutral substance (such as a sugar pill or saline injection) could often have beneficial effects. It’s now widely understood that many things can cause a placebo effect—that is, simply thinking that something will help one makes that outcome more likely to occur. (The nocebo effect—thinking that something won’t help or will hurt makes that outcome more likely—is also real.) If the woo-woo, “alternative” therapies I was taught rely heavily on the placebo effect, is that necessarily a bad thing? I had to answer that question “no,” as placebo and nocebo effects are a substantial component of Western medical treatments too.
I recognized that over my life, I had built a framework for understanding why people can believe what I see as obviously silly things, such as a three-for-one, divine-but-also-human deity; a charismatic cult leader; or even simple superstitions, along with an understanding of how to ethically use the placebo effect in my work. I also realized that there’s much more that we don’t understand about the human body-mind (I reject mind–body dualism) than what is settled science. Some of that woo-woo may someday turn out to be biologically sound—and even if not, it was okay for me to encourage benign placebo effects in my clients. Believing in one’s body’s ability to recover is a vital element of the healing process.
For a while, I was an angry and militant atheist. As I continued to choose and explore my path, I realized most of that was a result of the coercive elements in my religious experiences. I didn’t want to be angry at so many people, especially since many never question their path of faith—it’s just another tradition handed down by previous generations. I now prefer to keep my spiritual beliefs or lack thereof to myself. It’s mostly no one else’s business; and I would like others to recognize and respect that position.
The growing nationalist Christian movement threatening the US populace from the individual to the federal level has reawakened my anger; but this time, I’m channeling it broadly to support our civil rights. I don’t want any person to go through something close to my experiences, let alone anything worse.