Horror Stories

Why I Became an Atheist

Atheists get something of a bad rap. When a religious person hears the word, it often fills them with a sense of dread or anger. Personally, I believe this is because the possibility that the god they have dedicated their lives to being fake fills them with an empty sadness.

I don't believe in God. Along with that, I don't believe in ghosts, ghouls or monsters. This isn't a story about some supernatural terror that stalks the night. If things like that do exist, I haven’t seen them. You have to understand that I am a skeptic first. I only believe in what evidence compels me to believe. That is why I am an atheist.

What I have seen is far more terrifying than any monster.

I was not always an atheist. My father and I were both very pious. We were involved in a religious movement called the Followers of the Way. This was by no means a large group. In my time with the sect, it never reached more than twenty-five members; adults and children included.

I now realize that this church as we called it, was really a cult.

The story I am about to tell took place when I was about to turn 16. Dad and I had joined the movement about a year prior. After moving to the area my father, a deeply spiritual man, was unable to find a church he liked. We felt like a couple of guys without a home. Understand that when you are deeply entrenched in religion, it becomes the center of your life. Life without a church can feel like life without meaning. Eventually however, he spoke to people in the right circles and before I knew it, we were attending three weekly meetings of the Followers of the Way.

I never had much choice in this. My father was quite strict, you see. I grew up without video games or Internet. Every night after dinner and before bed, my dad and I would read scripture together and discuss how we could enrich our connection with God. As strange as this may sound, I never really complained. My dad was a consultant with an engineering firm, so we moved a lot. I never had a lot of close friends, so he really was my closest companion. My mother had died when I was 10, so all we had was each other. It was the only life I knew.

My only other friend in the world before joining the Followers was Bear. Bear was our giant, Leonberger. If you have never seen one, these are tall, stocky dogs with great personalities. I loved Bear. We had gotten him shortly after Mom died. He had helped me get through the hardest time in my life.

When Dad started taking me to Followers meetings, I was struck by how different it was from any other church I had attended growing up. We didn't actually meet in a church, for one. Every meeting was in a member's house. The leader, Ross, would lead us in deep scripture lessons and prayer. Similar to many churches, halfway through, those below the age of 16 would leave the meeting to do activities befitting a younger age. For us, it usually meant doing a written report on the scriptures or solitary prayer.

The biggest differences though were in our beliefs. In our eyes, our group was the chosen circle of God's true word. The people who packed into commercial churches for an hour every Sunday were just puppets going through the religious motions. Maybe they meant well, but they were not God's true followers. We believed that we and we alone were predestined to enter God's glory. I can't stress enough that I now realize how cult-like these beliefs were, but please understand; it was all I knew.

Amongst the teens, we always wondered what happened after we joined the adult study. At the time, there were only four of us. Myself, 13 year-old Chris, and the 14 year-old twins, Katie and Becky. Kids younger than 12 were deemed too young to take God seriously, and typically stayed home.

At that age, I never really thought about romance. Pastor Ross, as we called him, forbade it. He called it a distraction from God. Love was for adults. But looking back, I think I had a little crush on the twins.