Atheism: A Helpful Guide

*Based on some of the most common reactions to my atheism, here's something of a FAQ regarding it.*

1. How can you be an atheist?

It's quite easy, really. All you have to do is stop engaging in wishful thinking and be ruthlessly rational. The rest follows naturally.

2. How do you explain the complexity of the human body/the natural world?

The same way scientists explain it. All of this evolved gradually, in small steps, over millions of years. The process is known as evolution by natural selection. It's all far more probable than as explained in The Bible and does not result in an infinite regress.

3. Why are you an atheist?

I arrived there over the course of a long span of years, starting with a bad experience with a worship group at Drury University called Logos in 2001. Various other small bad experiences with religion, and bad experiences in general, left my faith battered but not beaten. Most of the work would be done by horrible experiences with four specific women, none more powerful than my engagement to a woman named Marie. In that relationship, I found all the evidence I needed that there was no such thing as a benevolent God. After a rather brutal betrayal by a Sunday School group I was in giving religion one last chance with, I started reading Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others and eventually had a logical framework for there being no God or supernatural force at all, good, bad or, indifferent.

4. You've got to believe in God!

No, actually, I don't. There isn't a single good reason you can name why I should, other than it being more socially acceptable to do so in this region of the country. Otherwise, Pascal's Wager, the argument from design, the ontological argument, the argument from personal experience, and everything else you can throw at me will fail.

5. I'll be praying for you.

Do you what you like, so long as I don't have to hear it. I used to erase your image from elementary school yearbooks and write hateful things under your class picture, but it never harmed you because you never knew it. Apply that same principle here, and we'll be fine.

6. You'll find God again.

How inconvenient for me, as I worked so hard to lose him. You must understand that becoming an atheist happened by a gradual process of evolution, much as life itself has developed, and I will not suddenly find God again that way. Were it to happen, it would happen gradually. The most important reason it won't happen is, even if I were to become irrational enough to accept theistic ideas again, I have against God an inconsolable rage that ensures, if I find out he exists after I die, he has more to fear from my judgment and wrath than I do from his.

-Frank