The Geeky Atheist

I used to be a fundamentalist Christian. I grew up in a Methodist church through grade school, and after moving, my family attended a programmed Quaker/Friends church.

In church I played the bass guitar as part of the worship team. In youth group I also was part of their worship team. I went on several missions trips to small towns in Mexico. I often debated "evolutionists" online, quoting Dr. Dino.

I married a wonderful Baptist girl in 2006. We lived Christian lives, and firmly believed that we would be going to heaven when we died.

Back in May of 2008 I began listening to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. I've always been fascinated with science, despite my creationist leanings. However, this show did something for which I must commend them: they dissected erroneous claims by pointing out the logical fallacies being used.

One side effect of that is that they did take time to dissect Intelligent Design claims, which nearly always aligned with my views. At first I just shrugged it off, but over time I started to actually see how fair they were being in their criticisms of everything, not just ID/creationism. I reached a conclusion: I needed to justify evolution with my faith.

I knew that Catholics didn't have this problem, but we all know Catholics aren't true Christians (this is how I felt/feel, separate topic entirely). I encountered The Language of God by Francis Collins. This book allowed me to accept the truth of evolution while still retaining my faith.

Another book that I read was Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. Initially I just found this book fascinating. Hardly any pastors teach about early Christianity, and nearly always avoid the topic of where the bible came from. It actually breathed life into this book.

What happened next, over the course of several months, is hard to do in a succinct fashion. I continued reading, including Christian books such as The Shack. But I also continued exploring science and religion. Around the beginning of November, I reached the point that I just didn't think I really believed anymore. It was then that I stopped praying daily.

This process was done completely on my own, without my spouse. We did discuss it a little bit in October after seeing Religulous, but I intentionally didn't explain where I was at in my belief. I did not want to be the reason she lost her faith.

In mid-November we discussed it again, and I could tell she was an atheist but didn't want to call herself one. Around January 1, 2009 she proudly proclaimed to be an agnostic while reading Godless by Dan Barker. A few days later, we both were calling ourselves atheists.

Since then I still love reading about and discussing religion, science, skepticism, and more. I finally reached a point in April 2009 that I needed an outlet to express my thoughts, and this blog was created.

When I tell this above story to people, they always suggest us writing our deconversion story up as a book/ebook/really long blog post. We're very interested in doing exactly that some day.

Thank you for reading.