For those of you who don’t know, I was an atheist until just before my 17th birthday. Someone told one of my pastors that being a young atheist was no picnic, and so he asked me to write something which let people know how much fun you could have as a teenage atheist Here it is, let me know what you think.
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My name is Christopher, and I used to be a teenage atheist. I’d like to take a moment to paint a little picture of what it was like. I hope the experience is at least informative and maybe even a tad entertaining at times.
I was a teenage atheist and boy did I ever have some fun with that. There were a lot of perks to being different. See, despite what many people think or say, most people adhere to some form or tenant of faith; it takes the rare soul to flat out deny God altogether. I was one of those rare souls.
I wasn’t an atheist out of rebellion to my parents or anything like that, I just was. My parents were hippies—one an alcoholic and the other a drug addict—the kind that ask if you had felt them thinking about you. If anything, I guess I’d have to call them agnostic because they definitely believed in some sort of higher power. However, they were very much against Christianity, and I did take after them in that respect. I hated Christians more than anyone or anything else.
I hated Christians for a multitude of reasons, the stupidity, the hypocrisy, the horrible things they did to me, and the list goes on. I had read the Bible through twice in my life by the time I was fifteen; I was not impressed. I had given Christianity its fair share of opportunities to convince me, but it always fell short. People couldn’t answer my questions, people didn’t live out their faith, and I was tired of being locked in little rooms for hours at a time while they tried to “convert” me.
Now the whole locked in a room thing, wasn’t entirely their fault. Obviously, if I had a choice in the matter I simply wouldn’t have gone anywhere near their churches. The problem was my Mother. My family was poor and she is an amazing talker; we never once went to a church that didn’t give us money when we asked. However, the people were always curious about her three children, of which I was the oldest. So, part and parcel with getting money from churches was people trying to convert me…for hours at a time. All it did was piss me off and give me more reason to hate Christians.
Now that I think about it though, the biggest reason I hated them was because the only Christians I ever met were pretty well off financially I thought that it must be easy to rely on some otherworldly force to control your life when you have food on the table, when you’ve got plenty of clothes, and when you’ve got a place to live. Often times I didn’t, and so I figured I didn’t need some sky fairy. Things had always turned out well enough without anyone else’s help; I was still alive and that was enough.
Now that you understand why I was an atheist, let’s take a look at some of the perks of being a teenage atheist that I enjoyed. First of all, I was able to do whatever the hell I wanted. I never felt bad about doing the things I did, not guilty in a way that made me think I shouldn’t be doing them anyway. Even when I began drinking at age thirteen, I didn’t feel bad. When I was only getting about two hours of sleep a night because of porn and illegal downloading, I never felt bad about it. When I was fifteen I decided that alcohol wasn’t something I needed in my life right then and so I quit that. Also, we lost our internet connection and my parents sold my computer, so I started getting more sleep.
I also got to show people how stupid they were; Christians were my favorite. In Middle School and High School, one of my favorite past times was to make Christians cry. Double points if they were guys. It was ridiculously fun and gave me quite the ego boost. I was the top dog. The alpha male, intellectually anyway, and what guy doesn’t have that innate desire to be the biggest and the best at something? I was the biggest and the best at refuting arguments, at cutting people down, at manipulating them until they broke. To this day the person I was still scares me, but back then I was having the time of my life; simply taking the respect of my peers any way I could get it. And after a few weeks at any new school, people left me alone about anything spiritual, they saw what happened to everyone else and decided they’d rather be friends than enemies.
After looking at the list, you’re probably thinking that things were pretty great for me, and they were…sort of. You see, while I got to do all of these things which made me feel better for a while, it was a pretty empty life. At the end of the day, I’d go home to my family that didn’t love each other, that didn’t love me and I’d wish with all my might that I could just cry myself to sleep. I never could. I’d lie in bed for hours, hating everyone and everything; most of all, hating myself. If I did drift off to sleep, I was constantly plagued by horrible nightmares. I was cold, I was alone, and all I wanted was some love. If you can look past those things to just the perks, then being an atheist was great and maybe you’ll think so too, but it’s not. Take it from me; it’s no picnic being a young atheist.
