My Odyssey to Anti-Theism

I was raised as a Roman Catholic, was baptized and did the rituals associated with the church at certain ages. We were a Sunday church-going family, although only through my early childhood. From what I could understand, we stopped attending because my grandmother had some sort of disagreement with the priest. We tried another church in town for a short while, but that didn’t last. Even though we didn’t attend church, the family was still religious, but the only times God seemed to be mentioned was when we said our nightly prayers. We weren’t a zealous family of believers.
I didn’t have a reintroduction into religion until I was in my late teens, near the end of my high school years. A friend of mine was religious, and I understand today that I only fell into the clutches of the Pentecostal denomination due to the fact that I was desperate for friendship. I was a loner, an outcast, and the church seemed to be the only place I could find it. I was a devout believer, much more so than I ever was as a Roman Catholic child, quite zealous to be more precise, and I believed wholeheartedly in what I read from the Bible.
This was also a coming out period for me. I was attempting to reconcile being gay with being Christian, and my new friends tried their best, but I understand now that their best wasn’t a true acceptance of me, but rather the typical attempt to change me into what they thought I should be in accordance with their beliefs. In the beginning, they seemed fine with me being gay, stating that God loved me for who I was, but as time passed it became apparent that God no longer loved me for who I was, because they wanted me to shed my homosexuality, as if it was a piece of clothing that could simply be removed from my person. I did try, I am sad to state, to change who I was. After all, I was a true believer and I did want to not feel as different and abnormal as I was being made to feel.
I was rebaptized into the Christian faith. My family, mostly my grandmother, wasn’t too pleased about that, but she never tried to convert me back to the Catholic faith.
At the time, only a couple of people knew my secret (that I was gay). One night in church was what brought about my eventual disconnection from religion. It was not to be a quick departure from the lies, but a meaningful one. That night in church the pastor spoke to the congregation about a message from God, how someone in the church was struggling with the demon of homosexuality. My eyes were immediately opened, because I knew he was speaking about me, opened toward the evils of the institution and the betrayal of the friendship into which I had placed so much stock. I looked over at my friend, knowing that it was her who had betrayed me.
I think I did allow the church to pray for me that night, wanting desperately to believe that they had my best interest at heart, but also deep down I was finally awaking to the truth of just what a horrible evil the church truly was. This was around the time of my high school graduation, so I wasn’t there much longer. I continued to attend mainly because of my friends and the sense of community I enjoyed.
When I attended college, I also attended a local church. My roommate happened to be quite religious, and we attended together with a couple of his friends, who also were new to the college. It wasn’t long before I discovered the orator who would forever change my life. I printed out many of his works and read them with a renewed understanding of what I had previously thought of as holy and truthful. His name is Robert Green Ingersoll, The Great Agnostic.
The new year, 2000, was approaching and most religious people believed the world might be ending. New Year's Eve was night of praying in church, and I found myself as devout as ever. I believe the fact that the world didn’t end was what truly broke my ties to the church, because I finally realized what a hoax it all was.
The church is not a safe haven, unless one also believes the same as every other theist in that congregation. I was witness to Christians bad-mouthing other denominations. I was witness to a personal betrayal because I could not be accepted for who I was. I was witness to the masks theists wear in order to appear good and loving, while underneath they are merely as vicious as their god. Theists are hardly ever as good as they perceive themselves to be. They seem to think that a mere belief in God allows them license to a demeanor that is nothing more than hate disguised as love.
At that time, I didn’t attempt to delve further in Ingersoll’s works. I was content being away from the church and having found myself no longer a prisoner of faith. Faith, however, is a fickle thing that can be hard to abandon, as most atheists who were once theists can attest to, and I eventually found myself discovering Wicca.
Wicca is much different than any other theistic path. I actually had nothing except positive experiences with Wicca, as opposed to Christianity. I wore the pentacle, I had a book of shadows, I performed rituals and spells. A part of me knew that magic was not real, but that didn’t deter me from the path of what I perceived as much more relevant, caring, loving than Christianity. I identified as a Wiccan for quite a while, until I made a slight shift that one could consider semantic. I decided to identify more as a pagan.
My beliefs began to change again when, years later, I discovered the religious forums on MySpace, where I began my journey toward Atheism. I eventually identified as an agnostic theist. Posting there helped me come to terms in shedding theism altogether, until I began to identify more as an atheist. Most militant, zealous, theists who deconvert also tend to become militant atheists. I was no different in that respect.
As a militant anti-theist, I find absolutely no truth in religion, the Bible or the theistic god, which I view as nonexistent. Theism stopped having any relevance when we began to reason. There is no good that theism can provide that cannot be found through secularism. To cling to primitive ideas is unreasonable and merely aids in delusion.