Inquiring Infidel

Basically, I’m just someone who’s really interested in learning about stuff like religion and philosophy in his spare time. I’ve always been an atheist, so unfortunately I cannot regale you with any exciting deconversion stories. There’s no one thing that “caused” me to be an atheist, or one single barrier keeping me from believing; I simply have never found any good reasons to think God exists.

I was baptized Catholic, but my parents became less religious when I was very young and I stopped going to church. So I’ve never gotten to experience what it’s like to believe in God. I occasionally thought about philosophic or religious issues when I was growing up, but I generally focused on other things. When I did discuss religion with other people, no one seemed to have any good reasons for believing that God existed or that their religion was true. I wasn’t terribly passionate about my disbelief; I just saw no better reason to believe in God than in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

When I learned about agnosticism in high school, I started labeling myself as that because I thought that there was no real way you could know one way or another whether God exists. Then in college I started calling myself an atheist once I learned more about what it means. I had always thought that atheists were people who claimed to know with absolute certainty that there was nothing supernatural and that is why used to avoid calling myself an atheist. The definition of atheism is still controversial, but most people see it as either a lack of belief in God, or a belief that God does not exist. Although I think the former definition makes more sense, I am an atheist under either one. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that some supernatural entity exists because I know just a tiny fraction of all there is to know. But I don’t know of any good reasons to think that God does exist, and given the infinitely many possible Gods that could exist, I think the odds that any of the religions happened to get it right are extremely low.

I got more interested in religion in 2008 when my dad started talking to me about religion and trying to get me to become Catholic. I asked him why he believed and I looked into some of the reasons he gave. None of them were convincing. My dad had gotten very active in the church and got a lot of emails from right-wing religious groups. He would occasionally forward them to me and I would offer my take on them. Then there was one particularly dishonest email he sent me from Focus on the Family that really set me off. We ended up getting in a long discussion on religion and that led to me reading up on it a little bit more. I found the arguments for religion fascinating to read, but unpersuasive. Reading up on religion has caused me to learn more about a wide variety of subjects, from philosophy, to biology, to history, to physics, to psychology. I really enjoy exploring all the incredible aspects of our world. Eventually, I decided to take a stab at writing about some of these things, so I started this blog.

If you disagree with something I say in one of my posts, please leave a comment. I’m sure there are plenty of things I’m wrong about, and it’s always good to find out what they are.