First Steps

This is my first blog and I'm not really sure where to start, so I thought I'd share the beginnings of my own conversion story. Of course it is incomplete and shortened for the sake of brevity.

The first step was simply questioning my own beliefs. I had been raised without religion of any kind, and in fact, was taught that those who had any kind of supernatural faith were either dumb, insane, disingenuous, or too intellectually apathetic to question their own dogmatic beliefs. Suffice it to say that for most of my life I thought religion was totally foolish.

During my teenage years I began to wonder about this. Freud is famous for believing that religious faith is a form of insanity. . . and if God does not exist then of course he is right! After all, believing in a supernatural entity that has supreme control over the universe, created mankind in his image, and is responsible for all beauty and goodness manifested by everything and everyone is behavior which would be sheer madness if it were not true. Adults get placed into psychiatric wards for having imaginary friends. If God is not real, then believing in him is infinitely more insane than having imaginary friends, because God is infinitely more important and influential than imaginary friends. Yet, I had definitely met orthodox men and women who seemed quite intelligent, not to mention lucid. My grandparents were ardent believers; were they insane? My own personal interests were laden with Christians. I loved the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's universe. Was he too insane? What about the 95% of the earth's population who believed in in some sort of supernatural entity? Insane? That is the thing about atheism: it requires an astonishing amount of arrogance and snobbery. It has to. How else do you tell the vast majority of people on earth that what they believe to be the most important thing in life is absurd and probably even insane?