Great Christina: How I became an atheist - GREAT post

[Ronja]

In 2007 Greta Christina wrote a three-part blog post about how she became an atheist. I just happened to bump into it today. It takes a while to get through, but boy is it worth the read. And, as usual, her post links to a number of other interesting posts (by her and others), so watch it - this one may take you on a quite lengthy spin on the interwebz.

Selected quotes:

Both my parents were agnostic when I was a kid, and they let my brother and me make up our own minds on the matter. I remember when I was about ten or so, they asked us if we wanted to be baptized... and when we looked at them like they were high, they explained that they hadn't baptized us as babies so that we could decide for ourselves, but now they thought they should check with us about it. (If memory serves, we continued to look at them like they were high even after this explanation. It just seemed like such a random, out-of-the-blue question, like asking if we wanted to learn Swedish or paint all our shoes bright blue. No, thank you, and why on earth would you ask?) ...

So then I went to college, and started smoking a lot of pot and dropping a lot of acid, and I started picking up a whole passel of woo-woo spiritual ideas and beliefs. Tarot cards, reincarnation, synchronicity, the idea that subatomic particles must have free will since their behavior isn't predictable... you know, the whole hippie drill. I read a bunch of Aleister Crowley, a bunch of Robert Anton Wilson. I wrote my senior thesis on Gurdjieff.

I should make it clear that these were not metaphors to me...

Then two things started to happen.

First: I began to get interested in books about science, and especially the science of the brain and the mind. Which was a problem. It's not that the science of the brain and the mind actually disproves the existence of the soul. It doesn't. That wasn't the problem.

Here was the problem: Reading books about the science of the brain and the mind made it very clear to me -- unmistakably, unignorably clear -- just how easy it is for the human mind to deceive itself. ...

The second thing that happened was that, somewhat by accident, I started reading the Skeptical Inquirer. Which was a problem for three reasons.

Reason One: I had believed for a long time that spiritual beliefs were beyond questions of evidence or proof… and that therefore, except for the obviously wacky ones (how I defined "obviously wacky" wasn't clear to me even at the time), pretty much any spiritual belief could reasonably be held by any reasonable person.

The Skeptical Inquirer -- and its mission of applying rigorous scientific methods to testing claims of the paranormal -- made it brutally clear that this was not the case. ...

And -- most importantly -- I began to realize that I didn't really believe in the immortal soul because I actually believed it.

I never had.

I believed it because I wanted to believe it. I believed it because I found the idea of permanent death to be dreadfully painful, and I found the idea of some sort of afterlife -- even a nebulous afterlife in which my soul dissolved into the world-soul -- to be a comfort. ...

Start here for more: http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta ... me_an.html