It was a dark and stormy night, after work — I had just finished my shift at a writing center, and he had finished his at an oil company. We were sitting back, relaxing, discussing politics as we often do, and eventually we came around to religion.

My roommate runs ten miles a day (we’ve been on a couple runs before), is 24 years old, makes six figures, is saving up to buy a farm (which is why he lives in the same cheap-rent place I’m in), rides horses through downtown Fort Worth (open invite for me to join him sometime), is very well read, doesn’t really ever use his car…and is a liberal Catholic.

We’ve talked about all those other features of his life (and corresponding ones in my own) at length. But all conversations that last longer than an hour eventually come around to religion, and we have both complimented each other on how we extend each other’s thinking in this area, in spite of very strong disagreements. Sometimes we end on decent terms, sometimes we end conversations in frustration, and sometimes it ends in laughter. But we’ve talked quite a bit, and one of the things I talk about is blogging about atheism — he’s an occasional sounding board for ideas I have for blogs I write (like this one).

So, anyways, it’s another late night, and it’s raining like crazy. There’s no TV in the background, because the storm has knocked the satellite signal out. And we’re hanging out in the living room, talking about my atheistic outlook and his religious one, and eventually he asks, “So, why do you blog? Because you said you blogged a lot before you got paid a cent doing it. Is your goal to make everyone an atheist?”

Well…there’s a lot to it, I told him. I don’t want to give a one-word answer, because that would be a bit inaccurate. But, to try to answer head on…I said that the best any of us can do is work to create the best world we can, based on what we know. So, based on what I know now, I think it is generally better for people to become atheist than to remain Christian. Just my view.

But I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong a great many times before about a lot of things, so chances are high that there are things I’m wrong about now. I don’t know what they are, though, but I’d like to know, and I’d like to leave the door open for people to convince me to be right on whatever goals are misplaced or whatever views I have that are inaccurate.

Incidentally, this was also my attitude when I was a Christian, I continued. I spent countless all-nighters on hundreds of message boards for several years, trying to convert atheists and agnostics because I wanted as few to go to hell as possible. But as the conversations progressed, I began to grow interested in their arguments. I began to evaluate, more and more, whether their arguments made actual sense, and I found, increasingly, that they did. And when that happened, I had to do an about-face and change the entirety of my opinion. And that change prompted many other changes in my thinking. Every day, I still am finding out ways that the way I thought yesterday was wrong in some way or another.

But I would have never found that out if I hadn’t tried to contribute the best picture I had of the world to other people and embraced the discussion and arguments that came as a result — if I had never engaged in that discourse with the sincere desire to get to the truth as much as I possibly could.

So who knows? I’ve been wrong about many things before; I might be wrong about my thinking that getting rid of God is necessary to promote a humanism that would ultimately make the world a better place for people. But I don’t see strong evidence that I am wrong on that point, so I tend to argue (sometimes fairly strongly when I think I have a strong point) that getting rid of God will make the world a better place, while at the same time inviting disagreement and dialogue.

And I think that’s the best I can do — or anyone for that matter. The best we can do, I argued, is to try and make the world a better place based on what we think will make the world a better place, while being open to the possibility that we are wrong. So it’s not like I’m trying to ram atheism down people’s throats, as much as I am straightforwardly trying to argue — based on arguments that have convinced me — that atheism is a primary step to a healthy humanism. I’d like to present what I’ve learned that has led to this conclusion, you can present what you’ve learned, and we can compare notes. And if I’m convinced I will change, hopefully, to an opinion that’s less wrong and forward it. The understanding is that you will do the same, because the end goal is not to “win” regardless of the facts, but to follow the truth, wherever it leads.

So yes (I continued), I do write, in part, to convince people to become atheists, but it’s not that simple. Being straightforward, yet thoughtful, about my opinions is what convinced me to leave Christianity, and it continues to shape my stance on God’s existence today. So I’m not trying to force you to have my opinion, so much as I’m trying to explain my stance in an understandable way and allow you to explain yours, as well. And I’ve been wrong many times before, so this is not about our egos. This is about trying to follow whichever path is right.

And then I added to this something else — a deeply personal (and communal) reason I blog. There was a time I wondered if my blogging was selfish — did I blog in order to convince myself that I wasn’t alone in my thinking, or to convince other people that they weren’t alone in their thinking? Was blogging centered on myself, or on helping other people?

After thinking about it, I think that both reasons are both same thing. A lot of what I write about are things that deeply bother me, personally. So I write about them and, ever since I started doing this, I have been regularly surprised at how they tend to bother other people, as well.

So I write to tell other people that they’re not alone, that what they think is, so far as I know, on target, and they echo that message back to me, oftentimes. There are criticisms, too, and those are helpful…but then there are also the people who take what I write and share it to their friends or close family members because I finally have come up with a way to express the exact way they are feeling to a third party. That’s a real difference I’m making, on a person-to-person level, that wouldn’t happen if I didn’t spend this time writing. So that really motivates me as well.

So, I told him, that’s why I hesitate to simply say I write to make people become atheists. In addition to my intention to engage in a discourse focused on following what is true and in the best interests of humanity, I also blog to connect to a community, and to allow for mutual encouragement in that community…while at the same time trying to be open to ways I can revise my thinking, with a constant view towards being less wrong, so that we can further work to make the world a better place.

That’s what I told my liberal Christian roommate. It was about a 15 minute monologue to a short question, but I finally got to the end of it. After a pause, I asked him whether I got my point across.

He leaned back in the sofa chair, thought a bit, gave me wry smile, and said, “Hmm…that sounds good, Pete. Makes sense.”

And we sat there for a few moments, enjoying the storm, before we started talking about God again. But I thought that was a good conversation, so I thought I’d share it with you, in case you’re wondering, too, why at least one blogger spends so much time on the Internet writing about atheism.

Thanks for reading.