How I went from growing up in a spiritual home to losing all religion.

You could say I was born into an unconventional home. My parents were eccentric travelers who rarely had more than a dime to their name and loved to drink. My mother was a witch, or rather, Wiccan. My father went along with it when they first met—having been raised Christian. Over the years, he began to believe in it sincerely.

My parents never pushed religion on me. My mother, who was inarguably the leader of the house, always said people should choose their own religion. At first I chose to be Wiccan like her. I was a Reiki master by the age of 8. I would cast spells with my mother to change the weather, bring our family prosperity and for many other reasons. I believed in it as a kid, as you might expect.

Eventually, when I was about half way through middle school, I started to question this mystical belief system. I started to apply my naturally logical way of thinking to this thing I had grown up with and decided there was little reason to believe in these supernatural concepts. I switched gears by getting myself involved in Taosim, for a while, then Buddhism. My mother was accepting of this switch and did little to alter my choices.

As I write this, I’m quite embarrassed. I feel like I sound like I was the weird kid at school who never got a haircut and didn’t understand social norms, but that is not how I was in my youth. Anyone you could ask would tell you I was mostly normal. A strange sense of humor, sure, but not a flower child.

My largest deviation from social norms was when I became a punk kid in my early teens, but I’m not at all ashamed of those years. I had a tall mohawk, a bleached vest, a fake leather jacket and red converse. Patches everywhere. Painted with attitude. I’m actually proud of those years, and perhaps my upbringing made them more likely, but I wasn’t the only punk kid around.

I was a Buddhist for years and followed the ideology closely. As a child I was a compulsive liar, and Buddhism helped me realize that was problematic. I had chosen to give up meat at a young age, and Buddhism helped me see the moral reasoning for that way of living. Buddhism also helped me learn to be more mindful and how to calm my easily provoked nerves.

Shortly after setting off for my brief stint in college, I started to become obsessed with science. I had nearly failed multiple science classes in my K-12 years, but I think they actually failed me. I had a yearning for science that I wasn’t fully aware of and that they hadn’t managed to activate. I started listening to podcasts like Radiolab and began researching topics like neuroscience and physics in my free time. The further I went into this scientific exploration, the less I believed in the more supernatural elements of following Buddhism.

I had believed in reincarnation my whole life. I had believed in some form of a higher power at many points in my life. Even after I stopped following Wicca, part of me believed that spells and things like Reiki could really work. Once these things become part of your psychology, they tend to put down roots.

Credit: Yuri Beletsky/Wikimedia

Eventually I stopped calling myself a Buddhist and tried to live a mostly scientific life, but it wasn’t easy, and it still isn’t. We are so ingrained to think that their are greater powers out there that it’s hard to give up on those ideas. We like believing in these things, because not only are they exciting, they are comforting.

Whether we believe in a god or fate or a horoscope, we want to believe there’s something greater. We don’t want to believe we’re completely in control, because that’s simply too much pressure. I still, to this day, hold onto the idea that perhaps one day we’ll explain a concept like fate using science. Maybe we will learn of some kind of massive cause and effect system we don’t yet understand. I struggle to give that one up, but at this point in my life, I won’t allow myself to believe in it until I can find some real, solid evidence.

These days I’m a satisfied atheist, or maybe even an anti-theist, and I ignore the stigma that surrounds the term. The atheist is often misrepresented. They tend to be good, reasonable people, but they are depicted as self-important and disrespectful. Furthermore, as I’ve written about before, atheism has been around in different forms for centuries. It is a long tradition. It isn’t just some modern trend that people are subscribing to.

I no longer believe in a god or the supernatural, and I’m fine with that, because this world is pretty awe-inspiring without them. I’m content with the fact there is no being or force in control of my life besides me. I don’t need religion anymore, and to me, going back to it would be akin to trying to be a child again.