My name is Jake, and this is my deconversion story. I've been an atheist for almost three years now. Before that, I was a Christian for the first

21 years of my life or so, and ever since I can remember, I've been involved in church,

going to church, doing church-related activities. My parents raised my two brothers and me within the

Assemblies of God, a kind of Pentecostal denomination, for most of our lives. We attended the same church

for about a decade. We went to private Christian school pretty much exclusively through our elementary school years, and that's where I really got a lot of ideas about

creationism and that kind of thing. After elementary school, my parents pulled me out and

started homeschooling us. That's when I started to find out more about

what a lot of more fundamentalist Christians believe and practice. For example,

we would go to these homeschool conventions—you know the ones, with 15-passenger

vans full of kids, and, you know, all the denim skirts, combed-back hair,

and tucked-in shirts. That was my homeschooling experience for much of my middle and high school years. Um, so that was interesting. But I...

I guess I didn't really object; it was just, as far as I could tell, a more

"proper" and correct way of practicing Christianity, so I went along with it,

and I thought that was the best way to follow God. You know, ever since

I just thought that was the best way to follow God. You know, ever since

I was born and have always been exposed to Christian ideas, Christian literature in school,

Christian teaching, that kind of stuff. I didn't really realize it at the time, but

a lot of the structure I had grown up in was really kind of a bubble,

so I never really had a good idea of what it was like to not be a Christian, and I didn't really

have a clear view of what people outside of the church even did, or were like. Um, because everything that I saw and

that I heard was filtered through my parents and

church leaders, and everything they told me about what people outside the church were like, that

was pretty much what I believed, and that's

kind of all my perception and expectation was of people who weren't like us for years. Growing up, I had read the Bible,

I had read it multiple times. I think at least

three times cover to cover, over the course

of my childhood and schooling experience, and

a lot of the explanations and ways that my parents and my pastors would

problematic stuff; a lot of the ways that

they described it, I never really thought twice about it. The first time I really started asking

questions and looking around was when my family

had a falling out with another family at our

church. I kind of stepped back and was like, this just seems like any other kind of

disagreement that people have, in or outside of

the church. Trying to reconcile these two things:

that there are people that don't believe and they're actually really nice, and then seeing

People inside of the church, not all of them obviously, but there are still people that fight

and don't get along, and it's not the one big happy family that we all want it to be.

But that was kind of the first time that I started asking the question like, what makes

us who we are? Is it religion? Is it something else? What is it? Um, and it wasn't too long after

that when my brother was diagnosed with cancer. That definitely changed my perspective for sure. I didn't really feel like I needed to explain

his diagnosis. It... it just felt like a normal,

random, unfortunate thing that happens to anyone. It didn't feel like God was testing us or anything

like that. I just... I don't know, I wasn't

I wasn't mad at God or anything. This kind of

gave me the perspective that maybe... maybe things aren't guided. Maybe things just happen randomly,

doesn't seem to make you a better person,

and it also doesn't seem to have any effect on the kinds of circumstances that happen to

you. Um, obviously people who believe in God

tend to explain and give meanings behind what

happens, but you know, if you really look at it,

we all kind of go through the same stuff. As

the months kept coming and going, my brother's

was kind of where I saw, like, my family,

and my mom especially, take a different path than I did. She started to get really involved in

these pseudoscience, alternative healing and medicine practices. And obviously, it was with good intentions; she was trying to help her son, but I just saw her become

more extreme in her beliefs and chasing anything that would give her hope. And I

took a different path. I started thinking a lot more about death and mortality, and I

looked into Stoic philosophy and other things like that. So I was definitely more curious about

these other ideas and ways that other people had explained and thought about these common problems we all go through, but I was definitely still a Christian and I still believed,

and I didn't really change much of what I believed until... until after my brother died in

late 2018. That's when I really started to question

what I thought and how I was raised. It's not because I was angry at God or anything. I think

at that point the question started entering my mind: is there really anybody to be mad at? I guess I didn't really have an answer for that,

I didn't feel like I was justified in blaming something or someone for what happened to

my brother. This kind of stuff happens to everyone, good and bad people,

however you define it—religious, non-religious, believing in all sorts of gods—

it's just... it was just life. It was about that time that I started to

find out more about the Bible I was raised with. I learned a lot about

the historical origins and the anonymous authors of so many of the gospels, and even

of the way that the books were selected to be added to the Bible. It was all... just didn't seem very inspired to me after a while, and so many of these, you know, literal interpretations

that I was raised with just didn't hold up anymore, um, as I started to learn more about science and kind of the way that... the way that we actually come to know things. I started to kind

of distance myself from those kind of a little bit more fundamental and literal interpretations and parts of the Bible, but I... I still kind of had the idea in my mind that, you know, Jesus

was a real person and, you know, I... I still had the whole kind of like, you know, Christianity

belief, relationship kind of thing intact. Um, until I started to kind of think more about like

my faith and... and what that actually meant. Like the word faith, what does that even mean? It's...

it's believing in something when you don't have all the evidence for it, or...

or you don't know for certain. Um, you know, there's that story about Jesus rebuking Thomas for... for not believing unless

he had that... that proof of the holes in

his hands. Um, and Jesus's words are used as kind of a reinforcement of, you know, faith over evidence, and when I started to really think about, you know, faith and and what it actually was,

that kind of was the biggest piece for me. I realized that so many other religions believe

so many different things on faith. What can you not believe on faith? Is it really a reliable path

to truth, if it's just a confident kind of belief or an assertion in something that you can't prove?

That didn't seem logical or reasonable to me, so after looking at the evidence, I realized that

I don't have a good reason for what I believe anymore, and that it was all kind of

about that extra step. That yes, we don't have evidence for it, but if you require

evidence to believe this, your faith is weak. Once I realized how much of my faith

was based on faith, a flip switched in my brain and I just knew that I didn't want to have

to believe things on faith anymore. I wanted to be informed and I wanted to understand

what I was personally believing, and that was kind of the moment when I realized that I was an atheist. It was

I didn't have to have an answer or an explanation for everything. We're still finding things out! We

don't have to assume, or claim to know anything that can't be proven. It's okay to say "I don't

know" sometimes, and a lot of the time, that's the honest thing to do. And it felt good to kind of

use that title finally. Becoming an atheist and really questioning my beliefs has only made me better, and I want to

My Deconversion Story

Scripts