This story was posted on The Thinking Atheist’s Facebook page today. Antonio explains how he was ‘converted’ to freethinking through a family tragedy.
“I was brought up in the casual religious fashion of the middle classes where I live. When I got to university, I became involved with the Christian Union for the girls (best decision of my life, trust me). I maintained a lazy faith throughout my entire life, never really believing in great detail but never bothering to examine anything closely enough to disbelieve, until three years ago. My father died of a sudden, one-in-a-million heart attack on Easter Sunday while cooking for a family barbecue. He died in my arms while my partner and her father, my father’s best friend, tried to help. In the week following what remains the most traumatic moment of my life, I began to closely examine the platitudes and the rhetoric and found myself becoming quite annoyed by it;
“He’s in a better place now” - No, no he’s not. My dad lived for his family, there is nowhere he’d rather have been than where he was on that day, at that time.
“He doesn’t have to suffer anymore” - He didn’t suffer in the first place, nobody was more surprised than him. In fact, as the light left his eyes, all I saw on his face was surprise and vague bafflement.
“God just decided it was his time” - Why? Why would God take a man in his mid-sixties? Why not allow him to enjoy the retirement he worked so hard for and the family he lived for? Why not give him the opportunity to meet his grandchildren?
My eventual conclusion was that, allowing for my grief, God was either A) Malicious, B) Apathetic, C) Incompetent, D) Impotent, or E) non-existent. In any of those cases, this was not a being I wanted anything to do with. I sat on that thought for a year until I was sure it wasn’t just my anger at dad’s death which motivated me, during which time the Murphy and Ryan reports came out (two reports on the endemic and systemic failure of the authorities to protect entire generations of Irish children from abuse at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, in whose care they were entrusted), after which I wrote a letter of defection to the archbishop of Dublin and formally declared myself an atheist. In the time since then I’ve assimilated all of the a- and anti-theist rhetoric on the internet but your [The Thinking Atheist] videos were the first I encountered (yes, before even Dawkins and Hitchens) and they, alongside Thunderf00t, c0nc0rdance and AronRa’s, are the ones which I continue to enjoy the most.
