I ♥ Atheism

I’ve never been a very religious person. My family was Catholic, but they never practiced. Sure, we’d do Christmas and Easter, but that was mostly about Christmas trees and chocolate bunnies. We only attended church when Grandma came to visit.

After I moved to Portland, I started to hang out with my coworker Susan and her friends. Susan is a lot of fun and is the life of any party. That’s why it floored me to find out that she and most of her friends are Atheists. Even though I was never religious, I was brought up to believe that Atheists were somehow morally defective. Without God’s hand guiding you, what reason do you have not to rob, rape, and murder? Susan and her friends didn’t seem like the robbing and raping type. After talking with them about religion and Charles Darwin a couple of times, Atheism started to sound reasonable and rational. I determined that I was foolish to dismiss Atheism for my half-hearted belief in Catholicism and was ready to embrace Atheism.

It started with a Darwin bumper sticker on my car. I met Jeff in the parking lot of Safeway because he liked the bumper sticker, and we’ve been dating ever since. Jeff studied biology in college. His knowledge on evolution is amazing. I can listen to him talk about Darwin all day.

I now have several pictures of Darwin in my apartment and lots of Atheism t-shirts and trinkets. My new goal is to start a weekly study group where we can all get together and study Darwin. We’d all wear our favorite Atheism and Darwin t-shirts, read passages from The Origin of Species aloud, and have someone give a talk about how Darwin relates to contemporary issues. I think I might bake cookies for this.