But I have a fundamental problem with creationists, and religious people in general. I’m from Québec, which, for the record, is the largest province of Canada, and the territory with the lowest church attendance ratings in North America by a significant margin. I couldn’t say I’ve always been an atheist, but I’ve never been a theist, and I would say I was never really agnostic, either. I was originally going to write a whole entry on the subject of my atheism being normal, so to speak. Most people here are nonpracticing, and many would be called atheists or agnostics, though many are so by convention; it became, in the last couple decades, normal over here to be a nonbeliever or a very discrete believer. If you want to look into the history of the matter, feel free to, but it’s not my specialty, so I’ll spare you that.

The point is this: I’m seventeen, and I’m an atheist. My identification to atheism and the degree of research I’ve done on the matter is probably seen as unusual, but my atheism in itself is a surprise to no one here. I haven’t had to fight for it. All my friends and most, if not all, of my teachers, are also atheists or agnostic. I haven’t ever had to fight for it, and so long as I live here, I don’t think I will have to. However, I identify strongly to those atheists, usually Americans, or people having spent much time in the United States (which I’ll use interchangeably with America, by the way. I would have been opposed with using America to mean the U.S.A. if it were on the rise, but by now it’s an accepted part of the English language, at least spoken.) who have had and still had to fight for their worldview. Many people in Québec would be content to call out the majority of Christians responsible for this obligation to fight as backwards conservative idiots. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the religious right in the U.S. is near-entirely responsible for the horrible reputation the whole country tends to enjoy over here. The thing is that I’ve grown up with the Internet, and learned English very early, and so I eventually got to know lots of people online. This is how I first learned that creationists were anything more or other than a minority of oddballs who congregated occasionally and were generally laughed at.

Sparing you the exact story of how I came to be an atheist, (it’s far less interesting than most stories on this site, anyway) I considered myself an atheist by that point already, though I didn’t really identify to any kind of movement; I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist, but I was definitely beyond agnosticism. I must have been about twelve or thirteen, so, about five years ago (which makes me feel really damn young, by the way) or so. Realising that people, what you might call a majority, even, were calling for something that seemed so patently false (and turned out to be patently false, or at best toroughly unjustified, any way I could look at it and research it), was really what made me identify to the label of atheist.

Even by that point, though, when the subject came up, which it never did in “real life”, I was generally content to state my strong opinions and support for separation of church and state, and leave it at that. What I think really made me into what American news headlines would love to call a “new atheist”, would be a religious debate that sprang up in the General Discussion section of a forum on which most of my online friends were and still are. We were all about fourteen or fifteen, some a few years older, so it really wasn’t such a good, straight debate. Being a population of nerds, though, atheists/agnostics/ outnumbered Christians, at least in the small part of the forum’s population that took part in the debate. (and this was a predominantly American forum, by a large margin, if that’s consolation to anyone here.) And, again, sparing a long story, we “won”. That is, you can’t really unequivocally win in that kind of a debate, but it became obvious that the other side didn’t make sense.

There were a few other debates on the same forum in recent times, and they were similar, except we’d all grown rather older and so they were much more like real debates. The results, though, were strikingly similar. So, now you know the recent history of my atheism, and how I never had and still don’t have to fight for it in any way, metaphorical or not. The real question is this: what, then, do I have against Creationists that touches me personally and drives me to fight for it by choice? This is an actual question that I was asking myself until recently; I met all kinds of creationists. I loathed some, who ensured that any logical conversation with them was toroughly impossible, but I didn’t mind a minority of them, who were, for the most part, logical and sensible human beings I could relate to on many levels. What is it that, in both of those vastly different archetypes and any in between, drives me to argue with them to the bitter end, usually long after they’ve given up? (except for the very extreme of the former archetype, who will not give up from an apparent ignorance that there exists anything to give up to other than Christianity)

I think I found an answer from my most recent series of argument with a creationist. The person in question is a girl my age from English Canada and, after some relatively fruitless debating, seems to have mellowed a bit and definitely appears to be the most cooperative creationist I’ve met that I would still call by that name, at least as far as I remember. It started with a religious debate on the same forum previously mentioned, but she turned out to try much harder at proper debating than most others did. Eventually we took it to MSN, since the debate didn’t really involve anyone but us anymore.

The first time we argued on MSN was fairly standard stuff. I could mention everything I didn’t like, her tendency to type four words at a time and interrupt me and such, but really, it was what you’d expect, she didn’t really budge. At some point, though, she linked to Kirk Durston’s articles (Google him if you would. I wasn’t aware until recently that he had just as horrible a reputation as he does. Can’t find the place she linked to anymore, but there are several blog entries from scientists who have debated him or witnessed his debates) saying that it had somehow “completely demolished” any chance of evolution being a reasonable position to her. It took me about three hours to read the paper she was pointing to (which was meant for laypeople, although the only argument he had that was not logically unsound was undecipherable to most laypeople, and was, apparently, factually wrong anyway.) and come up with a list of objections, with explanations as to why, which I’ll spare you. Durston also had written another layperson’s paper on the subject of “Christianity, killing, and Atheism” which commited exactly the fallacy you would expect: selecting only a few historical events where Christian authorities had specifically sanctioned or demanded a massacre, while accounting all deaths of the modern communist regimes to atheism, regardless of the actual cause of those regimes, which weren’t actually founded on atheism in any meaningful way. She also mentioned C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, so I provided links to more complete criticisms of the book than I could provide. (I really don’t think there’s any part of Lewis’ apologetic credibility left for me to remove, anyway, honestly.)

Now that I read the last paragraph, I realise I sound a bit high-and-mighty and such. That’s not how I want to come across. I think most people who’ve argued with creationists can agree, the part about destroying creationism isn’t very difficult if you just do a bit of research. It’s the creationists themselves that are difficult.

So, my rebuttals were sent by e-mail, from school. A couple days later, we start arguing again and, though she never says so quite straight, she seems to conceed that her previous arguments were wrong. She makes no direct mention of them (not using arguments I just refuted is probably worth extra points in itself) and is now saying that creationism doesn’t imply the absence of evolution, which is true, and she’s generally much more willing to discuss, and the discussion turns to the existence of God and creationism in general, not opposed to evolution. So, I make my general case for atheism, that there is, for all intents and purposes, no God, and no evidence of one that isn’t wildly subjective, and that under those conditions, postulating an omnipotent being is the unreasonable thing. Again, things were going much better at this point and it actually felt like a conversation that wasn’t being had in vain. Then we turn to the First Cause argument. I’d already explained to her why it was faulty, but she reused the exact same excuse for God’s “uncausedness” as she did the previous time, (scratch those previously-mentioned brownie points, I guess) that God was “supernatural”, and that therefore not subject to the same rules of nature. I’d already told her that this was a synonym, not an explanation; “supernatural” is the adjective we give to things which break laws of nature, not a justification for the laws being broken. I tried something different from the first time, though. I explained that, in theory, it was possible that things simply always existed, or that the Big Bang was an event that led to the Universe being as it is now, that it may not have been a cause of the Universe’s existence, but simply an event in it. I still agreed to the First Cause for the sake of argument, in an attempt to show her how it didn’t work. When I asked why it was that God could always have been there, but the Universe could not. She said something about God being supernatural, again. Repeat two or three times, with somewhat different scenarios from me and not-quite-identical answers from her. Then I tried a full explanation of why it didn’t work, instead of an analogy.

Then I think she got what I meant, and then she told me, quickly and not impolitely, that even if I did prove her wrong (my wording is ambiguous here. I’m not sure exactly what her words were again, but she didn’t clearly imply I’d actually proved her wrong. I can’t find the right way to put it.) it wouldn’t change her belief. And then she quickly changed the subject to casual talk. And because we’d been arguing for an hour and I had to go soon, anyway, I didn’t object. And when it was over and done, and I was thinking the whole thing over, I figured what it was that made me want to argue, that touched me personally even though I was free of the prejudice that many atheists face.

Yeah, this is where I actually get to the real, final point of this entry. That’s why it’s filed under Testimony.

It’s this wall that came up at the last second. This will, not directly acknowledged but definitely present, to stop all meaningful exchange of ideas, this will to not take into account the consequences of facts they can’t ignore. Not all of them draw the line at the same point; some will draw the line and refuse any kind of meaningful discourse as soon as you question the unquestioning devotion to “their” God. Others are willing to go further. I think that was the furthest I’ve seen, and that’s why I noticed. At first she drew the line early, and simply didn’t listen. Then, I have no idea why, but she listened, and behaved more like she would if we’d been talking about anything else. And then that wall came back. I think it’s that metaphorical wall that drives me to argue, not just because it’s frustrating (and it is) but because it’s… I’m not sure how far I can push it here, but I’m going to go with “potentially unhealthy”. And that’s putting it mildly, because that was a mild case. She wasn’t and is not stupid. But to unconsciously draw a line where one stops thinking, to put it bluntly, is something I can’t stand.

If people did not break those walls of presupposed faith, as they occasionally do, then there would have been no Alfred Kinsey, no Charles Darwin, to use the obvious example. No Karl Marx, no Emile Durkheim, and I question whether there would have been an Albert Einstein. There would have been no Ferdinand Magellan, no Giordano Bruno, no Thomas Jefferson. Name them. I tried to be original, and name at least a couple that people might not expect or know of, but there are more than one can count.

Maybe it’s because of where I live, because if those walls had not been broken, there would have been no Jean Lesage, no René Lévesque, and more generally because my province, which I see much like a country, though I don’t consider myself separatist, would still be the corrupt mess it once was, with the government-hired, church-funded “security” at voting booths threatning to break your legs if you don’t vote Union Nationale.

No, I don’t think religion intends to reinstate that kind of thing. Maybe it does, I don’t think so. But it remains that, without people to break down that wall, whether it’s theirs or someone else’s, and erase that line drawn by dogmatism, things would not have changed here, and they would not have changed elsewhere. And I contend that, if people did not occasionally break down that wall, most people on this site would not be here. The reason I don’t have to fight for my rights, don’t have anyone trying to strip me of them, or telling me that I already have been stripped of some of them, is because people broke down that wall. And that wall, that unconscious line that dogma draws in a person, at which point they stop thinking properly, is my problem with creationism in particular, for its anti-science roots, and my problem with religion at large, to whatever extent it applies. Breaking barriers is a tired metaphor, but I think at least this time, it’s the best there is.

I hope you found my story was worthwhile. Hopefully the text wasn’t too clunky and blockish for most people. I don’t call for religion to be outlawed or forcefully removed. I call for it to be questioned, through and through. That should be enough. It has been enough. If it isn’t, we’ll see then.