For me, learning was, is, and will always be the single most exciting thing I can do as a human. When I joined the Mormon Church at 19, I loved the church. I was excited to have answers to life’s most basic questions and I loved that Jesus Christ had forgiven me of my sins. Looking back at my journals from that time and reliving those days and my excitement for the Lord and my eagerness to serve, only paled, in my desire to learn everything I could about my the Mormon church’s history.
I loved going to the local LDS bookstore and buying my next book. Which was a lot of books.I loved to read and I read everything I could find. My love of learning was really focused on my salvation and learning all I could to be a devout follower of Jesus Christ.
I would read the books that claimed we were a cult and I would scour my own library of LDS books to find answers to the questions they posed. There is an entire industry within the Mormon church dedicated to writing and publishing books to keep us, the extremely curious Christians, completely happy. I loved my church and I loved the Lord. I was happy to be there, in that space during that time of my life. Extremely happy and focused on praying the gay away.
During that first year at Modesto Junior College, I also took Honors English 102. I don’t know the beliefs of the professor and it was not this class that caused me to become an Atheist. It was this class that began to help me focus on critical thinking skills.
If I remember correctly, in this course we had to read a ton more than regular English 102 and we had to write 10,000 more words compared to the standard class. My professor was a rather boring Asian American, but he was clear in what he expected of us and tore our arguments apart in our papers. He really required us to defend what we wrote.
We had a quiz at the beginning of each class, a vocabulary quiz that came from the readings he assigned us. As we read, we were required to write down every word we did not understand from the readings, defined them, and hope that we got every word that we did not understand. The vocabulary quiz, were words that he had written down from the readings that he figured we as honor students should already know.
No list to prepare from, just a sure fire way to get the student to do the readings, or miss words they might not know and fail the class. I think the quizzes added up to one third of the grade. You did the readings or you failed the class. It was that simple.
At the end of the class my vocabulary had soared, even today I find myself always being asked what this or that word that I use means. I found the class produced a new value system of heuristic exploration, that allowed me to accurately assess information and experience in my quest for understanding the world. The class taught me to really think on my own and not in canned messages or bumper stickers.
We learned about the various types and styles of arguments, like strawman, slippery slope, red herring, appeal to ignorance, begging the question, one-sidedness, gamblers fallacy, black and white fallacy and were asked to bring in personal experiences where we saw these in being used in the media, by politicians, by churches, and so forth.
It is not my job to educate you about all these arguments or to make your decision for you to be a Christian or not, it is only my job to share with you how I came to no longer believe in God. Everyone has to face these decisions through out their life and some people find the decision is much easier to arrive at much younger than I did.
My partner Bill and I talk about these things all the time on our porch. Bill never really gave God much of a nod. He said he figured out pretty young that this God and Jesus stuff was the thing of fairy tales. My son, Michael, asked me when he found out there was no Santa Claus, was I lying about God also? My daughter Felicty figured it out when she was 9 and the two most vocal about their atheism is my daughter Hillary and Jayne.
I raised four atheist in a Mormon household, in one week at Christmas, two weeks at spring break, and a month in the summer. That alone could be a book! Of course I should have seen my eventual ascension to Atheism when I was a young boy glued to the television enamored with Rosalind Russell version Auntie Mame.
From the first time she meets Patrick she handed him a book and told him to write everything down he did not understand and later she, Auntie Mame would explain to him everything he needed to know. I have to wonder if my English teacher stole that from the movie. Heaven knows, Bill and I raised thosed children as if we were channeling Auntie Mame. I digress, you do that when your old.
This class did not make me an atheist, it made me curious to see things as they really are, not as they are presented in the various argument styles. I was learning to learn in ways and about things and ideas prior to my conversion I was really never very interested in.
Something clicked inside me that first year and I threw myself into five years of intellectual development which had been lacking in my life. I had been flown to Austin Texas to interview with a software firm as an sales representative after handing the FEMA account for Grantree Office Furniture. The genteman who referred me thought I would excel in that area, despite my lack of education. He got me this amazing interview.
When I got home to my wife, I knew I did not get the job. They looked at me like I was a dumb hick from a small country town who exuded to much Mormonism and not enough exposure to the world. I found that out after I got home. The guy who referred me apologized for the interview.
It came down to art, I could not believe the amazing art that this firm had in their offices. Sculptures that I had never seen outside a Museum. I was giddy with excitement and it showed. My complete lack of understanding the world outside my faith was obvious. I did not re3sent it, for several months later I was a pharmaceutical sales representative for Goldline Labs, it was the loss of the software company.
Besides, it is hard to tell a person he is not good enough for a job, when the person is pocketing a $17,000 commission check for the FEMA account as a result of the Loma Preita Earthquake. It was the biggest check I had ever gotten. That earthquake paid a lot of bills for Shelley and myself. So I was not really that devasted, but his comments to me after the interview remind me how little information I had back then.
I looked at the world like all faithful Mormons, but that world was beginning to demand that I consider new evidence and the skills I learned in Honors English 102, required me to no longer blindly follow everything I was had learned over the last several years.
This evolution towards becoming an Atheist had nothing to do with me being gay. It had nothing to do with Satan creeping in and stealing my faith, there was no great crisis of faith, I was just being challenged to think more critically and was beginning to build skills of research and conclusions based on research being able to stand up to scrutiny.
In my geometry class they focus was on applying logic to deductions. In my zoology class on of the most profound things I learned was the definition of a ‘theory’.
You see when discussing the theory of evolution, one of the chief arguments made by low information individuals is that evolution is just a theory.
The problem lies in the definition of a scientific theory. When people say it is just a theory, they have just indicated to those of us who are informed exactly how stupid they are. I know it sounds harsh. I just called you stupid.
I used to be stupid also and I used to say, evolution is just a theory. Till I had my Zoology 101 course at Modesto Junior College and learned what a Scientific Theory actually is.
A Scientific Theory according to Wikipedia, is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed throughobservation and experiment.”[1][2] Scientists create scientific theories from hypotheses that have been corroborated through the scientific method, then gather evidenceto test their accuracy. As with all forms of scientific knowledge, scientific theories are inductive in nature and do not make apodictic propositions; instead, they aim for predictive and explanatory force.[3][4]
You see you just cannot say, oh that is just a Theory, let me tell you how this definition works in real life. So that you like me don’t embarrass yourself to some intellectual, who you might be interviewing with for a job. These things happen, our opinions should not be handed to us by others, we should develop them on our own based on real review of a subject.
When you say, oh that is just a theory, you give yourself away as a person who did not actually study the issue and you signal that likely you have an 8th grade education level. Which you may not have, but scientific theory is taught in the 9th grade if your paying attention. I was not paying attention, I remember learning in the ninth grade, but not understanding it the way I did at the age of 28.
So let me explain to those exactly what a scientific theory is in real language.
A Scientific Theory is well substantiated explanation of the world. That means that test after test have been run, on this explanation and pretty much 100% of all test have concluded that evolution as a Theory has been well substantiated, there are basically no test or studies or experiments of the thousands that have been done that refute the idea that humans evolved, like everything else on this planet is rooted in evolution.
If you click through all the links above you will see further explanation of how an explanation becomes a scientific theory. Basically there are natural laws and theories. Gravity is a natural law, the law of Thermodynamics is a natural law. The step right under natural laws are theories. Theories, are true, they are almost laws of nature. To become a law a theory must assess the explanation from every possible angle, imagine the theory of life and compare it to the law of gravity. Clearly one is easier to evaluate than the other.
So we are sitting in a world, slinging the word theory around when we don’t even understand it. I was 28 when I learned to no longer argue something is just a theory. It did not change my belief in God to know that we in all actuality did evolve from monkeys, it was simply added to my belief system of how God created the world.
That first year of school was challenging for me on many levels, everything I had accepted as truth was systematically being destroyed, but not in an emotional way. I did not once feel like I was loosing my testimony of Jesus Christ or that Satan had infiltrated the campus and was targeting me because of my great faith, which is what Mormons and most Christians are taught.
It was simply me being a good student and learning to learn.