Why I am an atheist (Part 3)

By the time I was in the 7th, I was pretty much an agnostic or a lazy atheist. Most of what organised religion taught was rather repellent to me.  The hatred and fear was suffocating. Every week in church there was more paranoia, more distrust, more rules, more clashes with reality.

Over the years it began to wear me down. The Catholic Church to which I was a part of was vehemently against homosexuality calling homosexual individuals sick and degenerate. I was enrolled in an all boys school, so as one can imagine there was no shortage of gay teenagers. I was friends with quite a few and I found them to be no different from any other human being on the planet. This clash of doctrine and reality had a profound effect on me. It showed me how callous and pity-less the church was when it sermonizes to its congregants to hate LGBTQ individuals. I saw first hand how homophobia was linked to church doctrine and how horribly teenagers were bullied for their perceived or actual sexual orientation.

The treatment of women too was another aspect that drew me further away. Just reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy in the Bible was enough to make me revile the religion my parents chose for me.

This clash whereby doctrine espoused by the church was not practical in the modern world was quite stark. It made me realize that, religious doctrine and reality could not go hand in hand. It was around the 10th grade when I finally decided to finally resist my religion. My first act of rebellion was to purposefully refuse to attend Friday Mass with the rest of my classmates and instead I sat with my non-Catholic classmates and played chess. A Brother came looking for me and asked me why I didn't attend. I never gave him an answer and he didn't really have time, so I was off the hook. That was that, the world did not end, God did come down from heaven to punish me or hunt me down. Nothing happened. I had begun to resist. I no longer attended mass with my family, I avoided Cathecism. By the time I was in the 11th grade I was openly an atheist.