Throughout my elementary years, all students were forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. That sentence alone might give you an idea of where I’m going with this, given the controversy in the news lately. Anyway, I had never been to a church in my life. My parents had decided to raise me and my brothers non-religiously. We celebrated Christmas every year, but that was the extent of our religious affiliation, and I had no problem with it. I mindlessly regurgitated the Pledge every weekday morning at 9:00, and was blissfully unaware of the complications that surrounded it. As I got older, though, and entered middle school, I became aware of the different religions and how mine didn’t really fit in. I had never met anyone who approached religion like my family did and so when my peers would talk about church group or similar activities, I would just quietly blend in with the nearest wall and try to look like I had some inkling of what they were talking about. The more I learned about this foreign concept called religion, the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how anyone could ever actually believe any of it. But, as I attended a predominantly Christian public school, I didn’t speak up for fear of being abandoned by my friends or bullied.

In my freshman year World History class, we were taught about all of the religions of the world and how they came to be. This was enlightening for me, because all I really knew were the major beliefs of each religion. Learning about how Mohammed supposedly had seizures and hallucinations in which parts of the Quran came to him really put religion in perspective for me. What would happen today if someone started having the same experience and claimed that God was talking to them? You know as well as I do that they would promptly be shut in a cushioned room in an asylum far from civilization. Yet people today still believe what Mohammed recited so many years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to target Muslims in any respect; I am merely using their religion as an example of how ludicrous these ideas are to me.

After taking this history course, I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, wishing to learn more about the scientific backing behind atheism. Theistic religions just didn’t make sense to me – when I heard people talking about creationism with all of the evidence of evolution staring them in the face, I wanted to rip my hair out or punch something exceptionally hard. The God Delusion put everything straight for me. It confirmed my suspicions and decisively disproved a lot of common arguments that Christians make against atheists. My favorite quote from Richard Dawkins is probably “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

Now, I don’t care who knows that I am an atheist. Many people resent me for it, or say that I offend them by not believing in God. My retort for that question is that I am offended by them believing in God. I have used this in more than one situation, and the person in question has countered the statement with a look of complete disbelief. Why do they think that it is okay for them to say something to me, but that it is not okay for me to flip the statement back at them? Ah, mysteries of society that I will undoubtedly never understand. My true friends are the ones that don’t care what beliefs I hold. Those who hold it against me are obviously not worth my efforts.

I think that society needs to realize that atheists are real people, too. As much as people nowadays think about not discriminating against Jewish people or Muslims, they do not think about the views of atheists. Why are public schoolchildren across the US forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning when it makes the reader swear that they are under God? Does the separation of church and state not go that far?

But do me a favor and think about religion and the factual evidence that is out there. Read Dawkins’ book. Ponder why you believe what you do. Is it because you’ve been told to believe it since you were very young? Or is it because it is truly what you believe? Don’t let yourself be blinded anymore. Open your eyes.

Thank you.