Yet another fellow Kiwi here today, thanks for your thoughts, Christina!

Tell us a bit about yourself and your beliefs. How did you develop then? Does your family have similar beliefs to yours?
I’m in my late 20s, and work as a Technical Writer. I love craft beer, own far too many books, and want to punch earthquakes in the face (three guesses where I live!). I’m agnostic, but I’ve only been calling myself that for about five years. For most of my life I’ve been a Christian; specifically, a conservative Pentecostal. For us, conservative meant that men made the major decisions in a family, and ideally women didn’t work outside the home. Things like sex before marriage, smoking, drinking, being gay and not believing in God meant you went directly to hell (do not pass go, do not collect $200). Pentecostals are a specific denomination, known for things like casting out demons, speaking in tongues, and literal healing. My parents are still very conservative, and some of their beliefs border on fundamentalism, but my brother is an atheist.
The easiest way to describe how I grew up is to say I grew up in a parallel world. I went to conservative Christian schools for 13 years (my primary school used an American Southern Baptist curriculum), went to church every Sunday (often twice), youth group every Thursday, and Girls Brigade every Monday. We listened to Christian music, read Christian books, went to Christian events. The only non-Christians I knew were other ‘people of faith’; Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or Catholics (Catholics weren’t considered Christians). We were taught to think of non-Christians as evil or hopelessly misguided. If you’ve seen the movie Saved, it’s really not so much of a stretch. When I went to uni after high school, I went through culture shock.
One of the problems with the brand of Christianity I grew up with was that it wasn’t tolerant of failure or difference. We were meant to be better than others because we knew God. I ran into problems with this at a young age. I was bullied fairly badly at Intermediate and High School, and went through a couple of major depressive episodes. This, I was told by people in my church and school, was because I had sinned and not repented, or because my prayers for healing weren’t sincere enough, or it was God’s way of testing me. That was when I stopped believing in a loving God. I had lots of fantastic, positive experiences growing up in that world too, but at some level I knew that despite my genuine efforts, I was never going to quite fit in.
My high school History teacher taught us to think critically about our faith and the world, discuss ideas robustly, and question things. That had a profound effect on me. After I left uni, I bumped into some Christian friends who met weekly to casually discuss the Bible, and ask the questions we weren’t meant to in church. We jokingly called ourselves the Heretics and eventually lived up to it – over the course of 3 or 4 years more than half of us became agnostic or atheists.
For me, those factors dovetailed into each other: experiencing hypocrisy and un-compassionate treatment from the system I grew up in; observing how the world is and how people really treat each other instead of just accepting what I was told; and systematically working through the logical and ethical issues of religion. Finally saying out loud to someone, “I don’t think there’s a God” was one of the most terrifying, freeing things I’ve ever done.

Do you discuss your beliefs with others in real life? Why/why not? If you blog, do you write about them?
It depends on the person and whether they’re comfortable with that kind of conversation. I really enjoy discussing different beliefs and people’s experiences with religion, so if I find someone else who’s similarly interested or open about their religion, we can chat for ages. The most recent church I went to was pretty liberal and I’ve had some really good chats with the pastors and other people. I had a blog up until about a year ago, and I used to discuss things quite openly. I think the whole losing-my-faith process is online, actually. I don’t talk with my family, partly because I haven’t come out to them yet (as it were), and partly out of respect for them.
Does your family celebrate Christmas, Easter or other religious/cultural holidays? If yes, how?
We celebrate Christmas and Easter, and ANZAC day is considered a religious observance in our family (my Dad is ex-RAF, and grew up during WWII). Christmas is pretty low-key, since our extended family are all overseas. Our family meet up for lunch, share presents and just hang out. Growing up, we used to do orphan Christmases, inviting people we knew who didn’t have anywhere to go – friends who were from overseas, or whose family members had died. We got people to bring a dish from their country/family tradition for dessert and things were really festive. Dad used to give a wee 5 minute sermon about the true meaning of Christmas, and people were pretty polite about it. Weirdly, we’ve never gone to church on Christmas day! Easter is a bit more full on for my parents, who go to church and sometimes observe lent. For me, it’s a great time to go on holiday.

Do you think there is a stereotypical secular person? Do you think you fit that stereotype?
Not really. New Zealanders are pretty laid back about that kind of thing.

What do you think is the biggest misconception held about secular people? Does it bother you? Why/why not?
The community I grew up in thought secular people had no hope because they didn’t have God, didn’t have good coping mechanisms or networks for dealing with negative things, and led Christians astray. I used to believe that wholeheartedly, but now the narrow-mindedness of those ideas bothers me a lot. They came from simply not getting to know people who weren’t like ‘us’. It’s a real shame, we missed out on a lot of stuff. I have much better coping mechanisms and networks now than I did growing up (partly because I’m an adult, and partly because earthquakes made it a priority), and I don’t mess with people’s faith because I know first-hand how important it is.

Have you ever felt bullied or marginalised due to your beliefs?
Not really. I’ve still got a lot of Christian mates (some conservative, some extremely liberal and cynical) as well as mates from different faiths or no faith, and people tend to get along alright. I’ve heard some Christian people (who still think I’m a Christian) talking about other agnostics or atheists though, and boy, that’s an education. Some of the comments are pretty derogatory, and I usually play devil’s advocate to diffuse them a bit. There’s a common joke that April 1 is Atheist’s Day, and that God doesn’t believe in atheists so they don’t exist.

What do you believe happens to people when they die?
They pass on, they cease to exist! They expire and join their maker a lot of other atoms. They are bereft of life! They run down the curtain and join the choir invisible (sorry, I had to work a Monty Python joke in there somewhere). I don’t think there’s any kind of afterlife.

Do you have any experience with people evangelising to you? If yes, how do you respond?
Hahahahahahahahaha. I have been at both ends of this – and if you were ever one of the people I evangelized, I am so, so sorry. I was crap at it; I’m an introvert, so talking to strangers was daunting. I tried to avoid it as much as possible. The Christian group I belonged to at uni sort of pushed us into it. A lot of us felt very uncomfortable with how we had to talk to people, but didn’t want to let God or the others down. Awfulness ensued.
I don’t think I’ve had anyone try and evangelise me since I’ve deconverted. If people are handing flyers out, I just say ‘No thank you.’ If someone were to get in my face I’d be a lot less polite.

Are you familiar with any celebrities/fictional characters who self-identify as secular? Any favorites?
I’m a fan of Tim Minchin and Bill Bailey, and respect the way they think critically about things, too. My deconverting hero was Reverend Spong. He was proof you could take the good aspects of Christianity (basically, the golden rule, the ideas of community and honesty etc) and yet not believe in God. At the time, his books felt like they were describing me precisely, and I’ve still got a soft spot for them.

Anything else you want to write about?
I’d like to make a disclaimer about my experiences: I have issues with Christianity solely because that’s the religion I grew up with and struggled in. I’m aware that crap attitudes exist everywhere, in all communities and religions (or lack of religions). I know lots of kids who grew up in the same world as me, were happy with it, and many are still Christians. In other words, Your Mileage May Vary.
If you want to get an idea of what growing up as a conservative Christian was like, Marianne Arini’s thesis ‘The Observer and the Observed: An Ex-Fundamentalist Speaks’ is fantastic. Our experiences, countries, and eras were different, but a lot still resonated with me. Don’t be put off by the title – it’s very easy and surprisingly quick to read.

Any interesting thoughts or questions to kick-start comments and discussions on this post?
Not at the moment.

This is the final Godfree Bloggers post! Thank you to everyone who participated! :)

Dance and Truth
Comments on Atheism
by Mark Panzarino
http://www.twitter.com/krankypanz
https://www.facebook.com/TheHonestAtheist

In 2005, my younger brother died, only a few months after my elderly Grandmother passed away. 

My mother’s mother, a Polish Jew, had a traditional ceremony with a rabbi, while a priest recited the Roman Catholic liturgy for my brother, who had always self-identified with my father’s Italian/Irish side of the family. Neither funeral was particularly helpful to me. I didn’t completely understand why we were wasting our money on people to perform these ancient – and completely useless – rites when my brother’s children could use those funds for very real needs. (And why weren’t these services free, anyway? What would happen if my family couldn’t afford to pay? Would my relatives’ "souls" be somehow not initiated into their next incarnation?) I had been a Gnostic Atheist for some time, although as a dancer and an artist, thinking about the effects of religion was not very high on my philosophical priorities…but it became more relevant to me as I passed through my particular grieving processes. I found no solace in attempting to embrace homilies, base tenets, and ‘solaces’ of the bibles I had grown up with, nor those of Marianne Williamson, nor the blatant batshittery of Deepak Chopra, nor that of virtually every new-ageism and denomination and doctrine I researched. 

What did give me great comfort, more than any other, was the empirical, provable, reasonable, rational, scientific fact of Atheism: we’re born, we live, we die. I wasn’t going to see my brother or Grandmother again, never. I was still alive, and I could enjoy his children while we were all alive together. This is all we get. Believing in what can only be described as pure imagination is folly…comforting imagination, yes…but imagination, just the same. Putting confidence in anything beyond the time definitively known to have is purely wasteful. Living for time that isn’t here; living in yesteryear; living in tomorrow: all wasteful, all disgusting. I preferred to remain living in today. Isn’t that what’s important? Isn’t that’s what’s most valuable? Isn’t that what makes each day joyous and delightful and precious, in real time? 

For me, this very same concept is what always made dance a great art form: that once you did it, it was over. One could record it or write about the event afterward, but then it was another medium entirely. There was no turning to an audience and saying, "Oops, you didn’t see that. Let me go back and try that pirouette again!" Dance is the truest representation of ephemeralness of life. And Atheism aligns perfectly with this interpretation of my chosen art form.

In 2008, I began transitioning my career from dancer to choreographer. My first complete choreographic work, presented in 2010, was a ballet titled "Adam and Eve and God: a dance for two". This was a commission from a talented contemporary dance company based out of Fort Worth, Texas, located very near Texas Christian University. 

The 1-minute trailer for the ballet can be seen above, and if you add me as a contact with a free http://vimeo.com/ account, you can watch and comment on the full 18-minute ballet at no charge at http://vimeo.com/markpanzarino. This was a truly unique experience for me. Not only was I determined to explore my own "Atheist Art", but I was attempting to do so in a largely conservative part of the country, in a company with whom I had not had any previous experience. I was quite fortunate to have very trusting dancers and an Artistic Director who had a great deal of courage. The ballet explored some of the logical fallacies, contradictions, absurdities, and injustices in Genesis 2. Reviews were mixed, which was better than I could have hoped for, and the company director seemed pleased with the whole experience.

It is amazing how much art is influenced by religion – both in volume and in depth -, and this is one area I think is often overlooked by Atheists. Music, television, commercial art, every last one of the fine arts (painting, architecture, poetry, dance, film, sculpture, photography…): all inexorably interwoven with religion to a degree that its presence is often undiscernable unless distinctly pointed out by somebody with a great deal of experience and a finely tuned eye. Here’s another frightening thought: art is a great way to indoctrinate children. Watch the trailer for "Rio" (distributed by 20th Century Fox) and count how many religious references you can count in just under 2 minutes.

I wonder how many Atheist parents took their kids to see that flick. After all…it’s from the creators of "Ice Age"…how harmful could it be?    Trust me. It is this kind of clandestine jamming that is the most dangerous. "Rio" grossed more than $484 million worldwide. Think about this the next time you choose to take your kids to a movie, let them read a book, or watch a TV show, without reading the Atheist blogs first.

In addition to continuing to develop my public Facebook page, in 2012 I hope to continue to expand my exploration of Atheist Art.  It’s high time this medium got the recognition it deserves.

This is the ninth post in a series I have running at the moment. Click here to see the rest, and if you are interested in participating, leave me a comment and I will email you. Thank you for reading and joining the discussion! :)

Starting this series back up today, with a couple more people before it (finally!?) ends! The last guest blogger I had on here is an actual friend of mine, and I have another one on today! Yes. I know some awesome people. You should be jealous. ;)

Tell us a bit about yourself and your beliefs. How did you develop them? Does your family have similar beliefs to yours?
I am an atheist humanist. I went to a (liberal) Christian high school and developed these beliefs there, not through a rejection of what I was surrounded with but just through natural scepticism (as a kid during Bible in Schools I seem to remember assuming that all the stories were in the same league as Cinderella, and being amazed when my teacher told us that Noah’s ark actually existed still sitting on the peak of Mt Ararat…I think she was making this up.)
I was brought up going to church, but not in a seriously religious way. My mum would have probably taken us to church more frequently but we lived in a small town that shared a vicar with 4 or 5 other towns, so the services weren’t always at child-friendly times. I remember enjoying going to church, possibly mainly due to the fun of taking communion (ooh wine aren’t we grown up!) and the fact that the vicar, a guy named Gerald who looked kind of like Reverend Lovejoy from the Simpsons, let my brother put the candles out at the end of the service with those snuffer things. I went back for Christmas Mass recently for the nostlagia factor but found myself getting angry, which kind of explains a bit about my view on religion now.
My mum believes in the Judeo-Christian God, but never goes to church now. I don’t actually know what my dad’s beliefs are, but he was brought up with a fairly religious dad who still goes to church on Sundays. I’ve recently been writing to my Grandma (dad’s mum) a lot and she’s an atheist – we’ve had some great discussions about Darwin. My dad has become more credulous over time, which I think is due to my stepmum, who is very spiritual/alt med.   
Boiled down, in my books, evolution is true, there is no need for a god or a devil or anything paranormal to explain anything in the universe, no matter whether we understand it through science right now or not, human beings do not require the threat of hell or the promise of heaven to be good, and the way to help the world’s underprivileged is not through religion but through education, proper medical care, and sex education/ contraception.

Do you discuss your beliefs with others in real life? Why/why not? If you blog, do you write about them?
I do sometimes. I have some friends that I talk to about religion about and some that I don’t. I will more readily start a discussion about science/evolution with people I don’t know very well than about religion. One of my best friends is quite religious and we’ve discovered that we agree about pretty much everything except whether or not God exists and whether the bible is true!
I don’t blog much any more. I’m more likely to blog about science and alt-med (especially anti-vaccinationism) than I am about religion but mostly I blog about random stuff, not real issues.
My stepmum and I steer clear of those issues now because we know we don’t agree! It sounds a bit cowardly, but I’ll generally only discuss stuff like that if I’m fairly sure that the other person/people agree with me, because I hate confrontation and arguments. I will let people think I believe something I don’t know before I’ll run the risk of offending them by actively disagreeing with them.
This is probably the most outspoken I’ve ever been about religion on the interwebs!

Does your family celebrate Christmas, Easter or other religious/cultural holidays? If yes, how?
Yup, we do the two main ones. None of the others (Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc) are really a thing in NZ. Easter is for eating chocolate, you get two days of ad-free tv, and they usually play ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and/or ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. Christmas for me is best explained by Tim Minchin’s ‘Drinking White Wine in the Sun’. Basically Christmas is about spending time with friends and family and enjoying the holiday.

Sometimes if I have Christmas at my dad’s house we do a Dutch tradition called Sinterklaas, which is where you write a poem and make or buy a present for a family member that takes the mickey in some way. For example my stepsister used to cuddle her kitten a bit much when she was younger so she got a balloon cat and a poem about if she squeezed him too hard he’d go ‘pop’. Can be as G-rated or otherwise as you like, lots of fun and generally hilarious. 

Do you think there is a stereotypical secular person? Do you think you fit that stereotype?
In some places yes, but not in New Zealand. Something like 70% of our population do not adhere to a specific religion, and our last two prime ministers have been either atheist or agnostic. I guess one is that you can’t be good without God. I am pretty sure I prove this one false.

What do you think is the biggest misconception held about secular people? Does it bother you? Why/why not?
See my last point above. I’ve been told by more than one person that I would ‘make a good Christian’. Why?! Just because I’m friendly and kind and want to help people, why does that mean I should believe in in some disembodied entity that punishes people for not obeying his every word?  /rant

Have you ever felt bullied or marginalised due to your beliefs?
Nope. Even at aforementioned Christian school. Good ol’ NZ.

What do you believe happens to people when they die?
They are cremated, or buried (decomposition follows), and their family and friends miss them and remember them. I read an awesome explanation once by a father to his young daughter who was worried about her Gran who was sick and going to die soon, that she would be scared (this is paraphrased; I can’t remember the exact wording). He asked her ‘Do you remember before you were born?’ ‘No,’ she said.  ‘What did it feel like? Was it scary?’ ‘No, it was just like nothing.’ ‘That’s what being dead is like, you can’t be scared.’ That made me smile.
 
Do you have any experience with people evangelising to you? If yes, how do you respond?
It happened a few times at uni. I generally just say ‘no thanks’. I remember being asked the ‘Lord, Liar, or Lunatic’ one once. If you’re not familiar with it, first of all you’re asked if you believe that Jesus might have been a real person and that he really did do nice things for people and was a good teacher. I guess a lot of people are willing to concede this even if they don’t believe he was the son of God. Once you’ve agreed to that, you’re asked whether you believe he was the son of God or not. When you answer no they give you three options, one that he was lying about the whole thing, which didn’t make him a very nice person. The second option is that he truly believed all of that but it wasn’t true, which makes him crazy, which isn’t very nice either. Because you’ve already said he seemed to be a good person, neither of these make sense, so they’re almost guilting you into agreeing that he was the son of God. I remember feeling very uneasy about it, until I thought about it later. It’s actually a false dichotomy (trichotomy?). Just because someone truly believes something that isn’t true, doesn’t make them crazy. I used to believe in the tooth fairy. I wasn’t crazy, it’s just what I was brought up to believe.
The most memorable time was when a group of three girls asked me to answer a questionnaire about religion. They ended up learning more about atheism/scepticism from me than the other way around! They were quite interested in general, and genuinely surprised when I told them I became an atheist not at uni (which I guess is a common thing for people) but at my Christian high school. 
Also, I went on a trip to Mt Taranaki with my family when I was maybe 11. I was looking around the visitor’s info stand and my dad had gone off to look at something else. Two or three men in black suits came up to me and started telling me about the Bible and Jesus. Being 11 I was a bit less critically-minded than I am now, and thought it was quite interesting. They asked me if I wanted to sign up to their group/mailing list/whatever (can’t remember now) and partly out of genuine interest, partly out of politness, I said yes. I was in the process of writing my contact details on this list when my dad came back and was like ‘wtf?’ and basically made them leave me alone. I’m still not sure what variety of religion they were, but I’m pretty sure they were either Mormon or Jehovah’s Witnesses. The whole thing never struck me as odd at the time, but looking back, what kind of grown people approach and try to recruit children into their group (religious or otherwise) when their parents aren’t around?! Pretty creepy.

Are you familiar with any celebrities/fictional characters who self-identify as secular? Any favorites?
I know of a few celebrities like Daniel Radcliffe who identify as atheist. My favourite secular fictional character is Dr Temperance Brennan from Bones, I think mainly because she says stuff that I wish I had the balls to say sometimes! And because she’s so knowledgable and intelligent in general.

Any interesting thoughts or questions to kick-start comments and discussions on this post?
No major additions. One thing I find interesting is the tendency of people who are sceptical of Christianity to be more accepting of so-called ‘Eastern religions’, like Buddhism and Hinduism, and even Islam should be given a free pass for some reason. They seem to find them different to Christianity, which I don’t quite understand. It does annoy me sometimes because it’s a total double standard to look at one religion with a sceptical eye but to completely gloss over others because of perceived ‘pluses’ like emphasis on peace, etc. 
I also find it interesting that some religions that people once believed in wholeheartedly are know accepted as myth, eg. Greek and Roman gods, Maori/Polynesian legends, and the Aboriginal ‘dreamtime’. I’d like to know how this process occurs, what has to happen for a religion to become a mythology. I wonder if it will ever happen with the world’s current religions.  

This is the eighth post in a series I have running at the moment. Click here to see the rest, and if you are interested in participating, leave me a comment and I will email you. Thank you for reading and joining the discussion! :)