The organizer of a group of skeptics in my home town of San Diego challenges members of the group each year to document in an autobiographical sketch the path that each followed to become a skeptic. The members are generally skeptical about all manner of hokum, but especially religion.
The organizer, himself, had a difficult path, for he was reared in a fundamentalist religious family. He described his path as a "spiritual journey." I grew up in the South in a more secular family, and I view my path to the age of reason as an intellectual journey. Here is what I submitted:
I was a military brat almost from birth. Born in 1941, I got my first tooth the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. (I could not have known that, years later, I would be in charge of running that base as Executive Officer of U.S Naval Station Pearl Harbor.) My dad was an Army Air Corps pilot in WWII. My mother and I moved around from base to base following my dad. When that was not possible, we moved to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, where my maternal grandfather was a Marine major.
The war was very confusing for me. When I dropped my lollipop on the ground, I was told not to eat it, for there were “germs” on it. When I asked why there were so many airplanes flying around the air base, I was told we were at war with the “Germans.” Germs/Germans – both bad, but I could not tell the difference, and there seemed to be a problem of scale. How could big airplanes help us fight some things so tiny that you could not see them on a lollipop?
When the war was over, my dad, who was such a skilled artist that he had once been offered a position as an animator for Walt Disney, went to work as a sales promotion manager for the Alabama Gas Corporation, a position that required artistic ability. He was involved in designing advertising layouts for the media. I believe that he eventually created the “Gas Genie” that was for years the mascot and logo for the American Gas Association. We lived in Montgomery, Alabama, where I was a typical ADHD, booger-eating, barefoot, rope-belted bubba. I did not show any of the precocity one would expect in a future MENSA member.
Oh, there were occasional flashes of brilliance that would get my father excited and launch him on a short-lived effort to teach me higher math or something. However, I was lazy. For example, I loved for my mother to sit down with me in a big chair and read the latest Disney comic book to me. I dared not let on that I could read it myself, for that would end the bonding sessions with my mother. That is, in fact, what happened. My dad finally said one day, “His teacher says that he reads well. Let him read it himself.” I was on my own and not happy about it.
I had little interest in religion. I was curious about whether angels were really watching me, for they never prevented me from skinning my knee or falling out of the chinaberry tree. What use were they? God was too far up the chain of command to bother with me, but, at the very least, the angels could have given me a hand once in a while.
My parents seemed to join whatever church helped my dad in business. His boss at Alabama Gas Corporation was a member of the First Christian Church, and he was soon baptized into that faith. I still remember the ritual. I did not mind because they had grape juice passed around every Sunday during the interminable sermons. My mother was religious in a non-denominational way. However, neither she nor any of the women in my life was able to civilize me and fill me with faith.
When I finished the second grade, we moved to Birmingham, Alabama. We lived in a very nice cul-de-sac shaded by huge oak trees. I immediately fell in love with Sandra Jarrell, the girl next door. She was my sweetheart off and on for years. The off years were when the Korean War started and my father was recalled into the Air Force. This caused us to move to Louisiana, where my father trained to fly RB-45 jet reconnaissance bombers. I do not remember us ever going to church there, or in Columbus, Ohio, where he was transferred prior to being deployed to Britain.
We waited in Ohio while my dad flew Top Secret reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union. It has only been 15 year since this information was released – not by us, but by the British, who revealed that they had painted three of the RB-45s with their national markings and flew them over Moscow. Stalin freaked out and upgraded his air defenses in response to that.
When the Korean War ended, we moved back to Birmingham and became Methodists. We started going to church every Sunday, which I hated. As we walked to the church, I can remember doubting the existence of a god, any god, but I tried to force myself not to think about it.
I was a Boy Scout, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. At a Sunday sermon during summer camp, a scout leader chose for his sermon the “watchmaker analogy.” The argument states that design implies a designer. If one walking through the forest found a watch, one would know that it had been designed for some purpose. Its complexity implies design by someone of intelligence. How much more complex is man, indeed, how much more complex is the universe than that watch?!" Clearly, a Creator, God, had produced man, the universe, and all of the watches lying around in the forest.
Even Alabama schools in those days did a fine job of teaching evolution, as well as theories on the origin of the universe. In my mind, I called “Bullshit!” on the idea that there was some great Creator who also was very interested in the peculiar details of who was diddling whom; a Creator so petty and unfair as to consign to eternal fire anyone who did not worship Him. The whole concept of any god being pleased by being worshipped by lowly humans nauseated me.
About that time, my mother died. She had rheumatic fever as a child, which had permanently damaged her heart. She also smoked heavily. One night she just collapsed at a dinner table with friends and died. “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” I was crushed, but I took it better than my young sister. The pièce de résistance was our minister assuring me that my mother was in a better place and that the “Lord works in mysterious ways.” I was now a confirmed atheist.
Living in the buckle of the Bible belt, I felt really lonely in my lack of belief, but I was reassured by a growing conceit that I was smarter than your average bear. I had been sort of a class clown, but in high school ribbons were given out each six weeks when the grades were reported. One time, I received a yellow ribbon for straight “A’s.” Classmates, who knew me only as a joker, were incredulous, warning me that I could get in trouble for wearing a ribbon that I had not earned. I had not made any special effort to make those straight “A’s,” and, for that reason, I did not always do so. I was still lazy.
In the middle of my sophomore year, my dad remarried and all we moved to Columbus, Georgia, from Birmingham. Birmingham was light years ahead of Columbus. I was immediately advanced a year ahead of my new classmates in math.
My first day in English class was a Friday. The regular teacher was out sick, but a substitute teacher was there to administer their six weeks exam. She came to me saying, “I know that you were studying different material in Alabama, but I have nothing for you to do. Why don’t you just take this test so your regular teacher will know where you stand? It won’t count against you if you don’t do well.” I was already ten minutes behind everybody in starting the test, but I gave it a good shot.
On Monday, the regular teacher was back. Being the new guy, I was sitting as far back in the room as I could, trying my best to blend with the wainscoting on the wall. The teacher, who was very myopic and had glasses hanging on an ornate chain around her neck, tried to hold the glasses at some odd angle that would help her make me out. She called, “Allan Bell, would you please stand up?” I reluctantly stood. She continued, “Allan Bell is the only one in this class that knows anything!” I had aced her test, but she had doomed me to be an outcast! My nickname became “Einstein.” If someone did not like me, I became “Eeeny Einstein.”
Fortunately, my cousin, eight months younger and reared with me and my sister, had outstanding emotional intelligence, and he was an excellent athlete. He was instantly very popular. He soon became president of his class and, eventually, president of the student body. The fact that I lived with him gave me a pass. No one would mess with Steve’s cousin.
I developed my own friends, who tended to be more intellectual (at least we thought so). I became well known for making successful amateur rockets in this post-Sputnik era.
In Columbus, we visited the library almost every week, especially in the summer. I would check out six books each time. I did not have time to read them all because of school work and rocketry, but I gave it a good effort. Discovering Bertrand Russell’s works proved to be my salvation. I wasn’t the only non-believer in the world! His writing was so clear and fit in so perfectly with my world view. Soon, I added Thomas Paine, Robert Green Ingersoll, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain.
My father knew I was an atheist, but he still required that I attend church. For him, it was a social thing. He was a very social person, prominent in the community. My sister and I suspect that he was a closet atheist, but that would not go over well in the South. I once asked him about it, but he said only that he had been an atheist until I was born. I did not believe that for a minute. He never tried to convert me. Instead, he gave me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s "How to Win Friends and Influence People." I never read it, but I probably should have. I will never match the esteem that he enjoyed in Columbus and in the natural gas industry.
My senior year in high school, I recorded some amazing scores on the Project Talent battery of exams. Project Talent was a national study that surveyed America’s high school students. At the time, it was the largest and most comprehensive study of high school students ever conducted in the United States. Over 440,000 students from 1,353 schools across the country participated in two full days or four half days of testing. The University of Pittsburg administered an extensive battery of tests and questions that examined students' competencies in subjects such as mathematics, science, reading comprehension, abstract reasoning, and creativity. I was 99+ percentile in most categories. My lowest scores were in clerical perception, for I had uncorrected astigmatism that handicapped my ability to follow the lines of a spreadsheet.
I also took a competitive examination for what Esquire magazine’s book "What Every Young Man Should Know" called “the juiciest plum in all of the services,” the Navy scholarship. That scholarship paid for your tuition, fees, books, and living expenses at any one of the 52 finest universities in the country. I took the exam with 1500 other applicants at an auditorium at Auburn University (very difficult to do on the tiny fold up writing surface). The biggest catch was that, totally independent of the scholarship, you had to be accepted by the university. Duke at the time had among the toughest entrance requirements of any school.
Being unsophisticated, I applied to Duke only – no "safety school." I took all of these exams and made my applications without any discussion with my father. His first indication of what I was up to was a telegram to him from Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge, congratulating him on my having won the scholarship. Since my dad, president of the gas company then, had been fully prepared to pay the tuitions of my cousin and me through college, he used the extra money to buy a new house on a big lake and a boat. My cousin had also won a scholarship to Georgia Tech.
My education at Duke proved to be better rounded than that of most folks because I changed majors while I was there. This forced me to take more than the normal load of courses every semester. I was a biology major my freshman and sophomore years, which had a heavy load of basic science and math courses. Then I became a psychology major with a heavy load of statistics, social sciences, history, philosophy, and psychology. There was also a religion requirement: one semester of Old Testament, one semester of New Testament. All of this was on top of 24 semester hours of naval science courses. When I graduated, I had about 60 more hours than were required for my Bachelor of Science degree, but I felt that the experience had really broadened me. I even value the religion requirement.
During the summers, I went on Navy cruises and saw the world. In the 1962, I bought a motor scooter in Florence, Italy, and toured all over Europe on it for two months. I had already visited many Mediterranean ports of call during the cruise. I met many Europeans and made an effort to see their perspective on things. I had a long discussion about religion with a young German studying theology. He tried to offer arguments for the existence of God, but none seemed convincing to me. Rather, I wondered why an otherwise intelligent man would waste his gifts on such a superstitious calling. A theologian is a man who looks without a light for a black cat in a dark room; only there is no cat in the room.
One of the last actions before being commissioned an ensign at graduation was having my dog tags punched. For religion, I had “agnostic,” for, by then, I knew that to be the easier position to defend intellectually. Proving a negative is hard.
I had a very successful Navy career, despite having superiors who knew that I was an infidel. I served on everything from river boats to an aircraft carrier. I commanded a nuclear weapons capable destroyer. I saw vicious, bloody combat contrasted with very moving humanitarian actions. On shore duty, I had many interesting and important jobs. While in the Navy, I completed a Master’s Degree in Systems Management at the University of Southern California. The Navy had both educated me and given me very broad experiences in many aspects of life. After retiring, I had successful careers in business.
I married and raised a family. I have two successful children, one a doctor, the other a federal agent. I have one grandson. Since his father is a rocket scientist, I have great hopes for him. His mother, in 1991, scored the highest combined score in the country on the set of three medical board exams. My wife and children are all non-believers like me without my ever brainwashing them. I even let my kids go to Baptist church in Hawaii when they expressed a desire to do so. That ended when my daughter recognized what a phony Jimmy Swaggart was during a revival in Honolulu.
Nothing in my fifty years since college has shaken my firm atheism, although I’m always open to any good, solid miracle. However, please don’t try to challenge my non-belief with cheap card tricks.