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Aug. 19, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:03
How I Lost GOD!
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Time Text
How I Became an Atheist 00:02:35
All right.
Hope you're doing well.
Question from an ex-listener.
And I really do appreciate these questions.
I ask for them.
And thank you so much for bringing them to my attention.
And so here's a question.
And it is, are you an atheist based on refutation of the teleological or cosmological argument or both?
And how would you express your refutations?
That is a very, very good question.
So I have an entire book about this.
So I'm going to just get personal.
I'm going to get personal.
And I'm going to talk about how I became an atheist from being, I would say, extraordinarily devout in my younger years.
One of my first memories is of playing with my cousin at my aunt's house in the attic.
And there was a song by Cliff Richard playing on the radio called Power to All Our Friends, to the Music That Never Ends.
And I remember, I've talked about this on the show before.
I remember there being a very cold eye that disapproved of the song because it was secular.
And the funny thing is, is that Cliff Richard is, I believe, quite a Christian, does a lovely duet with Van Morrison.
Whenever God shines a light or something like that, it's really, really pretty.
So that's neither here nor there.
So I will tell you what happened to my faith.
I will tell you what happened to my religion.
I will tell you what happened between me and God.
And I hope that you will forgive the indulgence in personal history.
Because the arguments I've put forward out there, whether they're theological or cosmological, whether it's by design or the nature of the universe, I've already talked about that quite a bit.
And I've mentioned some of this stuff in passing.
But I think it's important to understand if you're interested.
And it's not just my journey.
I think this is the journey of a lot of people in the West.
I think it's important to understand how people end up giving up on faith, giving up on religion, giving up on God.
Five Pennies in a Sock 00:03:20
I don't know if it's some, I always think of it as some sort of vague Anglo-Saxon thing, just this relentless empiricism.
What's factual, what works, what's real, and the evidence of the senses and all kinds of good juicy stuff.
For me, it's always been important to be practical.
And I know that's not an argument.
I also know it's annoying to say, well, what I believe is practical.
What you believe is I don't mean that.
And I'll sort of explain it as I go along.
And I'm just grappling my way through these particular thoughts and ideas.
And again, I really do appreciate the question.
All right.
So let's get started.
So I was very religious when I was young, truly believed in it all.
I remember being in boarding school.
I still had some remnants of faith by boarding school.
I went to boarding school when I was six.
So the memory I had was probably when I was three or so.
I remember very clearly being 10 months of age or 11 months of age before I could walk.
And by the, about three years of age, I know I still had very deep belief in God and faith in God.
And I think by the age of six, it was still there, but mostly gone.
And before that, I think at the age of four or five, I think I was cynical about it.
And I know, what a prodigious four-year-old cynic.
So, you know, again, I know it's annoying, and just bear with me as best you can.
If it's any consolation, if it annoys you, this precociousness, it annoys me first.
So, just to be aware of that.
Because I very clearly remember my aunt, I would stay with my aunt quite a bit.
This is my father's sister.
Well, one of them, he had three sisters.
And my aunt would take us to church.
And I remember she would give me, she gave me five pence to put in the collection box.
And instead, I put it in my sock because often after we were at church, we might go.
I'm not sure what my plan was, but we would go, and I think I could get a candy bar for a penny or two.
And I figured at some point I could get a couple of candy bars, chucky bars, instead of putting money in the collection plate.
So, just empirically, again, by maybe four or five years of age, because this was before boarding school.
So, by four or five years of age, I was not devoted to God, the church, or religion, but was instead apparently devoted to chocolate and the slow-rolling destruction of my teeth.
So, it's always been interesting to me how I went from that level of devotion to cynicism to hiding five pennies in my sock.
And here's the funny thing: and I very clearly remember my aunt saying, Do you have your, do you have your five pence?
And I'm, yeah, show it to me.
And I was like, Oh, it must have fallen.
Oh, my gosh, I wonder if it fell in my sock.
I mean, just honestly, the most ridiculous stuff.
And she kind of, I'm sure, let me get away with it or whatever it was, right?
Oh, it ended up in my sock.
I think I put it in my sock for safekeeping or something like that.
But I didn't get my two to five candy bars.
Lost Faith Circumstances 00:03:07
So, what had happened in the interim?
Of course, it's pretty hard to recreate your thoughts at such an early age.
And I don't have, obviously, I didn't have syllogisms.
It was all feelings, experiences, instincts, sort of you name it.
And so, it's hard for me to recreate this in any accurate manner.
So, I have to kind of look at the circumstances and try and figure out what was going on that my faith just kind of drained away.
I think it's John Irving who was talking about the faith of a priest as a sort of a stink insect that was climbing sticking sect that was climbing up a bathroom wall with a shower raining down, and eventually it just gave up and let slip.
Certainly, by the time I was in boarding school, I had some affinity for religion and I enjoyed some of the religious stories, but I was not religious.
I prayed because I was supposed to, but I did not pray anymore to God.
Now, I had not encountered any atheists or any atheism.
I had not read, of course, at that age, any works disputing the logical consistency of the existence of God.
I hadn't read or seen there weren't exactly a lot of comics based on radical skepticism of theology and so on.
So, I lost my faith with no intervention that I can recall.
Now, my mother is not religious.
My father at that time was an agnostic to my knowledge.
He later, later on in life, much later on in life, he became devout, devoutly religious.
But my mother was not religious.
My aunts were.
I don't know that my father ever talked to me about religion at that age.
But my father was profoundly irresponsible.
I mean, as I said before, he played a tennis game while letting me crawl around the tennis shed to the point where I ended up drinking Weed Killer, almost dying.
And so I don't recall any irreligious, anti-religious, or even non-religious consumption of anything.
In the media, I don't remember anything.
So I lost my faith due to circumstances.
Or, I mean, to be more accurate, due to my interpretation of circumstances, which, of course, as everyone knows, is not always the same thing, to put it mildly, right?
So I lost my faith due to circumstances or my interpretation of circumstances.
So what were those circumstances?
I mean, I think it's a big and important question because I clearly am far from alone in losing my faith as a child.
And I think a lot of it indirectly had to do with World War II, but we'll sort of get to that over time.
Coldness and Distance 00:14:36
And again, I appreciate your indulgence.
I hope this is of interest to people.
For me, it's always very interesting to work through particular patterns of thought or to figure out, you know, why I would give up on something as essential to my identity as my Christian faith, to give up on it or, in a sense, to see it evaporate within me because this was not a reasoned process.
I didn't sit and think, well, this doesn't make much sense and that doesn't make much sense and all of that, but it just kind of evaporated.
Like, you know, if you have a driveway and it rains and it's summer, then you get these pools of water and then the pools of water dry up pretty quickly.
And then next thing you know, you look and they're gone.
And that was sort of my, that was sort of my experience.
And I think that cold sort of saw on eye of God that I experienced when I was younger, and this could just be like a British thing, like growing up in England.
England is a cold place, man, emotionally.
And the sort of stiff upper lip, the frigid reserve, the class consciousness is a cold, cold place.
Not a lot of hugs, not a lot of comfort.
And I think a lack of comfort, a lack of kindness, a lack of gentleness, a lack of warmth, really, I think in the British culture, chilled the distance between me and God to like interstellar lengths.
Because if a culture worships God, which my culture, the British culture, if a culture worships God and the culture is cold as hell, then God must be cold.
I won't say cold as hell.
It seems a little blasphemous, but God must be cold.
My father, cold.
My mother, crazy.
My brother, cold.
My aunts, cold.
My cousins, cold.
I mean, 23 years ago, I married this wonderful Greek woman who's very warm.
And I mean, it really did thaw my heart, let me tell you.
Cold, cold, cold.
Very little spontaneous joy, very little happiness in the presence of children.
Very tense, a lot of frustration, a lot of eye-rolling, a lot of icy politeness.
A cold, just such a massive distance between people.
And that coldness is also the case in Canada.
It's also the case in the U.S. from what I've seen.
Certainly was the case in South Africa.
So maybe it's a wasp thing, I don't know, but just cold, cold people, cold, distant people.
No warmth, no hugs, no deep inquiries into how you're doing.
No, how's your heart?
No, you know, no real empathy, no deep consideration, no sensitive listening.
Just cold, broken, anti-tribal, shattered connections, enormous distance.
Now, of course, two world wars, the Great Depression, and you name it, certainly contributed to all of that.
Or maybe, maybe I should say it was not so much that it was a cold culture, but it was a culture that was dissociated through shock, PTSD, and the massive hemorrhaging blood loss of millions of its inhabitants.
And I find modern culture very cold.
I mean, you see it on social media all the time.
There's almost no warmth.
I mean, we think about it, right?
There's almost no warmth.
I mean, I will say to people, you know, like, I'm really sorry that happened to you, and you have my deepest sympathies, big hug from the Great Beyond, and all of that.
And I mean, I feel that, and I really do care.
You know, people have sad stories, but it's cold as a whole.
I'm not sure why, but Western culture, again, some exceptions, of course, Italians are quite warm.
Our Greeks, of course.
But for a lot of the Western culture, it's just cold.
Distant, icy, removed.
Guarded, really guarded.
Not like I had a conflict with a listener.
And I recorded it.
I'll probably put it out at some point, but just cold.
Just cold.
And that coldness, I don't know if it's a kind of superiority, not for the listener, but just what I experienced as a child.
I don't know if it's a kind of superiority.
I don't know.
But it's a sort of, there is a sort of smoke superiority and guardedness to that kind of coldness.
And so I experienced my culture as cold.
My aunt's as cold.
My father is cold.
My mother is distant.
My brother is cold, distant.
In boarding school, you got caned, cold, distant.
The woman who was in charge of us, the matron, like a real Nurse Ratchet style, you know, Louise Fletcher from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, like just cold, cold.
White, angry, white-hot anger, and cold, if that makes sense.
I know hot and cold.
The priests, cold.
No warmth, no empathy, no curiosity.
And as a sensitive boy who had had more than his fair share of heartaches, some warmth, some hugs.
I wrote about this with the character Catherine in my novel Almost.
Just warmth.
Can we get some warmth anywhere of any kind?
You know, you'd get injured.
You'd fall down, you'd taste blood, and have a loose tooth, bloody nose.
Ah, been to the wars, have we?
Been to the wars, have we?
It's cold shit, man.
God, just ice people.
Inhuman robots.
Cold.
Stiff upper lip is like a noose around your heart.
Not any particular passion, just this icy, shallow, empty rage.
I mean, I remember when I read when I was in my single digits, probably eight or nine, a book called The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris, I think it was, about how crazy people go in cities.
I don't think it's cities, but so all of that coldness, you know, if you were homesick at boarding school, nobody cared.
And that's, I think, why we went through all of these various hobby horse hysterias, the conquerors and the paper airplanes and things like that.
Just dissociated colds.
We were not social animals.
We were cold, competitive, distant, ice people, caustic to each other, as distant from each other as we were from our own hearts and our own experiences.
So given that everybody who worshipped God was distant, God could not worship closeness.
And that was not really a syllogism, but just very much my lived experience, right?
Everybody was distant from each other, cold, censorious, judgmental, aggressive, hitty.
The only passion I saw, then the white range, the white rage of tight-lipped disapproval, was my mother's florid raped into Adam's passion, which was craziness.
How could I get close to God when everyone who worshipped God was cold?
So clearly, if everybody who worshipped God and prayed to God for guidance was cold, then God must be cold, cold, cold.
A witch's breast at absolute zero.
Because if people were praying to God and said, you know, how should we live?
How should we be?
And everyone was cold and everyone prayed to God and everyone took instruction from God, then God must be cold.
Because if God was telling people, be warm-hearted, be open-hearted, ask people how they're doing, connect, right?
That's the E.M. Forster thing, like only connect, connect.
So if everybody took their instruction from God, but God was, then God was cold.
Everybody who was cold took their instruction from God, therefore God must be cold, which is why the eye that hovered over me a great distance when I was three or so in the attic with my cousin was judgmental, cold, negative, hostile to any kind of earthly pleasures, and demanding of endless self-erasure, devotion, and self-sacrifice.
And that message I got from very early on, that as a man in particular, as a boy, as a male, you were just supposed to self-sacrifice.
Now, I felt stress at all the coldness around me, because it meant that I was unattached and therefore unprotected as a little boy, as a toddler.
And I was.
I mean, I remember being six or so and crossing the street with my mother.
We weren't at a light.
And I dropped my coloring book and I reached down to pick it up.
And a car swished by at high speed so close to me that it drove over my coloring book, like inches from my head and hand.
High speed.
Crazy stuff.
And so if I didn't feel cared for, if I didn't feel loved, appreciated and warmly attached, then I was in perpetual danger.
I mean, if you don't care about something, you leave it behind.
You ignore it.
Children should be seen and not heard, I was told.
And if I was stood in front of something my mother wanted to see, well, I know that you're a pain.
I just don't know that you're a window pane.
So I think that coldness was, and this just struck me now.
So the coldness was God worships distance.
God praises distance.
God worships distance.
If God praises and worships distance, then the only way to worship God is to distance yourself from God.
And I think that's what I did.
Because if God commanded warmth, but everyone was cold, then nobody believed in God.
If God commanded cold and everyone be cold and everyone was cold and distant, then I should be cold and distant, which meant, in a sense, since God commands being aloof as virtuous, then I should be aloof from God.
So in a sense, my faith was to drop my faith.
Since being distant and cold is the ideal, then I should be distant and cold from God as God was distant and cold from me and from all those around me who prayed for guidance and became cold and distant.
And of course, it goes without saying, since I've said it before, but I mentioned it briefly here, none of my relatives asked me how I was doing with a, they knew my mother was deranged.
They knew my mother had been hospitalized for madness even after I was born.
And so they knew that my mother was mad and dangerous and violent.
And yet they never once asked me how I was doing, or my brother, to my knowledge.
So that's cold.
It means that they don't care.
And if God says, don't care about children, which again, everybody was praying to God.
And if God says, don't care about children, then it is good to not care about others.
And therefore, it is good to not care about your family.
And therefore, it is good to not care about God.
How can God command you to be close to God if God commands everyone to be distant from each other?
Which is exactly what I saw and experienced vividly, daily, nightly.
So no priest, no teacher, no headmaster, no relative.
Did I mention teacher?
No, no priest, no teacher, no headmaster, no relative, no friend, no neighbor.
No one ever asked me how I was doing, despite the fact that, I mean, the abuse that I suffered as a child was not quiet.
It was loud and violent and screaming and screechy and, you know, things being thrown, kids being thrown against walls, like it was just crazy stuff, right?
And nobody ever asked.
And so I accepted that people worshipped God, and I accepted that this was the result.
And if the result of people worshiping God is coldness, hostility, abuse, indifference to the suffering of children, and only performative morality, then they cannot be worshipping a good deity.
I genuinely think that I deep down believed that everyone had switched their circuits and was not following God, but rather the devil.
And it didn't make any sense to me.
I think it is all instinctual stuff.
I wasn't reasoning this stuff out.
I'm just sort of looking back upon the course of my life from, you know, 50 plus years on.
How could it be good?
You know, when I came to Canada at the age of 11, my brother went back to England for a couple of years, and there was not one phone call, not one letter asking me how I was doing.
He went back to England to stay with my relatives.
It's cold.
It's really cold.
I assume they didn't ask my brother how he was doing.
If they did, maybe he wasn't honest.
But again, they all knew that I was left alone with the crazy woman in a foreign country that we'd just moved to.
And this was the time when my mother truly lost her mind, like wouldn't get out of bed.
She was turning 40 and the game was up.
The wall, as they say, does not forgive.
Cold, cold people.
Cold people.
How could they be worshiping a good deity?
You know, and it's fun.
It was very confusing because I remember in the sort of color paintings that were in my Bible, you know, there's Jesus hugging lambs and, you know, Mary cuddling Jesus.
And there was, you know, Jesus seemed kind of dewy-eyed and warm and friendly and yet just cold, cold people.
So I was like, okay, something's not right here.
They're worshiping the wrong way.
They're worshiping in the wrong direction.
Either God is telling them to be warm and they're cold, in which case God is not believable even to them.
They don't believe in God.
Or God is telling them to be cold, in which case it can't be God, but must be the devil.
And then people are worshiping not God, but the devil and don't even know it.
And it just, you know, it just fell away from me.
Like it just became an impossible conundrum.
Like it cannot be solved.
It cannot be solved.
Why is everyone so cold?
And again, you can see this.
Again, I know it's not an objective metric, social media and so on, but it's cold.
People express vulnerability and there's all these, you know, 10 people saying, it was a long time ago.
Suck it up.
Why Is Everyone So Cold? 00:01:23
Grow up.
Doesn't matter.
Right?
Quit whining.
It's just cold.
It was cold.
And coldness is brutal on children.
When I worked in a restaurant in downtown Toronto in my early 20s, I broke up with a girl and there was a Nicaraguan guy who's like, how is your heart?
And I was like, none of my friends asked me that.
None of my family asked me that.
How is your heart?
Which just struck me.
Boom.
Struck me hard.
So I know this is not a philosophical argument, but there were philosophical conundrums that I was instinctively feeling my way past.
And I think that's how God and I parted ways.
Now, again, you can say, well, you know, but people are sinners and you shouldn't judge God by his followers.
And it's like, maybe a little.
I mean, it can't be completely unrelated.
It can't be completely unrelated.
If everyone who worships God is cold as ice, then that means something that matters to some degree, right?
And if you shouldn't judge God by his followers, then if his followers can't achieve virtue, then belief in God is not the solution to human evil.
So, anyway, I hope that helps.
I'd love to talk more about it, but I'm curious to see if anyone's interested in these ramblings to begin with.
But I hope that makes sense.
And again, I really appreciate your time and attention in these matters.
Lots of love, my friends.
Big hug from the Great Beyond.
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