Hi From the Buckle of the Bible Belt

Hey everyone, my name is Joseph Stern, I'm a fairly new atheist, having been a fundie up until earlier this year. I currently reside in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where I'm studying History at LSU. I'm politically liberal, and extremely knowledgeable about politics, the law and how they are intertwined with religion. I'm currently working on a thesis titled "The Solid Spiritual South" examining causes and effects of fundamentalism in politics. I'm also writing a blog about Louisiana and national politics at Liberal Louisiana. I also consider myself a musician, and I've been producing and recording my own songs for about four years now. You can check those out here. I look forward to the discussion, and I hope I can bring something new to the table. Thanks, and have a good one.

Welcome to the forum. You said you were previously a fundie so I'm curious, what made you decide to change?

I was considering becoming a Baptist missionary, and so giving due diligence, I decided that it was important to me that I be able to defend my beliefs. To that end I began to study everything I could get my hands on. I started finding things that didn't make sense, creation? slavery in the Bible? I realized that there were huge flaws in beliefs that I had built up to be some sort of holy untouchable ideals that couldn't be questioned. At that point, I had to make a decision about whether or not it mattered to me that the things I believed were true or false. I decided that it did in fact matter to me. That meant that I had to apply the same levels of rational scrutiny to ideas about a god as I did anything else, and in the end, those beliefs simply didn't hold up under careful inspection and examination. I had always been skeptical to a degree but never to the point of Atheism. About two years ago, I decided that I couldn't call myself Baptist anymore, as I had come to reject most of their dogma. I would say that doing that helped me a great deal by opening up my mind to other things worth learning about. Since then, I've taken every philosophy and religion class at LSU that I could find, and I can reasonably conclude that I cannot justify a belief in any god or other deity.

I don't know of many others who have shared the same path. This may be in part due to the fact that I was becoming more ostracized at church due to my political liberalism. Perhaps I should in fact be thanking the church for pushing me towards atheism by showing me their lack of compassion.

The South is mainly protestant, with the exception of course being my state. Louisiana has a higher percentage of Catholics than most states an the south, the only exceptions would probably be Florida and Texas (pardon my laziness, I'm not bothering to look it up) from their large hispanic population. For the protestantism though, most aren't Baptists, but it could very well be the case that Baptists own a plurality of the market. We have high numbers of Presbyters, Episcopalians, Non Doms, Black Full Gospels, Seventh Day A's, Methodists, Pentecostals, Charismatics (vineyard variety), and even some Mormons. The only thing we seem to not have a great deal of is Atheists.

That likely provides enough basis for me to say that I was fundamentalist because I did in fact grow up in an environment in which theism was socialized at an early age. 98% Of all social activity in my area is church related.

I haven't yet come out to my family as atheist. I still get asked to pray over the meal at large family get togethers (which I painfully do), I still get asked to sing in churches for pay (which I wish I could convince myself to do), and I still get asked when I'm going to enroll in seminary.

Thanks all for the warm welcome and encouragement.

Welcome! I just want to add that I like your sig.

The motto of the enlightenment! It was between that and the english translation "Dare to Know". I prefer Latin because it makes me sound less pretentious... Oh wait...