Hello! I call myself Atomliner. I’m a 23 year old male Political Science major at Utah Valley University.
From 2009 to 2011, I was a missionary for the Mormon Church in northeastern Brazil. In the last month I was there, I was living with another missionary who I discovered to be a closet atheist. In trying to help him rediscover his faith, he had me read The God Delusion, which obliterated my own. I can’t say that book was the only thing that enabled me to leave behind my irrational worldview, as I’ve always been very intellectually curious and resistant to authority. My mind had already been a powder keg long before Richard Dawkins arrived with the spark to light it.
Needless to say, I quickly embraced atheism and began to read everything I could about living without belief in God. I’m playing catch-up, trying to expand my mind as fast as I can to make up for the lost years I spent blinded by religious dogma. Just two years ago, for example, I believed homosexuality was an evil that threatened to destroy civilization, that humans came from another planet, and that the Lost Ten Tribes were living somewhere underground beneath the Arctic. Needless to say, my re-education process has been exhausting.
One ex-Mormon friend of mine introduced me to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I read only a few chapters of, but I was intrigued by the concept of Bayes Theorem and followed a link here. Since then I’ve read From Skepticism to Technical Rationality and many of the Sequences. I’m hooked! I’m really liking what I find here. While I may not be a rationalist now, I would really like to be.
And that’s my short story! I look forward to learning more from all of you and, hopefully, contributing in the future. :)
Honestly. Let’s investigate! OrphanWilde, under which circumstances would it be possible for you to divulge the location of this anomaly?