Welcome to Iniquity/X, a blog about religion, science, humanism, individual freedoms, and atheism.

Who am I?

For the purposes of this site, I will go by the pseudonym Rifter. I am a 20-something computer scientist  from Seattle, WA. I am a human being (a bipedal life form belonging to a biological order known as Primates). I am also an atheist, aspiring artist, and adventurer, amongst other things.

What do I do?

Most of my life is spent working with computer systems, networks, and the web. When I’m not doing that, I’m usually busy with a number of diverse interests. I love reading many books, both fiction and non-fiction. I enjoy the arts and music, playing guitar, drawing, design, and photography. The outdoors is another love of mine, including backpacking and mountaineering. And of course, I enjoy learning all I can about science and the natural world.

What does it mean to be an atheist?

I should first clarify what exactly I mean by atheist. For me, it is a lack of belief in any kind of god, deity, or supernatural entity. Naturalism describes my worldview; nature is all there is. All of life and the laws of the universe can easily be explained by purely natural means, without having to invoke gods, deities, spirits, or the supernatural. Gods and religions are man-made ideas created during various times and places in history when humans had no idea how the natural world really works.

Have I ever believed?

Yes. I was born and raised in a well-known restorationist Christian sect called Jehovah’s Witnesses, also known as the Watchtower Society. There I remained for most of my young life, preaching door-to-door about Jesus and God’s kingdom, giving public talks (sermons), and attending meetings (church) several times per week. It was a life that revolved around studying the Bible, debating doctrine, and attempting to convert others to my faith. Unbeknownst to me, it was also a life of fear, designed to keep one ignorant of reality, an inherent trait of all religion. Until one day, I discovered the poetry of reality called science.

Why did I leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses?

The story of my departure from the Watchtower Society is a rather long one, spanning many years from the point when minor doubts first began to set in, to full-on rejection of my belief in God. There was no single reason for this; rather it was the accumulation of unanswerable questions and experiences over the years.

As a young child growing up in a Jehovah’s Witness family, I distinctly recall making this simple inquiry to my parents: “If God had originally intended all animals to be at peace with humans and one another (as often depicted in Watchtower literature and illustrations of the restored Eden), why did he create many of them–seemingly from the ground up–with the anatomy required to pursue and kill one another for food?”  The answer was something along the lines of: “Jehovah will just make them all eat grass again”.

That didn’t make much sense to me. Just by looking at a picture of an African Lion, for example, I was able to determine for myself at the age of 6 or 7 that this was a beast made for killing. Every aspect of nature contends and competes with itself for survival and supremacy, often in very brutal ways. From the smallest microbe to the most dangerous predators, the cruel reality of nature that I could see with my very eyes didn’t seem to fit with our belief that all life would one day exist in total harmony, for all of eternity.

It took me another 2 decades to begin asking the same sort of questions again. What I later discovered was that I was on the right track in the first place. As Carl Sagan would say, my internal ‘bullshit detector’ had gone off, even as a child. By the time I was old enough to do something about it, indoctrination had fully set-in. I was baptized as a Jehovah’s Witness at the age of 16.

My early 20’s would see the sudden disappearance of my mother (who ran off with another man) and the subsequent divorce of my parents after some 35 years of marriage and service to Jehovah. I have not seen or heard from her since. As I looked around, all of my friends and associates were in the same situation… It seemed that just about every Witness family I knew was either divorced or well on their way. So much for our religion being a sure protection and a benefit to family life.

At the age of 23, I moved to the Pacific Northwest to pursue my career and get a fresh start. It was about this time that I began to think more for myself. I began learning about other religions, and noticed many striking similarities between them and my own. Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t the only religion that claimed to be the One True road to life. Curiosity drove me to explore deeper into the history of the Watchtower, and I discovered many disturbing facts. During my research, I learned that such issues were not just random apostate exaggerations and falsehoods as I had been led to believe, but all come directly from the Watchtower’s own literature. Dozens of failed prophecies — one after another — littered the history of the Jehovah’s Witnesses… every one of them proclaimed as unshakable fact. Then there was Russell’s obsession with astrology and the Great Pyramids of Giza. The long-held belief that Jehovah physically resided on and controlled the universe from a star called Alcyone, within the Pleiades constellation. Rutherford’s hostile takeover of the Watchtower leadership, alcoholism, and his opulent mansions funded by Watchtower donations. The bizarre, ambiguous, Biblically-unsupported claims of the invisible return of Jesus in 1914. The ever-evolving meaning of the ‘generation’ doctrine. The rapidly increasing number of the anointed class (members who believe they are chosen as one of the 144,000 angels) during the 21st century. Still, with difficulty, I shrugged it all off… for a while. The promised reward of everlasting life in paradise is a hard one to abandon.

After I began to question the dubious origins of the Watchtower, and God himself, the desire to discover another explanation of how human life began became the next natural step for me. I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the sciences of evolution, abiogenesis, and cosmology. I then reread the 1985 book Life-How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?, still considered by Witnesses to be the primary go-to source for questions on evolution. What I discovered was that the arguments my religion had used to convince me all of these years that evolution was false, weren’t really valid arguments at all. In fact, the arguments were so awful, that I couldn’t help but wonder if the authors had even bothered to research the subject before writing a book on it! Like all Witnesses, I had been duped. An accurate understanding of the natural world–without being filtered through Watchtower doctrine–helped me to find the answers I had been seeking all along.

Life as an Atheist

Today I am enjoying life like never before, learning new things every day, free from the system of mind control that is The Watchtower. Free from the fear of demons and evil spirits, free from the fictional concept of sin.

Without the false hope of living forever, without viewing this life as a mere transitory vessel to get to the next, I can now take full advantage of this minuscule but wonderful spark of human existence.