The Right To Have No God
by Paul VanRaden
1983 to 2026
“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with
God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an
enemy of God.”
James
4:4, Holy Bible (year 48 A.D.)
Letters
Handwritten letter (not sent): I am an Atheist
(1983,
posted 2026)
Dear family, I am an Atheist (1983, typed and posted 1999)
A Christian response, by Walter
VanRaden (1989-95)
Popular songs
Better
Beliefs for Nonbelievers (1996 slides)
In God Most Of Us Trust (2002)
How to become an Atheist (2025)
Should I convert others?
Christians often want to convince you
to believe in God and Jesus, but fewer Atheists want to convince you to believe
in no God. The difference is in our view of your future. I believe that after
you die, you will not be punished for not believing in God and not be rewarded
for believing. While alive, you can spend as much free time as you choose
praising God, playing sports, watching movies, or whatever makes you happy. But
if you truly believe that after I die I will burn in
hell forever, that makes you sad and you want to do something to help me. Thank
you for your concern for my eternal wellbeing.
Since 1738, the St. Petersburg
paradox uses probability to explain your gamble and my gamble. Betting $1
to get 100% chance of winning $1 back is not worth my time or your time.
Betting $1 to get a 50:50 chance to win either $2 or $0 is an interesting bet to
some people, but not to me. Betting $1 to get a 1 out of a million chance to
win the million-dollar lottery ($1000000) is very popular, but I do not play
that game. I believe that your chance to win an eternal reward is 1 divided by
infinity, which is exactly 0. I will not spend even $1 for a chance to win
eternal life. My life will end. After that, I will not collect any everlasting prize or pay any everlasting debt because I have no
everlasting soul.
What do Christians believe?
Jesus was a refugee. He and his
parents immigrated to Egypt from Israel to protect him from potential harm.
Jesus asked us all to be like the good Samaritan, a foreigner who helped
someone in need as if they were his neighbor. As an Atheist, I still practice
what Jesus taught us: to love everyone as much as yourself. The command to
“love your neighbor as you love yourself” is in the Bible 9 times. Many
Christians now hate their immigrant neighbors and want no refugees in their
neighborhoods.
Jesus asked his followers to give
their belongings to the poor and come follow him. He said that rich men will
have an extremely hard time entering heaven. Entering the White House is now
easy if you are a billionaire, but off limits for the rest of us while they
build a grand ballroom for the rich. Billionaires now run our US government and
seem to hate the poorest people, especially those that we deport back to the
poorest places and force to remain poor.
The 10th commandment says “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or land or
anything that is your neighbors” (Exodus 20:16) but in 2025 Trump
threatened to take Canada’s land and tariff them if they complain. He wanted to
deport all Palestinians from Gaza and build a resort for the rich there
instead. Many American Christians will be pleased if they can force their new,
un-Christian beliefs on everyone.
Converting believers to
nonbelievers was a low priority for me in the previous 42 years but is urgent now
because many American Christians are lost and have become dangerous. If your
central belief is based on lies, you are more willing to accept other lies.
Christians now vote for politicians who hate many of the moral values taught in
the Old and New Testaments that I still love.
What do Atheists believe?
The University of Maryland had an
Atheist Student Association in 1996. I spoke to them a November 18 at 5pm in
the Student Union with title “Better
Beliefs for Nonbelievers”. My topics were 1) Belief in Santa
Claus and why we give that up even if we can’t prove that Santa does not exist,
2) statistics on how many students believe in God, 3) Jefferson’s quote on why
In God We Trust is “sinful and tyrannical”, 4) the St. Petersburg Paradox, 5)
questions on what God does, where he is, and what a soul does, 6) my belief in
the infinite universe, 7) faith vs. scientific knowledge, 8) a list of prominent
Atheists, and 9) goals of my life that are now reported more fully in Solutions to World Problems.
My 1996 conclusions were 1) An
infinite universe requires no creation, no God, no Santa, no doubt, 2)
Knowledge and truth are better than faith, 3) Good Christians are better than
bad Atheists, and 4) Good Atheists are the best until better Atheists evolve.
That was the only time I spoke on Atheism and I was
not really trying to convert anyone, I was “preaching to the choir” so to
speak.
A problem for Atheists can be a
lack of social networks to get support from people who think like you. Most
religions set at least one day per week for believers to congregate together.
On Sunday mornings for many years I sang Rock and Roll
songs that support my
beliefs. I still sing those same songs, but not always on Sunday.
Holy Days are now called holidays so
that is some progress. As an Atheist next Christmas day, I will spend more time
thinking about Christ than most Christians do. I plan to add teachings of Jesus
to my Holiday
History report, just like I question the value of independence on
Independence Day, document the crimes of our president on President’s Day, and
reread Lincoln-Douglas debates every Juneteenth, my favorite holiday.
Who named you Paul?
My parents named me Paul after the
apostle who changed his religion from Jewish to Christian and his name from
Saul to Paul when he heard the voice of Jesus talking to him on the road to
Damascus (Dimašq) in about 33 A.D., a few
years after Jesus died (Acts 9:1-19). Three days later, inside the city limits
of Damascus, disciple Anani’as also heard the voice of Jesus
telling him where to find Paul, to lay his hands on him, and thereby heal
Paul’s temporary blindness, which Anani’as did.
Paul later wrote 14 of the 27 books
and about one third of the pages in the New Testament of the Bible. He sent his
letters to groups or to individuals in the Middle East. He had a global and
long-lasting impact on billions of people’s beliefs.
I changed my religion from
Christian to Atheist in 1983 and wrote a nice letter to family but did
not send it even to them and thus it had little impact. My family had a history
of mental illness. A stable Christian life could be much better than trying to
find a better religion but risking life in a mental hospital instead. My brother Dave ended
his life by suicide in 1992 after much mental illness and many hospital stays. I advised him to always try to just live a
normal life, but he could not. Like me, Dave was a workaholic
but he got depressed when he could no longer work, as stated in his final
letter.
My connection to the city of
Damascus is less direct than the apostle Paul’s. Just before changing my
religion, I shared a house in 1982-83 with Bassam Al-Safadi, a Syrian student
studying plant breeding at Iowa State. Five years later at the University of
Wisconsin where he earned his PhD and I was a postdoc,
Bassam was my best friend and even loaned me his Quran in English. I read most
of it and noticed its overlap with the Bible, but the Quran excluded much of
the nonsense and the love in the Bible. We talked about research but not much
about religion. During the next 35 years, we emailed occasionally while I was
in the US government and Bassam worked in the Syrian government, becoming the
Director of Biotechnology Research in Damascus. I did not hear from my friend
Bassam recently but heard much good news from Damascus this year. I hope he is
well.
How did I learn?
Every Sunday during my
first 22 years I attended church, sometimes also on weeknights or in summer
Bible School. I asked God to forgive my sins every week in the Lord’s prayer.
My experience as a Christian was normal except that my mother was invited to sing
solos at many churches. My father was a deacon or elder and often taught Sunday
school, as his parents routinely did. We in Sunday school often took turns
reading Bible verses and together we read the whole Bible from cover to cover
at least 3 times. I was an assistant Sunday School teacher
my senior year of high school in 1977.
At the University of Illinois in
1979 I got an A and 3 college credits in Religious Studies 101: The Bible as
Literature. I wrote my term paper on the book of Job. My church in Urbana once
invited a Mark Twain impersonator to give a sermon making fun of Christianity
which was unthinkable in my hometown but okay near a university where people
are supposed to think.
The religion that my church taught
predicted that I will go to heaven. I was baptized at
age 3 months in the Forreston, IL Reformed Church. I accepted Jesus as my
Savior in the Prairie Dell Presbyterian Church when I was 16 years old. I still
follow most advice of Jesus. When I was 23 years old, I stopped following
commandment 4 to “remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” but I still have
an excellent record on 9 of the 10 commandments. We Atheists by definition all
follow commandment 1 “You shall have no other gods before me,” whereas some
religions do have other gods.
How did I convert?
My 1983 letter to those
I loved most explained my decision as honestly and clearly as possible but was
only 3.5
pages handwritten. With no typewriter or word processor in 1983, I wrote in
ink, made 3 small corrections using white-out, inserted a word, and crossed out
“absolutely” in the sentence “I am absolutely convinced that there is no God.” I
typed and posted the letter in 1997, revised it to say
“Dear family”, but never mailed it to the family members I had listed. Back
then I had no experience at being an Atheist so I did not say more and had no advice to give.
After 42 years of being a true nonbeliever I can add some advice.
Today, I believe 100% in no god. As
my belief reached 99.99999999% years ago, I realized that any future evidence
of god that I ever see, hear, or read will be easier to
explain as being fake or coming from a higher form of intelligence and not from
any god creating or controlling the infinite universe. That is how my belief
reached 100% without rounding up to 100%.
The 1977 book Classics
of Free Thought by Paul Blanshard was very helpful after I converted. I
bought 5 or 10 copies to give away like we used to give away Bibles. The chapters
are short segments from people telling you why they believe in no god. My copy
has the chapters ranked by most convincing. Recently I reread the highest
ranked 3. They were about: 1) the evil of the Christian funded crusades from 1094-1291 that
killed millions of people while trying to take ‘Holy Land’ from Muslims and
Jews who lived there, 2) about the Church executing tens of thousands of people
for being
witches, and 3) about telling lies
to support the Vatican that reminds me of the lies of our current U.S.
government. I did not rank Absurdities of
the Bible highly because author Clarence Darrow said he was only agnostic
and not an Atheist and so had not fully convinced himself, also because I had
already noticed most of those obvious absurdities, but I remember his article
more than most.
Since 2020 my 4 siblings and I meet
for 40-60 minutes each week to talk about life in general. My oldest sister
Miriam started our family zoom meeting during the pandemic to give each of us
more social support. Our sibling meeting includes 1 Quaker, 2 Christians, 1
Atheist, and 1 SBNR
(Spiritual But Not Religious). We usually discuss
topics more important than religion, and none of us are likely to change
beliefs since we are 65-73 years old and set in our ways.
Our mother would be proud because,
by invitation, she attended services in Rockford, IL for almost every religion
and place where they meet. You can hear
her describe that. Our father thought the end of the world was coming in
the 1990’s and would be surprised that his children are still enjoying life
here on earth in 2025. The apostle Paul would be even more surprised because he
predicted that Jesus would return and the world would end 2,000 years ago
within Paul’s lifetime. Do not plan on a second coming of Jesus any time soon.
In November 2025, I watched all 13 of
the 45-minute documentaries in the series Religions
of the World. Religions can believe in 1 god, or many gods, or god as a
trinity, or 0 gods. The last episode Skepticism and Religious Relativism
briefly discussed Atheism, but mostly it reviewed conflicts between science,
philosophy, and religion. The series was interesting but did not convince me to
join any of those 13 religions. Then I watched the 3-hour documentary series Atheism:
A Rough History of Disbelief, with Jonathan Miller to get much more useful
continuing education. If you like science or people you will enjoy the logic,
discussion, and history in this documentary and might decide to join this
religion. Membership is free, and worshiping 0 gods takes very little time away
from your busy life.
If you change
religion, the most important thing is to continue having a normal daily life.
You still must earn a living, pay your bills, interact with family, and get
along with others. For example, 2 months after I spoke to the Atheist Student
Association, their founder and president of the club Ali emailed the 60 members
that “I’ll be resigning my seat as President of the ASA due to time constraints
and a horrible Grade Point Average.” Like me, Ali discovered that earning a
living is more important than proving that God does not exist.
After becoming an Atheist, you
might not feel any need to convert others to your new religion if Christians do
not attack your right to exist and to think. You and I can each believe what we
have found to be true. I do not expect any infinitely large present from Santa
this Christmas or from God at life’s end. Instead, we can help make life on
this earth more heavenly.
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