what do you tell them when they say, son, this hurts us. you re hurting our hearts. i am who i am and i m not going to change that. i can t change that. it s just part of who i am. and as loving parents of a loving son, on some level, they should be accepting of that. and they are outwardly, of course, but it s still lurking there underneath the surface. they ll always harbor some sort of regret or anger towards me for just being who i am. and that kind of hurts. coming up i almost wish i still believed in god. closeted and in the clergy. nobody knows my secret. living a double life. i was on any knees wishing i could go get my god.
north georgia. in the foothills of the appalachian mountains. to locals, it s god s country. for david gormley, it s just 15 miles from his childhood home, yet a world away from the life he left behind. we went to church twice a week. wednesday nights and sundays and we would be there for six to eight hours. there was always this pressure to assume that there was god, and that if you didn t hear him or if he didn t speak to you, you weren t trying hard enough. you never really felt comfortable. no. david is not alone. today, many young people are doubting their faith and walking away from god. why are millennials now questioning so much? i think they re struggling with questions of living with a
with questions of living with a lot of different faith groups in their schools and network of friends. they re inundated with media, with different perspectives. author david kinman has studied this phenomenon. 8 million millennials give up on god by their 30th birthdays. 59% of people who grow up in a christian home are going to walk away on some level. they re either going to become ex-christians or dechurched. david gormley struggled for years and at 16, gave up on god. i actually came out as an atheist. i didn t want to lie to people anymore. i was just tired of pretending that i was someone that i wasn t. david s news rocked his deeply faithful family. do you remember how they took it? with quiet silence at first. for about six months afterwards,
so would the world be a better place without god? the world would be an enormously better place would god, without religion, yes. there are all sorts of things we don t know. but let s seek the truth. let s be open minded. the time should come, i hope it will come, when we don t even need the word atheist yths because we shall live in a time because people believe things because there s evidence. there s no evidence for fairies or leprechauns or gods, that we shouldn t need the word atheism at all. david kineman says that day isn t coming any time soon. could christianity become obsolete? not in the next century. but we are becoming more religiously diverse. atheism is part of that diversity. so what does the future hold for the godless? back at the university of north georgia, david gormley. there s kind of a new wave of
how we were going to instruct them in scriptures and what our desire was for them. that they grow up to be. godly men. mmm. that would be the desire for them to be godly men. and how did you do that, as a couple? not as well as we should. not far from home delicious cookies, and all of our condiments. on the campus of the university of north georgia. this is for ask an atheist. cookies and condoms, what s better? the gormley son chose a life without god. nice to meet you, i m david. part of the north georgia skeptics society. david is an atheist. jesus was probably a historical person, but what