Shadowing Practice: This Is Exactly Why I'm an Atheist - Learn English Speaking with Video

Even with as many videos, interviews, and podcasts as I've done where I've talked about how I became an atheist, I don't feel like I've ever produced a single piece of media

that I could just show anyone to tell them the whole story.

Although it would be impossible for me to spell out or even remember every detail of the story, I'd like to do my best to summarize it.

I know that hearing other people's stories about leaving religion

and becoming an atheist has helped me understand that I'm not alone or totally misunderstood in my own experiences.

So, in sharing my story, I hope to offer some camaraderie and understanding to anyone else who may need it.

I was raised independent fundamental Baptist and my family was very devout.

We strongly believed in creationism, the inerrancy of the Bible, homosexuality being an abomination, the end times being near, and most of all,

in receiving salvation from burning for eternity in hell for our sins by accepting Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior.

I believed all of it completely.

I absolutely thought that I had a personal relationship with God, and I was well read in Christian apologetics

and strongly maintained my faith beyond my teenage years and even into my early 20s.

I went to a Christian university where my faith was always affirmed.

I was surrounded by devoted Christians, I went to chapel three times a week in church once a week, and did devotions in every class.

I started college in 2012

and my beliefs were not challenged in any way until I took an astronomy class in summer of 2014.

The professor there was a devoted Christian and while he constantly encouraged his students to embrace Christian ideas,

He didn't teach the universe was created in six days about 6,000 years ago like most fundamentalists believe.

I won't bore you with too many details, but in that class I learned for myself how to measure the age of the universe by multiple means

and realized that the universe was closer to 13.8 billion years old than to 6,000 years old.

I learned that performing various measurements on bright sources of light tells us what elements give off that light,

how the wavelength of that light has been affected by its movement toward or away from the Earth, and since we know the speed of light in a vacuum,

how far away the light source is and how long its light took to reach us.

I calculated the age of the universe myself in that way, and by methods involving the expansion of the universe and the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Scientists were right about the ancient universe.

For more details on this, check out the SciShow Space video in my sources.

Once I finished that class, I stopped believing in a young universe and six-day creation, although I still believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and that God created all life in its current form.

I was still a fundamentalist in every way except for my belief in the ancient universe.

Even though this didn't mesh with my belief in biblical literalism and inerrancy, I didn't allow myself to ask any further questions about Christianity or creation at that point.

I decided to rely on faith to affirm my understanding of God's Word and that it was true.

My beliefs in that regard remain the same for quite a while.

While the next few elements of this story may sound irrelevant or random right now, I assure you that they're important.

Not long after my astronomy class in mid-2014, my family began using, selling, and teaching classes about essential oils.

I attended those classes, was supportive of them, and believed their claims that essential oils had healing properties.

Later, in the fall of 2014, I began taking my first semester of a two-semester class in statistics and scientific research methods.

That class taught me how to avoid cognitive biases, avoid fallacious reasoning, isolate variables,

establish causal links, and perform many other essential functions in conducting scientific research.

Basically, it taught me the basis of the scientific method, how to apply it, how peer review works, and how to think critically about any problem.

As a result of my newfound critical thinking skills, I stopped believing in the validity of personal experience as reliable evidence for one's claims.

so I no longer considered my personal experiences of feeling God's presence as reliable evidence for the validity of my beliefs.

As with any personal experience, it was impossible to isolate the factors involved, which definitely caused my sensation of God's presence,

so I couldn't honestly conclude that I knew that God was involved in them at all.

I go into much more detail about this in a video I've linked in my sources.

Another result of my critical thinking skills

and ability to recognize good quality scientific research was my doubt of the efficacy of essential oils.

There were several arguments used in the defense of the claims that essential oils have extensive healing powers, and I began to see through all of them.

For example, personal experiences with them did not constitute reliable evidence.

The fact that they've been used for thousands of years for all types of things does not establish their efficacy, but only their antiquity.

Research touted to prove their efficacy is either irrelevant, of very poor quality, or preliminary.

If you want more detail, I've debunked seven of these arguments in one of my earliest videos.

Link in the sources.

Keep in mind that through all of this, my beliefs surrounding God and Christianity remained basically unchanged.

Then things finally got shaken up for me again when I took a master's level course in human sexuality in mid-2015.

There, I learned that there was a strong genetic component to homosexuality, that it tends to run in families, that it's increasingly likely to be expressed by men with older brothers,

that it appears uncaused by any set of life experiences, etc. I also learned that sexual orientation can't be changed with any known form of treatment or abuse.

If you want more information on this, Shannon Q made a great video about it, link in my sources.

That made me realize that if being gay was a sin like I thought, it was the only sin I knew of

that God designed as a built-in feature in some humans that could not be changed with any level of effort.

Sure, sin was our nature, but even sins like substance addiction could be overcome with enough work.

Being LGBT, though, meant that God designed you to constantly sin with no way to stop, and then he punishes you for that sin as if he could have stopped.

This brought old questions about Christianity into my mind after I had suppressed them for over a year,

but I still refused to address them and continued suppressing them the best that I could.

In 2015, I had become incredibly interested in science, likely because I finally understood its methodology well.

That led me to take interest in studying the theory of evolution.

Now, I definitely didn't believe in evolution as creationists like Kent Hovind and Ken Ham had taught me that it wasn't science.

But I thought, you know, I understand science well enough now that I should be able to know my enemy by studying evolution, all while seeing through it for the pseudoscience that it is.

As you might expect any honest, scientifically literate person to do at that point, I quickly learned that evolution by natural selection is an incredibly rigorous and well-evidenced theory

worthy of being the central theory to the entire field of biology.

I had been taught that there were no transitional fossils, which is false.

I was taught that structures like the eye couldn't have evolved because they're irreducibly complex, which is false.

I was taught that no evidence points to animals existing more than 6,000 years ago, that all signs point to intelligent design, that PhD creationists are prolific scientists who are unfairly discriminated against,

and that evolution is unproven because it's just a theory.

All of those points are false and are propagated out of a severe misunderstanding or total ignorance of evolution.

Proof of all of this is in my sources.

Finally, I understood that scientists were right about evolution just like they had been right about the age of the universe.

It didn't take long from this point for me to realize

that no intelligent designing force was necessary to explain the existence of life in its current form.

This opened the floodgates for questions and doubts about Christianity and the existence of God.

Still, I didn't want or plan to address any of them.

They buzzed around in my head constantly, but I tried to ignore them because I was just afraid to reconsider my beliefs because they were so important to me.

Besides, I thought, what's the harm in believing the way I do, even if I'm wrong?

It was then fall of 2015 and my last semester of college.

One day a family member who sold essential oils sparked up

a conversation with me about the science behind their use as medicine.

I knew

that supposed science was total bunk as I was the only one in my family who understood the scientific method

or the research process, and I began asking them questions about what they were presenting me.

I won't lie, I wasn't very nice about it.

I stated multiple times that their false beliefs about medicine could encourage wasteful or even fatal life decisions.

They couldn't answer any of my questions sufficiently

and ended up retreating to a point where they defended all of their beliefs about essential oils with personal experience alone.

I pointed out how personal experience was unreliable.

Their response was to tell me that they just couldn't let go of their personal experience even if it wasn't solid evidence.

This baffled me so I asked them why they felt that way.

They said that their personal experience was so important to them that reconsidering their beliefs would be frightening and painful.

Besides, they said, what's the harm in believing the way I do, even if I'm wrong?

As soon as they said that, I realized I was guilty of the same irrationality in the case of my Christianity.

I didn't know if being Christian was as irrational as believing essential oils were scientifically proven to have extensive healing powers,

but I did know that I had never allowed myself to explore all the questions I had.

100

Finally, I opened up to questioning everything unapologetically.

101

I prayed and told God that I needed to think about these questions freely, but that I thought if he was really there and Christianity was true,

102

my honest inquiry would help me find him in every line of evidence I would explore.

103

I decided to temporarily go off any media that could influence my thinking.

104

When I felt a bit more clear-headed, I would end that media blackout.

105

The media blackout served two purposes.

106

One, I knew that if I stopped believing, my whole family would tell me that it was because I blindly followed some worldly person, so I needed to make sure that wouldn't happen.

107

Two, I thought that if God was fundamental to all existence, and if people in the past who lack access to information

108

that we have now were expected to believe in God or else be damned, I should be able to find God on my own through pure reason like they were expected to.

109

So over the course of four months, I spent as much time as possible deliberating over the validity of Christianity and theism.

110

The questions I remember pondering the most are, Could the power of an omnipotent God justify logical contradictions in his word versus his creation?

111

Could I reasonably interpret the Bible differently than I had been taught?

112

How can we reliably determine factual information about the supernatural?

113

And was faith ever a reliable method of determining truth?

114

The answer to the first question was yes.

115

An omnipotent God could justify anything, even logical contradictions.

116

So sure, God could create a universe that could be demonstrated to be ancient, but really isn't, or do anything else which violates the laws of logic.

117

The problem with invoking an omnipotent God in order to justify logical contradictions in a belief system, however, is that it can be done to justify literally anything.

118

One can invoke an omnipotent God to justify any nonsensical idea within any religion or belief system, not just Christianity.

119

This puts every idea imaginable, no matter how absurd, on equal footing.

120

Because of this, it gives no more explanatory power to Christianity than to any other religion, and is useless for building a case for anything.

121

On to question two then.

122

Could I reasonably interpret the Bible in some other way than I had been?

123

Probably.

124

I had a minor in Bible by that point, and I understood how various literal and figurative interpretations came to be.

125

I could probably find more metaphysical interpretations that meshed with my understanding of science.

126

That thought, though, made me realize that given how many biblical interpretations exist, a lot of people, no matter how hard they try,

127

misinterpret and misunderstand the Bible.

128

This collection of books was supposed to be divinely inspired, yet it was just as likely to be misunderstood as any other text.

129

Whether you're Christian or not, you can probably agree on these premises.

130

The Bible is understood very differently, even by people who read it with the best of intentions, and some of those people base harmful actions upon their understanding of the Bible.

131

The issue is then, that if the Bible really is God's Word, he chose a method of communication that would be

132

so subject to interpretation

133

that it would inspire even its genuine students to carry out

134

harmful actions in what they understood to be obedience of God's Word.

135

This reveals a flaw in God's supposed nature.

136

If God is omnipotent and omniscient, then he chose to confuse his followers with the Bible and isn't omnibenevolent.

137

If he was omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then he failed to realize that the Bible would confuse his followers, so he isn't omniscient.

138

If he was omniscient and omnibenevolent, then he knew that the Bible would confuse his followers, but he just couldn't do any better, so he isn't omnipotent.

139

I realize that this paradox could not be logically resolved with both God's perfect nature and his authorship of the Bible intact.

140

With the Bible's inability to communicate its message more precisely than any other man-made book,

141

its inerrancy is falsified and it appears no differently than any other natural piece of literature.

142

I had to conclude that uninspired men wrote the Bible.

143

I then moved on to question three.

144

How can we reliably determine factual information about the supernatural?

145

I knew by that point that science was based on methodological naturalism, which is basically the resolution to investigate the natural and not make explanatory claims involving the supernatural.

146

This is done because, by the definitionally limitless and unintelligible nature of the supernatural, assertions of supernatural causes of any event could never be falsified in study.

147

Remembering this about the scientific method was what I needed to answer this question.

148

While refraining from exploring supernatural ideas, science has made enormous progress in building humanity's knowledge of the world, as demonstrated by our continuously advancing technology.

149

Meanwhile, supernatural claims being definitionally unfalsifiable all stand on equal footing right now, just as they always have.

150

It became obvious to me that we simply don't have any reliable way to test or measure anything supernatural.

151

We're limited to our knowledge of the natural whether we like it or not.

152

Finally, I asked myself if faith was a reliable way to determine truth.

153

One definition of faith I considered was simply reasonable trust, and the other was the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

154

Given the reasoning that I had already gone through prior to asking this question, I didn't think that I had a good reason to trust God.

155

If he would have me believe in him based on things that, to the best of my reasoning, had determined to be absurdities, then he didn't have my best interest at heart.

156

I couldn't trust him.

157

Still, though, I could believe in him based on faith by the second definition.

158

However, that would consist of me excusing multiple logical absurdities in favor of belief, and then asserting that the fact that I believed was evidence enough for me.

159

I realize that any idea imaginable can be believed to be true or false on faith, and if faith is a reliable way of determining truth,

160

then that means that all imaginable ideas are both true and false as evidence by faith.

161

Faith, I understood, was logically absurd.

162

Once I answered this final question, I felt I had cleared my head enough to consult outside sources.

163

I was most interested in studying Christian material because I hope

164

that there was still a way that I had been mistaken about Christianity.

165

I turned to the work of William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel, and C.S.

166

Lewis especially.

167

I studied up on arguments such as the Kalam cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, etc. One by one,

168

I re-familiarized myself with these arguments that I had learned previously, and one by one, I found serious logical flaws in them.

169

Instead of going through all of those here, there's a video playlist in my sources where Cosmic Skeptic represents my understanding of all of these arguments very well.

170

Finally, I had to face it.

171

I was no longer a Christian.

172

I researched other religions, but no sacred text proved less subject to interpretation than the Bible,

173

and no belief system demonstrated a reliable method of determining true information about the supernatural, so I couldn't really accept any religion.

174

By early 2016, I discovered that I had no reason to believe in any gods.

175

I didn't have any belief in any gods, but I didn't assert that I knew that there was no god.

176

I didn't think it was knowable, at least in my situation.

177

I didn't care about labeling myself for my own sake, but I really wanted to know

178

if there was a word for people who thought like me so that I could hopefully more easily find like-minded people.

179

I didn't know where to start, so I googled something like, I don't know if there's a God, but I don't have a reason to believe.

180

What I found very quickly was the term agnostic atheist.

181

That was definitely me.

182

Now, I know that even since then I've always met the scholarly philosophical definition of agnostic,

183

not atheist, But I found that the term agnostic when used colloquially doesn't represent to others how I think.

184

When most people I've interacted with hear agnostic, they think I just don't know and don't find believing in God or lacking belief in God to be much different.

185

However, when people hear the term atheist, they're much closer to understanding my actual position.

186

That I don't think it's knowable whether a God exists, that there is no reason to conclude that there is,

187

and the most reasonable position is to withhold such belief until it's evidentially justifiable.

188

So I use the term atheist and find that most people who use the term for themselves think similarly to myself.

189

Once I became an atheist, I acknowledged that I always needed to keep an open mind about the existence of God and the supernatural.

190

So I decided that I would happily reconsider my ideas

191

if I came upon a method to reliably observe and measure the supernatural

192

or found any argument which validated belief in anything supernatural without false premises or logical fallacies.

193

The reason I'm still an atheist is that I don't think I found those things.

194

The last part of the story that I'll mention here is

195

that becoming an atheist while surrounded by fundamentalists left me extremely frightened and lonely.

196

I didn't know anyone that I knew for sure wouldn't condemn me for my lack of belief.

197

That fear and loneliness is now all long gone, and I'll conclude by saying that the first moment it ever began to subside

198

was when I searched atheist on YouTube for the first time and watched a video from Hemant Mehta's The Atheist Voice channel.

199

I wouldn't be as happy as I am today if it weren't for other atheists sharing their stories and ideas online.

200

I hope that my story can not only help some of you, but inspire you to share your own story to help others.

✨ Recommend Video

34 sentences

“Al-Fatiha Made Me Fall to the Floor Crying” - Christian Pastor Converts To Islam

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

165 sentences

Philomena Cunk vs Prof. Jim Al Khalili CBE (2025 Edition)

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

236 sentences

Albert Einstein's Story || Learn English Through Story 🔥 || English Listening Practice ✅

Daily ConversationHigh School StudentsUniversity Students

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 200 sentences and 3498 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:31. The speaker talks fast, about 200 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 79% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
belief noun	/bɪˈliːf/	Mental acceptance of a claim as true.
supernatural adjective	/ˌsu.pəɹˈnæ.tʃə.ɹəl/	Above nature; beyond or added to nature, often so considered because it is given by a deity or some force beyond that with which humans are born.
atheist noun	/ˈeɪ.θi.ɪst/	A person who does not believe in deities or gods.
reliable adjective	/ɹɪˈlaɪəbl̩/	Suitable or fit to be relied on; worthy of dependence, reliance or trust; dependable, trustworthy
evolution noun	/ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/	A manoeuvre of troops or ships.
logical adjective	/ˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/	In agreement with the principles of logic.
interpretation noun	/ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/	An act of interpreting or explaining something unclear; a translation; a version.
justify verb	/ˈd͡ʒʌstɪfaɪ/	To provide an acceptable explanation for.
conclude verb	/kənˈkluːd/	To end; to come to an end.
explore verb	/ɪkˈsploɹ/	To examine or investigate something systematically.
differently adverb	/ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/	In a different way.
demonstrate verb	/ˈdɛm.ənˌstɹeɪt/	To show how to use (something).
heal verb	/ˈhiːl/	To make better from a disease, wound, etc.; to revive or cure.
semester noun	/sɪˈmɛstɚ/	Half of a school year (US) or academic year such as autumn or spring semester.
surround verb	/səˈɹaʊnd/	To encircle something or simultaneously extend in all directions.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.
see through verb		To perceive visually through something transparent.
carry out verb	/ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/	To hold while moving it out.
check out verb		To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
end up verb		To bring to a conclusion.
give off verb	/ɡɪv ɒf/	To emit; to produce and send forth; to come across in some manner.
go off verb		To explode.
point out verb		To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was raised · was always affirmed · was surrounded
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've done · has helped · has been affected
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	fossils, which is · complex, which is · people who read

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 65 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, don't, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: atheist /ˈeɪ.θi.ɪst/, worthy /ˈwɝ.ði/, methodology /ˌmɛθ.əˈdɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: supernatural /ˌsu.pəɹˈnæ.tʃə.ɹəl/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, validity /vəˈlɪd.ɪ.ti/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like belief, supernatural, atheist.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: This Is Exactly Why I'm an Atheist - Learn English Speaking with Video

A Great Reason to Not Be Religious Anymore - Anthony Jeselnik

The exact moment I destroyed my college career

Why Do I Believe in Jesus?

Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science? | Middle Ground

Ex-Buddhist: You Don't Understand Buddhism

Homosexuality, Catholicism & burning man

Is Myers Briggs Just Astrology for Smart People?

No Fear | Ajahn Brahm | 20-05-2011

Almost lost my mind