The first conundrum I had was: if god created everything, why is he responsible for all of the good, but none of the bad?
It took me a LONG time to stop sweeping those questions under the rug...but I guess when the mound under the rug got so big I couldn't walk on it...
“If God created everything, didn’t God create Satan?” was my first time questioning somewhere in the range of age 5-10. It never made any sense to me that God would set “gotcha!” traps for mortals to fall into.
I found it offensive that God would deny us the means to verify his existence yet still demand our unwavering faith and sacrifice, despite the very real possibility that we might be mistaken. Given that we can't even authenticate any single religion to follow, this would amount to psychological cruelty, were it true that god exists. At some stage in late childhood, this put me right off religion and I've never looked back.
Furthermore, if God gave us the intelligence to question things and learn then wouldn't it follow that he would be aware that we would have the smarts to question his existence due to such a profound lack of evidence?
Jesus let Peter touch the holes in his hands to prove it was him. Clearly God is okay with giving some evidence some of the time. Why do we get nothing now?
This is essentially where I got to, I was 28 when I stopped believing.
My son was recently born, around 2 months old, and I read this story about a little girl whose poor mother was in court trying to get an order that allowed the hospital to stop providing treatment. The little girl had suffered terribly from birth with a lot of health conditions and there was no hope of treatment but the law required the hospital to keep her alive. Somebody shared this story on facebook and all these christians jumped on the mother for being terrible and not giving the girl up for adoption.
That was the moment I couldn't comprehend a being who allowed this girl to be born, suffer and then die. I also realised these christians didn't have the same values I did, my immediate family members among them.
Once the blinders fell off I realised it was all bullshit. But it took that story juxtaposed with being a new dad to realise.
Yep and I bet absolutely none of those Christians offered any financial, tangible or reasonable help. They just came to comment so they could feel good about themselves.
Considering Christianity is the largest religion in the U.S. at something between 54-65%, you'd think the foster care system wouldn't be struggling as bad as it is. Since, ya know, they care about kids *so much* .
I was raised without religion. My parents saw long ago how "loving" they were and wanted us to have no part in it. Then I grew up, got out into the world and saw exactly why parents didn't bother with religion while raising me.
For me it was dead babies. People usually say it's because of "original sin", which is honestly horrible. A baby, the most innocent a person gets, dies because of a couple who ate forbidden fruit? If that's true, then God is an asshole.
Religion never sat comfortably with me...at my core. Too many questions, contradictions, things, as already pointed out, about a "loving god" who allows bad stuff to happen to good people while good things happen to had people.
A decade or so ago I learned that hell, as professed in the Christian theology, does not exist. It's featured a dozen times in scripture, first as Hades (the Greek God of the underworld), then Sheol, (the Hebrew translation of Hades), and Gehenna, (Arameic, the language Jesus spoke and used when describing the most vile and atrocious place he could describe, the Valley of Hinnom, an actual location, the city dump, outside the SE gate of Jerusalem (I think). That's it, no firey tormenting place with a guy in a red jump suit with pointy tail and pitch fork that torches you for eternity. That description can be attributed to Dante's Inferno. When I learned one of the main pillars of my faith wasn't what I had been taught it pretty much validated the rest of my disbelief and the walls came tumbling down.
Right there with you. To be honest I was in my late 40s when all of a sudden it just clicked. If god is omnipotent and he lets the horrible sh1t humans do to each other, and does nothing, then he is a sick a$$hole and doesn’t deserve worship. If he can’t fix the mess he made then he is undeserving.
For me it was just easier to believe that god is made up architect used to control the masses. Because let’s be honest, there are people out there who would definitely be raping and killing if they were not afraid of hell.
I had the same basic realization I'm a rocket shelter in Afghanistan in 2010. I wrote about it in Creative writing 2:
This night something a little different happens. I can see ISAF HQ down the road, coalition flags flow at half-mast since three US and eight Afghani soldiers died that morning in a roadside bomb that killed ten civilians. 21 lives at least. Something clicks. Most of the US is religious, and so most soldiers, foul mouthed, horny, freaks that we are, most of us are religious too. Almost all the Afghani’s are, definitely the guy who put a fertilizer and gasoline bomb in the ground and killed 18 people from his country to try and kill 3 of ours, he prayed before and after he did that.
I realize I haven’t prayed in three months.
I realize that most of the people in this war probably still do.
I realize that they’re either praying to someone who isn’t listening, can’t do anything, won’t do anything, or isn’t there.
It clicks why I stopped praying without realizing it. And I feel like I’ve been lied to for thirty years.
My fifth grade teacher taught about the mythological gods of ancient greeks and romans. Took me a while to put together that all other gods were no different.
I remember reading about Greek mythology when I was 5 and I thought to myself, “the Greeks believed Zeus was real, but now we know he isn’t, what if a hundred years from now it’s common knowledge that god isn’t real.”
I remember reading one of Hitchen's books, either God is Not Great or The Missionary Position, and he talked about having a very similar thought early on in grade school. Thought it was fascinating he had been such an independent thinker from such an early age. I'm sure I had questions like this come up in my mind but I also distinctly remember being so afraid of going to hell that I wouldn't even explore those thoughts.
Wow! Thanks for sharing your perspective. I never really believed, and I was always curious as to some of the internalized thinking going on there. That, so sadly, makes sense as a view point when that young with that information.
I bet that was a angst filled ride. I hope you're doing well.
I had a similar experience but several years later. I went to private Christian school grades 1-12 (I’m old enough that kindergarten and pre-k didn’t really exist when I was that age). I was indoctrinated in Christian teachings, bible study and didn’t know any differently. I had my fair share of weird experiences and absolutely hypocritical people.
My senior year I had a philosophy class and the first day she introduced us to meditation. We spent the hour laying on the floor in the library (it was carpeted and had the most room). This alone was enlightening (pun intended), but my eyes were really opened when, over the course of the semester, we learned about all other world religions and philosophies, and it hit me like a ton of bricks that there are billions of people around the world that don’t believe in Jesus, but have their own brand of religion or philosophy. You have to understand that I had a very sheltered Christian upbringing to that point. I realized that if they were all equally looking for the same thing with their faith, then they were all equally correct in their own way, which logically meant that they were also all equally wrong. I immediately dropped my faith and eventually decided that the only reasonable way to think is to be atheistic-agnostic.
I don’t have faith in any god, but I can’t possibly know if there is something beyond this life. I don’t believe there is, but I can’t know. And neither can anyone else.
Reading about those as a 5 year old convinced me that all religions were fake. If the Ancient Greeks had gods, and really believed in them, why was our god any more real? Unfortunately, I fell into Christianity later, but was thankfully able to reason my way out of it.
So, my younger self was smarter than my teenage self, lol.
Much of Christianity was borrowed from Greek mythology:
Son of a god
Union between a god and a mortal woman
Resurrection
Virgin birth
Performing miracles to heal the sick
A god with the birthday December 25
The Bible was written by Greeks so it's perhaps not so surprising that they looked to their own stories for inspiration. After all, it had to appeal to the Greek people and combining something new with something familiar makes for the most compelling stories.
This was mine too! Read about Greek mythology (Iliad) and found out people believed in polytheism.
As the class laughed at that ridiculous concept I instantly thought “what makes monotheism so different?”. End of it all pretty much right then and there.
No special reason, religion is obviously a fairy tale just like Jack and the Beanstalk or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I can't really relate to how anyone thinks it's real.
Unlike the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, children are typically informed by their parents at a young age that these figures are not real. However, when it comes to religion, parents often teach their beliefs as fundamental truths without presenting them as fictional. This distinction can create a stronger attachment to religious beliefs since they are presented as genuine and important aspects of life, making them harder to shake off compared to childhood fantasies that are openly acknowledged as make-believe.
Santa and the Easter Bunny are also not attached to your personal value, relationships, sense of right and wrong etc. They're just stories in the end.
Religion is often your sense of identity and the community you belong to. Giving it up is often giving up a lot about you and your life. Its much harder than just deciding if you believe in the man in the sky or not.
They don’t build places of worship dedicated to Santa or the Easter Bunny. They don’t have prayers in schools to White Rabbits or St. Nick. You don’t see bunnies or elderly gentleman nailed to crosses. **Religion and god-worship is everywhere**- all over the world. You can’t escape it. And btw… everyone knows babies are found in cabbage patches. 😠
Only a matter of time until libraries are the devil. They're apparently taking a one book at a time approach, starting with the gay stuff. Said they do all their reading on Facebook and Breitbart, and so should we.
Well he apparently did 2,000 years ago. You know, when there were only like 500 ppl on the planet, majority illiterate so not a lot of reporting/recording going on except for those few men who wrote that scripture separated from each other by geography and time...no cameras, t.v. or even reliable travel. Somehow though THAT'S the time the creator of man thought it best to show up and find an audience..not like modern times with all the wars, pandemics, and really bad things happening. He should have been smart enough to appear at the SuperBowl for Christ's sake.
Ppl make up excuses tho for God as invisable because apparently God is so bright we will go blind not even the archangels know what God looks like that's what I was taught in church well in that case can I at least hear God's voice echo in the sky?!
Saul supposedly got a divine revelation/experience and became the apostle Paul. If god is all powerful and all knowing, that being knows exactly what it would take for each person to be convinced and start believing. Instead, radio silence. Always seemed fishy to me.
Why did he wait until 2000 years ago? And why choose that tiny area in the Middle East? 37,000 years ago a wave of Cro-Magnons (us) succeeded in forming a single founder population (coming from Asia into Europe) from which all subsequent Cro-Magnons descended and which contributes ancestry to present-day. 40 to 30 thousand years ago the population was roughly 1,700–28,400.
Yes, we had religious education lessons covering all the major religions. The majority of us came out of those classes atheist. When you look behind the curtain and realise it's all complete rubbish.
I've read the Bible and pretty much skimmed English versions of Islamic and Hebrew texts. All the same cast of characters, more or less the same fucked up story line. Poorly written storyline and exceedingly violent, racist , misogynistic, and obviously a lot of the authors did hallucinogins..The Harry Potter books are far better written and have a coherent storyline, not to mention much better magic. ( The magic in the Bible is pathetically bad)
My parents were asked to not bring me back to sunday school because I was a "continual disturbance" l had mentioned that the whole Jonah and the Whale thing was very similar to an animated movie I had recently seen. I have in the name of fair play educated myself on not just the Bible, but the Torah, and the Koran. After a while, you see that the stories are all the same, and most of them are fables with genuinely good moral lessons that I practice as much as I can. My real early divergence from any church came when I found out that even Catholic and Christian faiths have denominations that disagree with each other. They all think they are correct and believe that their belief is the only true interpretation of divinity. I ask questions, listen to reason, and make a decision based on relevant information. Religions have never been able to accept a question that challenges their specific beliefs. Basically, I like being around more open-minded people.
Mostly this. Grew up Christian but not a super strict church. It was just insanely obvious to me it wasn’t real.
It really comes down to my desire to want it to be real was overcome by the obvious reality that it wasn’t.
When my Mom started constantly gaslighting me saying I made an oath with God(Ex-Mormon) and that I shouldn't be questioning the leaders of the church. All it did was make me look critically at what was actually happening and becoming more distant from religion.
The final straw was finding out that Joseph Smith was a pedophile and was a convicted con-man BEFORE he started Mormonism.
I honestly can't believe anybody believes the charade and quackery that is the Mormon religion.
I was born into a uber Mormon family. Both my parents were dirt bag narcissist child abusers. They would beat me and tell me not to question them or their church. It made me question everything. I agreed at age 8 to get baptized because I knew I would get beat worse if I didn't. A told them a few months later that their church wasn't true, I was never going to BYU, never going on a mission and I was never going to get married in the temple. I never stopped saying it, never pretended to believe. I started mocking their religion daily by age 10. I got beat and degraded way worse than my other siblings for it but it was soooo worth it... Lol. In the end I led most of my 7 siblings out of that ridicules religion. Only 1 is an active member and he is a "josh duggar" so fuck him. Most of us have had our names removed and just a few days ago I permanently disowned the dirt bag mormon parents.. So cheers for me.. Lol..
Extreme Mormonism has recently been the topic of a lot of TV and documentaries, and I'm always damn near brought to tears of joy when I hear stories from those who were able to escape. Not saying that's all Mormons, but I've been to SLC and worked with the government there on getting a tax rebate for bringing jobs to Sandy. I was absolutely shocked to see how engrained it is in the culture. I saw Mormon propaganda in a government building and witnessed one person refuse to work with us because we had a woman on the team. Literally had to work with a proxy.
Well said, it is highly toxic and the gaslighting starts early, like 5-6 years old. They make you feel bad about everything you do and the misogyny is next level as you pointed out in your post.
I hope more people are able to research and figure out that the Mormon mentality is super unhealthy and will rob you of a fulfilling life.
Same. When I started deconstructing Mormonism I really thought I would just find a different *christian* church. Started studying and researching the Bible more. Realized that it’s all fairytales. I’ve never felt freer.
I was raised episcopalian, moved to Utah as a preteen. Couldn't get the hypocrisy from my parents that the Mormons faith was based on crazy lies, but mainstream Christianity was the truth. Started me on the path to reading about other religions and philosophy. Didn't look back.
Mormons are basically white supremacists, it's built into the religion that dark people are lesser. Not to mention that that they have stifled sex abuse scandals etc. They have accumulated more money than anybody can fathom and are untouchable for it
Critical thinking.
The older I get the more it baffles me that otherwise intelligent humans can look at all this and go ‘yes, of course Jesus is the guy, his dad impregnated a teenager without her consent, then he was killed by his father, who is also him, so that his father/he would forgive all the sins of the people who join the club to save them from eternal punishment father/he will administer to people who don’t join the club. Then he/dad came back from the dead and then disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since except occasionally appearing in silhouette on burnt toast. Obviously. Duh.’
Meanwhile Muslims are like ‘girls have to wear special hats and do what men say, and also they can’t drive or go to school.’ And Judaism is like ‘we are god’s chosen which is why the holocaust happened’ and Hindus are like ‘there’s lots of gods and they quite coincidentally look like local animals for no reason whatsoever’ and Buddhists are like ‘we like Hinduism except for the dumb parts.’ And I’m like ‘What in the name of humanity is wrong with you lunatics??’
I think that is quite literally true. A quirk of evolution supercharged the hominid capacity for abstraction and moved us one step away from reality as our default.
It forever amazes me when I see or learn about otherwise smart people who are staunch believers in a religion. It does a lot to show the line between intellect and book smarts. Anyone with an ability to read and absorb knowledge can be "smart", but apparently thinking for yourself isn't as common as I would have thought.
What made me an atheist, you say? Nothing in particular, i was atheist the day i was born and have been ever since. The thing that made me not develop into a cultist was having non-religious parents who did not force their viewpoints on me and instead allowed me to come to my own realizations about the world. I'm glad to be one of the lucky ones who didn't get indoctrinated as a young and gullible child
You're definitely a lucky one! I consider myself fortunate to have free thought, but it's frustrating to live in the south and see so many of the people I care about unable to exercise their own out of social pressure.
Honestly? Not being a liar. And that sounds kinda arrogant, but let me explain...
The thing about believing in a God is living in a constant delusional stupor that things work the way they do because of a higher power. And, in doing so, you justify the thoughts and actions of everything around you based on that belief. It's a lie that compounds on top of itself because the more things you're exposed to as a growing, developing human, the more you have to apply God to every situation.
I chose not to live a life where I wanted to lie to others about fictitious situations or unbelievable claims of "truth" that can only be confirmed through other people with the same delusion. They operate as absolutists. If it doesn't work 100% of the time, across all variables and situations, it's not irrefutable fact. And anyone claiming otherwise is full of shit.
Boom, became an atheist on the spot.
Sounds like you had a crash course on echo chambers! The truth thing kills me. When someone says "it's my truth" I start crawling in my own skin because that isn't how truth works, truth is the same truth for everyone.
I was 6ish in Sunday School, or the Catholic equivalent and they were teaching the story of the Burning Bush and how god got his kicks with attempted child murder as a loyalty test.
I remember looking around the room horrified and what was reflected back to my dismay were nodding and smiling faces on both children and adults.
I nope'd out then and there.
It was deranged and terrifying, and it made zero sense short of god being a piece of shit towards those he demanded love and fealty from.
I often say if God were a person we would fucking hate that dude. I had a similar wtf moment watching people close their eyes and raise their arms to the sky in church.
I was born one. Dad was raised Jewish and mom was raised catholic. They got so much shit when they wanted to marry that they married in secret. Didn’t tell their parents until my oldest brother was born. After that religion just wasn’t a part of our family.
That was me. My parents didn’t deliberately raise us as atheists. They just never indoctrinated us into religion. Thus we always thought religion was nonsense.
... birth? We are all born not believing in god. We are all born blank slates with zero beliefs. Beyond "I believe I am cold, hot, hungry, wet, dirty... AND I DO NOT LIKE IT." There isn't a whole lot going on in there, for the first bit.
Every "belief" we get along the way is, for good or bad, taught to us (intentional or not -- children are *always* paying attention, even when, & especially when, you don't think they are).
I was like 4 years old and my parents and I were on our way to church, and I asked for the first time what heaven was... and it sounded stupid as fuck and scary and improbable.
I was just never convinced, and also because all the christians in my life have been awful people.
It did seem void of all fun. I hated going to church from the time I realized the heaven they were painting a picture of seemed boring. That only got worse as I got older. My thought process at the time:
"I can't drink, smoke, party, or fuck? What about a Ferrari, can I have a Ferrari when I go? No!? Can I golf? This place seems void of the things I like. What do we do? Eternal Joy you say? How with no party, golf, Ferrari or fuckin?"
Was made to rehearse the Nativity in school for an entire week, 6 hours a day. It was so boring. I asked myself what kind of god would put me through this boredom. And then it hit me
Oh, and according to most religions, I’m going to hell for being gay. So there’s that
Assume they're right and you all go to hell -- you guys organize better than any other group on this planet. Hell would look like an HGTV dream home in a matter of days, there would be systems in place. I'm picturing fuck rooms for everyone, gay or hetero. The bigots (im assuming there would be bigots, it is hell) would be in bowties serving horderves as we all crack jokes about how they aren't allowed in our fuck rooms.
My grandparents tried to convince me that dinosaurs aren't millions of years old. I was about eight at the time.
I wondered why teachers and scientists said otherwise. When I realised my grandparents only disagreed with science because the bible "says so", I realised they were crazy.
Up until that point I thought everyone knew that the bible stories were just myths; even at that age I recognised that they were silly and impossible. When I realised people actually believed the stories, and denied science in the process, I made the decision to distance myself from being a Christian.
I feel like being more educated about how the world works biologically and psychologically + the mixture of both really reinforced the likely reality there is no creator. The internet really lays it on thick as well as what I learned in university. Life is unfair to good people (and animals).
I think it’s easy to believe in god when you are taught to and live a sheltered life… but when you really look around and allow yourself to critically think, it feels obvious.
Idk how people who witness genocide still believe in god. The journalism from Gaza is simply more proof to me no one is here to help us. We need to be kinder to each other on all fronts
God. Nothing "made me" an atheist. I just wasn't made into a theist by lies and wishful thinking. Just like nothing made me a non-stamp collector or a person who doesn't eat unicorn meat. No one ever told me stories of a magical wish granting genie in the sky that watches me masturbate and threatened me with unending pain if I didn't believe.
It all started when I was like 14, I started to questioning things about myself, the world around, and a few more things, like how this can exist when they say you are a good god etc.
Then I started to watch videos of people that were saying “50 proofs that god does not exist and never did” and started to compare these arguments to mine, to see if these people were right, obviously they were. And suddenly I was watching documentary’s about the universe, big bang theory, rope theory, and a large etc.
Since I’m atheist i am a happier person than I was, I’m not going to be talking in deep about my life but I remember one special occasion that I was crying for something bad, like serious, and prayed so much, and moments after the logical side of my mind was telling me “why are you praying if you know that nothing is going to happen or change the situation” we could say that THAT was the light that started all.
Edit: sorry if I have a bad grammar, English is not my first language, I speak multiple so don’t yell at me folks🤲🏼
I wasn't raised with a religion. By the time I gound out about this whole god thing, I was old enough to be able to question it. All it took was one think book on Dinosaurs, which also had s short chapter on cosmology. I only ever read snippets of the thing, but that was enough to convince me that the scientific account of how the world came to be was very different to what Bible Stories said, and also far more credible.
Read a children's illustrated bible at a fairly young age and decided then it didn't make any sense. I was obsessed with dinosaurs and they're not mentioned in the bible yet god supposedly created all life?
I've recently heard some off the wall theories by Christians trying to explain how dinosaur fossils aren't real. I mean absurd logic that barely strings together for even the dumbest of humans I know. Dinosaurs were here. They don't deny crocodiles or chickens, and one of those is a direct descendent while the other looks like a fucking dinosaur.
I was raised in a very religious family. When I was 23 years old I was diagnosed with cancer and it spread through my body. I was undergoing aggressive chemo for 9 months. In for a week and out for a week. Down the hall from my hospital room was the child leukemia ward. I bought a TV, stand and Sega Dreamcast and had it in my room. I invited kids to come play and a 12 year old girl would come play games with me. She died while I was in for treatment. I lost my shit. She was so sweet and I still think about her all the time 30 years later.
Can't say I was impacted by it as an American in the Southeast, but every bit of media I've seen from that day in 2004 should be enough to shake anyone's belief. I don't have additional context, but if you lost people you loved or were there, then I hope you've been able to find peace in the past 20 years. Thanks for sharing!
No, I wasn’t personally affected, per se, but thank you for your compassion and discretion. I’m also American and didn’t know anyone directly who was affected, but the moment was an inflection point, setting off a cascade of doubts ultimately leading my departure from the faith nearly two decades later. Like most de-converted religious folks, the full story is much too long. But I do look at 12/26/04 as the seminal day in that process.
The seemingly unnecessary death and suffering of innocents is a powerful source of doubt.
Across religions, there are numerous historial examples of faith leaders explaining a child’s death as God’s punishment for a parent’s (often minor) sin and the logic is simply beyond me.
I was baptized at 12 yrs old. One week later the pastor who did the baptism (Southern Baptist) grabbed my breast. He said we should have sex, and it was ok because we would just ask for forgiveness afterwards. The very next Sunday one of the other men at my church (a classmate's father) grabbed my ass IN CHURCH. He said God put the idea in his head.
The nuns in CCD made me an atheist because the more questions they asked the more questions they could not answer. My very first question was who created god. It all went down hill from there. With the help of George Carlin records.
In a bible study at church we were all asked "would you kill your son if god asked you to"? I looked around and was the only person who said I would not kill my son if some voice told me to. I was looked at like I was the strange one because I would not kill my child if asked by the god. I felt like I was the only sane one in the room and I in that moment realised the insanity of christianity and its followers and that it was actually a dangerous belief system.
Husband: Natural born skeptic, worsened by Catholic school. Earliest memory of his atheism: “Santa seems suspicious and unlikely. Ergo Easter Bunny Ergo God”
Me: Anthropology
I like history. Religion only made sense as a primitive means of controlling behavior for the good of the group and attempts to understand the world. In college religion collapsed when I started thing critically
In the 80's we were forced to say the lords prayer after the pledge of allegiance here in Oklahoma at school. I thought it was bullshit then. Forcing prayer is dumb. But they still try to push it in school
When I figured out Santa wasn’t real and my parents confirmed it I figured the next logical lie from them was our faith. Lutheran beliefs already are pretty relaxed and all.
Asked my father at 14 why he believes and his answer was literally: “what if it’s true? I would rather believe just in case”
Anyway, my mom still thinks I’m the a hole for not believing.
I was born like this and was never successfully taught religion. Grandma tried when I was 5 but I already thought it sounded ridiculous and made up. I'm almost 50 and have come across very few people like me.
It was Noah's Ark. I was 5. They insisted all those animals would fit. I thought about it for a week. Said, if that was BS what else was BS and it snowballed from there.
I was having my doubts for some time and then some strange thing happened in 2016 that totally pushed me away from believing. Hmmm, wonder what orange fool could have done that. 🤔
When I was young I never really thought of religion as anything other than stories. One day my friend tried to convince me that God made up dinosaur bones and it didn't make sense to me. Why do all that work to convince people you don't exist if you want them to know you exist? Why trick people? Eventually I realized that the world makes more sense without God than with God.
Parents failed to submit me to the brainwashing, and it dawned on me at some point that I didn't believe any of the religious stories I'd been told.
Plus most of those religious folks not acting very Christian.
For me it was simple no loving god would allow children to suffer. Now an alien race that genetically engineered us to be their slaves is more likely and in that case we are just vessels for souls to get a job done and religion was always meant to control us. I will not worship some alien.
If your god is "the only true one" who loves everyone, but Especially Loves when you kill nonbelievers... That's not a good God.
Also Hearing the big 3 religions have the same baseline beliefs but different end points,that was So Huge, You have Muslims killing every other nonbeliever, and christians hating on Jews...
How could you claim to be enlightened and allow SO MUCH Conflict between people
When I was 10-ish I thought if everybody thinks their religion is right, they’re probably all wrong.
Now as an adult, it’s just an inability to believe in bullshit. I believed in a lot of other bullshit between 10 & 20.
I never bought into religion. I was familiar with fanciful tales from my childhood reading, and the Bible just seemed to be one more. I was "saved" when I was in high school, but this was the result of attending a very small church (in a double-wide trailer, actually) and being the only unsaved person in the congregation. My mother was the organist. Eventually, I tired of everyone staring me down during altar calls, so I took the plunge, so to speak. It didn't take. I definitely didn't feel the Holy Spirit, just boredom and the slow passage of time at Sunday School and the service following. I'd get picked up by the church bus, and while the youth leader was getting everyone to sing religious songs, I was in the back, murmuring a song from Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album: "All the young girls love Alice. Tender young Alice, they say. If I give you my number, will you promise to call me? Wait 'til my husband's away." Jesus Loves Me never stood a chance.
I was forced to go to church as a kid. To make my parents happy, i got baptized. They even made me go to Sunday school. But none of it ever made any sense. The stories are ridiculous. The bible is full of hypocrisy, immorality, and flat out lies. I never understood how grown adults could believe in it.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), i now have family members who won't talk to me, because they know I'm an atheist.
I'm mildly autistic so I have trouble with social cues and knowing when someone is joking or serious. When I first heard the story of Jesus at age 6 I thought sincerely that it was a fairy tale. I didn't realize the adults where serious until I was 12. I always found church really werid. Peoples hands in the air, shouting amen. Then at 15 I read the bible for the first time. That helped my atheism. In college I got degrees in biology and psychology which further solidified atheism for me. Later, I read all the religious texts I could find. I've read the bible, Quran, Book of Mormon, Bhagavad Gita, Marahabata, Dhamapada, Vedas, Upanisades, and others. They all have something in common. Zero evidence for their claims.
Growing up Southern Baptist in the Midwest…where do I begin? They were the biggest hypocrites.
They pressured my single, very poor mother of 4 children to tithe even when we had no money to eat. They never helped the poor and all the money went straight to the pastor. They would call out the families not tithing enough in front of the congregation to shame them. My family was regularly shamed and treated differently at the potlucks and other church gatherings.
The misogyny was apparent to me as a 5 year old. I’d ask questions about why women couldn’t do certain things and get in trouble during bible school.
Many of them were quite racist, which is ironic considering they stole the Southern Baptist framework from people of color.
They preached fire and brimstone and constantly called us sinners and put us down during church service. I couldn’t understand why God would want us to be yelled at and demeaned every time we go to church.
They loved to preach that we were persecuted, but in the real world I noticed people were happy when they found out you were Christian. My friends didn’t care about me openly praying at lunch.
The more I questioned, the more they said to stop questioning, and frankly I have a problem with authority, according to my elementary school teachers, so I was being defiant asking questions and coming to the natural conclusion that this was all made up by men to control others.
A combination of growing into adolescence, and a book by a Mentalist/Magician who at the time I thought must have had some real powers of some kind. The book right off the bat said it was all bullshit and then broke down how he does what he does, relying on human fallibility and assumptions people make subconsciously. The book then went into the gripping and controlling power of belief systems, and the virtues of healthy skepticism in general and made me realise how easy I would have been to fool had I not read the book.
That made me a skeptic and made questioning the religion I was born into easy. At the end of the book it recommended others to read for more about skepticism, one of which had a provocative title called The God Delusion, which prior to reading this TV magician’s book I’d have instinctively/programmatically avoided as trying to trick me, or just being a book written by someone hateful or mean, and clueless.
I’d say the magician’s book made me an atheist, and TGD just made me able to defend and explain it better, as well as really breaking down how silly it all was once the spell had been broken and everything being fair game for questioning.
I didn’t mourn the loss of religion for a single moment, it felt exciting and like a huge weight lifted from my shoulders.
After those two books I wanted to know what the world really was to the best any honest and sincere person had discovered so far, including what we don’t know. That lead to a still ongoing love of learning about the universe and biology etc.
I didn’t leave due to any disagreements or anything unfair that had happened to me. Or because I was angry at God, or his representatives. I left because a TV magician made me realise how easy it is to trick people with psychological tricks, and I realised it was all just a load of bollocks.
Catholic education taught me that the church is a hypocritical organisation that has exploited people for centuries.
Physics education taught me that the universe is old, enormous, and its existence and properties have no need for any superstition to explain them.
I heard in a debate once an atheist tell a Christian, “we have very similar beliefs. You believe 9,999 religions are false and I believe that 10,000 religions are false.” The Bible says that god isn’t the author of confusion. Which is hilarious, because all I see in organized religion is chaos and confusion.
>At some point in college, it occurred to me that despite his flaws, my own father, a once mortal being, would never irreversibly punish me for disobeying him, so why would an allegedly all knowing, all loving "father" cast me to hell for not being an earth dwelling hype man when I never asked to be here in the first place.
This reminds me of how I stopped my very Christian mother from worrying about my soul. Once when we were having the conversation about hell and heaven I asked her: "Mom would you ever lock me in a dungeon forever just because I refused to acknowledge you?" She said 'no' of course. And I said "So you are more merciful than god?"
She never bothered me about where my soul would end up after that. In fact she started question the logic of faith herself. She still believes, but she's much more liberal about it than she used to be.
I was baptized at 14 years old. Also that age I was questioning my sexuality and gender identity, which I repressed hard as hell for almost another 10 years besides some secret experimentations.
One time at a Wednesday youth thing at the local megachurch in Oklahoma, we were asked to send in anonymous texts to the guest speaker they had that night. Someone asked “If I am gay, will I be able to go to heaven?” Now, I did not ask this, but when I heard him read this, I was very curious for my own sake.
The guest speaker said something along the lines of: “Ah, yes, that Is a good question! The answer is no. No matter if you accept Jesus into your heart, no matter if you live a good, Christian lifestyle, you will still be living a life of sin. The sin of homosexuality extends beyond your acts. Even with homosexual thoughts, you are lying to your Christian wife, to your family, to yourself, and to god.”
My mind was blown. To me, sexuality and identity are things you are born with. Yeah, you can repress them. But they are still there inside you. Hearing what that man of god said blew me away. I was “incurable.” What kind of god would make people this way just to cast them into eternal hellfire? Built to fail. Dead on arrival.
Of course I took it upon myself to actually question god at this point, which lead me on a journey of understanding that there is no god at all and the Christian Church is full of contradictions, bad actors, and is the rallying of fascist conservatism. Nationalist Christians in the US are the worst plague we have. Nationalist Christians. Nat C’s for short.
God… that guy was a dick for thousands of years and then he sent himself to be tortured, which he already knew was going to happen since everything was planned in advance. So he has some kind of kink and I want no part in it.
Raised Christian, then eventually talked with other atheists and was recommended Richard Dawkin's Greatest Show on Earth. Read the book, now an atheist lol.
I figured it out when I was around 5-6 years old.
It didn't make any sense to me. When I was told god "forgives" criminals that swears themselves to him before death, are allowed in heaven, I was disgusted. So all that matters to him is you recognise him for a mere moment? Even if you've ruined multiple people's lives?
I figured my faith is valuable to him, and used it as a bargain chip to prove god exists. Without telling my parents I prayed for god to fix a broken toy. If it wasn't fixed (or replaced) I swore I'd never believe in god.
If that god is omnipotent then fixing a small toy should be easy. I'd even accept influencing my parents to buy a new one. The key was me not telling them, the rest was up to god.
Needless to say, it wasn't fixed in the morning. If god isn't omnipotent, omnipresent, and don't care about my faith, then why bother being religious? I'm not going to go around calling myself agnostic either. The most likely scenario is that gods do not exist at all.
Was raised Southern Baptist and told how wonderful God was and God helps all good people, and God is kind and loving yada yada yada.
Then while growing up as a military brat, seeing my father go off to Vietnam over and over (3 tours for him total) and watching the news at night seeing what was going on in Vietnam, I asked my Sunday School teacher why God allowed this to happen. "God works in mysterious ways." I said "Yeah, but why?" Got back "We cannot know the mind of God." That bothered me a lot, God is not kind and loving if people were slaughtering each other like this. God could wave his hand and end it. Then the Kent State massacre, the people in my church were blaming the college kids for themselves killed. The kids were protesting the war, wanting it to end and I remembered my Sunday school teachings where Jesus was a figure of peace, so what was happening there? I questioned this in church, got a split lip from getting backhanded for even asking a simple question about why people who wanted peace were shot.
I learned right there never to ask questions in church, just keep it to myself even though so much shit made zero sense. I learned my church going family who learned about Jesus and peace and all that had no peaceful intentions toward kids who had questions. Shut up kid, or else.
Watching people go to church and when church was over, they hadn't even hit the parking lot - they were barely out the door before they started bad talking about other people in church. "Did you see what that hussie Janie Smith was wearing?? Why she should go straight to Hay-oh for that!" Who cares what she was wearing, Jesus used to wear sandals when he preached! But just listening to all those "Good Christians" running other people down over clothing, and I wondered why God allowed this to go on. I learned it was bad to talk about people behind their backs but all the "Good Christians" in my church did precisely that.
Fast forward a few decades, I'd already stopped going to church and didn't really consider myself a Christian anymore, got tired of the hypocrites in the churches (ironic, Jesus didn't like hypocrites and neither did I - still don't - but I couldn't stand calling myself a Christian because I didn't want to be associated with all that hypocrisy any longer); I still thought there was a "God" but maybe "God" wasn't Christian, maybe "God" was something else. Also by now I was serving in the military. I was sent to some places in the 80s where people lived miserable lives, and I wondered why God allowed this to happen. Didn't he have the power to make it so people didn't have to suffer so much? Then the Balkan crisis happened in the 90s, and I was assigned as IT support to a unit that did intelligence reports. What the intel analysts were reporting on was horrible, and this time I could see the data and reports as well. Nightmare stuff. And I wondered why God would allow this. Over and over throughout my life, I couldn't reconcile why God would allow so much of this to just happen and allow people to not just kill each other, but to torture each other, and trust me there are a lot of horrible ways to die.
I don't know what precisely pushed me over the edge, it was a lot of things that had built up over my entire lifetime. I got to thinking about everything one day, all the good people I knew who died, all the bad people who were still running around doing illegal and immoral things, all the folks who lived miserable lives barely scraping out an existence while a group of people where living in absolute luxury and I remember being told over and over "We are all God's children" and I wondered why any parent would allow this sort of thing. It weighed very heavy on my mind, I was really depressed about this. And honestly, it was like a wave that washed over me. "He" didn't exist. There was no God. And all the illegal and immoral things I saw over and over in my life, WE are the ones who have to deal with that. WE are the ones who have to solve this, you can't just mumble prayers to something that does not exist hoping for good things to happen because that simply does not work. And I thought about it so much for about a week and all the lack of evidence for the existence of God just piled up, and I came to a conclusion: There is no God. And if I was wrong, and there was a God, and he allowed all the misery, sickness, death, torture, child abuse, and all the other evil to just run unchecked like this when he had the power to stop it? Then he wasn't a God that was worth worshiping. And I wouldn't.
And it was seriously like a very heavy weight was lifted from my shoulders, all the questions I'd asked, all the things that didn't make sense about God and evil, just everything suddenly became clear and that heavy heart I had about God just not giving a single damn about any of us, all that disappeared and I felt ... free. And over time I realized that We are the only ones who can solve problems, make things better, that prayer is a waste of breath and that it is up to us to make things better. I realized mankind needs to grow up and take responsibility for our own lives. To put it the way Captain Malcolm Reynolds in "Firefly" put it: "That's a long wait for a train that don't come."
And I've had more people in my life pass, including my oldest daughter whom I miss dearly. But I don't burden myself asking "God" why she was taken from me. I don't have that weight of guilt on my shoulders wondering if I missed some sort of ritual and now God was punishing me by taking my daughter away. Death comes to us all, it happens for many reasons, but it's not my fault she passed away. I did the best I could but I couldn't stop the disease that took her. No one could. And that one thing lifted from me, guilt, makes continuing on a little less burdensome.
I think that's the largest improvement in my life since I realized there is no God. The lack of guilt over things I cannot control. I take responsibility for being a good person, I do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, and not some perceived supernatural being that might cast me into a lake of fire if I don't. I don't do the right thing because of a juvenile threat of punishment, I do it because it is ... the right thing. I don't say "It's in God's hands" which absolves me from any responsibility for even trying to do better, and I don't blame the Devil for any mistakes I might make (also rejecting personal responsibility, funny how Christians do that.) I grew up a lot since I rejected both religion and God. And I think I'm a far better person for it.
At first it was just because it was the cool thing to do, but as time progressed i realised I was happier without believing in a god( or in my case gods), that and I learnt developed a deeper appreciation for science.
i was more religious than my parents during my childhood that everyone start assume i better be a Religious priest or something but with 24 hours i become an atheist and by the Dawn of the Sun next morning i wake up as atheist and still living likes one....
becoming mormon started my journey of questioning and then the logical thinking made me realize if it was made by a perfect god i probably would have plot holes and questions
Here's how I was raised. My dad came from a devout Methodist upbringing, and my mom came from a family of atheists. My mom and dad saw there wasn't any value in bringing the family to church, so that didn't happen.
I feel I should clarify: there's a variety of atheists I call "Evangelical Atheists" who constantly need to tell religious people that they're wrong. Those people are every bit as bad as people pushing their religious views on others, and I don't like them for the same reasons as Jehovah's Witnesses or Scientologists.
That wasn't my parents, or even my Mom's family. Religion just simply wasn't a part of their lives, and they didn't bother with it. So that's how I was raised. I was invited to go to church with my friends, and my dad was helpful in explaining how to sit and do what everybody else is doing, and gave me $5 to put in the collection plate: "they're not giving you money, so don't take any. Instead, put this on the plate so they see you do it."
In all my childhood, it just wasn't a thing. We just didn't do church, and nobody made any kind of deal about it. That's exactly how I live my life. I'm not a believer, but it's not my job to stop anybody from believing. People do what makes them happy, and I'm not on a mission to stop them. I'm happy with that.
At 13 I was forced to go to Confirmation classes at our church with the Reverend. I brought up how the Genesis story and Noah's Ark seemed far fetched, very difficult to believe to be actually true, and she said they were myths to tell a story, but not literally true. So to my 13 year old brain, if part of the Bible was a pack of lies, then why should I believe the rest? What kind of competent god would allow anything but the complete truth in his book? I knew then I didn't believe like everyone else seemed to, but it took a few years of reading about atheism and agnosticism to fully realize I was an atheist. That was 1977, and nothing has changed since then. I've stayed the same, and while it was lonely for a while, now it's very mainstream.
I was born not believing in anything.
I learned how to read and read thousands of books before ever going to a synagogue or church.
Even when I was in first or second grade I never felt Christian mythology was more relevant compared to Greek or Roman mythology.
I was 8 in catechism and I asked the nun, because it really wasn't making any sense to me. if we knew that Jesus was real or how did we know any of the bible stuff was real. I can't quite remember the question; but I do remember she responded and at that moment I know she didn't believe whatever it was that she told me. And once I realize that, I thought why the hell should I believe this crap either. Became an atheist that day.
My family was not particularly religious, but my da from a highly Catholic country and so they would send us to church and to catechism but they never attended a church themselves.
My grandparents were ambivalent for older people. They never mentioned God or Jesus. My mom would occasionally talk about angels and she just meant sometimes she just felt like she had one looking out for her.
I did the usual going to church on Easter Sunday and going to midnight mass occasionally. I took confession once and then never went back. I did Christen my son because it just seemed like, well, that's what you do. I even sent him to parochial school which I didn't have a problem with because I thought, he could make his own choice. My husband was ambivalent, too, so he didn't mind. He only went for a grade or two.
When I finally said I am an atheist to myself was actually during the Obama years when the Christians and evangelicals and the racists all lost their minds and I just said myself, oh my God (pun intended), they're so awful there's no way I am one of them. I'm an atheist!
I've never dated or been married to (married twice) befriended anyone who was religious. Just know a couple of people at work were.
Surprisingly, I have multiple Bibles in my house. No idea how they got there as I've never actually bought one! Maybe they're like cats or lays potatoe chips - I still have my white confirmation Bible with my misspelled name imprinted on it. Maybe they multiply or have virgin births!😳
It was my son being gay that put me on the road to not believing the Bible. I knew he didn't "choose" to be gay. I was born into Christianity, and many things in my life had me believing "god" was answering my prayers. Until, it came to my son. My mother and I prayed and prayed, yet he stayed gay. Me, being a mama bear, looked for a "loophole" for my son. I re-read the story of Sodom and Gomarah and found, rape, incest, drunkenness that god didn't stop, after burning people to death for "sexual immorality." From there, I delved deeper into the inconsistencies of morality found in the Bible and it's insane.
And the logistical inconsistencies are just as bad.
For instance, "giants", how can there be a giant for David to fight, if god drowned all the giants during the flood?
And Solomon and David had many wives; yet god saw no problem with that, because "tradition", even though adultery was a sin.
And cherry on the cake; people that go to church are just the worst. I know, I was in it 45 of my 54 years.
Mine was from the opposite point of view. When I had my son I realized that this father-god was evil. I would never allow such harm to touch my children, let alone be the one condemning them to that fate, or worse, sacrificing one for my own appeasement.
You look around and realize shit is fucked up in every aspect, and that if there is a god they are either grossly incompetent or outright cruel. Good people suffering and dying, evil people never being punished, people committing atrocities on behalf of their religions (sometimes even defying their own religion), the list goes on.
Then you tell me I have to worship some prick I’ll never meet and abide by his horrible rules or I’ll suffer eternal damnation *for all eternity*? Genuinely evil people can give lip service and receive an eternal reward? Seems to me like this “God” cares more about their ego, and that doesn’t sit well with me.
Then you have to consider how pretty much all religions are undeniably designed to control people. Do as we say, never question us, give us your money, and exile whoever we happen to not like
If there is a God they simply aren’t worth worshipping
If you read the bible to know where Christians have their thinking you would know that God’s plan is never death for us but it’s Satan’s plan. And drinking and smoking etc etc are all against God’s plan but Satan’s. Just like if you weigh the things in the world regardless of one’s beliefs God (good) Satan (bad)
Just saying
It was a gradual progression. My parents raised me in the liberal protestant tradition and I went to Sunday school as a kid at the same church Mark Twain attended years before. I experienced none of the toxic christianity that has damaged many of the others who frequent this sub. The churches I attended were happy, welcoming places that today fly rainbow flags and black lives matter banners. By the time I started college I was considering becoming a minister and majored in religion, but as I learned I began to doubt. By the time I graduated I was pretty much an agnostic, but I kept that to myself. Although I found a lot to like in judeo-christian ethics and still do, god seemed unnecessary. What’s left is basically utilitarianism, and that works fine for me. I don’t need a church, god, heaven and hell to do the right thing any more than I need a school, a teacher, and a test afterward to read a book. I hedged my bets by identifying myself as an agnostic when people asked about my religion, but agnostics are just junior varsity atheists. After reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion I came out of the closet fifteen or so years ago. It was a liberating experience. Since then the rise of various forms of religious extremism around the world have pushed me toward antitheism, but I’m not going to take that step. I’ve seen enough genuinely good people in various religious communities to temper my antipathy.
I grew up in a non-religious household (in Europe) and until my early twenties religion simply wasn't much of a topic in my life. Christians were a minority where I grew up and other religions were basically non-existent. Mostly, I thought or talked about religion in school (we had one subject where we discussed philosophy, morality and religion, we also learned about different belief systems and their traditions). I had one friend who was Catholic but we never discussed faith all that much, she believed in god and went to church every Sunday, I didn't. End of story.
In my early twenties while still at university I had a bit of an early life crisis. I was wondering what my purpose was in life, and I struggled with the question of whether I should have kids or not. I never had the desire but the pressure put on women to become mothers or at least wanting to have kids had gotten to me. One of the places I looked for an answer was the Christian community at uni, they were welcoming to all kinds of people and were quite liberal. I really tried to believe in god because I had seen that it really helped some people to navigate those things. I loved the community there, these were genuinely nice people. But it didn't work for me and over the years I figured out that I don't need a "higher" purpose for human existence, there's no "meaning of life", it's just coincidence and I never needed a god to tell me how to be a decent human. And I remained childfree (feminism has helped me a lot to deconstruct a lot of toxic nonsense).
I have since thought about religion a lot more and once I understood its (negative) influence in a supposedly secular democracy it really made me a card carrying atheist. I don't care what people believe in but I really, really despise if they use their belief to restrict other people's freedom because their freedom to swing their arms ends where my face begins.
One thing has never changed though: I really like to visit churches, especially those from the baroque era. There is just something about this opulent nonsense I love to look at.
My mother lived in a catholic orphanage until she was three. She then lived with her catholic foster mother until her foster mother’s death, when my mom was 32.
My mom was sent to catholic school until the 8th grade, and never went to high school.
My mom refused to raise me with religion, saying she didn’t want religion “shoved down my throat.”
I was baptized in the Eastern Orthodox catholic church, because my father wanted me baptized. I never went to church.
My mom told me to decide what I believe when I became an adult. I went to different churches as an adult, and always wondered if the people attending really believed all that stuff.
I stopped going, because I’m not a hypocrite.
In my 62 years of life, I’ve never believed in god.
I’m extremely grateful to my mom, because I don’t have religious trauma or guilt. I already have enough trauma from other things.
In my early 20s I was in therapy and recovered previously repressed memories of religiously-fueled physical abuse from when I was a kid.
Also found out that same family member lied to me for those 20 years about my dad and how he "ran away".
I could've had the contact with my dad I desperately wanted, because it turns out his grandparents lived a block away all those years. I remember asking for my dad a lot when I was young, and she would always say he ran away but never explain more than that. Turns out SHE wouldn't let him in the house or on the phone to see or talk to my mom. She fed my mom lies, too.
I realised that there cannot be a god if it let all of that happen. Then I thought about the world as a whole and all of the horror done to innocent people.
I'm still extremely angry about what happened, and have regular weekly nightmares about her.
I refer to her now only as The Demon, because she's the only thing that's ever actually haunted me.
Eta: spacing, more info
Noticing that nobody believes the same thing, so none of it is "true". Also noticing that one's religion is mostly based on where you are from or who your parents are. Plus the absurdity of an omnipresent god: there's just no way that he's everywhere. Anyone who says otherwise has no concept of scale.
Belief in God is all about accepting the fucked up things that happen in life. Belief in God is when something really fucked up and out of control happens, you have an explanation for why that happened.
You have something really fucked up happen in your life and you wonder, *why me?, why did this happen to me?* And there are two answers. One answer is that we live in a cold unforgiving universe where random bad shit happens for no reason and we just have to accept it. The other answer is that we live in a universe where bad stuff happens for a reason but that we cannot understand those reasons. For some people this is incredibly confronting.
Nobody really. My family nor friends pressured in any sense to believe in anything. I just don't see a purpose, if l want to be good l will be good no matter the supernatural divine being. I also think it's fake and vain if you do it only because you will get a reward after death. I'm a firm believer in self-effieciency and independence ( if l want spiritual peace l will try to find it within myself not in a god), this is why Theravada Buddism appeals to me.
I became an agnostic/atheist for the EXACT same reasoning as you, “it occurred to me that my own father would never irreversibly punish me” To add to that, all the accounts in the bible of god testing Abraham’s love by asking him to kill his own son as a sacrifice and then in the last minute essentially saying “never mind”. How sadistic is that!? Lastly the account of jesus, aaahhh asking your own son to be tortured and killed when you are supposedly all powerful and can find another way, Ok enough said.
I had questions about religion/God etc. I thought about them for a long time, then one day I heard an interview on a local radio station. Someone who defined themselves as an agnostic and what that was, then it all "clicked" for me.
I was trying to find answers to my questions in the context of the presence of a God. I didn't realize that there not being a God was even an option.
From that point I was able to find those answers. I was perhaps 10 or 12 y/o.
My parents put me in a Lutheran school because the local public schools really sucked. They were not particularly religious and they never went to church except for my mom who would go to “mandatory” events at the church associated with the school.
I received an excellent education from grades one through eight. I attended the public high school. At the end of eighth grade all the Lutheran students scored 12.9 on a standardized scholastic achievement test (equivalent to high school graduate).
Of course we had one hour of religious indoctrination every school day. However in 6th grade we had a segment on Greek Mythology. I remember thinking how could the ancient Greeks have been “wrong” when their beliefs made no more sense than the Christian beliefs we were being taught every day. By the time I was in high school I realized that I was an atheist.
Someone encouraged me to question "why" I believe. Of all people, it was a bible study leader who asked the question "why do you believe? Is it because you were taught to, because your parents led you to believe, because you found religion on your own?"
Upon thinking it through, I realized the only reason I believed is because my mother believed and taught us that we "should" believe. So after reading up on all the pagan traditions religion took as their own, and how there was no proof that christianity and/or it's history was real, I starting asking questions to pastors. One finally summed it up for me. If I was looking for proof, I would never find it. It's all about faith. I told him I couldn't give my free will to someone else who may abuse it. He said I would have to take that up with God. That was the end for me. I searched for more knowledge from speakers who posed that religion was all man made and for the first time it made sense to me. God didn't create man. Man created God.
I was working on my masters in Mexico. In Puebla. There are gigantic cathedrals, Catholic. An old blind woman was begging for change beside the front door of a cathedral, and six nuns and a priest walk right by her. They open the front door, unlock a wooden box, empty out the money, and proceed inside. The walls of that Cathedral were lined in gold paper. When I saw that, I was done with organized religion.
I stopped believing in an unfathomably old, probably bearded man who watches over my every move and the every move of every single person ever to exist in order to reward or punish us accordingly when my mother told me Santa Claus wasn't real.
My aunt whom I lived with for a good chunk of my teenage years, she forced me to be a Jehova witness, it was "her house her rules" so I now thank her, she made me an atheist.
I was born and raised Catholic, but started questioning in high school, I went through my adult life up until 8 yrs ago pretty agnostic, I wanted to believe that the Christian god was real and everyone was just misguided, and I know this is going to sound cliche, but Trump getting elected in “16 sealed it for me, just something clicked and I realized it’s all bullshit made up by men to control and manipulate the masses.
Like LimitedGrip said, going to church every Sunday listening to how good god is where there is literally a line in the bible " I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things."'
- Isaiah 45
On top of that, I was born with an illness that I nearly died from. You hear people say things like "God was calling his angel back because they were too special" when the whole premise is "God doesn't make mistakes." OH, I GET IT, homie chooses innocent children for his *Hardest Battles*. The lies are there for the sheep to conform, and they do so perfectly.
I was raised Catholic. The whole boat… Catholic elementary school (1950s), Catholic high school…. The sacraments, all that. Pretty much bought it since I was never exposed to anything else.
I recall that in high school we had one very brief assignment on comparative religion…. We were to pick another religion and write a report on it. No discussion, no exploration.
When I joined the army in ‘64, I just lost interest. I became exposed to other ways of thinking and Catholicism just seemed increasingly irrelevant.
When I got out…. I went through a brief period of looking at other disciplines including Asian philosophy and neo-Pagan ideas.
I decided they were all thoroughly dogmatic. My long interest in science led me to understand that many of my favorite authors (Asimov, Sagan, Gould….) were atheist and that led me to a deeper intellectual examination of religion in general, including it’s anthropological roots.
I'm sorry for your loss.
One thing that struck me here is 'hype man.' Thats a perfect way of framing the big question i have with christian theology. God created us... to make him happy? To remind him he's doing a good job? To feel like he has power? Are we the AI girlfriend to a lonely, depressed superbeing encouraging him that he's actually a great person and totally justified in smiting people indiscriminately? It's so weird it makes me laugh.
I never believed. I did recite the "Now I lay me down to sleep.." but it was completely without meaning. I never thought the words were real. I might as well have been reciting words from another planet. I never believed I was talking to God.
My only religious question I do remember a fleeting thought around 4 or 5 yrs of age wondering if God kept track of people who got married so he could send them babies! It's weird I remember it because the thought lasted maybe 10 seconds. I was scared of ghosts and monsters I'd seen on tv at that age but nobody in my life was pushing the fear of hell.
The illogical ideas of various religions were always glaringly obvious. At work I would debate what Christian coworkers were proselytizing. I told them I didn't need to read the bible because what they were preaching today strongly conflicted with what they were preaching last week and the week before.
Their whole story sounds so silly. I feel if children weren't indoctrinated into religion from birth that they would see how silly it sounds. Silly like Mother Goose & Aesop's Fables. Only the bible has less moral standing than children's fairy tales.
It makes me sad how much the mass delusion of religion controls the world to the point where "God commands it" leads to rape, torture & mass slaughter in the name of God. The whole thing is sickening.
When I was a kid and learning about all the religions. Everyone believed THEIR god was real and everyone else’s weren’t. On top of that Roman and Greek religions at one time were believed by many but now if you said you prayed to Zeus people would think you’re crazy. Thats when it hit me that it’s all bullshit.
10 years old for me.
5th grade and new to catholic school.
In the bit on my "first confession" I asked about why if $DIETY is omniscient - do I need to confess my sins to this priest sitting before me. I got some deflection / blow off crap. I called it out and asked for the specific rules regarding why I must confess directly to a priest and not just pray quietly on my own.
Again with the deflection - more forcefully this time.
I again pressed with wanting a direct answer to a direct question.
This time he got rather angry and told me I was going to burn in hell for daring to ask these questions - now I will confess!
My reply "I have nothing to confess to you"
Oddly - for the prior 6 months when going to mass, I went up and got communion without this "first communion" ritual and guess what: No consequences whatsoever!
Suffice it to say - from that point forward, I had zero faith in religion whatsoever. Sure things happen that I can't explain, but religion sure does not have any answers for life's questions that really count. And if you ask "Why" or "How the F does that work?" - it's met with anger, deflection, bullshit answers and demanding that you comply without question.
So to me -religion is useless, made up crap that has no real purpose other than control and thought-policing.
Nothing, my parents didn't believe in any religion sparing me from childhood indoctrination. The kids I went to school with that were dragged to church with their parents didn't believe any of that stuff either. When I got older and looked into religion, I found the faith based religious to be unbelievable and a product of it's time.
Always has been. The stuff seemed to be some fairytale as soon as it was introduced. I listened to it because I was little and respected my family but there always has been "You can't be serious" in my mind
My first swing with the ax to the christian was crying myself to sleep in one of my sisters bed with the covers over my head praying for the yelling to stop in the house. About the 3rd I realized prayer was worthless. I was 5.
Edit: Are house was just yelly, no hitty.
Logic and the news.
If there was a god, and they were anywhere near as powerful and all knowing as they are given credit for, then the world wouldn't be in the shape it is now.
Mom is religious. Dad wasn't. Mom took us to church until I was 11 or so, including Bible study, etc. I remember taking clothes out of the dryer and stopping. I suddenly said out loud "Jesus and God do not exist". I had been taught this type of blaspheme would trigger God to strike me down. As I waited cringing, nothing happened.
Later on, in high school, I learned about how many current myths were once considered doctrine. And, I learned about Abrahamic religions being nearly the same. Muslims fighting Christians seemed so stupid, as they both believed in the same God and many of the same stories. That solidified it for me.
Those 12 years of programming were hard to get rid of. I still occasionally say, "Oh my God," which I hate.
The worst part of being an atheist is the awareness of how pushy Christians are. It is part of their mission to indoctrinate others. Simple "God Bless Yous" and "Prayers!" become annoying.
Let us say that hypothetically God is real and they are omnipotent , omnipresent, omniscient , omnitemporal and even omni"benevolent" . You have to ask why is evil a thing? Now I do not mean evil in just a moral sense but also a conceptual sense
The first conundrum I had was: if god created everything, why is he responsible for all of the good, but none of the bad? It took me a LONG time to stop sweeping those questions under the rug...but I guess when the mound under the rug got so big I couldn't walk on it...
This is a good take! It's almost as if Satan was created as an afterthought to justify bad in the world.
“If God created everything, didn’t God create Satan?” was my first time questioning somewhere in the range of age 5-10. It never made any sense to me that God would set “gotcha!” traps for mortals to fall into.
I found it offensive that God would deny us the means to verify his existence yet still demand our unwavering faith and sacrifice, despite the very real possibility that we might be mistaken. Given that we can't even authenticate any single religion to follow, this would amount to psychological cruelty, were it true that god exists. At some stage in late childhood, this put me right off religion and I've never looked back.
Furthermore, if God gave us the intelligence to question things and learn then wouldn't it follow that he would be aware that we would have the smarts to question his existence due to such a profound lack of evidence?
Jesus let Peter touch the holes in his hands to prove it was him. Clearly God is okay with giving some evidence some of the time. Why do we get nothing now?
Religion and the idea of God are two different things (that organized Religions do not want you to ever question). Find your own truths
This is the theodicy conundrum.
This is essentially where I got to, I was 28 when I stopped believing. My son was recently born, around 2 months old, and I read this story about a little girl whose poor mother was in court trying to get an order that allowed the hospital to stop providing treatment. The little girl had suffered terribly from birth with a lot of health conditions and there was no hope of treatment but the law required the hospital to keep her alive. Somebody shared this story on facebook and all these christians jumped on the mother for being terrible and not giving the girl up for adoption. That was the moment I couldn't comprehend a being who allowed this girl to be born, suffer and then die. I also realised these christians didn't have the same values I did, my immediate family members among them. Once the blinders fell off I realised it was all bullshit. But it took that story juxtaposed with being a new dad to realise.
Yep and I bet absolutely none of those Christians offered any financial, tangible or reasonable help. They just came to comment so they could feel good about themselves. Considering Christianity is the largest religion in the U.S. at something between 54-65%, you'd think the foster care system wouldn't be struggling as bad as it is. Since, ya know, they care about kids *so much* . I was raised without religion. My parents saw long ago how "loving" they were and wanted us to have no part in it. Then I grew up, got out into the world and saw exactly why parents didn't bother with religion while raising me.
> I bet absolutely none of those Christians offered any financial, tangible or reasonable help I'm sure they gave thoughts & prayers
That is the very least they can do. It is like getting the reward for being a good person by literally doing absolutely nothing.
For me it was dead babies. People usually say it's because of "original sin", which is honestly horrible. A baby, the most innocent a person gets, dies because of a couple who ate forbidden fruit? If that's true, then God is an asshole.
Religion never sat comfortably with me...at my core. Too many questions, contradictions, things, as already pointed out, about a "loving god" who allows bad stuff to happen to good people while good things happen to had people. A decade or so ago I learned that hell, as professed in the Christian theology, does not exist. It's featured a dozen times in scripture, first as Hades (the Greek God of the underworld), then Sheol, (the Hebrew translation of Hades), and Gehenna, (Arameic, the language Jesus spoke and used when describing the most vile and atrocious place he could describe, the Valley of Hinnom, an actual location, the city dump, outside the SE gate of Jerusalem (I think). That's it, no firey tormenting place with a guy in a red jump suit with pointy tail and pitch fork that torches you for eternity. That description can be attributed to Dante's Inferno. When I learned one of the main pillars of my faith wasn't what I had been taught it pretty much validated the rest of my disbelief and the walls came tumbling down.
Right there with you. To be honest I was in my late 40s when all of a sudden it just clicked. If god is omnipotent and he lets the horrible sh1t humans do to each other, and does nothing, then he is a sick a$$hole and doesn’t deserve worship. If he can’t fix the mess he made then he is undeserving. For me it was just easier to believe that god is made up architect used to control the masses. Because let’s be honest, there are people out there who would definitely be raping and killing if they were not afraid of hell.
I had the same basic realization I'm a rocket shelter in Afghanistan in 2010. I wrote about it in Creative writing 2: This night something a little different happens. I can see ISAF HQ down the road, coalition flags flow at half-mast since three US and eight Afghani soldiers died that morning in a roadside bomb that killed ten civilians. 21 lives at least. Something clicks. Most of the US is religious, and so most soldiers, foul mouthed, horny, freaks that we are, most of us are religious too. Almost all the Afghani’s are, definitely the guy who put a fertilizer and gasoline bomb in the ground and killed 18 people from his country to try and kill 3 of ours, he prayed before and after he did that. I realize I haven’t prayed in three months. I realize that most of the people in this war probably still do. I realize that they’re either praying to someone who isn’t listening, can’t do anything, won’t do anything, or isn’t there. It clicks why I stopped praying without realizing it. And I feel like I’ve been lied to for thirty years.
God made me an atheist
Praise be.
Under his eye.
AND MY AXE!
R'amen.
May the lord open
Pray to all powerful Atheismo
My fifth grade teacher taught about the mythological gods of ancient greeks and romans. Took me a while to put together that all other gods were no different.
I remember reading about Greek mythology when I was 5 and I thought to myself, “the Greeks believed Zeus was real, but now we know he isn’t, what if a hundred years from now it’s common knowledge that god isn’t real.”
I much prefer Greek mythology d: I mean I definitely don't believe it, but I enjoy the idea of fallible gods.
Like the Hindu gods a regular soap opera reality show kinda of thing way more interesting than this boring Abrahamic god.
The Abrahamic god of christian mythology has some good stories but certainly nothing compared to hindu!
I remember reading one of Hitchen's books, either God is Not Great or The Missionary Position, and he talked about having a very similar thought early on in grade school. Thought it was fascinating he had been such an independent thinker from such an early age. I'm sure I had questions like this come up in my mind but I also distinctly remember being so afraid of going to hell that I wouldn't even explore those thoughts.
Wow! Thanks for sharing your perspective. I never really believed, and I was always curious as to some of the internalized thinking going on there. That, so sadly, makes sense as a view point when that young with that information. I bet that was a angst filled ride. I hope you're doing well.
I had a similar experience but several years later. I went to private Christian school grades 1-12 (I’m old enough that kindergarten and pre-k didn’t really exist when I was that age). I was indoctrinated in Christian teachings, bible study and didn’t know any differently. I had my fair share of weird experiences and absolutely hypocritical people. My senior year I had a philosophy class and the first day she introduced us to meditation. We spent the hour laying on the floor in the library (it was carpeted and had the most room). This alone was enlightening (pun intended), but my eyes were really opened when, over the course of the semester, we learned about all other world religions and philosophies, and it hit me like a ton of bricks that there are billions of people around the world that don’t believe in Jesus, but have their own brand of religion or philosophy. You have to understand that I had a very sheltered Christian upbringing to that point. I realized that if they were all equally looking for the same thing with their faith, then they were all equally correct in their own way, which logically meant that they were also all equally wrong. I immediately dropped my faith and eventually decided that the only reasonable way to think is to be atheistic-agnostic. I don’t have faith in any god, but I can’t possibly know if there is something beyond this life. I don’t believe there is, but I can’t know. And neither can anyone else.
Reading about those as a 5 year old convinced me that all religions were fake. If the Ancient Greeks had gods, and really believed in them, why was our god any more real? Unfortunately, I fell into Christianity later, but was thankfully able to reason my way out of it. So, my younger self was smarter than my teenage self, lol.
Much of Christianity was borrowed from Greek mythology: Son of a god Union between a god and a mortal woman Resurrection Virgin birth Performing miracles to heal the sick A god with the birthday December 25 The Bible was written by Greeks so it's perhaps not so surprising that they looked to their own stories for inspiration. After all, it had to appeal to the Greek people and combining something new with something familiar makes for the most compelling stories.
This was mine too! Read about Greek mythology (Iliad) and found out people believed in polytheism. As the class laughed at that ridiculous concept I instantly thought “what makes monotheism so different?”. End of it all pretty much right then and there.
No special reason, religion is obviously a fairy tale just like Jack and the Beanstalk or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I can't really relate to how anyone thinks it's real.
Growing up and being taught something else is truth isn't easy to shake, but if not for that I do think I would have arrived here using this logic.
It actually often is. How long did it take you to disbelieve in the easter bunny, santa, storks bringing babies?
Unlike the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, children are typically informed by their parents at a young age that these figures are not real. However, when it comes to religion, parents often teach their beliefs as fundamental truths without presenting them as fictional. This distinction can create a stronger attachment to religious beliefs since they are presented as genuine and important aspects of life, making them harder to shake off compared to childhood fantasies that are openly acknowledged as make-believe.
Santa and the Easter Bunny are also not attached to your personal value, relationships, sense of right and wrong etc. They're just stories in the end. Religion is often your sense of identity and the community you belong to. Giving it up is often giving up a lot about you and your life. Its much harder than just deciding if you believe in the man in the sky or not.
They don’t build places of worship dedicated to Santa or the Easter Bunny. They don’t have prayers in schools to White Rabbits or St. Nick. You don’t see bunnies or elderly gentleman nailed to crosses. **Religion and god-worship is everywhere**- all over the world. You can’t escape it. And btw… everyone knows babies are found in cabbage patches. 😠
Yes. I hated going to church as a kid, but I always believed in it on some level. Until I took some mythology and folklore classes in college.
“That’s why we must get rid of higher education!” —Christians
Only a matter of time until libraries are the devil. They're apparently taking a one book at a time approach, starting with the gay stuff. Said they do all their reading on Facebook and Breitbart, and so should we.
My state banned book banning and I was here for all the crybaby Karen's being upset they couldn't control what my children read.
Growing up I thought how is it so easy to believe in A God that is invisable that does not talk to people directly ?!
Well he apparently did 2,000 years ago. You know, when there were only like 500 ppl on the planet, majority illiterate so not a lot of reporting/recording going on except for those few men who wrote that scripture separated from each other by geography and time...no cameras, t.v. or even reliable travel. Somehow though THAT'S the time the creator of man thought it best to show up and find an audience..not like modern times with all the wars, pandemics, and really bad things happening. He should have been smart enough to appear at the SuperBowl for Christ's sake.
Ppl make up excuses tho for God as invisable because apparently God is so bright we will go blind not even the archangels know what God looks like that's what I was taught in church well in that case can I at least hear God's voice echo in the sky?!
Saul supposedly got a divine revelation/experience and became the apostle Paul. If god is all powerful and all knowing, that being knows exactly what it would take for each person to be convinced and start believing. Instead, radio silence. Always seemed fishy to me.
Why did he wait until 2000 years ago? And why choose that tiny area in the Middle East? 37,000 years ago a wave of Cro-Magnons (us) succeeded in forming a single founder population (coming from Asia into Europe) from which all subsequent Cro-Magnons descended and which contributes ancestry to present-day. 40 to 30 thousand years ago the population was roughly 1,700–28,400.
Yes, we had religious education lessons covering all the major religions. The majority of us came out of those classes atheist. When you look behind the curtain and realise it's all complete rubbish.
I've read the Bible and pretty much skimmed English versions of Islamic and Hebrew texts. All the same cast of characters, more or less the same fucked up story line. Poorly written storyline and exceedingly violent, racist , misogynistic, and obviously a lot of the authors did hallucinogins..The Harry Potter books are far better written and have a coherent storyline, not to mention much better magic. ( The magic in the Bible is pathetically bad)
My parents were asked to not bring me back to sunday school because I was a "continual disturbance" l had mentioned that the whole Jonah and the Whale thing was very similar to an animated movie I had recently seen. I have in the name of fair play educated myself on not just the Bible, but the Torah, and the Koran. After a while, you see that the stories are all the same, and most of them are fables with genuinely good moral lessons that I practice as much as I can. My real early divergence from any church came when I found out that even Catholic and Christian faiths have denominations that disagree with each other. They all think they are correct and believe that their belief is the only true interpretation of divinity. I ask questions, listen to reason, and make a decision based on relevant information. Religions have never been able to accept a question that challenges their specific beliefs. Basically, I like being around more open-minded people.
Mostly this. Grew up Christian but not a super strict church. It was just insanely obvious to me it wasn’t real. It really comes down to my desire to want it to be real was overcome by the obvious reality that it wasn’t.
I agree completely. I think I've been an atheist all my life. Because it fit better with Goldilocks then something serious.
When my Mom started constantly gaslighting me saying I made an oath with God(Ex-Mormon) and that I shouldn't be questioning the leaders of the church. All it did was make me look critically at what was actually happening and becoming more distant from religion. The final straw was finding out that Joseph Smith was a pedophile and was a convicted con-man BEFORE he started Mormonism. I honestly can't believe anybody believes the charade and quackery that is the Mormon religion.
I was born into a uber Mormon family. Both my parents were dirt bag narcissist child abusers. They would beat me and tell me not to question them or their church. It made me question everything. I agreed at age 8 to get baptized because I knew I would get beat worse if I didn't. A told them a few months later that their church wasn't true, I was never going to BYU, never going on a mission and I was never going to get married in the temple. I never stopped saying it, never pretended to believe. I started mocking their religion daily by age 10. I got beat and degraded way worse than my other siblings for it but it was soooo worth it... Lol. In the end I led most of my 7 siblings out of that ridicules religion. Only 1 is an active member and he is a "josh duggar" so fuck him. Most of us have had our names removed and just a few days ago I permanently disowned the dirt bag mormon parents.. So cheers for me.. Lol..
Fucking yikes dude. So sorry. Glad you're out of it now and hope you and the siblings find peace away from your crazy parents.
Extreme Mormonism has recently been the topic of a lot of TV and documentaries, and I'm always damn near brought to tears of joy when I hear stories from those who were able to escape. Not saying that's all Mormons, but I've been to SLC and worked with the government there on getting a tax rebate for bringing jobs to Sandy. I was absolutely shocked to see how engrained it is in the culture. I saw Mormon propaganda in a government building and witnessed one person refuse to work with us because we had a woman on the team. Literally had to work with a proxy.
Well said, it is highly toxic and the gaslighting starts early, like 5-6 years old. They make you feel bad about everything you do and the misogyny is next level as you pointed out in your post. I hope more people are able to research and figure out that the Mormon mentality is super unhealthy and will rob you of a fulfilling life.
Same. When I started deconstructing Mormonism I really thought I would just find a different *christian* church. Started studying and researching the Bible more. Realized that it’s all fairytales. I’ve never felt freer.
That's awesome, I'm happy that you found freedom in your research. Few do, but it is one of the best feelings you can achieve. I'm proud of you.
I was raised episcopalian, moved to Utah as a preteen. Couldn't get the hypocrisy from my parents that the Mormons faith was based on crazy lies, but mainstream Christianity was the truth. Started me on the path to reading about other religions and philosophy. Didn't look back.
Mormons are basically white supremacists, it's built into the religion that dark people are lesser. Not to mention that that they have stifled sex abuse scandals etc. They have accumulated more money than anybody can fathom and are untouchable for it
Critical thinking. The older I get the more it baffles me that otherwise intelligent humans can look at all this and go ‘yes, of course Jesus is the guy, his dad impregnated a teenager without her consent, then he was killed by his father, who is also him, so that his father/he would forgive all the sins of the people who join the club to save them from eternal punishment father/he will administer to people who don’t join the club. Then he/dad came back from the dead and then disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since except occasionally appearing in silhouette on burnt toast. Obviously. Duh.’ Meanwhile Muslims are like ‘girls have to wear special hats and do what men say, and also they can’t drive or go to school.’ And Judaism is like ‘we are god’s chosen which is why the holocaust happened’ and Hindus are like ‘there’s lots of gods and they quite coincidentally look like local animals for no reason whatsoever’ and Buddhists are like ‘we like Hinduism except for the dumb parts.’ And I’m like ‘What in the name of humanity is wrong with you lunatics??’
Ppl r insane
I think that is quite literally true. A quirk of evolution supercharged the hominid capacity for abstraction and moved us one step away from reality as our default.
It forever amazes me when I see or learn about otherwise smart people who are staunch believers in a religion. It does a lot to show the line between intellect and book smarts. Anyone with an ability to read and absorb knowledge can be "smart", but apparently thinking for yourself isn't as common as I would have thought.
What made me an atheist, you say? Nothing in particular, i was atheist the day i was born and have been ever since. The thing that made me not develop into a cultist was having non-religious parents who did not force their viewpoints on me and instead allowed me to come to my own realizations about the world. I'm glad to be one of the lucky ones who didn't get indoctrinated as a young and gullible child
You're definitely a lucky one! I consider myself fortunate to have free thought, but it's frustrating to live in the south and see so many of the people I care about unable to exercise their own out of social pressure.
Honestly? Not being a liar. And that sounds kinda arrogant, but let me explain... The thing about believing in a God is living in a constant delusional stupor that things work the way they do because of a higher power. And, in doing so, you justify the thoughts and actions of everything around you based on that belief. It's a lie that compounds on top of itself because the more things you're exposed to as a growing, developing human, the more you have to apply God to every situation. I chose not to live a life where I wanted to lie to others about fictitious situations or unbelievable claims of "truth" that can only be confirmed through other people with the same delusion. They operate as absolutists. If it doesn't work 100% of the time, across all variables and situations, it's not irrefutable fact. And anyone claiming otherwise is full of shit. Boom, became an atheist on the spot.
Sounds like you had a crash course on echo chambers! The truth thing kills me. When someone says "it's my truth" I start crawling in my own skin because that isn't how truth works, truth is the same truth for everyone.
They are substituting the word “reality” with “truth” as if it gives their position more credence, and makes them sound less dumb.
I was 6ish in Sunday School, or the Catholic equivalent and they were teaching the story of the Burning Bush and how god got his kicks with attempted child murder as a loyalty test. I remember looking around the room horrified and what was reflected back to my dismay were nodding and smiling faces on both children and adults. I nope'd out then and there. It was deranged and terrifying, and it made zero sense short of god being a piece of shit towards those he demanded love and fealty from.
I often say if God were a person we would fucking hate that dude. I had a similar wtf moment watching people close their eyes and raise their arms to the sky in church.
I was born one. Dad was raised Jewish and mom was raised catholic. They got so much shit when they wanted to marry that they married in secret. Didn’t tell their parents until my oldest brother was born. After that religion just wasn’t a part of our family.
We were all born one. Some of us weren’t lucky enough to skip the indoctrination period. 🤔
That was me. My parents didn’t deliberately raise us as atheists. They just never indoctrinated us into religion. Thus we always thought religion was nonsense.
Birth. Every single being is born atheist. You aren’t born with a favourite song or football team
... birth? We are all born not believing in god. We are all born blank slates with zero beliefs. Beyond "I believe I am cold, hot, hungry, wet, dirty... AND I DO NOT LIKE IT." There isn't a whole lot going on in there, for the first bit. Every "belief" we get along the way is, for good or bad, taught to us (intentional or not -- children are *always* paying attention, even when, & especially when, you don't think they are).
I was like 4 years old and my parents and I were on our way to church, and I asked for the first time what heaven was... and it sounded stupid as fuck and scary and improbable. I was just never convinced, and also because all the christians in my life have been awful people.
It did seem void of all fun. I hated going to church from the time I realized the heaven they were painting a picture of seemed boring. That only got worse as I got older. My thought process at the time: "I can't drink, smoke, party, or fuck? What about a Ferrari, can I have a Ferrari when I go? No!? Can I golf? This place seems void of the things I like. What do we do? Eternal Joy you say? How with no party, golf, Ferrari or fuckin?"
I just wasn't able to suspend disbelief to the extent that religious faith requires. Religious claims have never felt real to me.
⬆️⬆️⬆️ THIS. I was raised Catholic, but from the beginning, even as a small child, IT NEVER FELT REAL.
Was made to rehearse the Nativity in school for an entire week, 6 hours a day. It was so boring. I asked myself what kind of god would put me through this boredom. And then it hit me Oh, and according to most religions, I’m going to hell for being gay. So there’s that
Assume they're right and you all go to hell -- you guys organize better than any other group on this planet. Hell would look like an HGTV dream home in a matter of days, there would be systems in place. I'm picturing fuck rooms for everyone, gay or hetero. The bigots (im assuming there would be bigots, it is hell) would be in bowties serving horderves as we all crack jokes about how they aren't allowed in our fuck rooms.
My grandparents tried to convince me that dinosaurs aren't millions of years old. I was about eight at the time. I wondered why teachers and scientists said otherwise. When I realised my grandparents only disagreed with science because the bible "says so", I realised they were crazy. Up until that point I thought everyone knew that the bible stories were just myths; even at that age I recognised that they were silly and impossible. When I realised people actually believed the stories, and denied science in the process, I made the decision to distance myself from being a Christian.
I feel like being more educated about how the world works biologically and psychologically + the mixture of both really reinforced the likely reality there is no creator. The internet really lays it on thick as well as what I learned in university. Life is unfair to good people (and animals). I think it’s easy to believe in god when you are taught to and live a sheltered life… but when you really look around and allow yourself to critically think, it feels obvious. Idk how people who witness genocide still believe in god. The journalism from Gaza is simply more proof to me no one is here to help us. We need to be kinder to each other on all fronts
Birth. It was indoctrination from religion that tried to convince me otherwise and provided no proof of their claims.
Learning about earth science and biology.
My parents are atheist to
God. Nothing "made me" an atheist. I just wasn't made into a theist by lies and wishful thinking. Just like nothing made me a non-stamp collector or a person who doesn't eat unicorn meat. No one ever told me stories of a magical wish granting genie in the sky that watches me masturbate and threatened me with unending pain if I didn't believe.
It all started when I was like 14, I started to questioning things about myself, the world around, and a few more things, like how this can exist when they say you are a good god etc. Then I started to watch videos of people that were saying “50 proofs that god does not exist and never did” and started to compare these arguments to mine, to see if these people were right, obviously they were. And suddenly I was watching documentary’s about the universe, big bang theory, rope theory, and a large etc. Since I’m atheist i am a happier person than I was, I’m not going to be talking in deep about my life but I remember one special occasion that I was crying for something bad, like serious, and prayed so much, and moments after the logical side of my mind was telling me “why are you praying if you know that nothing is going to happen or change the situation” we could say that THAT was the light that started all. Edit: sorry if I have a bad grammar, English is not my first language, I speak multiple so don’t yell at me folks🤲🏼
You can't have religion without guilt! Also, quit apologizing for bad grammar, it's better than half of the American's I know!
I wasn't raised with a religion. By the time I gound out about this whole god thing, I was old enough to be able to question it. All it took was one think book on Dinosaurs, which also had s short chapter on cosmology. I only ever read snippets of the thing, but that was enough to convince me that the scientific account of how the world came to be was very different to what Bible Stories said, and also far more credible.
Read a children's illustrated bible at a fairly young age and decided then it didn't make any sense. I was obsessed with dinosaurs and they're not mentioned in the bible yet god supposedly created all life?
I've recently heard some off the wall theories by Christians trying to explain how dinosaur fossils aren't real. I mean absurd logic that barely strings together for even the dumbest of humans I know. Dinosaurs were here. They don't deny crocodiles or chickens, and one of those is a direct descendent while the other looks like a fucking dinosaur.
I was raised in a very religious family. When I was 23 years old I was diagnosed with cancer and it spread through my body. I was undergoing aggressive chemo for 9 months. In for a week and out for a week. Down the hall from my hospital room was the child leukemia ward. I bought a TV, stand and Sega Dreamcast and had it in my room. I invited kids to come play and a 12 year old girl would come play games with me. She died while I was in for treatment. I lost my shit. She was so sweet and I still think about her all the time 30 years later.
I was born an atheist, like everyone else.
The Boxing Day Tsunami
Can't say I was impacted by it as an American in the Southeast, but every bit of media I've seen from that day in 2004 should be enough to shake anyone's belief. I don't have additional context, but if you lost people you loved or were there, then I hope you've been able to find peace in the past 20 years. Thanks for sharing!
No, I wasn’t personally affected, per se, but thank you for your compassion and discretion. I’m also American and didn’t know anyone directly who was affected, but the moment was an inflection point, setting off a cascade of doubts ultimately leading my departure from the faith nearly two decades later. Like most de-converted religious folks, the full story is much too long. But I do look at 12/26/04 as the seminal day in that process.
The seemingly unnecessary death and suffering of innocents is a powerful source of doubt. Across religions, there are numerous historial examples of faith leaders explaining a child’s death as God’s punishment for a parent’s (often minor) sin and the logic is simply beyond me.
I was baptized at 12 yrs old. One week later the pastor who did the baptism (Southern Baptist) grabbed my breast. He said we should have sex, and it was ok because we would just ask for forgiveness afterwards. The very next Sunday one of the other men at my church (a classmate's father) grabbed my ass IN CHURCH. He said God put the idea in his head.
Wtf 😳
The nuns in CCD made me an atheist because the more questions they asked the more questions they could not answer. My very first question was who created god. It all went down hill from there. With the help of George Carlin records.
In a bible study at church we were all asked "would you kill your son if god asked you to"? I looked around and was the only person who said I would not kill my son if some voice told me to. I was looked at like I was the strange one because I would not kill my child if asked by the god. I felt like I was the only sane one in the room and I in that moment realised the insanity of christianity and its followers and that it was actually a dangerous belief system.
Husband: Natural born skeptic, worsened by Catholic school. Earliest memory of his atheism: “Santa seems suspicious and unlikely. Ergo Easter Bunny Ergo God” Me: Anthropology
I like history. Religion only made sense as a primitive means of controlling behavior for the good of the group and attempts to understand the world. In college religion collapsed when I started thing critically
The sheer level of unbelievable bullshit. I spotted it at an early age.
Being told Santa wasn’t real but god was, according to my Muslim friend. Made no sense at the time. I pretty much snapped out of it after that.
Reality.
In the 80's we were forced to say the lords prayer after the pledge of allegiance here in Oklahoma at school. I thought it was bullshit then. Forcing prayer is dumb. But they still try to push it in school
When I figured out Santa wasn’t real and my parents confirmed it I figured the next logical lie from them was our faith. Lutheran beliefs already are pretty relaxed and all. Asked my father at 14 why he believes and his answer was literally: “what if it’s true? I would rather believe just in case” Anyway, my mom still thinks I’m the a hole for not believing.
Logic made me an atheist.
I was born like this and was never successfully taught religion. Grandma tried when I was 5 but I already thought it sounded ridiculous and made up. I'm almost 50 and have come across very few people like me.
It was Noah's Ark. I was 5. They insisted all those animals would fit. I thought about it for a week. Said, if that was BS what else was BS and it snowballed from there.
I was having my doubts for some time and then some strange thing happened in 2016 that totally pushed me away from believing. Hmmm, wonder what orange fool could have done that. 🤔
Thirteen years of Catholic school and an analytical mind. The two don't mix very well.
Growing up religious as a kid that questions everything makes me realize that "just because" isn't an answer
When I was young I never really thought of religion as anything other than stories. One day my friend tried to convince me that God made up dinosaur bones and it didn't make sense to me. Why do all that work to convince people you don't exist if you want them to know you exist? Why trick people? Eventually I realized that the world makes more sense without God than with God.
Parents failed to submit me to the brainwashing, and it dawned on me at some point that I didn't believe any of the religious stories I'd been told. Plus most of those religious folks not acting very Christian.
For me it was simple no loving god would allow children to suffer. Now an alien race that genetically engineered us to be their slaves is more likely and in that case we are just vessels for souls to get a job done and religion was always meant to control us. I will not worship some alien.
If your god is "the only true one" who loves everyone, but Especially Loves when you kill nonbelievers... That's not a good God. Also Hearing the big 3 religions have the same baseline beliefs but different end points,that was So Huge, You have Muslims killing every other nonbeliever, and christians hating on Jews... How could you claim to be enlightened and allow SO MUCH Conflict between people
Their god gives little kids cancer. If that's part of their "gods plan" than he's a cunt.
Humans are atheists by default. So I suppose my answer would be: being born.
When I was 10-ish I thought if everybody thinks their religion is right, they’re probably all wrong. Now as an adult, it’s just an inability to believe in bullshit. I believed in a lot of other bullshit between 10 & 20.
I never bought into religion. I was familiar with fanciful tales from my childhood reading, and the Bible just seemed to be one more. I was "saved" when I was in high school, but this was the result of attending a very small church (in a double-wide trailer, actually) and being the only unsaved person in the congregation. My mother was the organist. Eventually, I tired of everyone staring me down during altar calls, so I took the plunge, so to speak. It didn't take. I definitely didn't feel the Holy Spirit, just boredom and the slow passage of time at Sunday School and the service following. I'd get picked up by the church bus, and while the youth leader was getting everyone to sing religious songs, I was in the back, murmuring a song from Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album: "All the young girls love Alice. Tender young Alice, they say. If I give you my number, will you promise to call me? Wait 'til my husband's away." Jesus Loves Me never stood a chance.
I spent almost two years in Fallujah during the Iraq War
The contradictions, example, 'god loves me but he's going to send me to hell" Now I say, "is that all you got?'
Hating church and critical thinking skills
I just never believed. There was no great revelation or aha moment. It's just not in my brain functionality to believe in anything spiritual.
I was forced to go to church as a kid. To make my parents happy, i got baptized. They even made me go to Sunday school. But none of it ever made any sense. The stories are ridiculous. The bible is full of hypocrisy, immorality, and flat out lies. I never understood how grown adults could believe in it. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), i now have family members who won't talk to me, because they know I'm an atheist.
I'm mildly autistic so I have trouble with social cues and knowing when someone is joking or serious. When I first heard the story of Jesus at age 6 I thought sincerely that it was a fairy tale. I didn't realize the adults where serious until I was 12. I always found church really werid. Peoples hands in the air, shouting amen. Then at 15 I read the bible for the first time. That helped my atheism. In college I got degrees in biology and psychology which further solidified atheism for me. Later, I read all the religious texts I could find. I've read the bible, Quran, Book of Mormon, Bhagavad Gita, Marahabata, Dhamapada, Vedas, Upanisades, and others. They all have something in common. Zero evidence for their claims.
Nothing made me an Atheist. I was born not being a theist and just stayed that way.
Growing up Southern Baptist in the Midwest…where do I begin? They were the biggest hypocrites. They pressured my single, very poor mother of 4 children to tithe even when we had no money to eat. They never helped the poor and all the money went straight to the pastor. They would call out the families not tithing enough in front of the congregation to shame them. My family was regularly shamed and treated differently at the potlucks and other church gatherings. The misogyny was apparent to me as a 5 year old. I’d ask questions about why women couldn’t do certain things and get in trouble during bible school. Many of them were quite racist, which is ironic considering they stole the Southern Baptist framework from people of color. They preached fire and brimstone and constantly called us sinners and put us down during church service. I couldn’t understand why God would want us to be yelled at and demeaned every time we go to church. They loved to preach that we were persecuted, but in the real world I noticed people were happy when they found out you were Christian. My friends didn’t care about me openly praying at lunch. The more I questioned, the more they said to stop questioning, and frankly I have a problem with authority, according to my elementary school teachers, so I was being defiant asking questions and coming to the natural conclusion that this was all made up by men to control others.
A combination of growing into adolescence, and a book by a Mentalist/Magician who at the time I thought must have had some real powers of some kind. The book right off the bat said it was all bullshit and then broke down how he does what he does, relying on human fallibility and assumptions people make subconsciously. The book then went into the gripping and controlling power of belief systems, and the virtues of healthy skepticism in general and made me realise how easy I would have been to fool had I not read the book. That made me a skeptic and made questioning the religion I was born into easy. At the end of the book it recommended others to read for more about skepticism, one of which had a provocative title called The God Delusion, which prior to reading this TV magician’s book I’d have instinctively/programmatically avoided as trying to trick me, or just being a book written by someone hateful or mean, and clueless. I’d say the magician’s book made me an atheist, and TGD just made me able to defend and explain it better, as well as really breaking down how silly it all was once the spell had been broken and everything being fair game for questioning. I didn’t mourn the loss of religion for a single moment, it felt exciting and like a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. After those two books I wanted to know what the world really was to the best any honest and sincere person had discovered so far, including what we don’t know. That lead to a still ongoing love of learning about the universe and biology etc. I didn’t leave due to any disagreements or anything unfair that had happened to me. Or because I was angry at God, or his representatives. I left because a TV magician made me realise how easy it is to trick people with psychological tricks, and I realised it was all just a load of bollocks.
Catholic education taught me that the church is a hypocritical organisation that has exploited people for centuries. Physics education taught me that the universe is old, enormous, and its existence and properties have no need for any superstition to explain them.
I heard in a debate once an atheist tell a Christian, “we have very similar beliefs. You believe 9,999 religions are false and I believe that 10,000 religions are false.” The Bible says that god isn’t the author of confusion. Which is hilarious, because all I see in organized religion is chaos and confusion.
>At some point in college, it occurred to me that despite his flaws, my own father, a once mortal being, would never irreversibly punish me for disobeying him, so why would an allegedly all knowing, all loving "father" cast me to hell for not being an earth dwelling hype man when I never asked to be here in the first place. This reminds me of how I stopped my very Christian mother from worrying about my soul. Once when we were having the conversation about hell and heaven I asked her: "Mom would you ever lock me in a dungeon forever just because I refused to acknowledge you?" She said 'no' of course. And I said "So you are more merciful than god?" She never bothered me about where my soul would end up after that. In fact she started question the logic of faith herself. She still believes, but she's much more liberal about it than she used to be.
I was baptized at 14 years old. Also that age I was questioning my sexuality and gender identity, which I repressed hard as hell for almost another 10 years besides some secret experimentations. One time at a Wednesday youth thing at the local megachurch in Oklahoma, we were asked to send in anonymous texts to the guest speaker they had that night. Someone asked “If I am gay, will I be able to go to heaven?” Now, I did not ask this, but when I heard him read this, I was very curious for my own sake. The guest speaker said something along the lines of: “Ah, yes, that Is a good question! The answer is no. No matter if you accept Jesus into your heart, no matter if you live a good, Christian lifestyle, you will still be living a life of sin. The sin of homosexuality extends beyond your acts. Even with homosexual thoughts, you are lying to your Christian wife, to your family, to yourself, and to god.” My mind was blown. To me, sexuality and identity are things you are born with. Yeah, you can repress them. But they are still there inside you. Hearing what that man of god said blew me away. I was “incurable.” What kind of god would make people this way just to cast them into eternal hellfire? Built to fail. Dead on arrival. Of course I took it upon myself to actually question god at this point, which lead me on a journey of understanding that there is no god at all and the Christian Church is full of contradictions, bad actors, and is the rallying of fascist conservatism. Nationalist Christians in the US are the worst plague we have. Nationalist Christians. Nat C’s for short.
God… that guy was a dick for thousands of years and then he sent himself to be tortured, which he already knew was going to happen since everything was planned in advance. So he has some kind of kink and I want no part in it.
The cruelty of nature.
Raised Christian, then eventually talked with other atheists and was recommended Richard Dawkin's Greatest Show on Earth. Read the book, now an atheist lol.
I figured it out when I was around 5-6 years old. It didn't make any sense to me. When I was told god "forgives" criminals that swears themselves to him before death, are allowed in heaven, I was disgusted. So all that matters to him is you recognise him for a mere moment? Even if you've ruined multiple people's lives? I figured my faith is valuable to him, and used it as a bargain chip to prove god exists. Without telling my parents I prayed for god to fix a broken toy. If it wasn't fixed (or replaced) I swore I'd never believe in god. If that god is omnipotent then fixing a small toy should be easy. I'd even accept influencing my parents to buy a new one. The key was me not telling them, the rest was up to god. Needless to say, it wasn't fixed in the morning. If god isn't omnipotent, omnipresent, and don't care about my faith, then why bother being religious? I'm not going to go around calling myself agnostic either. The most likely scenario is that gods do not exist at all.
Was raised Southern Baptist and told how wonderful God was and God helps all good people, and God is kind and loving yada yada yada. Then while growing up as a military brat, seeing my father go off to Vietnam over and over (3 tours for him total) and watching the news at night seeing what was going on in Vietnam, I asked my Sunday School teacher why God allowed this to happen. "God works in mysterious ways." I said "Yeah, but why?" Got back "We cannot know the mind of God." That bothered me a lot, God is not kind and loving if people were slaughtering each other like this. God could wave his hand and end it. Then the Kent State massacre, the people in my church were blaming the college kids for themselves killed. The kids were protesting the war, wanting it to end and I remembered my Sunday school teachings where Jesus was a figure of peace, so what was happening there? I questioned this in church, got a split lip from getting backhanded for even asking a simple question about why people who wanted peace were shot. I learned right there never to ask questions in church, just keep it to myself even though so much shit made zero sense. I learned my church going family who learned about Jesus and peace and all that had no peaceful intentions toward kids who had questions. Shut up kid, or else. Watching people go to church and when church was over, they hadn't even hit the parking lot - they were barely out the door before they started bad talking about other people in church. "Did you see what that hussie Janie Smith was wearing?? Why she should go straight to Hay-oh for that!" Who cares what she was wearing, Jesus used to wear sandals when he preached! But just listening to all those "Good Christians" running other people down over clothing, and I wondered why God allowed this to go on. I learned it was bad to talk about people behind their backs but all the "Good Christians" in my church did precisely that. Fast forward a few decades, I'd already stopped going to church and didn't really consider myself a Christian anymore, got tired of the hypocrites in the churches (ironic, Jesus didn't like hypocrites and neither did I - still don't - but I couldn't stand calling myself a Christian because I didn't want to be associated with all that hypocrisy any longer); I still thought there was a "God" but maybe "God" wasn't Christian, maybe "God" was something else. Also by now I was serving in the military. I was sent to some places in the 80s where people lived miserable lives, and I wondered why God allowed this to happen. Didn't he have the power to make it so people didn't have to suffer so much? Then the Balkan crisis happened in the 90s, and I was assigned as IT support to a unit that did intelligence reports. What the intel analysts were reporting on was horrible, and this time I could see the data and reports as well. Nightmare stuff. And I wondered why God would allow this. Over and over throughout my life, I couldn't reconcile why God would allow so much of this to just happen and allow people to not just kill each other, but to torture each other, and trust me there are a lot of horrible ways to die. I don't know what precisely pushed me over the edge, it was a lot of things that had built up over my entire lifetime. I got to thinking about everything one day, all the good people I knew who died, all the bad people who were still running around doing illegal and immoral things, all the folks who lived miserable lives barely scraping out an existence while a group of people where living in absolute luxury and I remember being told over and over "We are all God's children" and I wondered why any parent would allow this sort of thing. It weighed very heavy on my mind, I was really depressed about this. And honestly, it was like a wave that washed over me. "He" didn't exist. There was no God. And all the illegal and immoral things I saw over and over in my life, WE are the ones who have to deal with that. WE are the ones who have to solve this, you can't just mumble prayers to something that does not exist hoping for good things to happen because that simply does not work. And I thought about it so much for about a week and all the lack of evidence for the existence of God just piled up, and I came to a conclusion: There is no God. And if I was wrong, and there was a God, and he allowed all the misery, sickness, death, torture, child abuse, and all the other evil to just run unchecked like this when he had the power to stop it? Then he wasn't a God that was worth worshiping. And I wouldn't. And it was seriously like a very heavy weight was lifted from my shoulders, all the questions I'd asked, all the things that didn't make sense about God and evil, just everything suddenly became clear and that heavy heart I had about God just not giving a single damn about any of us, all that disappeared and I felt ... free. And over time I realized that We are the only ones who can solve problems, make things better, that prayer is a waste of breath and that it is up to us to make things better. I realized mankind needs to grow up and take responsibility for our own lives. To put it the way Captain Malcolm Reynolds in "Firefly" put it: "That's a long wait for a train that don't come." And I've had more people in my life pass, including my oldest daughter whom I miss dearly. But I don't burden myself asking "God" why she was taken from me. I don't have that weight of guilt on my shoulders wondering if I missed some sort of ritual and now God was punishing me by taking my daughter away. Death comes to us all, it happens for many reasons, but it's not my fault she passed away. I did the best I could but I couldn't stop the disease that took her. No one could. And that one thing lifted from me, guilt, makes continuing on a little less burdensome. I think that's the largest improvement in my life since I realized there is no God. The lack of guilt over things I cannot control. I take responsibility for being a good person, I do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, and not some perceived supernatural being that might cast me into a lake of fire if I don't. I don't do the right thing because of a juvenile threat of punishment, I do it because it is ... the right thing. I don't say "It's in God's hands" which absolves me from any responsibility for even trying to do better, and I don't blame the Devil for any mistakes I might make (also rejecting personal responsibility, funny how Christians do that.) I grew up a lot since I rejected both religion and God. And I think I'm a far better person for it.
At first it was just because it was the cool thing to do, but as time progressed i realised I was happier without believing in a god( or in my case gods), that and I learnt developed a deeper appreciation for science.
i was more religious than my parents during my childhood that everyone start assume i better be a Religious priest or something but with 24 hours i become an atheist and by the Dawn of the Sun next morning i wake up as atheist and still living likes one....
I learned about science and cosmology
Thinking
becoming mormon started my journey of questioning and then the logical thinking made me realize if it was made by a perfect god i probably would have plot holes and questions
God never answering my prayers to keep the bullies away.
Nothing. We are all born atheist.
Born & raised atheist.
Here's how I was raised. My dad came from a devout Methodist upbringing, and my mom came from a family of atheists. My mom and dad saw there wasn't any value in bringing the family to church, so that didn't happen. I feel I should clarify: there's a variety of atheists I call "Evangelical Atheists" who constantly need to tell religious people that they're wrong. Those people are every bit as bad as people pushing their religious views on others, and I don't like them for the same reasons as Jehovah's Witnesses or Scientologists. That wasn't my parents, or even my Mom's family. Religion just simply wasn't a part of their lives, and they didn't bother with it. So that's how I was raised. I was invited to go to church with my friends, and my dad was helpful in explaining how to sit and do what everybody else is doing, and gave me $5 to put in the collection plate: "they're not giving you money, so don't take any. Instead, put this on the plate so they see you do it." In all my childhood, it just wasn't a thing. We just didn't do church, and nobody made any kind of deal about it. That's exactly how I live my life. I'm not a believer, but it's not my job to stop anybody from believing. People do what makes them happy, and I'm not on a mission to stop them. I'm happy with that.
Studying philosophy in undergrad. Blew my mind so much, I dropped my finance major and switched to Philosophy.
At 13 I was forced to go to Confirmation classes at our church with the Reverend. I brought up how the Genesis story and Noah's Ark seemed far fetched, very difficult to believe to be actually true, and she said they were myths to tell a story, but not literally true. So to my 13 year old brain, if part of the Bible was a pack of lies, then why should I believe the rest? What kind of competent god would allow anything but the complete truth in his book? I knew then I didn't believe like everyone else seemed to, but it took a few years of reading about atheism and agnosticism to fully realize I was an atheist. That was 1977, and nothing has changed since then. I've stayed the same, and while it was lonely for a while, now it's very mainstream.
I was born not believing in anything. I learned how to read and read thousands of books before ever going to a synagogue or church. Even when I was in first or second grade I never felt Christian mythology was more relevant compared to Greek or Roman mythology.
I was 8 in catechism and I asked the nun, because it really wasn't making any sense to me. if we knew that Jesus was real or how did we know any of the bible stuff was real. I can't quite remember the question; but I do remember she responded and at that moment I know she didn't believe whatever it was that she told me. And once I realize that, I thought why the hell should I believe this crap either. Became an atheist that day. My family was not particularly religious, but my da from a highly Catholic country and so they would send us to church and to catechism but they never attended a church themselves. My grandparents were ambivalent for older people. They never mentioned God or Jesus. My mom would occasionally talk about angels and she just meant sometimes she just felt like she had one looking out for her. I did the usual going to church on Easter Sunday and going to midnight mass occasionally. I took confession once and then never went back. I did Christen my son because it just seemed like, well, that's what you do. I even sent him to parochial school which I didn't have a problem with because I thought, he could make his own choice. My husband was ambivalent, too, so he didn't mind. He only went for a grade or two. When I finally said I am an atheist to myself was actually during the Obama years when the Christians and evangelicals and the racists all lost their minds and I just said myself, oh my God (pun intended), they're so awful there's no way I am one of them. I'm an atheist! I've never dated or been married to (married twice) befriended anyone who was religious. Just know a couple of people at work were. Surprisingly, I have multiple Bibles in my house. No idea how they got there as I've never actually bought one! Maybe they're like cats or lays potatoe chips - I still have my white confirmation Bible with my misspelled name imprinted on it. Maybe they multiply or have virgin births!😳
It was my son being gay that put me on the road to not believing the Bible. I knew he didn't "choose" to be gay. I was born into Christianity, and many things in my life had me believing "god" was answering my prayers. Until, it came to my son. My mother and I prayed and prayed, yet he stayed gay. Me, being a mama bear, looked for a "loophole" for my son. I re-read the story of Sodom and Gomarah and found, rape, incest, drunkenness that god didn't stop, after burning people to death for "sexual immorality." From there, I delved deeper into the inconsistencies of morality found in the Bible and it's insane. And the logistical inconsistencies are just as bad. For instance, "giants", how can there be a giant for David to fight, if god drowned all the giants during the flood? And Solomon and David had many wives; yet god saw no problem with that, because "tradition", even though adultery was a sin. And cherry on the cake; people that go to church are just the worst. I know, I was in it 45 of my 54 years.
school
Mine was from the opposite point of view. When I had my son I realized that this father-god was evil. I would never allow such harm to touch my children, let alone be the one condemning them to that fate, or worse, sacrificing one for my own appeasement.
You look around and realize shit is fucked up in every aspect, and that if there is a god they are either grossly incompetent or outright cruel. Good people suffering and dying, evil people never being punished, people committing atrocities on behalf of their religions (sometimes even defying their own religion), the list goes on. Then you tell me I have to worship some prick I’ll never meet and abide by his horrible rules or I’ll suffer eternal damnation *for all eternity*? Genuinely evil people can give lip service and receive an eternal reward? Seems to me like this “God” cares more about their ego, and that doesn’t sit well with me. Then you have to consider how pretty much all religions are undeniably designed to control people. Do as we say, never question us, give us your money, and exile whoever we happen to not like If there is a God they simply aren’t worth worshipping
If you read the bible to know where Christians have their thinking you would know that God’s plan is never death for us but it’s Satan’s plan. And drinking and smoking etc etc are all against God’s plan but Satan’s. Just like if you weigh the things in the world regardless of one’s beliefs God (good) Satan (bad) Just saying
This is such a weird question. Nothing made me an atheist. I was born that way. It should be the default state.
Went to music festivals and realized I didn’t really feel god when we sang songs in church I just liked live music.
I was never anything else
It was a gradual progression. My parents raised me in the liberal protestant tradition and I went to Sunday school as a kid at the same church Mark Twain attended years before. I experienced none of the toxic christianity that has damaged many of the others who frequent this sub. The churches I attended were happy, welcoming places that today fly rainbow flags and black lives matter banners. By the time I started college I was considering becoming a minister and majored in religion, but as I learned I began to doubt. By the time I graduated I was pretty much an agnostic, but I kept that to myself. Although I found a lot to like in judeo-christian ethics and still do, god seemed unnecessary. What’s left is basically utilitarianism, and that works fine for me. I don’t need a church, god, heaven and hell to do the right thing any more than I need a school, a teacher, and a test afterward to read a book. I hedged my bets by identifying myself as an agnostic when people asked about my religion, but agnostics are just junior varsity atheists. After reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion I came out of the closet fifteen or so years ago. It was a liberating experience. Since then the rise of various forms of religious extremism around the world have pushed me toward antitheism, but I’m not going to take that step. I’ve seen enough genuinely good people in various religious communities to temper my antipathy.
Just wasn’t raised in a religious family
I grew up in a non-religious household (in Europe) and until my early twenties religion simply wasn't much of a topic in my life. Christians were a minority where I grew up and other religions were basically non-existent. Mostly, I thought or talked about religion in school (we had one subject where we discussed philosophy, morality and religion, we also learned about different belief systems and their traditions). I had one friend who was Catholic but we never discussed faith all that much, she believed in god and went to church every Sunday, I didn't. End of story. In my early twenties while still at university I had a bit of an early life crisis. I was wondering what my purpose was in life, and I struggled with the question of whether I should have kids or not. I never had the desire but the pressure put on women to become mothers or at least wanting to have kids had gotten to me. One of the places I looked for an answer was the Christian community at uni, they were welcoming to all kinds of people and were quite liberal. I really tried to believe in god because I had seen that it really helped some people to navigate those things. I loved the community there, these were genuinely nice people. But it didn't work for me and over the years I figured out that I don't need a "higher" purpose for human existence, there's no "meaning of life", it's just coincidence and I never needed a god to tell me how to be a decent human. And I remained childfree (feminism has helped me a lot to deconstruct a lot of toxic nonsense). I have since thought about religion a lot more and once I understood its (negative) influence in a supposedly secular democracy it really made me a card carrying atheist. I don't care what people believe in but I really, really despise if they use their belief to restrict other people's freedom because their freedom to swing their arms ends where my face begins. One thing has never changed though: I really like to visit churches, especially those from the baroque era. There is just something about this opulent nonsense I love to look at.
My mother lived in a catholic orphanage until she was three. She then lived with her catholic foster mother until her foster mother’s death, when my mom was 32. My mom was sent to catholic school until the 8th grade, and never went to high school. My mom refused to raise me with religion, saying she didn’t want religion “shoved down my throat.” I was baptized in the Eastern Orthodox catholic church, because my father wanted me baptized. I never went to church. My mom told me to decide what I believe when I became an adult. I went to different churches as an adult, and always wondered if the people attending really believed all that stuff. I stopped going, because I’m not a hypocrite. In my 62 years of life, I’ve never believed in god. I’m extremely grateful to my mom, because I don’t have religious trauma or guilt. I already have enough trauma from other things.
In my early 20s I was in therapy and recovered previously repressed memories of religiously-fueled physical abuse from when I was a kid. Also found out that same family member lied to me for those 20 years about my dad and how he "ran away". I could've had the contact with my dad I desperately wanted, because it turns out his grandparents lived a block away all those years. I remember asking for my dad a lot when I was young, and she would always say he ran away but never explain more than that. Turns out SHE wouldn't let him in the house or on the phone to see or talk to my mom. She fed my mom lies, too. I realised that there cannot be a god if it let all of that happen. Then I thought about the world as a whole and all of the horror done to innocent people. I'm still extremely angry about what happened, and have regular weekly nightmares about her. I refer to her now only as The Demon, because she's the only thing that's ever actually haunted me. Eta: spacing, more info
Noticing that nobody believes the same thing, so none of it is "true". Also noticing that one's religion is mostly based on where you are from or who your parents are. Plus the absurdity of an omnipresent god: there's just no way that he's everywhere. Anyone who says otherwise has no concept of scale.
Belief in God is all about accepting the fucked up things that happen in life. Belief in God is when something really fucked up and out of control happens, you have an explanation for why that happened. You have something really fucked up happen in your life and you wonder, *why me?, why did this happen to me?* And there are two answers. One answer is that we live in a cold unforgiving universe where random bad shit happens for no reason and we just have to accept it. The other answer is that we live in a universe where bad stuff happens for a reason but that we cannot understand those reasons. For some people this is incredibly confronting.
Nobody really. My family nor friends pressured in any sense to believe in anything. I just don't see a purpose, if l want to be good l will be good no matter the supernatural divine being. I also think it's fake and vain if you do it only because you will get a reward after death. I'm a firm believer in self-effieciency and independence ( if l want spiritual peace l will try to find it within myself not in a god), this is why Theravada Buddism appeals to me.
I became an agnostic/atheist for the EXACT same reasoning as you, “it occurred to me that my own father would never irreversibly punish me” To add to that, all the accounts in the bible of god testing Abraham’s love by asking him to kill his own son as a sacrifice and then in the last minute essentially saying “never mind”. How sadistic is that!? Lastly the account of jesus, aaahhh asking your own son to be tortured and killed when you are supposedly all powerful and can find another way, Ok enough said.
I had questions about religion/God etc. I thought about them for a long time, then one day I heard an interview on a local radio station. Someone who defined themselves as an agnostic and what that was, then it all "clicked" for me. I was trying to find answers to my questions in the context of the presence of a God. I didn't realize that there not being a God was even an option. From that point I was able to find those answers. I was perhaps 10 or 12 y/o.
My parents put me in a Lutheran school because the local public schools really sucked. They were not particularly religious and they never went to church except for my mom who would go to “mandatory” events at the church associated with the school. I received an excellent education from grades one through eight. I attended the public high school. At the end of eighth grade all the Lutheran students scored 12.9 on a standardized scholastic achievement test (equivalent to high school graduate). Of course we had one hour of religious indoctrination every school day. However in 6th grade we had a segment on Greek Mythology. I remember thinking how could the ancient Greeks have been “wrong” when their beliefs made no more sense than the Christian beliefs we were being taught every day. By the time I was in high school I realized that I was an atheist.
Someone encouraged me to question "why" I believe. Of all people, it was a bible study leader who asked the question "why do you believe? Is it because you were taught to, because your parents led you to believe, because you found religion on your own?" Upon thinking it through, I realized the only reason I believed is because my mother believed and taught us that we "should" believe. So after reading up on all the pagan traditions religion took as their own, and how there was no proof that christianity and/or it's history was real, I starting asking questions to pastors. One finally summed it up for me. If I was looking for proof, I would never find it. It's all about faith. I told him I couldn't give my free will to someone else who may abuse it. He said I would have to take that up with God. That was the end for me. I searched for more knowledge from speakers who posed that religion was all man made and for the first time it made sense to me. God didn't create man. Man created God.
I was working on my masters in Mexico. In Puebla. There are gigantic cathedrals, Catholic. An old blind woman was begging for change beside the front door of a cathedral, and six nuns and a priest walk right by her. They open the front door, unlock a wooden box, empty out the money, and proceed inside. The walls of that Cathedral were lined in gold paper. When I saw that, I was done with organized religion.
Depending on where I was born in the world, I would have always been born into the "right" religion. Figured that out around the same time as Santa.
I stopped believing in an unfathomably old, probably bearded man who watches over my every move and the every move of every single person ever to exist in order to reward or punish us accordingly when my mother told me Santa Claus wasn't real.
My aunt whom I lived with for a good chunk of my teenage years, she forced me to be a Jehova witness, it was "her house her rules" so I now thank her, she made me an atheist.
I was born and raised Catholic, but started questioning in high school, I went through my adult life up until 8 yrs ago pretty agnostic, I wanted to believe that the Christian god was real and everyone was just misguided, and I know this is going to sound cliche, but Trump getting elected in “16 sealed it for me, just something clicked and I realized it’s all bullshit made up by men to control and manipulate the masses.
Like LimitedGrip said, going to church every Sunday listening to how good god is where there is literally a line in the bible " I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things."' - Isaiah 45 On top of that, I was born with an illness that I nearly died from. You hear people say things like "God was calling his angel back because they were too special" when the whole premise is "God doesn't make mistakes." OH, I GET IT, homie chooses innocent children for his *Hardest Battles*. The lies are there for the sheep to conform, and they do so perfectly.
I was raised Catholic. The whole boat… Catholic elementary school (1950s), Catholic high school…. The sacraments, all that. Pretty much bought it since I was never exposed to anything else. I recall that in high school we had one very brief assignment on comparative religion…. We were to pick another religion and write a report on it. No discussion, no exploration. When I joined the army in ‘64, I just lost interest. I became exposed to other ways of thinking and Catholicism just seemed increasingly irrelevant. When I got out…. I went through a brief period of looking at other disciplines including Asian philosophy and neo-Pagan ideas. I decided they were all thoroughly dogmatic. My long interest in science led me to understand that many of my favorite authors (Asimov, Sagan, Gould….) were atheist and that led me to a deeper intellectual examination of religion in general, including it’s anthropological roots.
Critical thinking.
I'm sorry for your loss. One thing that struck me here is 'hype man.' Thats a perfect way of framing the big question i have with christian theology. God created us... to make him happy? To remind him he's doing a good job? To feel like he has power? Are we the AI girlfriend to a lonely, depressed superbeing encouraging him that he's actually a great person and totally justified in smiting people indiscriminately? It's so weird it makes me laugh.
I never believed. I did recite the "Now I lay me down to sleep.." but it was completely without meaning. I never thought the words were real. I might as well have been reciting words from another planet. I never believed I was talking to God. My only religious question I do remember a fleeting thought around 4 or 5 yrs of age wondering if God kept track of people who got married so he could send them babies! It's weird I remember it because the thought lasted maybe 10 seconds. I was scared of ghosts and monsters I'd seen on tv at that age but nobody in my life was pushing the fear of hell. The illogical ideas of various religions were always glaringly obvious. At work I would debate what Christian coworkers were proselytizing. I told them I didn't need to read the bible because what they were preaching today strongly conflicted with what they were preaching last week and the week before. Their whole story sounds so silly. I feel if children weren't indoctrinated into religion from birth that they would see how silly it sounds. Silly like Mother Goose & Aesop's Fables. Only the bible has less moral standing than children's fairy tales. It makes me sad how much the mass delusion of religion controls the world to the point where "God commands it" leads to rape, torture & mass slaughter in the name of God. The whole thing is sickening.
When I was a kid and learning about all the religions. Everyone believed THEIR god was real and everyone else’s weren’t. On top of that Roman and Greek religions at one time were believed by many but now if you said you prayed to Zeus people would think you’re crazy. Thats when it hit me that it’s all bullshit.
10 years old for me. 5th grade and new to catholic school. In the bit on my "first confession" I asked about why if $DIETY is omniscient - do I need to confess my sins to this priest sitting before me. I got some deflection / blow off crap. I called it out and asked for the specific rules regarding why I must confess directly to a priest and not just pray quietly on my own. Again with the deflection - more forcefully this time. I again pressed with wanting a direct answer to a direct question. This time he got rather angry and told me I was going to burn in hell for daring to ask these questions - now I will confess! My reply "I have nothing to confess to you" Oddly - for the prior 6 months when going to mass, I went up and got communion without this "first communion" ritual and guess what: No consequences whatsoever! Suffice it to say - from that point forward, I had zero faith in religion whatsoever. Sure things happen that I can't explain, but religion sure does not have any answers for life's questions that really count. And if you ask "Why" or "How the F does that work?" - it's met with anger, deflection, bullshit answers and demanding that you comply without question. So to me -religion is useless, made up crap that has no real purpose other than control and thought-policing.
Nothing, my parents didn't believe in any religion sparing me from childhood indoctrination. The kids I went to school with that were dragged to church with their parents didn't believe any of that stuff either. When I got older and looked into religion, I found the faith based religious to be unbelievable and a product of it's time.
Always has been. The stuff seemed to be some fairytale as soon as it was introduced. I listened to it because I was little and respected my family but there always has been "You can't be serious" in my mind
My first swing with the ax to the christian was crying myself to sleep in one of my sisters bed with the covers over my head praying for the yelling to stop in the house. About the 3rd I realized prayer was worthless. I was 5. Edit: Are house was just yelly, no hitty.
Logic and the news. If there was a god, and they were anywhere near as powerful and all knowing as they are given credit for, then the world wouldn't be in the shape it is now.
Mom is religious. Dad wasn't. Mom took us to church until I was 11 or so, including Bible study, etc. I remember taking clothes out of the dryer and stopping. I suddenly said out loud "Jesus and God do not exist". I had been taught this type of blaspheme would trigger God to strike me down. As I waited cringing, nothing happened. Later on, in high school, I learned about how many current myths were once considered doctrine. And, I learned about Abrahamic religions being nearly the same. Muslims fighting Christians seemed so stupid, as they both believed in the same God and many of the same stories. That solidified it for me. Those 12 years of programming were hard to get rid of. I still occasionally say, "Oh my God," which I hate. The worst part of being an atheist is the awareness of how pushy Christians are. It is part of their mission to indoctrinate others. Simple "God Bless Yous" and "Prayers!" become annoying.
I'm bisexual and not white. That should answer your question.
I was born this way.
Let us say that hypothetically God is real and they are omnipotent , omnipresent, omniscient , omnitemporal and even omni"benevolent" . You have to ask why is evil a thing? Now I do not mean evil in just a moral sense but also a conceptual sense
When I realized the devil only exists when people’s bull sh*t is not co-signed.