What’s kept me from believing? That’s a nonsensical question. Nothing makes me believe, so I don’t believe. Simple as that.
I pretty much agree that the question is phrased badly. One might as well ask “what keeps you from believing in ewoks?”
Why do you find this depressing? The freedom to think for one’s self, no fear of hell, and knowing the difference between reality and fiction are all really good things. How could it be anything but uplifting?
From an adult perspective (and I’ve been stuck with one of those for quite a few years), what Elvis L1ves has said applies to me as well. But I think I’ve had serious doubts from the beginning, which for me was one day when I was five, and my mother decided it was time to tell me about God. My initial reaction (which I didn’t say out loud, as she had quite a temper) was, “That’s nice Mom, but I’m busy playing.”
I had a brief spurt of religiosity a few years later. This was based partly on my liking our church, and partly on the “billion flies can’t be wrong” fallacy. Real belief never really happened, though, even though I was trying like hell to will myself to believe. By the time I was 14, I was done with that game.
Later on, the problems that Elvis mentioned became part of my thinking, but that was after the fact.
I don’t see anything sad about it, since it’s allowed me to pursue my own path. One gets used to there not being any absolute answers, and after a while even becomes comforting.
DtC - your initial post hits just about all the relevant aspects as concisely and objectively as I could imagine.
Well phrased, sir!
Oh, I didn’t mean that being an atheist was bad (see my entry above), I simply meant that there’s a lot of “realising there was no meaning the universe” “six pounds of grey meat” stuff. I’m sure that being nonreligious is a valid, even positive state (hell, I am myself), but it may not be quite so, uh, life-affirming as the threads in the “what made you believe” thread (“And then…I came towards the LIGHT!”). Sorry if my comment sounded glib. :o
Athiest here. Was brought up in a non-religious household. Went to Sunday School as a kid, but on reflection that was probably only so mum and dad could have a nice quiet Sunday morning, or a rowdy bonk.
I spent a lot of my childhood wondering if I believed in God and all that, probably due to having two neighbourhood friends who were very religious.
I decided as a teenager that the whole ‘faith’ concept was more of a construct for the churches to dictate how people should live their lives, and I felt that my own internal moral system was quite capable of helping me decide what was right and what was wrong.
I find athiesm very empowering. Everything I do in life is my will, not God’s will.
If I have a problem, I look to myself to solve it rather than asking someone else to solve it for me if they feel I’m worthy enough.
Athiesm allows me to take personal responsibility for both my failures and my successes. If I fail/suceed at something, it is because I failed/suceeded at it, not because God decided I should fail.
I look to better myself in order to reach my personal potential, not to please an entity that will give me a nice afterlife. Everything I do is for the here and now, not the hereafter.
Yeah - I’m a lot like may of the other posters. I was all Catholic-like until I reached about 12, when I thought “wow, what a bunch of hooey” and that was the end of that. I also am a critical thinker and tend to tear apart arguments to find the underlying logic and facts. Religion has neither of those.
That being said - it would be really cool to be a pagan and have lots of different gods to please depending on the time of year or type of activities going on. I don’t really believe in them, but maybe if you did all that stuff, you would eventually start believing. It just seem like you would have a “richer” more mysterious reality to inhabit. I mean really, I guess you could make the decision to believe anything to make life more interesting or safe or reassuring - whatever floats your boat.
I think sometimes we oversell that angle to make a point. It’s very freeing, in my opinion, to find that life doesn’t have a meaning imposed from someone or something not experiencing it, and that if you want it to have a purpose, it’s up to you to make it and live with it. I think it endows life with greater importance.
I don’t understand this. How could you possibly decide to believe something?
Personally, I believe people are genetically hard-wired to have a certain amount of faith. Those with a lot of it will find something to believe in and those that don’t, won’t necessarily. 'Course, I don’t really have any scientific evidence to back that up, so maybe I’m wrong. Just my pet hypothesis.
As you may have figured, I think I’m on the low side of that. I’ve never really believed in anything. I remeber having difficulty accepting Santa Claus.
Me too. Never had religion imposed on me in any way. I’ve never felt any desire to believe in anything as obviously-fictitious as Father Christmas, the tooth fairy, or God.
It’s probably easier to acquire and retain this point of view in a society where religion is a very private matter, and one’s lack of any religious affiliation or belief is rarely an issue, and even not publicly-known at all.
And it’s not that I don’t care. I probably think about religion more than most people (religious and secular)
Exactly. It’s not a case of “Wow, we have nothing to live for…bummer”, more like “Wow, we have nothing to live for… we have the power to do what we want with our lives”.
Right, because no intelligent person has ever believed in God. Sir Isaac Newton, what a dope! :rolleyes:
He believed in alchemy, too. This doesn’t mean you’re not a blithering idiot if you do too.
Brilliant comeback.
Wow, I’m glad to have gotten so many responses! 
The background to the OP: I grew up non-religious. My parents have never expressed any interest in religion, other than a sort of vague acknowledgement that the family background was Buddhist. We had a completely secular Christmas and it was a while before I learned that Easter was anything other than fluffy bunnies and Paas egg-coloring kits.
Although I flirted briefly with neo-Paganism while in college and medical school (okay, there were some specific neo-Pagans I was flirting with 
), I don’t think there was ever a time when I seriously believed in some sort of divine anything. There was a time, for a few desperately bleak years, when I would have liked to believe, but the best I could muster up was something like, “If anyone’s listening, I could use a little help.” Needless to say, if help ever came, it wasn’t in any form distinguishable from my own effort.
I eventually came to the conclusion that overall, religion was neither helpful nor harmful to my life, but simply irrelevant. As far as I could tell, I would be living my life the same way whether or not there was a God(s). Or, as ElvisL1ves put so well:
Oh, and for Priceguy and Diogenes, the question (“What’s kept you from truly Believing?”) was a poor attempt to make a parallel construction with the titles of the other two threads that inspired this one.
That, and because so many proselytizers have said to me, “You have to believe in something!”
One day when I was very young I realised that people adults included REALLY believed that there was a god. That those stories about Heaven and Hell, walking on water, coming back from the dead, saving our souls, never mind all the mad OT stuff was all meant to be believed and revered.
I was brought to mass every Sunday by my Grandmother till I was 15. I went to a Christian Brothers school and attended with everyone else religious classes and retreats that were all part of the school experience over here.
I never believed. It just sounded very silly to me. It didn’t represent the world I saw around me and the people who claimed a fate were often very unchristian.
As I grew and gain more world experience and knowledge my feelings on religion just became stronger. I could see why people from the past with no other way of understanding could place their fate in a myriad of Gods. I could see how that idea could morph over time and cultures to become the religions we have today. I also could see why belief in God/s and the structures surrounding it could be very beneficial to a society as a whole and why the State would have a interest in nurturing that belief. I just didn’t see how any of it could be true though.
A friend of mine reckons some people are just ‘wired’ in a way so that they find it easier to believe or not believe in things of that nature. Now he just pulled that out of his arse but it makes sense to me. It kinda answers the whole why do clever people believe in god type questions that some atheists have.
Logic and an ear for B U L L S H I T ! !
e.g. being told hurricanes are named for girls because girl names are easier to remember :dubious: …oil from cottonseed is called salad oil 
…all adults deserve respect from children ;j …the trinity…free will :o …why there is evil in the world if God is omnipotent… :rolleyes: