I was raised as a fundy Utah Mormon, but with the exception of a few stray spasms of belief, I didn’t really believe in the whole God-is-in-the-sky-watching-over-use stuff (much less the more bizarre Mo-Mo stuff).
As an adult I did a bit of seeking, testing to see if there was some brand of “spirituality” I could glom on to: Quakers, Unitarians, Episco, various “gay friendly” churches . . . nada.
Plus organized religion is really, really, really fucking BORING!
A few years ago I made a transition to staunch atheism and it has provided more comfort than any other religio-spiritual system I have tried on. For me, this means it would be swell if there were life after death, but a far better bet and way to live is to make as much meaning of this life as possible through loving, living, pursuing knowledge and curiosity, and being of service to others.
I was a member of the UMC and I guess faithful most of my younger years. I had questions with no answers even back then but I accepted Creationism and all that because I didn’t know any different. As I got older and found myself more interested in history and other cultures I recognized there were many gods other than my own. Everything really changed for me though when the internet started growing and all these forums and websites popped up. All those questions I had were answered but they told me more than anything that my god wasn’t even common, much less the “one true god”. I explored other religions and their gods looking for something to believe in when the answers I found were unsatisfying.
What’s a positive atheist, or a negative for that matter? Do you mean it in the sense that there are people without faith who really WANT to believe, but cannot and therefore are bitter, and you’re not one of those? I think these bitter types are very rare, I rarely encountered them.
Love this periodic non-witnessing we do every so often around here.
I remember being in RC catechism class in grade school - probably somewhere between 4th-6th grade - and the teacher was going on about heaven and how only baptized RCs got in. Struck me as ridiculous, to think that billions of Indians and Chinese would be sent to hell, no matter how wonderfully they lived their lives. I can still remember that lay teacher’s name - apparently my nonbelief was somewhat of an epiphany!
I remember the whole meat on Fridays, Lent, Confession, and transubstantiation things striking me as ridiculous - and then the church went and changed their rules! Had to keep attending church while living at home. Couple of philosophy classes in college were sufficient to persuade me that the supernatural was not needed to explain morality, existence, or anything else. After school, I read a lot about comparative religions. Didn’t find anything in the supernatural aspects of those beliefs that impressed me as desirable or necessary. And as time passed, I encountered more and more nasty and unpleasant folk, holding themselves out as good Christians.
Attended UU churches, primarily to provide the kids RE. While we did our best to not indoctrinate them into our nonbelief, we succeeded in raising 3 heathens out of 3! Go team!
Forced to go to Sunday school/church for years, up until my confirmation. By that time, I was just reciting the lines, like I was in a play. I think the real wake up for me came when we were discussing one of the Biblical stories, and I likened it to a fable, but everyone else treated it as true history. From then on, I realized that my teachers and many classmates and the clergy were all on a different page from me, and I wasn’t turning to their page. Actually tried to go back in my 20s, but papal infallibility coupled with questionable doctrine and taking every story seriously chased me away again.
Thanks for the thought. It was 40+ years ago, and the last time he EVER hit me. I invited him to hit me some more and it wouldn’t change a thing, and he came to his senses and stopped.
I feel like I was really slow compared to the rest of you! My parents took me to church every Sunday and I always thought it was BORING but at the same time really believed in it.
Everyone, including my mother, acted like it was the most horrible crime in the world if you had doubts or voiced questions, and I guess I really internalized that message because it wasn’t until I was college that I started having real doubts. What really got me was that there were all these other religions and they all thought they were right, so how could I be so sure Christianity was correct? It was then that started realizing that the most likely circumstance was that all religions were bunk, but because I was taught that it was so horrible to have doubts, I suppressed it for years. I didn’t go to church anymore once I hit college age, but it hasn’t been until the last few years that I’ve decided to stop fighting the doubts and just admit to myself that I am a nonbeliever. I’m in my 40s so it’s taken a long time to overcome those childhood teachings.
I really believed when I was a child. No doubts at all. And my mother still truly believes so I don’t say anything. She would be miserable because she’d be convinced I was going to hell.
It was a gradual transition, the more I learned about science and evolution, and the more I learned about comparative religions and the history of religions the more atheistic I got.
Things that really made me question include the fact that the only reason Christianity and Islam are such major religions is that historically people who believed in these faiths had better militaries and a better ability to convert powerful people. That is really the biggest factor in whether a religion spreads, can its followers militarily conquer people and/or convert rulers. You find out that the reason country A is Christian and country B is Muslim is mostly because a thousand years ago christians militarily conquered country A while Muslims conquered country B. It has nothing to do with whether one religion out of a thousand has any more truth than any of the others. Also the fact that life is 4 billion years old but religion is only a few thousand years old. That humans are just a microscopic speck on a planet filled with single celled and multicellular life, etc.
I believed hard through my teens. I was a withdrawn child and the rituals and forced camaraderie of the Methodist church probably helped me socially somewhat and I was willing to accept the basic idea without too much bother. We went to the Baptist church sometimes too, when we visited Grandma. That hellfire and brimstone stuff is scary and can frighten the faith into child but it can also set a child’s mind wondering, attempting to reconcile the two Gods.
I felt ‘moved by the spirit’ a few times in youth groups and can safely say I really believed in those moments. Prayed for an A on a test once in 9th grade and improbably got it, which was convincing for a time until I thought about how that means God helped me cheat. I tried on a few faiths through my teens and even into my college days, almost always with the basic premise of a Christian god lurking in the background, like a fall back position. In spite of the heavy handed use of the work ‘truth’ in church after church, I couldn’t find one that could give straight answers to even simple questions.
Can’t even remember when but one day I decided to try on the one idea that I’d been refusing to even glance toward. The one idea so heinous that every spiritual/religious person I’d every heard of or encountered, from the stern Mormon grandfather to the most wild-eyed California spiritualist, is vehemently opposed to: Maybe, just maybe, there isn’t some grandfatherly old dude watching us and we don’t live forever.
Stuff kind of clicks into place after that, sometimes painfully, sometimes melancholy, but things make sense with much less fuss than before. Once I accepted that there is no need to reconcile those dozens of screaming, conflicting notions of Gods and souls and afterlives, because there isn’t a correct version in the bunch, a great burden was lifted from my heart.
I never believed. Being Jewish I knew Santa and the Easter bunny weren’t real, but I didn’t buy the tooth fairy or Elijah coming to the Seder either. That disbelief included any deity. I have no memory of ever believing. That said, I always loved the Jewish holidays and going to services. Still do. No god required.
I was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic grade school, an all boys Catholic high school, boys scouts, etc.
When I was younger I accepted it the way I accepted everything I had been taught by my parents, and anyone else I thought of as an authority figure. As I got older ‘because I said so’ just didn’t do it for me anymore. The teachings of Catholicism, and the behavior of it’s followers, just didn’t make sense sometimes. I grew frustrated with my religion, start asking questions that were met with shrugs, nonsense, and sometimes outright anger.
When I got to college I realized I had been living a very sheltered life. I met pagans and muslims and jews and sihks and all kind of other religious flavors. And then I met atheists. I didn’t even know that was an option, it kinda blew my mind for a while. I did a lot of reading about religions, sampled a few, and eventually came to the conclusion that it was all nonsense, there wasn’t any real truth in any of it. It took years to get to that point, and I didn’t call myself an atheist for a long time, but that’s how it ended up.
My mom did not take this well. I took a lot of shit, screaming and yelling and crying about how horrible I was. She still gets upset about how I abandoned everything she taught me, etc. She’s always poking at it, asking me to pray or go to church, and it always ends in an argument. She seems to be stuck on the fact that D&D made me lose my belief, because it’s better than thinking her beliefs don’t have merit I guess.
That pretty much describes me. My parents certainly never went to services (until later and that was for social reasons only) and we didn’t have a bible in the house. We did have something called the Book of Knowledge which was sort of like an encyclopedia but each volume was a bunch of essays and I read all the ones on science. We did go to an aunt’s house for a seder every Passover. That was excruciating. Three hours going through all this stuff, waiting for dinner. Which wasn’t even that good. When I was 9 they sent me to Sunday school for a year; I never figured out why and I have little memory of what went on in it. When I was in my 12th year, they suddenly discovered that I should do bar mitzvah and I spent a year and a half learning to read enough Hebrew to do that. Then I walked out and never went back. At no time during all this did I believe in any god. It just never entered my head to and still hasn’t.
My parents were lapsed Catholics; for some reason (I use that term loosely) they decided that I needed to take communion (I’m forgetting the actual term used for the process). I went through it - attending Sunday schooling, etc…yet was from the start very unsettled by the indoctrination - just felt it was all so weird. After the wafer business was over my parents lapsed again. Fast forward to my high school years, they again picked it back up requesting that I attend Sunday services with them. While I didn’t cognize myself an atheist at the time, I took on a pretty strong stance against attending - it just really turned me off and made me feel uneasy. It came down to “our house, our rules” which led to my independent living at age 15. At around age 18 I’d heard the XTC song “Dear God” for the first time and it enabled me to put it all together in my own mind (i.e. why I’d been rebelling against religion. I to this day don’t think it was a rebellion against my parents - I did that in plenty of other ways.) and as simple as it sounds, I came to understand “Wow - I don’t believe in a god”. It took about 5 more years before I became comfortable with myself about that; it took my parents about 10 years to do so. It is all good between us for quite some time. Funny thing about the parents - they still do the lapse and rejoin cycle. They drop out for 5 to 10 years and rejoin for 2 or 3. I don’t ask.
I grew up one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Last fall I left the religion formally. It took many years to break the cognitive dissonance, but I had doubts about certain things since I was a kid. My doubts were more about the organization, motives, etc. than the Bible or the fundamentalist stance that we had on it. Over time I realized that things weren’t what they seemed in the religion itself and was crushed. I then realized that the basis of everything I believed was one book and that I knew little about where it came from, how it came about, and that I had been given one specific narrative my entire life. I started looking at some of the atrocities carried out in the old testament at the direction of God. Kids and babies are like cannon fodder. Just destroy them at will. Women, why not take them, particularly the virgins, as your own. They’re really little more than an object for sexual release and baby raising for family growth anyway, so why not. The lack of humanity and morality on display by the God of the Bible was rattling.
Then I thought about how much of the Bible was to be taken literally versus figuratively. Things like the supposed global flood of Noah’s day don’t add up scientifically at all. And let’s face it, right out of the gate the Bible scholars want you to believe that the world was created in days that are figurative, but there’s a talking snake that is literal. Really? I mean, this is supposed to be a book from God that my eternal life hangs upon and he can’t even tell it straight. God is supposed to be a loving father. Would a loving father give his kids a riddle and tell them that if they can’t figure it out he’ll kill them? So much hangs in the balance of a book that is full of holes and that evidence is hard to find for, rather evidence to the contrary is abundant (see the creation of individual animals versus evolution over time and the evidence of creation well in advance of the timeline shown in the Bible).
I wouldn’t say that I am a total atheist. I think there could be a God. I believe in possibility at this point. However, I can’t say that there is one, which one it would be, or that any such God cares one iota about me or what I do. I definitely lost all faith that I held dear for 38 years and it was hard. I’m enjoying my life on the outside though and the freedom that it brings.
Dad was raised Methodist. Mom was raised Episcopalian. We would have a big meal on Christmas and Easter, but we never attended any church. My folks once told me that they assumed my brothers and I would end up joining whatever church our wives attended.
If asked, Dad would say he was a Protestant, but he was always deeply suspicious of preachers. Especially politically active preachers. Especially politically active preachers who asked for money. He was an engineer, and encouraged us to study science.
One year, I went to a summer camp run by a Baptist church. (My kid brother had a friend whose parents were Baptists.) I came home a Born-Again Christian. That lasted a few weeks. My family just was not in the habit of being Bible-thumpers.
I was a bookworm, and read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Religious fanatics (and religious charlatans) tended to be the villains in those works. My favorite line from Edgar Rice Burroughs is, “I was born with a depression where my bump of reverence should be.” I read a lot of history, and studied Greco-Roman mythology, Norse mythology, Hindu mythology, etc. I saw no real reason to give Abramic mythology any privilege in my belief system. I read about faith healers in pretty much every religion, and I read about people dying of diseases in pretty much every religion. I saw no evidence that a deity favors any religion over any other religion, or believers over non-believers. “It rains on the just and the unjust alike.”
Sometime in late high school or early college, I acquired a set of labels for my beliefs: “agnostic”, “secular humanist”, “social Darwinist”. Something to offend everybody. “Agnostic” ticks off both the religious zealots and the militant atheists. “Secular humanist” ticks off the right-wingers. “Social Darwinist” ticks off the left-wingers.
I was about 12, walking back to school after lunch, when it just hit me: there’s no God. The world didn’t seem to run the way I was led to believe it did in the bible. Good things could happen to bad people and vice versa. Bad deeds could go unpunished and good deeds could go unrewarded. I didn’t know enough about the bible to be aware of the logical inconsistencies and contradictions. I just didn’t see any sign of a benevolent outside power intervening in our affairs. And that was that.
My family wasn’t religious except for a couple of years when my mom decided we should go to church (in the second year, my brothers and I conspired to put an end to that). I later learned that her belief was just the default position from her upbringing, and she came to be an unbeliever herself when she started to think about it.