Of course not. Otherwise history would always have this level of atheism.
Hard to say really. I was taught that there was a god, so I believed what I was told. When I started to think about it for myself and apply logic, I realized I had zero evidence of the supernatural. (Made a run through paganism first, but that was a step on the atheist journey)
I suppose it’s fairest to say that I was probably naturally an atheist, but had to undo the programming I was given as a kid.
I went to church when I was a kid, I accepted the stuff I heard unthinkingly. In my early teens I started thinking about religion – that’s when I became an atheist. It helped that the churches I went to were Baptist: lots of fire and brimstone and other obvious horseshit.
My vote: “I’m an atheist and want another option.”
“I’m an atheist and read my first dinosaur books before my first bibles”
I grew up in a small town with very religious friends and neighbors. My parents were not religious though. Through childhood and into early teens, I frequently tried out churches, church trips with friends, etc. It just never stuck, I was too much of a skeptic and had too much distaste for the authoritarian “because I said so” layer to it all. In retrospect it is clear now that I was trying to be converted. My parents, in contrast, never discouraged or reprimanded me for trying to reason or ask questions.
So in retrospect, I tried really hard to believe in a god and a dogma, but it was fundamentally contradictory to the rationality portion of my way of thinking.
One parent was scared away from church, the other was exhausted out of it. My brothers and I were raised unchurched. Growing up, I had the same sense of God and Jesus that I did of Santa and Luke Skywalker. I started reading D’Aulaires’ Norse and Greek in fourth grade or so, and I remember realizing that the people who worshiped Odin or Apollo probably felt the same way about their beliefs - that they understood how the world was made and what their place in it was - that Christians do about theirs. Then there were the theological conundrums of whether unbaptized babies could go to heaven, which outraged me at first and then convinced me that somebody just had to be making it up as they went along. By the time I was a teenager, I realized that I just didn’t believe and probably never had.
There have been times when I desperately wanted to believe. I craved both the comfort and community of faith. I tried Wicca in the hopes that I could believe in a feminine creator. That didn’t last very long. Finally, I found myself a Unitarian Universalist congregation, most of which appear to believe that talking about God as if you believe in Him is kind of rude.
I’m an atheist and I want another option:
I have not “always been” an atheist. I figured it out at a young age, but I had the advantage of non-interventionist parents. They told me the facts about religion – that there are people who believe X, and people who believe Y, and people who believe Z. They didn’t tell me, “X is the truth.”
If I had been raised in a strongly religious family, I’d likely have been strongly religious, for at least some of my life.
There may be some innate genetic predisposition to have a “believing” mental state. I’d like to see more evidence of this before I accept it.
I grew up Catholic and considered myself a believer, but it was a very uneasy belief. I was never comfortable examining it. When people talked about religion I’d always have the embarrassed feeling they were going into deeply TMI territory.
So, was I already an atheist who just wouldn’t think about it? Maybe. I know that once I recognized the cause of my discomfort, talking about religion became easy.
“I’m an atheist and want another option.”
I was never indoctrinated into any organized religion, but I was fairly receptive to superstition and supernatural stuff until I learned more about science and logic.
I was raised Roman Catholic, but became an agnostic once I actually thought about it for a second. There is absolutely no way anyone can know if there is or isn’t a god, or gods, or whatever, and it gets under my skin when people are so certain of their belief or disbelief.
I can state with conviction that I don’t believe in Church. I can tell you that much. The calling of Priest/Minister/Pastor attracts a special kind of asshole that I’d rather not be around.
Others’ certitudes of their beliefs shouldn’t bother you. I am certain there are no gods as deities are human constructs. Could I be wrong? Certainly. I strongly doubt it, but it is a possibility, I guess, however infinitesimally slim. Doesn’t shake my certitude that gods do not and cannot exist, though.
What do you mean you don’t believe in church? Church exists.
This pretty much fit my memories. I was raised catholic the episcopal. I always felt that the stories from church and Sunday school were to teach us lessons like be kind to others etc. I never thought they were real or meant to be taken as real.
I recall when I learned that people actually took it seriously. I was probably close to 10 and we were having our youth group meeting at my house. We did take communion that day with what looked like homemade bread rather than the usual wafer.
After we finished, I don’t recall any wine, one of the older girls asked:
“What kind of bread was it”
One of the women putting things away said, “it’s the body of Christ.”
Girl “yeah, but what kind of bread is it?”
Woman adamantly “it’s the BODY OF CHRIST!”
This was when I realized people actually believed this stuff. I could see that it was bread and not human flesh. It really confused me and I did try to believe, but I just couldn’t.
This. I stopped believing in a literal interpretation about the same time I stopped believing in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy (but don’t you dare try to tell me that the Great Pumpkin is not real, because it is!). As my parents were forcing me through Sunday school and Sunday church, I was often curious and confused why people were treating the Bible literally. I really couldn’t see the difference. It didn’t make sense to call one fake and one real.
Years later, I read The Bible cover-to-cover and realized several other mythologies were much better written.
I was never very religious, but I did believe in some type of god when I was younger. I was very credulous though. I believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy until I was at least 9, and stopped believing in God not long after, certainly before age 13. I also believed in fairy tale creatures. Gnomes, fairies, magic elves and the like. So when I stopped believing in all that stuff, God didn’t have long.
There is a big disconnect here between the title of the thread and the questions in the poll (itself with poorly thought through options), and, indeed, the contents of the OP, which seems different again. No-one is born unable to believe in a god, no matte what (and I do not believe Pascal meant to suggest otherwise). The evidence is the vast swath of human history (just about all of it, until the past couple of centuries) in which, to all intents, there really were no atheists.
Little kids really have no choice but to “believe” what their families and other people around tell them, which is usually, though not always, some form of religious belief. It is not until they are old enough to think for themselves, and to have absorbed some influences from a wider world, which means at least the teens, in practice, that they realistically may (though most don’t) chose to believe something different, which may be atheism, or may be some other religious orientation from that which they were raised in (and, in those rare cases where a kid was raised atheist, it might mean them choosing to adopt some religion).
Personally, I was raised more or less agnostic. My parents were, in effect, atheists, and we did not go to church or anything, and, when I was old enough to ask, told me they were agnostic, but, at the same time, I was exposed to a lot of Christianity at school (this was Britain, where religious education, which then meant Christianity, was a legally mandated part of the curriculum, and there were daily prayers and hymn singing), and my parents did nothing to prevent or counteract that. They left it to me to decide. Sometime in my teens I came to a conscious decision that to be agnostic was an intellectually cowardly option, and I defined myself as an atheist. (I dare say that that was a lot easier for me than for people who had to break with a firmly religious upbringing.)
I’m atheist with a memory of belief. I used to envy those who didn’t have to unlearn something before realising the (probable) truth. You must have been freer to absorb useful learning while we others were having our classroom time wasted on nonsense. I can recall the exact moment I realised the whole ediface of Faith was false. About 2:00 am, August, 1968. It was like an epiphany, without the angels and stuff.
When I was a small child I probably “believed” in that I didn’t question what I was taught. Whether or not I really believed or not I can’t really tell.
I know I “believed” in Santa because I was told to, but when I was about six I was watching the Rudolph special on TV and my little brother was really excited and I told him that was stupid because a flying reindeer with a red shiny nose isn’t possibly real. My mother took this as me not believing in Santa and took the opportunity to tell me that Santa wasn’t real and that the real reason I wasn’t getting anything for Christmas was that she didn’t have any money, not that I had been bad. I remember crying, but I’m not sure if it was because I wasn’t getting anything for Christmas or if it was because Santa was a lie. I was skeptical from a very young age and don’t think I’ve ever truly believed in a god or heaven or hell. I don’t think I ever will. It would take a lot to change that and I’d probably have to have a brain tumor or severe mental illness to ever adhere to an organized religion. I get that it works for some people and that’s great for them - I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it’s just not for me.
So I guess yeah.
When I was a kid I believed. I was Jewish, my family was Jewish, most of my friends were Jewish. No one cast any doubt. During the day I learned regular history, after school I learned Jewish history, which treated Moses and Abraham as historical figures. (But not Adam and Eve.)
I went to High Holy day services with my father. I went to shul more than I absolutely had to. We were not terribly devout - no Kosher, we’d drive on Saturday, but we definitely believed.
Then in High School I read the introduction to a Bible describing how the Bible was actually written, and it became obvious that most of what I had been taught was fiction. That was it. No more god.
I realize now that my grandfather was an atheist also, but he didn’t say so around kids. I decided not to make that mistake and didn’t, and raised two wonderful atheist kids.
Nothing about my religious education or experiences was negative in any way. It just isn’t true.
I was raised without any religious beliefs at all. Never went to any kind of synagogue, Sunday school, church service, temple, etc. at all. My father’s family is Jewish so my family celebrated Jewish holidays but it really had zero to do with God. It was simply a time to see family members and have nice dinners. My parents celebrated both Christmas and Hannukah, both purely in a secular way. It’s funny but as a kid I remember thinking that religions and gods were just no big deal, and believing in different religions was no different than liking different sports teams or music groups or something like that. Because my father was raised Jewish and my mother was raised in a Jehovah’s Witness household, whenever anyone asked what religion I was I would say I was both Jewish *and *Christian, because I had no idea that religion was a Big Thing that people actually Believed in and were Very Serious about.
I’m an atheist, but used to believe in God.
I was raised Methodist, believed in it until my teens, then my faith just seemed to fracture and none of it really made any sense to me any more. A lot of the people I talked to about religion at the time took, at least to some degree, a literalist view of the Bible, and I simply couldn’t do that. Questioning that meant questioning the inerrant Word and so forth, so faith fell to the wayside.
I am curious what “I’m an atheist and want another option” means, though. Wouldn’t that be agnosticism, which isn’t a poll choice for whatever reason?
I have a concept of the Divine, but it’s kind of nebulous. Also, my belief is that, whatever its nature and its properties, it resides equally within all that exists. So, with everything being just as much “God” as everything else, can I really lay claim to a belief in God, in any meaningful way? I tend toward a “no” on that question.
But I do feel a deep (and perverse) compulsion to learn which, if any, non-Pentacostal books Der Trihs actually burned. 