Whoops. I should have said “sinful,” not “non-Pentacostal.”
I was raised by parent who weren’t overtly religious, if at all, but went to a school where hymns were sang (English school, so a lot more common than in the USA, probably).
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t questioning the stuff we were being taught about how God created everything and the Flood and stuff like that. As soon as I found out what an atheist was, I knew I was one.
And then I just got on with my life. I’m lucky that I live in a culture where religion barely comes up at all.
Various books with sex scenes in them. Sex is sinful, you know. I don’t actually recall the titles after so long.
This. But I wouldn’t have characterized myself as an unqualified atheist until a decade later, when as a freshman in college I gave materialist explanations of phenomena like consciousness some serious thought.
This says it all.
My family wasn’t religious in any real sense, I think I set foot in churches only for weddings and funerals.
I have a strong memory though of some time in my childhood when someone was talking about how a dead person was in heaven, and I simply thought it was total nonsense. I saw no way for the person to live on if their body and brain were dead. I remember thinking that there were nowhere, just decomposing. That people went to heaven no more than a dead cat at the side of the road.
Well, it’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t even know how to phrase this exactly, but I’ll try. Although I’m not sure I ever really believed in any of it, I still must have believed on some level because I was pretty convinced that my lack of belief was a fault in myself.
I mean, it doesn’t even make sense, but I think that’s because when this stuff is shoved down your throat during your formative years, your brain reacts in strange ways. Then throw in the fear that non belief inspires and that makes it even worse.
I wasn’t indoctrinated by my parents, and I believe that such an indoctrination is key to one’s belief or non-belief. They pretty much left religion alone and didn’t try to convince me of any particular dogma. I went to Sunday school briefly, but even at that early age found it to be confusing and downright baffling. I remained pretty much an agnostic my entire life, but hedging my bets, just in case. As I got older, I developed a strong aversion to, and disgust with, organized religion (and self-professed Christians, in particular). I remain an agnostic, as atheism (much like veganism) has too many rules, and I’m a lazy git.
I wouldn’t say we have a materialist explanation of consciousness. The reason consciousness still gets discussed and studied so much is because it is an area where there are still major mysteries to be solved. Not merely ironing out the details, but actually still trying to form any hypothesis, even a crude one.
Don’t get me wrong, we have good grounds* for accepting that consciousness is purely a brain phenomenon. But that’s not the same thing as having an explanation of how it actually works. If this is your only reason for rejecting theism, you could find your position looking shaky if you had a debate with some theists.
- e.g. anything that affects the brain also affects consciousness (drugs, trauma, disease, electrical stimulation etc), we can now even see how areas get activated as we think different thoughts etc.
If there’s some “supernatural” component of consciousness, it seems it would have to be epiphenomenal.
I started going to church and Sunday school when I was probably 5 or 6.
Ever since I can remember, I couldn’t take it seriously. It shook me a little to look around at all the adults and think “You people actually buy in to this stuff??”
So no, I never really believed because it didn’t make any sense.
I don’t ever remember believing in God. We didn’t go to church and God was never part of any discussion at home. Religion wasn’t part of my life.
In my early elementary school years we had to recite the Lord’s Prayer every morning. I knew the words but didn’t even think or care what it all meant. One girl had to go stand outside the class when we did this. I never knew why that was; they’re only words. I think she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Poor little Holly.
I went to church. I went to Christian private elementary school. I read the Bible. I believed.
I clung to religion especially hard, as a coping mechanism, when I had to move to another state in the middle of high school. I wrote an essay denouncing “evilution” and I believed every word of it.
Then I took biology. Then I started thinking. Then I dated a girl who both didn’t believe in God and hated him for not stopping her childhood abuse. Then I went to college. Then I noticed the world doesn’t function the way the Bible said it did. My background assumption of God’s existence faded; I hadn’t been to church or prayed in years anyway.
For my final English research essay, I started out looking into the holographic universe theory, but wound up expounding something akin to Pantheism for 20 pages. I didn’t believe a word of it. The weeks of research wasn’t leading anywhere, so I just shoehorned it into a poor (but eloquent) attempt to fit a god into the laws of physics.
I came to the undeniable conclusion that there is nothing supernatural out there. No ghosts, no telepathy, no healing crystal power, and no God.
I believe that most of us atheists have studied the Bible more than those who still believe it. I so often hear about “interpreting” the Bible,but if it cannot be believed as written who the Hell are you to interpret it? Cannot listen to a TV preacher for 10 minutes without him saying “What that means is…”
I remember the first time i heard a guy say “I don’t believe in God, but I can give an exact description of the God I don’t believe in.” What struck me is that I had announced to the teachers in my religious high school that “If that is who God is He has no respect coming from me.”
After seeing what happens in different parts of the world I do have doubt, but to this day I’m scared to tell my family, as they said there are some questions that must wait. I however see the bible as a book of lessons, as many events are impossible
The question of belief is often confused and commingled with the notion of faith.
Faith is just one of many reasons one might hold a belief. Other reasons are experience, evidence, reliance on authority, and mental health conditions.
Religious beliefs typically rely heavily on faith, but also depend on reliance on authority (especially ones parents) experience (usually clouded by observation bias) and (sketchy, and sometimes fraudulent) evidence.
I believe that driving my truck without oil in the engine is a very bad thing. I claim that holding this belief requires no faith. I am relying on my own experience of things mechanical, and advice of multiple independent experts. Belief that this will be OK if I first treat the engine with Ultrateflonmiraclelube would require reliance on dubious experts paid by the product manufacturer, and some faith…a lot like religious beliefs.
So as an athiest, I certainly have a capacity for strongly held beliefs. I just need convincing. I do hold a few beliefs on faith alone. I won’t be surprised if/when these prove wrong. I will probably be delighted, in fact!
No. I was raised to believe in God. I wasn’t a hardcore, mindless believer, I was a skeptical child, always questioning. Tried real hard to get into it for a while but eventually honored my true feelings and haven’t looked back since.
I didn’t decide I was atheist until my early thirties. I had doubts from my early twenties and dabbled in several religions beyond the meek United Methodist doctrine I was raised to believe. I was a happy Christian but I was always one to question so when things started not making sense I could not accept the standard “God’s will is a mystery”.
Losing my “spiritual” faith was quite traumatic for me as I found great comfort in my beliefs. I was one of those angry atheists for a while but I think I’ve settled down lately. I’m not exactly anti-religion but I do speak my mind when asked.
Raise Roman Catholic and attended 12 years of Catholic schools. I even read the Bible a couple of times end-to-end. But as I got older, more and more stuff just didn’t pass the sniff test.
If there is a supreme being, I doubt it is anything like the vast majority of organized religions would have us believe.
I was raised in a non-religious household. When religion was first presented to me, at age 12 or 13, the idea of being saved from the horrible BS of my life sounded fantastic, but I couldn’t buy the story. In some ways, that was even harder. For a long time, I never really thought about it. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve become comfortable with identifying as an atheist.