Describe your conversion from religion to atheism or agnosticism.

Great Debates
41

My family is all Mormon, and I was raised in that - but don’t think I ever really bought into it. I recall once being quite sick one time and praying more fervently then I have before or since, to no avail, but that was a special case due to circumstances. (Had the prayer worked I might be different today, who knows.) I’m told that when I was supposed to be baptized at the age of 8 I told my mom I didn’t want to. (I got dunked anyway.) I was apathetic and bored in church, which didn’t change as I grew older - I was only attending because I would be punished otherwise. In my late teens I was told I didn’t have to go, and never went back.

In my late teens/early twenties I went through a period of spending rather a lot of time thinking abstractly about theology, more along the lines of worrying that some malevolent diety was going to thrash my butt than pondering a benevolent diety since the POE hadn’t entirely escaped me by that point. I also spent that time constructing and justifying a secular system of morality, since my parents only know and taught “god said so” morality, which didn’t impact me. After a while I got around to really grokking the arguments against theism and became a proper atheist - though unfortunately I still relapse to worrying about getting thrashed by some evil demon-god now and then. (Investigating the specific flaws of Mormonism as compared to the rest of Christianity came last, as it happens - and it’s not nearly as interesting.)

42

Being confirmed, then travelling and seeing dozens of conflicting religions - the justifications for, faith in, and passions with which they were defended, being largely equal. Full long write-up from a 2006 thread.

43

I’m technically not in the right thread, but I’ll post my experiences anyway.

My parents were both raised in good, large, catholic families in the Netherlands - early 50’s. Grandparents on my father’s side were pretty devout, though there’s a story about my grandma kicking the pastor out of the house when he suggested they should have more children - by then, they had 8, and of the last two, one was born crippled and the other has severe autism.

My parents got married and had all of their kids baptized for their parents’ sake; granddad was very strict in those matters; when my uncle’s first kid was born he refused to see them for more than a year because my uncle wasn’t married to his girlfriend (this was eventually resolved by my grandma inviting them all over without telling her husband). My parents were atheists or at least agnostic by then. Never really found out how that happened, though my dad basically went AWOL from his nun-ran boarding school :slight_smile:

We never really discussed religion much when I was young - we were supposed to fold our hands and be silent when our grandparents prayed over dinner and for some reason I picked up the Lord’s prayer (which impressed and amused my dad), and we had a multi-part illustrated children’s bible, which I browsed through sometimes when I was bored. Also: Christmas songs and -trees and the sporadic funeral.

I remember when I was about 9 or so, telling a religious class-mate that I believed in Jesus but not in God. She thought that was very strange. I hadn’t really caught on to the fact that there’s a difference in believing something exists/existed and believing in a god. I always felt that Jesus was an OK guy and I had no reason to doubt he lived and died pretty much as described. I never seriously considered the idea of God or of Jesus’s miracles - I didn’t dismiss them, they just didn’t make enough of an impression to think about them at all; if you’d had pressed me on it, I would probably have been bemused, because I wouldn’t have thought people actually took that kind of stuff seriously seriously (instead of just “seriously polite” or something).

Now where was I going with this?

Oh yeah: I went though high school and university without encountering pretty much any religion. Then I went to my grandma’s death bed, and then to her wake, which was organized by the catholic home she spent her last year. As you may suspect, besides her immediate family, not many of the visitors were catholic. Nevertheless, the speech we received from one of organizers started with something like “As we all know, [name of grandma] is now in heaven enjoying the splendor…” and THAT pissed me off. Do not tell me what I think, you bastard - you either have no idea what you’re talking about, or you’re deliberately lying to make your point and you’re using my dead grandma to do it. God damn I was angry.

Truth be told, the pastor who did the service at her actual funeral gave a very heart felt sermon without dragging god in all the time and knew a lot better than to try and pull that kind of rhetorical trick on the packed church.

Still, the episode made me a lot more critical of religion in general and the catholic church in particular. I used to think that people should be free to espouse their beliefs and be respected. I certainly don’t think that now. Feel free to believe what you want, but if you’re using religion to justify saying that homosexuals are bad in some way or that birth control is evil you’re a massive cunt and people SHOULD speak up to you, with no obligation to be polite.

44

I knew for a fact there was a god. I knew the ultimate truths of the universe.

Then I woke up.

45

I really cannot say I know when. I discovered myself knowing God, Father Christmas, the tooth fairy, the devil and the closet monster were real and always looked to see what I was doing. At that age I simply thought that’s the way the world works. I went to church (catholic) because the family went to church.

Sometime later I discovered how to read. That was an amazing experience. I read just about everything. Billboards, posters, books, scraps of paper, and yes, the bible too. My parents had a rather large library which included conventional and some not very conventional religious texts. I read St. Augustine and Aldous Huxley way before I could really conceptualise the premises they were working from. Eventually Father Christmas stopped coming, my teeth did not turn into coins, and the closet was always found to be empty. I began wondering about the devil and god. I began wondering what was really so bad about selling your soul to the devil if I can get all I want anyway. I read about people going to the moon and started wondering where heaven was and if I really dug way down I’ll get hell.

I guess somewhere between then and now I lost my religion, then my faith. Reading the bible did not help much as it proved more fantastic that Lewis’ “In the looking glass” and seemed, to me, to tell more about human thought than it did about “God”. I never really caught on at first so I guess it was easier for me to let go of what I had inherited and replace it with what I saw the world as. I admit there is a minute chance I may be wrong, but the evidence not available to me as of now supports my stand on this so until I find out otherwise I be an atheist.

46

The Baptist church that the family had gone to since they arrived in town back in the 1800s had a lovely man as pastor for some 50 or so years, and he died in about 1971. THe church picked a group of men to interview for a new pastor. They interviewed and settled on 3 candidates who each got to guest pastor for 4 months each, and they settled on one. Things went along well for a year or so, then he was teaching a young adult class, or little old lady class [I wasnt there, so I don’t know which group started it.] He stated his belief in miracles. One third of the church agreed with him. I can not remember exactly what he believed but the church divided up along ‘miracles happened in the past, and happen now’, ‘miracles happened in the past and don’t happen now’ and ’ I don’t give a shit, get on with it’

This bullshit went on for a year [I vaguely remember it concerned glossolalia] and the arguing got really acrimonious, enough so that my parents left and decided to go to a different church, and I got sick and tired of the arguing, and felt that if tehre was a god that actually gave a shit, he would have done something to indicate his choice one way or the other.

I am a deist, I feel there is something out there but I do not know what it is, though I am willing to believe that anybody’s god can actually exist for them if it makes them happy to rattle drawers and believe in Anonia, they can rattle their drawers and believe in Anonia. Just don’t preach at me, or try to legislate my beliefs.

My personal opinion is sort of like Stranger in a Strange Land, god is in every body and just is expressed individually. Of course most of the judeo-christian sects out there believe that because I believe this I am going to hell, but they can just keep believing what they want and leave me out of it.

47

deleted

48

Not technically a “deconversion” – I simply do not remember ever believing. In God, or in angles, or in the Tooth Fairy… My earliest memories just don’t go back that far – by the time I was old enough to have memories remain with me, I was over believing in any and all kinds of fairy tales.

Having “functionally atheist”* parents probably helped…

  • I’ve never asked either of them “do you believe in God?” and the answer doesn’t matter – they have lived / lived their lives in a way that clearly says “we answer to no higher power,” and that’s good enough for me.
49

Somewhat certain, though I’m sure my memories and the reality back then are quite different.

I remember being very bored in church and never paying attention to what was said. I would retreat into my mind and daydream or think about movies etc. I generally thought that stories like Goliath, Daniel in the lions den were intended to be more inspirational than based in reality, even though back then I really didn’t understand this and couldn’t express it.

I would ask questions in Sunday school or the youth group that were glossed over or ignored, usually with the answer, you just have to have faith. I really did try to believe, but as I got older, read and learned more the need to believe lessened until it disappeared. You could say, even though I tried to find faith, I never really had it to lose.

50

I was fourteen when I began to lose my faith. I was adopted, and as I have mentioned on these boards, found out in a fairly brutal way. It left a mark on me, and the way my adoptive parents reacted didn’t help and did more harm.

I went through years of deeming myself agnostic. During this period I threw myself into my religion and learned every religious story I could and truly loved the mythology - which I still do - and nearly became a priestess - just couldn’t learn Sanskrit in the hot Indian sun. I read the Old Testament and the Q’uran, looking for answers.

The denoument was remarkably easy. It was around mid-2001, which would make me…about 26. I was doing something unrelated one day, when I literally felt an ephiphany in me. I realized I didn’t believe in God. Not that I hated him, or anything like that. Just that there was no belief in me. What was more, I also realized on that day that I didn’t need a God in my life. I was doing OK and felt no need or urge for a Creator. So I didn’t even need to continue to fake it.

I still feel like this. I have no internal belief, and nothing in my heart says I need to believe in God. I am not a strident atheist. I hardly think about a God 99% of the time. I am content.

51

I was raised Jewish (Reform), and had somewhat of a revelation during my Bar Mitzvah ceremony. At some point during the service I was looking out over the congregation, and it suddenly occurred to me that the people were blindly accepting all the ideas they had ever been taught, and were teaching the same ideas to their children. There was no effort to prove that these ideas were better than any others, you were just supposed to believe without thinking. I was starting to see Judaism . . . and all religion . . . as nothing more than a cult.

I continued to do what I was supposed to do, reading the prayers and the Haftorah, doing all the things I was taught to do and not allowed to question. Then it came time to give my speech. Though I had written the speech, rehearsed it and memorized it, it just seemed like more hollow meaningless words. So the speech I gave was extemporaneous, and unlike any other Bar Mitzvah speech ever given. I was very critical of people who taught their kids what to think, rather than how to think.

After the ceremony, it was obvious that my father was furious (he had a very explosive temper). If we hadn’t been in a synagogue he would have unleashed his temper on me, just like he had done on so many other occasions. But then the rabbi came over and told me I had given the best Bar Mitzvah speech he had ever heard . . . and then he had a long talk with my father.

I don’t know exactly what they said to each other, but my father understood that I was growing in a very different direction than had been planned. He wouldn’t really accept this for many years.

A few years later, I read *Atlas Shrugged. *And the rest is history.

I have to take issue with the phrase “losing one’s faith.” For me, I didn’t lose my faith, I discovered reason.

52

I think what is interesting in this thread is that almost all of us started with a strong religious background. So when threads are interrupted by the religious attempting to teach us about their faith, we get annoyed. It is insulting when the religious presume we just don’t know the truth of religion. The fact is most of us have already rejected the religion, after being involved with it for a long time.

53

My bold – a measurement of the space between intersection of two lines requires no belief…… :wink:

I was raised in a typical Church of England environment that is God and Jesus mentioned quite a bit at school (well it was started by a Bishop….) but never at home and though my parents believe they never went to church. I didn’t question it until I ended up with a lot of time on my hands and only one book to read. After reading that Gideon’s Bible from front to back I was no longer a believer. This happened at the age of 17 and I honestly think up to that point I was a believer by default, I had never really though about it.

54

Raised Catholic, though as a child I was attracted much more to the ethical/moral aspect of religion and its analysis of human character. In fact, when I started to recognize the logical inconsistencies of many theological concepts, I didn’t really have an “Aha!” moment because this side of religion was far less important to me. And later–when I did take up these questions seriously–I was able to find arguments that were at least plausible and often challenged my own thinking. Let me be clear: I didn’t necessarily accept the conclusions, but reading the arguments let me accept that folks who believed in, say, the Trinity or the Eucharist weren’t just deluding themselves with nonsense, and in a few cases study of the various answers advanced my appreciation for philosophical thinking.

Rather, it was the stark contradiction between the ethical/moral ideal of religion and the practiced reality that did it. The Gospels explicitly question many of the things this world values–wealth and political power are the most obvious examples–but these same values have dominated Christianity since the beginning. So it wasn’t the inconsistency in the logic of religious belief–these IMO can be made at least presentable with a little bit of philosophical effort–it was the unforgiveable inconsistency between word and deed. Of course there’s nothing unusual about that–many people/groups fail this same test–but it also means the religion is nothing special. It’s about on a par with politics, business, and many other human pursuits which do not need a god to justify their existence and yet produce the same mixed bag of results. Once I understood this, I began to view religion as a means to an end; a drug that kept the population in check, a cudgel to bully one’s enemies, or a fig leaf to justify whatever course you were planning to take anyway. And whatever good did come of it–even intentional good–I began to view in the most cynical way possible.

If belief in God didn’t produce results that were any better than strictly human institutions, what, exactly, was God there for? I say I’m agnostic because despite all the worthless accretion in practice, I still find a faint, vague spark of divinity in the world, even if it’s much reduced from what it once was and I can’t positively identify it. But to borrow a line from the Gospels, you judge a tree by the fruit it bears, and if this is the best that belief in God has wrought, I have a duty to question his existence.

55

Since thread title is “Describe your conversion from religion to atheism or agnosticism”, I guess you won’t find many life-long atheists in here. Except for me, of course.

56

Please join in. Almost all atheists are converted from tribal beliefs. I would like to hear from some who were not.

57

Yes, do. I wonder if an atheist born and reared that way is a, um, fervent, as those who are born again, so to speak. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

58

See post #43 :slight_smile:

59

I don’t think I’ve ever believed - as far as I can remember I’ve always taken bible stories as being just stories, even at Sunday school when I was very young. Belief, or lack of it, has just never been an issue in my life. I guess that makes me an atheist of some description. Is there a term for someone who doesn’t feel the need to label themselves in relation to the existence or otherwise of a deity?

60

I was raised in it, but I don’t think I ever actually believed. Do I get disqualified since I experimented with a prayer?

(And yes, I dawdled posting because I thought the thread didn’t apply to me, until another never-believed posted first and paved the way.)