If you don’t believe there are any gods (it’s fine if you’re not 100% sure) then that makes you an atheist, because that’s what atheism means. But you don’t need to label yourself like that. Other people will be willing to do that for you 
- See the “agnostics are atheists” train wreck currently unfolding in GD. Or better yet, don’t.
Anyway, I usually just call myself a programmer. My atheism is only really relevant when discussing religion and its consequences.
Like many here, I’m a recovering Catholic. Both my parents are Eucharistic Ministers, and I was an altar boy until the 8th grade. I don’t know if I ever really bought into it but there was one moment that made me more dubious of the charade. I was in 8th grade at St. Anne’s, and this priest came over to give a little talk to the class. This guy was pretty unfriendly to begin with, and a bit unsightly, sporting a bulbous reddened nose like WC Fields. At one point he writes the word conscience on the board, then drew a line between the n and the s, making two words. He explains that con is a Latin word meaning with, and that the original word can be interpreted as “with science”. I don’t really remember what the whole speech was about, but I do remember thinking “this is bullshit”.
I did go to church out of familial obligation, but that stopped once I got to college.
It actually means “with knowledge” in Latin.
I was raised presbyterian but never really had faith. Then I went to college and found God. My parents thought I was becoming a Jesus freak and discouraged my religious acitivity. I don’t hang out with a lot of religious people and the ones I see on TV disgust me so I have a very distant relationship with God these days.
Are you an atheist or agnostic?
I was raised in a family more religious than any of my friends’, I have several pastors as uncles, went to Sunday school and Sunday church, and never bought any of it. At church I remember feeling like a detached observer, an ethnologist watching a curious, primitive ritual of a backwards tribe (and Lutherans aren’t exactly known for their flashy sermons). When I was still small, it was somewhat scary and anxiety-inducing - why do these adults suddenly behave like that? Why do they say those silly things, like lunatics? I’ve never seen my parents drunk, but believe much the same goes on in the heads of small children seeing theirs wasted / high.
I was raised Episcopal. I believed. But I had some questions about things that confused me, and when I asked the questions, I got every kind of response from “You just have to have faith” to a Sunday School teacher that went ballistic and called me a godless little heathen.
So around the age of 12 or 13, I started trying to find the answers for myself. This is back in the 60s, no Interwebz thingy, so I did it the hard way; I read and I read and I read and I read. And what I found out is that religion is a lie.
Period.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church and was “born again” at the strong urging of my mother when I was 6, and baptized when I was 12. I taught Bible clubs when I was a teenager, attempting to convert the poor lost neighborhood children. I went to a Baptist liberal arts college and after graduation married another Baptist. He got a job in a Christian school, and we were youth group leaders and I was a Sunday school teacher and sang in the church choir. During all this time, though, I had doubts that I pushed to the back of my mind. One thing that trouble me from an early age was the idea that I must love God with all my heart, mind, and so on. I would try, but I felt no love for God at all. How could I love something or someone I never met, couldn’t see, didn’t know? I decided God was just an idea, something people created to make themselves feel better. And then my husband had an affair with someone in the church, they ran off together, and I stopped going to church altogether.
That was more than 20 years ago. Now, I’m an agnostic and very interested in Buddhism as a philosophy, a way of living. There’s much more to this story, but that’s it in a nutshell. I don’t miss my former life at all. It was full of judgment, separation, elitism. Now, I just live.
I was raised in a Christian family, but not a strongly religious one. The one time in my life I went to regular church service was while I was staying at a friend’s house. I was only taught the very basic parts of the religion. This may be why my rejection of it came gradually and slowly.
As far back as middle school, I really didn’t alter my behavior any for god. For instance, around the time I turned 12, I got the Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. If you look up the lyrics to the song called Heresy, you’ll see that it’s very anti-christian. That didn’t bother me though. I figured god wouldn’t care what music I listened to. And then came Marilyn Manson and similar bands.
I don’t remember if I questioned Christianity or theism in middle school, but I certainly did in high school. I knew a literal interpretation of the bible was wrong. I thought those we now call creationists were morons. I was confident scientists were correct about the age of Earth, the origins of humans, etc. Still, I clung to other parts of Christianity as the thought of an afterlife was comforting.
I think it was early in college when I realized that what I wished was true and what I found comforting had nothing to do with what was actually true, and that I needed to base my religious beliefs more on logic and observation to be intellectually honest. So I did a lot of philosophical thinking and became an agnostic leaning towards deism. There may have been a brief deism phase in there; I don’t remember for sure. Over the years, the probability of a god has been decreasing in my head. Now I think there probably isn’t one, but I wouldn’t say I’m reasonably convinced. It’s a complex problem with such issues as how one defines a god.
In my early years as an agnostic, I was more accepting of Christianity and its followers. Like I said, I thought creationists were imbeciles even when I held on to religion myself, but I figured they could live in their own little world without hurting anyone. Now I’ve heard so much moronic and disgusting crap come out of Christians’ mouths that I utterly despise the religion as a whole.
“Gays shouldn’t be allowed to get married. It’ll destroy the sanctity of marriage.”
“Atheists don’t belong in this country. This is a nation under God; it says so on the currency and in the pledge of allegiance.”
“It shows you how screwed up this country is that someone named Obama could be elected. He’s obviously a terrorist.”
“Of course I don’t believe in evolution. What, do you think I’m a Russian or something?” (Yes, that’s almost word-for-word what someone said.)
And the real problem is that they don’t just live in their own little world. They affect society and bring misery to those who don’t believe their crap. I know not all Christians believe this stuff, but I have never heard one voice their opposition to any of it, except a few close friends. The hardcore idiots have the biggest mouths. I think that unless I get out of BibleLand, I’m going to lose my sanity within the next few years.
Anyway, I’m not trying to start a debate about the above issues or anything, just explaining where I’m at now and how I got here.
I was a card-carrying Latter-day Saint, aka Mormon, until recently. I believed in God and in Mormonism as a small child, and I remained a believing Mormon by pure inertia. Mormons are encouraged to testify that they know their church to be true. Therefore, to admit that it is false is to confess to lying previously about knowing it to be true.
My suppressed inner atheist has been getting gradually stronger since high school. I had balanced skepticism about God with my professed belief in Mormonism until last year. Then I visited a Mormon friend’s house, and they had Egyptian artwork on the wall nearly identical to a papyrus that Joseph Smith claimed to have translated in the 1830s. They said it is the Book of Breathings, well known in Egyptology. But J Smith translated it as the Book of Abraham. So if J Smith faked the translation, then it is reasonable to conclude that other of his translations and revelations may also be bullshit.
Opening my mind to the possibility that it was all false suddenly made several puzzles much simpler. Several Revelations and Scriptures in the LDS canon are in direct conflict with present-day LDS beliefs. The Unchanging Eternal Mormon God of 2010 bears little resemblance to the Unchanging Eternal Mormon God of 1830, or 1840, or 1850, etc. Why? Because it’s all false - they’re making this stuff up as they go along! If Joseph Smith thinks teenage girls are hot, then God says polygamous marriage is eternal. If Utah wants to become a US state, then God says polygamy is bad, and the church pretends the revelation was about Temple marriage, not Plural marriage. If Brigham Young is a racist, then God says the entire church will lose its Priesthood if a black man is ever ordained. If racist policies become illegal and unpopular, then God says black men should be ordained. Etc, etc, etc.
I hid my epiphany from everyone for 10 months until The Wife discovered that I was no longer paying the mandatory 10% of my income to the church. She was devastated for a couple of days, but quickly became my fellow apostate after reading my research notes.
When people learn I am no longer a Mormon they ask, well then what are you? The best reply is that I am a devout non-Mormon. Only an ex-Mormon can possibly understand how significant that is. Sure, I’m also an atheist, but that’s not really much of a change compared to the shock of becoming a non-Mormon.
I wuz raised nontheist, no conversion necessary.
Sleeping in on the weekends whenever possible was one of our core values.
I was sort of raised Catholic. I say “sort of” because my parents were raised Catholic, and I went to Catholic schools, but we didn’t go to church regularly and my parents didn’t really care about religion a lot. It was assumed God existed and whatnot but we were casual about it.
The truth is I never really bought it. If you’d asked me most of my life if I believed in God I would have said yes, but it was a reflexive response; I never really believed. Even when I was a kid, I just didn’t quite buy it. It seemed… well, phony. Unlikely. It was stories and games to me, nothing more. I was playing along, but I never quite suspended my disbelief. When I finally said “Hmm, I guess I’m an atheist” it was about as much of a conversion as when I was 14 and said “Hmmm, I guess I have to start shaving.”
So I’m not sure I can say I “converted” so much as I just stopped putting up a pretense. It helps that nobody in my family gives a flip about it.
What I find strange, though, are the people who seem to be saying that part of their lack of belief is based on an observation of the failures of believers - their hypocrisy, changing interpretation of scripture, and all that. I don’t get that; it’s like saying that because Nickleback fans are drooling fools, Nickleback doesn’t exist.
The moral or intellectual failings of Christians just don’t seem relevant to the issue, at least to me. Indeed, Christianity and Islam have the wonderful logical trap that all people are sinners and can’t understand the full nature of God and so if people are sinful and dishonest that’s rpecisely what you would expect. But it doesn’t matter. Either there is a God or there is not; it does not matter what percentage of believers are industrial-grade morons or assholes. If every believer was Thomas Aquinas, God still would not exist; similarly, if every believer was a homo-hating fundamentalist creationist tool and God DID exist, then God would exist, He’d just be very disappointed in His flock. In my view, God does not exist for the simple reason that God does not exist. The concept’s ridiculous, totally unsupported by logic, evidence, or common sense. It wouldn’t matter if its believers were all tolerant geniuses; there’s no such thing as God.
Mind you, that’s just IMHO; if that’s how you guys came to the conclusion there’s no God then that’s how you came to the conclusion. I just find it strange, that’s all.
Indeed, my religious education was VERY tolerant. Separate school education in Ontario in the 70s and 80s was very happy-God-loves-you version of Catholicism. Outright intolerance for other religions is, IIRC, heresy in the Catholic Church, so bad words about other religions would never even have been suggested. If I’d said “All Jews are going to hell!” I’d have been suspended. Actually, we had kids in our school who weren’t Catholic. We even visited other kinds of churches and a synagogue to learn all about them. We didn’t talk about Hell much if at all. It was a tolerant, self-examining faith.
I still didn’t buy it. It just isn’t true.
My family is mildly religious (United Church of Canada, went to church most weeks, my brother is a minister).
My belief in Christianity probably peaked in grade 9 or 10 when I was a counselor at a church camp. The final nail in the coffin was probably an ancient Greek/Roman history class I took in my first year of university. The professor was talking about syncretism and how Christiantiy was basically a merger of Judaism with bits taken from various mystery cults (Mithraism, e.g.) and that pretty much demystified religion for me.
This is very similar to my experience. Despite going to Catholic school until I was 18, it was never something that was pushed on me, and my family rarely went to church, and didn’t really talk about religion much at home. We had religions classes at school, but we also studied other major world religions.
It wasn’t so much a conversion as a gradual realization that I never believed all that much to begin with. Nothing much changed for me.
I grew up going to church (Methodist) and loved it. I was an acolyte, sang in the choir, did volunteer work there, loved the minister and the people. It was my social network and I really did believe in God in the abstract sense, I didn’t know many details. But the stuff they said never made much sense. It was often contradictory, either with itself or with what others said or with plain common sense. That was somewhat OK, God was mysterious and all powerful. But really, couldn’t anyone answer simple questions without stumbling? The ministers and Sunday school teachers were so sure in their knowledge - where did they get that knowledge, why did they contradict each other and why did they discourage ME from getting that knowledge?
There are two classes of religious people, IMO. Those who claim to have special knowledge about God and the rest of us who are supposed to accept what they say without question. I wanted to be in the first group, I wanted to know the secrets that they know. So I tried different religions, took some classes, and it turns out those people claiming special knowledge can’t even agree on simple concepts - Heck, they fight wars over absurdly simple questions. Once I allowed that crazy idea to percolate into my consciousness: “Maybe there isn’t an all powerful God!?” the world made so much sense, like cleaning the mud off of a dirty window. I can never go back to blind acceptance of people who are so clearly just making stuff up or parroting stuff someone else made up. If there is secret knowledge of an all powerful God it is lost in the babel of false prophets and that God isn’t the least bit interested in sorting it out for us.
I can’t hate churches. The need to believe in something larger than ourselves is universal (almost) and the desire to socialize is universal (almost). Those needs are met by churches and if there were no churches there would have to be something similar. But at the heart of each church is someone who believes he or she has the special knowledge and who, for some reason, feels the need to press it on others. That is just sad.
Not quite. Nickleback fans don’t make ‘they exist’ a special claim. It’s more like saying that because Nickleback fans are drooling fools, Nickleback isn’t a good band. The existence of Nickleback isn’t what’s in question, their quality is. With religion, the existence of god, and everything that goes along with that assumption, is in question.
I was raised as a Catholic and was devout up to age 11 when my twin brother and I started to debate its merits more as an intellectual exercise than anything else. After debating the merits of Catholicism alongside other religions, we felt that panentheism was the one most resistant to criticism and have been a panentheist from that point on.
I finally was able to jump to atheism after being on this board for 2 years. It really helped that a lot of posters here are able to articulate the arguments for and against atheism very clearly and I was able to let go of the need for a supernatural purpose.
I had a rather strange upbringing. My mother’s side of the family is very religious - Mennonite (not orthodox)/baptist. My mother married into a wild family, and promptly divorced my father after I was born, but kept ties to that side of the family. So I would alternate being raised as a devout protestant when my maternal grandparents were around (which was a lot - I lived with them off and on for years), but when we visited my father’s family, it was all drinking and wild partying, all the time. They claimed to be devout Catholics and went to mass consistently and prayed at supper, but other than that, it was pure craziness.
I associated much more strongly with my mother’s side when I was little, and loved my grandparents, and therefore I believed the whole thing. I was certain that I was saved, I felt like I was in the presence of God, etc. I did Sunday school every week, bible classes, church recitals, all the rest. We prayed at supper and before bed every night. I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world because I was ‘saved’ when so many people weren’t.
The doubts started pretty early. I’d say about age 8 or 9. I couldn’t reconcile things i was reading in the bible with what I knew to be true, and I also saw a lot of immoral acts being perpetrated in the name of God in the bible, and was confused by it.
It didn’t help that my family’s and church’s reaction to my questions was to simply slam a wall down and berate me. Once when I asked how the flood could really have been worldwide when there was no geological evidence for it, the ‘answer’ I got was a lecture on Satan’s influence and a haranging series of questions by my aunt about whether I was really ‘saved’ or not, which culminated in me having to sit in silence while she prayed over me. I recall that as the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The other thing that got to me was that a couple of my devout family members were not very nice people, and a few of the wild partiers were. So I’d have this strange contrast of seeing my uncle, a supposed pillar of the church, behaving like an ass to his kids and people around him, and totally getting away with it, while an uncle on the other side with a heart of gold and never an unkind word for anyone was condemned by my ‘devout’ family as a sinner. That taught me a lot about the intolerance that is inherent in a belief system that divides people into sinners and saints, and completed my break from religion entirely. I was probably 12 years old or so by this time.
At first, I missed it. It felt a little empty not having that warm feeling of being surrounded by God and knowing I was ‘saved’ and nothing could really hurt me. But then, I felt the same way when I stopped believing in my invisible friend when I was four. Today, I recognize that feeling as being something created out of whole cloth in my brain, created by the rituals of the church. I also recognize that you can gain that feeling in a lot of unhealthy secular ways as well, such as by totally surrendering yourself to any number of ‘isms’. Liberals and conservatives do it. It made me a skeptic of all organized belief systems.
I do think there are a lot of things that are admirable in Christianity. I think Christianity was crucial to our development of western ideas around individual rights and freedoms. I think the ten commandments are generally pretty good rules for living, minus the stuff about worshipping God. I think the golden rule is a great yardstick for measuring your behavior. I think Christians in general do good things in the world, and I have to say that the various churches I have attended in my life have been mostly concerned about doing good things and helping others. But I think we’ve moved past the need for religion as a vehicle for our moral values and social codes, and in many ways religion is holding us back.
The intellectual failings are indeed irrelevent, and in fact are as often as not inferred in reverse; it’s quite common around here to hear that all theists are idiots, determinable by the mere fact that they’re believers in a silly god. (IMHO the people who make these claims vastly underestimate the mighty and formitable powers of compartmentalization, which can allow a person of whatever intelligence to turn off their brain when the topic requires it.)
However, the moral failings of the devout are relevent, because God’s usually posited as being a moral standard for his followers, as part of is very definition. If this is the case, then logically his followers would be at least better on average than your average person, and in fact any moral failings require you to scotsman the believer - if he was a proper believer, he’d be morally infallible, so everybody’s doing it wrong, and some are doing it really wrong.
It’s kind of like saying that, if Nickelback is defined as making music that make people smarter, then if all Nickelback fans are drooling idiots, then Nickelback-the-smart-maker doesn’t exist - at least not as its fans are describing it. And with God, when you take away the believers’ credibility in describing their god, it swings the door wide for it to be anything, since there’s no other source of information about their diety, the way there is with Nickelback. A small pile of logic errors and emotional and intellectual phenomena can quite effectively fill the role.
I was lucky to be raised on by my mother’s side of the family. Had I been raised by my father’s side it’s likely that I would have been indoctrinated with religious beliefs that I wouldn’t have been able to shake even by now. My mother and her father, the two primary influences in my life, weren’t very religious at all. They were non-practicing Lutherans who didn’t spend much time teaching me about their beliefs. I vaguely remember my uncle describing the ADD I (supposedly) had in my youth as the result of Satan and that my meds were like a prison to lock Satan up. I ate that shit up as a little kid.
By the time I was in my preteens, I was still a vague believer. I don’t think it was a single moment but rather a string of moments where I prayed at the church my uncle attended and realize that it was all a bit silly. The break was as simple as that. I like to think I had been a bright kid and I just sort of knew that this was all a very complex game that we were playing. After that I described myself as agnostic to soothe the arguments from my peers at school (to them, to not believe was ridiculous), but on the inside I was an atheist.
By the time I was 15 or 16 I had started actively researching religious topics on the internet and I became a very firm unbeliever. I’m only 20 now and here I am. I don’t know if I broke off earlier than normal but it was certainly earlier than most of my friends who are now at the very least agnostic.