(Even today, it creeps me right the hell out when people talk about God. I get a primal urge to back away, wide-eyed, saying things like, “There’s no knives around, are there? Keep the knives away, people! Who knows what other crazy shit they believe in?!” Um, kanicbird isn’t anywhere around, is it?)
I never really believed. While my immediate family rarely went to church, my grandparents on both sides were heavily involved in their churches; heck, my paternal grandfather was a preacher. Whenever I visited them, which was often, church services were part of the package.
There was always doubt in my mind about it. The whole thing just seemed kind of silly.
I can remember the exact night where my doubt raised from about 30% to about 60%. I was in the fourth grade. We had a magic show at school that day. They hired a professional magician to come in and do tricks for the kids. I was thinking, “I’ll be able to tell how he does these tricks” so I sat in the front row eager to expose his ruse. But he was too good. I didn’t know how he did that stuff. I was particularly impressed by his making fire appear from the palm of his hand.
So when I went to bed that night, I asked God for a sign. I prayed, "God, if you are real, let me do what he did today. Make fire appear in my palm. Make it happen and I’ll know you’re real." I waited and waited and eventually drifted off to sleep. The next morning I woke up and basically thought, “OK, I get it. God’s probably not real.” My mind wasn’t 100% made up at that point, but it tipped the scales in that direction.
Of course, I now realize that this was not exactly the most tightly-controlled scientific experiment in modern times. But I got other reasons as time went on. My doubt never got below 60% again. Right now it’s at about 99.9999973%.
Than of course there are those idiots who jump into lion’s cages in zoos arguing that if God existed, He’d save them.
I don’t think anybody has ever risked grievous bodily harm to demonstrate that a nonexistent god won’t save them. Perhaps you’re talking about idiots who argue that god does exist, therefore they can handle venomous snakes/drink poison/ride out Hurricane Katrina in their houses or whatever.
I always called myself a birth canal non-theist in that I, like everyone, was born without a belief in God and I feel fortunate to not been indoctrinated to any religion as a child.
I don’t know what my parents believed as they are deceased and I don’t recall them talking about it one or the other. As kids we asked our dad to take us to church because we were bored on Sunday morning in our neighborhood. We only attended a few times and I distinctly recall being not favorably impressed with all the worship of an invisible being. We stopped going very soon.
I was aware that there are many religions and wondered why each one thought that they and they only were right and all the others wrong. How could that be possible?
As a teen, I had some unpleasant interactions with some neighborhood Baptists (the pushy kind) that left a sour taste in my mouth for religious types. As an adult, I have also had problems with some when my lack of religion has been found out.
I been going to my local UU church. I like the sense of community and shared values (and it is, sadly, a nice ‘cover’ for raising kids in a religious suburbia). They don’t require you believe their (or any) dogma. I don’t participate in the more religious parts but do participate in the non-religious parts.
I have been more vocal in the past about my religious views, but don’t want my kids to suffer the fall-out for my views at this time. I am open with family about my views. We have always discussed religion in what I hope is a fair and balanced way. I plan to let the kids decide what they want to believe. One is leaning skeptic, the other seems to be a deist.
I think he’s referring to the case where a guy literally did what Curtis describes. It’s a true story.
Either there’s no God, or He has a cruel sense of humor, because He didn’t save the dude.
Cite would be nice. Also: either way the guy was proved right, right?
maybe the lions had been arguing that if there were a God, he’d feed them 
I was raised in a religious family. From my perspective, we were a fairly typical Christian family. Went to church on Sunday mornings and evenings and Wednesday evenings. Went to Christian schools (that were usually the same as the church) until 10th grade (when I went to a public school that might as well have been private.) Not exactly a Bible-thumper, but I believed it.
Several years ago I had a job that had a lot of down time. I decided to write a book that put the creation story, extending throughout the Bible, into a form more understandable to the modern public. In this story, a character named Elliot was the lead programmer for a massive “sim” type game called “Univer-sim”, where the player created their own universe.* During alpha-testing, Elliot spent 6 days straight (not necessarily 6 revolutions of the virtual Earth, but 6 of his days) setting all the rules, creating the stars, the Solar System, etc for his virtual universe. (I think you can see where this is going.) I later envisioned him getting fed up with his virtual creatures not paying attention to him, and wanting to start over, but not wanting to spend 6 freakin days again, so he just flooded the earth to get a quick reboot. I envisioned that later he would more directly interact with the virtual world by creating an avatar of himself and interjecting this in the game. This avatar would, in a sense, be Elliot in computer form, and in another sense would be his son.
I just about had the whole thing outlined in my head, but there was one thing I couldn’t figure out how to resolve. Why did this avatar have to die? Elliot had set up all the rules for his virtual world. This got me thinking and looking for answers as to why Jesus had to die. I could understand why Elliot/God would want to send himself/his son to Earth to preach, but not to die. Who set up the rules that God was bound to? Why couldn’t God just say “from now on, you just have to ask for forgiveness and believe in me.”? I never found a sufficient answer to that, but my search led me to believe that it was all made up. It was a slow process over a few months. I don’t think that there was 1 moment when I went from believing to not believing. It’s hard to come to the realization that everything you had believed is your whole life was wrong, but eventually, I did.
I still think that something, maybe sentient, started the Big Bang, and I define “god” loosely enough that I consider myself more of an agnostic than atheist.
After I was certain that the Bible was made up by scientifically ignorant people over the course of several centuries, I felt like I had just escaped from a cult, and wanted to save my family. I became something of a rabid anti-Christian asshole and pissed off a lot of my family. The worse example of this was one Christmas when I was staying at my brother’s house for Christmas. I engaged my brother in a debate, trying to convince him how wrong his beliefs were. My SIL finally got fed up and loudly exclaimed that their house was a Christian house and she was not going to put up with my kind of talk. I was basically a dick with good intentions.
I have since mellowed out and now settled into a more “live and let live” philosophy. I believe that any of my siblings believing as I do would be ruinous to their marriages, so I don’t even want them to. As long as they aren’t organizing crusades or picketing abortion clinics, I don’t have a problem. I don’t preach to them, and certainly not to their children. When we get together for dinner, I bow my head when someone else prays. They don’t invite me to church, except I’ll occasionally go to some Christmas service when my SIL is performing. (I was actually a bit upset that I wasn’t invited to the event that my whole family went to when my brother became a deacon at his church, but I understand why they didn’t bother.) When we have religious discussions, we all are very careful not to stray into dangerous territory, and we don’t have these discussions in front of the children. I’d prefer it if my sobrinos didn’t even know, but apparently they do. I found out recently that their bedtime prayers often include “…and please help Uncle Andy to stop smoking and to believe in you.” (I try to hide my smoking from them also.)
- At one point, after doing some research into the creation/evolution debate and about other religions, I considered telling the stories of other alpha-testing done by other members of the programming team. For example, Darrin just threw it all out there, set the game to the fastest speed, and sat back to watch what happened. Kristy did something based on whatever I had read about Hindu creation myths. (I no longer remember, but i think it had something to do with the world being recreated every several thousand years.) Etc…
My first clue was when I was reading a Children’s Book of Bible Stories (or whatever the name was) and wondering “why the heck did God order Abraham to kill his own son? I couldn’t obey that.” I was pretty young, under the age of 10. At the time I consoled myself with the “all children automatically get to go to heaven no matter what” which I got from “suffer the little children to come unto me”.
Later, it was pretty much accidental. I got older and wasn’t a child any more and started to worry about that. The whole Elisha story bothered me (I’d read Time Enough for Love where I discovered it, and researched it). Then I found Snopes (researching the diet Coke thing), then found Straight Dope, then found talkorigins.org and read the crap out of that.
And that was that. I consider myself agnostic.