Former theists turned atheists: what arguments were most effective in turning you?

Great Debates
21

I grew up poor and I always wanted a nice family with a mom and cooked casseroles instead of a mother who worked three jobs and family who lived far away. :stuck_out_tongue:

I always wanted to be something better than myself, but I can’t remember the last time I believed in a god (or Jesus). When I was little, I lied and I thought I was going to Hell or something and I freaked out for a whole YEAR. After that, I was like…hey! *I can always be forgiven for whatever I do!*This shit is bananas! and became a very enlightened kindergartener who lied a lot. My dad paid for private Christian school, so I had a pretty strict and religious 7 hour day and secular pot smoking mom at home. **My first religion has always been reading, which in turn led me to develop a love of political science, philosophy, and history. **

My rejection of Jesus had nothing to do with a rebellion - it was just nonsensical. What kind of god expects you to believe in something you can’t see, hear, or feel? Gives you free will and no evidence and then punishes you for using your brain? I was open to the idea of deities (I was an oddly superstitious child) but nothing struck me as factual. Possible, like aliens or Yeti, but nothing I needed to be concerned about.

I once got into trouble for writing an essay that forgave the Jews for killing Jesus by virtue of “Jesus appearing to be a treasonous schizophrenic magician.” I was in fifth grade and they made me stay in at recess and they prayed for me a lot. :frowning:

I think I always wanted to believe in god, so I had ideas about being a Catholic doing charity in Zimbabwe or a being Buddhist or something. Jews seemed all right, but that angry God thing was a little weird. Plus I was always told in school that Jews were a race. A local library in eighth grade would tell me different. :o I had also started public school, so you can imagine how geeked out I was in bio class.

I decided to convert to Judaism, so I contacted a rabbi when I was 17 and went through The Haze.

God wasn’t really an issue - I didn’t* care* - but for whatever reason, I couldn’t not be Jewish. I had made some weird intellectual decision around the age of 15 or so and I had to wait. Long wait. I wasn’t about to go Orthodox, even though I wished (at the time) that I had the guts. Conservative worked all right. But seriously? That was a hard hard thing to do. Hard.

So AFTER ALL THAT, I found out my mom’s family had been Jewish and converted via assimilation and sending their kids to Lutheran school! I was like, WTF! You didn’t tell me this?! :eek:

And she’s like, “Well I never really thought about it…I mean, it was a rumor but you know how I went to Lutheran school. And my mom is so stuck in her German ways.” And I was like, “?!? aaaa–gg---- ! ! I went through two years of Judaism classes! It sucked!” She pauses and says, “Honey, I just thought Nana’s Yiddish swearing was German slang!” So I’m all :smack: and she muses, “I didn’t know you could be born Jewish.”

and I was all :smack::smack::smack::smack::smack: for the next several months.

Now I think it’s kind of funny when God-fearing Orthodox rabbis hear that, because they get all puffed up with pride about how God works in mysterious ways…and then worry about my attendance at a Conservative shul. :smiley:

Atheism wasn’t a terrible spiritual journey or anything. It was just logical. You’d have to peel the skin off my eyeballs to get me to leave Judaism, though.

I think it’s pretty natural to want to belong to something or to want to have something for yourself. Religion has been around since mankind discovered his consciousness. So I’d suspect that most monotheists have doubts, even if they aren’t so verbal about it. They have to…otherwise “faith” wouldn’t be such a hard-hitter. :wink:

I think people here are ‘suffering’ from bad religious experiences. What do bad people have to do with deism? The idea of a supernatural supreme being is that that being is 100 per cent separate from humans. It’s rather paradoxical because gods are always defined by humans, but I don’t deny the possibility. I think this makes me a ‘weak’ atheist.

In high school, I wrote an essay about “The Great Social Experiment”. It was about God planting Adam and Eve in a garden full of germs and seeing what would happen over the course of the next five thousand years.

If there is a God, he’s either 1) not paying attention or 2) having himself a quiet chuckle right now.

22

former roman catholic. studied geology. that didn’t turn me but it certainly helped a lot. i think it was the “free-will” argument.

i choose not to believe.

23

The complete lack of evidence, the fact that religion contradicts much of what we do know to be true, and the sheer evil of it. Oddly enough it wasn’t comparison to real-world religions that turned me against the Christianity I was raised in, but the made up religions of science fiction. It was kind of noticeable that unlike everything else in sci-fi, the made up religions had just as much evidence for them as “real” religions do.

24

I’m not sure what it means that so many of of those responding were raised Catholic. Of those who have responded and identify what denomination they were, 7 out of 10 so far say they are ex-Catholic. Assuming no statistical fluke, is it just a reflection of higher base numbers of dopers with Catholic backgrounds, or are Catholics more likely to turn away and become atheists than other denominations? The former seems improbable given that my understanding is that only about a third of US Christians are Catholic.

25

I wouldn’t say I’m an atheist but one of the main things that really shook me when I was younger was the suggestion that Paul didn’t write some of the letters attributed to him.

No-one in the Church had ever mentioned it to me, so I felt that I’d been lead up the garden path a bit. It made me wonder what other stuff they were “hiding” (e.g. confusion over the dates of the census in the Gospels, that kind of thing).

Another one which no-one I’ve asked in the church has been able to totally answer is:

  • If death and pain only entered God’s initially perfect creation as a direct result of human Sin (cf. Romans 5), then it suggests that before Adam’s fall no other animal ever got ill, felt pain, or died.

  • The fossil record suggests this cannot be the case, in which case death and pain (i.e. the markers of a “fallen” creation) were already present before humans arrived.

  • Therefore it’s not possible to blame a fallen creation on human activity, as creation was already fallen. So nothing for us humans to apologise for, which knocks holes out of the resurrection purpose.

:slight_smile:

26

I didn’t say, but I am a former Catholic, too.

27

It all started in religion class in 5th grade. Sister Something was lecturing about baptism and how you had to be baptized in order to get into heaven. I asked what happened to babies who died before their parents had them baptized. She said, in so many words, that they were SOL. I said that wasn’t fair. She was not amused.

28

The movie Ghost, though I wasn’t exactly a keen believer beforehand.

29

Same with me.

30

Me too (dual traditions for me, actually - RCC and Southern Baptist).

31

To be honest, I was born this way. I never remember believing in God. I could say it was my parents’ experiences in the Holocaust, or my naturally skeptical view on life, or something I heard at Synagogue, but the reality is that I never believed.

32

+1

33

I think it was a long road for me. When I was a teenager I believed in aliens and UFOs being aliens and all that. I was introduced to a Shermer book which introduced me to skepticism. It also squashed my creationist beliefs. I hadn’t really thought about them before, per say. It’s not like I went around debating my beliefs. I had internal struggles occasionally with my beliefs in that I didn’t think I was a good Christian or good believer.

So for a few years I was a theistic evolutionist. I read Spong and a few other people (Miller and the guy who wrote “Your God is too small”). Belief in God/Christianity in general was largely unassailable. I had read the bible and although I didn’t believe all of it literally I still thought that God was speaking through it. I suppose I believed that I was simply too ignorant to understand it fully.

I can’t recall what it was that made me want to search out a specific website on astrology and ancient beliefs, but I was tooling around one day and I came across a website that essentially asserted that Christianity was nothing more then a religion based on the Sun. I think it might have been Acharyia’s website (I created a thread on it, back in 2003 on Internet Infidels). After some careful research I discovered that there were huge flaws in the website.

That said, the damage was done - it shook me to the core to consider that I could have been fundamentally mistaken about my beliefs. That what essentially amounted to a completely different religion was a viable alternative to Christianity. What I mean is that it was the first time that I considered that what I believed was entirely wrong - as opposed simply being ignorant about what a particular chapter/verse was supposed to mean.

So I had a thorn in my mind and I applied some skepticism to my beliefs. I decided to start reading philosophical argumentation AS WELL AS what scholars thought about early Christian beliefs. I encountered Gnosticism, problems with the manuscripts, Justin Martyr arguing that the Pagans had an inferior version of Christianity (ie, that Christian beliefs/ideas were not really unique), amongst other things. At the same time I was doing this I was essentially praying 3-4 times a day for guidance. I usually prayed everyday, but not specifically for my faith to strengthen (except during times when I thought I wasn’t a good Christian). This period lasted quite a while and the result was that I had to admit that I was an atheist. I still prayed for months afterward - on the chance that i was missing something or wrong. I also debated the issue feverishly on several websites and continued my research with regard to the issue.

After a year or so, I no longer accepted that “God” should just be accepted as a coherent entity. That ‘creation’ was a coherent concept and a lot of other foundational beliefs. As the years passed I became comfortable with uncertainty - something that I think a lot of people struggle with. It seems to me that one of the primary reasons for God is as a weak explanation - an appeal to ignorance. So, when asked how did the universe come to be, I can accept that I don’t know (I have some suspicions) and I can realize that ‘God did it’ is not an acceptable answer since “I don’t know” is NOT evidence for “God did it”.

34

I was always skeptical, but I tried to be a Christian. What happened with me was, one by one, I eliminated supernatural claims. First was psychic stuff, and then general woo. The final nail in the coffin was The Amazing Randi’s book Flim Flam. Once I was convinced that all supernatural claims were hoaxes or misunderstandings, I finally applied it to Christianity and Theism and almost overnight I was free.

35

I was definitely a true believer until around 16, when I had a crisis of faith. I wouldn’t call myself a fundamentalist but I was a pretty staunch Lutheran. The problem of hell was the big one for me. I was raised in a multicultural area and had many friends who were raised in non-Christian households, and the concept of them going to Hell for rejecting Jesus – as I was told they had done – just never sat right with me. In my early teens, I recall going through an obsession with the Rapture, and hoping that it would happen so that all of my friends would have evidence for the Bible being right and convert. I also had a very strong feeling of unfairness when I realized most people don’t question their religion, and just follow along with their parents or their culture. Why should a Hindu go to Hell for obeying their parents, and a Christian go to heaven for the same?

Obviously, the Rapture (which would have sorted out all my issues at that time) didn’t happen despite my fervent prayers. Meanwhile I spent a lot of time arguing with people online (BBSes, in those days) about my views. I can’t say that any particular argument swayed me but sooner or later I just got to the point where I realized I had no evidence of God’s existence in my life. Even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to put God to the test, I started praying for evidence, or even just a religious experience to help me have faith. That didn’t happen either. I started giving myself deadlines. If I don’t have evidence for God’s existence by Easter, then I won’t be Christian anymore. Then I’d extend these. Et cetera. All the meanwhile I started to realize about all of the things I had taken for granted as true that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Finally I just started understanding I didn’t believe a lot of it. I didn’t go right to atheism though. Secretly, I started practicing neo-paganism (I did feel a very strong link to it on an emotional level, and had some religious experiences, but it was a very difficult time in my life and I was pretty susceptible). I started avoiding church and finally had a drag-out fight where my parents accused me of being an atheist, and I just said I wasn’t, but that I didn’t believe in organized religion anymore.

Even as a Pagan, I had a lot of problems since so many books and things aimed at that group are full of just the worst kind of horseshit, and I knew it. I explored that area for awhile, sought out a few other Pagans in college, and eventually just realized that this was all bullshit too - just bullshit that I personally found appealing. I realized that my religious experiences were coping mechanisms, and that I could appreciate ancient myths and stories without believing in magic (or “magick”, eugh) or gods or anything like that.

So, I called myself an agnostic at that time (or a “seeker”, as I was definitely seeking the truth). I explored a lot of things, from hanging out with far-right crazy street-preaching fundamentalists – and trying to debate them – to taking different college courses in Buddhism, Islam, etc. I never really settled what I thought in college.

Finally, after hanging out at the Dope for awhile, I realized I was not an agnostic and that I was just afraid of the connotations of the word “atheist”, but that’s what I am – and that it was cowardly for me to avoid the title when it was, actually, the truth of my beliefs. And there I am.

So, in summary, I can’t say anyone else’s arguments swayed me particularly, but being in situations where I had exposure to many people of different viewpoints and, particularly, skeptics was very helpful to me over the long haul.

36

Raised Southern Baptist - the full deal, three times a week at church, revivals, vacation bible school, etc…

For me it was two things:

(a) Science - the complete inability of the church to deal with scientific truth, going so far as to pitch what I knew to be lies, made me question everything else they said as well.

(b) Exposure to other religions - the more I learned about, say, Hinduism, the more I came to realize that a billion people believed just a strongly in something other than what I was taught. I saw no reason to think that one group was right and one wrong, since neither made verifiable claims. So it was easier to conclude that they were both wrong.

37

I was pretty young. I remember realizing that other people had different religions and they couldn’t both be right. Why would God create the world and allow more than half of it to worship the completely wrong religion, based on nothing more than the random circumstances of where they were born?

If God created the world and required you to randomly be born in the correct country to have a chance at heaven, he’s an asshole. If not, that means that he allows people of the incorrect religion (or perhaps no religion) into heaven. If that’s the case, why bother with any religion at all? You’re more likely than not to choose the wrong one and unless God’s an evil monster it won’t matter anyway. Sort of a reverse Pascal’s Wager.

Eventually as I got older I realized that all things supernatural were the result of wishful thinking and delusion.

38

I’ve mentioned it before (I think it was a MPSIMS thread a while back) that this board actually helped me immeasurably when I was coming to accept my atheism. So thanks for that guys :slight_smile:

I was raised Pentecostal, and it was pretty intense, just like Sleel describes. Faith healing, speaking in tongues, etc. I always struggled with it and tried so hard to make it fit. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I began to really question the roots of what faith I had.

Two big things swayed me:

  1. My brother became very ill, had numerous operations, and was in the hospital for months. He’s such a good guy and was a sweet kid of only 14 or so when this was happening: I couldn’t understand how the god I believed in at the time would let that happen. It’s selfish, I know, that this was one of the tipping points, and I always was troubled with the problem of evil in a world with a benevolent, omnipotent god, but it really struck close to home with that.

  2. Good old book learning. As an undergrad I was exposed to so much more discussion and reading about different religions and their faiths, as well as the science of evolution. I didn’t set out to study evolution, but I found it so interesting and ended up taking quite a few biology and psychology courses, many of which focused on explaining the features of an organism in terms of their evolutionary fitness.

I still remember one conference I attended where a professor used mathematical equations to model the pressure of evolution and the move towards a complex system that could arise out of randomness. It was a culmination of many things, but this moment in particular sticks with me; I left that conference an atheist, having finally surrendered any belief in a god. And I couldn’t be happier. :slight_smile:

39

I was never devout, but I was raised a christian and believed in God as a youth.

When I was about 12 I was riding in the car with my grandmother, a devout christian and a wonderful woman.

Considering the solar system, I said “isn’t it amazing we are just the right distance from the sun, not too hot, not to cold”, and so on. She replied, “yeah, I guess God had it all figured out.”

God’s role had never occurred to me. At that moment I realized, in my heart, I was not a believer. I came to the conclusion that religion had always been simple answers to scary, complex questions. Nothing since has changed my mind.

40

I was definitely not hardcore, but I did believe that the stuff in the Bible happened, and that Moses wrote the Torah. (Being Jewish, I never believed that Christianity bunk.) When I read in the introduction to the Bible used in our Bible as literature section of English that the Torah actually had multiple authors, and it was written long after it was supposed to be written, it all became clear. Actually reading the Bible all the way through in grad school turned me from a mild atheist to a sure one - as sure about that as anything in science, that is.

Hooray for education!