Ditto.
Reading the Bible and noticing little contradictions started me questioning when I was about 14.
My best friend in HS was raised Buddhist. The idea that people usually accept the religion they were raised in and would be damned just because of an accident of birth was what finally sent me over the edge. I just could not accept that.
It was never an argument. It was finding out that I was adopted, at the tender age of fourteen; that everyone in my family had conspired to hide it from me, and worse yet, to find out that pretty much everyone knew I was the product of sin and was ashamed to tell anyone my origins.
I knew this rocked my world at the time but I didn’t realize how much. It shattered me, and a big part of that was - it’s not my fault I was born out of wedlock, and where were the gods? Why, just read the Hindu scriptures - babies born out of wedlock are shameful and being given up or tossed downriver or neglected all the time.
Then it was a long heartfelt process.
Pretty much the same thing here. Also, finding out in school that the gospels weren’t contemporaneous didn’t help much.
I had a very religious upbringing, but it never quite “took”. Then the Problem of Evil gave my theism a wedgie.
Raised Episcopalean. The older I got and the more I was able to think about things logically and critically, the more obvious it became to me that it was all wish-fulfillment b.s. Also, though I’d suspected it before, it became increasingly more apparent that the feeling of “God’s presence” or whatever you want to call it that I would experience was coming from my own mind/will.
I’m not sure I was ever that much of a believer to begin with; I went to church because my parents made me, but it was never anything I felt strongly about.
When I was 12 and preparing for my confirmation (Episcopalian, FWIW), it kind of occurred to me that I knew people in other religions who didn’t have to go through all the prep and training for what seemed to be a pretty silly and meaningless ceremony, and I started wondering if any of it really mattered.
That turned into wondering if there was even someone/something/whatever out there to whom it would matter, and at that point, I washed my hands of the whole business.
I had a debate a few years with a friend about belief and after hours of in your face arguing, he asked me “what do you believe?” and I replied that I was 1/infinity on the side of there being a spiritual aspect to the universe. He responded that he was the same amount on there not being one. 
I was raised Catholic. Altar boy, choir, graduated CCD at 18. There being a God seemed like the default. My parents had marital problems and so from the age of about 11, not only did I do the Catholic thing, but they started looking in other churches and movements for the fix. Methodist and Baptist in various flavors. Cursillo and Charismatic movements. Cross and the Switchblade shows and people speaking in tongues.
I head to college at a university in a town self-considered as “the buckle of the bible belt” (I think they all think that.) I had an open door policy to every prosthelytizing group, mostly dominated by BAC. I took philosophy classes and history of religion.
It did not compute. So I’m “spiritual” without a belief in a God, but I stop short of Strong Atheism because I think the belief in the non-existence of God is just slightly sillier than the belief in a “one true God”.
Do you feel the same about disbelief in fairies? How about disbelief in the invisible purple squirrel sitting on your shoulder?
Mock not the squirrel! We will sup on his plentiful nuts in the afterlife!
I do stand-up, and want to ask your permission to incorporate that into my act somehow.
The point there was that I think both beliefs are silly. IMO, there’s no necessity to establishing a belief value for things you have no or insufficient evidence about.
If a child comes to me and says “there’s a monster under the bed”, I’m going to respond, “lets go take a look” rather than, “there’s no monster, go to sleep.” How you establish your beliefs and consider the asserted beliefs of others is profoundly important. Getting into the habit of rejecting things automatically based on how they fit into your “real world” is IMO, less than optimal.
In an effort to avoid a massive hijack, here is an excellent explanation of why when most of us use “atheism” we aren’t talking about a a belief.
I have to conclude based on the above statement that you think one true God existing is more likely than no gods existing. So how is it that you’re an atheist?
Yet you think believing one true god existing is less silly than being without belief?
Because you think a monster being there is as likely as one not being there or because you want to put the child at ease?
That’s not what atheists do, IME. Why do you reject theism other than “it did not compute”?
I was raised a Methodist, both my parents were science PhD’s so rational thought was encouraged. I went through confirmation as a Methodist and Sunday school every week, but generally didn’t give too much thought to the spiritual. By the time I was a teenager I was pretty sure that the bible was largely fictional, but I still wasn’t willing t give up a supreme being. As I said in my Eagle Scout Interview, I couldn’t see how something as amazingly complicated as human life and consciousness could happen by chance. Then while on a lunch break from a temp landscaping job while a sophomore in college I read about anthropic principal in “A brief history of time”. Humans were here because if we weren’t here we wouldn’t know it. That broke down my last barrier and so Atheism seemed the way to go.
A specific application of the problem of evil, wherein humans have no free will and god sends people deliberately to hell.
If a god-dude is omniscient, he knows the past/present/future. If he is omnipotent, then he controls every single thing we do and everything that happens to us. People therefore have no free will and do what god makes us do.
The god-dude doesn’t prevent everyone from going to hell, though. So he is purposely sending people to hell because they don’t have the free will to choose to do otherwise.
Life experience. God couldn’t have had a more faithful and humble servant and he pissed all over me without a second thought. Then I discovered Nietzsche and it all made sense.
From what I understand (and witnessed from friends), Catholicism takes a more skeptical approach to Christianity than most other forms, with scholars poring over texts, acknowledging inconsistencies, and generally placing an emphasis on reflection and study as a necessary component of belief and faith. Members of the Catholic Church are responsible for a decent amount of compiling and studying historical Christian works, even if they seem to openly contradict or complicate their own beliefs. Given this, it’s not hard to see Catholics being more likely to deconvert upon introspection. This is relative to people who are taught to accept the scripture as-is and simply have faith and spread the word, if for no reason other than the fact that study and reflection is encouraged, or at the very least not considered silly, evil, or taboo like some fundamentalist protestant sects consider it, or simply unnecessary like the more liberal protestants may consider it.
Eh, personally I take the same approach to anything silly and supernatural. Fair Folk, ghosts, invisible pink unicorns. My personal response is “I’m not holding my breath, but if you have good evidence I’ll consider it.” There are very few (if any) things that I express positive disbelief in.
As for how I became an Atheist? I’m not sure, I can’t even pinpoint me really, truly being a Christian. I recall being scared for her once when my mom said she didn’t believe in God when I was in 4th or 5th grade (this lasted for all of 3 days, and I think she was more “mad at God”), so I must have had some sort of belief at some point. On the other hand, I don’t think (or at least recall) I ever really understood the mechanism for a lot of things, I had a sort of cause->effect that “not believing in God sends you to hell” but I don’t think I ever had enough of a positive belief in God to attribute it to being a condemning action. By that I mean, I didn’t think God condemned you to Hell for not believing in him, so much as regardless of whether or not there was a God, disbelief in Him caused you to go to Hell, like it was a law of physics that triggered upon a very specific mental state at death.
My dad was an Atheist, though I never knew that, he didn’t really mention it and he couldn’t have been too against it since I went to church with my mom every once in a while and was baptized. After my parents divorced I ended up going to church every few weeks, but I can’t really describe what I saw it as. A thought experiment maybe? A game? Part of it was probably that since the Church had so many community elements I didn’t really associate church with god, it was more like an activity center that happened to involve praying at odd intervals (“we’re done with our rock climbing field trip! Let’s pray!”). The rest of it felt more like a drawn out philosophy class, at younger levels we were taught the stories and told what amounts to “and remember, Jesus and God love you!” And at the higher levels we switched between watching videos and reading scripture, and basically trying to extract the meaning behind different messages (same with daily devotionals at church camp), in addition to doing apologetics, such as explaining that evolution isn’t irreconcilable with God.
I think my dissociation with church and God (because of all the non-worship stuff), and my association with the scripture study as ethical philosophy and “brain teaser” exercises (“how can you reconcile these points?”) hurt my belief more than a lot of things could have. Even at church camp, they sometimes did things like making us close our eyes and listen to two rocks being banged together, to make us imagine Jesus being nailed to the cross, and a lot of people (including me), felt a dull tingling/minor pain in our wrists and ankles. My internal response was always more of a “huh… that’s a cool psychological effect” (albeit probably not as… informed sounding) more than “Jesus lives through me!”
Nonetheless, I still believed in God to a degree, partially because even though I viewed the apologetics as brain teasers, they still seemed, to me, to reconcile God with reality. I’m not sure when I technically was an Atheist, it’s a mess of memories, it was either during my confirmation, before it, or some weird combination.
Another thing, external to the church that probably helped was in 5th grade a friend and I at summer camp/daycare tried every manner of ritual we could dig up to summon Bloody Mary. She scared the shit out of me when I went to cub scouts and I was too afraid to even LISTEN to campfire scary stories (oh how things change). Well, once you’re used to trying to test dangerous terrifying supernatural claims things tend to get ruined for you.
In high school, I got into the occult, nothing major like literal belief in anything or joining covens at my high school and drinking blood. I was just incredibly fascinated by things of a wide range, like ghosts, alchemy, magic, supernatural urban legends, demonology and the like. I even got into studying other religions. I still am interested to a good degree. I tried a lot of the less illegal/question raising/painful stuff (the most amusing was trying out various spells on the internet to summon and control a succubus without dying because I was a horny teenager). Of course, none of this worked to my satisfaction, not matter how many chakras I tried to open, how much a tried to summon something, or how much I tried to pray did something happen reliably enough that I counted it. In addition to that, I’d been reading a lot since I was studying so much occult/supernatural things, which led to some questioning. Since I was interested in the little “brain teasers” at my church about reconciling God I kept giving myself even more absurd premises, and realized that sometimes I had to come to absurd conclusions. Once I gave myself the premise of a loving God… and all of God’s traits I knew of in the Bible. I ended up coming up with things like “God == Real Satan, Satan == Real God,” “God and Satan are friends, they’re totally fucking with us,” and other absurd notions because I couldn’t reconcile a lot of things, and rejected notions like “it doesn’t have to make sense” or “mysterious ways.”
I’m not sure about my confirmation period at church, I distinctly remembering only doing it to make my mom happy, even though I didn’t really believe in it, but I also remember asking questions during it that made me an atheist. I assume I probably was just on the edge by the time it rolled around, and the questions I asked merely solidified it. When I was doing my required bible study, while reading some staple chapters like Genesis and Exodus I came across the notion of the textual separation of “El Elohim” and “YHWH,” (or rather, caught on that God seemed to have different qualities in Genesis and Exodus) as well as catching onto the presence of other gods like Baal (and Asherah), and how the text seemed to support them as legitimate despite some parts contradicting this with bold claims of illegitimacy (which the Multiple Authors theory helps reconcile). Now, I don’t think I knew anything other than Baal by name, and it wasn’t exactly sophisticated textual analysis like “A History of God,” it was honestly just a sinking hunch that things were a little fragmented and inconsistent, nothing really too insightful. When I asked about my various specific Chapter/Verse pieces of concern, for the first time in church I ended up getting the “uh…” response, followed by a “well, God says” response which totally missed the question (well, yes, God says, but if there are other gods/God is multiple people, why are we taking his word for it?). I’ll freely admit that some of my hunches were based on shaky interpretations of the Bible due to English wording that isn’t supported by the Greek/Hebrew, however, but it balances out in the end.
Between that and multiple other questions, I think I finally became comfortable with being an Atheist, and I’d really consider that the point where I was really an Atheist rather than just a skeptical Christian. Although I never really let on, I went through confirmation, begrudgingly sat through Sunday School when my mom felt it important I go, and she still doesn’t know I’m an Atheist 5-7 years later.
So… now that I told that mouthful of a story, I think the arguments that convinced me the most are probably A. The notion that God is as legitimate as summoning Bloody Mary, Demons, or Fae. However, this wouldn’t have convinced me if I hadn’t studied the others so thoroughly, nor actually attempted to do a lot of occult things that simply didn’t work first. I had to set a foundation for doubting things like God’s will and Prayer. B. The basic outline of A History of God, just noticing the fact that sometimes the Bible was a bit schizophrenic in literary devices, internal consistency, wording, and whatnot ruined a bit of it.
Nobody convinced me. It didn’t take any arguments. I simply realized on my own how silly the whole thing was. Nobody ever told me Santa wasn’t real, it wouldn’t take any arguments to convince me of that fact, it just happened some time at an early age that i realized entirely on my own that my parents bought the presents.
I realized the whole reason for Jesus was nonsense. Adam and Eve? Original sin? really? Nevermind.
Took me about 22 years to figure that one out though… I guess some of us are slower than others.