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

Great Debates
81

Maybe you were just a good kid?

Not even an Apostle’s Creed thrown in? Sheesh, I had a couple of tough priests. One that counted penance in # of rosaries, and another progressive priest that actually assigned “chores”. You had to go do something for someone you’d wronged.

One of the other big problems I had was that it was pretty common dogma in most of the Christian churches I attended that you could not understand the bible unless you already had the Holy Spirit in your heart. That was a huge issue for me at that time because my interest in books exploded about that time and they’re telling me that nothing I could bring to bear on understanding the Bible would help until I believed.

82

For me it was more of a rebellious thing. I was just a kid and went to a Baptist church, that was constantly throwing Hell fire and damnation in my face.

I convinced myself that no matter what I did, I was going to burn in hell anyway. So I said “Fuck it!” And chose not to believe.

Shortly after that, I grew a fondness for all things science which only cemented my new found atheist beliefs. (Or Non-beliefs?)

83

I lost my faith over the course of my 15th or 16th year. On my 15th birthday, I was a believing Christian. On my 17th, a true atheist. It sort of slid off over that timeframe.

The biggest push for me started as a thought experiment: “What if I was an atheist NOW? What if I had never been exposed to the tenants of my faith, and was deciding whether to believe?” It was fairly clear early on that I wouldn’t be convinced to be Christian. I was sort of a general theist for a while, believing in a nebulous higher power. For a while, I would have said I was “spiritual but not religious.” Yeah, I was that guy for a while.

Eventually, I realized my theism was just habit. I realized I didn’t need “powerful force in the sky” to explain anything, and it made no sense to assume something extra. I also realized that any “higher power” truly capable of omniscience and omnipotence would be so far from a known conscious entity that calling it “God” seemed like needless anthropomorphization.

84

I was never a theist, but if you’d like to hear a funny, smart, meaningful story of a theist’s journey to atheism, watch Julia Sweeny’s “Letting Go of God”. She was a very committed Catholic, had very seriously considered becoming a nun, and her path, very interestingly, began as her wanting to get closer to God. The part where she describes her experiences in Bible study are priceless.

85

Super fundie kid weighing in (to balance out all the ex-Catholics)

Mom was raised Lutheran, so she really emphasized reading and studying the Bible and theology, unlike most fundies around us.

Despite that, I was way into it - we were those awful people putting Chick tracts into public bathrooms and confronting people in veils and turbans and prayerfully asking them to consider God.

You ever seen Jesus Camp? Yeah, that was me. I was every one of those little girls.

What killed my faith? To be blunt; the ‘health and wealth gospel’ doesn’t work too well when your dad dies of cancer.

… and then you blame the kids for their father’s death (in church, during a sermon) because they are obviously secretly evil and have unresolved sins.

… and then you perform exorcisms on them.

… and then you shun the whole family and kick them out of multiple churches for not fitting in with your required “look” to be the perfect advertisement for your congregation because you’re a widow with orphans, and OBVIOUSLY not healthy and wealthy.
So yea. They pretty much did themselves in. Once I got over the soul shock, I came away with the burning realization that I had been indoctrinated quite well.

Other than a burning hatred for a few dozen southern congregations, and a total lack of any ability to be near prayer and scripture any more, I feel like I came out of it fairly well, all things considered. At least I still have my brain.

The sad part is, my mother kept crawling back until someone took her in, and to this day, she blames me going away to college for my lack of faith. :frowning:

86

This is not the moment when I became an atheist, but this is when the first seed was planted:

I was maybe around 8 or 9, and in sunday school (Reform Jewish). We were learning that Abraham was the first Jew, in fact he was the first person to believe in only one God, when everyone else believed in many Gods. I asked the teacher why Abraham was right and everyone else is wrong. What makes believing in one God better than believing in many Gods? What if Abraham were wrong? What if someday we discover that there really are many Gods . . . or no Gods at all?

The teacher had no answer to my question, except to say that we believe in only one God.

That was my first step down the slippery slope of atheism.

87

I was raised in a United Methodist Church, but there wasn’t one moment that made me lose my faith. It started sometime in high school with the “classic” arguments against theism, and I flirted with the atheist label as early as my sophomore or junior year. My senior prom date, one of the first girls I really liked, belonged to some Bible-thumping, laying-on-of-hands, speaking-in-tongues version of Christianity, and called me one night to give me some kind of bizarre quiz from her youth pastor. I tried to give her the answers she wanted to hear, which I vaguely remember bothering me, but it didn’t work, and she broke up with me. That didn’t help.
I gave it one more try in college, even going to some kind of Christian retreat where a lot of the kids “found God.” I didn’t.
I continue to refine my attitudes on my atheism… I’m pretty firmly entrenched into it now, but I sometimes feel the need to preach when people start annoying me with their stupidity. I don’t like that part of myself, so I try to control it, just like I would like for Christians to do (funny, I’ve never been preached to by a Buddhist, or Muslim, or anything else…). At some point I realized that the only time I’ve ever been to church willingly was in Basic Training where the alternative was spending one-on-one time with the T.I. Every time I’ve gone to my church at home was either because that’s just what we did on Sundays or to make my family happy. I accidentally “came out” on Facebook recently, over a Jeep pickup of all things, when I forgot that some people actually read my posts there. I didn’t really intend to do that to my grandma and grandpa, because it probably made them feel better to believe whatever they wanted to believe about my faith, but I feel like they’re at least smart enough to treat me the same when I’m with them. I just know they’re praying extra hard for me now.

88

I was 12 years old, and in a fundie X-tian school. My parents weren’t religious, but they wanted a better education for me than public school.

The kids in the Christian school bullied me twice as worse as the kids in public school, and even got physical – something public school kids never did. It was real Chocolate War kind of bullying, with no exxageration

I bought into the school’s theology. Why wouldn’t I? God helps all his children, and I was fairly desperate for help. I couldn’t make them stop on my own.

I prayed to Him to show me the way to make them stop. For a full month.

I started hating God the following Friday when, after an hour of prayer for a particularly bad day, I found myself thinking that that suicide would make the pain go away…

43 years later, the bullying has still had a profound negative effect on my life, and attitudes and permanently sent me into bi-polar swings.

I’m not an Atheist. I’m an Anti-Theist. The world will be a better place without religion in it.

89

(This is kind of long, with a sidebar at the end.)

I was raised in a not-very-religious home. My father was a practicing unbeliever, but he went through the motions to please my mother. She operated on a “that’s what everyone does” philosophy about belief and church. We belonged to a very middle of the road Methodist church, where I was confirmed (or something like that) at the age of 13. They sent us kids to Sunday school every week, but I later figured out that it might have been so they could have some alone time together.

Anyway, I think I was around 11 when I started actually thinking and applying logic to the things I was hearing in sermons and in Sunday school, instead of just passively accepting them. By the time I was 13 I was pretty set as an unbeliever, based on religious stuff not making any sense, but without any further grounding in “atheism”.

Then when I was 16 I read the Ayn Rand Playboy interview (Mom, I’m reading it for the articles! And I really was). In that interview, she was asked “Do you believe in God?” and her answer was “Of course not.” That way of saying it, instead of a simple “no”, was a real eye-opener to me, so I started reading further and in college I was a philosophy major for a while. I was at one college where I was required, as a philosophy major, to take a philosophy or religion course. I found every argument against a belief in god convincing, and all of the ones in favor unconvincing, based on my grounding in logic. And nothing has changed ever since.

However (this is the sidebar) I am not among those who say that actively believing and participating in organized religion is always a bad thing. I have seen it have a very beneficial influence on my sister. She has done all this work herself, though she doesn’t realize it, but her religion and belief have given her a channel through which to work on her issues in a very productive way. She might have done it another way, but this worked for her, and I’m grateful for it.
Roddy

90

I’d like to say that I don’t feel angry or bitter toward reasonable religious people. I can understand that some people find comfort in it. Just as long as religious people don’t poke it into everyone else’s lives of course. It never brought me happiness or comfort though.

I was raised in a quite strict and fundamentalist family who belonged to a fairly small lutheran congregation. The church was very old fashioned and believed in things like a literal interpretation of the bible, 6000 year old Earth, evolution being a lie, homosexuality being a sin, women being subservient to their husbands and so on. Religion to me came with a lot of baggage, and it was a long and hard process letting go of it. I remember two things in particular from my childhood that were probably my first doubts about religion. One was the problem of evil and the existence of hell, and the other was the contradictions between the bible and reality.

I remember learning about astronomy when I was around 10 or so, and learning about light traveling from distant stars to the Earth. I asked my parents how light traveling for millions of years fit with the 6000 year old Earth I had been taught to believe in. It’s a long time ago, but from what I remember they seemed a little uncomfortable answering it. The answer I got in the end was that “God created the light already on way to Earth.” This to me felt like God was cheating. What was the point of trying to find out how things were if God had just made them look another way? In the end I was too afraid to question too much though, ended up burying my curiosity for a pretty long time, and instead focused on things that wouldn’t bring up the contradictions like mathematics. I always suspected that if I probed too deep, I wouldn’t be able to explain what I’d find, though.

The moral questions were more influential, though. The treatment and beliefs about gays and women seemed fundamentally unfair to me. I was also very concerned about the unpardonable sin, which I had stumbled upon while reading the bible. It says that “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven.” The church believed this literally too, and I remember worrying if I had committed it or not. In general it seemed like the more I read the bible, the more questions and concerns I had. The book of revelations in particular was a pretty disturbing thing to read. I was very frightened of hell, and more than a little afraid of God too. I knew my friends weren’t believers, so they were going to hell according to what I was taught. Someone I knew somewhat distantly committed suicide when I was still a child, and I knew they hadn’t been a believer. Some people comforted me that “Maybe he converted before he died,” but it seemed a hollow and unlikely comfort to me.

While observations about physical reality and science eroded my belief in a literal interpretation of bible bit by bit, it was the moral questions of hell and the problem of evil that was at the core of my deconversion. It also felt like fellow believers would always have better arguments for the biblical contradictions than the moral issues. I was very naive back then, and bought a lot of stupid arguments in favour of a literal bible. However, it seemed like most moral concerns would usually be answered uncomfortably with something like “You just have to trust in God” or “You just have to believe that it works out alright in the end.”

The whole deconversion process took me from the age of 10 to about 21 or 22 with various stages of belief. I eventually did start reading more on science bit by bit. I became familiar with TalkOrigins when I was around 20 or so, and Bad Astronomy back when it was still a website instead of a blog. Bad Astronomy was also my first real exposure to skepticism. One night I just decided to stop believing. It wasn’t an easy process getting there, but in the end I felt a lot happier without religion, and it felt like a weight off my shoulders. Afterwards I became interested again in many of the things I had ignored in my childhood. I remember a few weeks after I stopped believing I was walking outside on a clear night with no clouds, and I noticed the stars again and understood them. They were beautiful.

91

It was much the same for me.

No Santa Claus + inductive reasoning = atheism.

92

Personally just being exposed to rational and reasoned arguments had a great impact. Whether it’s a newsgroup, an internet forum or a public debate, you usually don’t have nearly as much chance of convincing the person you are arguing against. The fact that they are arguing usually means that they believe it pretty strongly, and have researched it at least somewhat. You do however have a good chance at convincing some of the audience. For every person arguing about something, there’s probably 5 or more lurking, reading, and being influenced by the argument. I never posted a single post on TalkOrigins, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t influence me.

You might also be surprised at how much it’s possible to willingly avoid as a believer, and how effective it is. I don’t think I even knew about the existence of Islam until stumbling upon it in religious studies class. It’s possible to avoid debate on the internet about religion or science, but it’s not possible to avoid a high school biology class. I think this is one of the reasons religious groups find teaching science in schools such a threat.

93

Alright, I’ll cop to something. I started posting on these boards some years ago, I have always maintained during that time that I was a devout Catholic. In truth sometime in the mid-1980s I rejected Catholicism and the entirety of religious belief.

The reason I have avoided the label “atheist” is that I have always felt most atheists had some sort of emotional trauma from a fundamentalist protestant upbringing and were basically the equivalent of children lashing out at their parents.

For various reasons I have decided it is wrong to continue such a large deception in my posting here and I’ll openly admit I am an atheist.

As to the topic of this thread, the most persuasive argument I ever heard went like this:

Me: Why are there so many different versions of the bible that history has argued about?

Priest Humans are flawed and will present many interpretations of the Word of God.

Me: So God couldn’t get us right?

To me that was the moment of revelation, when I recognized that under the very logic of the Christian God he was essentially ridiculous I stopped believing.

94

I was raised vaguely Protestant by rather non-religious parents, one of whom (I would later learn) fits the anti-Church ex-Catholic mold pretty well. (Ex-Protestants have left a congregation; ex-Catholics are refugees from a global empire. That, and a lot of them went to insane Catholic schools that will warp you in one direction or another.) I don’t even remember which church I went to because we moved for the first time when I was seven and never bothered to find another to go to. It was never even discussed in my presence, as far as I can recall.

Anyway, I was an atheist by the third grade. It wasn’t really an argument that turned me, but the inescapable sensation that prayer was just talking to myself. I really tried to pray. I honestly put forth as much effort as I had at the time to contact… something. I got myself.

(So I had an existentialist epiphany in my first decade or so on the planet? That’s how I recall it, anyway.)

My big revelation wasn’t so much that deities aren’t real, but that there’s a whole lot of atheists in the world and even in this country once you leave the Bible Belt. Getting into the Internet was vital to this process, even before I found this place.

95

So are you also acknowledging that this characterization of the origin of atheism in other people is not accurate?
Roddy

96

This thread pretty much confirms what I’ve thought for a long time. Evangelism is a waste of time. Either people are seeking a religion to latch on to, or they aren’t. Even as a kid, it seemed disrespectful to go peddling your deity door-to-door like it was a Kirby vacuum or something.

The flip side is, you’re never going to convince a believer that their beliefs are wrong. It’s a waste of time and effort. Their interpretation of their experiences will either confirm or destroy their faith, but arguing with them is pointless.

97

I was questioning religion long before I heard any atheist arguments. The things that got me were the really petty rules like, men shouldn’t have long hair. Why? Because the bible says nature teaches us that it is shameful. What in nature teaches us that? (no response) Men shouldn’t wear earrings. Why? Because that was a sign that someone was a slave. (Deut 15:17) Then of course there was the belief that the world was 6000ish years old and was created in a week, which completely conflicts with what we are learning about this planet. Things like this really made me wonder what the point was.

The idea that I was automatically going to hell because I’m gay was a big one too.

I tried paganism for a while, because it made more sense to me. Over time though, I realized that I didn’t really believe there was any sort of supernatural entity. I have yet to see any proof that there is, but I can’t prove that there isn’t so being agnostic is what makes the most sense to me. So far, that seems the most logical choice.

98

I’m the same way, which is why I’m atheist. Atheism isn’t a faith claim: It is, in modern usage, the idea that nothing is taken on faith alone, that evidence is required.

Agnosticism is, from what I can tell, more often used to name the belief, taken on faith, that humans cannot understand what is called the supernatural and so no statements about it can be made, not even the statement that it is unproven.

99

I would probably define myself more as what Wikipedia terms Weak Agnostic.

100

That’s about one’s view of knowledge, not what they believe. That doesn’t tell us whether or not one has a belief in God/gods are not. If you’re a weak agnostic you’re still either an atheist or a theist. From that same Wikipedia article:

Based on what you’ve said, you’re an atheist.