Mine was like that. But I remember around the time I stopped believing in Santa/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy being in church (raised Catholic) and thinking that no one around me honestly believed in God, and that they were all in there faking it. It was all just stories to me, much like the fairly tale books I read, and I honestly believed it was all just a ruse to keep kids from misbehaving (much like how Santa is used today, “be good or Santa won’t come”, IMO). To be honest, not much of my early religious training sunk in, as I learned at a very early age to zone out on things that I wasn’t interested in. At around age 15 I dropped out totally, even though I hadn’t believed in years.
I grew up the uber-Catholic. Catholic school, pouring over books about the Saints, giving most of my allowance away at mass, heartfully praying every day, went on religious retreats, gave two years of service as a volunteer Catholic school teacher in a poor parish, married my first boyfriend (okay I’ve always used birth control, not that brainwashed), taught in Catholic schools and am currently a volunteer religious education teacher since I stay-at-home.
I questioned believing in high school. Reading about the history of the earth was the start and going through the Evolving Planet exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago a number of years ago was the final nail in the coffin. I don’t see that there is a god and I’m okay with that.
It’s perhaps odd that I teach about God. I get twinges that what I’m doing isn’t best for my pupils and myself. I love the Catholic community though. I love the rituals, the songs, the grace and beauty of a number of nuns, fellow teachers and parishioners I’ve befriended and the history fascinates me.
I grew up in a very small town (less than 1,000 people) that had six different Protestant churches and one Catholic church. I could never understand why my friends went to a different church than I did (which was Baptist), even though we supposedly worshiped the same god. I asked myself these questions, a lot: Who was to say which was the right way to worship? Was I going to the wrong church, just because that’s where my parents went? As I grew older, I extrapolated that thinking beyond the borders of my hometown: there were other groups of Baptists who said that the way we worshiped was wrong, let alone all of the other branches of Protestantism, let alone Catholicism, let alone Judaism. If the residents of my hometown, all of whom shopped at the same grocery store, filled up at the same gas station, and the children of whom attended the same school, couldn’t agree which way to worship god, then how were the other people outside my town supposed to figure it out?
Later, I became aware that there were plenty of people in the world who didn’t even believe in the same god that all of the other religions with which I was familiar did. I came to realize that if there was one true way to worship god that would make him happy and grant eternal salvation to believers, there were a lot of people wasting a lot of time who were going to wind up in hell for all of their troubles.
If there’s one event I can point to that really sealed the deal, it was the Heaven’s Gate collective suicide in March 1997. A lot of people thought that this group of people was silly for thinking there was a spacecraft behind Comet Hale-Bopp that would take them to a different type of existence. That mass suicide happened to occur a few days before Easter, when many of those very same people who’d mocked the Heaven’s Gate believers went to church and celebrated the resurrection of a man who’d walked on water, fed a multitude with a few loaves of bread, and raised another man from the dead.
Between my confusion about which god in which to believe and how to worship him/her, and the hypocrisy that I saw at Easter that year, I decided it would be best for me if I just stopped believing in (any) god at all.
I was raised Catholic, and really tried to believe when I was young. I think it was mostly a ‘my parents told me this was right, so it must be’ thing. After a while, that kind of faded, and I started questioning things. I found out that questions got you weird looks, evasion, even anger, but never any answers. So I went out looking for questions for myself. I read the Bible cover to cover, read lots of literature on the subject, read about other religions, etc.
In college I saw a lot of religions for the first time, like Islam, Wicca, and Scientology. I also saw atheism for the first time. It blew my mind, it had never even occurred to me that it was an option. Everyone was convinced they were right, and everyone was very convinced all the others had it wrong, but still, no one seemed to have any answers. The CCC’s constant opposition to the campus gaming group I was in didn’t help much.
I fooled around with a couple of them, called myself a Wiccan for a few months, and eventually realized that none of it was real. The main big religions were in it for power and money and control, and the smaller religions just felt good. No one had any answers, they were all just either repeating the same thing that had been repeated for centuries, or making it up as they went along, and sometimes both at the same time.
I was kind of bummed about it for a while, cuz I’d had the whole Catholic thing drilled into me from day 1. I still have some habits from that time that just won’t go away. More reading into science and philosophy led me to atheism. Once I realized that I didn’t need anything like a god, I felt a lot better, like a burden I’d been carrying was gone. Been that way for years now, and never looked back.
My mother is very religious, and was really upset by all this. Every time I talked to her it was always ‘Why don’t you pray’ or ‘Just go to Church with me’. She’s gotten better, but still doesn’t really accept it. My brother got religion at one point and he gave me a lot of grief about it. He stopped after a while, but still tries every now and then.
I was raised in a dual-religion household. My mom’s family was Jewish and Christian. My dad’s religion didn’t count, since he left when I was 2. We didn’t really go to temple much, though we did go to some of the high holy services and I fasted for Yom Kippur (although I think that was my eating disorder speaking more than any holy inclination), but we did go to church almost every weekend. I was even confirmed.
At some point, though, there ceased to be a line between the two religions. Christianity just seemed like a continuum of Judaism. Then I was exposed to other religions through friends who were Hindu or Muslim or were raised by Bhuddist parents or parents who didn’t care. It seemed like every religion had the same basic ideas at their core: respect god, respect yourself, respect your family and don’t kill, hurt, steal from or commit adultery with anyone. Those “laws” seemed to be just common sense that shouldn’t require the fear of god to enforce them. So I decided that whether there’s a god or not, it shouldn’t matter what religion you practice or whether you practiced or not as long as you follow the rules (except for the respect god part, I guess).
Now I consider myself agnostic because I honestly don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I also don’t think it matters. Sometimes I miss believing. I’m not sure if it’s because I was younger or what, but religion once gave me a sense of being part of something bigger than me. Sometimes I get that feeling from being in a particularly beautiful spot outside or just watching the sun rise, but it was much easier to feel that way when I was less aware of all that’s going on in the world.
The first time I was twelve. Raised a Pentecostal Christian, I believed passionately in God & Jesus to the point that I once prayed to be able to feel a little of the pain Jesus experienced on Calvary. Then one day I chanced to come across a passage in I Samuel in which God orders King Saul to go kill everyone in the nation of Amalek, down to the baby born yesterday, even though that nation was currently at peace with Israel, because of something their ANCESTORS had done hundreds of years earlier. This only made sense, I thought, if God was a super-villain. Quite distressed, I went to my parents and raised my concerns and was told that I wasn’t supposed to understand, just to believe, accept, and be obedient. Thinking, you see, is bad.
I came back to belief in my late 20s and joined a more liberal church. But over the past few years I’ve felt my faith waning slowly, and last summer I decided that I am, at best, a Christian agnostic, and practically speaking an atheist.
Great stories all. I would like to add mine but don’t have time. Suffice it to say that after struggling through my teens over all the differing claims of the at Baptist summer bible school, Methodist church and youth groups and various other churches I tried out after leaving for college (all of which were positive experiences that I have no complaints about) it just dawned on me to consider the question from another angle. Once you really consider the possibility of a world with no God then a lot of stuff makes sense AND it becomes easy to let go of a lot difficult questions; because the questions themselves make no sense except in the context of a very rigid set of assumptions.
R.E.M. did it for me.
Same here.
I was raised Catholic, and was even Confirmed, but I don’t remember ever actually believing, even as a young child, that there was a God and Jesus and that they were somewhere above and loved me. Just seemed like a bunch of BS back then, and an even bigger bunch of BS now.
My dad was raised Episcopal and my mom was raised some vague loose version of christianity. They did not believe that any of that training should be forced upon their kids. We were not baptized and were not required to attend any sort of training.
I was free to investigate and attend church with my catholic friends as well as the occasional visit to the synagogue with the two jewish kids in the 'hood. We had various books in the house on the subject.
To answer the OP, I’ve never believed there was a god. I wondered, at times, but no one ever had a plausible answer to my questions, and as long as no one can give me a valid explanation for why this so-called superbeing isn’t as identifiable and knowable as anything else, I just can’t buy into it.
I can’t lose what I never had. I’ve never been a believer. The idea of a deity doesn’t now and never did make sense to me.
I’m not entirely sure how I became an atheist, but I can certainly recall some similar experiences to what others have said.
I was raised in the Worldwide Church of God, a Christian denomination that had some beliefs that were quite different than other denominations. I was taken to church most weeks as a child, which I only remember as being two excruciatingly
long hours of me having to be quiet, which began and ended with singing (that part I liked). I was born in 1985, and the church leader Herbert Armstrong died the following year, which led to a number of problems in the church that I was almost entirely unaware of. As a child I only remember that our family had a number of beliefs that were not shared by my friends, such as:
[ul]
[li]We held the sabbath on Saturday, so I was not allowed to play with my friends on that day. My friends believed that the sabbath was Sunday.[/li][li]We did not celebrate Christian holidays of pagan origin, like Easter, Halloween and Christmas. We instead celebrated Old Testament holidays (Passover, Feast of Tabernacles, Feast of Trumpets, Feast of Unleavened Bread, Pentecost). Unlike other posters, I was told that Santa Claus and the others were lies that parents told to their children. We spent Halloween sitting in the back of the house watching tv quietly, trying to make it look like no one was home.[/li][li]We kept rules about clean and unclean meat. Practically speaking, this meant I was not allowed to eat pepperoni pizza or bacon. I remember two instances involving the family next door, who had a son my age. They once ordered a pepperoni pizza, and I picked the meat off one slice and ate the slice of what was now cheese pizza. When I got home I was told that this was still sinful, since the meat might have been cooked into the cheese and bread. Another time I had some turkey bacon at their house, but I was told not to do that since they might’ve switched it for real bacon.[/li][li]My mother told me that she was not allowed to celebrate birthdays as a child, because the examples of birthdays in the bible are both evil. This rule was relaxed by the time I was born.[/li][/ul]
The son of the family next door told me that I was going to hell for having these beliefs, which I thought couldn’t be right. On the bright side there was no threat of hell in the WCOG, since the concept of hell was rejected as being unbiblical.
When I was 10 my mother moved to the United Church of God, an offshoot when the WCOG decided to change its doctrine to be more in line with traditional evangelical groups. At the time all I knew was the my parents were now going to different churches, and that much of the time at least one of them wouldn’t go at all.
I first thought of myself as an atheist sometime during middle school (ages 11-14), and I’ve gone back and fourth several times since then, usually to agnosticism or deism. I can’t say which, if any, of these events were actually important in my whole conversion process, but that’s what I can come up with for this thread.
I can tell you exactly. I grew up assuming that the stuff I learned in Hebrew School about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and Solomon were all true, and that Moses wrote the Torah. Then in senior year of high school I worked one period in the English book room. One of the books stocked was the Bible for the Bible as literature segment. It came with an introduction outlining the standard view of the multiple authorship of the Bible, and when it was actually written. That made me start to apply logic to the whole concept, and the slide to atheism (or ascent to atheism) began. It was not very traumatic since I was not very fervent in any case, and growing up not believing in what the majority believed (Jesus) made it easier to believe in one fewer thing.
I was brought up in a mildly protestant house. As kids, we were taken to church each Sunday, but religion never really came up at home. Sunday school was more about playing with other kids than anything else. At some point (maybe 9-10?), I started following my parents to church instead, and while waiting for the service to end, started reading the Bible on page one. It was clearly nonsense by page two, but I read most of Genesis anyway. I was suspicious, but never gave it much thought. A couple years later, my family moved, and we started attending a new church. This one had an orientation program for new members. During this program, the whole family had to go to 3 or 4 sessions at the church in the evenings during the week (which made us kids *really *hate it right off the bat). They had this questionnaire to fill out as like a final exam or something. It had all the standard conversion details. “Do you accept Christ was the son of God? Your one true savior? Yadda yadda?” That questionnaire made me a non-believer. I distinctly remember reading the questions, and thinking, “wow, what a load of crap.” I refused to fill it out (which didn’t mean anything anyway … we still attended that church). Not long after that I made friends with a kid who had some mischievous older brothers who had been a ‘very bad influence’ on him. My friendship with him cemented my non-belief.
When I realized that none of it (God, heaven and hell, salvation, souls, etc.) made any sense.
ETA: After preview, what Hajario said.
I can’t make sense of the Atonement. You have an omniscient, omnipowerful Creator of All Things That Are and they only way he can forgive you for your sins is by sending his own kid to be whacked?
I made an analogy for myself. At my house, I am the all-knowing, all-powerful Feeder of Beasts and Cleaner of Poop. To my dogs and cat, everything they know: being fed, their comfort, their health, their environment, everything is provided by me. If they want something, they pray (beg for food) to me. So, to them, I am god.
So let’s say one day the dog sneaks downstairs in the middle of the night and poops on the kitchen tile next to the back door. By Atonement logic, I should take the cat out in the backyard and shoot him in the head. He atones for all the dog’s sins. The dog is free to say he’s sorry, but he can do it again if he’s accepted that the Kitteh died for all of his sins.
That makes no sense to me. Different branches of Christianity spin the details in slightly different ways, but basically, there is no reason such a powerful Creator shouldn’t be able to forgive me all by itself if I broke one of its rules. Right? What kind of a god can’t just forgive me if I ask?
And then I realized that nothing really happened if I did something bad and didn’t repent. Atonement, sin, morality… I don’t think much of it has anything to do with religion. The more I studied it and thought about it, the more religion seems to be about controlling behavior than it does really offering peace, love, and guidance to the religious. And get this – you can get peace, love, and guidance without religion at all. So I fail to see the need for or purpose of Atonement.
I just want to jump in here with an observation, then I’ll jump right back out.
One common theme running through a lot of these posts (but not all) is how the poster in question started to direct many pointed questions at mom/dad or religious authority figures, and none of them could answer their questions, which caused them to fall out of/outgrow their childhood faith.
It has been my contention that Western Christian faiths do a very poor job of fostering this kind of spiritual growth, and indeed often actively try to inhibit it. This article goes into some depth about the distinction between what he calls legitimate & authentic religion. From the article:
“The capacity of a religion to provide horizontal meaning, legitimacy and sanction
for the self and its beliefs—that function of religion has historically been the single
greatest “social glue” that any culture has.”
Contrast that with the authentic side of faith:
“Where translative religion offers legitimacy, transformative religion offers
authenticity. For those few individuals who are ready—that is, sick with the
suffering of the separate self, and no longer able to embrace the legitimate
worldview—a transformative opening to true authenticity, true enlightenment,
true liberation, calls more and more insistently.”
But once a person starts questioning, trying to break free of the legitimate creed’s constraints, there’s often no room for said growth in said religious structure, and the authority figures will try to aggressively quash such explorations on the part of the given individual. A more authentic religion, perhaps such as Buddhism, would embrace these insights on the part of the questioner, and not fight them: “Yes! The old myths are bullshit! Now here’s what you can do from that point onwards…” It’s thus kind of sad that many in this thread felt they had no other choice than to forsake their childhood faiths completely and embrace (can’t find a better word sorry) a non-religious viewpoint.
I was raised going to Catholic mass and Sunday school. When I was somewhere between 10-16, I just lost any belief and stopped going. I’m not sure if I ever really believed.
I’ve reflected over the years on why I don’t believe in a religion, and specifically Christianity, and I think it’s because I could never accept an omnipotent, omniscient Deity who is all good having any control over the real world. I’ve just never believed that all of the evil and suffering was necessary to any end. Psychoanalyzing myself, I think that my inability to accept that stems from the fact that my father died unexpectedly when I was 18 months old, leading to the death of my unborn sibling when my mother miscarried. I’ve never found a reason why an all-powerful, all-knowing God would have to have let that occur.
Why sad? Religion has no true purpose. It is a very helpful social club at best and a horrible tool of oppression at its worse.
On the contrary, I find it refreshing when people don’t just go along with what they’ve been told. There’s nothing sad about it.