Welcome (back) to the club. A black helicopter will be dropping off your anti-rapture helmet shortly.
My epiphany happened when I was in charge of the English Book Room in high school. We had a stack of Bibles for the Bible as literature segment of English, and I leafed through the introduction and for the first time discovered the multiple authors. After that, it all became clear.
The cool thing about atheism is that there is no faith. I go into atheism threads not to convert anyone, or because I think liberal religious beliefs are wrong (as opposed to incorrect) but to see if there are any good arguments (to me) for belief. I’ve been doing this on message boards for 33 years, and I haven’t found any.
How are you parsing the difference between wrong & incorrect? Are you using “wrong” as a synonym for “immoral” and “incorrect” for “lacking factual basis”?
Well, welcome to the party. I’d rejected Catholicism, then Christianity, and was floating merrily along in a kind of unexamined generalized theism, when I got seriously into urban legends and skepticism. Having developed a robust “Baloney Detection Kit,” I one day turned it on the god question, and felt my theism slipping through my helpless fingers. To change metaphors mid-anecdote, I scrabbled at the edge of the cliff I was going over, to no avail, and had to admit to myself that if I wanted to be intellectually honest, I had to say I had become an atheist.
It’s as terrifying, exhilarating, and freeing as walking outside for the first time after a lifetime of staying indoors. Try to enjoy it. It gets less disconcerting and more joyful as you go.
Intellectual-ish message boards aside, it’s not about esoteric beliefs. It’s about culture. When your family are of a particular religious faith, announcing you are no longer believe in their particular god is not actually about that god, it is the perception that you are renouncing their culture.
Any idea why that is? It’s not as if we personally had a hand in creating our cultures; all we are doing is helping to perpetuate them in a context far different from when they arose. If someone grew up in a Klansman’s household, they’d be perfectly within their rights to abandon their ‘culture’, and damn the sentiments of others.
Based on reading many, many threads on these boards and having conversations with friends, very few atheists have any kind of “A-HA!” moment where they realize they don’t believe. So in that sense, Skald, your story is pretty mainstream.
I don’t really know what the right description for me is at this point. My position may have shifted or evolved a few times over the years, but it’s never been brought on by any one dramatic event. My parents struggled for a good long while with the idea that I didn’t have any religious belief or community attachment (Princhester is right), but got over it - and they really have none either. So go figure on that one.
Why do you hate the baby Jesus so much? What did he ever do to you, other than dying voluntarily to save you from being tormented in everlasting flame? Why must you shove your preverted “values” (I put that in quotes because you obviously no values–zero, zip, nada, nothing, except maybe Satan) up Christians’ noses like this? Can’t you atheists ever learn to simply STFU and let us live our lives in peace? No, you have to yak on and on and on about your “conversion,” tempting godly Christians to reconsider their beliefs and join your little cult of baby-Jesus-haters, losing their eternal souls in the process. If we choose not to think about the central core values we espouse, why get in our faces like this and raise this whole ugly subject? Why put us down with this insulting tirade? Do you think it makes you into some kind of big man, parading your destructive “beliefs” in public this way? Isn’t it better that you kept your “beliefs” to yourself, and simply let us worship God’s holiness in our own modest and quiet way? I don’t understand your sick motives for making yourself into a public spectacle like this, and I pity your poor suffering wife.
Skald, just a quick thought about Mrs Skald seeming submissive - I’ve been lurking on these boards for ages now and followed your thread about what she had to deal with at work and her subsequent depression. Her saying ‘Whatever you want to do, honey’ might not be her being submissive per se, or feeling she has to go along with what you want, it could just be that she’s realised what the ‘big’ things in life are, and are not. Church could be not a big deal to her anymore, so if you don’t want to go, she could just be thinking, Yeah, fair enough. Ime depression makes you realise that so many things we get worked up about just aren’t that important and can be let go.
Because it’s more than just rejecting their culture, it’s rejecting them, and what they stand for.
I’m an athiest, and my mother is very Catholic. I was raised Catholic, and sometime in college I realized I didn’t believe anymore. When I told my mother she didn’t understand. Why did I reject everything I had been taught as a child? Why did I reject what she had given me, brought me up with? Wasn’t it good enough? What is ‘nothing’ better than ‘god’? I heard it all, and I still hear it from time to time today. She basically took my rejection of her religion personally, as if I was rejecting her. And in a way, I am. I mean, I kinda declared that I thought a significant portion of her world view was baloney. People don’t like challenges to their core values, regardless of what they are. You can bet that if a child of Klansmen rejected them and thier values that they would react the same way.
It wasn’t so much what she said, but how she said it, and how she’s been acting now that she’s on her newest prescription. She just seems to have lost all confidence in her own judgment and faith in herself; she asks my PERMISSION to do things and seems, I don’t know, almost paralyzed until she gets it.
I’m sure she’ll get better in time. I got very meh for ages because of depression, but as my long-suffering friends would tell you, this smart-mouthed bitch returned a few months ago more mouthy than ever.
It must be very tough on you too though. I wish you both all the very best.
Exactly. Some people have excellent moral values and believe, incorrectly, that they come from god, while others have terrible moral values and also believe, incorrectly, that they come from god.
It depends strongly on how much religion is tied to the culture. My parents weren’t atheists, but my mother grew up in a secular household (my grandfather probably was) and while my father didn’t, he rejected it when they got married. For instance, they never kept Kosher, lit candles, etc. So, when I became an atheist, there was no impact. However, if they were observant, and I started to eat bacon, then I could see the conflict. When you become an atheist, you stop doing things you’re supposed to do (like going to church) and start doing things you’re not supposed to do.
Well yes. I suppose I could have qualified by saying “when your family are strongly of a particular religious faith”.
And your last sentence is very telling, although I don’t think it is that you are supposed to go to church (in the religious sense) it is that you no longer attend the centre of their community (which happens to be their church). It’s where they do the births, marriages and deaths. It’s often where they meet their spouse, and where they get together every week to see their friends.
That’s what it’s actually all about. Forget the supernatural stuff.
Were those message boards in 1975, cork surfaces hung on the wall to which people attached notes?
My own story is that I was very religious as a kid. Went to church three times a week on many weeks. I had the impression that the very religious in America were, or would be, persecuted, so had the feeling that we clung to the church as a barrier against a corrupt world.
Learning about evolution in high school biology, looking back on it, I think planted a seed of doubt. Yes, we learned about evolution in Texas high school biology in the mid-70s. Then in college, I really started to think differently, think critically, think for myself. I had biology again, and my belief started to crumble. I recall asking myself whether the Bible could be just an old collection of myths from a primitive society, and the obvious answer is that it most certainly could, much more likely than the logical hoops you’d have to jump through to actually believe it. Then I remember talking to a guy that I worked with - we saw something on TV which I no longer even remember, and he expressed his opinion followed by an explanatory “I’m an atheist.” It was then for the first time, that I realized I was too. That was somewhere around 27 or 28 years ago.
I don’t remember it happening so suddenly for me. My family is Christian, but hardly ever goes to church. I went one time as a kid with a friend. I think in middle school getting into Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, questions popped up in my head, but the doubts really crept up in high school. I mostly stopped believing what I had been told, but held on to theism from fear of oblivion after death. I believe it was in college that I realized that believing in something didn’t make it true and accepted agnosticism which I’ve followed to this day. (I’m 27 now.) There was no single event that made me change my beliefs, but just a gradual shift in thinking.
I grew up religious. But I had questions that nobody would/could answer, so I started looking for the answers for myself. That’s when I found out that religion of any flavor is nothing but a giant con game.
I’m agnostic, though - if asked if god exists, I respond that I don’t know and neither does anyone else. Although if he does exist, I have this mental image of the class clown giving humanity a hotfoot…
