I was visiting the family recently and the subject of my being an atheist came up. One of the things they’ve done as long as they’ve known I’m a heathen/non-believer/etc is speculate on what event in my known history changed me. You see, I can’t have reached such a position intellectually, despite long being considered an egghead - there had to be some life-changing experience that had me standing in the rain with my Coke-bottle glasses misted with fury, shaking my 12 year-old fist at the heavens as lightning flashed, renouncing religion. I fell off my bike, I got a B on a test, something.
My grandmother’s long-held suspicion was the death of both parents at 5. One aunt cites the car accident we were in on our way to church one Sunday (unfair, in her opinion, as we were miraculously unharmed). Another aunt thinks it’s when I hit my head falling of the swings as a toddler. My siblings still chalk it up to rebellion.
Curious if other Dopers have had that happen. What do they attribute it to? And do they, like my relatives, expect you to come running back to church when you encounter tragedy? (Two popular speculation topics in my family are what tragic event would make me return to God and what circumstances would make me cry; to be fair, my friends also love proposing scenarios for the latter as well. It’d almost be worth crying someday, just to see the reactions. Yeah, no - it wouldn’t).
Nicely done! My guess is that you are an atheist because you are a good writer and the two tend to be correlated, but what do I know?
My family never talked about it and we split apart fairly early on. My mother was a “protestant” (an oddly vague self identification I think) who never went to church, until she read “Chariots of the Gods”, and thought that sounded more likely. My father identified as agnostic. I may have been born atheist, though I don’t really remember. What I find most significant about what they said is the absence of much of anything. I don’t remember anybody in my family ever probing my beliefs or lack thereof - not in any way at all.
I can’t ever having a meaningful discussion about religion and god with my family.
The subject just never comes up. Perhaps the most that has ever been said is between me and my sister, the gist of it being “I don’t believe in God” vs “I sort of think there might be something”
As it happens, we did have something of a tragedy in our family a couple of weeks or so ago, My dad died. All very sad and when it came to the service I was nominated to say a few words.
I was happy to do so but nowhere in my 10 minute or so speech did I mention god or religion simply because I have absolutely no idea whether dad was a believer or not and I’m certainly not, so no reference was made (even though this was a church service).
Anyway, not once during the day did anyone mention god or heaven in relation to my dad, there were several hundred people in attendance but no-one made any religious remarks at all to me.
That may all be irrelevant to the OP but the point is that here in the UK religion holds much less sway and the scenario detailed above is pretty common. No-one cares much and a person’s atheism is pretty much assumed unless otherwise stated so the problem of those tricky conversations and debates in the OP don’t really come up.
also, as there is only really a low-level cultural C of E affiliation in the first place a huge proportion of UK people are functional atheists anyway, so no big deal.
Ha - that’s exactly it! I’ve explained to them many times that my first doubts were the (I suspect typical) questions of “Wait, doesn’t everyone think their religion is the right one? How are we different?” Weirdly, our pastor took it much more in stride (my first date was with his niece). Since I knew my grandmother’s reaction to the announcement would be “more church” I discussed it with him first and referred her to him when I told her I didn’t believe and shouldn’t be made to go every Sunday. Dragging me there every Sunday was one thing, having the pastor know she was dragging me there every Sunday was another.
Yet the family remains on edge. When my grandmother passed, the pastor came over and led the family in prayer. When he said “Let’s bow our heads and pray” all eyes turned to me, like I was going to make some outraged declaration and storm out or something. They had to be thinking her dying was just one more thing I’d be pissed at God about. Because yeah, at 104, her passing was a shock.:rolleyes:
In a very real sense every child is born atheist, it is the default setting. Indoctrination (either formal or by osmosis) then begins. Which explains why so many children follow the religion of their parents.
epbrown01, is your family right, to an extent? Did the death of your parents, or at least understanding it as you grew, cause you to think about religion, and you made the rest of the journey from there?I can’t imagine that it would have had no effect on your theological journey, since I’m sure someone said “They’re in heaven now” or somesuch, given that you’ve indicated that they’re religious.
As for me-Mom made a deal. I would go to church with her until I was old enough to drive, then it was up to me. We don’t really discuss it, just because she’s not that into religion anyway. I did talk to my friends about it when I was younger till I realized I was being too confrontational and dickish about it. And I’ve gone to religious schools all my life and now work at the YMCA, go figure.
I don’t think athesim is the default setting. I think agnosticism is. Athesim is a belief that there isn’t a God and beliefs have to be learned. I don’t think any child is born with either the belief in a God or the belief that there isn’t a God. Both of those beliefs have to be learned. Children are born agnostic, without knowledge.
One of my sisters and I are the agnostics in a family parented by two very devout people. We have “theological” discussions, if you can call them that, but not conversations about the origins of our views.
I don’t think it was a singular event that precipitated it. It’s not like I woke up one day in my 20s and, “Nope, not believing it anymore.” It’s more like I stopped being guilty that I wasn’t going to church, then I stopped being guilty that I wasn’t praying, and then I stopped being guilty that I didn’t feel a connection to God–which I had never experienced anyway. After I shed all the guilt, my rational mind would kick me whenever I told people I was a Christian, so then I stopped. No longer being a member of the “club” made me start seeing the Gospel with the eyes of a critical outsider, starting with the whole Jesus-as-a-sacrifice thing. A sacrifice, by definition, constitutes a loss. No matter how many times I looked at the Jesus story, I couldn’t see a net loss to anyone or anything. Which meant the directive to feel especially beholden to Jesus also didn’t make a lick o sense. Seeing as how that’s the keystone to the Christian faith, I guess you can say that the whole thing came tumbling down after that.
My parents probably attribute my “fall” to the liberal Jewish white folk I went to school with. Yet, that doesn’t explain my sister’s agnosticism. So maybe they blame something else.
I can’t say that it did. As mentioned, I was pretty young, and rather than “they’re in heaven now” I vividly remember my grandmother’s response to “Why’d they die?” “Everyone’s going to die, including you and me, and you never know when.” I wasn’t aware enough of God at the time to blame him for anything. We were fairly unchurched before my grandmother. I think that might be the core issue - by the time we went to live with my grandmother and started going every Sunday, I was old enough to ask questions about what they were teaching, rather than simply accept “this is what you should believe.” I think most people, certainly the many people that have tried to witness to me over the years, had religion handed to them early on rather than arrived at their beliefs on their own. My 3 siblings were 4, 3, and 2 when we moved in with them and they’re still members of the congregation, but they remember nothing of our life before our grandparents. To them, we always went, so why wouldn’t we keep going?
I became an atheist at a rather young age (perhaps around twelve)* despite living within a Christian protestant family. When I was a teenager my parents behaved as if my atheism were temporary; on multiple occasions my father gave me that tired old “no atheists in foxholes” routine. But I don’t recall much speculation about the source of my atheism, which doesn’t really come up in conversation anymore.
Possibly a few of the difficulties my family has faced — my father’s turbulent bankruptcy followed by my eldest brother’s death, and then my father’s own death — serve as obvious “reasons” to the religious people in my family. Maybe that keeps the topic from being raised, but I was a nonbeliever before all of that went down.
(*Okay, I did think about neopaganism for about a week when I was fourteen. Like all other things I did when I was fourteen, I regret it immensely.)
In my atheist family (and community for that matter) we discuss what went wrong to send my mum woo. I got nuthin’. She just went bananas one day, that’s all.
No, we’ve been down this path before so best to define our terms in advance. It is most certainly not a belief that there isn’t a god. It is the lack of belief in a god and that is all. Some go further into agnosticism and anti-theism but myself? I have no belief in god but I do not claim there is no god, I am an atheist.
As I said, we are all born without a belief in god therefore we are all born atheist.
I think it’s better to say that disagreement persists as to the definition of “atheism”. Traditionally (and to most current English speakers, in my experience) the term implies the rejection of religious belief; this is incompatible with the epistemological machinery of newborn humans. And then many others take “atheist” to mean literally without theism. I despair of any resolution to this conflict — it’d probably be clearest just to avoid using that word where it might make a difference.
I follow due process, very similar to a trial in court, and looked at both sides of the “book”.
for instance, http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ is s great start to review the many contradictions, absurdities, injustice, and misogynist ideals found not just in the Bible, but also the Quran and the Torah.
I found the evidence to be overwhelmingly in favor of the skeptic view of any religion, and the rebuttal by the corresponding religions response as profoundly lame.
I came from a very loving family, nothing tragic really ever happened to me, unlike some families that lose loved ones early on, or suffer through some other terrible disease or accident, etc. In my youth I went to church for five years straight, but never really was a believer, nor did I ever get baptized. Decades later, family still as close as ever although parents in poor health.
Sort of like what Novelty Bubble experienced; religion isn’t something that gets discussed much at all in our group. Nobody really cares what the other believes in.
This is a good summary. I don’t really think “atheist” is a particularly useful word by itself (as we’ve just seen) and it benefits from having said atheist describe more of their worldview. Otherwise, what do you actually know about them?
To be honest, I never had to explain what I meant by “atheist” until I came to this board. That single word seemed to satisfy most people and as there was never any follow-on discussion then the need for further clarification never arose.
But for clarity here I’m a weak atheist (same as Hitchens and Dawkins…about a 6.99 on the scale but stopping short of claiming god doesn’t exist), also a humanist, not that that is a specific choice. More that it seems to be the worldview that corresponds closest to my own.
