jenkinsfan, since you want opinions in isolation as opposed to a debate, I’m going to move this thread to In My Humble Opinion.
Jenkinsfan, as you can see, many of the people who reject religion are not necessarily rejecting on the grounds of skepticism. They reject the temporal organization of the church, much as Martin Luther did during the Reformation. For the most part, Christian churches have failed to reflect changing times. Outmoded and downright crazy ideas about sexuality, birth control, and the role of women scare many people away (myself included). Instead of forming a new religion, these people find it much easier to embrace modern-day secularism while still living moral and complete lives. And since there are so many acceptable alternatives for ex-Christians nowadays, those who choose to turn away from the church meet with very little resistance (as opposed to a few hundred years ago, when heretics could be tortured and killed for their beliefs).
–Caliban
Born and raised a Catholic, I can say that even as a small child I didn’t believe. I was a good girl and went to my classes, got confirmed etc., but I waited until my mid teen years to vocalize my real feelings, and tell others that I didn’t and never did believe in god. I do believe there is a higher power, but it is not “god” to me, if that makes any sense.
I disagree with many organized religions, so I don’t practice any (except my own).
Raised Catholic, never really beleived for as long as I can remember. I went to church every Sunday, sure, but that was just so my mother wouldn’t get mad. Same with my confirmation. I still feel bad about lying to Cardinal Law about accepting Jesus as my savior and all that. Not that it really affected him either way, but it just seems wrong.
The whole God thing just never made sense to me. I don’t feel any influence from any diety, and I’ve tried to believe. I really have. It just didn’t happen. Oh well. No big whoop, in my book.
As it happened, I got away from the church pretty early on, did some reading on my own, which strengthened my lack of faith, and gave up on the church thing as soon as I could. I’ve never really looked back.
When I was about 12 or 13, I got to know a kid in neighborhood who was not LDS (the predominant faith in Utah, by a wide margin). As I spent time with him and his family (I later dated his sister, so I wound up spending quite a bit of time there over a few years), I heard a fair amount of Mormon bashing. Well, this was MY religion they were talking about, so I stepped up to the plate and defended it. This was purely an instinctive action, and nothing to do with any deep fondness for my religion. I would have done the same for my school, my music, my bicycle, etc. When you’re 13, you don’t like anyone dissin’ YOUR stuff!
After a short period of time, this back and forth took the form of them citing specific things about the LDS religion, and then giving me “proof” that this was wrong/sinful/against the bible (the proof was usually in the form of Bible verse that would seem to show their point). I would then try to refute their point. This was a pain, because it required me to get more educated in my own religion, which up to that point had been just sort of a once a week habit that my parents encouraged.
So I’m learning about my religion as well as theirs (Jehovah’s Witnesses, which (not to offend anyone, but still) strikes me as even sillier than most religions). In the course of this, two things become clear to me.
First, so much of what I’m seeing strikes me as very strange or silly. I mean, come on! It’s not even internally consistent, at least not without making what looked like to me to be some very farfetched or amazingly convenient interpretations.
Second, it became obvious that I didn’t have “faith”. Everything I had questions about could be explained, but never (at least to me) to the point that there was no question. So when I would ask “But couldn’t it have been this way?” after hearing the official explanation, I would be told “But we have faith that it was that way.” So if you had faith, you believed it was true. I didn’t, and so was never convinced.
That did it for me. I couldn’t bring myself to believe in what seemed to me to be obvious myths. I quit attending church, and after a few years referred to myself as an agnostic. I still don’t know that there is or is not a god. I lean toward “is not” because to this point I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that there is, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff that I would think a god would put a stop to if he existed.
So I guess what killed my belief in religion was learning more about it. It was a clear case of the emperor’s new clothes for me. A lot of claims, but no substance.
Ugly
I barely qualify for this thread, as I lost my “faith” at such a young age, but I’ll add in my experience anyways. I was raised loosely as Catholic, attending church on holidays and occasionally other Sundays, but not very devout. I attended a Catholic school for kindergarten. Through this period I wasn’t really aware of the concept of “religion.” The bible had been taught as history-- in my mind I didn’t realize there was any difference between “Jesus was the son of God” and “George Washington was the first president of the U.S.” I simply didn’t know that there were other opinions; I thought it was just as factual as any other piece of history. Then in first grade I went to public school and there was a Jewish boy in our class. When Christmas time rolled around and he explained that his family didn’t celebrate Christmas I didn’t understand. It took quite a bit of explaining from him and my teachers before the concept of “religion” actually entered my head, along with the fact that there was more than one of them. My boyhood logic quickly decided that if different people believed different things for no apparant reason without having any evidence to back them up, then they were both wrong. With that decision, I moved on with my life.
In middle school I found myself in the minority as someone who didn’t believe in God, so I examined my beliefs to see if there wasn’t something there after all. Eventually it just further confirmed my athiestic/agnostic beliefs, when I read more about evolution, science, and the history of world religions.
Note: Please don’t interpret this post as meaning that I think anyone who believes in religion has the reasoning powers of a kindergartener: This is most certainly not the case, as I have many good friends who are deeply religious and are some of the smartest and most reasonable people I know. This is simply a record of my personal experience and how it affected me.
Very mixed religious/moral upbringing…mom was a Methodist, who adamantly believed parts of the dogma but rejected others. Dad was raised Presbeteryian, but became a weird but workable mixture of Buddhism and FreeMasonry.
So basically I was reared to seek wisdom, but question. Valuable inheritance, that. Not comfortable or popular, but…truthful. It taught me to reject dogma, and that any creed can be distorted, often by faithful followers. If questions aren’t allowed, it’s a sterile exercise.
Mostly it taught the search is the answer, and that most “truths” are self-limiting. I categorically reject religions because they reject others. Religion is no more “final answer” than science–or any other dogma. They all have limits, and to accept one is to reject the whole. They’re artifical, comfortable, self-imposed limits–and therefore defeat their own aims.
Veb
As Michael Palin once sang “I’m a Roman catholic, and I have been since before I was born”.
I was never really a full believer in the Churches teachings. e.g. I taught that its ban on contraceptives was dated and pointless.
I was very skeptical of of the Church as an Organisation, the guilt trips employed to make sure you gave to the church. The idea that only a large family was a good family.
What really made my decide to leave the Catholic Church was the fact that the church sheltered Paedophile priests from the law. Instead of turning them over to the law, they transferred them to another dioceses, where most of them re-offended.
I don’t know what I believe anymore. If I were to define it, I would be agnostic. But I hate labelling things like this anyway.
Raised Catholic. Mom and Dad weren’t terribly religious, but they did the Christmas-and-Easter church thing, and they sent me to CCD. The Catholic church in our town was next door to the Hebrew school, and as there wasn’t much free space in the church, they ended up holding some of the CCD classes in the Hebrew school. So that’s how I came to learn about God’s grace and mercy – in a classroom filled with timelines and photos from the Holocaust.
I drew my own conclusions.
If God did not exist, man would have to invent him.
I read that somewhere. (if you knwo who said this, please tell me) I think man DID invent God. I also think that it does not matter if a God exists or not.
I have nothing to add to this thread; my loss-of-faith experiences are similar to those described by others here.
I just wanted to officially check-in as one of the SDMB Atheists.
::Brief interuption::
My apologies. Please be patient as I learn. Thanks to all for sharing their stories. I’d certainly enjoy reading more.
Can you believe that dishonest freak?
Said he was gonna stay outta this, he did.
Fundies! Cain’t trust em fur as ya can chuck em!
(JK)
Raised Presbyterian, did not suddenly wake up one day and decide it was all a crock, but came to realization gradually, from about age 16 on.
I don’t wholly reject the concept of a supreme creator and life after death, but the lack of concrete evidence for either notion, plus what I’ve learned about geological and biological processes, make it unlikely.
The main thing I am skeptical of, however, is the idea that practicing one particular set of religious rituals will materially affect anything at all. I therefore choose to practice none. In particular, I reject on principle any religion that maintains a dress code:D.
The Bible includes many useful moral guidelines. So do other such books of supposed divine inspiration. It (and others) also includes much information that seems outdated, contradictory, obscure or simply silly. On those rare occasions when I consult it I pick and choose what seems to be sensible, and pretty much ignore the rest. I have to say, moreover, that I do not find it necessary to regularly consult the Bible to determine how I might respond to a given situation.
…although I guess I’m less offended, because I’m pretty used to it. Not only don’t I think there’s any contradiction between being a Christian and a skeptic, I feel Jesus has pointed out that a healthy skepticism is an essential component of Christianity: “I send you out as sheep among wolves; be wary as serpents, innocent as doves.” – Matthew, chapter 10.
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Just "me too"ing RTF. I’ve always been a little affronted by those who presume that Christianity (or other major religion) prohibits one from using one’s head. You can both think and believe; they are not mutually exclusive.
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” – Galileo
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jenkinsfan, there are 31 threads with the words “atheist” or “atheism” in them. How many of these did you look through before you asked this question?
DrFidelius wrote:
I used to be a gullible atheist. I’m still atheist, but now I’m a skeptic, too.
Perhaps I should use this thread to tell the story of how I became a “born-again skeptic.”
Some people are raised in a Catholic family. Some are raised in a Jewish family. Still others are raised in a Fundamentalist family. Me? I was raised in an Orgonomy family. Orgonomy is the “study” of “orgone energy”, a biological energy “discovered” by the late Wilhelm Reich and never confirmed by anyone other than Reich and his zealous followers. My dad, who had an engineering degree and knew the physical sciences well enough that he introduced me to organic chemistry when I was a wee lad of 8 years old, was nevertheless a “true believer” in orgonomy. He also dabbled in using pyramids to sharpen razor blades and other pseudoscientific hoopla, but eventually lost interest in all of these little hobbies. Except for orgonomy. Orgonomy stayed with him. He sent my brother and I on weekly visits to a therapist trained by the American College of Orgonomy. If orgonomy were a religion – and it does have many features in common with a religion – then the therapy visits were our penance in church. “Cast out those evil demons of character armor! Praise the orgone!” (I’m being sarcastic here – our therapist never uttered those words. But it was still No Damn Fun going to him.)
In my teen-age years (early 1980s), I was, like most other teen-age boys, feeling disempowered and inadequate. The fact that I was “nerdy” or “geeky” didn’t exactly help things. So when I started reading Wilhelm Reich’s books, naturally I likened this “orgone energy” to a secret super-power. It was like being given the keys to the universe. Oddly enough, Reich himself denounced such “power trips” as being indicative of a neurotic character. (Reich had started out as a protege of Sigmund Freud and was a trained psychiatrist, you see).
I continued to be a true believer in orgone energy, and “glossed over” the nagging inconsistencies between what Reich said orgone was like and what my growing knowledge of mainstream physics and biology showed as the Way Things Really Are, until the mid-1990s. I was going to an orgonomy therapist voluntarily at the time. We got to talking about some modern orgonomists’ experiments with Reich’s “cloudbuster”, an arrangement of metal pipes and hoses which could allegedly control the weather by rearranging the concentrations of orgone energy in the sky. My therapist was also a “believer” in orgonomy, of course, but he made one off-the-cuff remark about these cloud-busting experiments that has stayed with me to this very day.
He said: “I wish they’d publish the results of more of their experiments, not just their successful ones.”
Hmmm … if only the successful experiments were getting reported, how do we know what their failure rate is? How do we know that they aren’t “changing” the weather any better than they would if they didn’t cloud-bust and just left it up to chance? After all, some storm clouds are bound to form in the middle of nowhere from time to time, and all clouds eventually dissipate. And if the modern orgonomists could be wrong about the cloudbuster having any effect at all, could Wilhelm Reich’s own experiments have also been inconclusive? Could Reich have been jumping to unjustified conclusions because he “wanted” his couldbuster to work?
That started my inquiry. His “evidence” for a galactic orgone stream, or for orgone energy causing the stars to twinkle, also seemed specious when I read it. (Reich’s writings on astronomy showed quite clearly that he knew nothing about astronomy, and that his attacks on mainstream astronomers were nothing but strawman arguments.) His writings on the discovery of the orgone, via “SAPA radiation”, showed that all he had discovered was a new source of ultraviolet light.
Then I got screwed over by National Trust Services to the tune of $9500 for a worthless system of “pure trusts” that were supposed to make me lawsuit-proof and income-tax-free. I realized that I had fallen for their scam because I WANTED it to be true. Had I also wanted to believe in other things that weren’t true? My thoughts eventually turned back to my growing doubts about Orgonomy…
Today, I’m in the (slow) process of putting together a webpage debunking orgone energy and the other pseudoscientofic theories of Wilhelm Reich. It’s at http://www.netcom.com/~rogermw/Reich/ and, while it’s still got a long way to go, is even now packed with everything you could possibly want to know about Reich’s “bions” (bacteria-like vesicles that allegedly arise spontaneously in a sterile environment) and his “orgone field meter”.
And I don’t believe in ESP any more, either. 
Hmmm, there seems to be a problem with the 4th-to-last paragraph in my last post.
I tried to say:
‘That started my inquiry. His “evidence” for a galactic orgone stream, or for orgone energy causing the stars to twinkle, also seemed specious when I read it. Reich’s writings on astronomy, which are critiqued at http://www.phact.org/e/z/orgo.htm, showed quite clearly that he knew nothing about astronomy, and that his attacks on mainstream astronomers were nothing but strawman arguments. His writings on the discovery of the orgone, via “SAPA radiation”, showed that all he had discovered was a new source of ultraviolet light.’
jenkinsfan, I appreciate your honest desire to learn. Are there any of the books in the “books for fundies” thread that look interesting to you? Do you have any books for the “books for non-fundies” thread? When I get my webpage up, I want to be able to put both lists on it. Also, what forum should I go to in order best to poll fundies about their books? The Parlor? LBMB?
I should also mention that I will post my own deconversion story here when I can dig it up from the archive.
-Ben