I’ve been an atheist for as long as I can remember. The Bible stories always seemed made up to me, more like Superman comics than the stuff I was learning about history or geography.
Well, it does have a lot to answer for.
I can’t remember when I learned about atheism, but I distinctly remember trying to convince a neighbor kid that he was Jewish. He had just told me he didn’t believe in Jesus, which obviously meant he was Jewish, but he didn’t seem to realize that.
Me too.
I can recall testing out religion by trying to pray around age 9 or 10, then realising there wasn’t going to be an answer. Sort of the same way I can’t remember believing in Santa Claus.
I was about the same, but didn’t get the actual word for it until sixth grade, when I was talking to a friend about beginning to study for my bat mitzvah. I said I didn’t see the point, because I didn’t believe any of that stuff anyway, and she said, “So you’re an atheist?”
At the church I grew up in, we had a short “children’s sermon” during each service, when the little kids would go up and get a short sermon and activity at the front of the church. When I was 4, the minister’s wife was doing a children’s sermon asking “What do you think you’d find in heaven?” and drawing everyone’s answers on a giant pad of paper. Other kids were saying things like “Harps!” “Ice cream!” but my vision of heaven was a bit more literal, I suppose. When she got to me with her question, I stoically replied “Bones.”
“Bones? Why would there be bones in heaven?”
“…well, from the dead bodies.”
The congregation and minister’s wife both went silent and she just stared at me for a beat. Then, she moved on to the next kid. Without drawing the bones! I guess I really just didn’t get the idea of a soul or an angel. Anyway, it kicked off many long years of Sunday School skepticism 
I was never raised as anything but an atheist. My father in particular had nothing but scorn for religion in general - something for which I am grateful.
As far back as I can recall, I knew I was Jewish, but this had no practical meaning to me (except for the religious holidays I got to take off from school). My parents never went to synagogue and there was no religion in our lives. When I was 11 1/2 my parents suddenly woke up to the fact that I had to prepare for a bar mitzvah, so I was sent to Hebrew school two afternoons a week to learn to at least read and sing the prayers and also learn my haftorah portion. So I did (I can still, 58 years later, read the letters). They begged us to continue coming after the bar mitzvah, but I walked out of there that Thursday, performed my trained seal act and never came back. But I never, not for one minute, believed any of that stuff about god or heaven or eternal life and I don’t think my parents did either (or any of may grandparents, for that matter, although one grandmother went to high holy day services every year–but without the grandfather).
Until a few years ago, I probably would have said I was agnostic, but one day a good friend asked who was I kidding. So I went from not believing the existence of god to believing its non-existence, but nothing else changed.
I can’t ever remember not being an atheist. I didn’t believe in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus either etc- it never made any sense to me. From a very young age (5-6) I had a strong sense of certainty about my beliefs. My kids have been the same way, despite the fact that we are fairly observant Jews.
That is the best part part of being Jewish- it doesn’t have to be a religion of faith, but acts.
I don’t really remember when I first considered myself atheist, or how strongly I ever believed in God. Being raised catholic on the NW side of Chicago, it was just pretty much given. Part of the culture. At that time and place, Lutherans were way out there! 
I always thought church boring, but I was required to go every Sunday, go to confession, and attend catechism (RE classes). Heck, the public schools used to let all the catholic kids out of school on Wednesday afternoons so they could tromp over to the catholic school for catechism/CCD classes. Different times, huh? And I went thru communion and confirmation - 3d and 7th grade I believe.
I remember when I realized catholicism was bullshit. Fifth grade, in RE class, I remember thinking how stupid the belief was that only catholics got to go to heaven. From there it was a short hop to thinking that any god who would damn a perfectly decent Hindu/Buddhist/etc. simply for not believing in him, was quite the dick and not worthy of my belief/praise. And once you consider one or 2 things bullshit, it is pretty easy to see that just about everything else about the believe in supernatural beings is either contrary to the evidence or flat out unnecessary.
I continued attending church through high school because it was important to my mother.
I loved getting out early on Wednesdays so that the public school kids could get religious instruction.
I forgot about the whole ‘you have to be catholic to go to heaven’ stuff and it was a big part of my confusion. I kept asking about children in other countries that didn’t know that they would go to hell for it and no one would answer me. We were so catholic-centered that I didn’t even know that all Americans weren’t or what a protestant was.
And it’s also an ethnic identity. My grandfather, for example, is strongly atheist yet thoroughly Jewish. Just as you can stop believing in Catholicism and still be Italian, you can stop believing in Judaism and still be Jewish.
Well, as Calvin said, they really should have a cover charge and keep out the riff-raff.
Yes, that is a big part. I often try to explain this to my friends by saying “you can find Jewish cookbooks, but not Catholic (eg) ones! :)”
But- one can be a religious, not just an ethnic Jew, without faith as well. That is an aspect of the religion I find very appealing.
Seventh grade, Christmas Eve 1981 11pm. I was 12.
My mom was an emotionally, physically and psychologically abusive woman, and I was going to a Christian Middle School at the time, so I was a gung-ho God boy.
My mom got into one of her “wish you’d never been born” rants and I prayed to God to make her stop.
She didn’t stop, but I did. Believing, that is. Never turned back, and when the whole Christianity aspect is reviewed with an atheists’ eye, it is a joke that anyone deludes themselves with such superstitious garbage.
I was probably 10 or 11. My brother and sisters and I would go to my Dad’s every other weekend for visitation. He’d just remarried, to a woman that apparently decided to lead a Godly lifestyle, so we suddenly started going to Church.
I was confused, because my dad was a truck driver, and had the filthiest mouth (excepting my own) that I’d ever heard. He constantly went out of his way to screw over as many people during the week as humanly possible, but would magically change come Sunday morning. It didn’t make sense; I only had to believe in God one day a week? What’s the point?
First we had Bible Class, then came the sermon. I learned early on that if I skipped Bible Class, I could walk down the street to Denny’s, have breakfast, and make it back to the Church right as the sermon ended.
I couldn’t figure out if he was a hypocrite or a Sunday-Only Christain.
I feel like a total moron for this, but 9th grade. I’m not some old fogey raised in a different time, either: I’m twenty-two.
But one day, my dad mentioned that he didn’t believe in god, and it just clicked. That’s an option? You can do that? I thought it was one of those things that’s true but I just won’t ever ‘get’, like “coffee is good” (I came around on that one last year). In about twenty seconds, I went from “Christian” but feeling guilty for not believing to being a full-on atheist.
Let’s see… well, we never had religion in our home at all, atheism/agnosticism was the default, so the OP’s question would have to be “When did you become aware that many other people were a poart of an organized religion, but you were not?”
And that would be when we moved to a neighborhood that had a lot of kids my age, and my sister and I had no one else to play with on Sunday mornings because “they went to church”. Then my sister asked “How come we don’t go to church?” and we got a general answer about different cultures and different beliefs etc.
I think before that, any sense of “God” and “Jesus” were, for me, conceptually equivalent to the Tooth Fairy, ghosts, or Batman. About as “real” as wishing on a star or blowing out a candle on a birthday cake. I had heard of them through cultural references so I knew who God and Jesus were supposed to be, but Jesus didn’t have any more profound meaning to me than that guy, Jack, who climbed the beanstalk, or Hansel and Gretel.
I wasn’t always an atheist, but I can’t say I have any particular memory of some kind of eureka moment where I suddenly stopped believing. It just sort of gradually happened. I’ve never had anyone really try to shove religion down my throat though, so maybe that’s why I didn’t find giving it up to be very notable.
I have a skeptical nature so was never avidly religious, but my parents kept me in a state of mild belief through junior high by saying “the bible isn’t meant to be taken as literally true, you have to interpret it. For example, those Old Testament guys who supposedly lived for hundreds of years, or the fact that the earth was created in 7 days? Well, the people who wrote the bible were speaking poetically; they may have counted a month as a year when calculating ages, and by ‘7 days,’ they meant something like ‘7 eons.’”
However, they decided while I was in high school that a good family activity would be for the three of us to teach 1st grade Sunday School together. This necessitated actually reading and using a religious curriculum and teaching kids specific religious tenets. That experience caused me to confront the fact that I didn’t believe any of it, although I kept my mouth shut at the time.
Both my parents became official atheists in their seventies. I think they had harbored doubts for a long time, but it took Dawkins et al to give them the courage to examine and accept their own beliefs.
SurrenderDorothy
SNIP "I was in grade four or so.
All around the same time, I realized a few things.
First, that Adam and Eve had three sons and no daughters and nobody had a satisfactory explanation for how the rest of the human race occurred. "
This, of course, is where the expression “Motherfucker” came from.
No, really…
**dmatsch, **You could be my sibling! Had the same kind of “Mother”. She was the church organist so dad, sis, and myself HAD to go to church every Sunday morning until I got into highschool. I think when mum went through the change of life, the change kinda stuck in her head and she was almost unbearable 'till her later years when she finally calmed down. Died at 92, bless her heart.