Ex-Christians: How did you become an Atheist?

[zmonsterz]

Was interested to just hear all your stories, if you'd like to share...


Here's mine. Its kinda of confusing and badly written so understand it the best you can, Haha.


I never truly had faith. I mean I tried to pull myself into it for so long thinking that eventually I'd just wake up one day and suddenly be a 'perfect christian child'. I'd believe perfectly, I'd find comfort in God and I would feel his presence. But no... it never happened and I got sick of feeling guilty for not living up to Christian standards so eventually i just gave up and after years of never seeing any reaction from God I realised that was because he wasn't there. And I found myself instantly referring to the earth as being billions of years old, etc, etc. And my biggest problem was that God condemmed those that were Homosexuals. I have always truly believed in my heart that there was nothing wrong with homosexuals and that was eventually what got me thinking 'Now this is all a load of bullshit!'

[Hermit]

Here is an account of how it happened. Warning: It's a copypasta job.

• I regard my atheism as the result of freeing myself from brainwashing. Before my parents married they both converted from protestantism to catholicism. They wanted a really personal god, and all of us children were brought up according to their beliefs. We went through the whole gamut: Mass every Sunday, catechism lessons, first communion, confirmation, regular confessions - the works, and the indoctrination started very early indeed. I remember reciting the following prayer, the start of which went like this, every night before lights out before I was even old enough to go to kindergarten:
  
  Müde bin ich, geh' zur Ruh',
  schließe beide Äuglein zu.
  Vater, laß die Augen dein
  über meinem Bette sein.
  
  Now there was a truly personal god. I took the line "Father let your eyes over my bed" very literally at that age, imagining two divine eyeballs of human proportions and appearance perched on my bedhead after I went to sleep. God was guarding me, but he also was very fearsome. Sinfulness - and everybody is a sinner - is sure to be punished with eternal damnation unless we regularly went to confessions and did x laps on the rosary by way of penance. There was a distinctly cruel, unforgiving and brutal aspect to my loving god.
  
  Somewhere around the mid 1960s (I would have been somewhere between twelve and 14 years old) a train driver failed to heed a speed limit sign. The train derailed killing a dozen or more passengers. The following Sunday's sermon consisted of the priest admonishing us not to regard our god as a cruel god. No! On the contrary, the accident must have been in fact a good thing because god allowed it to happen. It's just our limited, merely human mind that prevents us from understanding just why it was actually a good thing in the grander scheme. A couple of weeks later I read an article in a magazine explaining how this accident could have been prevented if a mechanical safety device had been installed at that particular section of the track, and if similar devices were installed in another 12 or so locations, this kind of disaster could never again happen in Germany. I came to the conclusion that the priest was full of shit. Accidents are caused or prevented by us humans. God doesn't give a fuck.
  
  I rejected any and every kind of institutional religion that advocated the existence of a personal god, but convinced that since everything must have a cause, there must be a first cause - or uncaused cause - that brought everything about. I became a deist. My new god was sort of a divine watchmaker. He set everything up and then let it tick away, big bang, universal laws, evolution, the works.
  
  In 1972, just as I was about to finish school, Gough Whitlam lead the Labor Party into government, and among other things he made it possible for people that lacked the financial resources but qualified on academic grounds to avail themselves to tertiary education. Possessed of an insatiable curiosity, but lacking any ambitions to prepare myself for a career of any sort I enrolled at Sydney University, taking Anthropology, Sociology, History and Philosophy in the first year. Philosophy turned out to be of most interest to me (closely followed by History), particularly the courses dealing with epistemology. David Hume was a bastard. He attacked everything I held dear regarding the classical view of science, but, try as I might, I could not find anything to counter his critique of naive inductivism. Not even Karl Popper, who came the closest in circumventing the problem, was ultimately of any use. I had no choice but to concede that while no matter how often correlations (such as, say, the rising of the sun and the appearance of daylight) can be demonstrated, proof of causality never follows. The assumption of causality is of course an essential component for our survival, both as individuals and as a species, but it can only ever remain an assumption. The best that can be said of us is that we are superior inductivist turkeys. Now my attitude concerning the divine watchmaker was that since the assumption of causality is pragmatically of vital importance for survival, but philosophically bereft of any justification, he has become an item of supreme irrelevance. More than that, his existence (among other objects of metaphysical nature) is beyond the remit of what we can even discuss with any prospect of usefulness. The watchmaker may or may not exist. We cannot know either way, and it does not fucking matter either way.
  
  And that is the short account of how I became an agnostic atheist. I hope you can see that rather than being brainwashed into it, it was a result of me rinsing the brainwashing out of my system.

[FBM]

Ah. Edumacation did it for me. Mind you, I never really bought into the 6-day creation stories and miracles. I recall always more or less thinking of that stuff as mythical, even though I believed in the existence of a creator and found a lot of comfort in having him as my BFF. I was a huge fan of science and resolved the apparent conflicts in favor of science, but somehow keeping the imaginary friend, too.

Then, in university, as I was getting an undergrad degree in preparation to go to seminary and become an Episcopal priest (yeah, no shit), I took a class in History of the Bible. The professor was a Baptist minister, but quite a maverick. He didn't intend to turn me away from belief, but at some point during the class it dawned on my that the whole thing was made up as a means of gaining/maintaining political control over the ancient Hebrews/Israelites or whoever they were. By that time I was stuck with getting a degree in Philosophy. But that's OK. A degree in Philosophy may be useless, but at least it was expensive.

[Rum]

Reading the God Delusion made it a firm 'position' for me. I didn't have any particular faith for an awful long time having been a committed Christian in my late teens. I dabbled and read about the best ways to engage with the 'ultimate reality', had periods of agnosticism and periods of I don't give a bugger either way. Then for about ten years I would have called myself a Buddhist - lot of which in terms of a world view, I still stick with. Reading the God Delusion convinced me to stop pratting around though.

[Thinking Aloud]

I was raised a good Catholic boy. That influenced me for longer than I would have liked, however by my 20s, and not being able to square biblical claims with the observable universe, I settled into a kind of christian deistic position: there's something out there, and catholicism just happens to be one way of many to acknowledge that. Later even that idea faded somewhat, but by then I'd become entrenched in the weekly routine through leading the music at church services. I didn't really think about it for many years, but still the old fears would catch - in 2004 following the birth of Offspring #1, I felt a considerable panic to ensure he was baptised.

Soon afterwards, though, I started to think more about it, and concluded that god seemed rather unlikely. I bought The God Delusion on a whim at an airport, and the line "we just go one god further" sealed the deal. I would have got there myself, but I do remember reading that line and feeling a change in my head - a moment where I realised I'd got it right already, and that I wasn't the only one who thought that way.

[Feck]

Age elven or twelve I realised that all the teachers at school who preached at us were either heading for the loony bin or were total fucking psychotic bastards .
The teachers who I liked and respected and who bothered a shit about us pupils, took us hiking or on sea fishing trips or to the theatre etc were the ones who never talked about god . When I asked questions about the Babble it was made perfectly clear by the bible(and kid) bashing Christians that I was expected to accept what we were taught without question .

[zmonsterz]

When I asked questions about the Babble it was made perfectly clear by the bible(and kid) bashing Christians that I was expected to accept what we were taught without question .

I specifically remember at age eleven having a heated discussion with the church pastor about homosexuality. I refused to give in his to his 'but the bible says that marriage and relationships are meant to be between a man and a woman only'. I just stopped after a while. I couldn't be fucked arguing with him anymore though I was a particularly stubborn eleven year old. I reckon I must have been tired that day

[traditionaldrummer]

My parents taking me to a church for the first time sealed the deal. When you're told the someone "rose from the dead" and in reality they don't, and that I was a sinner and in reality I wasn't, and there was an all powerful, conveniently invisible entity when in reality there wasn't, it is safe to say that this was likely the official confirmation of my atheism. I tried to "find god" later in life but the elusive bastard never turned up anywhere.

[klr]

It just kind of happened over a few years. TBH, I was always too much the intellectual cynic to ever be taken in completely by voodoo. It just took time to become completely aware of the surroundings, and to step away from the mumbo-jumbo and look at it dispassionately from the outside.

[Svartalf]

It's a funny story... I dropped out of chretinity after a bout of self search concerning whether or not I had a vocation for the priesthood.

So I was like 22, and unsure what I was going to do with my life, an christianity had that way of knocking on the back of my consciousness, and I started wondering whether that meant I had a vocation.

The first step I took on the way to get an answer was a complete and detailed reading and study of the new testament... during the course of which I became aware that the whole body of work was a bunch of contradictions piled on top of a load of absurdities, not to mention the basic fact that Jesus simply did not fit the criteria set for recognizing the Messiah.

After that my mind did no longer need soul searching, I could not spend my life in the service of a set of beliefs in which I no longer believed.

[charlou]

Was interested to just hear all your stories, if you'd like to share...

There are similar stories posted here, too: Faith: what's it like?

Good stuff.

[charlou]

I'm not an ex-christian .. I was a theist brought up in a fundamentalist christian culture but I was never a christian myself ... I posted this brief summary about becoming an atheist in another thread a while back ...

I'd been raised from infancy to believe that the explanation for everything was 'God', so my belief seemed as natural to me as breathing ... but I hated churches and the madness and hypocrisy within them, the admonishment to believe without question, the rituals and the group think mentality. The nonsensical ideas (miracles, biblical morality etc) that defied my observation of reality .. the Jesus story, good/evil, sin/redemption, heaven/hell .. and the whole bible as a source of knowledge thing never sat well with me. So I believed in my own nebulous version of 'God' for a while before eventually reasoning my way to atheism.

[surreptitious57]

Five to seven years ago began to take a passing interest in Buddhism. Then discovered that Jesus was revered in Islam as well as Christianity, but had some subconscious niggling doubts because of the inadequacies between the two. Bought The God Delusion - wasn't impressed. Joined Richard Dawkins. net still a Christian, but slowly and independently came to the conclusion it is all wrong. Subsequently read The Bible - will do so again. Have just bought Origin Of The Species and one day will get round to reading The Koran as well. Bought Einstein's biography, read up on Newton. Not an expert, but would like to think that I could hold my own in a debate on the Big Bang and /or Evolution. Now only believe in something if it is true as in objectively. My new gods are Logic and Reason not Faith and Irrationality - though I hasten to add that I am not always right, but strive to be so. I am more than happy to have any belief of mine rigourously challenged and disproved. I am big enough to admit when I am wrong and see no shame in being fallible. I do not want to see the abolition of religion, but rather human rights abuses perpetrated in its name such as indoctrination, homophobia, misogyny and bigotry. Sorry for rambling. It's a habit of mine, can't be helped sometimes. Please forgive me . . .

[RandomGuyOnCouch]

When I was much younger, I was always asking questions of the pastor about his sermons, faith, the Way Things Are, et cetera. At some point, he began to be unable to answer my questions, so I decided to bypass the teacher and go straight to the source. Reading the Bible is pretty much what made me not believe in it anymore.

Interestingly, I still had to attend church because I wasn't an adult. My parents told me that when I "was an adult" that I could "choose whether or not to go to church" on my own. Looking back, I think they assumed I would make the "right" choice and continue going. Now, as adulthood was many years away and I desperately wanted to sleep in on Sunday mornings, I came up with the brilliant plan of doing Confirmation as quickly as possible (the Protestant version of Catechism, for any ex-Catholics out there), which made me an adult "in the eyes of the church". My reasoning went, if I'm an adult as far as the place I have to be an adult to stop going to is concerned, that should be all that matters.

Oddly enough, the only person in my family that still goes to church is my father ... who is Catholic ... the church is Lutheran.

[Hermit]

My new gods are...

Just a turn of phrase, I hope.