Question 11

What started you thinking of being an atheist?

• When Satan told me there was no God! :) Seriously, a teacher casually pointed out the fact that people tend to be the same religion as their parents. That got me thinking. I was about 8 year old at the time. (William R. James #306)

• Watching other Christians carry on in church. (dsg5)

• For me, it was the inconsistencies of Hinduism , coupled with the fact that as an aspiring physicist, I couldn't reconcile Science with an omnipotent, omnipresent God. (Vikram Prasad #917)

• I think that I was about four or five years old. I was talking with my mother about how everyone has a mommy and daddy. Which led to the inevitable question of where it started. My mother told me that God was the father of the first people. This provided a four year old with an obvious problem (unacknowledged by most theists): Who was God's daddy? My mother told me that he didn't have one and that God had always been there. I laughed and said, "I can't beleive that." My mother told me that I couldn't get in to heaven if I didn't. I thought that was dumb. I'm pretty sure I became an atheist right about then. (Greg Gyetko #911)

• Two things: comparing the cells in our bodies with the stars and planets in the universe. We're not aware of our cells dying (and we don't really care, because we know that new ones replace them), and I can't see that anything/anyone would be aware or care if our planet ceased to exist, let alone the creatures which inhabit it.

  The other thing was learning that a chemical, which occurs naturally in the body in varying degrees, can make you feel religious. (June Gill # 364)

• Well, when I was quite young I had terrible nightmares about eternity; my mind could not then, and still can not now, grasp the idea of something, especially my soul, "living forever." I would wake up in the middle of the night, crying that I didn't want to live forever--Which, needless, to say, confused the heck out of my McChristian parents. It got so bad that I would start to shake uncontrollably in church whenever Heaven was mentioned. So, I suppose I started thinking of becoming an atheist as a way to "avoid eternity." (Maynard R. Svor #828, and damn proud of it!)

• Hard to say, really. I know I'd always been relatively skeptical. Never believed in ghosts or demons or vampires or that things could occur by magic. Since god was, by all accounts, a magical being, its existance seemed less and less likely the older I got. I was always interested in science, too and the more I read, the more my feelings on the subject seemed validated. The things most people ascribed to god, were simply better explained by science.

  I didn't think much about biblical contradictions, since I didn't read any version of the bible until I was an adult, but I had been told about the triple-omni's and the contradictions there were obvious to me by the age of ten. In fact, I remember arguing with a friend of mine in the 6th grade about the supposed perfection of god and concluding that if god wasn't perfect, then it wasn't, by definition, god and if god was perfect, then nothing else would exist, because you can't improve upon perfection. (Alikhat #757)

• Watching Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" when I was 6 or 7. It made more sense than my mother's bull about angels playing bowling creating thunder. :) When I was a teen-ager, I decided to try religion because I thought you needed a rule-maker to have morality. Five years in every Christian church (from Eastern Orthodoxy to Anglicanism to messianic Judiasm to general, non-denomination Protestant) proved that one wrong. The final straws were dating an atheist who has more real morality and decency in his left ear than Christianity has managed to even dream of in the past 2000 years, and listening in to an enlightening sermon by a Pentecostal preacher who was patting himself on the back for disciplining a four year old by threatening to "beat him to death" if he moved during the man's two-hour sermon. What was even scarier was that there were 500 Christians there, laughing and nodding, like this guy was a hero for managing to keep the "unruly" kid in line. Just call me a born-again atheist? ;) (Sunfall #889)

• Like I said in response to question #10, I was dating a devastatingly intelligent girl (we were young) and she helped me see that all of my beliefs were based on a societal "norm" that has been unconsciously beatin' into me since day one of my life. I hope and think you all know what I am talking about. If not, just ask and I can expound.

  BTW, this whole questons idea is very cathartic. I am going through a very troubling time right now regarding my beliefs and this is helping me to see that there are others out there who really are capable of rational thought. Am I the only one who is surrounded by idiots or am I just more vocal about it? (Clark Nova #474)

• This is an easy one for me to answer. I was a very dedicated fundamentalist and a pillar of my congregation. What started me thinking that something about the whole philosophy (term used loosely) of christianity was off base was the behavior of christians. Specifically the divisive attitude that "my religion is more right than any other religion." In addition, I started noticing that the scriptures were interpreted in any fashion in order to fit whatever argument was being discussed at the moment. There was no consistency and a lot of contradictions and obvious holes in the theology. The concept that it cannot be understood by logic or simple reasoning but must be accepted by blind faith started to make me think there has to be something more. My leaving christianity was a gradual process. It took me about 3 or 4 years of questioning before I finally decided to leave it completely. I had done a tremendous amount of research about many religions and found similar inconsistencies in all of them. Leaving religion behind was the best thing I ever did(other than choosing my life partner!) Glenn Rimbey #750)

• One of my sisters became a rather fire-breathing Baptist, that kind who believe that only theirs of their sect will go to Heaven. (She was looking for the One True Faith; raised in the United Church of Canada, she eventually tried Catholicism--wanted to become a nun!--and speaking-in-tongues Pentecostalism, among others.) At the ripe old age of fifteen and change I realized that her belief system was ridiculous--my Protestant, Catholic, and Hindu friends would all go to Hell? *I* would go to Hell? Heaven would be populated solely by nasty, sanctimonious people of her particular brand of preachin'?

  Once you don't believe in Hell, you can no longer believe in Heaven. And once you don't believe in either, every other belief of organized religion more or less falls by the wayside. It took me a while--you don't just discard the fear of hellfire overnight, let me tell you--but by the age of 18 I had decided that fear wasn't a sufficiently motivating reason to believe in the palpably unbelievable. (Robert Matthews #1801)

• What helped a great deal was my "moral education" courses in grade 7 and 8 (ME exists in later grades too but by the 8th grade I was already an atheist). We were introduced to all the major religions of the world (Hinduism, Buddism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam) and some of the earlier ones like those of ancient Greece and Egypt.

  I started thinking about how all these religions, at one point or another, thought they were right and found evidence all around them to back it up. That was the first crack I found.

  The coup de grace was the "problem of evil". Something I came up with on my own. It just didn't add up: omnipotent + omniscient + omnibenevolent so much evil in the world. (Alex #2007)

• With the exception of a 1-year period in my teen years, I've always avoided religion. My family was of Lutheran descent. My father as a teenager was a JW, when he returned from WWII he was an atheist. My brother recently researched the major religions and discovered for himself that it was all bunk. He was expecting to find something good for his family, so naturally he was pissed off. He told me once, about 2 years ago, that Jesus Christ could go to hell. I was shocked at his blasphemy - I guess I still harbored agnostic feelings based on childhood indoctrination - but I let it go. Then one day he sent me a copy of Dan Barker's nontract, "Dear Believer".

  I was shocked and somewhat hurt at first, but continued reading. As I did, more and more I found myself muttering "right on!" and by the end I was moved to the revelation that God really does not exist. I wish I had actually *read* the bible before that point - I had never even entertained the thought that the scriptures could be as errant as they are. I've spent the last six months of my life swallowing up as much material as I can find, and diligently discarding the last of my religious ties by slamming Christians in the newsgroups. A few days ago I lifted my smoke screen - I see that as the final step towards accepting the non-existence of deities and accepting my own atheism. (Vic Sagerquist #2011)

• I was a deist for quite some time when I was younger - disdainful of the faults of organized religion, but still pretty sure there was some sort of god. The turning point for me came in high school, when I learned that a friend who I had previously considered intelligent and reasonable was a full-blown, fundamentalist born-again Christian and young-earth creationist. She told me quite cheerfully that she believed I was going to Hell. In that moment I reached the decision that if this was what God-belief did to people, then I wanted no further part of it. From there it was only one short step to declaring myself an atheist, and I never looked back. (Adam Marczyk #2001)

• Having given up on evangelical (Charismatic) Christianity... The only reason I could think of for believing in *any* gods, souls and an after-life was that I really wanted them to exist.

  But I kept asking myself: "Why should something exist simply because I want it too?" The answer I always came back to was that: things don't exist simply because people **really** want them to.

  And if I've learned anything over the years it is to be highly suspicious of beliefs based strongly on 'wishful thinking' (with little or no evidence to support them).

  I view atheism as my 'default position'. i.e. Given the thorough lack of evidence to support such extraordinary things as: gods, souls, (etc); I see absolutely no rational reason to believe in these type of things... Just as I see no rational reason for believing in faeries or 'Bigfoot'.

  It seems to me that, The most rational reason for the continued e xistence of belief in gods (and an after-life) is that these beliefs function as coping mechanisms to deal with our powerful and 'natural' fear of death (and the related fears of having no control over many things which can affect our survival). And these particular coping mechanisms are passed-on from generation to generation in the form of religious beliefs. (pan #1432)