Atheists, when/why did you stop believing in god?

It is only within the past two years that I've even opened myself up to the idea that the concept of a larger force on a higher plane of existence isn't inherently laughable, largely due to joining the church choir in college to make some extra cash and keeping up with it as a hobby after graduation because the music is so awesome. I still don't consider myself Christian but I'm not really an atheist anymore, either. Conversely, both of my parents are very Christian but neither has been a regular churchgoer since I was 7.

This pretty much describes my upbringing. My parents made a couple of halfhearted stabs at churchgoing when my brother and I were kids, but it was traumatic for us and didn't last long. Now that my parents are in their 70s, I guess they're hedging their bets on eternity, because they've joined a Baptist congregation down the road from their house. I would call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist — nobody's ever given me a reason to make that leap of faith, and it's certainly not necessary to believe to try to live a good life.

A Nairn scares me.

when they cancelled Small Wonder.

I didn't stop believing in a god because I never did. I can remember believing in Santa but not any gods.

I can remember being 4 and going to preps assembly and being made to sing hymns/say prayers and thinking "wtf"

Personally, I never went, but I've always found it interesting that that's so often the case. From what I'm told it's just the strictness that turned so many people off. I guess a lot of people just get to a certain point and say, "you know what? fuck this."

I think the seriousness of transubstantiation during Mass in Catholic school did it for me. I was an outsider and the whole thing seemed so over the top and brainwashing. I can remember a voice in my head going "THIS IS FAKE... THIS IS FAKE...". I think then my little head applied Occam's razor and cut the whole thing apart.

I had been reading a lot of physics textbooks that year. Now if there was a religion that found Gnostic truth in the properties of subatomic interactions and such things, I might sign up.

When I was about 14, my parents (my dad a former catholic, my mom some kind of protestant) finally found a church and tried to get me to go. I was in an adolescent stage where I felt the need to tell them how stupid church is and how god doesn't exist, etc. I still didn't think about it too hard, but that's when I really became an atheist. My dad was pretty bummed, I can remember one car ride with him where he asked me, "What do you think happens to you when you die?" and I said "Um, nothing, you go in the ground." Then he asked, "Well, what if there was a nuclear bomb, and nothing was left of you?" and I replied, "Well, I guess that's it then." We really didn't discuss it anymore after that, he gave up.

Now that I've thought about it some, I'm still an atheist, but I think god does exist in people's heads because it's something they've grown up with or something they think they need. It's just unfortunate that some of these people try to use it for political gain and stuff. My parents still go to church, but their church is really liberal and pro-gay (?) and not all that bad.

http://www.ucclcri.org

i've noticed that a lot of catholic school alumni have not only abandoned the religion but are really into things the catholic church would totally hate, e.g., bondage, butt sex, being gay. maybe catholic schools are secretly bondage training centers!

If I may elaborate on that...

I don't see people who believe in a god as stupid. If the belief is massively strong I'll most likely doubt their sanity, unless they've had a specific experience that's givem them cause to believe in a god [visitation etc], but even then it's probably a bit of a leap to think they weren't dreaming/hallucinating.

The fall from grace was more a 0.0001% downward tilt towards grace..

One time, I played the song "Jesus Loves Amerika" by The Shamen in the car with my grandmother, and she (after the 20th time I've played it in later high school in the house in my room, loudly, and lyrically audible), she told me how upset she was with the lyrics... the rift opened and I went one way, and my family stayed the religious course... and still do to this day.

That said, I'm more pissed off at the all-boys part and the lack of social skills thereof than the Catholic part. My maternal family is Presbyterian... so the "college-prep" part was the key why I was there.)

I attended a Christian school for sixth grade, but found it sort of creepy and the only parts of the Bible that interested me were the blood 'n' guts parts of the OT. Then I got asked not to return for various reasons and my ambivalence became irrelevant to a degree.

I'm extremely distrustful of true believers (of any stripe) - I can't comprehend how someone can really believe in God and heaven and hell and all that, my instinct is to assume they're faking to fit in with the populace or have some kind of ulterior motive.

Even if I could kind of believe in a higher being or spiritual plane, I don't see how it would effect my outlook - I couldn't follow a cruel/heartless God who allows so much suffering and pain and demands strict obedience or else. It's just not compatible with any of my other beliefs to take orders from him. I kind of follow Orwell's embittered atheist - 'I don't so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him'.

I find that I'm fascinated by religious art, because it lacks an overriding ego, there's something pure about Byzantine/E. Orthodox medieval art and Northern European Renaissance paintings in the way that the artist channeled something greater.

My mom (another catholic school example) lost her faith when she was told that unbaptized babies went to Limbo, decided that was fucked up and never believed again. My father bailed on religion when his parents abandoned him as a child. So there's probably something to be said for the traumatic experience angle...

BTW, Dan, as someone who was around for it, you weathered the storm better than anyone could be expected to. Love to you as always, sir.

I feel like that was uncharacteristically pleasant. Should I make a dick joke or something to make up for it?

this almost exactly describes my experience too. i was in year 11, it was around the time we were doing russian history at school, and i remember being a bit disgusted at the way that the russian church encouraged people to put up with horrible lives pending the wonderful afterlife... then it dawned on me that was exactly what the catholic church had done through the ages too! i remember going home from my catholic boarding school for the term holiday and telling my mum that i wasn't going to mass ever again as i thought all the rituals and whatnot was total 'hocus pocus' and i disapproved of the use of guilt to control the congregation's behaviour and values and the way women continued to be held in such low esteem by the catholic church. she didn't speak to me for 3 weeks and i don't think she has ever forgiven me for the words 'hocus pocus'. i've never been to mass again either, except for weddings and funerals.

interestingly even though i am now a proclaimed atheist, and i have my own little code of behaviour which just involves being as good a person as i can, i find myself constantly feeling guilty. i fear i always will, 16 years of catholic upbringing is unavoidable no matter whether i believe in god or the virgin mary or not.

I went from believing in god (small, non-Christian "g") but not believing in organized religion to being agnostic to being sort of pagan to being "spiritual" to being a nonspiritual cynical agnostic to, a few years back, being a straight up atheist because religion just doesn't make any damn sense to me when I look at it logically. Everything I read about religion just strengthens my conviction.

for me it was a gradual process. i don't consider myself an atheist, but i consider myself to be completely separated from any religion whatsoever. even if i was actively religious, i'm would stay far away from organized religion.

I think this is the reason why my dad, age 65, is attending church again after not having done so for most of his life. He sees the grim reaper waiting for him up ahead on the road and would probably whirl like a dervish if he thought it would put him in good stead with The Creator. Xianity has the edge on being the focus of his fears due to its status in American society.

Why/when did I stop? I've never had the opportunity to start! I'm completely devoid of spirituality, was raised without any notion of it in my life. My first brush with it was from my cousin, whose parents are very religious, and the notion just seemed senseless to me. I'm glad that I've gone without it.

i stopped going to church at age 18, my mom protested quite loudly. i didnt give in, i just couldnt fake it anymore.

even a collection to pay for the rental of the church, during which people are invited to turn in the pews and greet those sitting beside and behind them.

omg they have found the absolute worst bits to copy.

"motto: live better, help often, wonder more"

they should get some secular paedophiles in to prove there's no need for god to be an endemic to power structures that foster abuse.

that's like a boring, despiritualised and slightly offensive version of unitarianism (which i am totally down with, and whose main london church is unsurprisingly also based in islington)

if i've not been attending unitarianist ceremonies of late, it isn't coz i've gone off it, it's because i don't like waking at 8am on a sunday

that said, complete inclusivity and tolerance are unitarianism's watchwords, so i gotta be down with this as well i guess, the smug cunts

xp

or explore new paths of psychosis and abuse, get Justin Lee Collins as a guest preacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADDo5PT_ToI

read this on the BBC earlier, it had this quote at the end

But Bishop Harrison, a Christian preacher for 30 years, says he does not see his new neighbours as a threat, confidently predicting that their spiritual journey will eventually lead them to God.

thought the bish was probably otm there

I thought TED talks were secular equivalent of church services?

money's our new god, man

I never was religious. My parents are from New England and had horrible Catholic upbringings that led them to decide to raise us pretty free from that. So I never went to a church unless it was with some other kids. I remember the only time i ever went to Sunday School i was bored and started drawing a demon, cos i knew that was something taught in the Bible, and i wanted to fit in. I was into drawing monsters at the time, so i did a huge portrait of the face of satan. At the time i had no idea that was a dumb thing to do, so once it started upsetting them i flipped it over and drew Jesus on the back.

Only time i ever thought about belief was when i was 6 or 7 and my parents asked me if i believed in Santa Claus and by then i had enough faith in my rational circuits that i said "I believe in him as a symbol of the spirit of Christmas" or something, not exactly saying I didn't believe in him, but that i understood his purpose. I went through my teens reading books on Zen and pseudo-science and stuff. My mom was friends w some of the Subgenius people so i got heavily into that, and going to school in rural/suburban GA it was essential for rebelling against the small-town Megachurch that had everyone in a daze.

I think i was really 'atheist' during this time, in that i didn't believe in the God defined by pop culture and expressed through politics, etc. I was also severely depressed, suicidal, and manic, and every so often i would get this strange feeling like _I_ was Jesus or something. I would be in such a state that i was literally bringing tears to my eyes about how i was going to save the universe or something. There's a reason they don't prescribe accutane that much anymore.

After getting out of HS and going to college and travelling/reading/exploring/etc I just started realizing a whole other level of stuff that religions had to offer, which has led me to where i am now. I believe in God, but it's a pretty abstract concept. I could talk to a Jesus freak and completely understand every word they say in the context of this abstraction, but everything they say would to them be on a literal dogmatic level that doesn't really have anything to do w my understanding. At any rate I've accepted that there is something greater than the human experience, and that we are all part of that whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are living fully conscious lives or our bodies have long since disintegrated into the heavy elements inside an exploding star ten thousand years in the future.

I never was religious.

Yeah. When I saw this thread revival the first thing that struck me is that the question presumes that a belief in god is a shared starting point for everyone and that anyone disbelieving in god could only arrive there by losing any earlier belief. It would seem to me that infants are not born with any belief system.

Well i think to be a real atheist you need to believe in some form of God in order to believe he doesn't exist.

Age 7. Lived with grandmother who suffered progressive multiple sclerosis, attended Catholic CCE with remarkably dull teachers (you don't need a degree to poke holes in Aquina's proofs), and had figured out that Santa was another adult lie. So it was a trinity of natural "evil", adult credulity, and adult duplicity that drove me over the edge. Carl Sagan came to the rescue in by age 9 to inform me that I wasn't alone.

Atheism seems to me to be more of a political worldview, where actual belief or disbelief in God is incidental. If you agree that social policy should not actually be dictated by supernatural concerns then why isn't that enough?

Well i think to be a real atheist you need to believe in some form of God in order to believe he doesn't exist.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinong's_jungle

XP enough?! It'd be fuckin AWESOME!

Atheism seems to me to be more of a political worldview, where actual belief or disbelief in God is incidental. If you agree that social policy should not actually be dictated by supernatural concerns then why isn't that enough?

― Philip Nunez, Monday, February 4, 2013 11:29 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

+1

atheism is identity politics

I don't understand that point. If atheism is true then that's a reason to try to persuade people of its truth, right? It's better to believe true things than false things.

I think you can agree that supernatural stuff should have nothing to do w worldly politics and still believe in God. Politically that would make me an atheist, tho i don't agree with most atheists on basic cosmological/philosophical concepts.

If atheists go around trying to persuade people of the truth of their viewpoint how is that any different than a Christian or Muslim or whatever doing the same?

HEY LET'S DO THIS AGAIN

Provided that they do it on fair terms, I'm fine with Christians and Muslims trying a lot harder to persuade people. That way they expose themselves to criticism and counter-persuasion.

No one likes to be pestered, scolded, threatened or shamed, whether by evangelicals or atheists. Persuasion ought to be a civilized activity. It often isn't. I think we all agree with these sentiments. If so, there's little more to be said on that head.

XTC, "Dear God", seventh grade

"If atheism is true then that's a reason to try to persuade people of its truth"
if you were to circumscribe atheism to only include people who assert the unprovable claim that there is absolutely no supernatural deity, you might not even get dawkins in that camp.

That statement isn't committed to a definition of atheism. Replace 'atheism' with 'the view that there's probably no God' and I think Dawkins is included.

HEY LET'S DO THIS AGAIN

I lol'd

'the view that there's probably no God'

uh this is not my understanding of Dawkins' position

What is your understanding? I'm thinking of this thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Bus_Campaign

there's no "probably"

for example

Dawkins has stated repeatedly the position "there's probably no God". Any scientist would couch their position like that: absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, and there are black swans.

Its one thing to be a skeptic in Northern Europe or Australia, where its non-belief is so common that one hardly pays attention to it. In the U.S., we've had only one openly atheist congressman in our history, and prior to the internet, there were few forums for many atheists in small towns or red states to meet. We had our books, columns in Scientific American, etc., but little in the way of community, and remained for the most discriminated against community of "belief". The situation for skeptics in highly religious developing nations is doubtless worse.

Sure I think Dawkins is strident, and playing to the choir. But its not unlike gay rights advocates chanting "We're here, we're queer, deal with it". For many of us, it reassurance that we're not alone, just as much as its a voice for secular civitas.

I guess he's walked back that certainty since 2006...? (6.9 out of 7.0 on the "scale of doubt" or something?)

i dunno have we ever had a major openly atheist (major) politician, and i'm not sure that it's all that common around europe either tpbh

and lately i've been getting chills about whether or not 'non-belief' is half as common as i'd assumed even in my peers (abortion and end-of-life cases making headlines here lately has the crazies out)

i dunno have we ever had a major openly atheist (major) politician

uh how far back and how far east are we going here

'we'

and lately i've been getting chills about whether or not 'non-belief' is half as common as i'd assumed even in my peers (abortion and end-of-life cases making headlines here lately has the crazies out)

― ben foster five (darraghmac), Monday, 4 February 2013 21:53 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I suspect it's much less common. loads of people aren't churchgoers but get quietly onto the subject and they will speak of their experience of conscience in terms like "some kind of higher power " or even "a relationship with God"

'sin'

"absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence"

It is for the Abrahamic God.

i'm in the minority among people i know in not believing in god... in fact, i haven't met many people at all who don't believe. for some reason this surprises me, i'd think hardcore materialist agnosticism would be more of a thing these days.

It is, I guess it depends on where you're from? Or your situation is anecdotal.

New York City area, experience is people from all walks of life from all over the world.

Oh yeah?? Strange, me too. Though I don't think I know what anyone I talk to believes in that sense. Never asked.

Our Prime Minister's an athiest FFs. And yet she is still dead against gay marriage. GO figure.

Also:

When I saw this thread revival the first thing that struck me is that the question presumes that a belief in god is a shared starting point for everyone and that anyone disbelieving in god could only arrive there by losing any earlier belief.

This. It struck me immediately as well, and other people commented on the thread originally. It is a curious concept that this worldview is so common on the US. It just isnt, here, in my experience. And I say that as someone who *did* grow up around churchy la femmes.

Could be directed to those who were once theists specifically.

I've met many people who grew up in non-religious households. I know a few who grew up in households where the parents were clearly agnostics or atheists. My impression is that that's sort of rare, but I don't really know. I grew up in exurban Midwestern US, so atheists were certainly a curiosity for a lot of kids.