Why are you an Atheist? (disclaimer included)

[Lallapalalable]

This magical tale filled with sword fights and romance begins long ago, in the depths of my childhood memory. In what I believe to be an effort to start fresh after her divorce, my mother signed my brother and I up for a christmas play (he was a donkey, I was a bauce of an asian king), and I can only remember thinking "wtf is this shit?" You see, I had never set foot in a church, let alone had any portions of the bible conveyed to me in any way. I later thought it was some sort of magic show, but then I started going to sunday school. When I heard the child friendly bible stories, I registered them on par with the stories in this greek mythology book I had, and didnt really know what the point of all this was. My sunday schooling was erratic for a while, as I was a military brat and moved a lot.

Eventually, my mother retires, we settle down, and I get a good hard learnin' 'bout me some bible. I finally took in the gist of the basics, and Im like "Okay, I guess, everyone else is doing it and I just want to fit in. Its not that far fetched" (it was a protestant church, we used grape juice and wonder bread for communion, less 'sinners be burnin!'). For a while, a very confusing while, my mind struggled with conflicting ideologies: I dont really take this seriously, so would that mean I will go to hell? I flirted with agnosticism and atheism, and I could feel myself getting a little further and further away, but always scared straight by an angry and merciless god. All this, coupled with my dad dropping hints for years, I actually had the thought "I dont believe any of this, so I'm going to hell/be made an example of/deemed unworthy on judgement day!" and I kind of had a 'srsly? gtfo' moment. I think I was actually in church when that happened, and from that point on I just drew shit on the little activity booklets for kids (usually explosions and such).

To read the version with all the blade stabbing and kissies, look for the director's cut in stores near you!

 

[nmm123]

Because I have read the theories of abiogenesis and evolution as well as the big bang theory and it appears that the universe makes more sense without god some people tell me it's because I am only a teenager but I think not because if this were the case then I would still have at least a minuscule of faith but I have none

 

[nudger1964]

for me,
i was about 7 years old attending a traditional CofE primary school where we had the local vicar come in to take morning assembly 2 or 3 times a week.
I just recall listening to him telling us this "greatest story ever told" and thinking, this is just silly.
I went home, asked my mum if she believed in God...she didnt reply but told me that was something i should find my own answer to. So i tiold, in that case i didnt.
Since the age of 7 ive yet to hear an argument to make me rethink

 

[Andiferous]

for me,
i was about 7 years old attending a traditional CofE primary school where we had the local vicar come in to take morning assembly 2 or 3 times a week.
I just recall listening to him telling us this "greatest story ever told" and thinking, this is just silly.
I went home, asked my mum if she believed in God...she didnt reply but told me that was something i should find my own answer to. So i tiold, in that case i didnt.
Since the age of 7 ive yet to hear an argument to make me rethink

For me, it seems healthy to never stop waiting.

I am very curious given your story: how did your mother's attitude (or even your parents and their attitude in general) affect the development of your belief (or lack thereof, I guess). As a parent, I'd really like to know if that openness supported you in raising the question at a younger age (I'm guessing many people don't commit to a decision until their teens) ... and do you think her approach affected your confidence in any way?

Don't feel obligated to share if you'd rather not. I've come from a different situation and a very religious household, and am trying to figure out the best way to allow my daughter to make her own decision. But that's uncharted territory for me.

I hope I wasn't hard on you in the other thread ... I've been grumpy today and not sure how to handle myself. (Nothing was directed at you personally, I swear). I try not to let myself post when grumpy, and I usually just read up and don't post. But I guess I really liked that topic.

 

[nudger1964]

well to this day i still do not know if either of my parents had any kind of religious beliefs. My father died a few years ago and it was interetsing that when discussing his funeral, my mother didnt have any idea even if my father had any belief. Thats probably not a particularly healthy sign of our family communication i suspect.
I think it was more than just not having any reinforcement at home, it was my entire enviroment. Nobody outside of school assembly ever mentioned God, no one i knew went to church (other than the vicar, i presume he did)...so my exposure was exclussively the handfull stories repeated over and over.
obviously had my background been different i may have gone along with it a little longer, but ultimately i think i do not have faith becuase there is nothing within me that either needs or desires a god. That probably is entirely down to my mother and father.

 

[CowPolitician]

I grew up in a family that was not religious at all, nor discourage religion. When I was young, I wondered why some of my friends go to church, and my family didn't. At the time, I didn't know the point of church, nor understand the concept of religion. When I ask my parents why we didn't go to church, they said that they believe in something more powerful than god. Nice choice of words, but it's a horrible way to explain to a kid who didn't even go to kindergarten yet. I didn't even know who God was yet.

After that, I never asked my parents about religion as far as I remember. For a long time, I didn't know how to label myself because I didn't know what possible choices there are. I thought one thing was universal, most people believe in a supreme being. I consider calling myself a Christian because the god I knew was of Judeo-Christian myth. Especially since my close friend was Christian, and he was the only person I spoke about religion at the time (ironically, he now so atheist that he is more anti-religion than Christopher Hitchens, if that is possible).

As time went on, I decided to not associate myself with Christians because there are too many religions in the world. I never heard of the term atheist till 11th grade, which I find shocking now since I hear that term all the time today. I only found the term because I wanted a proper way to explain my belief to others. However, I was going by the definition that I found on a dictionary website, which explains that atheists are people unsure if God does or doesn't exist. I soon found out that it generally associated with complete disbelief in God, which I find is too harsh.

In grade 12, I joined a philosophy class, and was a major unit. My teacher really did try hard to seem fair and balance, and I think he succeed by presenting the argument, and letting us to do the debate on whether it's a valid argument or not. What I found scary is that I was able to debunk every argument with common sense and logic. I thought that these arguments were old, and we might of been able to find better proof with new science. I started watching apologist videos, which only serve to doubt God even more. I came across a Thunderf00t video explaining how he define himself (The PEARL video)

It was near the end of high school, and I shown this video to my philosophy teacher, and thought it was an interesting position. A new position that I could finally label myself proudly. I click to see what other videos done by him, and saw "Why Do People Laugh At Creationists" and thought that was an interesting title. I never heard of the term Creationist. So I waited to get back home and checked out some of the videos in that series. It was a great laugh, and very educational. I finally started to call myself an atheist and stop being scared of God.

Unfortunately, I started to distance myself from Thunderf00t within the past year. Especially with his response to the Ground Zero Mosque. I thought he was making really bad comparisons, and when other atheists called Thunderf00t on it, he reacted very badly. Today, I watch youtube videos from various atheists, Potholer54 being my favourite for an amazing sense of humour, awesome accent (kind of like Top Gear) and his focus on the argument and misinformation instead of bashing religion.

 

[Frenger]

Hi guys, I am fairly new to this forum but I likes it so far. I thought I would offer my reasons to why I am an atheist as recently I have been asked by many people.

My parents bought me up on Monty Python, Blackadder, Bottom and such forth so I was installed to see the "silliness" in things. Everything I ever heard about the bible, god or any religion always seemed far fetched and may I say.....silly. I never really knew why I thought the bible was so wrong, just that it had to be because believing in it would undermine everything I knew about the World (which was and still is very little).

A main reason for me at a young age was the feeling that religion kind of spoilt the mystery of things. All the questions I had, seemed instantally answered by supposing a god, and I really didn't like that. I think a lot of people say religion helps them with the "why?" questions as in "why are we here?" but for me it ruined them.

At University I spoke to many relgious people at length about their beliefs and every single question I asked, they answered by opening to a page in a book, I started to feel that I wasn't talking to a person anymore, but a book. That freaked me out a bit as I have always liked trying to think for myself and there were people who seemingly didn't want to.

The main reason for me is what I know about Science. Since University I have become obssessed with Science, I love Evolution and Cosmology and I think these disciplines are incombatible with any of the monotheistic religions I know of.

I have been asked to belief many times that I am missing out on something, that religion gives our lives purpose. Bulls**t. If these people knew anything about the natural world and our place in it, I don't think they would ever look back. Science is all the wonder, and more that we could ever hope for.

 

[Prolescum]

My parents bought me up on Monty Python, Blackadder, Bottom and such forth so I was installed to see the "silliness" in things.

I love you.






Not, you know, properly.

In some ethereal, non-committal, probably-best-left-to-the-imagination-although-perhaps-not-and-in-all-probability-is-just-a-very-agreeable-and-hopefully-warm-de facto-greeting-toward-a-like-minded-chap sort of way.


Barring accidents.

 

[Frenger]

My parents bought me up on Monty Python, Blackadder, Bottom and such forth so I was installed to see the "silliness" in things.

I love you.






Not, you know, properly.

In some ethereal, non-committal, probably-best-left-to-the-imagination-although-perhaps-not-and-in-all-probability-is-just-a-very-agreeable-and-hopefully-warm-de facto-greeting-toward-a-like-minded-chap sort of way.


Barring accidents.

You had me at "I love you"

 

[Andiferous]

Yeah well, love you or not, a 'win' I suppose is certified by specific criteria and I guess ample argument against stuff. Accept this definition only if you think I 'win* (or perhaps you win either). We'll have to consult specific parody scripts to trust in a real answer.

 

[Frenger]

Yeah well, love you or not, a 'win' I suppose is certified by specific criteria and I guess ample argument against stuff. Accept this definition only if you think I 'win* (or perhaps you win either). We'll have to consult specific parody scripts to trust in a real answer.

Is it about winning? I'm not sure if it is. My reasoning was that the claims of religion, the parables and stories and so on, are very silly. They sound a little like a childrens book, take the first story, that of god making people out of dust and a rib. It IS just silly. I don't deny that some of the language used is quite beautiful and poetic, it's just the stories that make no sense. I'm not saying that I took my religious education from Monty Python, more I took my outlook from them.

Earlier you asked whether you should ever stop waiting for the answer? Well, no, you should never stop, I am always open to evidence that would show the bible or any other religious text to be even slightly correct, but so far, nothing. As a result I live my life like the whole book is full or bogus claims. If the simple claims that we can test come up false, what chance have the extraordinary claims got?

 

[Anachronous Rex]

Welcome back Andi.

 

[Vaper]

Why am I an atheist?

Because I just can't be anything else.

I don't think I ever made any conscious decision about it and I can't think of any particular event or moment that did it either.

I've always took the 'find out for yourself' approach. I remember thinking about Santa and realising it was ridiculous. So I stayed up all night, pretending to be asleep and saw my dad putting the presents by my bed. I wasn't disappointed, no illusions were shattered, I just thought "OK, now I know".

My parents never pushed religion on me, I remember going to church with my mum because I asked to go, not because she wanted me to. I laughed during a song at the lyrics "I was cold, I was naked" (I was 7 or 8, the concept of nudity was profoundly funny to me at that point) and mum said I couldnt go with her any more.

My mum lost her faith after her mother died after a long battle with lung cancer and my dad was never religious anyway, he was an electrical engineer and I used to watch him for hours taking things apart to fix them and I remember being fascinated by the idea of taking something apart to find out how it works. I got in to a lot of trouble after that, it turns out that our first VCR was just fine the way it was in one piece. But that, with my natural curiosity pointed me towards science and technology.

Today, I am an IT Security and forensics analyst, an armchair physicist and amateur astronomer and the idea of god just isnt in my life. I certainly don't feel I'm missing anything without him.

And that's me as an atheist.

 

[Gnug215]

Why am I an atheist?

Because I just can't be anything else.

I don't think I ever made any conscious decision about it and I can't think of any particular event or moment that did it either.

I've always took the 'find out for yourself' approach. I remember thinking about Santa and realising it was ridiculous. So I stayed up all night, pretending to be asleep and saw my dad putting the presents by my bed. I wasn't disappointed, no illusions were shattered, I just thought "OK, now I know".

My parents never pushed religion on me, I remember going to church with my mum because I asked to go, not because she wanted me to. I laughed during a song at the lyrics "I was cold, I was naked" (I was 7 or 8, the concept of nudity was profoundly funny to me at that point) and mum said I couldnt go with her any more.

My mum lost her faith after her mother died after a long battle with lung cancer and my dad was never religious anyway, he was an electrical engineer and I used to watch him for hours taking things apart to fix them and I remember being fascinated by the idea of taking something apart to find out how it works. I got in to a lot of trouble after that, it turns out that our first VCR was just fine the way it was in one piece. But that, with my natural curiosity pointed me towards science and technology.

Today, I am an IT Security and forensics analyst, an armchair physicist and amateur astronomer and the idea of god just isnt in my life. I certainly don't feel I'm missing anything without him.

And that's me as an atheist.

You know, I might be suffering under a bit of bias here, but it occurs to me that many people who are non-religious or atheistic often seem to have that innate natural curiosity, wanting to know how things really work.

I think many would avoid doing that "Santa Test" that you did, Vaper, out of a fear of finding the truth and being disappointed by it.

 

[malicious_bloke]

I'd say i'm more an empiricist than an atheist. You can say that somewhere beyond human knowledge and perception there lurks a *God* in the Deist sense but I see no need to believe it's there just because it isn't impossible that it might be.

The gods of the various modern religions on earth can't in my view exist as described, all their combined attributes and attested manifestations don't stand up to scrutiny. But ultimately, even if they were proven to exist as described, their character and behaviour as described in their own scriptures mark them out as singularly unworthy of my worship.

 

[atheisthistorian]

It was a slow process that lasted into my adulthood. The first step along the way was being tricked, then learning how I got tricked, learning how to question, and finally questioning everything. Once I realized that religion had exactly the same merit as fairy tales or psychics or ghost stories I gave up on it.

 

[Visaki]

Short answer: Because I wasn't raised as a theist.

Longer answer: My mother is atheist (I think) and my father a theist (again, I think). Neither really mentioned religion to me or my brother or sister. We went to religion classes in school (as almost all finnish kids did), were members in the national Lutherian church (my father actually married his goddaughter, since mom had to join church so they could get a church wedding and my father was her godfather), got confirmed at about 15 (we here in Finland usually have a confirmation camp of 7-10 days with girls in it which might be the real reason for young boys getting confirmed), went to church once a year (at christmas, I still do that with my father), had a bible at the living room sidetable (because it was a nice decorative element, being a huge old thing). All perfectly natural finnish childhood. My big brother left church when he turned 18 to which my fathers comment was "right, come down the food is ready" and my moms reaction was even more of a non-event.

I think I'm rather lucky that my parents don't care much about what my religious views are but care a lot about if I'm happy.

 

[GeologyJack]

The simple answer is that I began to question my world.

I started life being fairly fundamentalist Christian, Protestant sect. For many years I blindly followed the faith, almost every Sunday I went to church, I was dedicated to it to the degree that I no longer wanted to go to Sunday school or any variety of youth group, I wanted to be up in the main church since I did not feel that I was truly learning what I needed to learn through the cheesy or ultra hip teachings of the Sunday classes. As I grew up my family got more involved with the church, my mother went to work for them and still works for them to this day. During this time I surrounded myself with Christian friends, got into debates with them over which churches taught the words of God better, I wanted more than anything in the world to be a devoted child of the divine.

My pursuit of a perfect relationship with God that started to make me question the world around me. The first bit that made me start to think was my experiences in church; the people in my church were incredibly religious and I would watch them as praises were sung, every one of them had their hands raised to the sky and they had this look of supreme delight on their faces, as though God himself had come down and shown himself to them at that moment. I tried and tried to allow this to happen, I wanted to speak with God, or at least have him speak to me, but it never happened. Friends would say that they had met God in their sleep, that he had provided direction in their lives, and admittedly I started to get jealous; I thought I was being tested.

I went on like this for several years, I asked several people that I viewed as connected to God what was going wrong in my life and everyone always said that it would come and I would have my own experience with God. About this time I started to get involved with computers. If the computers we had were top of the line, there is a chance I would not have developed my first level of angst against God; I would sit attempting to play video games and when they didn't work, I felt as though bargaining with the creator would increase my chances of getting a process to work, unfortunately, not even the most powerful being in the universe could make windows 95 work smoothly on a good day. I started to question God's power and his sense of justness, there I was, a very devoted Christian, and not even the slightest bargaining was working.

I cannot blaim my non-theism entire on Bill Gates as a few months later my mom, frustrated with the computer as well, went out and got a windows 98 machine and all was well in the world. Nonetheless, I have begun to feel wronged and continuously let down by my religion. My friends were becoming more and more religous and were developing stronger relations with the church. In a last ditch effort, I took the confirmation classes offered by my church. These did not help and it was at this time that I begun to truly question the world around me. On some level I realized that if I were going to reach some sort of divine happieness in life, I was going to have to look beyond the church and find another religion that would be more correct than Christianity. I said my goodbyes to God, apologizing to an extent for my lack of patience, then started my soul search.

For a while I found myself pursuing my faith in the realm of Buddhism. To a degree, it may have been just the foreign excitement of having an eastern religion. On a level, the religion made me happy, Nirvana was a beautiful option that was so relieveing after pursuing the ideals of Christianity for so long. Unlike with my Christian beliefs, under Buddhism I began to feel a connection with the divine, to this day if I need to focus my thoughts I still will meditate as I used to do. Still Buddhism did not explain all that I felt needed to be explained so I solely held on to that to fight the void that represented a lack of true meaning in the universe.

Around the time that high school was ending, I decided to buy The God Delusion, partially for my own interest, but also to piss of my mom who had not been happy with my conversion to Buddhism. To be honest, the book scared me so much the first time I read it that I put it far away and didn't attempt to think about it for a few weeks. When I got to college a few months later I was at least an agnostic. As my passion for geology grew, I began to realize that there was no need for any sort of religious creation to start things off, nor was there any need for the moral realm to be dictated by a being that is as baised or close minded as any normal deity.

Since my ascent to atheism, I have been pressured many time by those around me to seek religion, but as far as I can see, I am happy questioning the universe.

Thanks for your time.

 

[Dogma's Demise]

What made you an atheist? Or if not an atheist - what made you recognise your frame of reference? Or maybe you're still thinking on it?

Was it one epiphany? A slow and continuous evolution of little bits, or have you changed your beliefs at all?

It was a slow process really.

What made me atheist? To put it simply, growing up and realizing faith is not an adequate reason to believe in something, especially something as far fetched as the supernatural claims of the Bible.

Plus those who tried to prove Christianity without relying on faith just failed miserably. The ontological argument, in all its incarnations, is arguably one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read, it's always the same fallacy of thinking you can define things into existence. Not that the Kalam, Design, Moral etc. do any better job.

 

[bluejatheist]

Several years ago I sat down and told myself there was no god. Simple enough, though it was a formality on an already relatively detached view of religion, as it never represented to me anything more than an annoying concept of being spied on. In recent time it set in and now I keep track of atheist related movements. Parents apparently don't like it, but they're pitifully poor at giving any good reason why other than rare but annoying pleading to 'just believe.'