What turned you?

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Whenever someone asks me why I'm an atheist, I say, "Someone gave me a Bible."

I was raised to be more or less neutral towards religion. I'd go to church occasionally with one of my grandmothers, but I was always quite confused as to what church was about. At the same time, my mom and other grandmother taught me to do good deeds because they are the right thing to do, and my mom told me that the universe was created in the big bang (which I didn't really understand at the time). Around 13 I started to really think about this stuff. Before that I was merely indifferent about religion--it didn't really effect me, so I ignored it.

Around 13 I started getting interested in science, listening to some lecture by Dawkins, and learning more about evolution etc. I never had a sudden awakening to my atheism, but I guess I eventually realized that I didn't believe in god. I went through a fairly radical phase for awhile, before calming down to what I am today. I describe myself as a weak atheist. It means I don't think god exists but don't totally rule it out. My mom and grandmom (the non-religious one) insist that I am agnostic, but I disagree. The thing is, I live my life as if there is not god, and even if god game down from heaven and talked to me I would continue to live my life the same way (for complex reasons, which I can't be bothered to type right now). But I try not to get ticked off at religion in others, so long as it is not harmful towards other people or towards science. And so long as they are not trying to force it on me.


PS: One of my friends said that going to Catholic school was what turned her into an atheist.

Okay. First, a non-denominational college guy tried to sell me religion by telling me that, if I had Jesus in my life, I would have easy answers to everything, and I would cease to ever question anything. Anyone who has any morals at all would want to run screaming. It sounded like he was promising to make me into a zombie or something. Creepy.

Then there was a situation in which I was sitting in a First Baptist Church with my Baptist grandmother. The preacher came up to the podium and said, "you know all those odd liberal ideas and theories you have about what God is? Well, you can't have those ideas and still be a Christian." Well, I looked around me to see these "Christians" he was talking about, and most of them were decked out in gear that would put them overdressed for meeting the Queen of England. It was rather tacky. Frankly, I decided that Christianity wasn't an especially spiritual or fulfilling religion and decided that I wouldn't mind not being called one.

I started investigating the subject, and I realized that he was correct: my views were really more of a "pantheistic" nature, and I really liked philosophy more than I liked religion. On further reflection, I realized that this [pantheism] also really lacked support, and I eventually grew up to have pretty firmly established atheistical views.

The only note of bitterness I have about it is that, after I had become convinced that my parents were already aware that I was a skeptic, my mother tried to blow me out over calling the Noah's Ark tale "silly nonsense." Well, I told her that I hadn't had much of an opinion of religion for years, and both she and my father began treating me like I had murdered someone. Both of them behaved very childishly, and they were so shrill they could have shattered glass. There were various threats. When I showed a sign of temper finally, my mother became convinced that it was a sign of demonic possession, and the entirety of their reaction was unforgivably shameful.

I will enthusiastically humour just about any religious ritual, and I read along in the Bible, with great interest, when I visit with my friends at their religious services. I have even found myself enjoying some of them quite frequently. However, I still refuse to visit my father and mother unless I can obtain a promise from them that they will skip the dinner prayer, and religion is an unnegotiably forbidden subject. If they bring it up, I remind them pointedly and harshly of how ashamed I was of them on that day.

So far, they have complied. After all, I'm the only child they have who bothers to write.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 05 Jul 2011, 5:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

Raised Roman Catholic but realised I had no belief between 7-9 but continued to go through the motions until 13 when with the bolstering of teenage hormones and the urge to define my adult self I rejected judeo christian beliefs.

I am a self defined agnostic seeking gnosis or at the very least higher conciousness as I see no proofs either for or against a deity or deities. I reject absolute faith in 'science' as the new religion just as I reject money as the new god.

peace j

I was raised in a MODERARTE Baptist household (they did exist at one time—not hostile to science or common sense, and probably more evangelical than fundamentalist).

At 13 I was given the choice of going to church or not… most of the time I chose not.

Still, I believed in God and considered myself a Christian. Sometime in my twenties I decided to “get serious” about my spirituality and read the bible from cover to cover…

That was it for me. I couldn’t get past the conquest of the Promised Land and/or the graphic descriptions of God’s wrath if Israel didn’t “return to righteousness.”

It was completely at odds with the “loving God” I’d been told about in Sunday school. I simply could not worship a God who punished people for not being thorough enough in their practice of genocide…

At that point, I knew I couldn’t ever be a Christian in the traditional sense.

Eventually, via my interest in Roman History, I became acquainted with the Roman stoics and started to read Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Today my moral compass is calibrated with Stoic discipline and ethics.

~From The Golden Sayings of Epictetus


Spiritually, I consider myself a soft deist/determinist/panentheist (pretty much compatible with stoic cosmology).

I believe in God/Zeus/Logos, but I think we must negotiate this life on our own for the most part.

I LIKE to think Zeus ( ) can tweak things occasionally, but that’s only a feeling and purely a matter of faith.

It’s kinda like the Cosmic Cloud tells Bender in Godfellas, “When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.” The real God doesn’t leave fingerprints. That’s why faith is required.

Bump

Christian to Atheist: Hypocrisy of Christians like my mother and those that I was associated with at the time. Lack of evidence

What "turned" me?

Well, I started out somewhat Christian, because that's what my family is, and that's what they tried to teach me. We never went to chruch or anything, but everyone was expected to believe in god and identify as Christian.

Went through a time at about age 12 when I became more interested in Christianity.

At about age 13, I realized that Christianity wasn't my "cup of tea" or "bowl or soup" or "whatever." I secretly called myself an Atheist at that point (not knowing any better; I'd been taught that the opposite of being Christian was being an Atheist. you either believed in God or not).

At age 14 I discovered Wicca, decided to learn all about it, and haven't looked back. That was nearly 4 years ago.

I don't know what "turned" me, really. I always say (when asked about why I believe what I believe) that I started out by learning what I don't believe in and figured out what I do believe in from there.

I guess my learning more about Christianity is what turned me.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, science is winning.

Not zombies, exactly. He did rise from the dead, though, but he wants you to drink his blood so that you can become like him and never die. Then you can also make more like him.

the story of my turning is very simple. in eighth grade science class i learned about natural selection, it made sense.
ok there is actually a little more than that.
i was raised christian, but natural selection practically instantly supplanted my former faith. it made more sense to me than there are so many different beliefs, and yet i happened to be born to parents who taught me the correct supernatural beliefs.
though it made sense, at first the idea of a world without god frightened me. I looked into it more and came across nonsense like, the eye could not have been created by evolution. this alleviated my unease for a couple years, I didnt think much about it. Then a couple years later my interest in biology resurfaced, i checked out a biology book called River Out of Eden. This is a book by Richard Dawkins, whom i had never before heard of. I also checked Climbing Mount Improbable, and Unweaving the Rainbow. These titles do not scream atheistic undertones, quite the opposite if anything, based on titles alone.
I read these books. Dawkins presented Darwinian ideas in a way that did not make me afraid of a godless world. In fact he showed me life was much more beautiful than i could have thought, and the development of life by evolution over geological time only added to the grandeur. His words resonated with truth and invoked feelings of reverence, in a magnitude i had not experienced a fraction of from reading the Bible.

Thus concluded my turning, i have never, will never turn back. My life is much richer for knowing the truth.

I guess I was never really a believer. I went along with what my family believed in, but after I got old enough that I could form my own opinion about it, I considered myself atheist, but then some time later, I knew I didn't know for sure, and since then, I've been agnostic.

Before this century we had a state church, can't say I ever believed in that silliness. People still use church for weddings and burials and stuff, but very few really believe in Christianity.

I turned 10 and started using my brain a bit.

I have always been a skeptic, and have never been a believer of any particular faith. My family I grew up in was Christian, and I earnestly tried to believe in this "stuff" I was taught in church, as I desperately wanted to fit in with my family and friends (was only really permitted to associate with other Christians). But despite an overwhelming desire to conform, to accept the teachings of Christianity, I could not do so. And by age ~8 had incurred the scorn of much of my family, and poor treatment for the next ten years, as the black sheep, outcast, heathen, etc. This only heightened my convictions that god is dead (nonexistent).

Once I escaped that level of religious persecution, after getting out on my own as a young adult, my view points relaxed a bit. And I have since gone back and forth between atheist and agnostic. My core viewpoint doesn't change, but I'm not precisely sure which to classify myself as. I'm certainly not a theist, but the question of whether or not there is a god just strikes me as a rather silly question to even ask or concern oneself with, for it is unknowable. I certainly don't understand the need for a label of oneself that carries this much social weight to be practical or logical either, again....because the question is so silly. The fervor behind religion baffles me.

I prefer to simply be absent a label, to be honest, as nothing religious is a defining characteristic on mine. I am a student of philosophy, sure, a student of science, indeed. I love the arts, and good company (however rare that may be), and have a zest for life. But I honestly believe simply remaining silent, and not giving myself a label is the most accurate description of my religious preferences these days.

I was raised Anglican.

I was "converted" (for lack of a better word) when I realised that christians of all sorts constantly ignore parts of their own holy book, and can't explain any of the problems the book has without rationalisations or "you have to believe to see".

I attended church, read the Bible, went to seminary, asked the 'wrong' questions, and was encouraged to leave.

Then I realized that the Biblical value of Pi is both incomplete and in error. This put my mind in doubt as to the veracity of the entire Bible, especially the parts that contradict each other.

My experiences as a church elder led me to believe that those who like going to church should never be allowed to see how churches are being run.