At what age did you become an atheist?
Offline Curious,what age did most of you become an atheist,why,how hard was it for you to make the transition,and how much shit did you catch from coming out?
Id say i never truly believed,i was skeptical at age 5,but mom and great grandma were catholic,so I still had to go to church till i was 15/16,went completely atheist by age 7(from a too young age I could form my own educated/semi educated conclusions from a young age since i was always skeptical about anything cept santa(well not really,but the extra presents,well not extra,but having a few from santa just made it feel/appeari got more people feeding my childish need for toys coupled with it made mom smile me opening a present that i might not have gotten otherwise.Plus the santa thing I guess allowed me to still seem innocent/childish,which I know made them feel good,even to this day id give a child a present from santa,just makes them so giddy with delight.
But anyway,curious,want honest answers,input,etc.
Im sure many of you were late bloomers becoming atheist,with all the bs spewed by the majority.Guess
Im just trying to figure out how fucked up i was as a child being skeptical so young,or "enlightened"
through my own deductive reasoning as an immature little kid?
"Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions."--Frater Ravus
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Atheist from birth to age 7. Became an atheist again at age 18.
Sometime between 7 and now. I never really marked it down on the calendar when I exactly had a strong non-beleif. Never considered it really important that I did not beleive something, espcially since there are more important things to worry about like school and trying to get laid. What I don't beleive is primarily peripheral and not really central to how I live. IN terms of a personal experience that drastically altered my thinking, there was this time that I lived a house away from this really cute girl, I knew her since I was about 7-8 so we were friends before puberty. One night, I was really frustrated becuase, being the stupid(er) guy that I was, I expectedd her to just notice me and go "Aha!! lets go out". Naturally, I started doing irrational things like begging some spirit or something to make her like me. Well, since I came from a Christian family, this was the first time I really took the idea of God seriously and figured this would be the proving grounds for his existence (did I mention how stupid[er] I was?). Suprisingly, I got an answer in the form of a question, in which answering said question made the existence of non-existence of God irrelevant. That questions was: WHy should she notice me? I honestly could not come up with an answer to that question (nor can I now really). Nevertheless, it got me thinking about other things such as agency (I did not literally think agency but I later found out what I was thinking about has been termed agency in various philosophical treatises). Bascially, I realized that, I can do all I can to make her notice me or to show that I am a fine specimen and she can still say "NO!" for reasons competly unknown to me becuase I am not her (also touching upon the concept of subjectivity). From here, I expanded this very humbling realization to many of the things that were important to me, buying games, watching movies, trying to get into the movie business, getting laid, etc. and it occurred to me that this realization has much grander implications than merely why I'm not getting laid by the girl next door as it were. However, the one aspect this realization does not take into account nor does it need to take into account, was the existence or non existence of God. He might be there but whats the difference? Worshipping him night and day won't help me nor would making it a point that I reject him help me. The only thing that can help me, is me and me alone ( as well as humans like or not like me) by actually doing something and learning whatever I can about myself or others by doing it. And I caught more shit by becoming a philosophy major than I did by having this non-beleif ("So youre studying how to think about problems rather than fixing them . . . . greeaaat . . . .. "
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" Why does God always got such wacky shit to say? . . . When was the last time you heard somebody say 'look God told me to get a muffin and a cup tea and cool out man'?" - Dov Davidoff
I was raised as catholic, but also i was born nerd...
As a children i found anoying that people did not do follow their own moral believes.
But what make me change.. when i was 13, I read The origin of the species, then the books of GAmow, about the origin of life, and the origin of the universe, and then the Bible. I decided that that paranoic god, that wants obedience, even it that menas to kill a son... simpley could not be real... and worst. I was an useless concept .
Later i decided that I could say the same for the gods of other religions.
Honestly I never really held a believe in a god. For a while I searched around for a religion to believe in cause I thought that for some reason it was required. I seriously went from an agnostic state to atheism while watching the Root of All Evil, and then more so finding the RRS and reading the God Delusion. I realized that atheists exist, it was ok to be an atheist and that its really the only rational choice. Trying to find something thats not there is quite hard indeed so I now hope to try to get others to realize the same thing and so they can move on which is why I hang around here.
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When i was 7, i demanded god show himself before me. I waited for 5 minutes, and nature took its course.
Anyways, my family was always a free-thinking family. We are technically buddhist, but neither my mom or my dad practice it, other than a little picture of my grandfather we have in our living room, with a cup filled with water infront of him.
In retrospect, i am thankful my family was not christian. If they were, i would have grown up an ignorant retard, with more faith than knowledge, and more belief than wisdom. You could even say, i thank the lord my parents were pseudo atheists.
I'm infallible. I don't know why you can't remember that.
I was completely indoctrinated as a child.
Went to a Fundamental Christian private school from 4th grade all the way through high school.
When I was 18, my dad realized that I had nowhere to live and rented out a house for me and my best friend. He provided a lot. The relationship between me and my dad was, and still is, very hollow - so it meant something to me to see that he was really trying to help.
That was the only point in my life were I could truly say that I "loved" my dad. Then I sat back and remembered that he didn't really follow the Christian faith. He's a "Unity" church member, whatever the hell that bullshit is. I also knew that he was very skeptical, and pretty much didn't believe in God at all.
It was at that time that I tried to imagine my dad in Hell. Really, I visualized it. The worst possible pain and torment. And it totally broke me down. It didn't make any sense. I couldn't understand how that was fair at all.
And so my journey began.
I started debating with people on the Hardcore Christians MySpace (of which I got banned from twice), back in the smaller days of RRS. As my knowledge grew, I drifted further away from Theism. It took me awhile. I think I officially labeled myself as an Atheist about 8 months ago. So yeah, it took quite awhile. It's hard to break out of the Jesus mentality when it's all you've ever known your whole life.
I never had any faith in God. I think I recognized from a very early age that faith is an inherintly bad approach to discovering truth. However, my parents did try to raise me as a Christian. In junior high school I happened to think of Pascal's Wager on my own, and then I actually became afraid that my lack of faith in God might doom me to hell. It didn't take me more than a few months to realize, however, that a God that would doom me to an eternity in hell simply because it was in my nature to not have faith in anything was not a God that I could consider "good". And, if God is not good, then the teachings of the bible and the church must be false. Q.E.D.
Once I came to that conclusion, I became very angry at my church and my parents for a few years, but my parents respected my decision to stop attending church. Their position was always that I would be a Christian until I was old enough to make the decision for myself. Ironically, that was my dad's response to me when I told him (as a very small child) that I was not a Christian.
Probably immediatley after confirmation. I think I was 12.
After receiving the sacraments and affirming my belief in Jesus, then getting baptized a second time, I began to realize the implications of what I had just done, and what the church was doing to me.
They were essentially forcing me into promising them to be a Christian (which for a 12 year old seemed very final). And I asked my parents, "But what if I don't know what I want to be? I'm just tweleve years old! What if I wanted to be a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist or...an atheist!?"
This scared my parents considerably and they had me console a pastor. He talked with me about the meaning of being "born again", and the meaning of baptism. Really I found it rather disgusting and stupid. Why indoctrinate children into a theological opinion which they had very little knowledge of? Wasn't it better to let them decide for themselves as adults?
Then my parents made me go to a bible study. I listened to some of the ridiculous nonsense in the bible, and after discussing it with my fellow youth group, I began to realize just what a load of bullshit the whole religion was. It eventually culimnated into an argument with my youth group. I had come to the conclusion that Christianity had no reasonable right to claim that it was more correct than any other religion, and that all religions, lacking evidence, must be false.
The pastor threw pascal's wager at me. At the time I had never heard of it before, and it shocked me into being an agnostic for a few months. But gradually, I began to realize that the whole thing was a sham. I had a period where I was afraid of God and Hell, and thought about how mad God would be at me for not believing in Him, and all that paranoid bullshit.
But then I started reading about it. I started learning about atheism, agnosticism. I began to see christianity from a distant perspective, pick it apart, see its tricks and its nonsensical dogma. Then I was able to call my self an atheist without fear.