Just curious

[Beearewhyain]

How did you get to Atheism/Agnosticism? For me I was raised in a religious and evangelical/fundamentalist household but, you know, dirty, dirty science and critical thinking drew me.

So, were you raised this way or did you come to it via other means? Tell your story.

[Warpy]

1. I survived Catholic school, realized it was twaddle

went into full rebellion and got sprung and sent to public school in 6th grade. My parents despaired over my apostasy but they both ended up unbelievers by the time they died, unafraid of judgment or hell. I had nothing to do with it, we'd avoided the subject for years.

[Beearewhyain]

6. A buddy of mine is catholic

and while I try to avoid theological arguments with him as much as possible, his politics are mostly in my sweet spot. Needless to say he stays away from abortion questions and birth control cause, well...I know things.

All in all I kind of like the ritual inherent in catholicism(in an anthropological sense) but to be directly involved or in school with those mind rapi...um ....suckers, no.

That said, it is a hell of a thing to break from and I have much respect for you to be able to break free from it.

[Warpy]

9. I live in a heavily Catholic area in a heavily Catholic state

and I made my peace with them a long time ago. Flying without a net isn't for everyone.

I just didn't buy a word of it, still don't. Whatever it takes to believe that stuff is something I missed out on. They're welcome to it.

[Beearewhyain]

12. "Flying without a net isn't for everyone"

LOVE IT!

[RGinNJ]

2. For me it's easy, I just don't have faith.

[Solly Mack]

3. Never made sense to me.

I was called a "devil's spawn" when I was 5 for questioning doctrine. My mother would sometimes sing at tent revivals and she made me sing along with her, but one day she was asked to not bring me back.

I was called something similar when I was a little older for doing the same. (questioning doctrine)

I washed my hands of even being nice about it all after a child was raped and the so-called adult in charge said her soul was more important than her body and what was happening to her.

[Beearewhyain]

7. I had a "demon cast out"

of me for saying that there were contradictions in the (rather floating and nebulous) theology that was in vogue at the time. So I feel you my friend.

There's no abuse quite like theological abuse...amiright?

[Solly Mack]

8. No one ever wanted to cast anything out of me, so I was lucky I guess.

Sorry that happened to you.

People can be cruel when it comes to clinging to their beliefs and they all too often get away with it. Ugly and cruel.

Unfortunately.

[Beearewhyain]

11. meh, it happens

While I do consider it fucked up, it was that experience among others that granted me certain insights. In the grand scheme of things I am still better off than many and worse off than a few. I can more than live with that.

[mjvpi]

4. Just curious. That's it. That's how I got here.

And I don't feel as though I've arrived. Am still curious. There is nothing like learning something and all that leads to is the realization that I don't know shit about shit, but in the middle of that I can intuit infinity. Like looking at pictures from Hubble.

[Beearewhyain]

10. There is nothing to arrive to

That's kind of the point. Embracing the infinite is scary but exhilarating

All apologies to Dunning and Kruger there is a book that I would recommend for for the generally curious and generally knowledgeable. It's an awesome read...

https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718

[BigmanPigman]

5. I had to get up early on Sat for CCD. That sucked.

Then a priest came door to door asking for money when my parents were at work. The jerk tried to shame my sister who was wearing a cross as a fashion statement. She took it off after that. Also, they used to publish and mail who gave how much to the local Catholic Church each month. I always had to make up sins to tell to the priest during confession since I didn't sin but you had to tell him something. My dad never went to church and my mom said that when we (my sister and myself) were 9 we could choose whether or not we wanted to go to church anymore. We said NO! We only went 3 times a year anyway. I was the only one in my neighborhood at the time who stopped going to church and was ridiculed for it. I even took an anti abortion stand on a paper I had to write in 7th grade to appease my peers. I am still pissed off at myself for that. My whole family (3 generations) is Atheist and we often put down religious hypocrites and Repubs at family dinners. I did buy communion wafers on line a few years ago because I remembered that they were the only good thing about going to church. They are tasty! I was going to serve them with dip at a party but I was told it could offend some people. I don't know why. I would have serve them with wine so what is the problem?

[safeinOhio]

13. Religion?

I just prayed it away.

[MrModerate]

14. My family's been atheist for generations . . . n/t

I was ten years old before I realized that people actually believed all that god stuff -- I thought they were pretending, because no one could really believe such nonsense.

Or so I thought.

[Voltaire2]

20. My situation too. Raised without religion.

It made you wonder about the general sanity of the population.

[Mr.Bill]

15. Although I continued going to Catholic school

until the 6th grade, (I was even an altar boy) I lost my belief in god about the same time as I lost my belief in Santa Claus. It was very easy and logical to group those two imaginary entities together.

[trotsky]

16. I had a very ordinary upbringing in the Lutheran Church (ELCA).

So there were no traumatic experiences for me, no extreme fundamentalist crap that a lot of believers assume atheists must have had in their background.

But like Solly Mack above, it never really "made sense" to me, and I never "felt" anything either. Wanted to, hoped to, but it never happened. Felt like I was just going thru the motions. Wasn't until I got to college and started reading things that I had no idea existed (Robert Ingersoll, for instance) that I realized it was OK to see religion for the nonsense it is.

[mountain grammy]

17. I had a Jewish mother and Catholic father

we bounced around between Judiaism and Presbyterian. I tried to believe. Raised our daughter in local Presbyterian church that was open and accepting and sent her to summer camp that she loved every year. We enjoyed the social, but couldn't get into the faith thing. My daughter and I, atheists, my husband, with church crammed down his throat every week as a child, is still a believer but not in religion.

[LakeArenal]

18. I had to spend summers at a different Bible school

Christian bible... I have been Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Evangelical Lutheran. Each one had different rules, treated people differently and had a different Lord.. Kind and loving to Spiteful and Vengeful.

I can remember at 10 that it seemed too patriarchal, (not that I knew that word)and too many gods in one.

During this time, my parents attended church 0.0 times.

PS The Evangelical.... the WORST....

[FiveGoodMen]

19. Parents were religious, but also thinkers

Dad thought teaching me to reason wouldn't hurt faith since he believed they were compatible.

I think he was wrong about that.

Final straw was reading the bible from cover to cover. You get a whole different perspective than when you just repeat certain verses.

[rurallib]

21. Raised Catholic - 12 years of parochial school pretty much stopped believing as a 10th grader

1st big love was some other christian sect. After HS and in college pretty much quit going to church except for marryings and buryings.

My biggest problems with religion (catholic especially) was that those pushing the religion were so un-christian like. Just wanted to get away from the lies and the hypocrisy. An attempted rape and a summer of stalking by a priest when I was 12 really told what religion really was.

That was my teens - I didn't really swing all the way to agnostic-atheist until about 15 years ago. The big mover then was the politization of religion by the Republicans. My feeling until then was i just didn't want to deal with religion.

But if religion was going to become a political weapon, especially one that would be used to hurt people, then it was time to totally turn away from religion and do what I could to fight its influence.

And this was a time when the internet was just getting big so I could find information that I had been curious about all my life - such as was there really only one son of god story? If not how similar were they? On and on.

[Leith]

22. I Was Raised Catholic But I Was a Doubter at a Young Age

My first memory of having questions was singing the song They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love in elementary school. I didn't know much about various religions but I knew that not everyone was Christian and I was sure that they had the same capacity for love that Christians did.

I read voraciously when I was a kid and one of the books was a collection of Greek myths. I realized that it was the actual stories of an ancient religion and theirs were better than those in the bible. More and more I came up against the disconnect between what people said what they believed and how they acted.

I just could not believe the stuff "they" wanted me to believe. I can find no compelling reason to believe in the Abrahamic God any more than Odin or Zeus.

[Freelancer]

23. Speaking as one atheist adjacent agnostic...

My mom dragged me into the Perot for president movement way back. I spent days with a clipboard collecting signatures for her to get his name on the ballot -- mostly by approaching people standing in the lines to the port-a-potties at local events. It was a learning experience. I noticed that the Perot crowd was made up of people too odd to be Democrats or Republicans and those that were too good to be Democrats or Republicans -- or felt that way anyway. I've observed that there are several types of agnostic as well, that have arrived at the position by very different routes.

There's one type that, although they may say they are not angry, are in fact angry at something -- God, or hypocrisy, parents, etc. Then there's the type that have had no non-ordinary experiences in their corporeal stint, and so, naturally, discount anything grounded in mysticism. Then there are the ones that have had enough odd things happen to know that what religions spew just doesn't jibe with the weirdness that is out there.

That's my take anyway, for what it's worth.

[Act_of_Reparation]

24. Raised Catholic.

My grandparents and most of my extended family were fairly devout. I went to Catholic school, volunteered as an altar boy, got my Parvuli Dei with the scouts, was confirmed, and all that jazz. No, I was not sexually abused nor did I know of anyone who was.

I didn't have a particularly painful break with the Church, either. I never really believed with much intensity and when at last I started going to public school in the 9th grade, I just stopped going to church. College was pretty much the nail in the coffin for belief; once I'd taken a few philosophy, psychology, and anatomy courses, it became pretty clear to me that God was little more than an imaginary friend for adults afraid of their own mortality. Largely out of fear of ostracism, I didn't make public my atheism until I was in my late 20's.

[beam me up scottie]

25. Like everyone else I was born atheist, it's the default position.

I was raised without religion so I don't have a deconversion story but I respect atheists who got here by way of reason and logic. Mad props to anyone who a stood up to their fundy families and proudly declared their atheism.

[Eko]

26. For me it was when I realized

there was no Santa Claus. Made sense to me. I also remember being about 14 and telling a girl at school that I was an atheist and didn't believe in god, she replied "So you must believe in the devil".

[Croney]

27. I grew up brainwashed in a family of Southern Baptist

hypocrites. Later, when I lost a child and people around me all said it was god's will, I had a light-bulb moment and knew it was all hogwash. I'm much happier knowing that life and death and random events have nothing to do with a supernatural blob in the sky.

[3catwoman3]

29. Of all the things people say when a child dies, the god's will...

...crap is particularly offensive. The claim that god is a loving father does not square in the least with a god that would chose to have a child die. No loving parent would do such a thing. When my brother died, way back in 1978, when he was only 23, a friend said to me, "God must have wanted your brother with him really bad." I knew she was trying to be comforting, so I let it pass, but I really wanted to tell her to just stop talking becuase what she was saying was of no help at all.

I am so sorry to hear about your child.

[Croney]

30. Thank you. That was 47 years ago, but of course

one never forgets, as you know with the loss of your brother.

[3catwoman3]

34. The agonizing raw edges soften with the passing of decades, but...

...we are forever changed. The bereaved parent/sibling "club" is a whole lot bigger than any of us ever know until we end up as unwilling members of it.

[Sneederbunk]

28. Evangelical atheism, the bane of contemporary discourse.

[Lordquinton]

31. How is something that doesn't exist

A problem to discourse?

[Beearewhyain]

32. Oh, that's a really good choice! But I'm going to have to go with

Simplistic, overly generalized, denigrating comments. They are the bane of contemporary discourse.

I would love to provide you with an example of what I mean but where oh where would I ever be able to find one? Where indeed?

[Lordquinton]

35. I'll keep an eye out

They are so hard to find...

[beam me up scottie]

33. ...

Last edited Mon Sep 11, 2017, 08:50 PM - Edit history (1)

*this is sarcasm, the kittehs are safe

[trotsky]

36. So atheists should keep quiet about their lack of belief?

Defer to the religious, never speak out about anti-atheist bigotry or the harmful ideas found in religion?

Got it.