How Does Your Background Influence Your Atheism?

At least back a decade ago, it was often noted that there are atheists that were raised in Catholic schools, and then there is everybody else. For some reason, Catholic school engenders a level of spite for religion that many atheists with liberal Protestant backgrounds generally just don’t “get.”

I think you see this dynamic a lot less these days, in part because of the huge influx of younger atheists at the bottom who are as fired up about being anti-religious as the old Catholic stereotype, and a few prominent voices at the top who also fit the profile, but as far as I’m aware, break the stereotype in that they didn’t go to the Catholic school.

Speaking as someone who came to the conclusion ‘there is no god(s)’ one would have to say that the ‘first’ generation atheists are on the whole much more activist and interested. Mostly because the cause is more personal for them.

[disclaimer: all of the above are ‘opinions’, held by no-one in particular…]

Briefly, I went to a school with religious affiliations for a time, though I wasn’t aware of religion to the extent that I am now. For a time, I prayed before going to bed and worried about going to hell. At some point, perhaps when I was 9 or 10, I seriously started to question the bible, then religion, and finally god. What’s interesting is that while this transition was frustrating, it wasn’t particularly difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I resented religion, but for quite a while I was content to be a relatively quiet atheist until I was much older. For many others this wasn’t the case. They had to bleed before they came out the other side. Relationships ended, families were broken … lots of emotional stuff that I didn’t have to deal with.

I feel a bit silly chiming in here, but…

I’m not an atheist. I was brought up in a liberal Christian denomination.

I really do think, though, that if I was brought up conservative Catholic or some brand of fundie, I would be an atheist now, and probably quite an angry one.

I think there are huge differences between atheists in different countries. In the US especially in cities where there is a very strong religious culture, atheists tend to be strong free-thinkers who have thought about the issues deeply and chosen, often through rationalism, to reject religion. It’s not an easy choice and it’s not taken lightly.

But in other parts of the world like much of Europe and even in parts of Canada where I grew up, religion is more sort of a curiosity or a quaint part of our cultural history. There, atheists are much more common and so many haven’t seriously thought about theological questions or haven’t had the pressure to join. I’ve met some wild kooky, irrational atheists. Just look at much of the New Age movement – many of them are atheists, but are as irrational as the day is long (and it can get pretty long up north).

Sam Harris has talked about a world where the word “atheist” ceases to have meaning. That is already the case in many people’s lives, but when that happens, the irrationality and gullibility doesn’t disappear, it gets redirected.

There are most definitely cultural differences.

I live in Denmark, which is said to be one of the most atheistic countries in the world, but I (an American) don’t really agree with that description. People here are apathic about religion. I don’t consider a person an atheist unless they actually believe that the likelihood of the existance of a deity is negligible. That’s quite a bit different to me than just not caring if there’s a deity or not. I don’t know many native people here who would actually tick the “atheist” box on a survey, though they probably live their lives with little, if any, more spirituality than I do.

I was raised in an entirely secular way, but I don’t think that means someone else “convinced” me to be atheist. No one ever told me there was no god. There was simply an absence of religion, and that meant I explored many different ideas on my own. I experimented with Christianity, because that was the larger context I lived in, and I tried various denominations. I also studied Buddhism. Nothing ever stuck (although many Buddhist ideas still make more sense to me than any others). I always came to realize that I simply didn’t believe it, or have any need to believe it.

I’ll add my own anecdotal story. I’m a 2nd generation atheist from the American South (formative years in the deep South). So even though I had no de-conversion experience, I had to deal with the religious pressures of the community at large. For example, I remember to this day of sitting in a circle in kindergarten and the teacher having all the kids tell the group which church they went to. As everyone spoke-up in turn around the circle, I was in terror about what I was going to say. That was tough for a kindergarten kid.

In high school, almost every fundi girl took it as a personal mission to convert me and get me to go to church. I guess I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the “true believers” after that. I liked the attention. As a reaction to this, I made a tee-shirt that said “I swear to God I’m an atheist”.

Recently, my wife (who is a conservative “liberal Christian”) starting wanting to take the kids to church, any church. One of her friends got her to start going to a church which had sermons tailored for the “unchurched” which sounded seductively attractive. But the congregation was filled with the same fundi-types I knew so well back in high-school. My own blog is a reaction to my experiences of going to this church and the small group we joined. I like the people. They just believe crazy things… like biblical literalism… demons and all.

In summary, as a 2nd generation atheist, I have normally kept my thoughts about religion to myself through most of my life. Only through conflict with the larger religious community, have I publically reacted and become vocal and appeared to some as an “evangelical atheist”.

I probably wouldn’t have a blog nor regularly be checking in with this website had it not been for my wife insisting that we all go to church. Interestingly, my wife is getting a little tiered of going and my kids absolutely hate going. 3rd generation…

It seems like you’re implying that atheists from Christian fundamentalist backgrounds have been victimized/traumatized in some way that turned them away from Christianity and that, had they been from “liberal” Christian homes like you, they might still be Christians.

I think there might be some truth to the idea that “liberal” Christians might be less likely to deconvert, simply because they don’t have to think as much about what Christianity entails.

When I was still struggling to achieve faith, I often wished that I could be a Christian without having to accept the literal truth of the Bible, and it was my knowledge of the Bible that created most of the struggle in the first place. I think if you could just take comfort in the idea of a God who loves you and is taking care of you without worrying about the nonsense His Word lays out for you, there would be a lot less incentive to buck the tide and think through your faith.

In my case, I had mostly positive personal interactions with most of the Christians, who were mostly to the right of our own Mike Clawson but to the left of the Religious Right, so I didn’t have quite the chip on my shoulder about Christianity that I’ve seen other atheists have.

I live in Canada, probably one of the least religious places in North America.
I have been an atheist all of my 73 years and because of that I do not worry about all the things
that can not be proven at his time. I think that only people who have been indoctrinated into religion have these worries. It seems really simple for me to decide which of the two sides to believe. I really cringe when I hear what the religious people believe about how everything happened and other supposed facts of the bible. Common sense dictates that the scientific view is the easiest to swallow, at least for me.
The definition of atheism is simple, no belief in any god(s) or supernatural entities.
Since I have never seen any god(s) or anything supernatural, I naturally believe they don’t exist. All religious people pray about just about everything, if they were truthful they would all say that it doesn’t work. I will be a believer when “God” suddenly decides to show up for work and actually does something credible. My proof would be: all amputees with their limbs regrown, all cancer
gone forever, all human problems corrected, etc. Until then I am content to
go on as I am, being a good living person without regrets or worrying about an imaginary Hell or Heaven. I put it all down to
freethinking.

When I was still struggling to achieve faith, I often wished that I could be a Christian without having to accept the literal truth of the Bible, and it was my knowledge of the Bible that created most of the struggle in the first place. I think if you could just take comfort in the idea of a God who loves you and is taking care of you without worrying about the nonsense His Word lays out for you, there would be a lot less incentive to buck the tide and think through your faith.

While I was transitioning away from faith I did ponder the possibility of being a liberal Christian. I thought that since I had devoted so much time to religion such a faith would permit me to jettison the unbelievable without losing everything I had accomplished. I knew that many people took this option, whether they were deliberate about it or not. But, in the end, I couldn’t do it. A liberal Christianity just didn’t give me anything worth the trouble that I could not get, and far better, elsewhere, except for the community–I miss that still.

I have pondered over the years about religion and its persistence here and how I ought to regard it, since it’s a fact of life. Joseph Campbell suggested that new myths might arise that would take the place of the old myths that we know as the great faiths. I’m not so sure. We may be living in a time when new faiths of such power that they spread the world over are no longer possible. We may simply continue to revise and extend what faiths we already have.

Being surrounded by believers I am bound to recognize the compelling narratives and stories transmitted in the great faiths. It must be that these stories provide enough benefit to believers so as to overcome religion’s worst aspects and outlast its primitive features. For the “common man,” his religious practice provides perhaps the only occasion for him to separate his mind periodically from the crude world and reflect upon ethical and transcendent values in solitude and in society of his peers. Religion becomes the place of thought, meditation, silence, and contemplation of what is most vital and what is good, and of ethical action. It becomes a place of restoration and refreshment. Perhaps any good story would do as a frame on which to hang all this, but, for better or worse, we have what we have.

Religion used to be all this for me, nevertheless I have gone beyond it, and I’m a better person for it. There is nothing better than to be fully alive, and one cannot be that unless the mind is free. I had to shed my religion to free my mind. It is entirely possible to devote oneself to a religion and have a free mind. Strange but true.

As for the deconversion rate of fundamentalists vs “liberals”, there are statistics that definitively show that fundamentalists have a poorer retention rate than other Christian denominations (though not all these deconversions are to nontheism). But they still have a net growth rate because of a high rate of conversion. (I cite my current reading, The Authoritarians, p128).

It’s a rationalization to suggest that “angry” atheists have been hurt by religion. To protect the faith of the believer. They don’t have to consider that what they believe is bullshit, if they refuse to believe that their are rational atheists with reason to lack belief. For similar reasons some religious people refuse to believe that there are atheists, they believe atheists secretly believe in God.

Many of the most damning criticism of religion comes from the British, many from secular families, taught in one of the most liberal forms of Christianity imagineable. If you read them, they’re angry at the harm religion does, and it seems to me if you’re not angry about that, you don’t give a shit about people. There points about religion being irrational nonsense are not presented in an angry way, it’s presented in a way that makes it clear they care about what’s true. Sometimes merely caring is seen as angry to the apathetic religious.

Perhaps it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what anger is, but I suspect it’s prejudice. Many people have been indoctrinated to believe in a stereotype of atheists that biases them in reading atheists in a certain light. Even some atheists are biased in this way, the ones that prefer to call themselves agnostic. They’re always talking about the “shrill” tone of books like the God Delusion. Of course it isn’t, if you’ve read books from other authors on different subjects. A lot of the parts that are meant to be humour are bizarrely mistaken for being “shrill” or “angry”.

I’ve noted that many atheists who lost faith later on in life have lost it in an irrational way, through the loss of someone, rejecting all religion because the religion they believed was wrong, and seemed to be based on what they wanted to be true.

Many atheists I know about raised in liberal christianity left faith earlier (early to mid teens, sometimes earlier) than their counterparts from fundamentalist christianity who seemed to wait for college to doubt. Fundamentalists fear college will free their children from indoctrination, they create separate colleges to keep the indoctrination flow steady. I suspect fear is the tool used to keep fundamentalists from questioning their beliefs longer than more liberal christians.

I guess I’m a second generation atheist, with non-religious parents, that are probably best described as agnostics, they don’t seem to have any views on the subject. I didn’t lose faith, I never believed in the first place, and my position didn’t change to “atheist”, I was always an atheist, I lacked that belief. I still look at it in those terms, I don’t see why I should believe in any religion, they’re all equal claims with no evidence. None of the religions I’ve read about are a great hypothesis that solves anything for me.

I said I’d bow out, but I think this deserves a clarification:

It’s a rationalization to suggest that “angry” atheists have been hurt by religion.

I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I think this is true. It’s no doubt sometimes true, but there are different kinds of anger.

I think that the biggest mistake that both sides have made is throwing everyone from the other side into the same category, when in fact, there is a huge variety of attitudes and experiences on both sides.

There is one group of atheists not mentioned here that I have noticed. Some come by it via studying religious texts- ie Robert Price and Dan Barker. I see a vast difference between Dan and his wife- his wife was raised by atheists parents and he was not.

I can’t quite put my finger on it enough to put it into words, but it seems to me, that those who have studied religion thoroughly and intensely- much like Bob and Dan have- are a bit different. Bob enjoys studying different religions and Dan has studied at least Xianity intensely. I haven’t met too many other atheists, except maybe Richard here, who can use the Bible and maybe other religions in a way that can make some religious people think or even debate them like Dan and Bob can and do. I’ve met many more atheists who could careless about any of it than I have those who have knowledge like those two. I think it takes a lot of talent to say, “Now wait a minute!” and then write or say something in rebuttle like Bob does or even the talent Dan has in debating Xians using their very own book.

Steven Carr said,

June 23, 2008 at 12:44 am

Personally, I think there is a big difference between atheists who have read the Bible and atheists who have not.

Atheists who have not tend to say things like ‘Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God;’

Atheists who have read the Bible tend to say things like ‘Jesus said….’

It really annoys Christians when Jesus is quoted, rather than praised and worshipped!

Yes, precisely. I see a difference too- a big difference. Personally, I don’t mind being almost as knowledgable as Bob and Dan, although sadly not as knowledgable, because I can get to some Xians and hopefully plant some seeds of doubt that way, even if it does tick them off. I also enjoy learning from people like Bob and Dan too, probably because we have a common background.

I grew up un-churched in a house where my parents were nominally Christian, but never went to church and never talked about religion except at Christmas (and not much even then). So I had the luxury of growing up questioning, exploring, and generally making up my own mind. I really, really wanted to be a believer for a long time (mostly out of fear of death), but always had the questions. I didn’t completely accept my atheism until after I was out of college.

It was a long road, but I think it was good and healthy. More people should grow up that way, I think. Allowed to question, seek, and make up their own minds without interference at early ages.