Questions for Atheists: Did something cause your unbelief?

Mike — nope, not for me. Honestly, despite dalliances with religion, I don’t think I ever *really* believed in God (for whatever “really believe” means 🙂 ). Intellectually, I wandered back and forth, and I can’t point to any one thing, or several things, that “made me an atheist.”

My sister and I sometimes talk about this, and always come to the same conclusion — we don’t feel it. Where people we know are quick to ascribe God to events and things and feelings, we just don’t. And that despite a definite ability to feel very “spiritual” in many ways.

Does reality count as a cause?

Just kidding. 🙂

No, nothing caused it. I don’t know personally any atheists that have a ’cause’ either, but then I live in a pretty secular city. I do know of atheists via the ‘net that arguably have causes – ex-Christians, for instance, who left the church for some reason. One friend of mine that grew up as a Christian toyed with atheism for a while after his father died of cancer so he came close, but he never took the leap.

If this author had gone to any country in Europe, much of Canada, or even cities like Seattle then he’d meet many people that were not brought up in a religious environment and who never made a conscious decision to accept atheism, but rather were atheist by default and just never saw any reason to be a theist.

Incidentally this means that the atheists that you find in these environments would look much different than the atheists who grow up in very religious environments. Instead of being rationalists or universal sceptics, you’ll see that New Age, Homeopathy, spiritualism, crystal BS and other magical thought can afflict atheists as much as theists. I get a little miffed at atheists in the US who describe us as rational, sceptical or anything else like that – it’s a nice thought and it may be true for some areas, but it’s ultimately parochial (pardon the expression). (Pardon the side-track!)

It was a confluence of forces that led me to stop believing in God. I learned too much about the history of religious/philosophical ideas, and as I did the comparisons among religions raised doubts about the singularity of Christianity, and a general doubt about all beliefs. In addition, I was honest with myself about the emptiness of my experience. Finally, I was tired of closing myself off from humanity; tired of the us-them mentality that treated non-Christians as either adversaries or targets.

I had worked very hard to synthesize everything that I knew about Christianity and about secular culture from my own experience as I passed through various stages of theological repositioning, but it was such a burden. When I finally let go, I saw clearly what religion was and what I had been doing.

I set myself free 20 years ago. I can’t believe it’s been that long. It’s now difficult for me to remember just how I felt back then. I kept diaries, and I’m glad I did. I don’t want to ever forget what I was at that time. I tried so hard; I worked so hard; but I used religion like a weapon. I’m so glad I found my way out.

It’s ironic, now that I think about it, but in my desire to no longer be separated from the rest of humanity because of my faith I became an atheist, a stranger, to all the religious peoples of the world. Life is crazy.

Mithras.

Well, I guess I’d have to say that my atheism was caused by the fact that along the 20 odd years from my birth to the moment I finally ‘declared’ myself an atheist, I had not come across a single piece of evidence that would have even suggested the possibility of there being some sort of a higher power.

So the complete and utter lack of evidence, would probably be the top reason I’m an unbeliever.

Also it kinda helps when you notice along the way that pretty much everyone who does believe in something, seem to have some sort of a glaring psychological need for it, or that they’re just completely nuts.

Reading Henry Morris’ Scientific Creationism when I was a teenager set me on the path to explicit atheism. The egregious errors in the book got me to start questioning what else existing religions might be wrong about, which eventually led me to notice the lack of positive evidence for religions.

If it weren’t for that book, I would probably be a Deist or a Buddhist or with some other moderate religion.

My unbelief was created slowly over the years, starting with vague mystical theism in my teens (being raised in a non-religious household), brief flirtings with various faiths, none serious, then into general meh-level agnosticism. The thing that finally tipped me from agnostic to atheist was good old FSTDT. Look up Troy “Churchwork” Brooks some time. I can single “debating” him out as the straw that broke the camel’s back. In the process of making one-sided arguments with him, I ended up finally doing enough research and introspection to realize how much BS it all was. I picked up audiobook versions of God Is Not Great and The God Delusion, and made it official.

I was raised in a Catholic home. I don’t know exactly when it happened, I just realized some time in high school that I didn’t believe in the existence of any god and I hadn’t for a very long time.

Gregory said,

Mike — nope, not for me. Honestly, despite dalliances with religion, I don’t think I ever *really* believed in God (for whatever “really believe” means 🙂 ). Intellectually, I wandered back and forth, and I can’t point to any one thing, or several things, that “made me an atheist.”

My sister and I sometimes talk about this, and always come to the same conclusion — we don’t feel it. Where people we know are quick to ascribe God to events and things and feelings, we just don’t. And that despite a definite ability to feel very “spiritual” in many ways.

That was going to be my answer almost exactly, but replace sister with wife.

Since I reached the “age of reason” or whatever they call it, my faith was headed for a decline. When I was a teenager it progressed to agnosticism and stayed there for a year or two.

While I have no doubt that I would have eventually come to atheism anyway, the event that pushed me over the edge was reading Ivan’s monologue about the suffering of children in The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky). The argument struck me so deeply that I threw out the idea of God altogether, although it did take me a few weeks of thought afterwards to fully consider myself an atheist.

From what I have read around the blogosphere, most deconverts seem to describe deconversion as a journey – sometimes triggered by certain events, but those events were just the start of a (usually painful) process of discovery and letting go of faith. I personally don’t think that change occurs all-at-once from a single event – we tend to think so because of our cognitive biases towards single-cause sequences, but really a lot of deep and profound changes are processes that happen over time, with many causes all working together and influencing eachother.

That said, I was never a “true” believer in Christianity or even New Age mysticism. For both of them I had a very long period of time where I tried very hard to believe (“believed in belief”, if you like), but every now and then contradictory evidence turned up, such as learning about science (I like to read… a lot) or just having several weeks of unanswered prayers. I spent the first 9ish years of my life in an essentially secularist society raised by non-religious parents, so I was never taught to blindly believe things. As a result any contradictory evidence would stir doubt – which I never learnt to ignore – and I’d fall away from belief again.

I teetered back and forth for a long time before I began to learn critical thinking at high school, when I started to be more interested in philosophical arguments for and against “Omnimax God”, and I did some Internet searches, read lots over several months, and eventually formed my position as an agnostic bordering on atheism. It wasn’t until I finished high school and became more confident (I had very low self-esteem when I was young, related to other issues) that I began using the term “atheist”, mainly because it was a more accurate term for the way I lived my life, and the way I viewed life.

So… I think that, for most people, it’s the sum total of experiences regarding religion and life in general that makes one an atheist (or a theist/agnostic/apatheist, etc), not any single defining event.

I’m not actually sure of any particular event that “caused” my atheism. I’ve thought about it a lot, and all I can come up with are various things that, over time, lead to this conclusion. It’s not that I was never religious (I was quite religious) it’s just that I’ve been down so many winding paths of spirituality with long bouts of apathy that there are too many “events” that did it.

It was a slow, piece by piece, replacement of one view of the world with another. Once I consciously gave myself the label of “atheist” (or “agnostic” for a while) many of my views changed very quickly. But up to that point, my views were slowly being replaced as I found out more about the world, and the more I thought about philosophy.

I could probably talk about certain events or things in my life that helped point my path (Confirmation, science classes, forum threads), but it wouldn’t tell the whole story.

By the way, is that actually supposed to be an argument against atheism? If it is, it’s an exceedingly poor one. Wouldn’t it be natural to be able to explain how you came to a certain position? Especially if it’s something you actually as the atheists he talked to did with him.

On a side note: When you think about how you came to believe what you do about Christianity, do you think about any specific events?

In spite of the fact that there were incidents that you’d imagine might have been enough to put me off my belief in God (such as it was), none of them did (how often does that really happen anyway? I mean, really?).

It was more to do with the whole thing just not making one blind bit of sense, and me finally admitting that to myself, and agreeing with myself not to keep ignoring the huge gap between what I could see actual support for and what it would be convenient to go on believing.

I think that sort of thing comes about because there’s a VERY large group of believers who insist that we’re angry with God, like we just had an argument or something and we’re busily stomping around the house and slamming doors and just behaving crappy, and once we get over ourselves we’ll be nice little believers again… Unfortunately, in spite of having met many dozens of people (maybe even hundreds if you count all the ones I’ve communicated with online) with no belief in any god, I don’t think I’ve ever met one that was *angry* at god. I’m not even sure how that works UNLESS you believe god is real. There are some who would be angry with god if they thought there was one (I tihnk I would be too) – but there’s no anger with what isn’t there. It’d be like being angry with Santa because he didn’t bring me any presents last Christmas, but who I nevertheless don’t believe in… kinda schizo.

The thing is, if you don’t believe in god, you can’t attribute bad incidents to him – it’s the same problem. Incidents can’t do much to cause disbelief, because if God was being a bastard, it would be a reason TO believe, wouldn’t it? (it might be a reason not to worship him, but you could hardly ignore his existence, could you?)

The only way I can see a particular incident leading to disbelief is if someone had a strong belief that both
(i) God is pretty much controlling everything that happens
(ii) God is purely good and would never harm us

Then if a bad incident occurs, the person with that rather odd set of beliefs would have to question that belief structure – but surely they’re more likely to adopt a slightly different belief (one that is less rigid) than to simply reject the entire edifice?

Hi Mike, good to see you back. Yes, Hemant has posted at least one other question something like this, but it’s a good one to ask again. Maybe if we can find the other one the responses there will add to your research.

I too wonder about the depth of the author’s experience with atheists, and also wonder what exactly is the point of his statement anyway. Stated by itself out of context it kind of sounds like he is trivializing the atheists’ unbelief by attributing it to a single, identifiable and possibly traumatic event, perhaps something they could have gotten over, rather than a deeply considered decision and/or a slowly developed perspective. Well, it is taken out of context so it’s not fair to judge. You’re the one reading the book so maybe you can tell us what he’s getting at, once you figure it out.

In my case there was a specific event but it wasn’t the cause of my unbelief, it only brought to my attention the fact that I had already been an unbeliever for several years.

I was always a skeptical kid and having been brought up by non-religious parents I picked up beliefs only from being immersed in the general society around me. It never was more than a vague, pantheistic-deistic thing in my teens and early twenties. As the decades wore on that stuff wore off. By the time I was fifty I was not believing in any religion or deity but I wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other. It just was not an issue that I spent time considering.

Then I watched the Twin Towers go down and that morning I realized that not only had I already been free of belief in gods for quite a long time, I also knew I wanted to be free of any last traces of the bad habit of persistently assuming the truth of things without evidence. I was revolted by what that can lead to. I wanted nothing resembling in even the tiniest way the lunacy that had darkened that day. After some searching and scouring I was clean. I don’t practice belief. Ever since I have felt more free, more healthy and more happy than at any time before.

Since I’ve never been part of a religious organization, so I never needed to have that “aha moment” to notice that it was all BS and here in Germany, even in the conservative south I hardly had any encounters with religion at all.
As a 7-8 year old I attended a protestant religion class at school and one day I was set home for arguing with my teacher.
She had told us the Christian creation myth (6 days, Adam, Eve…) which I as an 8 year old thought was somewhat fishy, so I asked “what about the dinosaurs?” and she gave me an unsatisfactory answer. I questioned the time line, saying that I know that plants were about at the time of the dinosaurs which was at least 65 million year before people existed… eventually I was sent to the head master’s office who contacted my parents and seemed to think that I had committed some sort of serious offense. My father backed me up 100% laughed at the head master for being so silly and then excused me from attending religion ever again.

I was raised with in an implicitly protestant home, by parents who went to church only a few times a year but sent me and my siblings to their Lutheran church for religious education. It didn’t really take – especially the transubstantiation – but I passively accepted it.

I joined a Bible-study group in college, as a way to learn more; it was slightly cultish (a Korean-based, moderately evangelical group whose leader seemed to set up a lot of marriages), but even after I left the group, I had to work to suspend my disbelief in the Bible I “studied” (which meant reading only selected portions).

I dabbled in woo-woo (Zen and other forms of Buddhism, various New Age “energy” types of crap), but none of them stuck either.

About 10 years ago I read the Bible cover to cover. That put the stake in the heart of any faith I might have had. But I still was a vague theist, based on a form of irreducible complexity argument, and wishful thinking (“wouldn’t it be nice if…”).

About 3 years ago I spent some time praying for faith. Naturally, there was no one on the other end of the call. About a year ago I started reading science – especially evolutionary biology – more heavily. That sealed it. There’s simply no good reason to believe the supernatural exists. Its drama and flair explain why people seek it.

Summary: I never really believed, but gave it several solid shots, and am much, much happier now that I’ve accepted my atheism. All we need to do to convert more Christians away from nonsense is to get them to read the Bible, all of it.

I was raised in a baptist church as a kid. When I was growing up, I was exposed to several religions. I really, truly wanted to believe. I even dabbled in Wicca since it was more of a feminist belief. About 12 years ago I started taking an antidepressant and that was the end of religion for me. It gave me a clarity that I hadn’t had about religion. I was finally able to be honest with myself and say “I don’t believe”. I’m not taking them any more, but I’m still an atheist 🙂 I still have the “clarity & reason”.

Mike, as I’ve told you, I began from a position of agnosticism, and spent over thirty years making my way through the catalog of world religions, trying to find both a common thread pointing to something underneath (the “perennial philosophy”) as well as a belief system involving something greater than myself in an attempt to give my life meaning and purpose. In the end, I was forced to give it up as a bad business. I never found any evidence, nor did I have any subjective experiences, that would have enabled me to “believe” – whatever that means.

I did have a few experiences within the past year that caused something of an internal shift, and led me to feel that I couldn’t continue to identify as an agnostic, and that it was more honest to regard myself as an atheist. I went from a position of not knowing to a position of disbelief.

I went looking for God, Mike – there was no one home.

For me it seems it was a long progression of things.
First was the theological position of growing up a liberal Catholic with the attitude that all other religions were wrong, but that God would still save everyone who lived a good life, despite their mistakes.

Then there was the time in a college history class when I was chastised by the professor for suggesting the cause of a particular event in the Middle Ages was “a miracle.”

Then there was the movie “Jesus of Montreal” which suggests that even if Jesus was the bastard son of a centurion and was never resurrected, it wouldn’t take anything away from his message.

Then getting a degree in Medieval History taught me that the “traditions” of the Catholic church were pretty much crap they made up and didn’t actually go back that far.

I decided that I believed Jesus was sent by God but was not God.
So I quit going to mass because I thought it was disrespectful to the congregation of me to go through the rituals with sincere believers when I was not a sincere believer.

Through enough reading I realized there just was not enough evidence to support the existence of God but I chose to believe anyway. I thought to myself “Well, there’s no proof, but I can believe anyway because it is a comfort.” After a few months of that I decided I wanted to live a justified, rational life and that it was irrational to believe something without evidence just because I wanted it to be true.

Sounds like the author has met many atheists or hasn’t talked to them. The comment is pretty vague, as event could be taken as a lot of things, is going to college or reading the bible an event? I didn’t have one major even but followed a series of steps until I lost my christianity.

However, his question sounds like the argument that something bad must have happened for a person to be come an atheist. I’ve heard several people say something along the lines of, “I’m sorry the church/pastor hurt you, but give christianity another try”. Like the only reason to leave Christianity is because of bad experiences. I fell away from Christianity despite having great experiences and having a large circle of friends at church. I enjoyed singing in the choir and being at church 3 day a week, so I didn’t leave because of a negative event, my brain was just hurting from the mental gymnastics and I had to be honest with myself. So maybe being honest with myself was my “event”.

I started following various atheist related blogs several months ago, and because of the “non-conversion” stories I’ve read, I’ve spent a bit of introspection on this myself. Even though I spent a lot of time in church at least up through high school graduation, and really cannot recall a time where I can say I was ever a believer.

The only “defining moment” I can think of was learning about Greek and Roman mythology in elementary school. I found the topic fascinating, and read every book I could find in our county library on different mythologies (Greek, Roman, and Norse primarily…it wasn’t that great of a library). At that time, a cover-to-cover reading of the bible was included in my studies. I pretty quickly came to two conclusions: 1) At one time, these were religions just as prevalent and just as believed as Christianity, and 2) There was little difference in what I was reading as “myths” and what I was reading as “religion” in the bible.

From there until my escape to adulthood, I operated in an “acting out the parts” mode in church, dutifully going every Sunday and attending all of the various functions, but not really ever feeling like I belong. It was so refreshing being able to drop the facade once I graduated from college and was responsible for my own decisions.

Rick

Hi Mike. Glad to see you posting. There was not a single event that turned me into an atheist. It was more of a long progression. I was raised in a southern baptist home. I was baptized at the age of 11. I had heard our preacher describe some peoples’ conversion from ? to christianity while on a mission trip to Africa. I’m not sure what country. When I didn’t experience the same transformation that was described, I thought something must be wrong with me. That started my doubt. I was almost 30 (I am now 33)when I had finally finished my conversion from christian to full fledged atheist.

I think usually one can pinpoint the chain of events that lead you to becoming Atheist, just like you can pinpoint the chain of events that lead you to do any action.

I don’t have any major event that change my belief, but I can pinpoint the chain of events.

I never took my faith very seriously to begin with, and just kind of took it for granted and believed in god because I thought that was what good people did. I was Catholic and went through all the sacraments, and finally was going to get confirmed, although I honestly didn’t care that much. For confirmation in Catholicism you have to have a member of the church sponsor you. I think my sponsor contributed to my Atheism (not on purpose) – he was a pretty religious but open minded guy who I thought of as an authority in the church at the time. He told me that it was good to question my faith, because it will always come out stronger in the end.

So after getting confirmed and everything I head off to college where I was exposed to different viewpoints and wasn’t afraid to question anymore, I definitely did NOT strengthen my faith by questioning and instead just saw it fade away.

No cause for me.

Despite pretty much growing up in a church (my dad was the organist and my mom was in the choir) I just never really bought into the whole religion thing. I can point to plenty of “events” that reinforce my non-belief, but none of them had any causal effect on it.

I never had any sort of epiphany where I thought “Wow, God doesn’t exist!” Both of my parents were raised in religion, but chose to raise me without it. I didn’t even know what Christianity and Jesus was all about until I got into middle school. They wanted to me to figure stuff out on my own. The one thing my dad always told me is “It doesn’t matter how much you go to church or how loud you pray. Just be a good person.”

The only epiphany I had was when I heard the term atheist for the first time (when I was about 13). I just sort of blankly thought, “Oh yeah, that’s me.” It’s when I starting telling people what I was (not knowing I would have such a negative reaction) was when I first started investigating beliefs. But everything just sounded so crazy to me, that it didn’t really take an event to settle in my atheism.

Reading about dinosaurs at the age of 6-7 and then reading the first couple chapters of genesis, and asking my rabbi where are the dinosaurs and getting a reply that at that age i knew was bullshit…

About 8 years ago I was walking through a bookstore and I saw a book entitled ‘The Birth of Christianity: Reality and Myth’ by Joel Carmichael. Simply reading the inlet was enough to cause a stir in my ‘religious’ mind. It made me realize that there are so many aspects regarding Christianity and Jesus’ life to be learned NOT from the bible, that in order to be honest with your faith one absolutely must examine these aspects from external sources. Well, one you start doing that, the house of cards falls quickly.

So I guess for me, the one event that triggered it was reading something other than the bible, and taking an honest look at the faith.

There were two events that led my questioning of the beliefs I grew up in, but there wasn’t a specific event that led to my disbelief in god.

I watched the movie Stigmata when I was in 7th grade. It included lines from the Gospel of St. Thomas: the kingdom of God is inside you and all around you, not in the buildings of wood and stone. This made so much sense to me; god was in everything, not just in church. I got my mom to watch it and she made the comment that that gospel wasn’t approved by the Catholic Church. That got me thinking that maybe the Catholic Church isn’t always right

The second point was probably a turning point for a lot of people. Until 9th grade, my world consisted of the neighborhood I grew up in. So on 9/11, I wasn’t even aware the WTC was in NYC. I had just gotten the internet, but I only really used it for music. On 9/11, I started using it to research all sorts of topics including politics and religion.

Throughout the next few years, I did so much research. My journey kinda went like… Catholic to disenfranchised Catholic to Wiccan to Buddhist to Satanist to Agnostic to Pantheist and finally to Atheist. There was no specific event that led to atheist other than a slow peeling away of supernatural beliefs.

Yeah, I’m one of the people that author hasn’t spoken with. Our parents just didn’t raise us to be concerned with this type of thing, and I had no real idea what other people believed until the early teen years. I had no reason to notice that I didn’t believe until I knew that others did. After I learned, I thought about it for a really long time and understood how difficult it would be for most people to face death and non-being and that this was probably the source of thier beliefs. I didn’t identify as an atheist for a few more years, possible because I hadn’t yet heard the word, or possibly because I knew that it often was understood as a challenge. Until I went to school outside of the Northeast, I mainly regarded people who held religious beliefs with a sense of profound compassion. (Facing death is terribly hard.) My first year of college made me realize that I would be more comfortable calling myself an atheist, but it was more a matter of formally declaring myself outside of the believing group, where I had been all along.

Tried to edit and it turned into a double-post. Sorry.

No event, no epiphany. I was raised around and by vague believers but just never bought into it.

I checked, and the author of the book is a Catholic priest and lives in Rome. Is it any surprise, then, that all the atheists he knows have a cause for their rejection of religion?

I did want to take issue with what Adrian said, though, at least are far as Seattle goes – I live there and all the atheists I know are as quick to roll their eyes at the woo-woo as they are at traditional religion. The ones I’ve met that are into the new age mystical stuff are mostly deists, in my experience, but I will say that there does seem to be a whole lot of them.

Mike C you said I’m less than impressed with this book. Can you Elaborate a bit more as to what you feel the failings of the book are?

I had already been trailing off from fundamentalist Christianity and finding a lot to be excited about in the emergent church… then I started studying Judaism, expecting to find the source of Christian faith. But I didn’t. Christianity seemed like a complete non-sequitor, and a re-imagining or re-interpretation of Jewish faith. It took me a few weeks to process it all, and then I pretty much never prayed again. If there was a God, I realized, it was the god of the Jews, and since I’m not Jewish, there’s nothing more required of me. It all started with that thought. Not sure where it would have gone if I was Jewish.

Wow, Mike! That passage is something else! It sounds like Thomas Williams is writing to an audience of the religious, rather than to atheists.

The atheists are angry at God stuff is funny. It sounds like every “atheist” he knows is currently a Christian: “I was only an atheist so I could get an abortion, now I’m a Christian again!!!”

I enjoy no personal friendship with any of the authors of the atheistic works being considered here [Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens], and I am not privy to sufficient details of their private lives to confidently identify the underlying causes of their hatred of God.

I crack up at Dennett’s inclusion in this roll-call.

I never believed.

The idea of God was presented to me as a child; the notion of “God” seemed like wish fulfilled for older people who wanted to control the behavior of us young’uns. Here was a perfect Divine Policeman; if you “got away” with bad behavior, “He” would still know about it, and you’d still be taken to task for whatever you did at some nebulous future date.

Also, there was the early self-knowledge of my own homosexuality, which I was lead to believe “He” didn’t approve of. And the attendent homophobia which kept me closeted until my 20th birthday. (I actually “came out” as an atheist when I was 15; it was good training for later.)

Not to mention that I heard outright lies from the pulpit every Sunday about human origins, history, psychology, etc., etc., etc. These lies (and there is no other word for them!) are still being presented as facts in churches, synagogues and mosques everywhere.

I’m grateful for my unbelief. And I’m grateful for my homosexuality. I love being both. In some very real, very concrete ways, both of these facets of my make-up are responisble for who I am today. And when anyone tells me that either of them are morally wrong, I know that they are simply liars, whether they know it or not.

Now, as much as I detest religion in general–and make no mistake, I do detest religion!–there’s a big difference between religion and its’ followers. Most everyone is actually a decent person (for which we have Darwinian evolution to thank, not some bogus Imaginary Friend).

Mike,

While he does go on to make a few good points later in the book, for the most part I’m finding an astounding lack of familiarity with what most atheists actually think, though oddly enough the author actually lives in Europe (Rome).

He’s a professor at the Pontifical University, and my guess is that he spends most of his time in a somewhat isolated, rarefied environment. He probably isn’t speaking to typical, secular Europeans. And, of course, he’s seeing what he wants to see.

When you finish the book, you may want to go over to Amazon and write a review. Most of the reviews so far are five-star, and contain the usual nonsense, “He’s completely refuted the atheists! Read this so you’ll be armed the next time you have to argue with one!”

I have distinct memories of the things that made me first start to question the veracity of Christianity as a young child – mostly related to learning about the mythology of older cultures (loved them Greek mythology stories!). But that just started a long process of questioning and questing – a struggle between a desire to still believe the happy religious ideas and the growing conclusion that they simply couldn’t be true. Eventually I got weary and just put the struggle away – stopped thinking about it. Some time after that, I was exposed to some people who may be some of the best human beings I’ve ever met, who happened to be very devout Christians. I gave Christianity one more serious go at that point – just on a personal level, by reading the New Testament. But in the middle of that, I was exposed, for the first time, to the writings of an open atheist. And I agreed with so much of what he said that I had to admit to myself at that point that I really didn’t believe in god anymore, and that I was, in fact, an atheist. I’d never really considered myself in those terms before, despite all my years of questioning. Once I did, however, it felt like kind of an epiphany, and I felt much better about myself and about the world. Like a weight was lifted.

I don’t consider this to have been an “event” that made me an atheist, in the way that people would probably think of such a thing. My atheism was a long process – a journey. The first step and the last step had an event aspect to them, but I wasn’t “turned into an atheist” by those events. At least, that’s not the way I perceive it.

I’ve had a gradual journey away from faith that culminated in my late 20s when I found that the world made more sense and that I was more comfortable with agnosticism. I was raised and confirmed a Methodist in a suburb of Chicago. I have vivid memories of attending the little Methodist Church in Sciota Illinois with my grandmother. There, in the very best sense of the word, my much older cousin Eldon played harmonica with the church choir.

I attended Sunday School, but found it dissatisfying. Actually, the questions raised and explored in my later religion classes at Elmhurst College were more what I had hoped to explore in Sunday School. In high school I attended a number of Methodist Youth banquets and events, but felt out of place with the faith I saw around me. I stopped going because I felt hypocritical when I attended and did not believe as deeply as the other teens.

Around this time, in high school, I read and underlined the bible I was given for confirmation, as an exploration in faith.

At Elmhurst College, although I didn’t attend any other than mandatory chapel and stopped attending church at all, I silently prayed every night all through college and into the first few years of my marriage. (My college prayers were a great surprise to my college roommate, who had no idea I prayed at all.)

The more I thought and read, in secular and sacred texts, the less likely I found the existence of a beneficent, personal god. There was no crisis, nor any dramatic turning point. The questions I asked and the readings I did all slowly reinforced my sense that god was a man made construct – although I did not use that phrase at the time.

I never became anti-religion, just anti-certainty and anti-dogmatism. (An interesting aside is that as an agnostic, for several years, I taught the Religious Literature elective, which was basically a comparative religions class, in a Chicago suburban high school.)

For the last thirty years, I have read widely, if not deeply, in world religions as well as in the sciences, to say nothing of novelistic treatments – since I am an English teacher. I have found nothing in my readings, nor in world events, that would shake my doubt.

As a child, I was (at best) a “naive” theist. When I was 7 or 8 years old, I accidentally locked myself (and everyone else) outside the car. Happily, the rear window was open, and the driver was able to break into the car.

I said, “Thank God the window was open!”

The driver said, “God had nothing to do with it; it was just good luck.”

That seemed obviously true to me. (I didn’t feel shamed or corrected; I was a very precocious and smart-assed child, used to challenging my elders if I thought they were bullshitting me.)

I was never serious about theism ever again. I subsequently thought about theism and religion in a lot of different ways, but I was never able to make it work out. Finally I just stopped thinking about it for a many years, and then explicitly self-identified as “atheist” around 2000.

But perhaps it goes even earlier. When I was 5 years old, in Kindergarten, I did a show & tell presentation of an experiment that showed that light always travels in straight lines. One of the other students objected, pointing to a picture of the sun, with wavy yellow lines representing the light. I remember clearly thinking that it was silly to consider such a picture as having any sort of authority or relevance when I had just shown an actual experiment to the contrary.

I can’t say I can trace it to any one event. I’ve never truly believed in a god. Of course, everyone’s born atheist, so you have to point to a cause of a belief. 🙂

I would think that it would be a weak and simple faith that could be nullified with a single event, suitable only for weak and simple people. In my experience, they are the ones who harbour a pathological distrust of other faiths, other belief systems, and skeptical thought. I’m related to a few of them.

If your faith is worth anything to you, it would take more than one thing, no matter how bad, to destroy it for you–I’ve seen rationalizations that make me squirm, justifications for evil or bad luck usually.

For me, my faith was as strong as anyone else’s I guess, until I started really thinking about it. Many of the people in the churches I attended used god to justify their bigotry, against Catholics, Muslims, Jews and gays. So my faith was ugly. It was very, very ugly. My god hated. I expect that’s part of it.

I, like everyone else, it seems, took a long time giving up on religion, and then a long time giving up on “belief”. Sometimes I’m lonely, but I’m much happier.

Echoing many others on this post, it was more of a process for me than a single moment. I was raised Catholic, although my mom was never very pushy about it. We never went to church, but I went to religion classes for two years and made first communion, but I remember being very confused about these classes. In my normal school classes, if I asked a question, my teachers would give me an actual answer, and in some cases admitted they didn’t know the answer. In religion class, there was this negative tone when anyone would ask questions, and the answers were always lacking. So I told my mom I didn’t want to go to religion anymore, and stopped going to classes around 7 years old.

So I figured there was something wrong with Christianity, and that God must be more sensible than the Catholics let on. I thought for a while I was in on some secret, that I knew God better than Christians. I still prayed occasionally, if I was going through a rough time, partly out of habit and partly because I still thought God was there, just a little less interested in silly rituals than Catholics thought. But I realized that praying didn’t seem to do anything noticeable. After a while, I started testing God, praying for things that should be no problem for God to perform, and noticed again and again that nothing would happen. I finally figured out that God probably wasn’t that interested in me or anyone else, and I became a deist, because I still thought God was necessary to explain the universe, human consciousness, etc.

Finally, I studied psychology and philosophy in college, and I started to put together the real problems with the God hypothesis. First, philosophy classes showed me how lacking the arguments for God were. I realized that I was treating God as the default position, as if someone else needed to prove that God doesn’t exist. So I started looking at the evidence for God, and it was mostly anecdotal and very suspect.

Cognitive psychology was the final nail in the coffin, because I finally understood where all these feelings of the divine come from. Things like pareidolia and confirmation bias are much stronger than anyone realizes. One of my professors was also an expert on eyewitness testimony, and how unreliable it can be. After finishing my Psychology minor, I was pretty well convinced that most religious experience can be attributed to natural, psychological phenomena.

My siblings and I were raised in an irreligious household, and all four of us find the notion of genuine god-belief quite peculiar. I personally find the idea so strange that I suspect that many professed believers are merely saying what they’ve been conditioned to say without ever having given much thought to the matter.

Mike, I have no idea what the norm in the US would be; it would not surprise me if most atheists here were deconverted Christians, but neither would it surprise me if most of them were never true believers in the first place.

It’s surprising to me how many atheists here seem to have been raised in atheist or very nominally religious families, or at least claim to have never really believed, even as a child. Is that the norm among atheists?

I think most atheists approach religion from a more logical angle whereas theists often go for a more emotional approach. The problem with this is that our memory works best with emotional things, especially at a young age, so even if we think we never believed we should take the fact that our memories may be inaccurate into account.

Personally, I have witnesses to the fact that I was an atheist by the time I started kindergarten (and I was in a part of the country where this wasn’t viewed as especially odd my peers). Since my parents fall into the “nominal” category, it’s possible that I had some form of religious belief before then, but I have no memory of it. However, I still wouldn’t feel justified in guaranteeing that it never existed.

Also, the term “atheist” is a little too vague to be meaningful here. While I didn’t believe that a god existed in kindergarten and indeed thought that it was a silly belief, I certainly wasn’t interested in things like the influence of religion on politics or the philosophy of belief, both of which are much more recent acquisitions for which I can identify specific causes. So, while I can’t identify why I stopped believing in a god (if I ever did), I can definitely identify reasons why I started caring about the answer to the question.

I was born an atheist, and for me I simply remained one being raised without any religious beliefs. At one point I read the Bible out of curiosity knowing full well most people believed in what it said and I tried to think of it as a “real true story”, but I found nothing compelling belief in it, and thus continued being an atheist. 🙂

Being raised Mormon, my atheism was mostly a result of realizing that the LDS church had no more monopoly on truth than any other church claimed. Once those blinders were removed, it was easy to see WHY people believed in god, but just as easy to see that there was NO god.

Regarding the author’s blanket statement about the cause of atheism–it sounds like most church-goers’ response to apostacy (especially mormons since I’ve gotten it from them). They think that people only leave the church for two reasons:
1) they were offended (hate god)
2) they wanted to sin (hate themselves)

I think my family lumps me in with the wanting to sin part because they’ve seen me enjoy a glass of wine (big no-no for mo-mos) with dinner. They can’t understand how I could give up eternal salvation for a glass wine and I can’t understand how they could believe that any god would base any salvation on such a petty thing.

Remember, your simple atheism is an affront to many believers because if they admit how easy it is to live, love, and be happy without god, then they’ve lost “the war.” They always want to find some ulterior motive for not believing in god. The response of “he’s just not there” scares them. But now I’m making broad, probably-inaccurate statements about people who believe differently than me. Ah, humanity–ain’t it grand?!

Oops posted in wrong thread

I grew up being catholic. Got taught the whole thing in school. Prayed every morning. Then at age 10 or 11 I did a class presentation with a school friend of mine on Greek History. We dug really deep into the history. Really deep. We wanted the biggest presentation the school had ever seen. From cuisines to linguistics, from their ancient gods to their current religions.

And there I was. With that friend of mine. Looking at all those gods.

We didn’t have Google to help us out. But we had libraries full of books. We went there. We read up on a lot of things. Mind you, two 12-year-olds are sitting in a library with all these theological books in front of them.

We spent hours reading on all those deities history has known. We went from one unknown word to the next, browsed more books with the help of the library’s computer, and eventually decided religion is nothing more than a psychological ploy to explain the unknown.

Specifically death.

Thankfully, our teacher was a very liberal guy and quite possibly atheist himself. He gave us a 10 (highest rating where I live) for the report.

It wasn’t a tragic loss that made me change my mind. It was a stack of 50 or more books about our own history.

Mike Clawson said,

It’s surprising to me how many atheists here seem to have been raised in atheist or very nominally religious families, or at least claim to have never really believed, even as a child. Is that the norm among atheists? I guess I was under the impression that the majority of atheists (in America) were deconverted Christians. Is that not the case anymore, or are the demographics for this particular blog just skewed for some reason?

Atheism, or more broadly, freethought is a rather quickly growing group, so it stands to reason that it has a higher percentage of (de)converts than many religions. But I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the (de)converts were only nominally Christian before. Especially from Catholicism, because the Catholic Church just seems to enjoy using nominals to inflate their own numbers. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers are more than slightly skewed here. Among the requisites to be here are being concerned about the issue, and outspoken enough to delurk. And then, we all need to be interested in “friendly” atheism, whatever we think that means.

As one of those people who grew up as a nominal Catholic, I could describe what it’s like. It isn’t so much about believing or disbelieving. It’s about being Christian and vaguely thinking that must be a good thing. It’s about feeling slightly guilty that you don’t pray every night, but then just getting on with life anyways. If you thought about the actual religious beliefs, they seem a little silly, but that’s just religion for you. Services aren’t really something to enjoy, but they are more like vegetables. It’s good for you to attend, and maybe listen, but it’s also very boring.

I could easily look back at these memories and say, “I never really believed”, but I think that’s not quite what it was.

It’s surprising to me how many atheists here seem to have been raised in atheist or very nominally religious families, or at least claim to have never really believed, even as a child. Is that the norm among atheists? I guess I was under the impression that the majority of atheists (in America) were deconverted Christians. Is that not the case anymore, or are the demographics for this particular blog just skewed for some reason?

Mike, perhaps you or someone else who wants to put in the time could compile the stats from this topic. It may not be a fair representation of all atheists, but it might show some interesting results.

If you include a child of a Christian family as a de-converted Christian, then I think the majority of atheists probably are just that. But looking back, I don’t think I was ever really a Christian. I had no idea why I believed what I did, I did it because I didn’t think there was a another choice. I would expect many other atheists from religious families feel the same way. Not that there aren’t atheists who once truly believed in God, but I suspect the vast majority were questioning from an early age, and only held on to religion so long because that was all they knew.

I was struck by your statement “I did it because I didn’t think there was another choice.” I can never forget the feeling that came over me when, as a young boy in elementary school, I asked another schoolmate what religion he was (simply assuming that everyone was something) and he said he was “agnostic.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I suddenly felt alienated from him, and I felt a distrust of him. I didn’t know what to say after that. It really caught me off guard.

I think most atheists approach religion from a more logical angle whereas theists often go for a more emotional approach.

I’m skeptical of that generalization, but I would think that, because atheists have to buck the trend, they might have to have substantive reasons for not believing.

It wasn’t a tragic loss that made me change my mind. It was a stack of 50 or more books about our own history.

Bravo, MHD. You did it the hard way.

It seems that some of you think God ought to set a deadline and put an end to all wrong and evil things in the world. If He did that would you not be atheist?

That might convert me, if there was no better explanation for why evil all of a sudden stopped existing, of course. But, I think if God is all-powerful and all-loving, this should be no problem from him, and something he would want to do. It’s not that I think God should do anything. It’s that if God actually DID exist, he would have already done so, or at least there would be a better explanation as to why all of this evil exists. “It’s a mystery” or “God only knows…” never cut it for me.

I must say that reading these responses has left me amazed! Its interesting to see how truly strong so many of these minds are. Its hard, if not impossible for impressionable children to sift through the shit excreted by authoritative figures. I think its wonderful to see that people have abandoned their pacifiers, and demanded explanation for what was thought to have been already explained.

Everyone who has posted has made me feel infinitely better about myself and the world around me. To know that unproven fear of the unknown could be recognized as false by so many of us at such a usually young age is inspiring and comforting.

Thanks!

I can’t say there was any sort of cause for me — as far as I can recall I was just born this way XD. I was raised in a hodge-podge of religious beliefs, as my mother moved through several different faiths (and “woo”-related stuff) throughout my childhood. I think this helped me a lot: from near the beginning I came to see religion as what you made of it, or rather, as something which suited the seeker rather than as one fixed and unchangeable truth. I didn’t exactly question things — at that point, I don’t recall ever realizing that people *believed* the stories I was told or truly thought the rituals etc. did anything special — but I would argue some of the philosophical points with my mother on occasion, which would usually result in my crying “But that doesn’t EXPLAIN anything!” or something similar and storming off in sheer frustration.

When I was about 16, a philosophy forum I was a member of started discussing religion. After some brief self-examination I said I didn’t believe in god so I guessed I was an atheist. It was kind of an “aha!” moment for me, and the first time I ever voluntarily used the label, but it was really more in the order of a realization than a ’cause.’ It wasn’t until I encountered the blogosphere last year that I realized atheists were actually a minority (for some reason, this honestly surprised me) and became a lot more militant about my disbelief. I guess I’ve been sheltered here in New Zealand XD

Happy Christian said:

It seems that some of you think God ought to set a deadline and put an end to all wrong and evil things in the world. If He did that would you not be atheist?

Right! Which god? Whose idea of wrong or evil?

If the Flying Spaghetti Monster appeared in the skies tomorrow and extended His Noodly Appendage to each of us with a message of piracy to combat global warming then I’d probably be forced to believe in him and his magic sauce.

Of course he’d have to be obvious about it so I didn’t accidentally attribute the new prosperity of the earth to some natural or human influence.

I was born an atheist and have remained so my entire life. I was never indoctrinated into (or conditioned to be) religious at any time. For me, hating God is like hating Santa Clause or hating the Easter Bunny. Ironically, I am married to a semi-religious woman who feels a need to attend and participate in church. I do hate giving money to perpetuate an institution I don’t believe in. This particular church is struggling financially (just covering salaries and utilities) and there is hardly anything left over to help the poor (except for the time people invest). Money would be better spent at a mega church.

I never went to church growing up, and only had a vague belief in a Christiany kind of God probably due to the surrounding culture. Once when I was pretty young (7?) my cousin said he didn’t believe in God which shocked me at the time since I assumed that man lived (literally) in the sky, just like Santa at the North Pole. I guess that started the ball rolling. I didn’t get interested in skepticism in general until college. I do remember arguing with creationist classmates in high school though.

I certainly don’t hate the idea of God. As I’ve written elsewhere I wish there was a God. I like the idea of life after death and some kind of justice in the world. (The philosopher Colin McGinn expressed this idea very well in Jonathan Miller’s The Atheism Tapes.) I just read a fascinating book about North Korea (by Martin K. Bradley) and the amount of injustice in that country is overwhelming. Millions starve, thousands waste away in concentration camps, while the Dear Leader eats sushi feasts and paddles around in the private pools of his various mansions with his harem. Like his father, he will probably die with no justice served. However, I do hate the idea of eternal punishment in hell. Even Hitler doesn’t deserve that. (especially if there IS an afterlife for all his victims…)

Williams writes,

No one writes angry books about other phenomena in which they do not believe.

The “angry” part is debatable, but in general it is not true. Lots of people write, lets say passionate, books about things they don’t believe in. Such as: global warming, UFOs, conspiracy theories (JFK, 9-11), astrology, psychics, ghosts, string theory, communism, capitalism, etc… (and atheists!)

Oh, dear, Happy Christian. I don’t think you quite get it. No Atheist thinks your god ought to put an end to all wrong and evil things in the world.

stephanie, you don’t seem to get it, either. Of course no atheist thinks that any god should do this or that; as we don’t believe in any gods, such a belief would be incoherent. The question is whether we would stop being atheists if (the presumably Christian) God ended all evil and suffering. It’s a rather stupid question, I’ll give you that… if it was clear that God took action, then it would be clear that God actually existed, and every atheist would become a theist of some type. If, however, evil and suffering simply vanished with no indication as to why, many atheists would remain atheists, as the responsibility for such a change should not be immediately assigned to an entity for which there is no evidence (as is the case for every phenomenon we already observe but cannot explain).

It’s about as logical and thought-provoking a question as whether Spider-Man or Batman would win in a fight.

Though, to be fair, Bruce Wayne could kick Spidey’s scrawny, mutated ass around the block twenty-seven times without breaking a sweat. </offtopic>

stephanie, not exactly… the question is a hypothetical; if X happens, would Y happen? The fact that we don’t believe in a necessary condition (the existence of God) for X to happen does not prevent us from answering the question if we grant, for the sake of discussion, that X happens (God exists and acts to end suffering). The stupidity of the question lies in the obviousness of the answer once this condition is granted (yes, of course we’d become theists… we’d become theists if God did anything discernible).

On a side note: who are all these “Meyers” people? PZ Meyers, J Meyers… they are always getting the credit (or blame) for what PZ Myers and I (no relation) say. The extra “e” is the less-common spelling, so they must really be doing something to grab everyone’s attention.

To me, that question sounds a bit like “What caused you to be gay?” It’s not that something caused it for me. It’s just who I am. This position is a realization of my personality, knowledge and understanding.

That’s my non-snarky answer. My snarky answer would be ‘reality’ caused me to believe what I believe. RAmen. (I’m eating ramen right now! haha)