Before You Became an Atheist…

Well I was raised a devout member of the church of the flying spaghetti monster, but when I got married, I had to stop going to strip clubs and I started losing my faith. Now I’m just a run-of-the-mill atheist.

Some theists say they have evidence, but it’s not the kind of evidence we talk about, or the kind that would convince them to believing in another religion. Faith is belief without evidence, or even despite of evidence, most theists advocate faith although not in the cases when they dislike the beliefs. This doesn’t say much about their experience, but it does tell us that they’ll say just about anything.

I remember seeing programs where they would claim to have found this (or that) “proof” of the existence of Jesus… just look at all the believers who are ‘flocking’ to see the “virgin Mary” reveal herself on a griddle.

The strange thing is that I actually saw lots of evidence backing up religion at first. I used to defend it against my soon-to-be-atheist friends. The evidence I held to was the authority of the mob. Though I used to agree with them that no religion could be right, that the existence of supernatural forces and god(s) must be true because of all the recorded observations. Afterall, it seemed the likelihood of all these myths, legends, and fables, being wrong, despite with all of their similarities, would be really small. The problem with my argument, I later realized, was that I was assuming there was no other explanation for the stories they told. That realization broke my hope for the stories and I turned to science and atheism.

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
— Carl Sagan

Pretty much hits the nail on the head. Took me a couple of decades longer to get rid of my political delusions after I’d shed the religious ones, but in both cases really it all does come down to forcing yourself to care whether your position is objectively right or not. And you also have to stop thinking of lists of reasons why the “other side” is wrong as being evidence for your position.

When I was a kid, I had a breakdown and I could not stop crying when I realized there was no way that Jesus’s mother could have been a virgin, and that most of the other miracles in the Bible frankly could not have actually happened. But I shoved it deep down inside a dark corner of my brain and went on believing for over a decade before I let myself think again.

Slightly off topic: One of the reasons I left the church was because I did not agree with the conservative politics the churches started promoting in the 1980s. But that was a separate process from me losing my faith and becoming an atheist.

I was raised by a devoutly religious Catholic family and attended church services weekly at the family’s church. I think my atheism came out of the fact that I didn’t get anything out of the services because I am deaf and it was a hearing church that didn’t have sign language interpreters. So I studied religion on my own fueled by my exposure to students of different religions in public school. I was surprised that Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worshiped the same God yet each claimed to be the “True Faith”.

I came to the realization that it was impossible to know which religion was the right one… they couldn’t all be right, but they could all be wrong. So I became agnostic. Further research lead me to atheism and eventually antitheism.

As a very young kid I was something of a geography prodigy. I really liked reading maps and learning about far-away places.

As I learned about foreign cultures, I discovered that there are other religions out there, and they’re just as sure THEY’RE right as my fellow church-goers thought WE were right.

In a burst of critical thinking (bear in mind I was about TEN) I set out to figure out whether there was any objective reason why I should be a Lutheran Christian over any other religion. Too few people seem to reach this state of self-reflection in their lifetimes, sadly.

By 16 I had found no compelling reason to be Christian over any other faith, but I remained broadly theistic due to Pascal’s Wager (I had never heard of Pascal’s Wager… I had come up with it independently only to realize the concept already existed).

By 20 I said to myself “I haven’t really believed in God in a long time anyway, and Pascal’s Wager is flawed”, And in a puff of logic I became an Atheist.

In short, it was a quest for knowledge about something unfamiliar, and to objectively compare it to the familiar, I applied some basic introspection.

I agree with many of the statements above. When I believed, I didn’t even look for evidence, I just KNEW that what I believed was right. I was raised in the church and had no need for questions or searching for evidence. I already had everything I needed in life and there was no thinking about the fact that I might be wrong. No matter how far fetched the story, if it was in the bible, I believed it. I don’t know what got me started thinking, but I know what it was about: other gods. I thought about all the other religions that taught that their god was the one true god too. “Well, we can’t all have the one true god”, I thought to myself. When I first had these thoughts of course I deemed the other gods as “false”, but the question wouldn’t be dismissed. It always came back to me. I eventually came to the realization that since I thought the other gods weren’t real, *gasp* mine not be either. Yay, rational thought! ….and the rest is history.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the story of my deconversion right there. I was already quite skeptically minded, long before I decided to consciously apply critical thinking to religion.

When I did apply critical thinking, I realized right from the start that Christianity did not have much evidence to show. I also realized that many Christians argue that evidence is unnecessary, and faith suffices. But I found this unpersuasive. I also realized that there are an assortment of arguments for God/Christianity for those who don’t like the idea of “blind” faith. But I saw these arguments, and found them lacking. Yes, I found this extremely disappointing.

And yet, I existed in this state for a few years. The position of doubtful adherence is surprisingly stable.

When I stopped believing in Santa Claus, I had doubts, asked my parents about it, and they were honest with me. They were still honest when I asked about God, but the response was decidedly different. For my every doubt, the mere conviction of my family was enough to keep me in. Still, I constantly doubted. I constantly thought, “How could an all-powerful god leave so many gaps in his story?” I was severely troubled by the idea of an eternity of worshiping and praising god. This is our reward?

I’m pleased that I had the courage to step outside my comfortable life to seriously consider what I believed. I truly think that many people hang on for the wrong reasons – social pressure, family expectations, even fear. To pause and objectively contemplate religion is the only step anyone needs to make. Do this, and the lack of evidence is overwhelming. Still, one needs to make a conscious decision to remove the blinders.

After taking a leap of faith, I needed to take a leap back to reality. It took some courage, but I remember the moment when I was standing on the edge. I decided to jump back to a secular world and take a look. I’m glad I did.

I realized that pretty early on, and I realized that I had to just deal with the issue. “Just dealing with it” got to me after a while, though, and it’s how it got me where I am now. 🙂

I was Catholic and honestly I don’t think I ever thought about my faith critically until the end, when I stopped believing. I suspect most people are the same way.

I had a multitude of questions about what I was taught as a young child and I was given answers for every one. They didn’t have to be good answers to be convincing to me at that formative time, coming from the people I most trusted, and combined with the understanding of faith as a virtue. Once the basic framework was in place, for the next twenty years or so I tried to answer my own questions within that framework, looking increasingly to apologetics and more liberal interpretations of Christianity. Along the way, I experienced powerful spiritual community and the occasional ecstatic or transcendent moments that cemented my faith. I did not stop thinking of doubt as a particularly threatening sin till perhaps mid-college, so when I speak of “questions” from before this time (after the initial indoctrination), I am referring to very fleeting feelings of panic that I drowned out with more prayer, more meditation on reassuring scripture, more church attendance, etc. I had many “yeah, I must admit this looks weird” moments but always with the rapid follow-up thought, “but God will make it right somehow and it’s not my place to judge God.” I knew enough to see that it didn’t make sense to justify biblical arguments with the Bible when trying to convince unbelievers, and I could think critically about a great many things but I saw faith as necessarily different territory. Obviously this became maddeningly difficult or I wouldn’t be here.

I was raised in a methodist church, and the funny thing is when people told me the bible was symbolic, I took it to mean “not real” in the first place. i never believed and had sort of an epiphany when i realized people – grown-ups for that matter – took this book seriously and thought it actually happened. i was about 7. but i did what i was “supposed to do,” trying to not get caught pretending. i didn’t really get comfortable with my atheist self until much later.

Were you ever discouraged or disappointed by the lack of evidence

HAHAHA, Oh man, YES! I had once intended to study up on evolution in order to debunk it and maybe even offer a sort of sunday school class at church. The more I dug, the further away that goal got.

I also thought about an all around apologetics thingy. Again, nothing encouraging about what I found.

The atrocities in the Bible also took the steam out of me. I found that my bible-based ambitions kept running against my values and intellect. So, I remained a devout but more or less paralyzed xian until I deconverted years later.