The First Time You Wrote About Your Atheism…

I used to be somewhat of an agnostic, leaning towards the “there is no God but there might be an afterlife” side. After listening to logical arguments on why we shouldn’t believe in an afterlife or supernatural happenings, I gradually evolved into an atheist. It wasn’t a single moment, but a long period of time.

I remember when I started having atheist thoughts. I was about 7 years old at the time. Now I’m 16, atheist and I still remember exactly what I said.
I was in the car with my mother, and after some silent thinking, I turned to her and said “Mom, if God holds the earth in his hands, where does God stand?”
That’s when I started being an atheist.

I don’t have any piece of writing or anything, but I do remember the time when I knew there wasn’t a god. My mom comes from a rather large Irish Catholic family, so we had gone to church until about the time I was in 4th grade, mostly because of a falling out my parents had with some people at the church. I don’t really know all the details, but all I know is that we stopped going, and never went to another church.
I remember hating church, mainly because a long Catholic sermon is interesting to no child, and CCD was way too much like school, which I also hated. I specifically remember someone saying during a sermon that this church was a house that god built, and at the end talking about a church fundraiser for repairs to the building. In my head I remember thinking well a being that lives in the sky couldn’t have made this building, otherwise how come he doesn’t fix it?

Strictly speaking, someone who doesn’t care about gods would be an apatheist

The earliest I can remember thinking about the issue was just after my first cat died. I was about 10 or 12 and it was the first time I really thought about what it meant to be alive and dead. I thought about what an afterlife might be and what I knew of brains and life which, given my age, wasn’t all that much. Even still the afterlife idea just sounded more and more insane the more I thought about it. I knew personalities and memories arose from the brain but the brain was most definitely destroyed. I tried to think if there was anything non-physical which could survive but every important facet of life was covered and determined by our fleshy, squishable bodies. The whole idea seemed like an absurd magic story and even then I couldn’t imagine how or why anyone would believe. That was when I realized that I definitely didn’t believe.

I very clearly remember my first atheist thought. I was 4, and it occurred to me that giant talking mice and ducks were not real. So I asked my mom about it, and she said, no, they’re people in costumes. Then I said, so, the easter bunny isn’t real either, or santa clause. She was a bit taken aback by that, but it was a rhetorical question.

My mother bounced around eastern spiritualism and native american ‘great spirit’, but was pretty scornful of Christianity while I was at home. After I left home, she (and my younger sister) became Christian. I’m not sure exactly why or in what order.

I did spend some time as a cultural pagan, and would have to say I was less skeptical in my 20s than I am now in my 40s, but at my core I’ve never believed in ‘God’.

The first time I remember writing anything down, my Junior year in HS, I asked myself “Did God create man in his image, or did man create god in his image?”
I don’t know if I heard it somewhere, read it somewhere or made it up. I just remember asking myself and then asking others on a debate team bus trip (including my Catholic girlfriend, who is now agnostic/atheist, 16 years later)

oh, I’m gonna go a’digging through the old notebooks right now. How exciting. I haven’t done this in years 😛

I find it really interesting how the kid who wrote that essay talks about the fact that a bunch of his friends are religious and he helps with some of their religious charities sometimes. It reminds me of how, when you ask most people under 20 about LGBT issues, they are so open and accepting and, frankly, a little confused about the discrimination that LGBT people face. Makes me think that the up and coming generations might be moving to a place where people of faith and my fellow non-believers can just kind of exist next to each other without it being a big deal for most. Nifty.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I became an atheist. I kind of remember moving away from Christianity but I wasn’t particularly devout or anything anyway and neither was my mom (she’s not exactly a christian either, she’s sort of a “all religions have it a little right and a little wrong” type, with a side of “wormhole aliens rather than an actual deity” for spice).

THinking back, I think I had doubts since early childhood but just sort of went with the flow (prayers before bedtime always FELT like I was talking to an imaginary friend). I know I started questioning my sort-of fundie grandma (fundie beliefs essentially but she didn’t agree with the whole idea of organized religion for a bunch of reasons, as fundies go she was actually pretty cool) on some of the big stuff at about 9 or 10. And I went through a fun new agey wiccan phase in my late teens and early 20s (that started with some American Indian stuff). And then it all kind of morphed to where I’m at now.

I consider myself an apathetic agnostic atheist with a side of (don’t know, don’t care, don’t think it can be known either way, still don’t care) ignostic for my own spice (think the question itself as well as the answer is irrelevant).

It seems I was 13 the first time I wrote that there is no god, in an extremely strange short story about a guy who’d been transported to another dimension to live inside a gigantic ethereal being that happened to speak English and have a similar cultural memory while also being too old to believe in gods. Cool shit.

an excerpt:

“There is no God.”
“So now you attack my faith?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because a war is being fought over who has the strongest invisible friend.”

(I’m pretty sure this was very soon after I finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman and that is what I was referencing)

It later addresses many of the hypocrisies of religion and of the nature of the Christian deity. What a weird little kid I was. I don’t remember when I first started thinking atheist-esque things, but it was probably when I got yelled at for drawing goatees on Jesus in my children’s Bible when I was 6 😛

I am 34. I was raised in a Christian household but had considered myself to be agnostic for years. At some point in the past year or so, after reading and thinking about it a lot, I realized that I’m an atheist. I first wrote about it here, in my homeschooling blog, in April of this year.

I stopped calling myself a Hindu around about aged 7. In 1992, Hindus went on a massive riot claiming that a mosque in Ayodhya was sited over the birthplace of the Avatar of Vishnu, Rama. This resulted in the mosque being torn down by an angry mob with nothing more than brute manpower. The mob then went on a killing spree killing muslims solely for believing in another god. I refused to be associated with them but I still prayed. Refusing to call myself a Hindu was a protest against their behaviour.

When I was nearly 15 I went to Ayodhya with my parents for a pilgrimage. I was searched thoroughly and waited in queue with thousands of other devotees. 4 hours later we reached the shrine, the thing which hindus were fighting for. Inside was a poorly made hand painted doll.

It hit me that people died just because of a doll. That Vishnu himself stated that it didn’t matter what you prayed to as long as you prayed. It was eye opening to realise that thousands of people suffered because people believed that magic would occur if you prayed hard enough.

I was never “properly” indoctrinated into any religion (though baptised and later confirmed into Catholicism). My father died when I was eight and though people would say he was looking down on me from heaven I don’t recall internalising that belief really. Religion to me was something I occasionally visited as a tourist. I didn’t believe in God, but I didn’t disbelieve either. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, sometimes attending Catholic schools, sometimes public schools. Around the age of 11, I got confirmed because I was in the Catholic school, but it was all theatre to me. I liked the ritual stuff and put in my name to be an altar girl (for whatever reason that didn’t end up happening), but it was no different in kind to me than being a Girl Guide or taking riding lessons.

As soon as I started to learn about Christianity, I rejected it deliberately. Early on, my first objection was the doctrines about animals and the earth. In my grade 9 religion class, I and a couple of other people argued with the teacher about how if humans had souls, so did animals. That it wouldn’t be fair for humans to be able to go to heaven but not dolphins or dogs. Our little group of objectors called ourselves “The Atheist Society” as a joke and countered the dogma whenever we felt it was unjust.

At the same time though, I was beginning to believe that there was a God–I was developing into a pantheist. I came to the conclusion that all religions were man-made “paths up the same mountain” and investigated all the major ones, finally settling on neoPaganism in my late teens and twenties. In my early thirties, I fell away from practising the religion due to reasons other than belief or lack of it, but being solitary again opened the door to more critical analysis about the premises of those foundational beliefs I still held. It’s only now in the past few years that I’ve come full circle, back to being, for all intents and purposes, an atheist.

I’m a 2nd generation atheist but grew up in a fairly religious community. I learned early to keep my thoughts to myself while at school. Although in high-school, a friend of mine and I got atheist tee-shirts made and wore them to school one day. It caused quite a stir. His said “Atheists Unite”. Being a prankster, mine said “I swear to God I’m an atheist”. I have no idea where that tee-shirt is now some 30 years later.

5-10: I was thinking about evolution (yep, a little young for that). I tried to ignore the obvious theological issues.
10-13:I started a blog, about evolution, I went into a catholic high school I had to confront it, and I did, on the internet and my first formal writing about it is here, I investigated it on websites like this first though.
Ummm… I’m still thirteen so that is it. I think that is my only writing on it incept in little comments such as this and links to material on the subject. I also had a discussion in a separate page that has been destroyed in a freak saving accident.

My family never went to church, so I grew up as an atheist in spirit because I was never presented with a religion. I didn’t know that’s what I was, I had an inkling in middle school, but the first time I wrote something about it was freshman year of high school. I had just finished The God Delusion and Atheist Universe back to back (first atheist books ever, I hid them from my mom under my mattress). At the same time, my English teacher had given us an assignment for an opinion piece. I wrote about how atheists are generally misunderstood because people like to demonize what they don’t understand. It was a pretty wishy washy piece, looking back on it. I had just recently plunged into the atheist blog world, so my opinions weren’t as strong as they are now. But it’s sort of fitting, because now I’m a junior and I wrote my Common Application college essay about a small incident in elementary school that contributed to my atheism.

This blog actually helped me write that first essay freshman year because this was the first atheist blog I ever read, and I kind of used it to help me not chicken out of writing my essay. I thought, “If Hemant can write a public blog about it, I can write a stupid essay that only my teacher will read about it.” 🙂

@William- wow! Impressive blog. Thanks for the link.

I’ve enjoyed all of your stories and recounts. I am the product of 12 years of Catholic school, and always felt there was something wrong with me because I didn’t buy into any of the stories.

My first memory of consciously not believing in a god or gods was when I was about 8-9. I would lie in bed, picture myself flying through the vastness of the universe and wondering, ‘When I die, what happens forever and ever and ever and ever…’ With each passing ‘ever’ I imagined myself going farther into space. Even with an active imagination, I couldn’t picture a heaven, or any other kind of stopping point. Ironically, once I really thought that when I die, I’m just dead, I was relieved. (And I wasn’t even a bad kid).

I went to an evangelical Pentecostal church until I was about 11. But when I was 9, I was at a Jesus Camp and everyone was rolling around on the floor speaking in “tongues” (AKA: Gibberish). I just sat there thinking “Are we gonna do this talent show thing or what?” That’s when I knew I wasn’t Xtian. I fancied myself a pagan in high school, but I didn’t believe in a single all-knowing, all-seeing creator. Shortly after high school I was just like “F@#$ it, I’m an atheist.”

I have been born in a bathist family. the difference is my mother and father were very focus on the good things you could take from Christianity. I know as a child I could never really pay attention in church and part of me felt strange for me to believe. during around middle school me and my friend would commonly visit each others house, and I remember we had long winded rants on various topics. religion was my friends favorite, he was already an atheist.

the more we talked about it the more I realized that nothing in religion made any sense to me logically. One day during high school that friend gave me a book, he knew I was on the wall for the longest time. the book was entitled the atheist universe. the book was a proving point for me, and really helped me open my eye’s. at the age of 15 I was sure of I did not believe in any god. eventually my family found out…which was heart breaking because, while i was not punished or hated for it and still accepted, it hurt to know that in some way I was letting my parents down, whom I still love to this day. It hurt even more that my dad (due to depression medicine) forgot that i was atheist…so a second time I felt like I hurt him. none of this will change my standpoint though, as i know i can lead a good life as a person, just like Reilly has discovered.

I read the bible at the end of middle school and my freshman year of high school I had to write a personal essay about any random topic, and I wrote about 12 pages about why I think “god” is silly, why saying he’s silly shouldn’t be such a touchy subject, and why I felt religion was a bad thing. I somehow incorporated public bathrooms, as I recall…
I got a C and the teacher requested I abstain from reading it aloud like everyone else, haha

For me there actually was a moment at which I completely let go of religion. After being a strict, fervent, fundamentalist Christian until I was 16, I had a conversation on the phone (one of many) with one of my friends who was an atheist. I don’t remember the exact words said, but it truely occured to me during our conversation that I had no faith left to hold onto and I broke down into tears on the phone.

That night I basically panicked and was in a completely different world than those around me. I ignored everyone, zoning out and focusing all my attention on the reality of the god-less world. I couldn’t sleep. The next day I felt a weight lifted off my weary shoulders, and I realized my new freedom. My teen-angsty mind decided to burn my very well read bible in the back yard with a whole gallon of gasoline, whose absense my dad certainly noticed later.

I also wrote a long list of things that would remind me of why there was no rational reason to believe in god should I ever “back-slide” and re-convert, but I remember not being able to find it and being so paranoid that my mother had found it and read it and would kill me one day (or herself from sadness) but neither ever happened luckily.

I remember when I was about 10 or 11 years old, I would ask my Grandmother questions about god and our religion (Catholic) and she was unable to give me satisfactory answers. Eventually I was enrolled into this program called Released Time. It really opened my eyes to how ridiculous the whole thing was. I would constantly ask questions about god and all I got was to take it on faith, and read the bible. I’d ask questions about Revelations and they’d tell my that I shouldn’t read that until I was old enough to understand it.

It was just one great big scam. I mean it was great to get out of school early on Fridays and one of my best friends went too. Another bonus was that a girl I liked went to it too, but honestly the whole thing just made me realize how Jesus and god were as real as Santa Claus and The Easter Bunny.

But hey, free pizza, praise the lord!

I’ve never believed in gods so I’ve always been an atheist. It didn’t come up in conversation at home and I’m pretty sure that I would not even have a concept of gods without those busybody believers insisting that I be told. As it is I still struggle to understand what they are talking about when they say “god” as the concept seems pretty devoid of meaning to me.

I grew up atheist, so religion was foreign and completely irrelevant to my life as a child. Atheism was just normal to me, and I wouldn’t have thought to write about the fact that I didn’t believe in any gods. In all the diaries and journals I kept growing up, I think the first mention of religion is in the one I kept during eighth grade. The summer after middle school, I went to Mormon summer camp with a friend. That was my first experience of being immersed in a religious setting for an extended period of time, and I did write about how strange it was. But nowhere in those entries do I mention the fact that I’m an atheist. It’s just sort of a given.

Here’s an excerpt:

Sunday, July 28th, 1991. Well here I am at Camp Liahona. It is a Mormon camp so they do some really strange things like folding their arms when they pray. Camp is fine, I guess, personally I think there is more religion than other things around here. They pray when they raise the flag, breakfast, lunch, dinner, lower the flag, at campfire and at bedtime. Plus they sing songs that I just hum to since I don’t know the words.

Despite that rather lackluster description, I did actually have a fun time at camp. The girls and the counselors were nice, and no one tried to convert me while I was there. I did tell them that I wasn’t Mormon, and it didn’t seem to be a problem. I can’t remember if I told people I was an atheist. Probably not. My friend knew I didn’t believe, but I don’t recall getting into theological discussions with anyone else while I was there, and there wouldn’t have been any other reason for me to mention it. I was more interested in having fun, and I dealt with the religious aspects by being a quiet observer.

My first thoughts that my god belief was wrong was when I was 13. We were studying ancient religions in history class, and the thought, “If none of these gods are real, what makes the Christian god special?” That’s when I stopped caring about God, but didn’t call myself an atheist. I only began calling myself that when I was 17. Now I’m 20, and openly advocate atheism over theism. Or as I like to call it, “reality over fantasy.” Not easy while living the most religious state in the US, but some people are actually willing to listen to what I have to say.