What Convinced You to Become an Atheist?

Stargate SG-1 turned me into an atheist :-p

This sounds like what PZ is currently doing. Are we going to get into an IPR battle among atheists now? 🙂

I had to read the bible….. twice. The first pass set the stage for doubt, the second buried my faith entirely.

For the record, nothing “convinced me to become an atheist”, once my faith was stripped I became atheistic by definition.

reading the bible convinced me i was atheist

To be fair, PZ is ripping off the idea from an early 1900’s newspaper called “Blue Grass Blade”

I read the bible.

The more the merrier.

I was never actually able to suspend disbelief, though not for lack of trying while younger. I thought I was defective that I never did believe. Turns out it wasn’t a bug, I was right all along.

I converted and over time the feeling of God’s presence dwindled.  I wondered why God was “leaving” me when I wanted him in my life so bad.  That combined with constantly witnessing to friends and family that I loved and seeing no response, and then suddenly realizing that, while I would do anything, even take their place in hell, God wasn’t making any effort to save them, that if a single person went to hell it would be because God hadn’t put forth the effort to save them.  I think I stopped believing long before I realized I had, because I didn’t want to let go of the idea of eternal life and love.  Eventually I realized that I had lost my faith, and when I went back to study the apologetics that I had spent so much time on before, I saw all these questions that I had never considered. 

I’m Italian, i was sent to nuns schools from the age of 5. No wonders I was actually quite a hardliner catholic. but the more i was trying to be a good catholic, the meaner i was becoming as a person. it sounds absurd but it was like this. The bible is a book so contradictory, they say “love thy neighbor” but then also that “homosexuality is abomination”, “god is love and mercy” but “you have to suffer in order to follow him” etc…when i started to thinking with my own head, all of this didn’t make any sense. I want to be a good person, and to be as such I MUST NOT to be a good catholic…and this apply to any other groups of people who think they know THE truth. The only thing I follow now it’s common sense, so far it works much better than religion rules. I delete my name from catholic registers (to be coherent and also for political matters, in Italy you have lots of financial benefit and jobs favoritism just to be a catholic, but I couldn’t watching me in the mirror…so….) and  I warmly suggest everyone to do so to “fight” all this non-sense that produce just lots of barriers and discrimination.

Bible reading and theological studies, reinforced by applying observation and logic. 

From that, there followed the realization of how small the Christian god was (in light of the grandness of the Universe, there is no way their petty despot could have even understood the physics of it, let alone designed it) and how silly the attributions were.  For example, when the survivor of a fire declares, “Thank God we all got out,” my thought is, “Where was your god when the fire started?”
If both teams pray to the same god for a victory, shouldn’t the result always be a tie?
The silliness that God intervenes in our lives, that He sends calamities to punish us, or prosperity to reward us.  The unjustness of letting children starve when there is food for them, and die from easily prevented disease while the nasty people steal relief supplies and live in luxury, whereas a good person who didn’t happen to be born in the right place will burn for eternity.  Eternity is a very very long time, and burning causes incredible agony and as such, is inappropriate punishment even for the worst evil. 
When I heard that New Orleans was flooded as punishment for the Christians allowing people to speak of those who are Takei, then see the child rapists and cruel selfish people live in luxury and without feeling guilt or anxiety because they are Christian and believe God wants them to be prosperous, and they think that poverty is evidence of not being Christian enough, then I see there is something very wrong with these beliefs.

Having determined that this God didn’t measure up, I studied as many other religions as I could, searching for one I could support, but none qualified.

I can’t support an unjust supreme being.  Yes the Universe isn’t fair, but at least it doesn’t do that on purpose.

I was always an atheist… even while attending 12 years of Catholic school (I just never bought into it all), but it wasn’t until I had a child that I went from calling myself “non-religious” to atheist.  I realized there were simple things I could do right now that would make the world a better place for her when she grew up.  Telling people you are an atheist and letting them get comfortable with knowing a real, live atheist is one of them.

I was also never a believer despite my best efforts ask a kid to try to conform. 
 I think doubt started pretty young for me.  I remember being at a swimming pool with a band aid on my arm after getting a shot (I couldn’t have been more than 6) and a woman asked me what had happened.  I explained that I had received a shot and she said “Oh we don’t believe in shots”.  I later asked my dad why they didn’t get shots and he said in an incredibly condescending voice that I will never forget “They think God is going to heal them.”
 It wasn’t until I took an early American lit class in college that I started to identify myself as an atheist.  In particular, rereading “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” gave me a great moment of clarity that sounded suspiciously like my brain fake-sneezing “Bullshit!”  

I didn’t get ‘convinced’: I just suddenly realized, after 30years of worrying about offending people, that it was ok to say out loud what I was thinking in my head, which was something along the lines of “God is a cushion for people who are small and scared, and the Bible (my atheism comes from a Christian education) is the equivalent of 1st-century tabloid press.”

Who wants to live small, scared and ruled by tabloids?!

I appreciate your experience in losing your christian faith TH, but while you may lose your faith in christian dogma, there are many other dogmas that you could have easily jumped to. My point is, that once you lose your faith (whatever that may be) you do not necessarily become an atheist by definition. Just ask Cat Stevens. 

Takes about as much or as little as it did 108 years ago…http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005PJKWUY

It may sound strange to some that a TV show helped you lose your faith but Stargate SG-1 played a huge part in me becoming an atheist.

The show really did make me question everything I was taught and raised to believe and the snowball effect pretty much took over as I learned more and more.

And now I’m a very happy atheist.

I went to Catholic school for 14 years (including kindergarten)

We seem to have a lot in common.

I had the exact same experience.  I grew up in conservative Christianity but I remember disbelieving and trying to talk myself into believing from the time I was about 7.  I don’t know where this disbelief came from as I really wasn’t exposed to any critical thought.  Everyone I knew was religious and I even went to Christian schools.  Throughout my teenage years I really thought that there was something wrong with me.  I tried begging “God” to give me any amount of faith, but I just felt ridiculous for talking to the air in my room.  I finally gave up and figured if god wanted me to believe he’d let me know somehow.  I was finally able to relax and start trying to figure out truth instead of trying to force my brain to do something it was incapable of.  I started calling myself agnostic, but that didn’t last long and I quickly realized I was atheist and had been for quite some time – actually, probably my whole life.  Conservative Christians for the most part don’t believe me when I tell them about this experience.  They can’t accept that someone could genuinely want to believe and that their god would ignore that person.

My catch-phrase as a child was “what’s it do?” As long as I can remember, I enjoy figuring out how things work. I was raised nominally Methodist. Growing up, the occult fascinated me. I investigated magick and even had a Wiccan phase in high school. None of the occult stuff ever gave any results. I guess I approached it more as a scientist than a believer. In high school, a “friend” tricked me into attending bible club at lunch. As a social outcast, I embraced the attention the bible club heaped on me (with the agenda that I’d convert). I spent a year as a bible thumper, mostly for social interaction. One weekend at a prayer rally, they had kids come up front to break their “secular” CDs in front of the audience and only listen to Christian music from then on. I remember thinking how stupid it was and how much I like some and the bands they were destroying. I quit after that event and never went back. I called myself agnostic in college and eventually admitted I was actually an atheist later on.

I was 14 or so when the tsunami in 2004 happened. That was all it took.
The Kansas City Star had an article titled, “What kind of god would allow this?” or something to that effect. The article featured religious apologists but my mind was made up when I started to ponder what sort of god would allow this sort of thing to happen.

“It” meaning religion. Sorry