(Via Marshall Davis)
My first day in a Southern Baptist church was 2 weeks after I was born. I was always a bit shaken when I saw how emotional people got at certain times, but I was always bit more calm than anyone else. I stopped going to any services when I left home – I always had something more important to do. I went to my old church for my best friend’s wedding, and all my great uncle (a deacon) said to me was that I needed to cut my long hair. I never went back. When my sister started studying Wicca, I tried to find a religion that was internally self-consistent – the closest I came was Buddhism, which I found as more of a philosophy than a religion. I got bored of staring at walls (meditating) so I forgot the whole thing. I wanted to find a Wiccan get-together, as I have heard they have some wild parties, then I found the Jacksonville Atheist Meetup and went and found I was an atheist and among friends. 
(Via Angela Rey)
my ascent to a humanist perspective has been a very slow and painful journey. raised independent fundamentalist baptist (IFB), i very deeply believed in heaven, hell, jesus, literal creation, virgin birth… if it was in the christian scripture, i soaked it in. i was baptized at 7, led my first convert to christ at 10, and attended bible college at 18.
after bible college, it made sense to me to learn about scriptures from the jewish perspective; so i enrolled in the judaic studies program at UCF.
to avoid deceit, i must confess that a big part of the draw was to learn how to better convert jews. don’t listen to what other evangelicals may tell you, we totally get extra points for the chosen people.
instead of finding a community of people lost and empty in their own self-deceit, everyone seemed totally normal. what’s more, a lot of them were atheists, and no one seemed to have a problem with that.
i had been brought up to believe that “humanists” and “atheists” were under literal demonic influence and part of a vast evil plot by satan to destroy humanity.
imagine my surprise when the exorcisms failed.
so i’ll spare you the details of my lengthy discussions with professors, rabbis, pastors, physicists, and my cosmically important friendship with a reformed jew turned atheist.
intellectually, the evidence was clear. A fundamentalist view of the world stops working the minute you look beyond the few resources approved by your tiny sect.
emotionally, this was all very hard to accept. in order to give myself the freedom to objectively assess the situation, i had to take the chance that this was all some elaborate scheme of satan’s to deceive me.
in the end, it seemed to me that a religion worth believing in should stand up to a little objective scrutiny.
from beginning to end, it took me 5 years to drag myself out of fundamentalism completely… and another 2 years to tell anyone about it.
i was 27 when my mother found out. she cried, fumed, prayed, and kept my atheism as her shameful secret. i led a double life to save face for her.
the election in November changed everything. for the first time in a long time, i cared about something. i liked that feeling and decided it shouldn’t stop.
i refuse to feel like an outcast because i’m no longer religious, and i refuse to be quiet about gay rights, stem cell research, evolution, abortion, or anything else i’m passionate about because it may offend someone else’s beliefs.
it seems to me that there’s some unspoken rule i had agreed to. that because i don’t have a g-d or imaginary elf associated with my beliefs, they’re somehow less important. that’s simply not true.
i do not need a g-d to validate me. i do not need a hell to scare me into being a good person. i handle that all on my own. i’m out, and i’m proud.
(Via Ryk)
I wasn’t actually raised an atheist. Both of my parents technically professed a religion. Dad was Methodist, Mom was southern Baptist. However they never went to church or talked about God or the Bible. Religion was strictly a label and not a very frequently worn one.
I figured out early on that my friends believed in God. At first I didn’t really see it. I went to Sunday school with them sometimes and it was fun but it never occurred to me that anybody actually believed it. When I figured that out I though it was weird and silly. I soon learned to keep that opinion to myself.
I was about fourteen when I finally “came out” I was in a rebellious stage anyway, and I just stopped keeping quiet about it. At first I got a little flack about it. This was particularly funny coming from friends with pentacles on their jackets and Slayer tapes in their stereos. However it didn’t take long before people just accepted it.
No one really seemed to care. It has only been in the last few years that my atheism has been an issue with anyone. Lately people have started to ask questions, sometimes positively other times less so. Recently I have become a “Militant Anti-Theist” I blog about atheism, argue with Christians, belong to atheist groups. For the first time in my life I am seeing it as a part of my identity as well as just a lack of belief. I can’t say if it is good or bad, but I know I am not ashamed of being Godless I embrace it.
(Via Jerry Buchanan)
Atheism is very much a part of who I am. I join with other atheists in many venues. I used to follow what the Baptist church told me to follow—no questions asked. In my late teens, my closest friend taught me how to question. He and I didn’t agree on many things philosophically, but we did question each other and others.
I believe it’s important to help others in many ways. I currently volunteer in about a dozen projects, either daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. There is no god who will help the ones asking for help. We must be the ones. If a homeless child needs help with education because he misses a lot of school, it’s my responsibility to make sure he gets that help. If a senior needs to get out from in front of the TV, I’m responsible for taking her out for a walk. If a stretch of a street needs a regular litter pick-up, I am the one to do it. God won’t do those things.
While I don’t throw my atheism in anyone’s face, when the subject comes up, I’m very proud to announce my belief.
One thing I do throw in people’s face is skepticism. I am quick to point out the dangers in following “psychics,” astrologers, and other such charlatans. Some say there’s no harm in getting a tarot card reading or some such. Au contraire. These people prey on the emotions and the pocketbook of the vulnerable. They must be stopped!
There is little that I can do. But I can do something. It is important that I do what I can. If you do what you can, together, we’ll make a difference.
(Via yunshui)
My parents were, and still are, fervent Baptists, and so I was raised in the Church from birth. I was something of a sceptic as a child (my mother still recounts how, aged 3, I announced that I no longer believed in Father Christmas because, “there are too many children for him to visit in one night”. Admittedly, this doubt was quickly quashed by the realisation that no Santa meant no presents…) but I was nonetheless so heavily indoctrinated that I happily accepted as truth the stories, with their accompanying pretty pictures, in my Children’s Illustrated Bible. After all, Mummy and Daddy said it was true, and so did the pastor at our church, and so did my teachers, and my friends, so what was to question?
My friends and I were regularly dispatched to various Scripture Union holiday camps – the basic premise should be familiar to anyone who has watched “Jesus Camp” – and it was at one of these that I became “born again”. Aged about 10, I sat down one evening with one of the youth leaders and announced that I was giving my life to Christ. I have to confess, I don’t remember much about the conversation – there were a number of pamphlets to be read, and a prayer I had to recite, although I don’t recall the specifics – but I do remember the youth leader asking me how I felt at the end of the process. My reply was, “I feel sort of… lighter.”
But I didn’t. In fact, I felt nothing, save for a vague sense of silliness. Suddenly it seemed a bit ridiculous to be sitting in that room, surrounded by Christian literature, looking into the beaming face of the youth leader as I asked a long-dead Palestinian to make me a better person. Nonetheless, I pushed this mild feeling of discomfort aside, and, beatific smile firmly in place, went to rejoin my friends, all of whom had been through a similar process in the preceding years. Their support, I rationalised, would help me through this moment of doubt. It did. I was baptized the following year, and spent the next half-decade or so raising my hands in church services, speaking in tongues and generally getting over-emotional in the cause of religion. I proselytised to my long-suffering atheist/agnostic schoolfriends, on one occasion giving a memorably incoherent rendition of Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument to my evolution-subscribing friend on the bus home. It should have suggested something to me that I, a member of the debating society and widely-regarded as one of the smartest kids in a highly selective school, should have had my argument so thoroughly demolished by a boy who had got into said school on a hockey scholarship. But I was a believer…
The vague sense of silliness had stuck with me though. I always felt a bit self-conscious praying aloud, or speaking in tongues (it didn’t feel particularly divine, and I never seemed to be able to speak in French or German, or even Latin, which would at least have had some practical applications – just “bagahabfalamalabollifilliblahashmaz etc”. If that’s the language of Heaven, it’s no wonder God has a hard time making himself understood…). Things came to a head when a visiting pastor to our church (can’t recall his name – he was from Singapore, I think) held a real humdinger of a fire-and-brimstone service. Lots of people were “slain in the spirit” (ie. got over-emotional and fainted), but the high point was when one member of the congregation, whose name I shall keep anonymous to preserve his dignity, went up to the front of the church and announced that, owing to the demonically-inspired TV programmes he had watched as a child, he was possessed by the spirit of He-Man.
That’s right, He-Man. Not Beelzebub, or Azazael, or Mephisto. He-Man, the Most Powerful Man In The Universe. Unfazed entirely by the fact that He-Man is A FICTIONAL CHARACTER*, the visiting pastor proceeded to “cast out” this evil spirit; a process of much shouting and wailing, culminating in the possessed man raising a hand and shouting, “By the power of Grayskull!”
Weirdest. Thing. Ever.
After that, I found it impossible to take church seriously anymore. I started to be the lone voice of dissent in the Youth Group – having actually read the Bible in its entirety, I was in a much better position than any of the other members (or the leaders!) to qualify my arguments. I took particular issue with St Paul, who, to my teenage mind, had perverted the original teachings of Jesus and created a Church entirely out of step with its original premises, and had great fun debating with the rest of the group. In retrospect, I think they had rather less fun than me. Finally, I stopped going to church altogether, and by the time I went to University you would have been hard pressed to recognise a modicum of Christianity in my personality.
The departure of Christianity from my life had left a large, God-shaped hole in my psyche, however, and I was ready and willing to fill it. For a while, hard-left political ideology served as temporary Polyfilla of the soul, but eventually I had to admit that the other Socialist Workers scared the crap out of me. Through my newfound practice of t’ai chi ch’uan, though, I discovered Taoism. Now here was a religion I could get behind! No actual god as such, just a vague, undefined and nebulous “force of nature”. No dogma save “follow the Tao”. No priests and catechisms, no evangelising, no afterlife to aspire to or live in fear of. I have of course, since learned that Taoism has all of these things, but even now, I retain a soft spot for the most basic “Tao of Pooh” form that I originally encountered.
The problem with the sort of New-Age spirituality that I gleaned from Taoism, though, is that it comes with a lot of baggage. As a t’ai chi practitioner (and later instructor) I was encouraged to believe in the “chi” energy that Taoists say infuses the universe. This led on to Reiki (I’m a fully qualified Reiki Master, y’know – meaning that I paid a few hundred quid to hold my hands above some equally deluded hopeful for half an afternoon), crystal healing, kinesiology, dowsing, naturopathy, and a whole slew of others. (To be fair, my personal jury is still out on a couple of these: acupuncture, for instance, seems to work even if only as a placebo, and t’ai chi is still one of the best martial arts and forms of physical exercise that I’ve encountered). The irony was that I nonetheless looked down my nose at practitioners of those esoteric arts to which I hadn’t subscribed. Homeopathy came in for serious criticism (it’s WATER, FFS!), as did iridology, astrology and palmistry, and don’t even get me started on yogic flying… but I failed to realise the hypocrisy of my position for quite a while. When enlightenment came, it came slowly – but my trusty inner cynic won through in the end. I think the final straw was quite recent; an online debate with a very old and dear friend (whose personal journey had paralleled mine, but resulted in quite a different outlook – he’s a very devoted churchgoer) on the reason for our diametrically opposed views prompted me to re-read The God Delusion et al. I sat down, took a look at my thinking, and changed my religion on my Facebook profile to “Atheist” – you don’t get a more sincere declaration of nonbelief than that!
*re-reading this, I see now how that wouldn’t have been a problem.
(Via Nigel)
I was raised Christian. My parents started out as good Baptists, ‘heard’ from God to move from England to Australia, became Pentecostals, ‘heard’ again to move from Australia to Canada and left the organized church. I pretty much bought into all of it.
I wound up on an ‘End time farm’, involved in the ‘Move of god’. The end times were here and god was going to make us his chosen people.
So what happened to make me an Atheist?
As a young married couple my wife and I found ourselves rebelling against the authority of the eldership at the communal farm. We left but still attended meetings of the Move cult. As we lost interest in this we started attending more mainline churches. We more or less lost interest in those too.
I suppose I was a backslidden christian for the next 20 years or so. I didn’t hate god but quit praying. I more or less just didn’t care.
And then … Our younger son came out to us. He is gay. He told us how he went to church as a kid and prayed to god that he could be normal and not be attracted to other boys. (God didn’t help much there.) Anyway, one of the things he told us was: Either god created him as he is, god screwed up and he turned out gay or ‘I am what I am’ and there is no god. My original understanding was the first option but it started me thinking. He is what he is and there is no god.
Wow! It has been a journey since then and has taken a few years to really start to get my feelings together. I am using reasoning and reading as much as I can. I don’t believe. Prove me wrong and I will listen. Just don’t quote the bible.