(Via Andrew)
In the beginning there was the Book, and the Book was by God, and the Book was about God. In the end, it would be the Book that would lead me from God, and then from any god. But lets not get ahead of ourselves…
I had the boring stereotypical white-bread, middle-class upbringing, complete with church and/or Sunday school most weeks (and let’s not forget Christmas Eve). This included being only one of two kids in my fifth-grade class to memorize each of the monthly bits of indoctrination (all the books of the Old Testament in order, anyone?), but hey, there were prizes on the line! I was even an acolyte for several years, lighting candles and carrying the cross ahead of the choir as they entered and exited the worship area.
It was never really an act of faith, though. I made the motions; I sang the songs; I spoke the words; hell, given a minute to think back, I could probably still spit out most of the Lutheran liturgy that I had memorized by repetition. But I never really had any sense that it was at all meaningful. That’s not to say I doubted the existence of God, though, because, like a good little Christian, I never questioned it…or anything.
This continued through the start of my high school years, when my mother decided to go back to school – in her case, a seminary. Like any good kid, I did my duty in this situation and began to look up Bible passages that might cast doubt on her decision to become a minister. (“Look mom, it says right here that women shouldn’t speak in church!”) It was here, seeing the utter stupidity of so much that was ensconced in that book, that the seeds of doubt were planted.
Those seeds, however, wouldn’t begin to sprout until several years later. I was working in an internship in Iowa one summer, and bored as someone could be. Thinking about the doubts that had started to grow some years earlier, I decided to do the unthinkable – I bought a Bible and began to read. And I read…and read…and read. And the only conclusion that I could come up with was that there was no way that what was in the book could be true at the same time that mainstream Christianity was; the two were just too far contradictory.
Now that the doubts had sprouted, it would only take the triple threat combination of water, fertilizer, and time for it to bloom. In this case, the water came in the form of a battery of European, Western, and World History classes and the fertilizer in the form of Comparative Religions classes. The history classes, in showing the rise, spread, and abuse of Christianity throughout Europe and the West, opened my eyes fully to the farce that it is. Nietzsche was right, it is the religion of the slave, and the masters of Europe used it to strengthen their hold over their chattel. The comparative religions classes cemented my feelings that all other faiths were equally absurd.
So, that’s how it came to pass. No sudden break, no big moment, just the ordered progression from doubt, to dissatisfaction with organized religion, to rejection of the faith of my parents and my society, and finally to a rejection of faith in its entirety. Just, that is, the ordered, logical progression of one who thinks and reasons – and, after all, that is the domain of the atheist, is it not?
(Via Chris Mitchell)
If you just want to know the train of thought behind my own mental blossoming, I suggest you skip the first segment.
I was born a human and raised a Christian. My family attended services at a contemporary Presbyterian church. I attended kindergarten at a Lutheran school and grades 1-7 at a Catholic school.
I’m not sure what to call it, but the environment I was raised in was not that of fundamentalist Christians, thank goodness. I was naturally inquisitive growing up. This especially applies to me spiritually. I could never stop questioning my being. Of course, I was so close to the religious beliefs I had been brought up with, they were always a part of my self-image. I could not view myself without a god.
My mother, unfortunately, kept me hooked on many of the weakest faith based ideas. My father, more open minded, and an atheist himself, was and still is an incredibly weak man. Weak to temptation and quick to anger. My time spent growing up was a… very confusing part of my life.
Finally, at the age of 17, my parents finally broke up. There were a few other tragedies, which I will not make particular mention of, that really struck me. A great number of other heart-wrenching events decided to take their place literally within the same week of the divorce. Mentally, I broke down. The household and family I had grown up with fell apart entirely and I had lost all of my good friends, which was basically all of my friends. This was a major changing point in my life. Not weird, I suppose, but after these events I found myself lacking the will to do absolutely anything. So I spent most of my time thinking, listening to music, playing video games, and thinking some more.
This is how it occurred to me. I always found it strange that so many other religions exist other than “my own”. I simply thought thought that if there were so many Christians, we must be right. But then it began to dawn on me just how different beliefs were from person to person. What was the point of a religion that refuses beliefs from all other religions when there are not only many variations of said religion itself but variations of beliefs from person to person? Could you really be a Christian if you were not a fundamentalist? And if I said yes, was I not simply in a state of denial, torn between my own morals and beliefs and the “faith” which I felt I belonged to?
Eventually, I came out of this denial. I called myself agnostic for a small period of time but soon realized the bullshit involved with such a concept. One of the core elements of “faith” is indoctrination and so I figured it’d just be better to call myself an atheist. Not to mention realizing that believing in something does not make you a christian in any way, shape, or form. Also, what I believed in did not include a deity. I finally realized that spirituality was a core element of my own, personal being and it was not necessary to butcher the term with religious beliefs.
Now, I do not call myself an atheist. I do not need to. I am a free man.
(Via Ted Goas)
I hope my testimonial is short and to the point. I was raised by two educated, traditional parents in the New York metro area of the U.S. I was introduced to, schooled in, and eventually confirmed Lutheran. At no point was I ever enthusiastic about my religion or going to church. But like many others I took religious teachings at face value, went through the motions and believed what I read in the Bible.
But then I went to graduate school, which turned out to be my turning point. There I learned to question things, filter out bad information, ask for proof, and basically ask “Says who?”
During this time I watched a documentary and heard this quote from Michael Shermer: “Smart people come to revisit things they learned for not-smart reasons,” or something to that effect. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
It made me realize that children can’t control how we’re raised. But we can re-evaluate what we were conditioned to think. After doing so, my story is probably similar to many other testimonials on this site. I converted to militant agnostic / atheist. My fiancé and I constantly research the subject of skepticism (in which the topic of religion naturally falls) and publish our findings on skepticalmonkey.com.
(Via Dust)
Okay, this, under most circumstances for me, would be a very hard thing to clarify. However, I am on the edge of drunk, on Bacardi 151, so I’m more at liberty to slew out my opinions of the moment, on my journey from general religion to general atheism (for the most part) or where I stand now. I’ll start out with my childhood. My dad was a Jesus freak, for the most part, or as far as I can remember. I remember him having us watch the sermons on TV when we woke up late at his apartment when I was visiting him. He was also, and I assume the overlapped, deep into drugs. Which was apparent in his death by heroine overdose. But I remember once, long ago, when I was probably five or six, my father and my older brother discussing revelations in the bible, and the end of the world as we know it, and how horrified I was, in my own quiet world (I’ve always been shy) sitting on the couch listening them talk about “doomsday”. I also associate this with, at this time, my first contemplation of oblivion, or imagining what it would be like to not exist at all, or to have never been born ,and the weird empty pulling that is associated with such a consideration. Then, another event involving my father, when we were at a pool in a hotel with a Chinese restaurant, probably 4 years later. There was a big golden Buddha outside the restaurant. I rubbed the Buddha’s stomach, I believe, and right after, my father told me an old superstition, that if you rub the Buddha’s stomach it’s bad luck, but if you rub his head, it’s good luck. (it could have been the other way around, I haven’t heard of this superstition since, and I don’t remember exactly what I rubbed) but either way I rubbed his head or stomach and thought that was bad luck. I thought of this while swimming, and until bedtime. I remember at bedtime I would pray, and this was my only connection with a god that I for the most part, disconnected with our Lutheran faith and the boringness of church. I would pray to pure light and not even a humanly figure (which later became the basis for my “religion” while I had one, but after Christianity.) Yet, this particular night, I prayed to this essence of pure forgiveness, goodness, etc. A pure philosophical ideal: that I could be not be punished for rubbing the Buddha in the wrong way. I was praying to a christian god, to forgive me for enacting a superstition upon a Buddhist “god”. I find this ironic and hilarious in retrospect. Anyway. While drifting through the Lutheran church. Which, to me, is the democrat to republican, in Lutheran to catholic, and I later chose a third and more informed option on both right-left choices. (maybe logic) Yet, the entire time I felt something was off. The church did give me insight. Often in my later years, into things about philosophy and poetic concepts, yet never did I fully take them seriously, as they did themselves. I got confirmed, told them my idea of god (without selling out my beliefs) and was still confirmed into the church. (which is a process of carrying candles for the pastor and taking bible classes) I did all this at the will of my mother. Yet, when they asked me what seemed to be the final question about god, I told them as I actually did believe at that time, that god was a standard of good, and Jesus was a representation of that. The only place I stretched my beliefs with this question was in telling them that I thought Jesus was a representation of that whole good, when in fact, I was already considering the fact that he was just a smart prophet of the time, if he existed at all, and that there were many others since him more enlightened that A Christ or a Buddha. Since confirmation, I never went to church. it was a funny thing. I basically stopped right after that. I only go when my grandma comes to visit. Yet, since then, I have once been what is called a Deist. Which is a general philosophical notion that there is a higher power, expressed through nature, and that it’s not a personal god, or necessarily represented in any specific person. Yet, it is evident to me that some people are “smarter” or just generally more with their own act than others, and that these people are becoming more and more, and that awareness is spreading, not in a religious way, but in the way that possibly Jesus, as a character was, and that people will awake to freedom, and discard establishment and government. This is just a hope of mine. After Deism, I became intensely intrigued by Buddhism, Zen Buddhism in general, (not the folklore over the man Gautama Siddhartha the Buddha, but general Zen Buddhism, for peace of the mind) Anyway, this realization came almost side by side with psychedelic drugs and my journey into trying to discover the beyond, or what we can glimpse of that beyond us, while alive. This gave me a more democratic god view, which I haven’t totally discarded today. I considered the works of Huxley and Allen Watts, as what if everything is truly god, and that we all suffer the same way. Which still much intrigues me today, as do all religions, if thought about in combination or studied, but as they apply to politics and real life, they become dangerous, so I guess at this point, when I realized the combination of stupid religions and dangerous politics, have realized that we cannot afford group religions, because it becomes, like race, a way to separate people, and that all we can assume is that everything is god and that we must leave the balance to the nature of things, that which can never be understood or explained, so I remain agnostic, but with a strong inkling that the afterlife does not exist, which makes me feel more atheist, yet I’ve heard that even some Buddhist religions are considered atheistic, and I still sway toward eastern religion, it seems more fascinating, maybe because it is further from me. I even consider Christianity in a general sense, I do not like to take down the bible itself, however outdated, like other atheists. because, it all is metaphor, for what really is and can never be spoken, and from what really is and is here in front of us. It is all archetypes and myths of the great One man, the self, in search of whatever he must find in his pointless life, for the game of it. I think, if life is meaningless, you can have more fun with it. Society’s problem is making it serious, you do not NEED to achieve anything in life, but simply to live in peace. I leave you intoxicated, hoping to forget this section of my overall accumulated belief, but that it is genuine, and that I do believe it all amounts to nothing, but that is the beauty. A poet, a philosopher, an artist, yet not doing this for a god other than which I know is a metaphor for the ironic struggle, that is I.