Did you ever believe?

[Nia]

I tried to believe. I got VERY involved in my church for years in an attempt to understand. I never did, though.

[HeyItsZeus]

I believed strongly when I was a small impressionable child. Now I have learned I can think for myself. So I thought for myself. Here I am, an agnostic atheist.

[fr0d0]

I find nothing selfish about the human need to say a final goodbye.

Semantics... but anything exclusively concerning self is self-ish. No one else's need is met but your own. No one else suffers but you.

[Diamhasla]

No, never. My parents always insisted that There Is No God and that I should never let anyone tell me otherwise. It was a bit narrow minded and aggressive in hindsight, but still infinitely better than the alternative. I went to live with my aunt when I was 12, who is very spiritual, for want of a better word, but also very relaxed about belief systems and she encouraged me to figure things out for myself. I stuck to atheism, but it was nice to have the choice.

[Ace Otana]

I never did believe. Nothing could convince me. My parents couldn't convince me of Santa, till they managed to pull off a pretty convincing illusion. Convincing me of a being that cannot be detected in any rational way was going to be impossible from the start. The more I learnt about religion, the more I rejected and ignored it.
Religion makes absolutely no sense at all to me, and so I ignore it and will only debate or talk about it online. Religion is that big of a joke to me, that I don't even recognise it's existence. It's nothing but a bunch of lies believed by fools worldwide.
The biggest joke on earth.
Something to be ignored, laughed at and never ever taken even remotely seriously.

[Diamond]

I was a believer without a doubt until age 13. At that point, I only believed because I didn't wanna go to hell (believing "just in case") but I was so sure that there was a chance that my beliefs could be wrong. In other words, I kept thinking that some of the other religions I learned about might be right.
Then last year, with my school doing a production of Godspell, I was hearing talk about god and xianity. I got incredibly annoyed and thought "Why are people treating this god thing like it's so important? What if there is no god?" After Godspell was over, the religious talk died down but I was still questioning things. After a few weeks, I just stopped believing altogether.

[Chido-Wan Kenobi]

That's really hard to answer. I was raised Catholic, but I think my mother was actually a closet Atheist, so we never attended mass or prayed at home. Perhaps we were Catholic because it was the accepted social norm. Now I also realize that you can't possibly know if a 6 year old kid truly "believes", because at that age, you have been trained (like a puppy) to just give the "correct" answers.

I attended Catholic school and was a very good student - to the point that the priests tried to recruit me (imagine that!) But three things happened by the time I reached the 10th grade:
1. I began to notice some of the obvious fascist inclinations of my teachers.
2. Another stupid closet pedophile teacher made a clumsy pass at some of my friends and me.
3. My hormones kicked in, at just the time when miniskirts were becoming very popular

The end result of all this mayhem was that I talked to my family into sending me to public school, were I was promptly "seduced by the Devil"... and I've never looked back.

[Skipper]

I never did believe. Nothing could convince me. My parents couldn't convince me of Santa, till they managed to pull off a pretty convincing illusion. Convincing me of a being that cannot be detected in any rational way was going to be impossible from the start. The more I learnt about religion, the more I rejected and ignored it.
Religion makes absolutely no sense at all to me, and so I ignore it and will only debate or talk about it online. Religion is that big of a joke to me, that I don't even recognise it's existence. It's nothing but a bunch of lies believed by fools worldwide.
The biggest joke on earth.
Something to be ignored, laughed at and never ever taken even remotely seriously.

haha, that bit needs to be explained

[Theoretical]

I used to go to church when i was younger, however i do not now and it will remain that way.

[Ace Otana]

My parents couldn't convince me of Santa, till they managed to pull off a pretty convincing illusion.

haha, that bit needs to be explained

Three things:
1. They'd hide all the pressies, and when I got down stairs the whole living room was full!
2. Dad dressed up and with some good acting, I was really starting to fall for it.
3. (Which is what really convinced me) There was a full-fucking sized Santa, slay and all his reindeers on someone else's roof, they positioned me so that there'd be no way that I could tell if it was fake or not. I really had to see it to believe it. I saw it, so I believed it.

So yeah, they managed to pull it off.
Of course, theists are going to have a much tougher job of convincing me, I'm a little older and wiser now. Making it virtually impossible to convince me of such an irrational, illogical thing as a god.