(October 6, 2015 at 12:40 am)bambi_swag Wrote: The closest I've been to being an atheist was just a big bout of agnosticism that lasted for around a year when I was younger. So I don't know how you guys see things. How did the whole atheist revelation come to you?

When? At birth

Where? Hospital

How? No action required

Why? Because I was born with a fully functioning skeptic's brain. They would snatch my nose and say they "took it". I'm like, no you didn't. That isn't possible as it is attached with a variety of membranes, blood vessels and cartilage. Yet they persisted in pretending to snatch my nose, and later introduced me to Santy Claus. Another in a long line of lies...

(October 6, 2015 at 10:34 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Though reading the Bible twice cover-to-cover cured me of being a Christian, it was exposure to apologetics and logic that tipped me over to atheist about 15 years later. Understanding burden of proof was a big part of that, along with the realization that there is no such thing as good apologetics. I don't know exactly when it happened, one day I realized I had stopped believing in God entirely.

Glad to see you're okay, bud.

(October 6, 2015 at 10:55 am)abaris Wrote:

(October 6, 2015 at 10:37 am)bambi_swag Wrote: Seems like you had a experience with Catholics. Are Catholics the main Christian denomination in Australia? I have zero experience with Catholics.

And we don't have kangaroos either, since it's Austria and not Australia. Just a little bit removed. Only smack on the other side of the world.

Yes, Catholicism is the mainstream.

Edumacation is a marvelous thing!

I was born without belief in any gods. If I was not indoctrinated, I would most likely have remained that way.

In my early teens, I began to explore logic and critical thinking (thank you Carl Sagan, Issac Isamov!). I applied them to all sorts of unsupported claims: alien abductions, ESP, ghosts, etc, etc, and discerned that there was no demonstrable evidence to support belief in any of them.

But most importantly, I applied them to all the other god claims of all the other religions other than my own. I thought to myself, "I already do not believe in these other god beliefs because my parents, relatives, religious teachers told me they were not true, I should see if there actually good reasons not to believe in them".

At some point, it hit me that I was not applying critical thinking, and valid and sound logic to my own god beliefs. In the name of intellectuall honesty, I had no choice but to examine my beliefs with the same level of scrutiny I applied to all the other unsupported god claims. It did not take long for my god beliefs to vanish.

For a very short time I was a deist, then a pantheist. Then it became obvious, that the thing I was labeling 'god' was the universe. The first thing that entered my mind at that point was. "oh, I am an atheist".

Born into a non-religious family so I never got programmed.

I was brought up milquetoast protestant. I decided it was all bull (and told everyone) when I was between 12 and 14. By the time I did the confirmation thing I already was a staunch atheist (I told my parents beforehand that I didn't want to, and they talked me back into it saying that it's traditional and a "cultural thing"). In hindsight, I never really believed the stuff. I think I half-heartedly prayed a few times by myself, but lost interest very soon.

Well I was raised as a Methodist and had always been fascinated with science and history. My dad had never been very religious but he still identified as a Christian, but my mother was quite religious and we went to church every Sunday. I don't really want go into details about my life but to put a long story short there were some events that happened that caused my parents to divorce and my mom to go into rehab. My grandparents were supposed to pick out which rehab she went to and since they were Evangelical Christians they picked out a Christian rehab. By the time she had got back she was completely brainwashed, but turns out no actual rehabilitation and just praying alcholism doesn't work and she soon went back to rehab. Then I met my dad again who was dating my stepmother he had completely lost his marbles he now believed the Illuminati exists and that the government is putting out chem trails. At this point I started thinking objectively "do I really believe any of this stuff they tell me". So I started reading the Bible I found verses in their that just blew my mind, my pastor was hiding all these verses from me that I didn't even know was there. So I guess you could say that unlocked my critical thinking and reasoning skills. I just started researching and looked at arguments from both sides, and just came to the conclusion there's no God.

(October 6, 2015 at 2:10 pm)JesusHChrist Wrote:

(October 6, 2015 at 12:40 am)bambi_swag Wrote: The closest I've been to being an atheist was just a big bout of agnosticism that lasted for around a year when I was younger. So I don't know how you guys see things. How did the whole atheist revelation come to you?

When? At birth

Where? Hospital

How? No action required

Why? Because I was born with a fully functioning skeptic's brain. They would snatch my nose and say they "took it". I'm like, no you didn't. That isn't possible as it is attached with a variety of membranes, blood vessels and cartilage. Yet they persisted in pretending to snatch my nose, and later introduced me to Santy Claus. Another in a long line of lies...

Not necessarily. Shoes and mugs are Atheist too you know but that doesn't mean they are skeptical. Skepticism usually comes in the teenage phase.

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(October 6, 2015 at 3:31 pm)Gawdzilla Wrote: Born into a non-religious family so I never got programmed.

Speaking of which, what are the reasons why someone who is programmed want someone want to program someone? Everyone has some form of being programmed in something. I guess the human race, (especially us religious kind) are a virus of ideas.

Political Tip:
In my opinion, If atheists truly want to succeed in changing the world away from religion, you guys should start media and educational campaigns to deprogram people through manipulate tactics that religious people use. (E.g. Make a "Critical Thinking Bible" and a kind of a "Church of Rationality" though itself sounds religious but eventually would be successful) Then You would essentially be an anti-virus against us theists.

But please don't add communism to the list of programming though. I'd hate that lolol.

The most successful people to change the world to conform to an ideology are the ones who grab a hold on media and education in order to brainwash the masses. Brainwashing in itself is not evil, under the condition that you just have to brainwash the right stuff (e.g. Atheism since you guys believe Atheism to be right)

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(October 6, 2015 at 11:28 am)abaris Wrote:

(October 6, 2015 at 11:02 am)bambi_swag Wrote: Do the Nationalist Anti-immigrationist Church folk ever bother you?

What church are we talking about exactly?

I just mean the Church in general. Atheism has a tendency to the left, while religion and nationalism has the tendency to the right on the political spectrum.

I have never cared to turn the world against theism, I simply wish the theists would stop trying so aggressively to turn me towards it.

I can tell you the exact date. March 27th, 1977. It was one of the biggest turning points in my life.

(Someone beat me to it with this )

I was born. Instantaneously, I was a "default atheist". (Perhaps you could argue this happened at an earlier date, inside the womb.)

I was raised in a household where religion was neither preached nor hidden. "God" was not discussed, either for or against. It just wasn't an issue.

The next big event would have been sometime in 1982. At the age of five, I was exposed to a school where Christianity was preached every day. It wasn't a religious school as such, but it had extremely heavy overtones. That may have been the norm back then, I'm not sure. It wouldn't fly today. They presented "fuzzy Jesus" and "prayer answering, good old God."

After taking in all the information about Christianity I was presented with over this first school year, I become a "cognitive atheist". My parents gave me no warning about getting "sucked in", no opinion on the truth of any of it, and we didn't even discuss it at all as far as I can remember. I just came to my own conclusions.

Not much has changed since then. I got into counter-apologetics and the study of the bible a few years ago, at which point I discovered the evidence was even weaker than I thought. I also found out religion was doing even more damage than I thought. This was part of the reason I joined this forum, to try and speak out against this damage, to promote rational thought and to support atheists all over the world who have it much harder than I do. I don't wish to abolish religion, I don't expect to deconvert theists, I just want people to think. I am anti-harm, whatever form it takes. It just so happens that religion is one of the biggest things going, with possibly the biggest potential to cause such harm.

Through critical examination of not just the evidence but the actual claims, I recently changed from agnostic to ignostic (God is not well-defined).