It was a long process for me. I started having my doubts in high school, but ultimately it was when I read the bible that I became an atheist. I had never read it before, and only listened to what they said in church. It really opened my eyes to see that the book everyone was following so strongly read like it was written by people who were trying to figure out how the world worked, and not by a divine creator. I started realizing that my religion was no different than the greek or roman myths. The morality was just too centered on the 'then', and not on the 'now'. A god's morality would be 'timeless'

(December 30, 2015 at 10:17 am)Deidre32 Wrote: If you were ever a theist/believer, what led you to no longer believe? Not looking to preach, that’s not my thing and it’s against rules anyway, but just curious. I remember my own journey over the past few years with it all, and just thought it’d be interesting to hear your ‘stories’ if you were once believers before identifying as an atheist. 

How do you know which of the dozens of religions is true?, why do the holy books of the various religions have so many many contradictions and logical fallacies?, why is there a need for a god?

(December 30, 2015 at 12:26 pm)Red_Wind Wrote:

(December 30, 2015 at 10:17 am)Deidre32 Wrote: If you were ever a theist/believer, what led you to no longer believe? Not looking to preach, that’s not my thing and it’s against rules anyway, but just curious. I remember my own journey over the past few years with it all, and just thought it’d be interesting to hear your ‘stories’ if you were once believers before identifying as an atheist. 

How do you know which of the dozens of religions is true?, why do the holy books of the various religions have so many many contradictions and logical fallacies?, why is there a need for a god?

Of course few if any theists come to god belief abstractly.  It is almost always the gods ones parents have which one inherits.  Without knowing why there is a need for gods we should begin by acknowledging there has almost aways been god belief among peoples from all over the world, and there is evidence that it has been around a very long time.  Why is there a need?  Don't know.  I have no need for them but this belief arises just the same.  I guess it will fall out of fashion when it does, if it does.

I was raised in a very Catholic family (entire family involved in the church and my father taught Sunday school) and I was as devout as a preteen could be. I firmly believed in God and the churches teachings and found comfort in them during loss of loved ones and during other challenging times.

I first started doubting around 11 or so. In religion class we were studying the book of Job. It prompted a series of questions about the nature of God as this contradicted my previous lessons about god. I asked my teacher, our priest, and my father. They did their best but eventually my line of questions led to "God works in mysterious ways". The hard barrier left me feeling that maybe the church was wrong. I still believed in a higher power but didn't buy the church's explanation
blindly anymore.

In 8th grade we had a mythology class and it got me thinking these stories we call mythology are just as believable as the "truth" the church taught and was based on the same amount of evidence. So I started to wonder if in another 1000 years they would be teaching the Christian mythology to students. I began looking into the history of Christianity by sources outside of the church and found how the church would adopt or abandon key principals or rituals to expand its membership. That was when I became convinced religion is just a tool used to manipulate people created by people. They may have had benign or malignant intentions or it may start as one and evolve into the other, but at its core is about control.

Around the same time I was discovering a passion for history and the sciences. Through those I began to find theories in human development, source of life, and the nature of the universe. All of which based off of evidence that can be observed and repeated. Yes there are gaps and as I learn new information my hypothesis will change but those gaps are not hard stops. Just an opportunity to further explore. Everything makes more sense to me now and I'm filled with more awe for the world around me and a greater sense of contentment.

I came to my belief through intuition. As long as my belief remained an intuitive truth, I didn't have to question it. I was a believing Hindu, but not a very knowledgeable one, as I had not been raised in the tradition. So I knew what I believed, but I didn't know all the stories and texts. I decided I wanted to change that, but I faced a practical problem. Which stories to take as meaningful to my faith, and which to disregard? I came to realize that the only way to enrich my faith was by picking and choosing based on a rational sense of what was and was not useful. But I had been avoiding reason as I 'knew' it couldn't trump my intuition. But I was faced with a turning point in which I could only depend on reason to illuminate my belief. So I chose reason. Once having made that choice, I re-evaluated what my intuition had been telling me, and, over time, realised that rational explanations made as much sense of my experience as intuition. So I abandoned my intuitive grasp of reality as interpreted by Hinduism, and over time, embraced the rationalist account of reality instead. I'm still somewhat uncomfortable distrusting my intuition, but I had to make a choice, and the only options available to me were reason and reason.

Reading the Bible cover-to-cover twice got me started. Figuring out that one's beliefs ought to be justifiable helped. Growing skepticism (I believed all kinds of crazy stuff, God was the last of those I gave up, not the first, I just couldn't keep giving the God idea a free pass), I realized how much you want something to be true has no relationship to whether it actually is true, I started valuing truth over comfort, I learned there are naturalistic explanations for the origin of the universe, and I learned about logical fallacies and burden of proof. My religion professor wouldn't cover atheism for a reason that I realized was fallacious, so I did my own research. So about 15 years after my 2nd reading of the Bible, I realized one day that I'd become an atheist, though I can't tell you exactly when I stopped believing. I just know that one day I checked the contents of my brain and realized the sort of tenuous, 'I want to be open-minded and know I can't prove God isn't real' space for the God idea I had been maintaining had disappeared entirely so I no longer had even the faintest concern that God might be real left.

https://youtu.be/KiU5ht5W_lk

Correct me if I am wrong Jor, but years ago on these forums (perhaps under your previous username?) weren't you still a theist?

If so I think I was away when you became an atheist. I think I come back to see you as an atheist but I could be wrong.

If I'm correct then I must say I've been wondering how you lost your faith and I find it fascinating to see your story of how you gradually went for reason more and more.

Theist or atheist though, you've always been cool as fuck.

I decided that if Christianity was true, it ought to stand up to critical scrutiny.  It didn't.

(December 30, 2015 at 10:17 am)Deidre32 Wrote: If you were ever a theist/believer, what led you to no longer believe? Not looking to preach, that’s not my thing and it’s against rules anyway, but just curious. I remember my own journey over the past few years with it all, and just thought it’d be interesting to hear your ‘stories’ if you were once believers before identifying as an atheist. 

Well I was raised Catholic and come from a mixed religious family (Jewish Grandparents, My father has eastern spiritual beliefs, my other grandparents were agnostics and Universal Unitarians, my mother jokingly called it 'Church for Atheists') but only ever really believed in God or the supernatural when I was younger. Getting older all the stories and everything about Catholicism and all the other religions I was exposed to made less and less sense. I also got to witness the similarities and the similarities in arguments made by different religions. By the time I was maybe 14 or 15 I was really justifying my belief in God to myself, making weak arguments against my own skepticism in my head. By the time I was 18 or 19 I could no longer convince myself to believe in God. It wasn't really a painful transformation, like some people report on the pain of deconversion or something like that. I didn't really experience anything like that. It was more of a slow drip of losing beliefs.

However the more supernatural beliefs that dripped out, they more I got to replace it with knowledge of the real world. In college I got a degree in history with a focus on middle eastern history and studied Islam extensively from a secular perspective. I also am casually interested in a lot of science and anthropology and early man and how he lived. Dealing with the world as it is makes it so much more interesting in my opinion. I take a lot more joy in the world and there is so much real stuff to discover, endless knowledge and information that I don't see the need for the supernatural. The natural world is amazing as it is.