Always been atheists? I got rid of it more or less when I quit believing in the drunk bastard dressed in red and had a beard.

Nah, I was raised Catholic. I slowly came to the conclusion between 16 and 18 years old.

Nah, I was a christian for about twenty years, before my parents got the internet in the house, and I started talking to people outside my bubble. Yes, people would ridicule me for still believing in Santa and the tooth fairy in my tweens, but religion is quite a bit more ingrained than that. It's a little funny that my sister kept the faith enough to send her kids to a private christian school, even though we had the same upbringing.

I mean, I've definitely never been religious. I was born into a Hindu family, and in Hinduism there is a concept of astik and nastik, where nastik is the lack of belief in god and astik is belief in god. I was always nastik, i.e I never believed in god, so I used to consider myself a nastik Hindu until about 4 or 5 years ago, and around the age of 11 I finally realized that I didn't really want to be in any religion, even one as tolerant as Hinduism. So I became atheist. So.... in response to the original question, I guess no, but I've never been a believer.

I was never particularly religious but I used to call myself a Christian until I read The God Delusion at age 19.

(July 21, 2018 at 1:28 pm)Icy Wrote: Always been atheists? I got rid of it more or less when I quit believing in the drunk bastard dressed in red and had a beard.

Not for one second have I been anything else. My mum was Christian and made a stab at making me believe by making me go to sunday school for a week to see if I liked it. I remember they asked not to have me back because I just kept on asking questions. You're not supposed to ask questions.

Or possibly I was just a shit, who cares I never went back.

(July 21, 2018 at 1:28 pm)Icy Wrote: Always been atheists? I got rid of it more or less when I quit believing in the drunk bastard dressed in red and had a beard.

Raised in a non-religious household, so I was never indoctrinated.

As a child, I was a nominal Christian, participating in Sunday School and church service along with mother. As a teen I was something of an accidental atheist. I didn't believe, but not for any strong reason. At seventeen I converted to Taoism, and remained more or less involved with Taoism until perhaps the last decade. In my twenties, I went through 6-7 years in which I was apostatic, contemplating what I felt was a difficulty in Taoism. Starting in college, I became interested in the Hindu worship of the Goddess Kali. The more I reflected on it, the more I came to believe that Kali was a vital, living force in my life, and in my forties took to describing myself as Hindu, as well as Taoist. In the last couple of years, I came to the realization that if I wanted to take my Hindu beliefs seriously, I needed to learn more than I then knew about it. So I was faced with the task of examining the literature, but without any guide as to how to go about that. Some reflection led me to the conclusion that reason was the only logical choice for a guide. Given that, I didn't see any need to retain my Hindu belief and it's basis on intuition, and so self-consciously embraced atheism.

I've always been an atheist. My parents never mentioned religion or atheism to me, at any age. I didn't even learn that there was a word for "not believing in God" until a lot later.

OP: Nope, not always. Went thru the programming up to around age 13 (Evangelical Lutheran). Then critical thinking kicked in and bullshit answers just didn't cut it anymore. Left completely between age 13 and 14.