Well shit. I thought Exian was back.

It was about a two year journey for me. The short answer is, it stopped making sense to me. I spent about a year-and-a-half trying to get it to make sense. Eventually, I realized I didn't believe, and then I had to spend another six months coming to terms with that, and learning to be comfortable with it.

Always have been an Atheist.

My mother was always a bit of closet theist (she and my step father became 'born again' a few years ago), whilst my father was always an Atheist as well. He personally thought, (as I do now with my own daughter), that if a child wants to follow religion, they should be allowed to look at the information themselves and decide if that's what they want.

I was raised in a funny time in England, where at school we had to sing hymns and pray every day, but nobody was ever really consulted about their religion or thoughts on the matter. Despite that I turned out to be fairly logically minded, and have always regarded Christianity in the same light as any religion. As a teen I did a bit of self research and read the bible cover-to-cover, confirming what I already thought to be true: It's all total shit, and that most religious people themselves don't have the faintest idea, past the "main stream" stories, and even then their knowledge on that is a bit shaky.

My mother always has been, and still is, respective of my view on this and "gets it" from my point of view as well. Like wise I respect what she believes, and leave her to it.

Yeah. The god-botherers make light of the Santa argument, but too many years ago it actually WAS what deconverted me.

Raised RCC, but not looney RCC. My mother was a believer but tolerant of pretty much anyone. My father was devout, but the nightly rosary fiasco beat it out of him. Basically he decided it would be a fantastic idea to have a nightly rosary service. (this was back when I was a teen). I and my three siblings came up with any excuse to be urgently elsewhere at all costs. Occasionally, one or other of us would be trapped and did the whole "nurr, nurr, nurr" muttering and mumbling. Then it went pear shaped altogether. A competition arose amongst us to actively trap each other into having to do the rosary thing. It got so extreme that eventually Dad called a halt and abandoned all pretense that his kids were anything other that godless heathens.

Around the time that I was still in single digits yearswise, I found out that Santa was not real as all kids do. And the logical penny dropped.

Isn't god the very same?

Beardy bloke in the sky? Check.
Can be everywhere at once? Check.
Creepily watches your every move and thought? Check.
Rewards you if you are "good" and punishes you if you are "bad"? Check.
Has a wonky moral compass? Check.

And so forth.

40 years later, here I am a happy atheist of 40 years standing.
In godnut world I should be horribly depressed, but I am certainly not. Tomorrow, I will be going for my first full day of training as a counsellor on the phone to people in need. (Don't call me you wingnuts LOL).

The jebus crew claim that I have no reason to do that. Fukkem. I don't need their approval, nor jebus' approval, nor that of their imaginary deity. I am doing it for free because I care about real people and their real problems.

It wasn't really an event or a specific argument or anything. I just started becoming interested in the topic of religion, watched debates, read books, listened to lectures...and just came to the realization that I had no good reason for believing, and I was literally incapable of believing it anymore.

Goddidit.

My memory officially sucks. I was under the impression that I became an atheist but a few years ago, as before that I was honestly too young to think about it. But I found some old writing, online posts, messages, etc etc that are from 2009 and I've called myself an atheist in those thingies. I was fucking seven. Why did I even have an opinion about religion and atheism, I wonder. So I honestly have no idea why I became an atheist. 

(PS My mom is Hindu and my dad is an 'agnostic hindu' and I live in a religious country so... it's not because I grew up surrounded by atheists, or anything like that. )

(February 8, 2012 at 8:40 am)Handprint Wrote: For me, atheism sits better with me than Christianity ever did. I was constantly trying to fit Christianity into a mold of logic which did not work, and i realized that and gave up.

Your turn.

Various individuals convinced me of atheism:

1)  Professor Richard Dawkins in his The God Delusion, especially, Dawnkin's description of Professor Bertrand Russell's orbiting teapot analogy.

2)  Professor Bart Ehrman -- various talks and articles.

3)  Realization that most elite scientists and philosophers are atheistic.

4)  The virtual absence of Christian fundamentalism with the Academy.

Christians.

I'm eight years old. One of my friends says "How do you know god is real?" I handled him a Thor comic book.