What made you become an atheist?

[brewer]

A Lutheran youth pastor.

Oh, stop it, not that way.

[Bob Kelso]

Grew up in a Southern Baptist -and later- Catholic household. The religious teachings I grew up with failed to make sense in my later teen years as I thought about things in a critical fashion, and the more I looked into what science, humanism and reason had to offer the less I liked what I had been taught.

One thing led to another and bingo bango I’m an atheist.

---

Maybe god really is a dick, and they're doing it right? I don't know why people reject that out of hand.

It’s a scary as fuck thought, that’s why. Lol

[Rahn127]

As soon as I became a human being, I became an atheist.

So ya, pretty early on.

[no one]

Logic.

[Dancefortwo]

I never became an atheist.  I was born an atheist.

[epronovost]

When I became an atheist is fairly unintersting question in my case. I never lived in a religious household neither in a pious community or culture. Though, I became active as a skeptic and an atheist on the web following my early teaching experience. During a class in which I taught the theory of evolution one of my students entered a state of surprising rage with a few others following his lead. I never expected that, in my part of the world, there were still a significant portion of creationists with enough pull to actually cause such a strong and violent reaction. That's when I started to explore the strange a wacky world of creationism and other contemporary religious canard. My views on religion, science, skepticism and social justice stiffened a little bit and I started to enjoy debates and conversations in place like this (also, my knowledge of basic natural science improved as did my capacity to vulgarise and teach some elements of it).

[Dr H]

What made me become an atheist?


I was born.

[Dom]

Read the bible when I was 10. Thought the fairy tales were lousy.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

In a way, we're like most people, we are the religion we were raised in. Just that for some of us, that religion was "none". This just further points up the rule that "you take the religion you were raised with".

But do people who change religions four times go to at least three hells?

[unfogged]

Respect for the distinction between reality and wishful thinking