When, Where, How and Why did you become Atheist?

[robvalue]

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).