If you were ever a theist...

[Pat Mustard]

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. 

Partly it was a reflection on the world around me and how vastly it differed from the world presented in catholic theology, and partly due to a single event.

The reflection bit was a process, which probably started early in secondary school but which I was aware of only from University, I gradually stopped going to church and started looking at different points of view vis a vis religion and god, to the point that at the age of 21 (about 2002) my religious views were best described as being pantheist (I'd done quite a bit of reading on Spinoza when I should have being reading on FRS's and tax legislation), a position I now described as being only one small degree away from atheism (in that the pantheistic god is indivisible and inseperable from the rest of reality).

But then in 2005 I was watching a documentary on Channel 4 (UK), the name of which I have forgotten unfortunately, about trying to find out who it was that jumped from the top of the twin towers on 11-09-2001 rather than face the slow death inside the building (there was a series of pictures at the time with some fame depicting this event). At one stage the documentary presenter was thinking that the clues best described a Puerto Rican man who worked as a chef on the top floor and whose body hadn't been recovered at that stage. The presenter went to the man's family (who were catholic) and their vehement response to the possibility shocked me hard. The essentially said that there was no way their son/brother/cousin would throw himself off the building as that would be suicide and the he knew he would go to hell if he died that way. I realised then that there exists no being could possibly twist someone's thinking in such a way as to ensure that they would take a slow agonising death over a quicker and less painful one (and throwing yourself off the top of one of the twin towers that day could in no way be considered suicide, you were dead already) for fear of what may happen to a non-existent part of themselves after death, to discount suicide as the ultimate evil (as the Puerto Rican family did), and be considered good or moral. It was at this stage I said out loud to my flat mate 'Fuck this, I want no part in such evil. I cannot even think to believe that a god exists and either allows this to happen or creates it'. I'd finally come to the realisation that all religion was simply snake oil salesmen exploiting the gullibility of others for their personal gain. That is why I'm an atheist.

Now I'm not going to say that a god can't exist, but my realisation that day was that all the gods of the varied human cultures are simply creations of their cultures and have no existence, nor can they ever have an existence.