I was brought up Methodist and began to question Christianity when I read the Bible cover to cover at the age of 12 for a Sunday School project. So much of it was unsuitable reading for a 12 year old I began to wonder a) why we should follow this book, and b) just how many adults had actually read it that they thought it was an appropriate thing for a kid to read!
A couple of years after that we got a good Religious Studies teacher at school, so Religious Studies stopped being Bible study and started being a study of comparative religions and moral issues. Learning about all the different religions people believed in made me doubt that Christianity was anything special. Our teacher also admitted that he was an atheist, which made me realise it's OK not to believe in god.
I went on to study Philosophy at university, which gave me the critical thinking skills to analyse different belief systems. I toyed with just about everything, going from Christianity through deism, pantheism, paganism and Buddhism. About five years ago someone on a forum asked me to consider whether god was necessary to explain anything that I knew to be true about the Universe. It was that question that made me realise I didn't need god.
From there, the thought processes I have gone through in order to justify my atheism to others, have led me to consider the concept of god to be incoherent.
A couple of years after that we got a good Religious Studies teacher at school, so Religious Studies stopped being Bible study and started being a study of comparative religions and moral issues. Learning about all the different religions people believed in made me doubt that Christianity was anything special. Our teacher also admitted that he was an atheist, which made me realise it's OK not to believe in god.
I went on to study Philosophy at university, which gave me the critical thinking skills to analyse different belief systems. I toyed with just about everything, going from Christianity through deism, pantheism, paganism and Buddhism. About five years ago someone on a forum asked me to consider whether god was necessary to explain anything that I knew to be true about the Universe. It was that question that made me realise I didn't need god.
From there, the thought processes I have gone through in order to justify my atheism to others, have led me to consider the concept of god to be incoherent.
"Books don't offer real escape but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw" - David Mitchell
