I've wanted to join an atheist forum for a while, and I think this may be the right one for me. Seems somehow more easy going than the others I looked at! 
Anyway, about me:
I'm 25, I live in Australia and I was born in Germany.
I'm a little bit ashamed of it now, but I wasn't always an atheist. I used to be a christian up until a few years ago, but never really hardcore.
I couldn't tell you now how or when I made the shift. It was fairly gradual, passing through a kind of bizarre agnosticism of my own design before finally landing on complete atheism. This shift went for probably about a year starting about 5 or 6 years ago.
The seeds for my atheism, however, were laid far back in my childhood. Our church had a very fundementalist pastor (it's a Lutheran church, by the way) and I was expected to take the bible as the literal truth. When I actually sat down and tried to read it cover to cover one time I couldn't get past Genesis. I was probably only 13 or 14 at the time, but even at such a young age it just sounded too ridiculous to believe. So I just shut the bible and ignored the unpleasant feeling.
Eventually when I finished high school I think I realised it was time to invent myself as my own person - an adult capable of making my own choices. I returned to the idea of God and began dissecting it and what I believed about my religion. Things I had thought of on and off throughout my life returned to me, particularly why, out of all the thousands and thousands or religions out there, I could be sure that the one I was brought up with was the right one. The only answer I had was that I couldn't be sure. And as such I stopped dogmatically believing what I had been told to believe and instead try to work out for myself what I thought to be true.
The more I thought about it the more abstract my concept of God became. He became for me no longer good or evil, loving, hating, jealous, or any of the other anthropomorphic things we tend to thrust onto him. The idea of omniscience was troublesome for me too. If God knows absolutely everything, then effectively an exact replica of the universe exists in his mind. So with two exact copies of the universe, why would we need this one? Or maybe this universe is the one in God's mind and there is no "real" universe. And so on and ao on.
And as I stripped away the layers of God I eventually realised there was nothing left - nothing necessary anyway. I came to the conclusion that I no longer needed to believe in a God to explain the universe - he was a useless appendage that doesn't give an answer, he just raises more questions.
That's when I became an atheist.
Anyway, about me:
I'm 25, I live in Australia and I was born in Germany.
I'm a little bit ashamed of it now, but I wasn't always an atheist. I used to be a christian up until a few years ago, but never really hardcore.
I couldn't tell you now how or when I made the shift. It was fairly gradual, passing through a kind of bizarre agnosticism of my own design before finally landing on complete atheism. This shift went for probably about a year starting about 5 or 6 years ago.
The seeds for my atheism, however, were laid far back in my childhood. Our church had a very fundementalist pastor (it's a Lutheran church, by the way) and I was expected to take the bible as the literal truth. When I actually sat down and tried to read it cover to cover one time I couldn't get past Genesis. I was probably only 13 or 14 at the time, but even at such a young age it just sounded too ridiculous to believe. So I just shut the bible and ignored the unpleasant feeling.
Eventually when I finished high school I think I realised it was time to invent myself as my own person - an adult capable of making my own choices. I returned to the idea of God and began dissecting it and what I believed about my religion. Things I had thought of on and off throughout my life returned to me, particularly why, out of all the thousands and thousands or religions out there, I could be sure that the one I was brought up with was the right one. The only answer I had was that I couldn't be sure. And as such I stopped dogmatically believing what I had been told to believe and instead try to work out for myself what I thought to be true.
The more I thought about it the more abstract my concept of God became. He became for me no longer good or evil, loving, hating, jealous, or any of the other anthropomorphic things we tend to thrust onto him. The idea of omniscience was troublesome for me too. If God knows absolutely everything, then effectively an exact replica of the universe exists in his mind. So with two exact copies of the universe, why would we need this one? Or maybe this universe is the one in God's mind and there is no "real" universe. And so on and ao on.
And as I stripped away the layers of God I eventually realised there was nothing left - nothing necessary anyway. I came to the conclusion that I no longer needed to believe in a God to explain the universe - he was a useless appendage that doesn't give an answer, he just raises more questions.
That's when I became an atheist.
