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RE: how old were you
January 24, 2015 at 10:22 pm
Like a lot of you, I've never known a time when I wasn't a nonbeliever. My parents brought me up to know my own mind and expand my learning, particularly in my interest in astronomy; which means I look out and see the grandeur of the Universe... never the heavens. Growing up in the 70s helped considerably, I'm sure - the likes of real Doctor Who and The Goodies offered a rich and fertile playground for my imagination to examine no end of concepts.
It's only in the last decade or so, after I got my grubby little paws on the internet, that I've 'come out' officially as atheist.
No, I've never been taken in by any god bollocks, even when the world had meaning. I'm fucked if I'm going to start now.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: how old were you
January 24, 2015 at 10:36 pm
I had the authoritarian parents. I went to church up to 3x a week up until I was 16. I never remember believing. I do remember, however, having a sense for what adults wanted to hear, so I was good at faking it. I kept that shit up until I was in college. I remember (with shame now) sending my mom an email filled with stuff from the Da Vinci Code explaining that I am an atheist. I wish I could recover that email. I sent it from my Naval Academy email address. Oh, were it possible to recover that fucking email!
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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RE: how old were you
January 24, 2015 at 10:58 pm
I was 16 and it wasn't as good as they say it is...
Oh you mean, when I became an Atheist? I was 17 and it was much better than they said it was.
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RE: how old were you
January 25, 2015 at 10:46 am
Somewhere around 14 or so I started having really serious problems with it and stopped with the Christian thing. I tried again around 19 or 20 for a short time, but finally admitted I was an atheist when I was 20 or 21.
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RE: how old were you
January 25, 2015 at 1:55 pm
(January 24, 2015 at 5:45 am)jackson Wrote: What age were you when God stopped making any sense?
Probably my mid/late 20s, though it took another 12-15 years before I finally gave up and admitted it just couldn't be salvaged.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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RE: how old were you
January 25, 2015 at 2:01 pm
8. Though I stopped believing, or trying to believe, at 13
Playing Cluedo with my mum while I was at Uni:
"You did WHAT? With WHO? WHERE???"
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RE: how old were you
January 25, 2015 at 3:11 pm
(This post was last modified: January 25, 2015 at 3:12 pm by IATIA.)
I do not remember ever believing in a god. I remember being baptized at 5, but with no concept of god or why that guy was pouring water on me. At 7, when I was confirmed, I was reciting the god stories, but again with no concept. By the time I was able to envision god, I had already dismissed Santa and friends and even understood magicians do not do magic, so why god? I never accepted this vision or possibility. It was obvious, later in life, that whatever would allow a god to exist could just as easily allow a universe to exist, ergo, no need for god then, no need for god now.
You make people miserable and there's nothing they can do about it, just like god.
-- Homer Simpson
God has no place within these walls, just as facts have no place within organized religion.
-- Superintendent Chalmers
Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends. There are some things we don't want to know. Important things.
-- Ned Flanders
Once something's been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral.
-- The Rev Lovejoy
