Hi there! My name is John, I'm a Swedish atheist from a protestant family. Can't really say that I have a particularly interesting background and de-conversion story to share, which all things considered probably is a good thing. I grew up believing blindly in what I was taught about God and the christian world, my father is very religious and my mother used to be a christian as well. Fortunately for me she never liked the hypocritical church sects and mostly kept me away from that which has probably saved me a lot of pain.
Getting older with less and less religious friends and more agnostics and atheists and myself eventually moving out as a teenager to study natural science in high school made it harder for me to stay religious even if I never noticed it at the time. As we all know, cognitive dissonance is hard to notice in yourself.
Only one or two years ago did I realize that I was an atheist, something that had been growing for a long time but it felt like turning on a light. To the amusement and encouragement from my friends I went from a die hard christian to a gladly outspoken atheist and somewhat antitheist.
Coming to this realization I discovered a great interest for atheistic and scientific literature which fortunately, until recently, I had a lot of time to delve into. I started, like so many others, with Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, and also read several other of his more scientific books. Moved on to Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, then Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lawrence Krauss, Yuval Noah Harari etc etc. I could keep rambling about all the great literature and authors I've discovered and I have a huge list of books in my phone that I hope to have time to read some day! I also spend a lot of time watching debates and discussions on Youtube, try to catch The Atheist Experience whenever they're on and spent sometime myself on Cookie, previously 9chat, only to debate religion until they closed that group.
So there's a very brief summary of me I suppose. I've been wanting to speak more about all things religion and atheism for a long time now and now I felt that it was time to join a forum for it again. I'll probably float around here in the beginning and get the feel of the forum and we'll see what happens!
Getting older with less and less religious friends and more agnostics and atheists and myself eventually moving out as a teenager to study natural science in high school made it harder for me to stay religious even if I never noticed it at the time. As we all know, cognitive dissonance is hard to notice in yourself.
Only one or two years ago did I realize that I was an atheist, something that had been growing for a long time but it felt like turning on a light. To the amusement and encouragement from my friends I went from a die hard christian to a gladly outspoken atheist and somewhat antitheist.
Coming to this realization I discovered a great interest for atheistic and scientific literature which fortunately, until recently, I had a lot of time to delve into. I started, like so many others, with Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, and also read several other of his more scientific books. Moved on to Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, then Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lawrence Krauss, Yuval Noah Harari etc etc. I could keep rambling about all the great literature and authors I've discovered and I have a huge list of books in my phone that I hope to have time to read some day! I also spend a lot of time watching debates and discussions on Youtube, try to catch The Atheist Experience whenever they're on and spent sometime myself on Cookie, previously 9chat, only to debate religion until they closed that group.
So there's a very brief summary of me I suppose. I've been wanting to speak more about all things religion and atheism for a long time now and now I felt that it was time to join a forum for it again. I'll probably float around here in the beginning and get the feel of the forum and we'll see what happens!
"History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets." -Yuval Noah Harari
