I'd like to hear YOUR story...

[xxMaryJane]

I'd like to do something. I know that probably a lot of people have done that on this forum but since I'm relatively new here, I'd like to share my story about how I learned that I was an atheist.

I really realized that I was an atheist about two years ago. During a class, we were talking about religion, life after death and things like that.. My teacher asked me what was my point of view on those subjects and I just answered : ''Religion just doesn't make sense to me. I don't agree with what the bible says. I can't even imagine we go to heaven or hell after we die, because well I believe we just die, and after that, nothing happens. In general, all those things are just too abstract to me and I absolutely don't believe they are even real.''
I said it like that.

And my teacher just said : ''Well guys, I think we have here a real strong ATHEIST !''
I was like, whaatt ? I didn't even know that word existed. I had no idea what was an atheist.
I didn't know what it meant to be called that word, but well I had a little insight on what it meant with all the questions and ''feedback'' I got from the real strong theists in the class the moment they heard ''REAL STRONG ATHEIST''.
So I did a little research and found out the exact meaning of that new word I had learned. I could really relate to its definition and that's how I knew that was me. At that moment, I have started calling myself a proud strong atheist.
This is it.

Part of the reason I decided to join this forum is that not only do I wanted to share my story but I also wanted to know about how other atheists are dealing with their belief.
Now, all atheists out there, I really want to read YOUR stories. I want to know when and how you realized your were an atheist. I also would like to know how you felt when you learned it and if you had ( and maybe still have ) trouble dealing with people judging you harshly.

[iNow]

I have always been an analytical person.  I love solving puzzles and finding solutions to problems.  I always thought the stories were too childish.  I realized that there are different stories, and they couldn't all be right.  One group of people says that X is the absolute truth, and another group says that Y is the absolute truth.  Since X <> Y, I realized that one or both of them are wrong.  I went with both.

I am open to evidence, but without it, I tend to reject ideas.  I had been leaning toward atheism all during high school, but I suppose it was in college when I studied psychology and sociology that I realized the MOST logical explanation was that this idea of god was just in people's heads.  It wasn't really an "aha!" moment for me, but more of a gradual decrease in my willingness to accept [strike:1mvlueoz]Thor[/strike:1mvlueoz] [strike:1mvlueoz]Zeus[/strike:1mvlueoz] [strike:1mvlueoz]Leprechauns[/strike:1mvlueoz] [strike:1mvlueoz]Unicorns[/strike:1mvlueoz] Jahweh as real.  I tended toward the more realistic explanation that this is simply mythology in the modern day, and that we humans through evolution have been primed toward belief.


Your story reminded me of this video below.  I wonder if that's how you felt in class that day:

[youtube:1mvlueoz]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0A4_bwCaX0[/youtube:1mvlueoz]

[xxMaryJane]

Hahaha I liked the video . And, well yeah It relates in a funny way to the way I felt that day.

[Will]

My freshman year in high school I was enrolled in AP Biology. My teacher, Ms. Rose, was just out of college and was really passionate about what she was teaching. I'd always loved science, but when it came to the few weeks we were going to spend on evolution, I found myself on the wrong side of the debate. You see, my father is a Lutheran pastor and I was raised relatively fundamentalist. Naturally, Ms. Rose and I had a difference of opinion when it came to the process of evolution. I took the rather foolish position that god (specifically the Christian God) created the world basically as it is now and that evolution was contrary to the Biblical historical record. She disagreed. We debated for several entire class periods, and the argument culminated in me bringing my Bible, like a faithful little Christian soldier, to cite as evidence. I think she may have finally lost her patience with that bold act of stupidity and she tore me apart, ensuring that no part of any of my arguments was left. I went to school a Christian and went home an atheist that day.

I really should buy her flowers or something.

[LoneMateria]

I too had a fairly quick conversion.  My father's a Presbyterian who hasn't been or taken me to church .... ever.  I haven't seen my mom since I was 9 (she moved and didn't want anything to do with my dad or me) my step-mom is a Catholic who went to church about once a month until recent years.  She only took me to Church once or twice, the majority of my church experience was in a small town in Michigan when I visited my grandparents who took me every Sunday, but it was to a very small church in the very small town they lived.  Anyway that was all the church experience I had until I was ... 14 ... 15 something like that.  The last time I went to church my buddy's father took me (I live in the bible belt) so I went to a southern baptist church where people ran up to the stage fell and started crying, convulsing, and talking in tongues.

But I considered myself a Christian until I was about 16.  I stayed the night at my one buddy's house who was an atheist.  I didn't know what an atheist was at the time.  At one point he asked me some questions about my belief and about God which I couldn't answer.  I thought about it a lot the next day (did some good old fashion yahoo searching) and finally realized that I had no good reason to believe in a god and from then on I called myself an atheist.  Well with the exception of when I was in public, I felt that atheist was not a good word to say so I used agnostic, but I grew out of that after a little while.

[Tanker]

I was raised by my Mom. She never told me about any religion in either a positive or negative light. She would always answer any question I had at any age openly and honestly and as far as I could tell without bias. She never "warned" me if I stayed at a friends and went to church with them but she would answer my questions afterward. To put it another way she did so little to promote any religion I had assumed she was a weak theist as I had remembered her being vaguely buhdist when I was 5 (she later said it wasn't for her). It  wasen't until a couple years ago I found out she was an atheist thats how little she spoke of religion I had no Idea what she believed. Without anyone to tell me or my brother what was right or wrong to believe we were left to decide for ourselves. Indenpendently in this religious vacume we both found Atheism the most reasonable position.

When People say they aren't brain washing children into thier religion I look back at my own childhood without any religious bias and see where most people would end up with out indocrination.

I suppose her own religious view are unsurprising her father was a physicist ( he has a pretty good understanding that the universe works without magic) and I belive her mom is a unitarian (pretty far left and vaguely Christian I guess).

[Arctonyx]

I just come from a rather odd family. My family is Mormon and Atheist/agnostic in a pretty much 50/50 split on my mum's side. My parents were very good about giving me a secular upbringing, although my Grandparents (on my Mum's side) disapproved of my 'Godless' ways. So until I was about 10 I just really didn't think about religion all that much, but around 10 I was having a pretty rough time with being sick (had some kind of spinal injury, which made walking extremely painful for quite some time), so being a kid decided it would be a good idea to go Mormon so God would make me better. My grandparents were really rather proud of me doing that, and although I didn't attend their church too often I still did the praying thing very often and got my parents to buy me the book of Mormon, and when the problems eventually faded I just carried on, attributing the 'cure' to God (and in hindsight, not to the fantastic Doctors who worked very hard to figure out the problem). This continued until I was about 13/14, whilst on the internet I stumbled across some websites relating to Mormonism, and what they believed. Being such a young kid and in a lot of pain when I'd converted, I'd never really actually questioned anything about Mormonism, and really just thought of it as a God you prayed to every night, to make good things happen (I realise now that I was making completely random connections between things to justify my praying). So I read through these claims, and just thought: "Wait... what?" had a small period of time where I thought these websites must be lying about the beliefs of Mormonism, then pretty much decided that the claims of all religions were so far fetched that there was no point believing for anything put a psychological placebo.

[skurry]

I was raised Catholic. I was actually an alter-boy and in the choir. That was mostly just because I had to be in church anyway and it made it go by faster if I was an alter-boy. I never felt anything from religion and hated going to church if I wasn't up there I sat and counted the music notes in the books.

Even in second grade evolution made sense to me, and you can believe in a god and evolution. I am amazed now when I think back to a discussion I had in second grade with my classmates. I said we evolved from monkeys and one kid responded, "I didn't come from no monkeys, you might have come from a monkey, but my grandparents were people." This is still the same argument adult creationists use.

I guess I just went along with the traditions, prayed, went to church, gave the right answers about what god thinks while in religion class, and so on. Once I could think for myself, probably 11 or 12, I started to doubt that god existed. First I started thinking about god in the puppet master sense and decided that if there was a god he couldn't be conscious. He would be like a never stopping rolling rock, just keeps going and going without being aware of itself. Then I was thinking that a god could be many things and he could just be a big ball of energy with some karma added in. At that point I was essentially calling the big bang a god.

And that's where we get the term "What a croc."!

[Ultima22689]

I come from your standard black/???? wut? family. My dad was raised as catholic and my mom came from a house hold of those born again christians. My grandparents are hardcore bible thumpers but my parents while they believed in God gave us a fairly secular home, we rarely went to church. It was a happy 5 years of the beginning of my life. So when I turned 6 my mom sent us to California to spend the summer with my grand parents. So when they realized we had a secular upbringing they were shocked, so they bought us both bibles. They told us that by signing them we would be saved by Jesus Christ. My bro immediately signed his without question. Me being only 6 looked at the book and as my grandparents talked about what Christianity was, you know, the whole heaven and hell, jesus saves, original sin, the whole nine yards. Despite the fact that I had a conversation with Sonic the hedgehog only a few hours earlier my BS radar went off and I was skeptical of the book. I even read the first 100 or so pages the next day. Now bear in mind i'm only 6 and can hardly distinguish reality from fantasy at the time, maybe I always did know what was real and what wasn't, I just didn't consciously think about I think, i'm not sure but something told me that the book was not something I should even remotely believe. So to my grandparent's dismay I rejected Christianity. From then on i've been indulging in  my passion for technology and science. Haven't regretted a bit of it.