When did you first question the existence of God? Were you raised in a family that believed?
When I was about 8.
I don't recall ever thinking god was real.
I'd say I was in my late teens but I can't be sure. My mother was a Methodist and my father kept his beliefs to himself. I was raised for a short while as a Christian but I don't know that I believed back then. My father got tired of my mother making his sons go to church every Sunday and asked us one day whether we'd rather go there or watch cartoons. The cartoons won. I was pretty young, not even sure I was in school yet.
I do remember a time when I had this whole salvation act figured out. I decided I wouldn't worry about it until it was time for me to die. Then I'd ask for forgiveness. Again, I was pretty young.
I left a post somewhere about my deconversion. I'll try to summarize so as not to repeat myself. Besides, some days it's hard for me to recall events.
Basically, I went to a Christian private school because my grades were slipping. I was being bullied but never mentioned it. I guess I was sixteen or seventeen when my depression got the best of me and I discovered the love from an invisible inaudible, intangible being who loved me no matter what. A few years later I was out preaching on the street corners and came across a former Methodist minister. He asked me if I've ever read the bible from cover to cover. That's what it took for me to doubt.
I was raised surrounded by believers, and highly conservatives ones at that, in my family and out. As a kid I just assumed the Xtian god must be true (even tho all the other gods weren't) because everyone said so and did my best to go along with it, figuring that like so many others things I would understand it when I got older. And I did in a way, just not the way I was supposed to.
I became disenchanted with Xtianity in my late teens and officially left the Mormon church then, and spent the next 15 yrs exploring other religions including, at the end, those of the non-Xtian gods everyone I knew had said weren't really real. I figured one of them might fit, but no, and finally even my willingness to suspend disbelief on other peoples say-so collapsed and I accepted that a universe without the supernatural made much more sense than one with it.
Like No one it was fairly early for me. It helped that I was an inmate of a Catholic school. I'd estimate I was nine or ten years old when I began to entertain doubts; by my eleventh winter I no longer believed in gods.
i was an atheist most all my life. raised in the baptist belt but went overseas as a child and grew up[ knowing lots more about hinduism and buddhism that i ever did about christianity. joined the quakers for about ten years and abndoned the theism only quite recently.
didn't fit with the empiricism i used everywhere else.
i still dont consider myself an atheist, partly because im impatient with the restrictive need for definitions and partly because i ascribe to the old useage of agnosticism, that the answer is ultimately unknowable.
im comfortable with that ambiguity, and would quite happily accept certainty either way should it appear. until then i muddle through
I have a side question, for those who went from theism to atheism -- when you were still a theist, did you read books about atheism or listen to talks by public atheists, and is that what caused your switch?
I ask because I see conservative theists often blaming atheist books and lectures, etc, for turning people against god and religion; however, I never read about atheism or listened to atheists talk about it until after I'd realized I was an atheist myself.
Before that, I had no interest in the topic and I've heard other atheists say the same. In fact, most theists>atheists I know got started down this path by reading the bible -- that was certainly how I got started.
Quote from: Sandra Craft on July 03, 2020, 11:14:55 PM
I have a side question, for those who went from theism to atheism -- when you were still a theist, did you read books about atheism or listen to talks by public atheists, and is that what caused your switch?
I ask because I see conservative theists often blaming atheist books and lectures, etc, for turning people against god and religion; however, I never read about atheism or listened to atheists talk about it until after I'd realized I was an atheist myself.
Before that, I had no interest in the topic and I've heard other atheists say the same. In fact, most theists>atheists I know got started down this path by reading the bible -- that was certainly how I got started.
For me I had never heard of atheist books or lectures. I just knew that at that moment there were two atheists, myself and the former minister whom I never saw again. When I got to applying logic, a computer programmer's friend, the bible unraveled like a worn out sweater. So if anyone is to blame for getting my head on straight it's the theists for pointing me in the right direction!
Oh, as a side note: There was a deacon at our church who gave me his COBOL books. He told me that logic was making him doubt. How the logic of computer programming would do that I don't know. I do know that there are some things that at the moment are real in the quantum world but are illogical because we don't have a good enough grasp. So I prefer the term "rational" which to me means I may not have all the answers but what I do have points me in this direction.
I didn't read any literature or listen to anyone, there wasn't a single element of a wish granting magic sky fairy that made any sense at all.