Happy Atheist Forum

Were you? Is it common for atheists to be raised in a religious household, and at what age do they typically become one? Do they tell their parents? What is that experience like?

I grew up in a home that was only nominally religious.
I got sent to Sunday school.
As a ten year old I asked questions like what's with god killing all these people.
How come all these other religions are wrong.
I got kicked out of Sunday school, you can't have rebels leading the sheep astray.
In retrospect, I think my parents biggest disappointment was loosing their Sunday mornings free of kids.

I am going to answer yes, although my father was an agnostic, he was a lax one overly sympathetic to religion. So I was raised a Christian by my mother.

I was raised with religion but wouldn't say in a religious household since my parents (as I know now) did not share in the idea that religion is a good thing.  

Almost everyone questions their worldview at some point in their life even if that doesn't include exploriong atheism as an option.

Some tell their parents...some don't.

My transition from religion to no religion was gradual and fairly non-eventful aside from the personal conflict it created at times.

I wasn't.  My mom is apathetic/agnostic and my dad was an atheist.

I am English and have lived here all my life apart from some business travel and holidays. The first thing I would say is that the UK is very different from some parts of the USA and theistic expectations here are more like the northern states but even they are more theistically inclined than the UK where mainstream religion is pretty much a spent force. There are millions of people who identify themselves as Christian but only a tiny proportion actually attend church other than at births, deaths and marriages. There is even some doubt about the visit of the pope being properly funded. Apparently most of the money has come from a few very rich Catholics with very little combing from the rank and file. In the UK being a church going Christian is to a large extent considered a little odd.

I was born in Dec '59 which makes me 50 ATM so I was brought up in the 60'/70's. My Mum was a protestant and attended the Church of England, my Dad was an atheist but I don't recall him ever saying as such. He died of cancer two weeks after my 17th birthday after yeas of treatment and remission.

So I was taken to Church fairly regularly until I was about 13 when I simply stopped going as I considered it a complete waste of time. So I consider I had a relatively balanced exposure to a theistic/atheistic world view. What made religion irrelevant was that it simply had no real answers to bloody obvious stuff (why isn't the periodic table in any holy book), religions mostly deny the scientific method, although that is not the case for the Catholic church which is always keen to jump on any band wagon that it thinks will help its cause. When I looked at what made sense about religion it simply looked like a load of bollocks.

So I simply ignored religion, after all it's not for me to tell others what to believe or how to live their lives. In the UK it's perfectly OK to live a secular life and religion plays a virtually non-existent roll in day to day life. Most people in the UK don't actually pay attention to religion at all until it starts to get uppity and stick it's nose where it's not needed.

So I gave up religion in my mid-teens and pretty much ignored it until 9/11 when God botherers decided they knew best and and carried out yet another murderous atrocity in the name of their particular religious delusion. I was still fairly live and let live as it is patently obvious that the minority of fundamentalists do not represent the majority of a particular flavour of theists.

However I read The God Delusion and found myself agreeing with a lot of what Dawkins had to say so out of curiosity I joined the Richard Dawkins Forum (RDF), the first discussion forum I had ever participated in. I was a moderator there for about a year. Until I joined RDF I had never encountered American evangelist preachers, it took a while but they turned my view of religion from ambivalent to antagonistic. If I had to pick one person who personifies all that is bad in religion it would be Ken Ham and his science denial.

So I was never a real theist, I never believed in God or gods, they were an answer to a problem I didn't need an answer to and people who followed religious doctrine are usually reality deniers.

These are my thoughts about the origin of the idea of God.

QuoteGod was the creation of human frailty and fear, in particular the fear of the perceived but not understood and the unconscious ramblings of the mind. At the dawn of human awareness came the moment of knowledge without understanding. Humans have evolved into cause and effect machines, we see cause we infer effect, we see effect and we infer cause. It's the way we evolved as the ability to second guess our prey and/or predictors is a huge evolutionary advantage. But with this ability came the cost of cognitive dissonance when a cause is seen or an effect is observed we are evolved to balance that equation. And every night unconsciousness came, not in a comfortable bed in a secure home, but surrounded by predators out in the open. And there were dreams and nightmares, the unexplained visions, an affect of what? What caused the visions seen at night that were good or bad, heaven or hell? So our ancestors had knowledge, they could see the Sun rise, they had effect but no cause, they did not understand why the Sun rose, a psychologically intolerable situation. They knew their dreams, visions of beauty and fear, an effect with no cause. So they balanced the equation with superstition and called it God. God is the filler in the cracks of our evolved mind.

I have been married to the same wife since 1980. She went to a nominally Christian school but she, like me, found no value in religion. So our three children have been brought up in a religion free environment and have all succeeded within their capabilities to do so.

In my experience religion is of no consequence except when it interferes with society and attempts to create a dogmatic autocratic rule based on it's own particular superstitions. If you consider Christianity to be a good thing just look at Saudis Arabia or Iran where theocracy rules. It might be a different world view than Christianity but at some point, unless checked by common sense and secularism, it will become the dominant world view. When are you or your children or grand children going to convert to Islam?

Regards
Chris

My childhood household was largely apatheist. For that matter, they didn't care about me too much either - which is good.

The only person in my childhood to try shoving religion down my throat was my friend... Eventually, I demoted him from friend to buddy to stranger. Preaching, it gets old.

I am a preachers kid and an army brat. I struggled with it for all of my childhood. I went on several missions including one to the island of Mindanao in the Philippines in 1977. While there I met and was hosted by "ecumenical" or interfaith Muslims. I also experienced a few tense moments with gun toting militants. That was the beginning of the end for me. I started my science training at the local state university right after. By the time I was done I was a committed free thinker.

My parents and I have had many theological discussions, and although I have not specifically said "I am an atheist" they know where I am coming from. My family is very religious and all the family gatherings revolve around religious ceremony. I still read the bible and engage in religious discussion. I don't like football or any other professional sports either, but without some knowledge of players and teams, I'd never get in a discussion outside of work.

I grew up in an atypical Catholic family... at least I think.

I was an alter boy, as were my brothers. My dad was a Knight of Columbus, including a Grand Knight. My mom volunteered at the local St. Vincent DePaul food bank. My grandparents were also very active (on my mom's side). As a family, we would volunteer to help when church functions such as breakfasts and holiday dinners were put on, as well as fundraising programs. We were even awarded the KoC Family of the Year for the state of Oregon one year. Actually, that is something for which I am proud, because as an 11 year old boy, I remember the hard work that went in to "earning" that award every Sunday and usually some weeknights throughout that year. We were busy with church functions.

We attended mass... ahem... religiously, every Sunday. We sang, we knelt, we sat, we stood. That was all I ever really took from it. Our parish was in the process of raising money to build a new church in town, as well as a new school, so it was business on Sunday, preaching more about community than faith during the homilies. I was open minded to it all, more or less, but it just never stuck with me. It hit my older brother hard... he went off to college, became a bible study freak, and has since settled back down in to a regular glass 1/4 full Catholic that goes to church out of habit and as an excuse to dress up nice.

Where it gets atypical is that my grandparents were both involved in the church when they met. Grampa was in the seminary and Grandma was in the nunnery (or whatever) and they both dropped out, got married and had 9 kids. When Grandma died, Grampa went back and became a priest again. He was a journeyman priest for a while, but now is the head Priest at that new church mentioned above (which finally came to fruition under his direction a couple of years ago).

I was married in a Catholic ceremony, by my own grandfather, which is something that not many other Catholic kids get to say... so that is pretty neat for me.

Church rarely carried over to home, except we said the same prayer before meals each time, including at restaurants, which I was always just a little embarrassed about. We didn't go to weekday mass. We were Sunday only type Catholics. We'd hit the early mass, come home to do some yard work, then watch football all day. During the football season at least...

Anyway, I never really believed there was a god, but I can remember as a kid even thinking "all of these people can't be wrong, can they?" What I think I've come to realize is the vast majority of people that do attend church aren't "wrong", they are just looking for a sense of community, and that is a good place to find it. All of our family friends (namely my parents' friends who had kids of similar ages) we met through church. Some I am still friends with to this day.

I tend to believe that most people are moderate about their Christianity and are willing to pay a couple of bucks in to the collection plate each Sunday, go sing in a group of people (because with the choir and the acoustics, it did always sound pretty cool), and just kick it for an hour in a room full of burning candles. A lot of them make life long friends that way.  

It's too bad there had to be a bloody dude nailed to wood hovering over our head piece the whole time.  

Grew up Catholic lite...we went to church for some holidays, prayed at large family dinners, but never went all out.
My little sister has been an atheist her whole life...My other sister is a believer, but not a regular church goer.
I'm the oldest at 54 and spent most of my life agnostic, except for a period of time when I was member of my current wife's Lutheran church.
But I never fully bought into the whole thing and gave up going to church about 10 or so years ago.
Finally, after watching my Father die in '07, while my Mom asked God for help, I was done.
I have considered myself a fairly hard line atheist ever since.

My grandfather believed in reincarnation to the point that he would not let us grandkids kill a bug, as the bug may have been someone in a past life.
I don't know how big a part that played in everything, but I think it did cause me to think about alternatives at an early age.

Grew up fundamental pentecostal.  Got tired of being told to read the bible for answers to my questions, because I had read it already (several times actually) and still had questions.  I didn't like what I read either.  Started deconversion around 11 or 12 being almost completely non-theist once I hit college at 16.
No, my immediate family does not know, it's better that way.  Though quite a large number of us cousins (30 of us) are openly atheist with each other.

I hope pc4lf appreciates these a tellings.
I don't know if I have my wording right there, but well done everyone.

Quote from: "pc4lf"Were you? Is it common for atheists to be raised in a religious household, and at what age do they typically become one? Do they tell their parents? What is that experience like?

me personally, no
my mom believed in god, but she wans't the church-going type
my dad doesn't believe in christianity, but he thinks there's "something out there"
telling dad that I'm an atheist was quite easy. I never felt I should tell him, its non of his business anyway, but sometimes religious subjects came up, and I did mention my atheism. He doesnt mind.

Quote from: "pc4lf"Were you? Is it common for atheists to be raised in a religious household, and at what age do they typically become one? Do they tell their parents? What is that experience like?

Both my parents are religious but not consistent church goers.  They didn't force me and my siblings to go to church when we were young however I often went with friends to many different churches - Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Church of Christ, Episcopalian and so forth.  Therefore I was what would best be termed a generic Christian for most of my life.  I began to wonder about things when I started to get into reading philosophy more and more during my time in the Navy.  I worked nights in my shop on the ship and had a lot of time to read.  I also began to read into other religions and schools of thought especially Eastern religions since I was active in martial arts.  As my stint in the Navy was ending I was wanting to go back to college and delved into sciences of interest including the behavioral sciences and biology.  I began to learn more and more about evolutionary biology but then was exposed to the entire world of the "controversy" I never knew existed, but that's another story entirely.

Also, during that time I decided to sit down and read the bible cover to cover which I had never done.  I ended up reading a KJV and a NIV both of which I still have along with a couple of other bibles, Tao Te Ching, Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Poetic and Greater Edda, the Koran  and even the Urantia book of which I admit I've only skimmed over.

It was when I was around 25 or 26 I really deeply began to examine these beliefs I had that I wondered why I believed them when all my life people just told me I had to believe and not question it.  I was told that atheism isn't anything good that it leads to lack of morality and disrespect for everything and that atheists were "bad" people.  But I realized eventually this was just crap that had been passed on down from person to person accepting it blindly without question like everything else involving religion - I grew up in rural south Texas btw.

So, by the time I re-entered college when I was about 28 I had settled finally upon agnostic atheism which is where I stand right now six years later.

And, yes, may family is aware of my atheism and they told me what they thought about it and that was it.  They didn't agree with my stance but that didn't change anything for them.

Hey and welcome.  I grew up in the Bible Belt in South Carolina, so you KNOW I was raised in a VERY strict religious home.  I have a number of family members who are ministers, and even thought once upon a time, I would be a minister myself, that was until I reached the age of about seven.  I call bull shit on religion when I was forced to believe in Noah, Adam and Eve, and Jesus walking on water; but was told that Santa wasn't real.  

Seriously, my atheism really took off in college when a very well meaning professor showed me the fallacies of the bible in an attempt to "strengthen" our beliefs.  I know it's crazy, but I think the guy was a closet atheist, albeit an ordained Methodist Minister.  I admit that I didnt' "come out" as an official atheist until I met Dawkins and Hawkin in England in 2005 and really understood more of the "science" behind the disproof of god.  Hope that helps.

Quote from: "pc4lf"Were you? Is it common for atheists to be raised in a religious household, and at what age do they typically become one? Do they tell their parents? What is that experience like?

 I was raised by parents who were raised Christian and claimed to believe in God. My mother never went to Church, my father barely ever went.  My older brother went to catholic school for a few years, but by the time I was old enough for school, we couldn't afford catholic school, so I went public.

I never became an atheist, I always was one.  I told my parents. My father never graduated from highschool, and he pretends to not even know what I'm talking about. I guess it's denial.  My mom understands my views but finds them unappealing.  Our relationship is unaffected by my atheism unless I bring it up.

I was raised in a religious home and went to a religious school until I was a teen.  My family are all very devout and go to church every Sunday and sometimes more than that.  They know I am not Christian but since I have never been asked, I haven't told them I am an atheist.  

I am trying to remember exactly when I became an atheist and I think it was around the time I read the bible and started to really listen to what was said in church.

Quote from: "pc4lf"Were you? Is it common for atheists to be raised in a religious household, and at what age do they typically become one? Do they tell their parents? What is that experience like?

I was raised in a religious household. I became an atheist at age 13. I told my mother recently just a few months ago, it was awkward.

Mine was a religious household, in a quiet way.  I attended church two, and sometimes three, times a week.  Sunday School on Sunday.

My parents weren't very vocal about their faith, but in both families ostentation was spurned, so their silence is explicable.

I broke my programming when I was 14.

Quote from: "Thumpalumpacus"Mine was a religious household, in a quiet way.  I attended church two, and sometimes three, times a week.  Sunday School on Sunday.

My parents weren't very vocal about their faith, but in both families ostentation was spurned, so their silence is explicable.

I broke my programming when I was 14.

How did that happen?  With me, reading the bible did it.

Quote from: "notself"How did that happen?  With me, reading the bible did it.

Interesting thing, that... The first attempt I had at The Bible, I was reading a book by Jules Verne in parallel and so I couldn't help myself but compare the two books. And I remember thinking about the Bible, "What a load of CRAP! How can THIS be the most read book worldwide?!" ...And then I put it away until I picked it up again at a more grown-up age when I became a conscious atheist.

Quote from: "notself"

Quote from: "Thumpalumpacus"Mine was a religious household, in a quiet way.  I attended church two, and sometimes three, times a week.  Sunday School on Sunday.

My parents weren't very vocal about their faith, but in both families ostentation was spurned, so their silence is explicable.

I broke my programming when I was 14.

How did that happen?  With me, reading the bible did it.

It's a long story, long enough to give rise to a book as yet unpublished.  Put shortly, the dissonance between the Bible's description of God and my eyes reportage of His creation put paid to the lie.

It may be interesting to note that I carried out a poll at RDF asking people what religion they had followed prior to becoming an atheist. The highest number were ex-Catholics, not surprising as there are a lot of Catholics. If one does a crude adjustment for the size of the congregation I would say that the most likely religion to spawn atheists are the Jehovah Witnesses, small congregation proportionally lots of atheists. Also of note that atheists who have been Witnesses are very unlikely to tell anybody because of the shunning. There were a disproportionately high number of ex-JWs on the poll and most of those were still hiding their atheistic world view. There was also an 'innate atheist' option that one could select if one had never been subjected to a religious upbringing.

I was also interesting that by a small margin 52/48 the atheists at RDF were ex-theists. Now this could well be an example of sample skew caused by the fact that the poll audience (the RDF membership) were self selecting as people who are actively interested in discussing theistic matters. It may also be indicative of the fact that ex-theists are a little bit more likely to seek out support for there new world view than innate theists.

There was a similar poll on a Buddhist forum.  The majority by far of theists who became Theravada Buddhist were ex-Catholics.  The proportion in this instance was much larger than the percent of Catholics in the world.  Theravada has practically no ritual, does not require a teacher or guru and is the most clearly atheistic.  I know I studied Theravada when I became interested in Buddhism for these reasons.  

If it weren't for immigration from Mexico, the percentage of people self identifying with Catholicism would have dropped significantly.  

QuoteCatholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.  http://religions.pewforum.org/reports (http://religions.pewforum.org/reports)

No. Religion was never a part of my childhood.