Convert survey

[Asmodean]

There has been a post about it before, but I thought to do a site-wide survey by poll. The question is: how did you come to be an atheist?

EDIT: Converted here means a (relatively) sudden and/or fast-paced change, possibly triggered by an event. If you went through a longer process of losing your religion, please vote for the coresponding option  

[Tanker]

Sorry I've posted my story before but it doesn't really match any of those options. I was ALWAYS aloud to decide that for myself.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Atheism started taking root around 11 or 12.  By fourteen I knew I was atheist, but had very vague, wooey beliefs until about 16 or 17, by which time I had slid into atheism without even really thinking about it.

[Tank]

First option.

[reed9]

The first time I expressed a disbelief in God I was around 6.  My best friend's family was very religious and I recall at some point he asked me if I believed in God, to which I said no.  (I don't think I'd ever thought about it.)  He got terribly upset and the upshot was for the next 15 years I switched to answering, "I don't know" whenever I was asked that question.  But in my 20's I switched back to saying "no", though with better reason now, I think.

Obviously, my family was not traditionally religious, though they did and do believe in other silly things, astrology, homeopathy, ghosts, and the like.

[Asmodean]

Oh! I hear you! My childhood friend asked me the same once.

Told me that "You'll come to believe when you grow up", so I said "Riiight..." and that's when he told me there was this book called the bible... I read it and quite frankly, my seven-year-old mind could not find a scrap there worth reading OR believing in.

Naturally, that friend and I grew apart fairly quickly since I never tried to hide that I thought his beliefs were nonsense.

[Caecilian]

I've always been an atheist. I was brought up that way- my late father, in particular, was a physicist and a very staunch atheist. So from a very young age, I learned to respect science but not religion, and to value rationality but not faith.

I think that I've been very fortunate in that respect.

[MariaEvri]

I never was the kind of christian I see online. I just... "believed"
slowly as I entered late elementary and early highschool I discovered national geographic and science. It improved my english and my view on the world

[Martin TK]

Well, I grew up in the BIBLE BELT, in South Carolina where religion isn't something you are exposed to on Sunday, but truly a way of life for those living there.  EVERYTHING, and I mean everything, revolves around religion and the church.  Nearly all activities for children are run by the local churches, at least when I was young, they were.  We attended Vacation Bible School in the summer, and went to the Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings on Sunday evening.  If you were Baptist, you went to church three times a week, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night bible study.  In the rural parts of South Carolina, the church was often the only place where people and children could get together as a group, so it was central to the small communities and their lifestyles.

I said all that to kind of set the table for how I grew up.  I had little say in my religious thinking as a child.  Many of my family members, uncles, cousins, etc, were ministers and you can only imagine what family reunions were like, little more than extended church services.  As a child, nothing was more prestigious for a family than to have a child go into the ministry or into teaching.  Most families believed in the bible and tried to live by their church's interpretation of the bible.  

I was a bit lucky only in that my father was a military man, and while he traveled because of his MOS, we stayed put, surrounded by family.  It wasn't until my freshman year in college that I truly began to question my faith.  I took a religion course that managed to do quite the opposite of what my family hoped it would do, it made me question EVERYTHING, to the point that I began to doubt the bible, and most of what was written therein.  Eventually, as I became more educated and spent more time with people who spent less time worried about the bible and more about social issues, and science; I realized that god was a creation of man.  As Dan Barker says in his book Goodless, "I lost faith in faith."

[KDbeads]

Out of curiosity, what part of SC were you in?

[Sophus]

I fall under the "Went through (relatively) slow degradation of belief before settling on atheism" group. It was the beginning of me thinking deeply and honestly about that one question I never allowed myself to think honestly about. And I did it without knowing any atheists at the time.  

[Argie]

I guess the slow degradation of belief applies to me.  I was born a catholic, had been baptized, had communion and confirmation.  At home, religion wasn´t very important, we went to church once in a while on holydays and so.  My father was always indifferent; my mother on the other hand was the typical "truth seeker" jumping from cults and pseudoreligions but never imposed anything on me.  Being a catholic was more of a social thing for us.  When I was around 17, I became friends with this jewish fellow that challenged my belief in Jesus, so he had me convinced and ended up converting to judaism.  Within judaism I´ve got dissapointed when I realized that even they publicly deny it, judaism is a form of nationalism, because if the nationalistic manifestation of a people, the jewish people, and no matter if you get accepted as a convert, you may never be a true jew, just the same as you may not become a black if you are not from african descent.  I went back to being a catholic just for convinience since my faith in Jesus was alrerady eroded; I needed to go to college and the best college was a catholic university.  As my mother I kept "searching for the truth", I tried yoga, UFOs, spiritualism, and a lot of other things.  My faith the "almighty" was degrading over the years... I was an atheist but just didn´t or couldn´t accept it.  One lucky day, I saw a quotation in a book I was reading, that quotation was of Richard Dawkins... I looked him up, and read some of his works... and there, I became an atheist although I still have a hard time sometimes with the "what ifs" days and the left over of superstitions that sometimes arise.

[rlrose328]

I can remember TRYING to believe because that's how I was raised.  I asked questions in Sunday School and was looked at funny and told to "have faith."  By my teens, I was using "agnostic" to describe my beliefs and stuck with that until my 30s when I decided "atheist" wasn't a horrible thing at all.  So I chose slow degradation because my embracing my atheism was indeed a long, slow process of acceptance (if not disbelief).  And I'm "out" in a big way.  I don't necessarily volunteer the information but I won't back down if the subject comes up.  

[Cecilie]

None of the above. I was never religious, but not always atheist either. My mother never took me to church, not even on Christmas (though that was usually because she worked on Christmas). I did however go to church with my school once a year and I've been to christenings, weddings, funerals etc. When I was 14 I was conformed, and after that I really realized that I was an atheist. I guess I've always been agnostic, but without knowing it.

[Asmodean]

None of the above. I was never religious, but not always atheist either.

An apatheist is still an atheist. De-facto does count