Why don't you believe?

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Jake55778
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Why don't you believe?

Post by Jake55778 » 04 Jul 2012, 15:55

...a discussion about the nature of God's existence should be no place for an atheist.
Fair enough, although I don't think debate is something to be shied away from if handled maturely. However in the interests of avoiding conflict I present an alternative venue for atheists to share their views.

To any atheists, antitheists, agnostics or deists: What led you to your current world view?

Were you born into a religious household?
Did you consider yourself religious at any point in the past, or have you always held the view you do now?
If you did consider yourself religious, at what age and in what circumstances did you "lose your religion"?
Do you hold any spiritual beliefs outside of religion?
Spoiler! :
My personal experiences perhaps aren't the most interesting. Both my parents are atheist and religion was never something I was pressured towards. It wasn't discouraged in any way either, it was just something I was expected to come to my own conclusions over. For a few years while at primary school and for a little while after I considered myself Christian, although looking back I can say that I was probably at least somewhat agnostic even then. I prayed and sang hymns with the other children, but I'm not sure I ever truly believed.

During my early teens, while at secondary school, I quickly lost whatever faith I had left with the discovery of other major religions. I couldn't reconcile the idea that for one religion to be right, the others had to be wrong. If believing is generally a prerequisite for entering heaven/the afterlife then that would require at least two thirds of the world's population to be denied, or even condemned, simply for one wrong decision. I tried to keep an open mind towards religion for most of my teenage years, classing myself "agnostic" whenever asked. I gave some thought to joining other religions, but my issues towards Christianity generally applied equally to any other major religion.

By the time I left school I considered myself firmly atheist. The more I learned about science and history, the less plausible any kind of religious explanation seemed.

I suppose these days I could be classed as an agnostic deist. Skeptical though I am, I accept the possibility of a creator at the very origin of the universe, but believe everything that follows from that point can be explained without the supernatural.
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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by 697134002 » 04 Jul 2012, 16:04

My parents were going to send me to a private school, but it closed down the year I was going to go to it. Rather than put me in the public system, they sent me to a catholic school. While there, they told us stories but never explained why they were true. I never really believed, in the sense that a kid can't really decide things like that, and when my parents had a test performed on me and found that I qualified for a gifted program, they sent me to the elementary school in the area that had it for grade 4. After that, I just completely stopped caring about religion. I don't know when I became an explicit atheist, but I think it was in grade 5 or 6.

My dad is catholic, but never goes to church or prays or... does anything, really. He just believes in the christian god as defined by catholicism.
And I think my mother is is agnostic and doesn't care at all about religion.

And I hold no spiritual beliefs.
Richard Dawkins wrote:I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by Furdabip » 04 Jul 2012, 17:38

Religion was nothing to me all throughout my early years. Phrases that included "jesus" or "lord" entered my lexicon ("jesus christ!" or "lord almighty") usually through comedic use in films. Other than that, I had no clue what religion was.

Around 8 or 9, a friend of my mom's son, the same age as me, was going to some children's group called "Awanas" and suggested to my mom to get me to join as well. My parents paid for me to go, and looking back now, I hate how it operates. You basically go, hear a story about some bible thing, then go into back rooms where a teacher-thing would recite verses from the bible and you would read along and have to memorize them. After you finally were able to repeat the verse without looking at what was written down, you could go back out and play some games with the other kids. The entire time, I just wanted to play with the other kids. I imagine the other kids were the same. So, we'd try our hardest to breeze through that shit just to go play. I retained NO verses into memory, so the process of indoctrination didn't work at all. :-)

Forgetting mostly about the whole thing when my parents could no longer afford Awanas, I didn't even think about religion for some time. It was around age 11 or 12 that I started hearing about how some religious people wanted to ban gays, or kill abortion doctors that I then associated religion with acts of violence or malice. I didn't ask my parents about any of it, I just instead ignored all religious activities, as I tend to ignore things that don't directly or indirectly affect me. In ignoring it all, the only alternative to religious shows or such, is science and educational shows. I spent most of my time from then on learning about how the world worked.

When I got the internet when I was 16, naturally it wasn't long before religious debates came up on forums or in chatrooms. They always included contradictions to what I had learned through watching/reading educational things, and thus began my crusade against religion. Since the moment I've heard about it, and the more I read about it, I am thoroughly against religion's misteachings and zealotry. I am antitheist.

About growing up in a religious household, my parents both claim to believe in the Christian god, but don't claim any religious affiliation.

I never went to church growing up besides the Awanas thing.

I hold no spitirual beliefs at all. There's no afterlife, there's no heaven, no hell, no reincarnation, and knowing that there is none of that does NOT make me depressed or afraid of death. When I die, I will be dead. I will have no regret for anything I did in my life, no lingering doubts. I won't exist, I won't have a brain, so I couldn't feel any emotions anymore. I understand people's fear of death and desire to believe that this life isn't the only thing they have, though. I just don't feel the necessity for it for myself.

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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by Sti_Jo_Lew » 04 Jul 2012, 19:43

Well, I'm probably the least spiritual person on the planet, and usually base things off logic and facts. Literally every single person other than my sister is Christian in my family. I guess I became atheist when I was a kid, after realizing the Bible said absolutely nothing about dinosaurs, and claimed the earth had only been around for a dew hundred years. It just baffled me that something that was claimed to be a book of truth could directly contradict what I was so interested in at the time.

After that, I kind of just kept the fact I was atheist away from my family since I didn't want to cause any heated arguements. I had seen what religious debates could do in school, and I didn't want to deal with the drama. In fact, I only recently told my parents that I was atheist, didn't go over too well. :/
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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by Tomenaki » 04 Jul 2012, 20:36

Well this is a first, at least the first time I've seen such a thread before. I suppose I can give you my little story.

I grew up in a mixed religion household, my dad a Baptist, my mom a Roman Catholic (What a mix, right?). Mostly, as a kid I only ever really "half-believed" in god and all that stuff and I had to go to church (usually my father's type) every Sunday. If anyone knows how Baptist church sessions go most of the time, they are lengthy (2+ hours on a short day), so for a kid of like 5 or 6, you can imagine this is a very boring thing to do every Sunday. It wasn't the boredom that affected me the most, though.

As I got older, say around 10 or 12, I still had to go to church, say prayers, blah blah blah, but at this point I really started thinking to myself, "who is this invisible man in the sky who sees everything I do and why can't I see or talk to him?". Mind you, this is pretty simple thinking, but it started me down the road to looking more critically into the concept of god. It made no logical sense for something like god to exist in the world and after the age of about 13, I didn't go to church very often, if at all. I didn't pray much either, not that I had done so very much in the past to be honest, and around this point I just stopped altogether.

At 16, while attending a Christmas Eve Mass with a family my family knew, I realized just how much unbelievable crap was coming from the pulpit. It all seemed very contradictory to what religion had always been said to be. Believe me, I went to Sunday School as a kid, I read up on my bible history, and I still keep apprised of things in religion as well. The things I had read, vs. the things being preached (or having been preached in my past) did not click with me and that was the last time I ever even considered believing in either a god/deity or religion whatsoever. In fact, to quote myself that Christmas Eve night as I talked to one of the people that had come with us.

Me: Well this just confirms what I thought about religion.
Them: And what is that?
Me: It's all a bunch of crap.
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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by SMWasder » 05 Jul 2012, 07:18

My parents never really told me anything one way or the other, I think my dad is atheist and my mum is agnostic, but they did always say that whatever I felt they would support me. Considering most of my extended family are batshit crazy ultra-catholics I was always thankful they let me make up my own mind. I don't think I ever really believed in god, even when I was a kid. I never saw any reason to, I've never seen any convincing evidence that there's a god and I think everything can be explained by other means.
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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by duhriddler » 05 Jul 2012, 16:04

I grew up in a rather interesting religion (assuming it's actually big enough to not be a cult) called "The New Church" (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Church). To sum it up, every last bit of the bible has an inner meaning. This guy called Swedenborg wrote all about his divine revelation of these inner meanings in MANY volumes of books. The whole religion lends itself to high compatibility with science (the bible isn't literal at all, and the writings say little outside of what happens in the spiritual world/how you should live), so despite going to a heavily religious school I still got a proper science education. However, being taught properly also allowed me to think, and when I considered God himself, all I ended up at was a logical impossibility. So I ended up going through high school, including being top of the advanced religion classes, while firmly disbelieving in any god.

So my basic thinking is that omnipotence is logically impossible, and a non-omnipotent god is not worth worshiping or otherwise changing my life for any more than the Goa'uld would be. It's more complex than that, but I have no time to expand on it for now.
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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by random980 » 06 Jul 2012, 00:53

As far as i can remember i never really cared at all about religion, even with a gigantic Jewish background. May dad never followed the religion that much but my mum made me follow it, i even attended a jewish teachings program for a few years when i was young(learnt Hebrew and what all the jewish holidays were about, ect) and ive even had a bar-mitzvah (even then i only cared about the huge party at the end of it all) but nothing about the Judaism has really stuck. To me god was made up, like santa or the easter bunny and no one had really told me otherwise except for very religious people, even then i dismissed their claims because it contradicted with basic logic, as simple as my logic was at the time.

As ive gotten older ive learnt more and more about religion and how much it contradicts not only science and logic, but itself. I am sceptical about the existence of god or gods, if there is a heaven or hell or if we reincarnate or just end, letting the world forget we even existed. I still like having the title of being jewish but im in no way religious myself and honestly, why do we honestly care if any religion is true or not? When i die i will meet the exact same fate as everyone else, an end, and im hardly scared of what comes next nor do i care if some supreme lord judges me on how well i did, as if life was a sport.
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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by Bo3wais » 01 Jan 2013, 15:20

Mmm... Religion was pressured on us where I'm from, and I believe it was just that, accompanied with the total BS people who are heavily "Devout" 'sometimes' spout, I think it just drove me off and made me contemplate religion.

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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by Tulonsae » 18 Jan 2013, 04:01

random980 wrote:As far as i can remember i never really cared at all about religion, even with a gigantic Jewish background. May dad never followed the religion that much but my mum made me follow it, i even attended a jewish teachings program for a few years when i was young(learnt Hebrew and what all the jewish holidays were about, ect) and ive even had a bar-mitzvah (even then i only cared about the huge party at the end of it all) but nothing about the Judaism has really stuck. To me god was made up, like santa or the easter bunny and no one had really told me otherwise except for very religious people, even then i dismissed their claims because it contradicted with basic logic, as simple as my logic was at the time.

As ive gotten older ive learnt more and more about religion and how much it contradicts not only science and logic, but itself. I am sceptical about the existence of god or gods, if there is a heaven or hell or if we reincarnate or just end, letting the world forget we even existed. I still like having the title of being jewish but im in no way religious myself and honestly, why do we honestly care if any religion is true or not? When i die i will meet the exact same fate as everyone else, an end, and im hardly scared of what comes next nor do i care if some supreme lord judges me on how well i did, as if life was a sport.
Hmm... There's no particular problem with being an atheist or holding to scientific principles in the Reform Judism I belong to. In fact, most Jews are cultural Jews (worldwide).

Edit: in fact, in my family, my hubby and son are cultural Jews who don't particularly believe in God while I enjoy the spiritual side of things as well as the community.
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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by Aerobotic » 13 Mar 2016, 12:34

The existence of God is irrelevent but the moral teachings of religion are important for a sustainable society.
Learn from your mistakes!

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Re: Why don't you believe?

Post by Lord_Mountbatten » 14 Mar 2016, 15:54

Better tell the lawless atheistic wasteland societies that.
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