What caused you to become an atheist?

Question

Just asking respectfully. I am turning into one as a function of my research. Thank you for your answer, and I hope you had a great day.

Answer 1

I have answered this so many times... feel free to look through my answers if you'd like to know why I'm one. I'll say this - the final straw was something to do with someone here and a comment about the Amish kids, but I'd been leaning toward total disbelief for a long time. Just read the bible cover to cover - if that doesn't make you ask some questions, you're too brainwashed to try to help. Good luck to you!

Answer 2

I figured it out about the same time I figured out there wasn't a Santa. I never really bought the whole thing even though I was taken to church regularly.

It took a little while to be OK with it. I mean I was saying that I thought just about everyone I knew was delusional. I finally got old enough to read guys like Carl Sagan and realized that I wasn't the only one who could see it. I've been an atheist for 30-35 years now and I really have trouble see how anyone could buy the nonsense.

Answer 3

I've always questioned since I was VERY young. I would try to figure out god and life and come to a brick wall. I would ask people who believed and they had just accepted without ever going deeply into things. I then had these realizations that the universe and the whole mechanism of life feeding on life and other suffering didn't make sense. I then read and read everything and anything -- Near Death Experiences, scientific 'proof' for god, etc. -- and everything would come up short. I *wanted* to believe. I continued for YEARS, doing as much research as I could. I also realized how powerful the mind is and, given the horrible and full-of-despair way I felt when I thought about the reality of death, I realized that it would be preposterous if the mind didn't create concepts like the afterlife. I did research on this, too, and realized that these were concepts that developed. I then watched and saw how people have these different belief systems that are either ingrained in them from birth or that they adopt later on to give life meaning -- and how belief doesn't make it true (just look at a suicide bomber). I then realized I was an atheist and did NOT like it. I kept an open mind and read and read but I saw the holes in everything -- and how the afterlife and stuff about past lives, etc. had the same dynamic of people trying to prove to themselves and others that death wasn;t the end. I did keep an open mind, though. Years later, I went through a bad panic disorder episode and, for the first and only time in my life, I literally got my ego out of the way one night (I was desperate and couldn't be in control any more) and had a spiritual experience. I then realized that it wasn't god that wasn't real but, rather, all the concepts and beliefs about god. I consider myself an atheist because of this -- a realization that all concepts of god are projections from our ego that are used to make its thought system real.

Answer 4

Well it came as a realization when some one said, "all this could not have happened randomly." It got me thinking that it makes more sense that it happened randomly or at least by billions of years of evolution than a single entity doing it all. Man that would be one incredibly smart and busy Mo Fo. Plus one little phrase. "What created the Creator?" It does not make any sense the line "He was always there."

Answer 5

It was a number of things for me, and it wasn't an overnight decision, either. It's been a slow, gradual decision that I've probably been heading towards for the last ten or fifteen years, but was afraid to embrace until this last February.

What started it was a bit of emotional abuse from certain members of my family. Even when I was a believer, I was treated as not being "good enough". If I asked even the slightest of questions about religion, or why something was the way it was, just out of childhood innocence and curiosity, I was scolded quite harshly for it. No answer was given, just told that I shouldn't be asking such things.

My cousin could memorize and recite prayers and Bible passages. Because I wasn't interested(ok, I was FIVE at the time, since when do five-year-olds have an attention span for anything other than playtime?) and would rather play, I was shamed. I was told at the age of SIX when I was bullied on the bus to school by my grandmother that I had a miserable life and always would because it was "God's plan" for me.

That's just a few things. It escalated the older I got. You can see why hearing such things repeatedly made me wonder just how a supposedly loving God would allow my family to tell me such things when I was but a small child.

As I grew older and began to doubt the validity of what I was raised to believe in church, I began to look into things. Originally, I was trying to find a reason to believe, that there was some reason that my family was saying such things to break my young heart. But I only found cruelty. I didn't find anything to explain what they were saying, I only found Biblical passages that seemed to reinforce that they had the right to what they were saying.

It didn't make sense to me that I and my cousin could do the exact same task the exact same way, yet he would be praised and loved while I was humiliated and scolded for some absurd reason or another. It didn't seem right that they had a right to hurt me and it wasn't just some little kid saying; "Oh, I ate a cookie without asking, now mommy scolded me, so I hate her" sort of thing. It was getting that constant feeling that I could become a saint and they'd find something wrong with it.

I had a lot of questions and doubts, but couldn't do anything about it really. Not going to church every sunday wasn't an option in my family.

But then I went to college. I went to a college in a bigger city three hours from home. I met people from other towns, other states, even other countries. I learned about different religions, different cultures, and just plain different attitudes. Growing up, not believing wasn't an option. Being a different religion wasn't even an option where I come from. Suddenly, I realized it was an option, that where I lived wasn't the entire world.

So I explored other religions in hopes that if I wasn't satisfied with Christian beliefs, I could find something else. I was actually afraid of becoming an atheist at the time because the way my family and culture in my hometown would tell it, atheists are horrible, nasty people who'd sooner burn a bible than read it. I grew up not wanting to be associated with that stereotype.

After college, things just got worse. If I wasn't Christian, I wasn't worth it to certain members of my family. I began to slip further towards disbelief. Far as they were concerned, if I wasn't what they wanted me to be, I was as damned as if I didn't believe at all. I resisted, but as time wore on, I believed less and less, especially as I began to do research on prayer in schools and dug deeper into the matter than listen to what I was being told by my family, which I knew was their thoughts, not necessarily how it really was.

I've read the Bible a few times. Found discrepancies that I thought were odd, but nobody would give me any answes as to why. Things contradicted what I'd learned about science, but nobody would answer that, either. I just slowly gave up caring until this last February.

That's when I realized that the one cousin I was close to as a teenager had become like the others who thought it was a good idea to target and trash me for not going to church on a regular basis. Where he'd been a nice guy before, suddenly he became arrogant and pushy and couldn't email or talk to me without ambushing me about religion. It's one thing to deal with the people I'd been dealing with for ten years. But to have a cousin who's practically a brother to me start up, I couldn't take it.

That's when I realized that religion wasn't worth it and was probably completely bunk to begin with if any deity could allow its followers and religion to turn on their own blood families like that. It wasn't overnight, it wasn't easy, and it wasn't because I didn't like the rules or wanted to be promiscuous(either sexually or through drugs and alcohol) or just plain be a rotten person.

I'd been hurt, both when I believed and when I didn't, and I wanted no part of it any longer.

Answer 6

You know how kids believe in Santa and the Easter bunny then as they get older they figure it out? I guess I took it one step further after really studying the bible and some other religions. They are morals and ways to live with fairy tale stories weaved in.

Answer 7

I started to become a disbeliever after the first time I was told I was going to Hell for asking questions. The more questions I asked, the more I got told either, "You have to have faith", or "Don't you want to go to heaven," (Which is a nice way of saying that I'm going to hell). Religion was shutting down my curiosity and my desire to know.

Answer 8

The lack of a real god .
I got tired of pretending there was one .
I always felt weird Praying to something that wasn`t there .
I only said I believed just to fit in with society..
I could go on ,but Nobody really wants the TRUTH.

Answer 9

Lack of evidence, but Catholic school definitely helped. The fasted way to becoming an atheist is reading the bible.

Answer 10

I'll answer for my wife.

As a little girl, she was brought up in her faith and dutifully went to church every week.

But her father was a beater and terrorized the family.

She prayed to God for intervention, but none came. She went to the elders of her church, but they declined to get involved, as it was a "private, family matter."

Working up her courage, she fought back against ther father to stop the beatings.

At that point she realized there was no God, people in the clergy were liars and faith was completely bogus