When did you realize there was no God?

Question

Aethist question...-.- dont answer for points...When did u realize that there is no God? or did ur parents not believe? no offense..if u see any..just want to know

-.- im a hard core christian btw so dont start saying qoute"WHEN YOU START BELIEVING IN GOD I WILL PRAY FOR YOU"end qoute...lol that 1968 one was funnyo0 hope that was a joke

yo im getting pissed! READ THE ADDITIONAL DETAILS!!!! CRUD! your breakin ma balls here!....btw thats a south park joke.....>_>

im so sorry i put this up... i breaks my heart seeing so much ppl turn away frm God...its even more crushing that he still loves them...i dont know why...but as i read the answers i cried...so overwhelmed with sorrow and grief...i believe that knowledge is man's greatest fault...it brought so much suffering to the world...why?why?why? thats all i hear...why not? why are u saying why? please...ask God...He will answer you one way or another...pray and pray and He will answer...listen to me! please hear me out...God is real and He has a plan for everyone, we just need to pray to Him and be patient.Also, The old Testament is the base of the Christian religion. But Jesus created christianity by dying on the cross for our sins and opening the kindom of heaven. Someone sed that it is those who do not believe that God wants to save ...thats true...Be open to God....accept Him and i will pray that he opens the eyes of your heart and wit dat may God be praised. God Bless...

Answer 1

My parents were both devout Christians while I was growing, my mother remains so and has even joined some charismatic and cross-denominational efforts, while my father has been growing more and more deist with each passing day.

My becoming an atheist started when I was three and a half, when my mother bought the family a Commodore VIC20 for Christmas 1982. Because I already knew how to read at a 3rd grade reading level, I was able to read the manual that showed how to program it, so instead of playing the games, I jumped right into learning how to program. So I had the rules of logic down pat from a very, VERY early age.

I was Christian through out my young life, though I branched a little into paganism during my early teens, but not seriously so. I returned to my Christian faith, however, and poured myself into my religious studies, having read the entirety of the Summa Theologicae by St. Thomas Aquinas by the time I was 16, and The Confessions by St. Augustine shortly after. By the time I was 19, I was determined to get a degree quickly so that I could go into seminary and enter the priesthood.

I never made it. The more and more I studied religion, the more and more I realized none of it made sense. The hardest part was, I desperately WANTED it to make sense, so I read more and more, determined to find whatever it was that I was missing; it wasn't that faith was missing, it was that reason and faith had finally reached the point where they were in conflict -- there would have been no conflict had there been no faith.

For over two years I'd go into church after hours, stare up at the cruicifix and alternately boil over with rage that I was being challenged as I was or boil over with desperation and beg from the very bottom of my heart for even so much as St. Thomas was given, some tiny little speck or sliver of evidence to help me restore my faith.

It never came.

The funny thing is... before that pain started, I was certain of myself. I knew my place in the world, and I had strength in the knowing. It wasn't until I closed my Bible for the last time as a believer that I realized I had found that strength again, but in knowing myself, not an outside being. The next time I opened my Bible, I finally understood it for what it really was, and finally understood what it really meant.

Answer 2

A few reasons turned me atheist.

1. My parents are both muslim so they got me into it when I was born. Well as I grew up, I started asking questions at religious classes and to my mom, yet no one could answer them right. They'd say "it just is" or they'd get mad at me for questioning the religion. If no one will answer my questions, how am I supposed to believe in the religion and God?

2. At our mosque, someone reads excerpts of speeches or whatever they're known as, from the religious leader [similar to the Pope] and listening to them, each and every excerpt is pretty selfish. He'd say "faith is the most important aspect of life" and "pray to me and I will show you happiness". Even when talking about the troubles in today's world, he still has to talk about believing in him. So I ask, what's the difference between him and a conceited person? Both think they are the "best" and we should "serve them".

3. The last 2 years of my life have been the worst, l've lost my best friend, seen my other friend lose his parents in a second, l've gone through severe depression, etc and praying to God to help fix everything, or even help take away some of the pain did absolutely nothing. In fact, I got worse, I just wanted to end it all at some points, and the man upstairs watched me suffer.

So through all this, what's the point in believing in him? If there really is a God, why does he cause pain and suffering, doesn't he know that we would just cut him out of our life? I've noticed, the more we pray to him, the more we suffer.

Answer 3

Glutmas Eve 1965. A-T-H-E-I-S-M (spelled correctly) is not something that is stumbled on in the dark or in a blinding flash. To achieve rationality is a developmental process that has to overcome the mindless programming that has been shoved at you since childhood. I'm amazed that I started asking the right questions when I was eleven and even more amazed that I was able to take the "because" answers of religion with a jaundiced eye at such a young age. Still it took three more years before I called myself an agnostic and three hard years more before being to call myself an Atheist. Happy about it? Sometimes I envy delusionalists who think they are going to end up in some cosmic Disneyland when they die, instead of the void on non-existence, but in the end, I'm happy I do not live in the delusional haze that seems to keep them anesthetized to reality.

Answer 4

why do you blindly state that as fact. why not say when did you start to believe there is no god rather than rather than when did you know? Really if you want to get into the absolute logic theorem of it you cant know there is no god since you have given it a name and how can something with a name truly not exist. But that's rather complex rhetoric. A truly good question is why are atheist so very angry at religious types and treat them as inferior and stupid? What is the true harm in be living in something that may or may not exist. If you don't believe in god do you teach your children to believe in Santa clause. If not do you get mad at others for doing the same.

Answer 5

i just wanted to apologize to anyone who has ever been offended or turned off from God because of some Christian's behavior. it's so incredibly sad when a Christian is a hypocrite and doesn't serve or love others like Jesus himself commanded us to do ... he or she claims to be a follower of Christ but sometimes you would never be able to guess it.

that's not what God is about. God is about love.

for anyone who believes there is no God because of the way you have seen people of the Church living, i am truly sorry. i'm frustrated with the hypocrisy as you probably are, but not all people of the Church are like this, thankfully! there are many great examples of Jesus' love out there!

i beg you, please don't believe that God doesn't exist based on the fact that some people are ignorant ... just because some Christians give you the wrong impression of God does not mean there is no God at all ... it just means that that person is giving you a wrong impression of Christianity.

God and Christianity are not equal. Christians make mistakes and unfortunately really big ones at times!

to whomever this answer applies ... i encourage you start thinking of all the reasons as to why there could be a God ... you have all the reasons as to why there is no God ... please give God another try, and i pray that you will begin to see God as he truly is ... REAL, COMPLETELY IN LOVE WITH YOU, FORGIVING, POWERFUL, CREATOR!

i promise you, if you allow your heart to honestly look for God ... you will definitely find him! he's waiting for you because he loves you, and the fact that you may deny his existence does not lessen his love for you whatsoever ... if anything, it just makes him want you more! i pray that the Holy Spirit of God begins to make himself a reality in your lives ... and may you soon find comfort in the God who you deny today :)

Answer 6

I was raised in a very religious family. I had doubts about all of it (mormon religion) when I was a teen, but was so enmeshed in the social aspects of the religion (all of my friends & family were mormons) that I kept my mouth shut & stayed with it. When it came time to go on a mormon "mission," I let my parents talk me into going. Believe me, nothing focuses your beliefs better than working at something that *requires* those beliefs 16 hours a day, 6.5 days a week! I never seemed to get answers to my prayers, the illogic of it all was bothering me, and then having gone through the secret mormon temple rituals just before leaving for my mission really threw me (a bunch of strange freemason-based rituals involving robes, aprons, hand-signs showing ways life can be taken, secret handshakes, magic passwords, etc.).

I did my 2 years on a mission, and when I came back and was away from it for just a week I felt so RELIEVED, that I knew I had to get out. I began studying skeptically, read everything I could get my hands on, learned about the history of religions, ancient myths, archaeology, geology, biology...and I finally accepted the overwhelming evidence that there is no god, and humans just made it all up.

I'm much happier and wiser since doing so :)

Answer 7

For me, once I learned that there was no Easter bunny and no Santa Claus, I started to put two and two together.

Then when I was taught about all the stars and galaxies in the Universe when I was about ten years old as a cub scout, it became clear that if we could see thousands of light years to other galaxies with our own eyes, there was a significant problem with "finding" God. The astronomical numbers made God a very remote possibility.

Then when you look at the science of physics today, there is no place in the Universe for a God other than in man's mind.

Answer 8

When I was 17. I had been a Catholic. I started questioning. I started researching. I started pondering and critically analyzing. I realized that deities do not exist and that I couldn't possibly be a Catholic any longer. I actually dropped out of confirmation, a Catholic tradition which allows 16-17 year olds to CHOOSE to remain Catholics.

Many people told me that I should just go through with it, that I could stick with it and THEN choose to leave. That didn't make sense to me. Why would I stay when I knew I couldn't believe in their God?

Answer 9

I started looking at the world through a logical lense and god isn't compatible with the things we know scientifically (through logic). It was in High School.

Wow that Mike guy is sorely mistaken and I feel bad that he is so ignorant. First off, Mike, atheism is not a science. It is a belief. A belief in no god. Sure we can't test our theory, but we really don't need to. Believers have the burden of proof, we are all born atheists.

Answer 10

I Read the Bible every word, from beginning to end. Then I did again. A few years later again. I started because I thought it would strengthen my faith. but it took my faith away. The Verses in Deut. Which tells parents to have the children stoned to death convinced me the most. But the factual errors and the contradictions could not be overcome.