Athiests...what is your basis for being a "non-believer"?

Question

I'm just curious. Were you born into an athiest family? Has something about religion turned you off? Is it just a personal belief?

Answer 1

My basis is that I have seen no proof in my life for the existance of any god figure

Answer 2

After some time previously being herded into sunday schools and church of a christian kind, I really saw through it all at age 12. This was a huge sense of freedom.
The god concept is as man-made as any other god that sits alongside it in this world and with any other god that preceded it in the history of mankind.
That decision was reached ... 53 years ago. I am now 65 and have not regretted receiving an education; an education that freed me from the ignorance and intolerance that is the virus of the mind posed by religion.

I only found out later, at age 15, that my parents were also atheist. They had done the right thing in exposing me to religion and allowing me to make up my own mind.

Personal belief? How can it be anything other?

Answer 3

I turned away from Christianity at an early age, unable to believe anything that was so cruel and cold could be my creator.... later on after a wide and varied spiritual path I came to the idea that all deities are metaphors for something abstract but greater than a deity could ever be, and I have never been able to really believe in them since. Now I'm a Taoist.

Answer 4

In a nutshell, i'm a non-believer because the Holy Spirit stood me up. Religions generally admonish their followers not to put God to the test; but if God exists *and* is relevant, then i should be able to discern its effects upon the world. In this, absence of evidence was, if not strictly evidence of absence, evidence of irrelevance.

BTW, the word is spelled a-t-h-E-I-s-t.

I was born into a devout Roman Catholic family. There were a few things that turned me off about Catholicism, namely:
- The doctrine of everlasting hell
- The hierachy's blatant sexism, of which they wash their hands in a river in Egypt
- The "God is so wonderful that He loves you even though you are as filthy rags" bit (for me, a killer on the self-esteem)
- The unworkably rigid, legalistic, and brittle sexual moral code.

Make no mistake though; my feelings about these dogmas played NO DIRECT PART in my losing the faith. I had long accepted that my feelings are irrelevant to the truth. Just because i don't like it doesn't mean it's not true.

I stress this because many Christians ASSume, incorrectly, that we are atheists because we don't want to live by God's rules. This is an asinine notion because in order to rebel against God, we'd first have to believe that it exists--in which case, by definition, we wouldn't be atheists! I do appreciate that you are thoughful enough to ask us about ourselves.

My feelings about a couple of those issues did play an *indirect* part in my loss of faith, in that they got me thinking about them, but it was my rational conclusions that were the final arbiter; my feelings played no part in that.

Answer 5

Everyone is born atheist.

Despite having a Christian family, I never was indoctrinated into being a Christian (or any theist). My parents DID try - church, prayer, the usual stuff.

I was born an atheist, still am an atheist, and shall always remain an atheist until theism has evidence.

Atheism is not a belief.

Answer 6

My family was nominally Christian, and attended church. When I was eight years old, it became clear that the biblical tales could not be reconciled with science, and since science is obviously right (it works!), the bible had to go. I have never encountered any evidence of the existence of any sort of god, and neither has anyone else. It can be proven that no such belief can have any use in the real world.

Answer 7

I thought about it all my life.. took an Intro to World Religions course and realized that my religion is no better than anyone else's. I started to see it as more of a psychological thing-- why do humans need to believe in this extra-power? I saw a pattern.. why are there new emerging religions and sects all the time?
There is no proof to any of it.. not even any real evidence.
I just couldn't believe in it if I saw absolutely no evidence in it.. Even though my grandparents are believers. (My parents are secular.)

Answer 8

it takes just as much faith to believe in atheism. To make the absolute statement “God does not exist!” is to make a claim of knowing absolutely everything there is to know about everything – and of having been everywhere in the universe there is to go – and having witnessed everything there is to be seen. Of course, no atheist would make these exact claims. However, that is essentially what they are claiming when they state that God does not exist. Atheists cannot prove that God does not, for example, live in the center of the sun, or beneath the clouds of Jupiter, or in some distant nebula. This cannot be proven, so it cannot be proven that God does not exist. It takes just as much faith to be an atheist as it does to be a theist

Answer 9

There's no empirical evidence. I don't believe sh*t for sense ancient myths written by goat-herding nomads who had no fundamental understanding of how the world operated at the time that they wrote the book. I would, if there were proof affirming their claims, but until then, it's just a myth.

Answer 10

I born in a Catholic family in a Christian country.
I quit from all religions. Why? Using some logic to understand the world around me.

Answer 11

Education........not a collage education but having an open enough mind to study several religions. All of them have common ground and that is Truth......everything else is written in the context of the tech level and understanding of how the universe works, of the people who wrote it "in the name of 'God'".