Atheists (honest, not-loaded question), how old were you when you decided/realized there was no god?

Question

I made an assumption based on my own experience, being raised as a church-going christian. It slipped my mind that other don't necessarily share this.

Answer 1

For me it started around the time I was 12, but the process took several years. I was raised Mormon and was living in Utah so nearly everyone I knew was Mormon and most were very devout believers. At 12, I wasn't sure that Mormonism was wrong, but I was smart enough to know that if I told anyone I was doubting it, they would try to interfer with my figuring it out on my own. I was convinced that Mormonism was wrong and mostly convinced that the Biblical concept of God was wrong by the time I was 16. But it then took several more years to shake off many subconscious thought patterns from all of those years of indoctrination. Reprogramming a brain is a difficult thing.

Answer 2

I think that I was about 13 or 14 when I 1st started to drift away from believing in God. My dad had died a few years earlier and I was looking for reasons behind it, and I started to question why God would let such a thing happen.
Then as I got older and moved away to go to University, I found that the most prejudice people I would meet were those that called themselves Christians. I got sick of people trying to reason their prejudices by saying "I don't agree with this because I am Christian and it says its wrong in the Bible" - I thought that was an easy way out for not taking personal responsibility and I didn't want to be associated with that.
So I guess I was about 19 or 20 when I 1st called myself an Atheist.
And for those wondering I started studying the Bible at age 7 or 8 in school and continued to study it until I was 16.

Answer 3

I never really truly believed in the first place.

When I was younger, I recall having a conversation with my mother and my best friend over what "heaven" was. They kept insisting it was a place and I kept asking the "inconvenient" and rational requests like "Is it a planet? Is it a cloud? Is it on the moon?" to which, their answer was always "No, its just a place"

Eventually, I conformed to the idiotic notions of pure evil and pure good with the rest of my generation while watching Saturday morning cartoons during the '80's. It wasn't until my college years that became an agnostic and then, in my late twenties, I explored the potential political aspirations of a polytheistic character I had been writing about and I came to the realization that the notion of "god" has never been anything more than a political tool.

Thus ending any chance of religious faith entering my life.

Answer 4

12

Answer 5

17

Answer 6

Don't remember the exact age. At high school, found I couldn't reconcile the science I was so hungry to know more about and the fiction being taught as truth in church. As a teenager I read some great books like "Unweaving the Rainbow" and it was more fulfilling than any religious experience I had ever been told about.

Answer 7

At birth probably. I was born and raised an atheist. When I was 16 I met a Christian for the first time in my life. Before that, I had honestly never even thought about any gods, or religious people.

God never played any part in our family, nor in the town I was raised.

Answer 8

I was 19

Answer 9

While I always had my doubts, ( still do, as an agnostic not an atheist), but rejected god as a result of thrid grade history ( whats that? eight years old?) I learned about the burning of the heritics and decided that religon was bull, and even if it wasn't, any god who would allow such things was not worthy of worship.

Answer 10

Erm, I never really started out believing in God, but my theistic streak was from around ages 15-18