What made you become an atheist?

Question

Was it a process or a sudden moment of revelation?
Did you suffer at all?

Dear A bloke no I am not having a dig. It is a genuine question. I have recently become an atheist .

Answer 1

It was definitely not sudden, and yes, I suffered terribly during the process. It was traumatic for me for a while. (Not as much becoming atheist, but FIGHTING what I really believed was traumatic. Giving up everything I was used to was also very difficult.)
I was raised a Christian, and I had a VERY strong faith growing up. If you had told me when I was a child, (or even a teenager) that someday I would be atheist, I probably would have put your lights out. lol.
It's just that the older I got, the more questions I started to have. Things just started to not make sense, and other things just were too crazy sounding for me to find them believable. I started to think that the beliefs we held were really not all that different than the beliefs of any other religion from any other time or place. The stories themselves might be different, but the basic jist of it was we believed in an invisible super-being living in a magical world in the sky. We believed that this magical being impregnated a virgin, who then gave birth to a human/God. (Same idea that you find in many Greek myths.) I started to think it just seemed sort of, I don't know...primitive to still be believing in and bowing down and worshiping gods. (I'm sorry...I don't mean that to sound insulting. It's the most honest way I can describe my feelings.) Now religion had been such an important part of my life growing up, and I fought tooth and nail against losing that faith. It's very, VERY hard to give up something that had been such a big part of you. I can't tell you how much time I spent consulting preachers, and talking with fellow Christians, and researching, and studying. I read the Bible cover to cover twice. I also studied the beliefs of other religions, to help understand other belief systems better. Well, I became very educated about religion, but I no longer believed. It actually took years for me to finally be able to admit that I was atheist. Once I was able to admit it, though, I became perfectly comfortable with it. I am now completely at peace with my beliefs.

Answer 2

You don't become an atheist, you are born an atheist !
It's only after you are spoon fed religion that you become something else.
When you get older you can decide for yourself, if not already brain washed, you can choose what to believe.
Imagine that you are an adult who has never heard of any religion or faith, but you are clever ie sciences,maths,language etc aware [Impossible I know, but try to imagine the scenario] I come to you and tell you a big invisible being made you, he had a son who was born of a virgin, died, buried, back to life after days, left the planet earth and went into the sky to a place called Heaven that no one has seen but in it live men like creatures with wings called angels... well I think you get the picture!!
Your unpolluted commonsense and acquired knowledge would tell you this is nonsense ! Unfortunately our brains are polluted at a very young age and we can not distinguish between reality and the spoofed rhetoric, and for those people I feel truly sorry.

Answer 3

Nothing. No one is born religious.
Humans are taught religions.
Once again, if you were born on a deserted island and survived to become self-sufficient, you wouldn't know about "God" because there would be no one to teach you.
You wouldn't be exposed to ANY religions.
Think about it.
It is human nature in the world we live in to try to make sense of the things around us but the reality is that which you would learn if you were on that deserted island.
Just because millions of people believe it doesn't make it true. It only proves the human ability to communicate and tell stories.
Humans are tribal and have a need to connect with each other. The belief in a "superior being" helps this process along.

Answer 4

I realized I didn't believe in any gods. Simple as it sounds, that was it. There was no trauma, no anger, no suffering. I sorta thought as a kid that I believed in god. I listened to an argument one time, one of the basics, in which a theist was arguing the universe couldn't have been here forever, it must have been created. When asked where the creator came from he said He'd been here forever. I started thinking about the other arguments for and against god existing and realized that I didn't believe in God and saw no compelling reason to change my mind. It wasn't quite all of a sudden, but it was a relatively rapid and painless process. I was about 11 by the way and have still, many MANY years later, found no evidence to cause me to change my mind.

Answer 5

I'm not an atheist, but i know some who are and they in a moment of revelation realise they don't believe anymore and start to question things that to them are relevant, none of my athiest friends have suffered at all : ) but they say they feel a whole lot better for it!!

Answer 6

I was always an atheist/agnostic.

My parents were agnostic, so I was never indoctrinated into a religion. I was very much aware of the Judeo-Christian belief system though.

Never saw any reason to believe it.
Never saw any reason why god needs to exist.
Saw lots of reasons why any god that does exist is not as it is described in the Abrahamic holy books.
Saw lots of reasons why early man would invent gods, and how they would evolve into a form like the Abrahimic versions.

So, god, like unicorns mermaids and dragons, is an invention of the human mind and not of the real world.

Answer 7

Common sense made me become an atheist. In my opinion it just seems absurd to believe in God. It was a process. I used to attend a synagogue tri-weekly and had my bar mitzvah.

After thinking for a while, I just can't make sense of there being a God. Finally, one day I made the decision that I don't believe in God at all and I have never felt better.

Answer 8

i'm certainly not suffering and it wasn't a sudden moment i was born an athiest like all of us, i live for reality, what's here and now, i believe religion is for the weak minded, 'god' is a fall back for people who aren't strong enough to deal with life outside the church, by all means have faith but in those people who you love and are around you that you can see and feel, not the pages of a man made book.

Answer 9

It was a process, and a very gradual on e at that. I can honestly say I suffered less when I gave up on trying to make the pieces of the puzzle fit in a way that was never going to make sense to me.

Answer 10

It was more a sudden moment of revelation. The best way I can think of to describe it is like tearing off a blindfold and finally being able to see...