A question for Atheists....Christians, be a little more compassionate and learn to love more.?

Question

I would like to start out by saying, I am a NON Judgemental Christian. I know everyone has their views and I am not here to convert you. Please spare me the insults!...lol, i know to you God doesn't exist and I can understand that. My question is to you though, at what point did you realize you didn't believe in God? How old were you when you made the decision? What was the turning point in your lives that said no way God isn't real? I would love to hear details...thanks guys and take care.

Answer 1

Strange but true: those who have loved God most have loved men least.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, speech (1881)

Answer 2

It's a long story, but to make things short, when I was little, I would write letters to the tooth fairy. My dad would sneak into my room and answer the questions I'd ask, then slip the paper back under my pillow. I thought that once my grandfather passed away, he too would be able to answer my questions in this manner, so I wrote to him and prayed every day. When I never got a response, I began wondering why - why wasn't God answering my prayers? Why couldn't I receive a sign from my Grandfather? Why would he let me cry for so long without so much as giving me the tiniest reassurance? I read the Bible, I asked questions, and as I got older I began to see the flaws of my belief in Christianity. My faith dissipated and eventually, I was agnostic, and then, an atheist.

Things just never made sense once I was old enough to see things for as they are in the world. I no longer had the sugar coating of instant belief in the "comforts" religion taught me. Logical thought and rational decision making brought me where I am now, though I still respect and appreciate religion of any kind, and the people who believe in what I don't.

Answer 3

I was about 40 years old and began looking into other religions of the world. Sometimes because of friends of different religions and other times because the Bible did not seem to make sense. I learned that some books were not added that it made sense to add and there were deliberate manipulations made by the Christian/Catholic church to control the poor and illiterate of the times. I do believe in a god, an all loving, caring being, but just not the one that I grew up learning about. However, I am grateful that I was taught.

Answer 4

I doubted, questioned, and starting using free thought right when I hit highschool. Religion was never really my thing, so obviously I had to do some research about it to find out what I was going through. Reading, researching, and using the world around me, I decided I was an atheist. I believe in myself, not what I am told. I believe in free will, love, and happiness. I strive to be a good person because I want to, not because I have to (to get into heaven or prevent going to hell.) I have more value to my life, because I realized an afterlife is just a crazy myth. Now, you can't prove a negative, but we have plenty of evidence to show that god's existance, atleast the god of the bible, it's faulty and ridiculous. Anyone who does enough thinking, questioning, research, and reasonsable thought will come to this conclusion.

Answer 5

I never believed in God, as I was not taken to Church when I was young. But once I heard enough about him (in middle school and high school from other friend's who were religious)...I decided it didn't make sense to me.

People need to believe in something, or they commit suicide. They have to find they have a purpose...or feel comfortable still searching for it. For some people, they find that purpose in the Afterlife- and sharing it with God.

For me, I find it in humanity and trying to better the environment. I went to a few different churches, but too much "burning in hell" was talked about in my opinion. I know that's not always the case...but even the person I'm staying with right now is Catholic and he has some religious things printed out next to my computer...and several of the lines start with "Fear of god leads to..." like wisdom and long life. To me that makes no sense. Why would I want to live my life in fear?

Inconsistences are numerous. If the Adam and Eve creation story is true, then the story about Cain can't be true. Everyone alive right now would be the product of incest. The Bible states that very few people will actually get into Heaven. So we're not completely guaranteed to get in even if we are "saved by Jesus".

Also, predestiny and "free will" make NO sense to me. God makes us knowing full well we're either going to heaven or to hell. And we can chose? What kind of choice is burn in hell, or spend forever worshipping God?

I don't know. I'm proud, but not in a bad way. I've overcome a lot of difficulty in my life, by my own will power and hard work. I don't believe anything mystical ever happened to intervene.

Two (overly used) quotes I leave with you. "Remember what it was like before you were born? Death is just like that." And, "Think about the reason you don't believe in all those other gods (like Odin, Ra, etc)...and just understand I just believe in one less than you do."

So to answer your questions simply. "Never, at least 9 when I decided for sure he didn't exist (after all, Santa was supposed to be real too :( ), and just the fact that anything I would "need" from God, I found I could achieve better if I spent my time getting up and DOING something instead of sitting around praying, going to Church, and "hoping" for better things.

Answer 6

Mmmm, I was about 18 or so. I went to college, and I had been questioning how illogical and unprovable Christianity was. It was also very patriarchal, which bothered me tremendously. I thought about it, agonized over it, and then... it drifted away from me like a soap bubble floating away into space, getting thinner and thinner, less and less substantial. I didn't want to go to hell, but all of the dogma just couldn't be true, it was too absurd to me that a real important God would care about the petty little stuff that we do. One of the main things about it that killed it for me was that there is no logic to the idea that an all powerful God would have set up a system like Earth, have created the people on it, knowing in advance that they were going to break his law, going ahead and setting up the system, watching them break his law, and then BLAMING them for breaking the law!!! It is just tooo unfair and ridiculous. It's like making a washing machine without an important widget in it, knowing that it will break when you plug it in, and then getting all mad when you plug it in and it breaks! Do you see what I mean?

Another thing that killed it for me was the notion that god had to have his son killed. Why? To atone for our sins, which he knew beforehand that we would have? Well, if god is all powerful, and he make all the rules, why did he make THIS rule about that the ONLY way for us bad sinners to be saved was if Jesus had to die? Who made up that rule????God???Why???Why not make a different rule, or no rule???

I anticipate that you will say, in response to my words, that God does things that are a mystery and that Christians just have to have faith and accept them. Well, I couldn't accept them and I decided I could not honestly call myself a Christian if the reason why I was doing so was to save myself from a hell that I didn't believe in. It was being spiritually dishonest.

So, I left. I am not an atheist; in truth, I am an agnostic, by which I mean that I believe that the notion of "god" is beyond my understanding, and I don't say there is or isn't one. I just say that I don't know, but that whatever there is, if anything, it is beyond my human understanding. I answered this bc I figured an agnostic was close enough!

Thank you for the question.. I tried to answer it respectfully, sometimes I get fervent, but that is all the capital letters were for, for emphasis, not disrespect!

Bright Blessings,
Lady Morgana )0(

Answer 7

It wasn't an overnight change for me. I just gradually found myself having less and less interest in my religion at the time. I was about 18 or 19. (On a side note, I had already long-since rejected Christianity for a variety of reasons, but I was still a believer in the existence of deity none the less).

The concept of deity eventually became something I simply no longer thought about. I think moving into an environment where I no longer felt I had to be defensive about my religion had a lot to do with it (before this I was living with my parents and going to a Catholic school, and again needless to say I was not a Catholic at this time).

When I found myself practicing ritual out of guilty feelings of obligation, rather than because it was something I desired to do, I knew it was time to move on. I came to realize that the concept of deity was no longer something I felt the need for, and also no longer something that I felt I needed to explain certain personal experiences (in fact, I found that it complicated issues and just added more inconsistancy).

Also, I realized what was really attracting me to religion in the first place (a love for organized ritual, the structure of dogma, the meditative joy of devotion, personal identity especially, etc.) and realized I could get those things without introducing deity into the picture.

Answer 8

I was raised in a Christian family and so was basically instructed to believe in God and pray. But in my preteen years, I really began taking a more thoughtful approach to philosophical matters. By about age 12, I occurred to me that God and religion made absolutely no sense to me, and that in order to explain the world around me in a religious context, I'd have to make up a whole bunch of excuses and rationalizations for a being who was supposed to be omni everything. It wasn't really any specific events that triggered this change within me. I'd just that say that, as I matured intellectually, I outgrew religion.

By the way, I appreciate the respectful and articulate way you asked this question of people who don't share your views. And I hope you don't disappoint me by picking a cut and pasting Bible quoter for best answer.

Answer 9

When I was 8 yrs old, I was told to pray to god when I was in trouble and needed help. Not trouble like when I did something wrong or anything like that. I was told that if i prayed, he would come and help me. That is a total crock, because when I was being raped at the age of 8, I called out to him and begged for his help, I got nothing. I had faith that he would help me, but sure as I am sitting here, he didn't help me. That's when I realized that I have been lied to, and learned never to be that gullible again.

Answer 10

I remember listening to stories from the Bible when I was about 8 or 9 and thinking, "Huh? That can't be true." Or something along those lines.

Despite this, I held onto my beliefs until I had left high school, but then I started reading more on the subject.

The more I learned, the more skeptical I became.

Answer 11

i'm a radical/strong atheist. though i was born and baptized as Roman Catholic. before, i was a radical theist. i get angry at people who don't pray properly and actually teach them. i pay close attention in cle class [Christian living education, i'm in a catholic school] and you can ask me anything about Jesus or God and i can answer you confidently. though my parents weren't religious enough...

since i was a child, i answered questions logically/rationally but never questioned my faith.

At the age of 10, still a theist, i asked myself why pray when you pray with no feelings and no meaning? and i really didn't understand WHY Jesus had to die for us. the teachers said that he died to save us from our sins. if he will save us from our sins doesn't that mean that there should be no hell since it'll be useless because Jesus will save us anyway? people always threatened other people that they will go to hell when they will no believe! and i didn't grasp the concept/story of Adam and Eve...

for years i didn't dwell much on my faith. but at the age of 13 i already started probing my teachers and arguing with them about religion. so i doubted, questioned found some unlikely answers and used logic. using the internet, people, my thoughts/knowledge and the bible... i became more of an atheist.