Two questions for Atheists with religous upbringings.?

Question

These are really for people that were brought up with religions then became Atheists in later life.

1) When you started to doubt/stopped believing the things you had been brought up with, did you go through a stage of Agnosticism? Was it long or short, did you explore many other religions or spiritual beliefs before you concluded Atheism(if you did)?

2) Did you encounter a paradigm shift, or massive change in your prioritys upon comming to your conclusion? Can you describe it if you did?

I am just curious.

Answer 1

1) I'm still in the Agnosticism stage (for over 30 years), and I expect to remain there. In fact as far as I'm concerned I'm not an atheist, and, judging by your question, you'd probably say I wasn't either, and most dictionaries and ordinary speakers of English would seem to agree. But there are a lot of atheists, and some agnostics and believers, who would say I'm a Weak Atheist, because according to their definition, 'Atheist' means the same as 'non-theist'.

2) I had long been a skeptical Roman Catholic basically kept in the fold by what is called Pascal's Wager (though I'd never heard of the term, and would have simply called it fear of the possibility of their really being a Hell). In the end, I just got embarrassed having to go to confession every time I masturbated just on the remote chance that confession would save me from eternal agony in Hell if I died, probably in a motorbike accident, with the unconfessed 'mortal sin' of masturbation on my soul, as the Roman Catholic Church taught at the time (and perhaps officially still does, though quite likely it's now embarassed into teaching it so quietly that many Catholics never get to hear the teaching). Of course I only became an agnostic, but, as already mentioned, some would say that makes me an atheist.

Perhaps 15 years later I experienced a paradigm shift in my attitude to Hell-religions like Christianity and Islam when I concluded that they were basically Unwitting Devilworship, since it is literally infinitely evil of their 'God' to inflict or permit people to suffer eternal agony in Hell. (As usual, I must emphasize that none of this should be taken as in any way justifying persecution of such religious people, who are mostly misguided (in my view) but decent people. For more on all this, see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Christianity_As_Unwitting_DevilWorship/ ).

But if anything this paradigm shift has actually made me less atheistic - the apparent perversity of this situation seems to suggest explanations a lot more perverse than Natural Selection, which should favor intelligence, which is hardly the word to describe a species half of whom seem to be unwittingly worshipping the devil and the other half of whom seem to be failing to notice and/or protest. And there are many other instances of seeming perversity in this world, which I won't go into to save time and space.

Answer 2

I started reading about Kabbalah (or however you spell it) and then reading some books by Deepak Chopra. I guess you could call this agnosticism, because they preach a kind of "mysticism", and it may have helped me transition.

This lasted about a year or two, then I was back to questioning again...

I didn't have a paradigm shift. I just stopped going to church. I never considered this a very large part of who I was, so I just found different activities to be a part of... no big deal. I haven't really "concluded" atheism, partly because I think most atheists are too smug. I am open minded to different beliefs, and I like the ideas I encountered at the beginning of my questioning. Simutaneously, I despise the other end of the spectrum (religious fundies). There is not enough evidence for either side, and everything had to have started somehow, so it is smart to question where it all began...
No one has won this arguement yet; but I'm not changing my opinion on this without good reason, and no religion has a very clear line of thinking. At least as an atheist, you get to use your own judgement and rational.

Answer 3

1) I went through a 3 year long period of agnosticism. First I identified myself as a Christian Humanist because it seemed more like how I really felt about things, but I was still worried about the consequences of not being Christian. So I kept it in the title. Then I realized that was stupid so I became agnostic. I think I knew for quite a long time that I was an atheist but (like the saying) I didn't have any balls so I just called myself agnostic. Eventually I realized that I wasn't experiencing any emotional or intellectual fulfillment just sitting on the fence, and I was finally able to embrace my atheism.

2.) I didn't really change much after my conclusion. I began to appreciate life more and I felt more free but I didn't go through any major existential crises or anything, probably because it was a belief that had been germinating for a long time. Though I like to think that the paradigm shift has just begun and I will continue to change in how I view the world.

Answer 4

Even as a very young child, when the religious indoctrination was forced upon me, I had serious doubts.

It was ALWAYS a conflict in my mind that Jesus loved me but if I didn't behave I was going to hell. Even at the tender age of four I knew that something wasn't right. That wasn't love to me then and it sure isn't love to me now.

Took me awhile to sort it all out though. The guilt alone took a couple of decades to get rid of. It was a lot easier when I stopped going to church. Once the weekly dose of guilt was eliminated I could see things a bit clearer.

So in answer to your question the GUILT was the obstacle I faced in trying to determine the truth. And the truth is I probably am still an agnostic but politically I am an atheist. I think that religion is so damaging that I never want to be associated with it's philosophy. The spiritual message is valuable though. "Do unto others, thou shalt not kill."

Religion, however, is so manipulative and self-serving that I cannot in good conscious support the ideology.

That has been a life-long challenge, to find the "truth" as I see it. That's all that matters, to me anyway. I really could care less if people believe as I do. I do care that others try to FORCE their interpretations on unsuspecting people, like children, who may NEVER outgrow the guilt.

Peace.

Answer 5

1. Since agnosticism is making a different claim than atheism, I imagine you could say I went from being a Christian to an agnostic Christian to an agnostic atheist. I now say simply 'atheist' because the unknowability of a deity is sort of folded into the evidence-against file. I didn't explore any other religions, although I did read quite a bit about several of them.

2. Not really, moving from monotheism to atheism is really just subtracting belief in the unsubstantiated. It was only slightly different from figuring out that the Tooth Fairy was my mother.

Answer 6

1. Of course, I did not go straight from Christian to atheist. There was a short agnostic period in between. During that period, I asked questions of religious elders and explored the basics of other religions. But my questions basically drew three answers: "read the Bible", "pray" and "have faith". Those are not satisfactory answers to me. And I quickly gave up of religious belief in general because they all seemed to asking me to believe things that were unsupported and illogical. I started doubt at around age 10 and dropped my faith completely by age 12. I'd consider myself and agnostic atheist, believing that God is either nonexistent or unknowable.

2. As I matured mentally, I started to place a much higher value on rationality and introspection. It didn't feel good or secure to just believe what my family believed anymore. I needed good reasons to believe, reasons that made sense to my own logic. At this time, I also found myself become more studious and less concerned about what other people thought.

Answer 7

Well, I was raised a militant Christian. The more I saw how everyone else had the only right religion though, the more I questioned. I finally became an agnostic and later an athiest, and then a born-again agnostic discordian which is where I am now.
I shifted paradigms hundreds of times, and continue to do so now.

Answer 8

1.) I was about nine when I figured out my devoutly religious parents were enormous hypocrites because they had lied to me about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. I immediately suspected they were also lying about God, but couldn't figure out why they kept going to church. During this time I was an agnostic. I was twelve when I finally figured out that my parents themselves were deeply deluded about God. That's when I became an atheist. I wanted nothing to do with a superstition that destroyed people's minds the way I had often witnessed Christianity reduce otherwise normal adults to babbling idiots.

2.) I was also twelve when I started my "escape fund" so that I would eventually be able to escape from my parents. When my family "got Jesus" it destroyed my happy home and drove me away from my parents. Dad began beating me with either a leather strap or a plywood paddle to teach me "respect" for his and God's authority. Mom graduated from speaking in tongues and rolling on the church floor to become a full blown hallucinating schizophrenic. I've hated both my parents and organized religion ever since. I'm sixty now and my parents have been dead for about twenty years. Not a day goes by that I don't remember how much I still hate them for my rotten abusive childhood.

I hope this satisfies your curiosity.

Answer 9

I went through a long stage where I explored, studied and learned all I could about all religions. I went from agnostic straight to skeptic. Atheism denotes proof of non existence of a deity. I remain skeptical, and not believing, due to a lack of proof.

I experienced a full blown crisis of faith, a severe paradigm shift that left me a fully unconvinced skeptic. Besides being a skeptic I am also philosophically a cynic.

Oh yeah, thanks for the reasonable question.

Answer 10

1) I did go through a stage of agnosticism - mostly when I was looking into other faith systems. It was pretty short lived, compared to my prior life as a Christian and my current one as an atheist.

2) Well, believe it or not, I was never this nice of a person...I was an angry, hateful, alcohol and drug abusing person when I was a believer. The only "epiphany" I ever had was that I was killing myself slowly, and that this was the only chance I was ever going to have on earth, so Id better clean up my act. Wasnt a massive change - but surely a positive one.