I started seeking a better “truth” from my early teens because it just didn’t make any sense in the Catholic church. I tried other Christian sects, then other religions, then non-religions, and so on. Then I spent a long time just not thinking about it much (but still ticking forms as “Christian&rdquo. Then I had my daughter which started me scrutinizing how religions treat women and it was the final brick to fall. I just couldn’t let anyone treat her like that. I was surprised, though, how hard it was for me to definitively give up the idea that there is an afterlife. It was quite scary at first. It sometimes still is.

Former Roman Catholic. I left when I realise a just a merciful God would not let his agents and apostles fuck little children and abuse authority for their own near-sighted gain.

Evil cometh from within

I was raised in a very religious family, my father was a minister of what I would now classify as a god bothering religion. So attendance at church every week was simply mandatory. Plus all the other church functions that came along were also part of the regular "spiritual" diet. I think that by the time I was about 15 I had come to the conclusion that the tenets of the religion were pure fantasy, and the organisation, was nothing less than a shrewd business operation. The week that I finished high school, I managed to leave school, leave home, and leave the church all at the same time. It was quite liberating not to have to put up with the facade of church for the first time in about 3 years since my realisation of what it was all about.

I questioned it since childhood. I was raised in religion but the stories they told never made sense. I always questioned it and people couldn't answer me. I was skeptical. In high school, I did a research paper on the origin of religion, that included a lot of research. I guess I just didn't really believe it.

I've described my experiences in answers to other questions, so for those who read them already this may be repetitious.

I had doubts from when I was todl that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny weren't actually real. Later in high school, in a church study group we were reading the old testament, while at the same time in school we were reading Greek Mythology. The similarity in the way stories were told, increased doubts. The Bible has a few really ridiculous things like a talkign snake and a talking donkey, as well as a couple of mythical beast (monsters), not to mention a woman turnign into a pillar of salt. It didn't seem all that different from Greek myths, yet they were supposed to actually be true.

In retrospect, the oly reason I kept goign to church for so long was not because i believed, but because religion provides a sense of community, and I did't wan tto lose that sense of community. As animals we evolved in trives and villages to which we felt a sense of belonging and humans ae social animals, so to lose that sense of belonging to a community is scary.

To me, it was not worth going through the motions and pretending to believe just to keep that sense of belonging, because that was the only reason why I had stayed for as long as I did I just could not believe in the "magical thinking" that comes with religious belif.

I had begun questioning my Christianity after leaving high school. I had always wondered why I had to go through these church rituals in order to prove myself as a good person. I read articles and watched YouTube videos of one guy and his disconnection from religion. I had then released myself from religion and became an atheist. Religious stuff I had in my room, I put in the garage, but was later confronted by my parents for why I did it. I skirted around the question, afraid to admit that I stopped believing in God, and pressured to put the artifacts back in my room after a long talk. I inadvertently told my mom about my lack of religion one day when we were driving back home from work after she told me to pray for my dad who had serious health problems at the time. She flipped out on me when I said it did not make sense to pray because prayer doesn't seem reasonable to heal someone, and she cried most of the way home. Put under pressure, I apologized and told her I would "change my ways," but even after going to church more following the debacle, I still considered myself an atheist. I felt deeply pained not because I offended my mom, I felt pained for lying to her and myself, that I couldn't be open about my lack of religion and feel proud of it. Now that I'm living on a college campus, I feel more open about my atheism and part of the Secular Student Alliance, but still closeted around my family and old high school friends.

My Exodus from Bible Believing

While watching a cable channel program on the “out of Africa” theory of human history which asserts that all humans emerged from a single place on the earth, I was reminded that I also believed that, and not only just us humans, but also all the animals on the planet. That single place being the landing place of Noah’s ark.

On the program it was easy to see how humans could get from a single location to all the continents of the Earth because at one time the continents were merged together and moved to their current locations over millions of years. However, we do not have that much time between now and the time of Noah’s ark. According to the Bible it was thousands of years ago because it provides a genealogy from Jesus all the way back to Adam. It is a simple matter of counting the generations and doing the math. So now I had a new mystery to solve. How did humans AND animals get from one continent to all the others within thousands of years?

While working on this mystery not only did I come to realize that it had no reasonable solution, but I came to realize the Bible is loaded with many other problems. I was stunned and spent a great deal of time in very intense prayer. I had been working to serve as a minister and could not just turn around and give up on believing in the Bible.

An example of another problem within the Bible is the genealogies of Jesus. There are different genealogies for Jesus in Matthew 1 and Luke 3. Between the two genealogies not only do the names not match up but the number of generations between Jesus and King David do not match either. The number of generations is not even close. So I had started with one perplexing Bible mystery and ended up with many.

Ah, but what about Jesus? Even if the Bible has problems, certainly he is still a savior, isn’t he? Well, 1 Peter 3:18-22 connects the salvation brought by Jesus to Noah and the flood. So the original problem I was working on I found to be linked to my Savior. What from there?

It all unwound from there. And over a period of time of study and prayer the Bible slowly slipped away as part of my belief system.

I attended Catholic schools because of the quality of the public schools at the time. My parents were non practicing and I was indoctrinated by the nuns. As a young teen I did research and became an atheist. My two sisters followed suit because of my influence. My parents also gave up all belief. The sister who married, is married to an atheist and her 21 yr old daughter is an atheist. I really am fortunate to have an intelligent and skeptical family.

I was raised in a home with fundamentalist Christians. But I don't remember ever believing in God. I just remember not telling anyone what I really thought.

Something I shared in an other post... I was about 7, in Sunday School. They told me Jesus wants to save me. They asked me if I could hear him knocking at the door of my heart. I cried and said yes and they were moved and gave me kool-aid in a paper cup and a cookie. But I cried because I felt nothing and I said yes because I was ashamed and afraid. Over the years the more I doubted the less I feared damnation. It wasn't till my teens I realized I could find my own purpose in life. And I was in my 20s when I realized the oblivion of death was not infinite darkness but the same oblivion I was born from and would someday return to. "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." - Mark Twain

welcome to the real world its a lot better

I was baptized Lutheran as a baby. However, my mom was always very accepting of the idea that I should go to a bunch of different churches and decide for myself what I felt to be the right path for me.

I can remember questioning a lot of the things I read in the Bible that didn't make sense to me when I was around eight years old and, though I continued to believe in god until I was 20, I think that was the start of my eventual atheism.

I stumbled on the "Religion is Bullshit" bit by George Carlin one night on a YouTube binge. That was the beginning of the end of my belief in a deity. Through Carlin, I found Christopher Hitchens. Through Hitchens, I found Richard Dawkins. And before I knew it, I was quoting some of the most genius voices of our time in debates/discussions and once I saw that other people really had no logical argument against any of the points I was making, I saw religion and the belief in god for the brainwashing tactic it truly was. All of that combined with the untimely passing of my aunt from breast cancer led to my departure from religion and belief in god.

I was raised Catholic, went church ever Sunday and even attend Catholic school for boys. It was there that I started on the road to being Atheist. I had a religion teacher that gave us both side of the story, the bible and science. Then from there I started asking question. I went from catholic to spiritual to agnostic and finally atheism. It is a long road that starts with questions that have no logical answer.

Fallacy and hypocrisy became more apparent over time so much so that remaining was untenable. I was in my late 20's.

My road to non-belief took almost a decade too. I was raised Christian, but I was interested in supernatural and psychic topics that weren't covered in my religion. I did some exploring until I landed in the "new age". I realized I wasn't Christian anymore at 16.

I was into 3 different online new age groups over six years, lead by people who "channel angels", which I'm now ashamed to admit. xD

I slowly began to realize at age 22 that I had no real reason behind those beliefs, and it's only this year at age 24 that I can finally admit that I now reject them.

The Atheist v.s. Christian debates helped me a lot too. I still watch them a few times a week.

Welcome to the group. I cannot really relate to you experience of leaving a previous religious life as I rejected religion a very young age(8) it was a conscience decision because I found it relied on magic and magic had no logical evidence to support it.
As a kid it was a rough ride living in the bible belt of Alberta, I often found myself ostracized for my lack of belief but, I was never one to sucrose to peer pressure over anything especially over something I felt was total nonsense.

Hey Ladystardust96. I am writing a short blog on why and how I became atheist and I have published 2 of the 3 parts. If you are interested in reading it just follow the link.

[ateowear.com]

I definitely understand being in denial. I'm just glad you came to your senses early. Being part of an extremely catholic family it took me to the age of almost 30 years old to finally grow a pair and admit to myself and everyone around me that I am an atheist. Best decision thus far. Enjoy the blog.

Damian

Christians always assume that atheists are just too lazy to attend church or read the Bible, and that we all just up and decided to hate god one day (the difficulty of hating something you don't believe in aside). But really, I think when you've been raised in a religion, it's very difficult to completely confront and defeat your brainwashing, particularly when society in general is so steeped in religion. Most atheists I know were raised religious, and it took a lot of thought, study, reading, and even support and talking, to finally allow oneself to admit that you cannot believe.

I've always been a questioner, so I started young. But it wasn't until I started reading the Bible as an adult and trying to really reconcile all the contradictions I'd noticed but never examined that I feel like I officially "left" religion. But even then, I wasn't open about it. I didn't really become open about it until I found other people in my social circle who think the same way I do - people I had assumed were super religious! It's been a long journey. There wasn't one particular thing that made me leave, but a slew of little things that just do not make any sense.

Do most atheists lose their faith in adolescence? Are adults too trapped in their ways?
Perhaps adolescent rebellion gave me "permission" to challenge and reject orthodoxy. I was a real smart-ass, pompously proud of myself for outsmarting the alleged grownups.
It took years for me to recognize the full ramifications, and see what a profoundly different mental world I was now living in. It's a Copernican revolution.
Think carefully about what you believe and why. To be a believer, I would need answers to:
Exceptionalism (why my cult is better than everybody else's -- or, why my shit don't stink)
Theodicy
The Euthyphro Dilemma
The problem of scriptures (which to believe, and why)
Why the world looks exactly like what we'd expect a godless world to look like
Why Science seems to have power, and Faith does not
Why the stupidest people I see are mostly people of faith, and the stronger their faith, the crazier they seem to be
Why, when I ask, "Is this bullshit?" the answer always seems to be "yes".

Be a person of principle. Decide what your criteria for belief are, and apply them fearlessly.
And live by the First Commandment of Science: never believe anything more than 95%.

i am afraid my answer might not be of much direct help but perhaps it can offer a different perspective. i didn't have to lose faith since judaism, while definitely centered around what a god wants jews to do, isn't faith-based, in that, unlike christianity, your biggest joy isn't your faith and your biggest sin isn't losing faith. there is room for doubt. in fact, asking questions and doubting is very jewish lol. anyway, i was raised quite secularly and although i knew i was jewish and had something of a grip on what that meant, the religious part of it wasn't really discussed much in the house -- oh, we knew what the holidays were for and all that, but we didn't talk about god, or commandments (we have 613!) or any of that. so when i realized, age 15, there was no god, it wasn't like "oh no, i'm not a jew anymore!" the way the same realization for a christian really is a loss of faith and identity, and no leaving. i'm still a jew. i'm just an atheist, is all. so if your family is religiously christian, and/or your friends are, you may be in for some criticism, and you may have some residual guilt from everything you believed so long (don't succumb to it). i never had to go through any of that. i am learning, here, how traumatic it is for christians to find out they're atheists! (i don't call it becoming; as you did in your post, i call it realizing.)

g

Can you call my ex girlfriend and convince her how you stopped drinking the cool aid, and that life is now better.