I can only speak for myself so please do not be offended (fellow atheists) if I generalize.
I was born into christianity. I was extensively schooled in the church and bible. I had questions haunting my mind that were left unanswered by that instruction. When I openly asked them I was rebuked and punished for asking. As I became older more educated more experienced I sought the answer to those nagging questions. I found that the answer did not lay in christianity. I searched other religions and faiths. The answers were not there either. So there came a time that I realized that there was no god and that religions just made excuses instead of providing answers. But still, I did not give up on christianity. You see this is the period that all atheists struggle. They don't want to outcast or shunned. So we, I, poured through everything I could to justify a belief in a god. I could find none. I then realized that I would never find one. At that point on only at that point did I make the decision that there is no god. My decision wasn't hastily made. Do you know how hard it is to understand that your core belief, that everything you have been taught, that the very society in which you associate is basically wrong? It isn't easy or trivial. So when christians come here and claim that they have new proof that god is real, you can see just how skeptical we atheists, that I am going to be. Because we've seen it all before. We've done it all before. There is nothing new other than the wording. All these new approaches don't meet a minimum requirement of proof, they never do.
So don't offer the bible as proof, we have scoured not only YOUR bible but just about every bible ever written. Don't offer the "just look around you, idea. Observation is only one step in proof and not even close to meeting the requirement of proof. Don't proffer that things seem to be a certain way and then claim a god made them that way. You are leaving out two vital steps.
1) Proof that there is a god.
and
2) That said actually did those things.
A leap of faith is not proof, it is an excuse for not having proof.
Also, it isn't the onus to disprove a god. The responsibility is on those that believe in a god to prove their god.
One final thing. We all rail about the atrocities committed in that name of christianity or not. The fact is that humans caused all those crimes no matter why they did it.
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An excellent post.
Great post!
I am likely quite a bit younger than mykob4. I come from a family that was inherently not very religious, we certainly did not waste our time on sunday morning going to a church. Living in a more remote area in my younger years with limited TV, I really did not get exposed to the concepts of god/religion much at all until my mid teen years when my family moved to the city.
By then I had the facilities to weigh concepts based on available evidence. Just like I was at that age, able to dismiss Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and perhaps more importantly, ghost and monsters in my closet/under the bed, I was easily able to dismiss the god idea. Although it did create some confusion for me when I realized so many others did believe in it.
Sort of a: "did not your parents tell you that is god idea not real either and explain why?" type of moment for me. "Didn't your develop the facilities to separate the obvious BS from reality for yourself without your parents guidance at this point? What happened that cause you to miss this basic life skill??"
Hey Mykcob4,
How interesting. I crossed the same ground, though via a slightly different route and timing. Ended up at the same place, though.
Thanx for all your replies. I would actually like to hear how all of you became atheists. My story does not reflect the entire spectrum.
In particular, I would like to read about when and how the "struggle" went. If anyone would like to share.
It seems to me that believers think that we atheists just wake up one day and arbitrarily decide to not believe in god. They have no idea how long and how hard that decision really is for some of us. They also think that in some way we must have been or traumatized by a priest or something to become an atheist.
My family was Catholic when I was younger. I was baptized without my knowledge. When I was around 8 I had First Communion and went to confession. At 11 years old I began to question the myths they were teaching me in Catechism. I argued with the priests and nuns. At 11 I stopped going to confession. It was 1970 and I had a lot of cultural support to question authority. At 13 years old I was listening to John Lennon's song "Imagine". I turned it into a thought experiment. I went outside and looked into the sky and imagined only sky, no heaven above or hell below. That made sense and I liked the way it felt. I was an atheist throughout high school. While I was in high school my parents became Pentecostal. I did not travel that path with them. In my twenties I became enamored of Eastern Mysticism. I ended up initiating into a very hippyish Sufi order. That lasted a couple of years and then I fell into what could be called Apetheism. I just let god thoughts fall into File 13. I became a more outspoken atheist on-line in my 50's. With people like Roy Moore gaining success and ISIS/ Al Quaeda I feel I need to present my personal atheism in protest. I avoid religious controversy at work and around my home. My family is very religious but they don't bother me with it anymore. I think Christian testimonies are really fucking boring. I feel my atheist testimony is only slightly more interesting.
Thank you for sharing such a great post.
I would like to add that a god (like anything else) must first be defined before being proved. I think Abrahamic god(s) and all other gods currently defined have been effectively disproved - unless one thinks it reasonable that Zeus, witches and fairies all be presumed to exist unless "scientifically disproved". We know much about the origins of the Babble, Koran and Torah and how monotheism and Christianity came to be so widespread.
Myke,
The crux of your post to me is, “Do you know how hard it is to understand that your core belief, that everything you have been taught, that the very society in which you associate is basically wrong?”
Perhaps because of the weight inherent in that sentiment, it took me almost 60 years from my earliest indoctrination until I finally challenged it. I never was very religious, it was just something that was there in my mind. To deal with the cognitive dissonance, most of the time God/religion was walled off in its own little compound, because lots of the beliefs that I had been taught just didn’t make sense to me.
I have to thank my religious sister in law, Mindy. She expressed to my wife that she was worried that we didn’t attend church. My wife said, “Well, Alembe has some concerns about God.” To which she replied, “Well, he’s a scientist, he can research it.” And, some months later, I did.
I started by searching for “Scientific evidence for God.” Most of the results were God of the Gaps arguments, statements filled with non-sequiturs and other rubbish. Then I looked at the earliest history of Yahweh. I discovered that he was just a warrior god of the ancient Hebrews, one of a pantheon of gods, equal to Bale, and had a wife Asherah. All of these lesser gods were below the great god El (as in Israel).
With the realization that the One God that I’d been taught about (God/Jehovah/Yahweh) was just a jumped-up junior warrior god, everything fell apart. If God was not real, then everything else, the Bible, Jesus, heaven and hell all became irrelevant and non-sensical. At that moment of realization, I became an atheist. The cognitive dissonance and all those religious disparities just evaporated from my mind and I felt a tremendous sense of liberation and inner peace.
Initially I felt a little “naked” because there was no God watching over me, but I got over that. Additionally. I had to come to terms with the fact that there is no heaven. As a consequence of that, I decided to live and enjoy every moment of life to the fullest, because it’s all we have.
I love your posts, guys. My humble contribution.
When I was a kid, my father already called himself agnostic and my mother (who usually made the decissions on our education) was a non-practicant Christian Catholic. I took Religion at school until I was 11, and I also attended church class (twice a week for two years); I recieved Communion at 8, and hold weekly communion for several more. When I was 10, fundamental questions began to chase me.
My mother is too nice to strangers, so for a while, we had two Jehova's Witnesses once a week for coffee, pastries and some scripture at home, and they used to leave some free pamphlets. I kept them apart from my dad's sight.
That year, I eagerly read the Bible by myself for the first time. I was looking for answers. I was trying to prove myself that God was real. I couldn't finish the Old Testament. The morals were so wrong...The New Testament was less gore and easier to read, and even more fun those JW's pamphlets, but thanks to the good Old Testament, I was already out of the bubble. I told my mum that was it and I changed Religion class to Ethics. My best choice ever.
In my teens I loved to read ancient European myths, or about Asian religions, and I called myself agnostic (and even pantheist for a while) until I was 30 or so and I had always avoided religious debate, because I thought it was polite and proper. Most of my best friends and relatives are Roman Catholic Christians; some profess a different religion, and only a few atheists or agnostics. I have always worked surrounded of RCs and some Muslims.
A few years ago, thanks to the New Atheists, and a dear Peruvian devout Christian friend of mine, my usual counter-partner in debates for a couple of years, I realize how important is to be labeled as atheists and to engage into conversations. I still stay semi-closeted to some part of my family, but I don't lie when I'm confronted. When it comes to oppression, we must learn from other minorities' Civil Rights movements, such as gay people: coming out of the closet, with proud, in countries were our lives are not at risk, it's the best long term global strategy, if we expect to be taken into account in politics such as education, laws, use of public space, etc. and if we want our countries to openly criticize and press on those where apostasy is punished.
(edited)
Awesome are there more?
I was raised with bible stories being presented as fictional parables; not unlike the three little pigs and the old lady who lived in a shoe. Then later when I was sent to Sunday school, I remember being shocked and a little scared when I realized there are people who took those stories to be factual accounts (even some adults!). I don't remember when I learned the word atheist and realized it described me; my moment of realization was that first day of Sunday school.