I really questioned religion as a child, but due to symptoms I experienced from mental illness, I wasn’t able to fully call myself an atheist until my early twenties.
One commenter on a previous post explained that a gruesome and far-fetched story from the Bible made them stop believing in god at a very early age.
I had very similar feelings as a child. I’ve always felt that the bible was filled with fairytales and fables and even as a kid I didn’t take them very seriously. It’s an interesting book but nothing more.
People, where I live, tend to take the Bible quite literally. It’s like with spirituality — this one area in their life — they throw all common sense out the window. If you took stories from the bible, took out god and Jesus, and put it in a different context, people would say you’re crazy for believing in it.
We have friends of the family that didn’t tell their kids about Santa because they thought when they questioned the existence of Santa, they would question the existence of Jesus, too. That really says something, doesn’t it?
I probably should have posted this in the other thread, but it goes in here, too: as a child, it was very obvious to me that the adults didn’t want us around. Kids know when adults don’t like them. Around the time I was 7 or 8, it occurred to me that I was even *less* worthy simply because I was born a girl. It was the early 1970s and we had seen the movie Free to Be You and Me in school and popular tv shows were exploring the idea of women taking a larger role in life than simply being mommies and household drudges. It was obvious to me that Mary Richards was the smartest and hardest-working person in the newsroom yet she was always trying to smile at the men and flatter their egos. Little-me thought it was utterly wrong that the highest honor I could achieve in the church was getting to clean up everyone’s messes.
I kept getting the message from all the adults around me that God wanted women to be less than men, and see it was right there in the Bible. That’s when little-me decided that the Bible was probably written by men and this God character was just someone made up so men could get their own way in everything.
As for the stories in the bible; I never thought they were any more real than the bedtime stories my mother read to us. I’m saddened that so many people apparently think they’re all real and all the Word of God ™, and as Ned Flanders once said, “Even the parts that contradict the other parts!”
God sending bears to maul children who mocked a prophet’s baldness was probably overkill, no matter what I think of crappy teenagers.
yes that child’s prayer : now i lay me down to sleep …..if i should die before i wake….terrifying
I appreciate your whole post here but that last paragraph particularly made me smile. When my son was about 6 or 7 he started asking me questions about Santa and within months asked me somewhat similar questions about Jesus and at that time I had to pause when I realized my answers to each sounded pretty much the same. I think that had cinched my journey towards absolute undoubting atheism.
@3: Yeah, that prayer never sat well with me, especially the part about dying, and me in my bedroom all dark and scary….