After seeing a few recent atheist videos and reading a few godless articles, I had a question: where are my natural-born, god-free from birth atheists at?
It’s just strange that all the popular atheists nowadays are people who deconverted — you know, like Matt Dillahunty and Paulogia — which is fine, they are good representatives, but I can’t relate. Other ex-Christians and ex-Muslims probably find them relevant and interesting, but they aren’t me. I never believed; I got shuffled through Sunday school more because it was free daycare for my parents, who had six kids wearing them out, and I would memorize Bible verses for the teachers, but that was just an exercise that would get me praise on Sunday. I never prayed, not even as a very young child, because it seemed stupid to me. Who’s listening? I didn’t expect a response from someone else inside my head.
My parents were not religious either, and neither did they ever pray or even go to church. My grandparents made me read from the Bible every Christmas, but do you think they ever went to church? Heck no. I didn’t know anyone, except the Sunday school teacher, who was particularly devout, and even the pastor, when I asked him about why I was going to church at all, just shrugged and said it was fine if I didn’t. (I wonder if he was deconverting himself — he later left that church).
This is not a complaint — atheists who deconverted are great, and an important part of the face of atheism. I am just feeling unrepresented. For instance, I don’t give a flying fuck about interpreting Bible verses or finding contradictions, but there’s a lot of atheist content on that sort of thing, which I find largely irrelevant. I enjoy stuff about humanism and science, which matters far more to me.
What about you? Are there more people here who never ever believed in Jesus or prophets or whatever, or more people who fought the good fight to escape from youthful misconceptions?
Hey, that’s me! I finally became a Buddhist because I thought I needed a moral center that was not Christian. But I’ve always thought the Bible was BS and Christians were deluded. And I never held with mystical crap.
I’m guessing this is me?
My parents went to church for a few years when we moved to AZ (and being 4 I don’t have more than a few hazy memories earlier than that, none involving anyplace outside our apartment in Chicago) so I vaguely remember some Sunday school classes. Then they stopped, and I was never subjected to religion again.
Always thought this God business was rather nebulous, but then I was never subjected to the kind of hard-core indoctrination most deconverted people have, nor was I ever shunned or chastised by anyone for not believing.
So I guess I sort of fell into athieism the way most people fall into Chritianity…by default.
I was taken to church (Church of England, so hardly a hotbed of religious fervour) pretty regularly as a kid. I remember sitting there once, wondering if I would believe this stuff when I was older. Never did. Just stopped going once I had a job and my own place.
I don’t think I ever believed. I remember saying in a Sunday School class that there was not enough room for all the animals on the Ark – it just did not make any sense to me. I tried to quietly pass as a believer because that was the community I lived in…but the people who talked about God talking to them always sounds crazy to me. (And they got upset and couldn’t explain how they knew that God was talking to them when I asked them. I was told that you had to have Faith, but that didn’t make any sense when I looked ‘Faith’ up in the dictionary.) I used to wonder if I was crazy because I have no awareness of this ‘God’ they talked about.
I spoke to god once or twice as a child, thinking how nice it would be have an on-the-go friend always at the ready. Deep down inside, though, I knew it was all horseshit.
Similar situation to PZ: religious grandparents, non-religious (maybe “spiritual” at times) parents, explicitly athiest me. Only went to church if I was visiting my grandparents or something, I can remember maybe a half dozen times throughout my childhood. Cant remember ever talked to a priest during that time. And now Im an evolutionary biologist.
Actually writing this while sitting on a break at a giant evolution conference. Yesterday, I had a conversation with one of our undergrads who is here at their first conference which I think might answer PZ’s question. They were raised in the Deep South of the USA, and washed up here in Montreal for university (the pronouns I am using for them give you enough of the explanation as for why). Having been raised in a God-soaked upbringing, they were absolutely floored at being in a conference of 2000+ people where “no one questioned evolution”. I first had to cavaet that there probably were some people there who partioned their personal religious beliefs and their scientific “beliefs” (I put that in air quotes because belief in those two phrases are not equivalent), since I knew of at least one off the top of my head. But I was largely stumped as for a followup, which I think is the answer to PZ’s question. For the undergrad, it was refreshing and exciting, a whole new world. They felt liberated and wanted to talk to someone about it. But I just… didn’t really care (that no one questioned evolution). Religious beliefs dominating my life, whether I share them or not, is not a problem I have have had to deal with. I wouldn’t talk to others, write a blog post, make a video, or otherwise spend part of my life communicating it, anymore than I would do the same for “Isn’t it amazing no one here is a flat earther?”
If athiesm has no exceptionality to it, you dont spend much time making it part of your identity. If you have deconverted, have always had to defend your non-religiousity in a very religious environment, or got caught up in “culture wars” surrounding religion because you studied evolution (tentatively putting PZ here unless he corrects me), it WOULD BE exceptional, and you communicate that to the world.
But for most of us “born athiests”… I think we just don’t give a shit.
Well, I’m kind of in between. My family did go to church and in fact my uncle (by marriage) was the pastor before we moved to another town. My mother taught Sunday school, although I think she mostly did it go get practice teaching because she wanted to go into that profession (and ultimately did). I performed in the Christmas pageant, all that. When I was 12, I wanted to be confirmed. Then when I turned 13 I just realized that it was all bullshit. My father and his parents weren’t religious and my mother mostly belonged to the church for social reasons so it was no big deal that I realized I was an atheist.
However, it is worth studying the Bible, and I have read it carefully. In fact I’ve been in the process of reading it chapter by chapter on my blog for a couple of years now. It’s important first of all as a central cultural document. It’s also a part of history. The history is inaccurate — in fact up until possibly Solomon it’s pretty much entirely fictitious. But the belief in the history has shaped real history, and still is in very important ways. It also records the history of how belief changed. The theology and ethnics of the Torah are quite different from what we get later on in the Tanakh, and of course the New Testament is more radically different although not as much as many people like to think. Finding the sources of Christianity in the Old Testament is a useful exercise. I’m not saying you have to find it interesting.
By the way, you might keep this in your back pocket. There is no mention of abortion anywhere in the New Testament. Jesus says nothing about it, neither do the epistles, and certainly not Revelation. There is exactly one mention of abortion in the Old Testament, in Numbers 5. It prescribes a ceremony for the purpose of inducing abortion in the case of an unfaithful wife. That’s all God ever had to say about it. Now, is that worth knowing?
That’s pretty much me. Short version: I grew up in rural areas of Pennsylvania and was sent to church and Sunday school but could never really believe it all, but there was no one to discuss it with at the time. Eventually through science, science fiction, and finally an essay by Isaac Asimov I decided I was an atheist.
I wrote up a much longer version on my blog about ten years ago: https://namelyjt.com/2015/08/20/2015-8-20-i-have-no-need/
I’m almost your age, PZ, and I think it would be difficult to find many USAians of our vintage who were never believers. I grew up in a town of less than 5000 people, but it had maybe 20-30 churches. Most of my teachers attended the same church my family did. It was the Methodist Church, and while it had a fairly easy-going philosophy, nevertheless it meant that virtually all the authority figures in my life were either true Christian believers or if they were atheists they kept quiet about it.
Even as my interest in science kept pointing out more and more logical fallacies in the Bible, I was still unsure about atheism until I read ‘Asimov’s Guide to the Bible’ at age 19 and finally understood that the Bible is very much a human invention.
Thank you PZ for asking: it’s been a discussion in our family for some time. Father converted to atheism when a student, from a strong Plymouth Brethren community in Scotland: he discovered “science” and I still have his dog-eared copy of Decent of Man. He left the village, got a degree (in geology…), went to England, met mum, had a family, and brought us up as simply not interested in religion. Perhaps he was actively, or even deeply atheist, having to cope with being ‘otherwise’ to his siblings, but we rarely saw this side; we were just not religious. In UK that’s not odd. A dull story perhaps, but I sense more relevance with his struggle and bravery in this freethought community; your blog, PZ, has helped me understand a little more of what he must have faced, leaving (or being cast out of?) a close and supportive fishing community and setting out into a strange, billion year old world, and a near infinite universe. Thank you.
Third generation atheist on one side, second generation on the other. A belief in a deity isn’t all that important to me, and so being an atheist isn’t particularly important either. It’s just who I am.
Fighting those people who are using religion to gain power or control others is important, but the fact that I’m an atheist in that battle isn’t. I know a lot of people who do believe in a deity who also fight against people using religion to control others or gain power. They are my allies. I’m not going to lump them into the same pot. Religion, as an structured set of beliefs, can be an enabler of those petty despots, but theism does not have to be.
I qualify. My father hated religion, churches, and pretty much everything about them. Mother’s family was mid-west Baptist, but he showed her the light early on. I’m older than PZ and don’t recall ever being inside a church, not even for a wedding. (I wait for the reception.) There won’t be any churchifying when I go either, I’ll be on a slab at Stanford med school.
I remember seeing God as an adult version of Santa Claus back when I still believed in Santa Claus. My parents were members of the United Church of Canada when I was growing up, but limited their god-talk to church, and switched to Presbyterianism once the other church changed hymns about religious prophets to being about the head masters of Canada’s United Church. But I never believed, and my conversion to atheism really had zero impact.
Laughed all the way through that Catholic thing they make you do when you’re 11 or so, collected my gifted TV from grateful parents, and generally never believed a word of their BS.
Yeah, they signed me up for Lutheran confirmation, the two-year long training in the faith that was a required indoctrination before you could take communion. I made it a few months before I decided it was all bullshit and gave up trying.
As far as I can recall, I’ve never been religious.
My parents didn’t go to church, and I went to a public school. So I was spared religious indoctrination. Some of the family on my father’s side were religious, but we were not particularly close.
To me, religion is just obviously false and always has been.
Natural atheist here. I used to call myself a “nothing” until forced to pick a category: https://medium.com/@metaform3d/my-life-as-nothing-37fb3125a147
DaveH @ # 6: But for most of us “born athiests”… I think we just don’t give a shit.
In which case(s), the word “atheist” may not fit as well as “apatheist”.
Retrospectively, I think I owe much of my godlessness to my parents having exposed me to Greek and Roman mythology, so that I had an appropriate mental pigeonhole prepared when encountering the ambient culture of Christianism. Or maybe it comes from our family’s rural semi-isolation, such that I didn’t feel much need for socio-ideological conformity at all costs.
Previous beleiver. Became fully atheist about 21.
I’ve never been religious. Closest I came was at 15 when I bumped into some nice Protestants with a booth at the county fair. An hour later I met a Quaker peace activist at the Fellowship of Reconciliation booth and never looked back.
I was baptized into the Catholic church as in infant and that is the totality of my churching. I am well versed in the New Testament and familiar with the Old. I’ve worked with devout Christians on homelessness, peace & economic justice issues & for whom I have great respect. The Deacon & parishioners from my father’s Catholic church were invaluable in the last months of his life. There are a whole lot of good moral people whom believe in a God. Interestingly, not one of them tried to proselytize me.
My atheism comes down to the fact prayer doesn’t work for me. Every time I’ve tried I got bored after about a minute & moved on to something more productive. Same thing goes for meditation. There is no supernatural for me, no metaphysic. It’s just not an issue and never has been. The real world is more than enough for me.
Born atheist, here. Come to think of it, aren’t we ALL born atheists? Atheist parents; religious maternal grandparents. Paternal grandparents are a mystery. Allowed myself be talked in to going to church while in elementary school, and grandparents took me and siblings to church every Sunday when our parents left us with them, which was a LOT. None of the religious nonsense stuck with any of the three of us. My sister is somewhat friendly with religion while my brother and I are kind of hostile to it.
None of this has seemed to affect my social or professional lives (FWIW, I’m a bit of an introvert, mostly a loner), but I’ve mostly lived and circulated in tolerant territories. (Although I do remember one high school doofus asking me what kind of church atheists go to.) Noteworthy that the primary area where I grew up has taken an extremist turn. The friendly neighborhood drug store has been replaced with a gun store, sporting HUGE T***p and confederate flags. No doubt to celebrate Michigan’s long history in the confederacy.
Oddly enough, there is a lot of overlap between where From the Ashes of Faith now lives (Toledo) and where I grew up (just across the state line from it), yet Ashes’ experience as an open atheist in that area is very different from my own.
Now I live in a liberal college town, in a mixed neighborhood of races, religions, ages, and sexual orientations, so nobody cares or asks about religion.
Maybe PZ et al could just hang out with Scandinavians? In my early childood “christianity” was still a school subject, -and the church remained a State Church until the endo of the millennium- but it had zero impact on the thinking of us born in the 1960s.
Religion is just not relevant, it is seen as a private issue, like collecting stamps.
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The one religious issue that required a bit of thinking was the need to not regard individual muslims as inherently joined at the hip with the various muslim theologies (or the lying imams that have kept people from reforming their faith the way Xians or Jews have done). People are just people and fuck the Popes, Messias’es and Prophets.
(What is the plural noun of messias? A murder of Messias?)
I was raised Anglican and went to a church-run school. However, I started to have doubts at around 8 or 9 years and by the time I entered adolescence I stopped believing altogether. I didn’t “come out” until I left home for university.
Both of my sons were taught to question and we encouraged them to argue with us. They were raised as atheists as they are raising their children. They have thanked me for not indoctrinating them with religious nonsense as many of their friends were.
Atheist, atheist parents, and grandparents both sides. Before that, I don’t know about my paternal great-grand parents, but on the maternal side, my grandmother told me her parents weren’t religious either. There is a family story, possibly apocryphal, about her grandfather teaching himself to read so he could read the bible, then burning it and swearing off religion once he’d done so. She was 2yo when her family emigrated, so that would have happened in the Ukraine ca, 1880 -1890.
I only realized that plenty of the Christians around me actually believed some of stuff when I was about 20 or so. Until then, I thought it was just make-belief and fancy rituals for everyone. So basically, I’ve always been an atheist, but I don’t really consider myself “an Atheist” – I’m just a normal person.
See https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2011/12/02/why-i-am-an-atheist-brian-ralter/ for my own childhood experience.
we talked about this a wee bit on the podcast. im the same, to the extent i’ve wondered if some amount of atheism can be inborn – that some people, when first informed of religion, will never believe it. i have a few old articles about it, and my newest one proceeds from the assumption this is true.
I am another of the never-been-religious crowd. My parents and grandparents too.
I went to fairly typical British primary and secondary schools – where lip service was paid to Christian religion (I think the legal phrase is that the school week has to include “an act of communal worship or contemplation of a broadly religious or spiritual character”). When I was about eight or nine I went along with the praying we did in Monday morning assembly, because I was a goody-two-shoes type who didn’t want to cause a fuss, and I felt that the adults probably know best. I remember there were times where I tried to take it as seriously as I could, just in case. As an experiment I tried as hard as possible to communicate with whatever is on the other end of the praying, but eventually after many attempts and no reply I figured it wasn’t real after all. I don’t think I ever seriously thought it would work, but I gave it my best shot in case the adults really were on to something.
Me too! My parents were a mixed-religion couple — my mom Jewish, my dad Southern Baptist, but neither had any real religious beliefs by the time I was born. They always encouraged me to believe what I thought made sense, and instilled in me a love of science and discovery. I did go to a religious private school (because it was the best school in town), and later attended a church camp group with friends, but while various evangelists did try at times to convert me, I never got any closer than mildly curious.
Me. I was exposed to religious ideas (mostly through bad medieval art) but it did not take me long to figure out that christians were more concerned about who got tortured for what than saving souls. I ignored the whole mess until I read Joinville and Villehardoin in high school and that shocked me from “these guys are doofuses with bad art” to “religion is a bad idea that must be resisted.”
I’m pretty much a lifelong atheist. I wasn’t raised to believe in anything in particular. No one on either side of my family ever went to church or talked about religion. Ever. In fact, religion was so unimportant in my family that, to this day, I couldn’t tell you what most members of the family believe in or don’t believe in. Nor do I care, really. Same goes for them. If I suddenly decided to announce that I was converting to Christianity, and would start attending church, no one would care.
I had a vague notion of a god-like being when I was a little kid simply because it’s so ubiquitous in our culture, but I honestly thought of it in the same vein as Santa Claus. When I gave up belief in Santa, at about age 8 or so, I also gave up on thoughts of any kind of higher power and have lived my life from then on as though one doesn’t exist. In all that time, I’ve still never been given a good enough reason, or any evidence, to change my mind. I had friends when I was growing up who were raised Christian, but none of them seemed to take it seriously, so that certainly didn’t help convince me of anything. As an adult, I still see belief in a god, especially the Christian god, as a silly, yet incredibly dangerous belief to have. It seems to reinforce a lot of toxic, intolerant behavior and narcissistic personalities. I’d say a great many of the devout Christians I’ve encountered throughout my life have been jerks and that kind of advertisement isn’t going to change my mind either. I’d much prefer to remain a friendly, empathetic, egalitarian atheist.
#22: I grew up with Scandinavians! Great-grandparents with thick Norwegian & Swedish accents (it was a mixed marriage), the Lord’s prayer in Norwegian on the wall, a church that had occasional services in Norwegian. It was as close to Norway as you can get in Puget Sound (oh, right, we also had a fjord.)
I’m a nominal Reform Jew. Even as a kid, I never believed anything supernatural. I wanted to—everyone else seemed to—but I couldn’t. Since Christianity represents religion to most people, I think it’s easier for a Jew be an atheist. I had no trouble relegating religion to the bullshit pile. None of it makes any sense.
Atheist parents, Grandmothers both indifferent (or perhaps even antagonistic) to religion. Grandfathers both strong believers (one a Freemason Anglican, the other an Irish Catholic who forced his daughters to convent schools)
I have many religious friends, and have even married a small “c” christian. (He occasionally prays that his all-loving god won’t punish me; I told him he could invite God to our wedding, but I didn’t think he’d show) Church is not part of our family’s life, as husband was made to go by his fundie-father, and wont do that to his kids.
My kids (late teens) are not showing any signs of religion, despite their fundie pop’s best efforts, and both have diverse friend groups including very strong believers, atheists and agnostics.
Although I went to church with my friends, and read their holy books, I never felt the urge to see it as anything more than entertainment, and a culturally indoctrinated position.
I always thought god was what Terry Pratchett calls “lies-to-children”. I was surprised, and kind of alarmed to discover as I got older that there were adults who actually believed in a god. My father was raised U-U, and my mother was raised Episcopalian and happy to discard it. I would describe them both as militant agnostics (“I don’t know and you don’t either”). Their very Minnesotan advice to me about religion was that it’s not polite to discuss it, which probably saved me all sorts of trouble on the playground. I tried to figure out the religion thing, and read all the mythologies I could get my hands on from an early age, including the Bible. All that stuff made great stories (with plenty of boring bits), but obviously stories.
I will admit that I believed in Santa Claus for quite awhile, but, in fairness, I had some evidence of his existence.
I believed in that stuff in childhood, but stopped at age 11. I was obsessed with “proving” how dumb and inconsistent and irrelevant religious texts are for a couple years, but eventually my parents stopped forcing me to go to church, and my interest in engaging with such things has continued to wane in my adult life. It’s irrelevant to me, after all. Why bother?
Like you, I grew up in a heavily secularized Lutheran culture and family that maintains affiliation with the church as a cultural tradition. This is pretty much the mainstream experience for Finnish people of my generation.
Hardly anyone in Finland goes to Sunday school as a young kid. However, I did sometimes go to a church-run afternoon club, which might have been largely similar. I have no memory of it whatsoever, but I’ve been told I started parroting some religious rhetoric in an embarrassingly ham-handed way.
Growing up, I didn’t really know anyone who prays or goes to church for personal reasons. When I was about 10, a religious ed teacher in school recommended that we try praying sometime in private, just to see how it feels. I then tried it before going to bed, and experienced a strong sense that I was talking to a wall.
I think my paternal grandmother was somewhat devout, though she never broke out the Bible on Christmas. Everyone else was either lukewarm, apathetic or nonbeliever. Some of my maternal relatives disavowed the church for leftist political reasons (it was seen as a bourgeois institution), not because they were more consciously atheist than others. I only know this because I’ve sometimes broached the topic as an adult atheist – otherwise we never talked about matters of faith.
Our religious education in Finnish public school was partly intended to normalize Christian cultural identity, mythology and ritual tradition, without really presenting said mythology as factual. It was my main exposure to religion as a kid, and the main reason I ever thought as a young teen to ask whether I believe in God or not. The intuitive answer was “no”, but that did not seem to conflict with our standard cultural Christianity in any way. The school also provided some great secular understanding about the history of Christianity, for the nerdy students like me who paid attention.
You’ve mentioned before that you skipped the Lutheran confirmation. In Finland, confirmation school (kind of a brief Sunday school for teens, usually held at a summer camp) is extremely popular and normalized as a cultural tradition and simply as a fun social experience. I went awkwardly along, because it felt expedient (I wasn’t really pressured, though my parents encouraged me to do it for the social experience), and because there was no sense that your personal belief or unbelief should have anything to do with it. Only at the last moment I realized that the confirmation itself would involve ritually announcing my desire to believe, to be an active member of the church etc. It felt wrong, but it was too late to back away, and I don’t think there was really any serious reason back away. I took the confirmation, and participated in communion for what I knew would be the one and only time.
Ironically, confirmation school was the provoking experience that drove me away from being a nominal Christian. It wasn’t a bad experience, but did feel slightly manipulated about the confirmation ritual, and slightly weirded out by the exposure to religious ritual in general. I immediately started considering about resigning my formal church membership, a matter which has some actual civil relevance in Finland. I continued to read about secularism, and around 18 I started identifying as an atheist. At 20, went to a regular church service once more, just to confirm that I was fully alienated. Shortly after that I did the paperwork to quit my membership, after giving it far more consideration than most people in my place would do.
I never believed. Talking to invisible people who didn’t talk back made no sense, and I was really into mythology and comparative religion from a young age, so it was obvious that lots of people in history had believed in lots of stuff that didn’t actually exist.
When I was nine or so I considered believing in Greek gods because they had the best stories and the highest amount of nudity. I tried to dream up my ideal God and came up with a sanitized Athena, because who wouldn’t want to obey a smart domme girl in glasses, but the problem of suffering always got in the way. It didn’t even seem like it’d be fun or comforting to believe in a God who mismanaged the universe this badly, no matter how hot she was.
My grandfather was an atheist logician, my grandmother seemed to be apatheist, and none of their kids believed except for the schizophrenic one. My mom and brother ended up secular Buddhist, my sister’s a half-hearted deist, and we’re all cultural Presbyterians whose self-esteem is bound up in being useful to the world, but that’s about it. There was never any pressure to believe.
There was a brief phase when my mom took us all to various churches because she thought it might be good for our character, but none of the pastors were attractive enough to keep her interested, so it fizzled out.
My mum was raised Anglican but she never really believed (despite being a Sunday School teacher for a few years – it was just a job that she got through family connections). My dad wasn’t raised in a religious household: his dad wasn’t religious, his mum was Christian, and so my grandparents compromised by occasionally going to a Unitarian church. I’m also told that my dad’s great grandfather along the paternal line, who had moved from Belfast to Kingston, Ontario in the early 20th century, was an outspoken freethinker.
So, long story short, I wasn’t raised religious and have a lot of atheists in my family going back several generations.
School in the UK in 1960’s and 70’s meant morning god-bothering was government mandated along with “Religious Education” = Christianity. As part of the latter I was forced to read the entire bible, which I suspect my teachers subsequently regretted.
I always thought (and still think) the whole religion thing completely mad and deeply resent the hours, days and weeks wasted in compulsory grovelling. Such are the joys of living in a theocracy (as part of the whole royalty gig King Chuck got his very own religion).
I’m not sure which incident broke the back of it at school. Possibly the dissertation I wrote in RE regarding Christians and communism solely to upset the school chaplin who was as mad as a box of frogs and would have fitted right in at a US republican convention (it worked). At any rate I was suddenly excused RE classes (it was supposed to be compulsory to O-level) and spent the latter parts of the morning assemblies with the Jewish and Quaker kids. The Society of Friends have some funny ideas, but I can respect their lack of hypocrisy, disinclination to proselytize and they tend to be politically radical as heck which led to some hilarious larks pissing off the more right-wing of our teachers and introduced me to whole new arenas of political activism.
Once I left school I no longer had to put up with such nonsense and have regarded the antics of religious family and friends with amused tolerance (ahh, they’re cosplaying), and the more radical believers as completely barking mad. I’ve learnt not to argue with mad people. I’m now polite rather than rude to the religious (I’m British after all) but am so tempted to take the piss. (When younger I was less restrained, leading to an incident involving a black monk’s habit and an entire stadium full of Jehovah’s Witnesses).
I’m a bit ticked off that I’ve had to pay for a bunch of this rubbish and the utter waste of time over the years though.
Mark me down as another of the “never believed a word of it” contingent.
Honestly, if I had Norwegian ancestry and lived in the US I’d be investigating how to emigrate back to the fjords as quickly as possible, what with how Norway is a great country to live in, and the US… isn’t.
People are sharing stories, so I’ll add one to the score.
I was raised by atheist parents in a secular country. They ever really pushed me one way or the other. It was simply a non-issue.
I was taught a bit about Christianity in school, but most of what I know about religion I learned through self-study in my teens and twenties, when the library was my second home. I rolled with the Hare Krishnas for some years, and I still fondly remember the company and the food, but it turns out that being different doesn’t mean making more sense.
Since then I’ve considered myself a deliberate atheist, but these days I tend to think that religion is more symptom than disease.
A Calvary of Messiahs, surely.
Here I am.
I kinda stepped out of the social media atheist pool because I don’t feel like I relate to the “converted” atheist crowd. Proud to have been one since birth. I don’t think either of my parents were soldiers for Jesus, at least one was self-described as “agnostic,” but they did go to church occasionally when I was a toddler. It was early 1960s, and I guess they felt they needed to put on a show for the neighbors by sporadically stepping out on Sunday morning. At age 3, my mother wrote in my “baby book” that I refused to say my bedtime prayers. Evidence enough that I was a freethinker from an early age. I don’t recall a time in my life where I was a believer.
\raises hand: “that’s me!”
I’m European, so not that much an exception. My father was raised Catholic, but is also a physicist, and my impression is that while he has very fond memories of his faith, he doesn’t actually believe. My mother, her father (a mathematician), and much of that side of the family were all atheist. My parents tried to raise me in an open-minded “let’s see what happens”, way, but with all the science coming from both sides of the family I was clearly atheist at age 8. (Fun anecdote: my mom recalls that when her sister married, in a religious ceremony, after the priest finished his priesting I politely raised my hand, as in school, and said: “I don’t believe that, I believe in the dinosaurs!”, priest: “okay… that’s fine, can we go on now?”)
Shocking change then when we moved to the US at age 12 (this was in the 90’s). At that point I was firmly of the opinion that religion was completely out of date and only something that old people (grandparents) did… So I was a bit surprised when I expressed my opinions in my, then new, middle school, and everyone started pulling out crosses from under their necks and waving them at me like I was some kind of vampire!
Like many here, I never bought the theism (or deism) thing. My folks took us to church (Lutheran) and sent us to Sunday school, but never preached at us or objected when we opted out. When I started to think about it (age about 10?), atheism was never an option for me, but a necessity.
Apart from not being able to buy in to the stories I was told, there was also the obvious harm that certain beliefs led to when adhered to dogmatically, especially when abused by grifters. You know, like pretty much any ideology/worldview can.
It also occurred to me fairly early on that for many (maybe most) people, some form of theism may be as necessary as atheism is for me. People are complicated. Who knew?
A child of the 60’s I had no choice growing up. My parents were from the Greatest Generation and, of course, they were associated with a denomination. Looking back, I don’t think I was ever a believer, rather, I memorized, recited and sought acceptance from the adults. I liked being an acolyte, though, probably the authoritarian streak in me but being goal oriented I worked my way up the ranks to Head Acolyte. In my teens I grew tired of the church scene but any talk about “leaving the church” was met with disapproval from my parents. I was saved, however, not by baby jeebus but by Pepino’s Patio where I worked the late shift on Saturday. Need my sleep, Ma, can’t make the service on Sunday!
Now, my kids are probably the data you are looking for. They were raised in a None household and although my middle daughter went to some kind of church with a classmate for a semester or so in the Fourth Grade, it was for the hoopla and the snacks. They turned out to be nice kids, good students and responsible adults.
Hey, I’m with you too, PZ and others above!
I was taken to mass (and later, communion and confession and confirmation) every Sunday because my mother and grandmother went. But of course I didn’t believe it (or understand it), it was just something we did.
One Sunday when I was seven, we were getting up from the pew to leave, and I suddenly thought “This isn’t real”, and never wavered the rest of my life. Never believed, born an atheist!
I was a preacher’s kid so my family was embedded in the culture and I did believe during my youth. I even thought I felt the Holy Spirit in some special church services. This was a mainline Protestant denomination, first the Evangelical United Brethren church and then United Methodist (E.U.B.s and Methodists merged to form the United Methodist denomination in 1968).
I think this background gives me more tolerance and empathy for people with religious views, and a fair amount of sympathy. I try to reason people out of religious beliefs because that’s what worked for me (reasoning, science, and sci-fi). But of course, I seldom succeed since few are really reasoned into their religious beliefs.
But I do have trouble understanding how an adult can believe though. It’s one thing to believe in fairy tales as a child, but another to continue to do so as an adult. And with all the evidence of how people believe nonsense and how religions ‘evolve’.
My wife and I raised our two kids (sons) as atheists but took them to a UU church to expose them to various religious ideas. UUs accept people of any religion and no-religion, and are largely humanistic. So our sons, and now our 2 grand-kids, are part of the ‘always atheist’ demographic.
Another one for the never column PZ.
I will stand up and get in line as a “natural atheist.”
As a grade school-aged child in the US, I was expected to go to church on Sundays. But as soon as I could get lost in the crowd and get away with it, I just brought along whatever book I was reading. I stood when I was supposed to, sat and read when I could, and sorta enjoyed the singing. My parents wanted to encourage me to read and self-educate (and I was born “gifted,” which meant they struggled to understand me, anyway) so I got away with it.
If they knew WHAT I was reading, though! :-) Almost exclusively science fiction, heavy on the Heinlein (this was the ‘70’s). The nonsense I heard from the pulpit wasn’t much different from the nonsense as portrayed in the stories, except the stories admitted that they were fiction. Plus I never, ever felt any supernatural influence on my mind or life. As far as I could see, there was nothing to believe IN.
Later in High School, a youth group called “Young Life” got me interested in going to their meetings and activities and summer camps, because my friends were doing it, and they were all a lot of fun. I wound up converting to Baptist for a while.* But once in college and away from their influence, the religious impulse faded away. I now take it as an excellent object lesson in indoctrination and culturalization, and use that experience as a reminder to be kind and humble when interacting with a person’s belief system. “There, but for the Grace…” (pun intended).
*(“I used to be Baptist, but I got better. Now I’m immune.”)
Now? I’m a firm empiricist; I deny the existence of the supernatural. If something exists, it is part of the universe and can be studied. If it can’t…well. I do admire the teachings of the Buddha, though, and try to follow them as part of the Western Secularist movement of Buddhism of the last 50-100 years.
Looking at all these comments, though, it occurs to me that natural atheists probably exist in great numbers, but aren’t as strident as the deconverted. Those with a grudge, or a hurt that needs healing, would naturally call more attention to themselves because they are the ones who would blog, post videos, go to rally’s, carry signs, march, testify, and so on.
$0.02
@birgerjohansson #22:
An annunciation of messiahs? “Behold the Mother of the true Messiah! Ignore all the other ones. Hallelujah!”
I’m on the same camp. My grandmothers are both religious, though in very different ways, my maternal granny is a very strict Catholic in everything, while my paternal one practice folk Galician Catholicism, which is basic paganism with extra steps and is a staunch anticlericalist (which coming from a line of socialist sindicalist women it is not unexpected). But then all the rest of family were never truly religious, ranging from atheist to agnostic that goes through the motions. The only time I went regularly to church was just for my first Communion, because it was my Grandmother’s wish and I remember not believing anything and questioning the priest during Sunday school. After that I have stepped on a church was for funerals (not even weddings, since all of my friends got married by the state only) or as a tourist to admire the art inside.
Episcopalian childhood through high school, head acolyte, and even church cleaner. But had no difficulty with realizing it was all an intricately documented story. I stayed pretty much to keep the people around me content. Because there was also the other issue (that other posters have brought up): since I never had a Great Realization or Conversion, it was just never a big part of my mental life. Not a big deal — so easier to just hang out until leaving home, then don’t bother coming back.
I can’t recall exactly when I lost Santa Claus, but I have to give my mother credit for the very best strategy ever at that moment. When it was clear I no longer believed it (down the chimney, cookies at the fireplace, gifts in stockings in the morning), she told me “I know you don’t believe any more, but your Grandmother still does. We need to do the Santa Claus thing tonight for her…” I’ve always admired her for that.
I never believed any of it.
When I was about 8 (oh so many years ago) my school in Sydney got me to read some bible text at an assembly. It was from The Good News Bible, which I kept, and I worked hard on my presentation. For the life of me I didn’t understand a word of it. I did use it to inspire some content for my D&D games in the early ’70s.
Went to see the Sydney premier of Jesus Christ Superstar and was really enthralled by the whole show and the music. Still no belief.
Went to temples of various sorts. Read up on many religions. It just didn’t connect. It seemed…childish.
This is me, too!
I think we hear more from the deconverted because their stories are much more dramatic.
My parents were not very religious, and I never went to Sunday school or prayed. When I was in kindergarten I suffered a major rift with my idol, J.P. Patches (Seattle kid’s TV host) because one of his rules for being a Patches Pal was “Say your prayers”. For a time I was worried that I might be a…a … Boris Buddy!
Similar non-religious upbringing, but my Sunday school visits only lasted a few weeks. What a load of horseshit. I’ve only been to one funeral when I was 12 or 13 years old, never been to a wedding and only one reception. More horseshit. Even though brought up culturally Christian now I don’t celebrate any of the holidays, haven’t for a couple of decades, and convinced my close family members to do the same. So much less stress and money saved. Amazing how much cleaner my shoes are…
@ 22 & 51
By definition there can only be one future Messiah. But that also requires only one religion. The difficulty is with the myriad Messiah maniacs (Messiahniacs or Messy-aniacs?) and their insistence on theirs being the only and correct one.
I was never a believer. I shut out the nuns at age 6 in Catholic school. Never believed in Santa, Easter Bunnies, Satan, or God. I have no idea why i was a natural born skeptic with an over active bullshit detector. Aand I simply cannot understand why reason and rational thinking is something so many people utterly lack.
Cue David Bowie’s “Oh You Pretty Things”.
I was never a believer. Went to Sunday School a few times as a kid, when we moved to a new town and my mom was trying to make new connections. The first time they said I was too old to play with clay with the little kids, and had to go study the bible, I walked out to the parking lot and waited for my mom. She never took us back.
I think born-again atheists are some of the loudest voices in atheism, for exactly the same reason that some of the loudest churches are born-again. If you had to fight to get to where you are, you might be a little more inclined to shout about it. For the rest of us, it just seems “normal”.
Me too. I have never ever believed in Jesus or prophets or whatever. My parents were not religious, and my mother was a confirmed atheist, though I only discovered that gradually. I think I may have attended church or Sunday school once or twice for some reason I don’t recall and was not impressed, and that was that.
My wife was Catholic, then Methodist, and now Unitarian and an atheist. Our three kids, now in their 30s, all seem to be lifelong atheists, but we never talk about that stuff, as what is there to talk about?
TGAP Dad:
Sarcasm, I presume? I don’t think Michigan’s been south of the Mason-Dixon line since sometime in the Paleozoic or thereabouts …
arno@25:
That may be how it started. The Dawn of Everything has evidence that things like that (and, especially, associated hierarchies of authority) began as LARPing, until people who grew up entirely immersed in it took it for reality, or something like that. Also, social dominators would have been attracted to authority-positions in the LARPs (think the Trump who fired people on The Apprentice) and then sought ways to expand that in scope and duration so there’d be no escape (think the Trump who just declared he’d end elections in America and who backs Project 2025).
Great American Satan@27:
I may be a data point in support of this thesis: see below.
vinnievidivici@50:
This has always seemed obvious to me. Indeed I’ve refined it to a formal argument: one may decompose the universe (or our observations of phenomena that happen in it, including any putative consequences of supposed divine intervention) into a “signal” and some “noise”, where the signal is whatever has exploitable regularities that can be used to make better-than-chance predictions (aka “science”) and to manipulate outcomes (aka “technology”) and the noise is whatever is left over. Needless to say, regularities can ultimately be expressed in some way (e.g. as laws of physics), and once all regularities have been accounted for, whatever is left over is ipso facto unpredictable and unexploitable, i.e. is noise. The only thing left is to throw the laws of physics, plus a probability distribution function fitted to the noise, into a model and that model, in principle, will predict everything predictable and tell you how to do anything that’s reproducibly doable. Everything left over is down to happenstance: vagaries of the boundary conditions and the random number “god” underlying the noise.
This appears to leave the so-called “supernatural” with no quarter; no ground to stand upon. If it’s not just “natural” but not-understood-yet (like lightning was to scared iron-age peasants), or scientifically understood (like most things are now), then it’s TV static and anything you “see” in it is just pareidolia. The closest thing to a supernatural god is, in fact, the random number god of RPG player love/hate relationships, even if the cosmos is nondeterministic (which the Aspect experiments and followups seem to indicate is the case).
I was delighted as a kid when the Ghostbusters film came out and, though ghosts were real, people did what people do: built tech to measure them and interact with them. (Of course they promptly started rounding them up and throwing them in jail without probable cause or due process, the bastards. Sentient beings have rights y’know! Sure, some turned out to be invaders bent on conquest, but a blanket jail-em-all policy is rather disturbingly reminiscent of Japanese internment during WWII.)
Le Chifforobe@55:
I should hope so — theirs are the atheists whose stories have a turning point.
And as for myself (and to satisfy Great American Satan), I was raised by Anglicans who were not devout (that I ever noticed; no regular church attendance, prayers or other religious ritual at the dinner table or other daily events in the home, etc.) but received no strong direct parental indoctrination. At some early age I was enrolled in some club, Sunday school, or similar thing that was Bible-focused and being an avid reader from an early age started leafing through a Bible there and had so. Many. Questions. Why this, why that, wait this bit contradicts that bit … apparently I got kicked out for asking questions the organizers couldn’t easily answer, or something. I have never believed any sort of religious claim.
Not too long after that, digging around stacks of old books in a basement I came across a hardback with a simple black cover with one word embossed on the front in silver: “Genesis”. It was not the Old Testament Genesis. Instead it was an accounting of the best scientific understanding (as of, I think, the 1970s or so) of the origin of humans, from cosmology and astrophysics through stellar nucleosynthesis and planet formation to geological history and evolution. I found it fascinating, not least because it didn’t just assert stuff — it explained how we knew. It described Penzias and Wilson discovering the cosmic microwave background; nuclear physics experiments and astronomical spectra that combined to tell us a lot about what makes stars tick (and, with that, where the carbon and other stuff all came from); and so on, and so forth.
I have unfortunately not been able to track down a link or reference for this, with Google, Amazon, or Library Genesis searches, including sorting all of the latter’s hits for the title by date and looking at all of the undated, 60s, and 70s results. But I think it was a big part of setting me on a path toward science and empiricism as credible, and revealed “wisdom” as not.
Of course everything since has only served to reinforce that. Discovering just how many religious there are, all mutually contradicting. Observing that praying has no discernible effect on outcomes, but figuring all kinds of physics and engineering math out and then using that as a guide for putting steel and concrete together to erect a suspension bridge that spans miles and stays up for decades under heavy traffic and in all weather does. Everything we have as a civilization comes from figuring shit out for ourselves and applying that, or else from what it’s now fashionable to call “ecosystem services”. None of it, so far as I can tell, has come from divine intervention, unless the divine really did write some of those holy books, and in that case all we seem to have to thank it for is a bunch of strife, oppression, and war.
Another thing I found was that I have strong moral intuitions, and those invariably are at odds with one or another tenet of pretty much any religious prescription for conduct. Such prescriptions invariably seem to include hurting people for doing things that, in turn, had hurt no-one, as well as excuses for letting horrid things go on instead of intervening. Submitting to authority even when it’s clearly wrong, morally or just factually — really, even if the idiots are about to re-enact the Charge of the Light Brigade and I have inside info that predicts the sorry outcome? And obviously, a lot of the time this stuff has been twisted into a means to legitimate unearned privileges and maintain clearly-unjust hierarchies of power and standard-of-living. I can spot a legitimating priesthood a mile away now, and I smell one right now in the Chicago School of Economics, pretending to be science. Sneaky bastards.
Besides such privilege-legitimation, all the other failings of religious moral prescription I quickly learned were not just theoretical: they routinely cause some devout people to refuse lifesaving medical treatments for their own kids (aka letting horrid things go on instead of intervening), persecute people for being LGBTQ+ (aka hurt people for doing things that hurt no-one), and so forth.
My reading tendencies went strongly to science stuff — science fact and also science fiction. When in grade school, I found ways to avoid being forced outdoors for recess (into bitter cold and merciless, poorly-supervised bullies) and sneak into the library instead, reading a chunk more of some book or another in each 20 minute opportunity, on top of borrowing more to read at home. I think, in hindsight, I went in more for SF than other fiction because it was sure to come from a secular-rational POV, as much as because science interested me in its own right. I was not otherwise all that picky: viewpoint characters might be male or female, or extraterrestrial, for instance. That may have made my already instinctive empathy extend further, so I’ve seemingly always had a humanist (or maybe sapientist?) outlook.
It also means I can easily entertain all sorts of bizarre ideas as hypotheticals, evaluate them, figure out their implications, and not take any of them especially seriously. I can enjoy a good yarn in a world where magic works or there are gods or a mutant can do things that overtly defy thermodynamics or whatever. I don’t think I believe anything, beyond provisionally, save if there is an evidence “paper trail” to substantiate it, and even then that’s subject to refinement in light of newer evidence. Essentially, a scientist’s outlook, and I’ve been that way since my age was still in the single digits. And I’ve been terribly allergic to compulsory religious displays, refusing in school to sing bits of the national anthem that mention “God”, etc.; funnily enough I think the God in question would, if He existed, approve of that, seeing as how knuckling under to that sort of thing would violate the Ninth Commandment and all …
So, the TL;DR of it is: I never really held much truck with religious belief or the supernatural, and everything in my experience since then, and in my own innate tendencies, has only tended to reinforce that. I guess that makes me another born atheist.
My mother’s family was raised in the Presbyterian church by a mother who was descended from Scottish immigrants.
Their father was a Cherokee who refused to set foot in “the white man’s church”
There were eight children. Of the seven who survived to adulthood, six married Catholics and converted.
My mother followed her father’s example and was never really interested in religion, so I wasn’t indoctrinated as a child.
My husband was raised in an Episcopalian family. I could tell when I met my mother-in-law that she didn’t believe all of the hype, but was keeping up appearances.
My husband and I met at a Catholic university run by Jesuits and there learned to always question everything.
We dabbled a bit with the Episcopalian Church when our kids were young, mostly for the socializing. We attended a very liberal church, and our older kids learned to accept everyone there.
When we relocated to Texas, we were turned off by the churches there. We and our five children all found our way to Atheism while we lived there. As for myself, I found my way back to my childhood Atheism.
If anyone had the right idea about religion, I think it might have been my Native American ancestors, along with other “Pagans”.
That said, I have had experiences that might be described as “spiritual”, usually in connection with nature. I don’t, obviously, attribute these to supernatural explanations. They probably are an important part of the human experience.
I suspect it may have to do with what can be considered to have “intent” or “purpose”. To have such things, some kind of “optimizing process” or “goal directed system” is clearly needed: rocks falling off a cliff have no intent (unless someone kicked them over the side), nor do stars burning hydrogen have an inherent purpose. But trees and animals and such have some. Non-human animals formulate goals and act on them, if not with as much cleverness and foresight as humans; plants have at least the purpose of self-reproduction, as products of natural selection, an unintelligent and rather single-“minded” optimizing process bent solely on maximizing copy-number.
We have a sense that tries to suss out agency, to detect plots against us from tigers, or sharks, or the more amoral and Machiavellian-minded of our own kind, and even to detect potential allies whose goals may dovetail with our own. I expect this sense triggers sometimes on pure noise (pareidolia again) and often on things that are actually purposive, but not as strongly so as human actions and artifacts (such as anything biological at all). Our sense of a “spirit” behind something makes sense in this light.
Another part of such spiritual experiences is a feeling of connection, being a part of a greater whole. This, too, is not irrational, particularly (again) when in nature, but also when in civilization. We arose as part of an ecosystem; we exist as parts of ecosystems now; and also, usually, as members of a civilization. A basic recognition of interdependency is healthy in these cases, and apparently can manifest in a way often termed spiritual. There may also be a sense of “homeness”, attaching to environments that resemble ones in which our ancestors thrived. This would attract us to environments likely to provide us with food, water, and materials with which to make shelter and tools, while nudging us away from deserts and the open sea. It could explain the attraction to greenspaces, not to mention why affluent humans tend to burn much of their dough on Kenyaforming whatever environments they wind up in, creating a lawn with scattered trees and, in some cases, small scale creeks and ponds, even if this requires irrigating the everloving crap out of some patch in the middle of a freaking desert, or hewing it out of a rainforest and then expending constant labor and exposing themselves to toxic chemicals to try to keep it from turning back into rainforest.
Even so, we also seem to find a different sort of beauty in inhospitable environments: the sea, the desert, craggy mountains, ice caps, and even the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. This seems harder to explain, other than maybe still being a partial match to “well, at least it’s a landscape rather than a cave-in or something”.
In any event, the supernatural may not be real, but feelings and experiences generally called “spiritual” ones indubitably are, and appear to have value. Life seems better with than without them, so long as they don’t get twisted into excuses for oppression and privilege-gradients, and it seems likely they serve various evolutionary purposes. I am as capable of those experiences as anyone else, even if I seem innately averse to supernaturalistic beliefs or explanations. Like my strong moral intuitions, I think they come from a deep wellspring of pre-modern “genetic advice” that is adaptive in a social species that lives in a forest/savanna transitional environment as a generalist forager whose foraging strategies frequently involve teamwork and specialization of labor. Certainly, they inform my politics, which is strongly green-and-left, anticonformist, antiauthoritarian, egalitarian, and so on.
I was raised by liberal and unenthusiastically religious catholic parents I now suspect were making their parents happy by continuing to go, and I can’t recall a time when I even remotely believed a word of it. I made that clear to them by the time I was about 14, and that I was nearly certain no gods at all exist by the time I was 18. They were accepting both times, and I suspect are down to either disbelief or near deism themselves these days.
I’m a third generation atheist on both sides of the family, both sets of grandparents and most emphatically both of my parents were loudly and openly disdainful of religion. From what I gathered over family Christmases my great-grandparents were the usual hodgepodge of cultural Christian but none of them gave a toss about their kids’ descent into godlessness.
Choosing to be a believer is incomprehensible to me.
Won’t someone think of the moderates! I’ve got some good ideas for protest slogans: “The status quo was pretty good, actually!”; “Will our firebrands please keep it down?”; “We’ll settle for less!”
The deconverts are better activists because they’re intimately familiar with the policies Christians are pursuing to ruin our lives. Well, some of us, anyway. The moderates will probably be safe, as long as you’re content not to rock the boat.
I’ve never been a believer of any kind.
My father, and his father, were confirmed atheists. My mother’s side is a little more complicated – her parents were believers but not the church-going kind. If she had any religious beliefs she never mentioned them.
I remember finding the family bible ( printed n 1910, with a bunch of blank birth and marriage certificate forms at the end ) when I was about 12, read it, and decided I don’t want anything to do with this nonsense.
We never really talked about it, but I think my parents believed but weren’t particularly religious as I was growing up. I was baptized, and we said grace at supper but that was more about making sure everyone was sitting down before we started eating. We never went to church, and I never saw either parent with a bible.
My mom seemed to talk a little more religiously as she got near the end but it was still very mild, and my dad died suddenly so there wasn’t really time for that.
On the other hand my grandmother was very religious, but not the fire and brimstone type, and she handled it better than my parents when I came out (I’m bi and lean towards women).
I’ve been atheist most of my life. One of my earliest memories is getting my adenoids removed, and even as a toddler I couldn’t understand how an “all powerful” “benevolent” god couldn’t just create me without adenoids. I was pretty sure there was no god by the time I was seven. My mom believed in a god for most of my childhood, though she eventually stopped. My father has been atheist for most of his life, though I didn’t actually know this until I was a teenager: I suspected that my mom had convinced him not to tell me he was atheist, though my parents purport not to remember keeping it a secret.
When I was a kid we went to a reformed synagogue almost every week, mainly because my parents wanted to meet other people in the region (they had moved across the country shortly before I was born). When I was nine we switched to a conservative synagogue because it was closer to our house, then two years later we switched to another reformed synagogue.
My mom was pretty unhappy when I told her I wasn’t going to have a bar mitzvah, but she eventually accepted it. My sibling is also atheist.
Our organization (not huge) has discussed our life paths regarding atheism. We are not intellectual giants. Most of us were indoctrinated into some form of religion when young. Most of us talk about how as we grew and matured and began to reason, we started looking at the bible critically, analytically in the light of logic. We found it was an obscene, exaggerated work of fantasy. So, we chucked out all shovels full of superstitious bullshit.
Unfortunately for me, I grew up with parents who converted later in life, but before I was born. My father became a minister at age 41, and my childhood was filled with church attendance, sunday school, sermons, singing in the children’s choir (which I actually liked — I loved to sing), church camps, church groups, and on and on.
I won’t go into the unwitting emotional abuse that came with the incessant god-bothering; I read science fiction from age 7, loved science in school, and I could not reconcile the inanities preached at me with my observations of the real world. At the age of twelve while on a long, lonely walk, I looked up at the magnificent night sky, filled with awesome star fields and galaxies and asked myself the question: Do I believe in God? The answer was immediate, clear, and concise: No.
I had to maintain the fiction of belief for another six years until I attended university and swam in the secular sea.
Once out of the church I did not re-enter it until 25 years later when my younger “believing” brother asked me to attend the baptism of his daughter. Once exposed to the grovelling of the hymn lyrics, the sanctimony and disrespect of the sermon, and the overall hypocrisy of the attendees and participants, I acquired a violent revulsion to religion and all of its trappings.
My son was brought up without religion and is contemptuous of religious belief, faith, and all of the “must-be’s” attendant to talk with the religious. He lost his best childhood friend to Islam and is hostile to all supernatural beliefs, including the crunchy-granola spiritual types.
I am still coping, at my late age, with the religious abuse of my childhood. “Get ’em early, and you can torment them for life, even if they leave the Church!” (paraphrased).
When I was a kid, my parents made me go to church. To make that chore more interesting, I even became a altar boy. I stopped when I started feeling sick and throwing up all the time. Turns out all those half-baked an frankly unsanitary ideas in church had given me psalmonella.
I’ll take exception to these folks being good representatives, but since that isn’t really the topic I’ll just stop there and keep an eye out for a better place to criticize them.
You can count me as a never believer. Mother took us to church a few times after getting divorced, summers we went to church every week with our grandparents. recently I’ve gone to church with my wife, she has now given up on me. I don’t recall any one talking about religion out side of going to church.
On the other hand I do have some belief in Santa, my wife is from San Nicolas, in Iriga city, Philippines.
I was brought up in two religions, alternating years between Episcopal Christianity and Judaism (my mother was devoted to her church, but my father was not particularly devoted to his synagogue). At age 13, each of us was given our choice. Two of my siblings chose to get baptized and confirmed as Christians (mainly for social reasons—neither was a strong believer), but the other sibling and me chose not to join any organized religion—no one chose to be converted to Judaism. I describe myself as agnostic, rather than atheist (I have no evidence one way or the other about the existence of a god—I don’t think it is a testable hypothesis). I may have believed in a god as a young child, but I was never a strong believer.
@TGAPDad, I had an atheist girlfriend in college whose family was atheist, but they sometimes went to a Unitarian Fellowship for the social activity. A number of Unitarians are atheist.
@Bekenstein Bound, I think that it is the 2nd commandment, not the 9th commandment that god-botherers are violating.