I am an atheist because of my personal experiences. I am not an atheist because I am a rationalist or because I am a student of the sciences. Indeed, the opposite is likely true. I became a rationalist and enthusiastic about science after my scepticism about gods emerged. It was my attempt to find reasons why gods probably don’t exist that led me to logic and empiricism.
I was probably born an atheist; I can’t remember one way or another. After a long try at Christianity mostly because that’s what just about everyone I ever knew acted like they thought, I realized I know nothing of any reason to believe in any God. So, I returned to no belief as a natural honest action appropriate to no evidence otherwise. Born again.
Robert Huckabee
United States
I am an atheist because, as my brother once said, ‘If it don’t gel, it ain’t jello’. Religion and supersition in general just does not gel. I see no reason to believe in gods or the supernatural. It took me some time and and a good deal of exploration to come to that conclusion, but in the end there is simply no evidence.
No correlation with experience. There are far too many holes in the theory, if you will. Its a simple as that.
KillJoy
I was brought up to be a Christian, taken to a protestant church from the time I was born until I went off to college. Everyone in my family is a Christian, indoctrinated into the faith with bible stories every night and prayers at every meal and nearly every public event. Christianity was part of who we were and part of my personal identity. I believed, and I prayed, and when I prayed I knew what God wanted me to do.
I was raised in the quite conservative Reformed Church of America. I was a very curious child and read the entire bible through a few times starting at a young age, yet I still swallowed every lie they fed me. I never really fit in in high school youth group. We went to a smallish church and my school friends all went to different churches. In addition I wanted to learn things like theology and apologetics; the others wanted to learn about pop culture and dating. We also weren’t much of a priority for the church (we got no funding and the room we used twice a week had to be arranged the way the elders wanted it for their monthly meeting). Because of this I was slightly bitter towards the church I grew up in, although not religion in general yet.
While most of the articles on this topic have been from ex-Christians or people born to non-believers, my story is quite different.
I was born to religious Muslim parents (in one of the various sub-sects of the Ismaili sect in the Shi’ite branch) in a small rural town in India. This caste is very similar to the Roman Catholic Church setup, where there is a religious leader who claims to be the god’s representative and has a network of priests spread over the world wherever the leader’s followers live. This leader and his coterie also need a lot of money and keep track of everything happening in the followers’ life and family.
My rational journey began with my grandparents oddly enough. My grandfather was a Jewish journalist in Nazi Germany. Through an amazing stroke of luck, he was on holiday in Switzerland when the entire paper was shut down and employees shipped off to concentration camps. His sister sent him a simple telegraph saying “don’t come back”, and although he managed to get his parents out, he never heard from her again.
When I really look back and think about where I started becoming an Atheist, it’s a bit funny. I never was raised explicitly Christian- I did go to a Methodist preschool, but I didn’t retain a thing save for the fact that there was apparently a God and Jesus, which I never questioned- it was just a thing that was true and mentioned very rarely, as we never went to Church after I finished preschool. Nevertheless, I certainly was Christian, if only because I didn’t know there was a choice.
I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, but not into a Mormon family. My parents could both be best described as agnostic. I was encouraged to attend the Mormon church by my many friends as I grew up, but I usually refused because the services were so deadly dull. However, this did leave me vaguely believing in the idea of god and heaven.
At the age of 10, I was playing dangerously in my backyard and my father yelled out the back door at me to stop it. I remember the conversation very clearly because it was the start of my atheism. He asked me, “What if you fall off that thing and die?”
Having grown up in secular Holland in the 1980’s I don’t need a reason to be an atheist. One’s an atheist by default. Those attending church on a regular basis are either few and far between or tend to live in the heavily segregated villages in the Dutch ‘Bible belt’. The only interesting question that pertains to my situation would be; “why didn’t I become a Christian?”.
