I discovered I was an atheist when I was 18 years old, but it would probably be more accurate to say that’s when I discovered other people weren’t atheists.

I grew up in the midwestern USA in the 80’s. Nobody in my family ever mentioned anything about religion when I was a child. It’s not that anyone was against it, they just didn’t bring it up. I was generally aware that many of my friends and acquaintances went to church on a fairly regular basis, but they never mentioned anything about any god in my presence and I assumed that it was just a cultural habit they inherited from their parents, and if their parents didn’t attend they wouldn’t either.

Then, one year, I got invited to Christmas Mass with a good friend. My family always had a Christmas tree and exchanged gifts, but it was a completely secular affair. I’d never actually been in a church as anything other than a tourist looking at architecture, and I thought it would be interesting to see what happens in practice. The fact it was a Catholic service made it ever more interesting.

It was pleasant enough, and at times you could even call it uplifting. Even when I was there, however, I didn’t get the feeling anyone actually believed anything they were singing about, and even the priest seemed more of a philosopher than a theist. It was all exactly the sort of “be nice to each other” messages that I’d expected, and I didn’t hear much of anything that required any particular religious sentiment. There was obviously some readings from a bible that mentioned god and angels, but I took that more like a reading of poetry that was the cultural basis of all the “be nice to each other” songs and speeches. In other words, I managed to get through an entire Christmas Mass as an atheist without feeling out-of-place.

It wasn’t until after services that I started talking to my friend and found she genuinely believed in some kind of supernatural entity. By coincidence, quite a few other friends also started becoming more engaged with religion over the following year, and I discovered they all seemed to have a nonspecific belief that something supernatural is afoot. They were so vague on the details that I wasn’t entirely sure what it was they believed. They clearly had a firm belief in somebody named Jesus and that it was vitally important to believe he existed, but that was about the end of it. It seemed to be mostly that they enjoyed the sense of community they felt when they said and did the proper things, plus it was a security blanket to make them less afraid of death and the randomness of the world.

To this day, I’m still baffled how so many people claim to be Christian but seem to have no understanding of the basis of the religion they profess to embrace. I honestly think that the ranks of atheists are far larger than the statistics suggest. How can someone be religious when they have no understanding of their religious they profess to follow? Many people identify themselves as Jewish and openly treat it as a cultural/ethnic quality that no longer has any religious significance. For many people there’s no conflict in being a Jewish atheist because Jewishness has become a matter of heritage. Many Christians are the same, but they’re afraid to actual use the word “atheist”. With all due respect to folks like PZ and Dawkins, I also think that the increase in open atheism in recent years isn’t because people are actually changing their views, it’s because they’re realizing they never believed in their religion in the first place.

Anonymous

I’m an atheist because when I asked questions like, “Did Jesus really
come back from the dead?”, my parents said, “What do you think?”

I’m an atheist because, when given permission to think for myself as a
child, I compared the Bible stories with reality and realized they
belonged with fiction. Believing in the Bible, to me, is like
pretending that Lord of the Rings really happened. Actually, if I was
given the choice, I would rather believe in Gandalf than God, because
Gandalf is at least likeable.

Cheryl J Sonnier
United States

Because I have learned to think for myself.

Rajesh Shenoy
India

I was raised as a Roman Catholic but honestly, only in a vague way. My mother never went to church until she married my father. My father is religious, says the rosary before going to bed, but also hated going to church, especially if there was singing. (Mostly he’s just an old Yankee curmudgeon who doesn’t like people in general.) My parents worked at a state hospital that was basically a nursing home. My mother and I would go to services at the hospital where I would help out with the giving of communion by giving the patients cups of water. It was service to me. I wasn’t an alter girl officially. I just liked helping people and helping to put away the church items-snuffing the candles and playing with the wax and such.

I officially became an atheist around 6th grade. I realized I really didn’t believe in anything I’d been learning about in CCD or heard in church. It didn’t hurt that I’m chemically sensitive and the church we started going to around that time used incense and we always managed to sit near someone who bathed in perfume. I spent a large amount of time standing in the foyer with time to think. For me CCD was basically school…you read the textbook, did crafts, took tests, memorized things…got grades. Standard school stuff. I think the thing that stuck with me, and really cinched it for me, though was this ridiculous explanation of “Hell” from ‘Father Mike’ (clearly one of the new school priests). He said that Hell was like an ice cream shop where all your favorite flavors were present but the spoons were too big to use and no one would help you. I still remember this vividly to this day. It was the stupidest thing I had heard up until that point in my life.

After I told my parents they were, blessedly, totally supportive. I’m sure they were disappointed but they knew me well enough to know that I meant what I said and would only change my mind if I came to a new conclusion. Again, it didn’t hurt that the Deacon of the church called my parents on more than one occasion to try to convince me to come back. (I’d left right before the final test of the CCD year and the year before confirmation classes.) My mother tried to explain that I’d stopped believing in God. He didn’t seem to care…as if it were not an issue or that he was sure I would change my mind.

I’ve never looked back. I think I’m one of those people who didn’t have the ‘god gene’ or something. I don’t think I ever really believed. I don’t ever remember fearing hell or worrying about sinning. The thing I remember from my childhood is spending years making sure my hair was over my ears before I went to bed because I saw Star Trek, the Wrath of Khan too young and feared insects would crawl into my ears if they weren’t covered. That was my Devil. The dreaded earwig. I still get an instant fight or flight response if I see one.

Stacey Cooney
United States

I am an atheist quite simply for the same reasons most people are theists. I’m not talking about the theists who think about these things or wonder how we got here.

I’m talking the majority of theists. Like them, I’m an atheists because I was raised as an atheist. I was never baptized, I was never forced to join or go to church and (unlike most here in Finland) never attended religious education in school.

Religion was a subject that was always treated neutrally in my family. Thor and Mars were always seen as equals to Moses or Jesus and both nothing more than myths and legends (tho I always thought Thor was much more badass than Jesus).

I can’t remember ever asking my mother why I attended ethics class while all the other kids on my age group had religion. I just kind of accepted it. In any case it wasn’t anything that picked me out from the other kids.

There are a few times I can recall thinking (with my then first or second grader mind) if there was a supernatural being watching over everyone and even a few times talking aloud to said being on the off chance someone was there, but it always seemed just a little too silly even back then.

Perhaps the question overwhelmed me back then, but in any case, I’ve never really believed in gods and I’ve never had, what some people call, “a religious experience”, I don’t even know that that means to be honest.

Today the reasons for my atheism haven’t changed. What has changed is my understanding of why other people are theists.

Ville Orelma
Finland

Here’s a confession: I find myself resisting describing myself as an atheist, and I wonder why that is. Since I can’t claim certainty, I suppose I could use the rubbery rubric of agnosticism. But right or wrong, I can’t believe there are gods (and there have been times when I’d have liked to). So why the reticence? Maybe it’s fear of reprisal; it is, after all, an untidy time for people like me, whose offense is only looking at the world with clear eyes, neither willing nor able to go beyond reality and the observable; the constitutional inability to make a leap of faith, even as our country seems unstoppably heading toward theocracy. But I think it’s something different.

As I’ve thought about it, it seems that atheism ought to be the default assumption, for anyone. Certain things ought to go without saying. One should not have to describe oneself, for example, as a mathist. Or a gravitist. (Yes, I realize the analogy is sort of a semantic contradiction, but you get the picture.) I believe the grass grows; I believe in chlorophyll. I (sort of) understand radioactive decay, and I understand (to a degree) its relation to measuring the age of the earth. I know (mostly) why planes fly and I don’t need to claim an angel holds them up; I don’t think the earth rides on the back of a turtle, and it seems reasonable that anyone would assume that about me. Nor does the fact that I don’t know everything lead me to fill in the blanks with imaginary answers. I can wait. Belief in the demonstrable ought to be the default baseline for anyone, and it shouldn’t need a particular label.

Okay, maybe “realist.”

Or “normal.”

It’s when you begin to come up with magical explanations (ones, I must point out, that other believers in other magic will decry ferociously and consider false magic, capital blasphemy, compared to their version of it, with no sense of irony whatever), that it seems labels should be applied. I think of those judges who sentence people to wearing a sign after they stole something. People who didn’t steal anything don’t need a sign saying so. Not believing in gods oughtn’t need particularizing any more than breathing does. I do breathe; I admit it. But it’d be strange to identify me as a breather, wouldn’t it?

A world-view ought to start with reality. Reality is enough. Reality is, for one thing, real. Realists shouldn’t need to explain it, or to have (loaded) labels applied. Nor, for that matter, should they feel the need to brag about it, or get in the faces of others. Why should the world need a movement that announces its commitment to reality?

Except for the fact that any realist can’t help being shocked, worried, and appalled at the direction we’re headed in the US, as magical thinking has become the basis for a major political party; as intelligence, the quest for knowledge, are considered elitist and abhorrent, actively and proudly mocked and scorned. In that party, belief in god seems to have become synonymous with rejection of science, with denialism, with economic amnesia. It needn’t be thus; it wasn’t always so. But those who wonder why there are suddenly a few highly outspoken and, as some have called them, “militant” atheists out there need only look at today’s Republican party, its teabaggers, its “values voters” for the answer. Scary, hateful, regressive, aggressively ill-informed people.

There’s where labels belong, seems to me.

Sid Schwab
United States

I am an atheist because there is no god.

I was raised in an increasingly religious environment–the parents I grew up with took us to church every week (Catholic & eastern Orthodox), and they sent us to Catholic schools. I listened, I tried to believe, I memorized everything they told us in Religion class & tried to understand how people believed it.

But I could not believe.

After my parents split up, my mother became gradually more religious. Here’s the fun part: I am autistic & have temporal lobe epilepsy. My mother went from a bit off to absolutely convinced that I was possessed by demons. Eastern Orthodox don’t even really do the exorcism thing-certainly not the way evangelicals do-but I had not one, not two, but three exorcisms. Being waterboarded with holy water is still being waterboarded. Could any really loving god allow this, or my mother’s increasing use of church and marathon prayer sessions as punishment? I’m thinkin’ not.

So I survived years of abuse because “god told me to do it”. No god I knew or was told about would do that, but I kept trying to believe. I got straight As in religion class. We had to pass a religion test to graduate high school; I scored high enough to get “advanced scholar of catechatical knowledge” on my diploma.

Yet still I had doubts.

That summer I went to an Eastern Orthodox church camp to coach Special Olympics for a week. Being teenagers, all of the volunteer coaches snuck out of our cabins and stayed out way too late. I was surrounded by kids with whom I should have a lot in common, except they seemed to have no doubts at all, while I saw all the ritual as a routine, but nothing that meant anything to anyone but the people doing it.

It hit me that I am an atheist that summer. We were laying in the outdoor volleyball court looking for shooting stars. It was beautiful-I had never seen so many stars, and had certainly never seen so many shooting stars. We were all very quiet except for the occasional muttering about the beauty of God’s creation–and at that moment I knew, absolutely KNEW, that there was no god who put all those stars there. There was no god who made us and the plants and the stars and the things so far out we did not know about them. It was so vast and beautiful that saying some guy in the sky (but not really the sky-some kind of other dimension or something) put them there just for us was far too conceited and just didn’t make sense. There’s so much out there humanity may never experience, and no one put it there, and that was far more awe inspiring to 17 year old me than “goddidit”.

I was born an atheist, I couldn’t learn not to be, and reality is so much cooler anyway.

Kassiane

My parents were Catholic, as was their parents, and their parents, etc. as far back as anyone in the family can remember. When I was about 4 or 5, it didn’t understand mass or any of the other rituals and ceremonies that make up Catholicism. I know that I hated going to church, catechism, confession, communion, and all that stuff. But I was sometimes terrified that I might die in my sleep and go to Hell because I wasn’t in a “state of grace.” When I was about 5, my mother told me that Catholics had to suffer in life and that only Catholics went to Heaven. Wow, what a horrible thing to tell a 5 year old! I went to church and catechism every Sunday, and I mean EVERY Sunday. There was no “go or else”, there wasn’t any “or else”. At about 12, I began to doubt all the teachings of the church, but didn’t really know if I believed or not in a god. When I left home, I also quit going to church and told my parents I didn’t believe in any of “that stuff”. My parents practically disowned me for a time. Thereafter, for most of my adult life, religion wasn’t a part of my life and didn’t think about it. I didn’t know or associate with anyone that went to church. I probably did know people who went to church, but they didn’t talk about it. I went to my father’s funeral mass only to please my mother and swore I would never go to a mass again and I haven’t.

When I was 44, I married a woman who was about as Catholic as the Pope. Probably more Catholic because she really believes on all that bullshit. I doubt the Pope does. He’s just another ambitious politician who used religion to gain power and status. My wife and I argue religion all the time, but this hasn’t had a really bad effect on our relationship. At least she finally stopped nagging be to go to church.

But then we moved to northwest Arkansas, part of the Backward, Baptist, Bible, Belt. Here, there’s church on every block, people talk about their church, their religion, their Bible, their Bible study class, their choir practice, etc. etc. constantly. I got so tired of being told in person and on the TV, that the Bible says this and that, that I read the Bible, the ENTIRE Bible, to see what it said. Makes me sick. The best source I know of for turning a believer into a non-believer, is the Bible. The people who are always quoting the Bible and how it is the basis for morality, obviously haven’t read the Bible. If I were god and someone said that I wrote it, I would be insulted. I also read much of the Koran. By the way, Arkansas is one of seven states that has an unconstitutional state law requiring a belief in god to serve in a public office or on a jury. I know this is the law and from personal experience. I was excused from jury duty for refusing to take a religious oath. Arkansas doesn’t say which god you have to believe in, but then you’re given a Christian Bible to swear an oath. Doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, a non-believer, or whatever.

After reading the Bible, I started reading about other religions and also I read Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris , Dennet, plus the writings of religious people. I tried reading a book titled, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.” I read about half of it and couldn’t read any more it. Total bullshit, circular arguments and nonsense. For example, “God exists because the universe exits.” “All religions claim to be the true religion”, (true). But in the next paragraph, “of course, Christianity is the true religion.”

I don’t know why people are called Agnostic.

In reality, everyone is an Agnostic. Agnostic means, no knowledge. That is what we have about Heaven, Hell, and an afterlife. Of course religious people “know” there is. Religion enables people to know things that are impossible to know.

In summary, if one studies religion, which of course the clergy forbids, one can only come to the conclusion that it’s all a lie.

Wayne K

I am an atheist because I am a feminist. I think that statement is self-explanatory but others have been stumped by it so let me elaborate.

When I was young, my parents sent us (my siblings and I) to Catholic school. We weren’t a terribly devout family, but the Catholic school was very close by and, technically, we were Catholic so off we went.

Given our age, my classmates and I were on the cusp of modernization. The Church was moving towards a softer, gentler Catholicism. But, our priests were old and we still got the old lessons. So, when I was 8 yrs old and preparing for 1st Confession, Father Tim informed the girls (in a special lesson that we were seperated from the boys to receive) about the punishments of Eve. Not only were we responsible for the Fall of Man from His Perfect StateTM but we (as in “all women for all time”) would have to pay for it also. In particular, we would have to pay for it by submitting to the authority of our fathers, brothers and, someday, husbands and sons. The feminist in me revolted and in a moment of clarity where I may have actually exclaimed: “Eureka!” (It’s hard to tell since all I could hear was the blood rushing in my ears, maybe I yelled “Bullshit”) I knew that he was lying.

I told him so as well. There are few things in this world that an 8 yr old is certain of but I was certain of these things. First, I knew that I was smarter than my brother and the likelihood that I would ever submit to his will was right up there with pigs producing beef (experience has held up my childhood hypothesis). Also, I knew that sons damn well submitted to the will of their mothers, if they knew what was good for them. Plus, lots of women don’t get married and even those who do marry don’t universally submit to their spouses, so that rules out husbands. And, as for the will of our fathers… Well, every child (male or female) submitted to the will of its father, there was nothing special about girls in that case.

I was promptly sent to the hallway by my teacher to consider my insubordination for the remainder of Christian Living. This was a bad move on the teacher’s part as it gave me time to think and my moment of clarity blossomed. If Father Tim was lying about Eve, what else was he lying about (other than the fact that he was sexually assaulting altar boys regularly – a fact that didn’t come out until I was in my 20s)?

Once I asked that question and started to examine the claims of the Church, it was only a matter of time before I was a full-out atheist. Although I rejected Catholicism at first (because I didn’t know enough about other religions to accept/deny them) ultimately I realized it was the existence of god that I was rejecting. I didn’t really give religion any thought in high school (in Canada in the 1980s, religion was only discussed as a strange phenomena of a by-gone age) and it wasn’t until I took a university course in Philosophy in Religion that I seriously thought about faith and the existence of a supernatural world. That’s when I realized the interconnections between the Abrahamic faiths and how equally spurious their claims were.

So, by the time I was 20 yrs old, I had considered the question and decided that I was an atheist. But ultimately, what sent me down that road was my feminism. And I’m still a feminist now – and an atheist, trade unionist and social justice activist.

Sandra Goodick

“I’m an atheist. I know that can be hard for some people to understand sometimes. But I’ll give you my background and perhaps it will shed some light. It is true that some atheists have had bad experiences with churches. I was one of them, but my atheism grew from that after much contemplation and research.

I’m 45 years old and female. I grew up in a very rural area in western Pennsylvania, on a small dairy farm. I was within walking distance of most of my relatives.

We all went to the local Presbyterian church. It’s a lovely country church. My grandma was always with the other “ladies” in the one pew. My parents ran the youth group a couple years, and I was in choir, Sunday School and I even taught Bible School. There were quite a few others my age in the church so it was nice.

One year, another local church burnt down. My congregation invited them to join us in our church. I believe they were Methodists but we were close enough that there should have been no problems. But there was, of course. I was in my early teens and watched the whole thing. One of the ladies from my congregation said that God had spoke to her in her garden and said that the church should be abandoned and a new one built. The church split over this. People were so nasty to each other. Even to a young girl, this was ridiculous. I couldn’t understand how God could let this happen. It didn’t help that my friends’ parents were on opposite sides of things. Of course, all sides were sure that they were “good” Christians, and God sure didn’t seem inclined to show one or the other side that they were wrong.

I prayed to God to let me understand. There was no response and things got worse. The new church was built and those from the new church “removed” e.g. stole the antique communion set and an antique ceiling lamp from the old church. They also took the regular communion set. This went on for several years and I was more and more confused. I finally ended up reading the entire Bible, looking for some answers “from the horse’s mouth” as it were, and because my father didn’t think I could (I read voraciously). I read it and found that it was full of contradictions and acts I found horrible but that were evidently okay to God. I couldn’t understand how God who was also Jesus, and who I sang “Jesus loves the little children” to, could be like this. Sending people to hell for no more than not knowing about him? What of all the children? What about all the animals and people killed during the flood and the attack upon Sodom and Gomorrah? Why were people being damned for the sins of two people when those sins weren’t their own? And weirder, why does Romans 9 indicate that no one has a choice to believe, and people are damed just for the heck of it? I recommend everyone to read their holy book and really see what they profess to believe.

I used to pray every night. I prayed to ask God to protect everything I cared about and even things I didn’t care about, but were “good” things, like starving people, hostages(it was the 80s), etc. Since I read that God was such a contradiction, I stopped praying. And nothing changed. Things weren’t any better or worse, and I didn’t feel like I failed if something did go “wrong”. I no longer felt that I had to supplicate God for every little thing. I started reading more about other religions and even tried some others, still searching for something. I came to the realization that all religions are false because their deities do nothing. I realized that any good that occurred in the world was because of people, not some supernatural force.

So, now I’m an atheist. I have a job where I help people. I contribute to charities that I find worthy. I’m married to a perfectly wonderful man. My parents are still the good people they have always been, though they do not often go to church because people *still*, more than 30 years later, are being stupid about things. I do not fear some deity in the sky and do not need a carrot or stick to “make” me act good. I just am and I’m happy about that.

Andrea