The arguments maybe too simplistic to some but I am thankful for this site launching me into decades of doubt and eventual apathy to atheism.
What was your initial journey to atheism?
Just attending mass and actually started listening to what the fuck they talk about at around 17 yo
For real. I think most of us has underwent that scenario at some time in our lives. The contradictions alone would probably turn anyone off. But not many would take the leap due to parents and family.
Like everyone, I was born an atheist. I just never started believing.
Curiously I was troubled by the hiddenness of God and the mandate of faith, which seemed unreasonable. More over (since this was in 1970-1990) atheists and Muslims were not yet regarded as a threat, so the ministries were glad to compete with each other, so they routinely asserted other churches were deceptions by Satan, which made the faith mandate even more extreme.
(I’d later learn of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura that together mean its up to the individual what the bible means, and a reasonable Lord would accept any sincere effort. Faith of a mustard seed. However neither minister nor apologist is willing to concede this, eternally arguing that a believer’s salvation is forever in jeopardy, which makes Christianity look like a violent dad with alcoholism.)
My last bridges to naturalism were confronting my mortality and insignificance. It was especially hard once the climate crisis and the plastic crisis spelled a high risk of human extinction in the next few centuries, very much highlighting that we naked apes are still a petty species facing some serious great filters before us, and the universe is likely not to notice that we have gone.
So my ambitions of a long-tail contribution like a Pythagorean theorem or a Fifth Symphony are much smaller than they once seemed to be. My work as an absurdist was, and remains, cut out for me.
For me it was going to a Catholic high school. I was all well and good with the eucharist being a metaphor and what not. But then when I learned about transubstantiation, and that we were suppose to believe when the priest said the magic words those wafers and wine literally, and I mean literally, turned into the body and blood of Christ, I was out. I started questioning lots of stuff from there and eventually found myself moving toward deism, then agnostic, then finally straight up aetheist.
I was never Catholic and assumed it was a metaphor as well until ex-catholics corrected me.
Wtf. It is so clearly a metaphor. Why is this hard?
I kept getting scolded when I used to ask how many Jesus meat and blood do we need to consume to get into heaven. Your post reminds me why I chose to be quiet about my growing atheism as a teen.
Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell
Gotta thank my paternal uncles for that! My grandfather was a retired Baptist preacher so I internalized the idea that Christianity was an ideology of love, generosity and brotherhood as a kid.
In middle school my dad made some bad financial decisions which put our house at risk of foreclosure, and his loving Christian brothers, who had received plenty of help from him to find jobs and transportation when they immigrated, promptly told him to fuck off while calling my mother a stupid whore. Anything goes when calling YHWH’s a one-way street.
So I started off as a confused misotheist, but reading through the Bible and the history of Christian faith again, I had the stunning realization that talking donkeys aren’t real. Oh, and also that being a sociopathic bastard is par for the course for soldiers of Christ, real and imaginary. At least modern Christians don’t have the teeth to kill and enslave their neighbors to steal their land. You know, like frugal loving people do.
I mean this in a nice way, not to diminish what you felt whatsoever. Did you tell this story on reddit or is this bullshit so common that it feels like I read it before?
Yes and yes! I have commented quite a bit on r/atheism and there are indeed a lot of assholes among Baptists (and almost every large denomination, really) who help create former theists with similar stories. PKs (Pastor’s Kids) are somewhat stereotyped even in church communities as being especially awful when they have an opportunity to power trip. This sort of verbal warfare wasn’t uncommon in the Asian American churches I’ve been to, since parents go a little insane trying to keep up their cutthroat competition of sending the most emotionally stunted child to the Ivy League and make a billion dollars when the pastor keeps telling them to live humbly and frugally (while also sending his own kids to college out-of-pocket).
The most bizarre outcome of this whole experience is that the rest of my immediate family is still staunchly Christian. They can’t conceive the idea of blaming God for having so many awful followers, or the real dreadful thought that no gods have ever been around to reply to their prayers at all.
Yeah my wife is an asian immigrant so most of our friends are as well. I have seen what you described.
The whole one-upmanship thing is…well a mixed bag. And yes my kids play violin and get straight As, how did you know? Haha. Fine line between a trait being positive and being toxic.
Wasn’t any aignifigant specific event for me.
Juat a slow process of increasingly recognizing that thw whole thing is man-made.
The more questions I had, the more inconsistencies I noticed the more I learned and researched, the less plausible the entire thing appeared.
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But, I guess if I have to identify one starting point, it was probably thinking about the implications of “one true church” / “one true religion”.
Every church/religion makes some variant of that claim, and obviously only one of them can be correct in that assertion, but they can all be wrong about it. Which led to “what else are they confidently wrong about?”.
Turns out the more you look, the more wrong things you can find.
Carl Sagan. He started it with his kind skepticism. The way he could deal with a cultural or personal story, take it apart, and still preserve the dignity of the person or people.
He gave me permission to question without interrogate.
Long story short, my parents weren’t christian but sent me to church and church activities because it was basically free daycare, leaving them free to live their life without being dragged down by having to take care of a little kid (or having to pay for daycare). Once I realized this was the only reason I was forced to go to church, not because my parents were actual believers who were simply toO bUsY sUpPorTiNg tHe FaMiLy, it made me question a lot of things. My faith in religion didn’t survive the questioning.
I always enjoy this kind of conversation. People emerging from incarceration in a prison of the mind gives me joy.
My journey started with a conversation with my father around the time I was to be confirmed Catholic.
During that time, my confirmation sponsor was my father’s best friend. I spent some time with him every week or so for a little while, and we’d have chats about our shared superstitions and delusions and why they are important to us. Well, at one point for some reason I don’t recall and is unimportant now, I decided that I wasn’t sure I was ready to be confirmed. I think at the time that I was acutely aware of what that said about my ownership over that relationship, and I wasn’t sure that was a commitment I was ready to make.
As far as my father was concerned, if I was not ready to make that commitment, he would not be willing to help me pay for college and jumped directly to how I would have to move out the day I turned 18, get a job or join the military and probably get killed in a war, and then go to hell because I’m not Catholic. The important takeaway here was that he was basically telegraphing the reality that he would disown any responsibility for my life if I wasn’t certain I wanted to dedicate myself to the same cult he was in.
So I got confirmed. I might be cognizant of the importance of commitments and doing what I say I’m going to do, but I’m also not stupid, and a middle school kid can’t manage any part of their own life without support of their parents.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that up until that period of time, I was devout. I’d drank the kool-aid, I was an altar boy and considered seminary for a while. Following this ultimatum, I was not interested in that any longer, but I still went to church with my parents until college.
Once I went to school, I only went to church on xmas every year, and then only because I loved my father and we had a tradition of playing guitar and singing for the xmas mass. It was just him and I, and I know it gave him joy for us to sing hymns together. That was the extent of my religious involvement for a while, and during that time I was very much on my way out. Not yet “certainly” atheist yet, as I was a bit confused about semantics for one, and innately fearful of eternal damnation as I was raised to be straight out of the womb.
During my last year in school, I lived in an off-campus party house that was on the side of a “mountain” in Vermont. One of my routines was to wake up every morning and run up the mountain, look over the land, and run down again. This was not a particularly large mountain, but it was also not really a rock and bigger than a hill. Let’s call it a mountain.
One day, at the top of this mountain, looking over the lakes, the mountains, the streets with the cars as tiny as points on the landscape; observing the green earth and the moon still visible in the sky, I said aloud for the first time “I don’t believe in god.” I remember the moment as clearly as any I have available in my memory from that time. At that point, it was 2001 and the “four horsemen of new atheism” hadn’t yet written their seminal works on the topic. I also had no particular feelings against cultists other than pity, and I had an overwhelming sense of freedom and a bit of anxiety as I now had to consider what morality was all about… since in my world, morality was tied to religion.
I feel as if my comprehension is considerably better with the advantage of 20+ years’ adult experience since that time. I’ve lived more than half my life free from superstition and have a much better defined worldview… but that doesn’t matter to this comment. :)
For me it was forgetting to keep reminding myself to pray. After having forgotten to pray, and therefore think of Christianity, for a few years I just kinda noticed I didn’t believe and that it was actually a change from previously.
Just: Getting kicked out of church for seven years on account of being a violent little shit.
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