How many of the questioners used to have religion?

Eric_PK

I’m the son of a Lutheran minister, so you can say that I was very religious for quite some time.

I’ve always been into science, and was never very dependent on religion. When I got to my late teens, I found that I wasn’t really getting anything out of church so I stopped going.

When I went to college and took philosophy and comparative religion, that pretty much cemented my beliefs.

Dave Hitt www

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, a mind-numbing cult that requires total devotion and belief in really idiotic things. I escaped when I was 20, and spent the better part of a year holed up in a ratty apartment reading everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t realize it then, but I was deprogramming myself. It wasn’t until a few years later that I felt completely released from the JW’s mental shackles, and sometime during that period I came to the conclusion that all gods were as inconstant and illogical as the God of the Bible.

George Ricker www

I was raised attending the Methodist Church and became very involved in it as a teenager and young man. I was active in the youth fellowship group, sang in the choir, regularly attended church services and even served as a lay preacher when I was in high school and college. The church was one of the focal points of my social life. Most of the adults I knew and most of the friends I grew up with attended that same church. I never felt I was being brainwashed or anything like that, but I also don’t recall anyone ever mentioning any viable alternatives to god-belief and so on. This was in the 1950s and early 1960s. The only mention ever made of atheism was by people ranting about the “godless Communists.”

Once I had graduated from college, I decided to enter the ministry and attended a theological seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. Although financial circumstances forced me to abandon my studies (my wife and I were expecting our second child, and I had to go to work to support my family), I remained fairly active in the church after returning home.

At that point in my life I was really focused on the day-to-day business of taking care of my familiy, earning a living and so on. I still attended church and took part in many of the activities at the church. At around 30, I began reexamining some of the things I had always accepted as “givens” and that led to my turning away from belief in gods and religions. This was a gradual process that took several years to accomplish. There was no sudden revelation, nothing that made me angry, no personal tragedy, that triggered this process. It was simply a period of self-examination in which I took a critical look at the religious ideas that I had previously accepted as “settled” questions.

By the time I was 35 I was calling myself an agnostic and within a year or two I realized I was also an atheist. Not only did I claim no knowledge about gods, but I had no belief in any of them or even in the basic concept of supernatural forces or entities.

Since then I have continued to study science, the nature of belief systems, history and human psychology. I think today I am much better informed about the nature of life and the universe than I was when I was under the spell of god-belief and religion. All in all, I have found the experience liberating. Since leaving gods and religions behind, I have been a happier, more complete and more productive person than I was before.

The most important single thing in that process was my determination to be honest with myself and to reject all attempts at special pleading and question begging. I took as my motto the lines from Hamlet when Polonius advises his son, Laertes, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

I have been an atheist for more than three decades now and have absolutely no regrets.

Paula Kirby

I got into Christianity as an adult and was deeply religious for about 6 years, until about 6 years ago, and would definitely say it was the most important part of my life at that time, completely dominating the way I viewed the world, the decisions I made, everything. I definitely believed very firmly in a loving god whom I could have a personal relationship.

In my last year of so of Christianity, I was attending quite a high church, with a communion service and formal liturgy every week. And one week I heard myself repeating a line from the creed saying ‘He descended into hell’; and I got a real shock because I had NEVER believed that, yet there I was – and there I had been every Sunday for the previous year or so – saying that I did. What shocked me most was not that I didn’t believe it (I’d never believed in hell – it was simply utterly irreconcilable with the loving God I believed in, and made no sense either in terms of justice, logic or decency; I won’t expand here, but you could always post another question if you’re interested!); what shocked me was that for months and months and months I had been SAYING I believed something when actually I didn’t (even though I still firmly believed in other aspects of Christianity at the time), and that I’d never even noticed the discrepancy.

So I decided to be ultra-alert in services over the next few weeks, and to scrutinise every single word I was being asked to go along with, whether it was the words of hymns, prayers, sermons, bible-reading, the creed, whatever. What else had I been saying/praying/singing/going along with, that I didn’t actively believe?

Well, it was a hugely eye-opening experience. There were HUGE amounts of things that I simply didn’t believe, even though I still believed in the Christian God. I had simply gone along with them without even noticing that there was a mismatch.

So I then decided I needed to be very clear about what I DID believe. So I wrote that down and looked at it with fresh eyes, and realised that it made no sense at all. It had been a very nice belief to cling to, but I honestly had no reason to believe it was TRUE. I stopped being a Christian there and then.

Discussions with Christians over the next year or two just further confirmed that what they believed made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and eventually I got off the agnostic fence and realised that I was completely atheist.

Now I look back on my six years of Christianity with a combination of bewilderment and embarrassment. I can see why I liked the idea of it at the time; I just can’t see why I ever believed it, or why I switched off my critical faculties so completely for so long. Waking up from it was the best thing I’ve ever done (and, again, I’d be happy to explain why in an answer to a separate question if you’re interested).

If you are religious yourself, though, I would issue a challenge to you: to go through the same exercise that I did and scrutinise EVERYTHING you are being asked to declare you believe in church, and to check whether you really do actively believe it all or not; and if you do, to ask yourself WHY you do. Not whether it makes sense within the context of the story, but whether there is actually good reason to think that it is TRUE. Go on, I dare you! :-)

SmartLX

I was raised Catholic in Australia. At age 12, faced with the Problem of Evil and without any good answers at the time, I lost my proper faith very quickly and became an agnostic.

After that I didn’t think about it much, until 15 years later when I read a general article about atheism. I thought about it and, rather than deciding to be an atheist, I realised I was one already.

This was just before the big “New Atheists” media explosion, so the sudden burst of public support immediately afterwards was very encouraging.

brian thomson www

I was taken to Catholic Church as a kid, by my mother. I was even an altar boy for a couple of years, which was like being in a play, something I was involved with at school. However, my mother died just before I turned 13, which meant that there was suddenly no-one to take me to Church any more – so I just stopped going.

I doubt that I ever “Believed with a capital B”, as I put it: if I had, I would surely have made some effort to attend church, right? In general, I doubt that children really understand what they’ve being dragged in to, and while they may get called “religious” based on the noises they make, can they really be considered “true believers” if they didn’t make an impartial, fully-informed, reasoned choice to believe it?