I believe I wrote one post, a long time ago, asking readers to recount their journey to nonbelief. That, I thought, would not only help us get to know each other, but to appreciate the diversity of ways that people either embraced atheism from the outset, or did so while leaving their faith.
Today, though, I have a different question, one that came from a hypothesis I floated two days ago: is anybody an atheist for reasons other than lack of evidence for God or evidence against the idea of God (e.g., the existence of undeserved evil)? In other words, is your nonbelief grounded on evidence or the lack thereof?
I’d like to know the answer to this, for in truth I can’t see any other reasons for rejecting God. So here I pose a simple question to readers, which I’d appreciate your answering. It’s this:
If you were asked explain to someone, say an open-minded person you’d just met, why you’re an atheist, and were limited to at most three sentences, what would you say?
I’ve given my own answer before, but as always I’ll answer the question here. It’s this: “I realized at age 17 that there was not a whit of evidence for anything I’d ever been told about God, and abandoned the idea within a few minutes of that realization.”
Your turn.
Why would anyone exposed to the discipline of rational thought ever believe in a spirit world of any kind. Religionists choose to remain in a state of arrested inquiry. Faith and dogma halt the pursuit of truth.
When I was about 14 I was convinced by a preacher at a sermon that I needed to accept Jesus into my heart and I would have an immediate change of life. When nothing happened I began to think and eventually investigate my beliefs. It took a while but eventually I realized that there was simply no reliable evidence for any of it.
The good Christian God I learned about cannot possibly be true. (Babies suffer without sinning. Animals suffer, and the world works in such a way that this suffering is inevitable. If omniscient God set up this world, God is at least as evil as good.) Study of comparative religion acquainted me with images of God that could be true (e.g. Vishnu floating in the milky ocean, dreaming the world) but my belief or disbelief in such ideas is of no importance at all. We can understand the world well without reference to God; God is an unnecessary hypothesis unsupported by evidence.
I began to realise in my teens that religion seemed to me absurd and its claims very improbable.
I never really then thought much about religion again for many years until I was much older.
I am now 71 and over the last 20 years or so, due to mainly reading articles from the sciences, I am convinced my atheism and humanism is an honest and correct position. Books by Anthony Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss and similar have only reinforced my views.
I guess with me it’s lack of evidence. So that raises the question, if there’s no evidence, why do people believe in God? Either they somehow override the fact there’s no evidence, or else they say there IS evidence.
1) I really wanted to believe and thought for a time I did.
2) Others have mentioned “testing” through prayer, etc, not once in 25 years did I have an answered prayer or a religious feeling/experience.
3) Being unable to believe, as a matter of personal integrity I felt I had to admit it publicly and leave the ministry.
I was a semi sophisticated theologian and among the christian community it was unanimous that I wasn’t “doing it” right.
So, ironically speaking, I can’t be a member of a club who would have me.
I grew up with God as the creator and overseer of good and evil. As I learned more about the universe, God had to change to fit my growing world view. Eventually God became so thin, that it became transparent, and ultimately discarded as unnecessary since there was no evidence that he was ever there at all.
Laplace (allegedly) said it best: “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
The world makes more sense without a god than with one.
Wonderfully succinct! You could just use the second sentence.
I became an atheist when I realized there is no evidence for religious magic. But today I am a skeptic because I managed to develop simple tests that – always arguably, of course – reject it. By now I have a handful of independent tests, and the result was that magic failed all of them.
[3 sentences by the book. But if asked “what tests” I would describe tests such as thermodynamics of closed systems, quantum field physics of the vacuum, cosmology as a system, et cetera. Either qualitatively -thermodynamics exist so no magic – or quantitatively – knowing > 4000 chemical reaction’s (say) enthalpy allows for a 3 sigma yes/no binomial test of energy closure.]
My parents never said anything about god to me when I was a child, so I never gained the impression that the word means anything.
(Not quite true. When I was four or five my mother said that God is love and wherever there is love, there is god. It made no more sense to me than it does anyone else, but I was under no pressure to pretend it did.)
I went college and learned, among other things, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and epistemology. In my third year, a psychology professor assigned us Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and after reading those books, there was no longer a place in my worldview for the stories I was taught in church. Later, that professor taught us the definitions of Theist, Agnostic, and Atheist and had us raise our hands to indicate what we were, and at that moment I knew I was an atheist.
My “epiphany” came in church! Christmas Eve no less. Had become indifferent about religion prior to that night, but accompanied my dear Mom to the mass and listened to the priest rail against other religions / extol Catholicism … without any good argument for his position. Right then & there I said that’s it, this is f**ked. I think God Delusion came out shortly after, picked it up in an airport & didn’t put it down during a transAtlantic flight. I had a lot of thoughts thereafter back to my catholic high school education. No regrets, the priests there were for the most part decent people (luckily no incidents ever reported of sexual misconduct, though there was one guy who was definitely gay, but I digress), they were even pretty cool with the skeptical questions but their response (“ours is not to know all” bla bla) I now recognize as a lazy cop out.
Funny how sometimes insights happen in church. (Not the ones they want, however.) The Christmas after my 19th birthday, I was in church with my 5 siblings and parental units, all in one pew. I turned to my next-youngest sister and whispered, “I don’t believe any of this.” “Me neither,” she whispered back. I said, “Pass it on and pass it back.” 5 minutes later I had my answer. None of my siblings believed, from Dan, age 11 to me, age 19. The only one who said, “I’m not sure,” was my youngest brother age 9. My mom was giving me nasty looks for my whispering. My parents had brought us all to the University Newman Center for mass (a “liberal” Catholic parish), because they knew I’d kick up a fuss about going to the conservative church they usually attended. But still no good. To this day, despite my parents’ trying, all 6 of us are one sort of atheist or another.
Religeon is not nessasary and gods are nessasary to religeon. I am a better person without religeous entanglements. I am free from religeon’s gods and I am better able to understand my self as I relate to the world.
No convincing evidence for any supernatural beings, any kind, anywhere.
The world does and has swarmed with religions, which are contradictory; and which, if they were actually referring to a reality “out there” somewhere, would be expected to converge on the correct knowledge of that thing(s) out there — but they haven’t, they are randomly diverse.
The “world” (reality, the universe) looks exactly as one would expect for the (actual) case of no supernatural beings: Just nature and the laws of physics.
(I stretched the three-sentence rule with run-ons; but I wanted to make the three points.)
It’s funny, I was talking to my wife about similar things the other day and she told me about the questions she kept asking in Sunday school, when she was young (even as young as 4 or 5).
Every one of those well-known questions, she asked it (e.g., where did Adam & Eve’s sons’ wives come from? Why will people who have never heard of Jesus go to Hell? etc., etc.)
Eventually, they asked her parents not to bring her to Sunday school anymore. No wonder I married her! 🙂
Whenever someone asks me why, I ask if they want the short answer or the long answer.
The short answer is “Because I grew up. I don’t believe in unicorns or dragons or faeries or angels or demons or gods, all for largely the same reasons.”
In addition to lack of evidence….
The concept of God does not solve the “problem” of creation.
In other words, who (or what) created God?
To introduce the supernatural into any explanation of natural phenomena exponentially complicates things and renders such magical phenomena even more unlikely.
I’m an atheist because I understand how plainly obvious evolution is, how it works–the randomness of it. I understand the size and indifference of the universe, our insignificance in it, and how we are part of this planet, not *on* it. These truths negate a creator, certainly a personal one.
I was born an atheist, and was never indoctrinated into any particular religion. Over the years my curiosity has wandered, but never once did it occur to me that I needed to believe in one particular deity, or subscribe exclusively to just one of the hundreds of religions around the world.
I was born to atheist parents and raised in a very secular society (in Uruguay, which has the highest percentage of atheists in the Americas). By the age of 7 or 8 I started wondering about that curious god thing other kids would sometimes talk about and it struck me as so silly and absurd. At about the same time I started to be fascinated by the similarities I saw in some animals like cats (we had one) and humans with tigers and orangs in the zoo and developed an interest in evolution.
Assuming you’re correct about Uruguay, any idea why? What is different there?
Statistics consistently show Uruguay at the top: http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html
As for the why: historical circumstances and reasons. Some started arising even before independence (1825). But the main events happened during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, particularly during the presidency of José Batlle y Ordóñez, a liberal atheist leader. The profile of the culture carries on till present. Our preceding president was openly atheist (and so is a much more relevant celebrity in the country: our national soccer team coach). I could expand but it would take space and time. The Pew Research Center noted the following on one of their polls:
Religion in Uruguay
On many questions in the survey, Uruguay is an outlier, far and away Latin America’s most secular country. Fully 37% of Uruguayans say that they have no particular religion or are atheist or agnostic. In no other Latin American country surveyed do the religiously unaffiliated make up even 20% of the population.
Laicidad, or the separation of religion and the state, has a long history in Uruguay. In 1861, the government nationalized cemeteries across the country, breaking their affiliations with churches. Soon after, the government prohibited churches from having a role in public education or issuing marriage certificates. Secularization continued in the 20th century: A new constitution enshrined the separation of religion from public life, references to God were removed from the parliamentary oath and religious references were dropped from the names of cities and villages.
Today, Uruguay has by far the lowest levels of religious commitment among the countries polled. Fewer than a third of Uruguayans (28%) say that religion is very important in their lives; in no other country surveyed do fewer than four-in-ten people say this. Relatively few Uruguayans say they pray daily (29%) or attend religious services weekly (13%). In neighboring Brazil, by contrast, 61% of adults say they pray daily, and 45% report attending services at least once a week.
Raised in a fundamentalist (Exclusive Brethren). To become a member I was required to accept Jesus Christ as my Saviour. I never did as I was shy and didn’t want to speak in public and I also thought it was silly and didn’t really believe it or for that matter care about it.
I was ADD. Never paid attention and wasn’t interested in what they were talking about. Went to meetings 3 times on Sunday for an hour to an 11/2 hours. I had difficulty sitting still of course and was punished regularly for not paying attention and being disruptive. As I remember it most Sunday evenings was strap time, 20 on each hand with a belt. Eventually that stopped as my Father realized it was not effective and never had been. There were meetings on Monday night, sometimes Tuesday night, Thursday night and two day meetings on weekends with 2 sessions on Saturday and 3 on Sunday. On long weekends there were 3 day meetings, 2 sessions on Sat, 3 Sun and 2 on Monday. Torture for me with my ADD. Always punished after those.
I was inundated with religion. Breakfast bible reading and prayer, dinner bible reading and prater and before bed my Father would read and pray again. He never tried to get me to speak or read the bible, perhaps he knew I wouldn’t do it.
By the time I was 16 my father was becoming more insistent and my defense was to clam up and not answer any questions or make any comments. When members came from other congregations someone would always try to ‘Save’ me. No matter what they did I would not speak. Eventually they’d give up.
The next tactic, to ‘save’ me was fear. I can remember the morning and evening prayers at home when my Father and older brother would pray that god would take me rather than being ‘lost’ to the world. That didn’t work so they took it to the congregation and other members would pray that god would take me. One afternoon there were some members from another congregation who gave it their best shot. One started asking me questions and when I wouldn’t answer, he said to my brother “You’re his brother, You make him talk!” As soon as he said make, I got up and left. My brother followed me to the door. I hit the door knob, it was one of those that locked when it was pushed in and the door wouldn’t open. My brother grabbed me by the shoulder and said “You can’t get out of here” I was about to hit him and my Mother, the only one with any common sense came and told my brother to let me go. That was the last time I went to any meetings. I was eventually asked to leave home as well. Met a girl when I was 16, 1961 and we are still together. She also had problems with an abusive alcoholic Father. We supported each other!
I’m not an intellectual and I didn’t become an atheist through any awakening of reason, it was circumstance. I never paid attention to what was going on. When they started praying for god to take me, I’d say to myself, of course, “Okay big guy take your best shot!” I must have been an atheist to challenge god like that! Although for a little while I was waiting for something to happen. When it didn’t it confirmed to me there was no god.
I have since taken a much closer look at religion and don’t understand how anyone can believe 4000 year old goat herders’ writings vs verifiable evidence from modern science.
William, your family sound very much like JW’S, disowning for not believing their tripe.
In all honesty, what other reason could there be that would be rational? I’ve skimmed the other comments and it seems like a lack of acceptable evidence is almost always the case for someone to be atheist.
For me, I just never believed. It never made sense to me. I kind of went along with it, but even during my days in PSR/CCD (raised in a Catholic home) I was the kid asking how all the animals fit on Noah ark, and how did he get the lions to not eat all the other animals. But any time I tried to make sense of how this “guy” up in space could have made everything and created miracles happen and always knew what we were doing and watched over us could allow bad stuff to happen, or never answered when I ask him stuff, and never seemed to actually be anywhere doing anything…
In addition to there not being any evidence for a god(s) and in some cases, evidence AGAINST a god(s), just think of the striking life changes that would inevitably come with belief. If you’re Catholic for example, perhaps you’ll be persuaded to a life of celibacy due to an almost paranoid fear of sin. After all, why do anything half way? If this stuff is true, might as well try your best to punish yourself the most and deprive yourself from good food, drink, sex, etc..
I suppose it’s not the worst price to pay for eternal bliss, but that eternal bliss doesn’t even sound too blissful. Not by my current standards anyway. I wouldn’t want to live a life like that.
This certainly isn’t the best reason for not believing. That’s why I chose to write “in addition to the lack of evidence”, because there could always be a god-like figure out there that is incompatible with the way you want to live your life. But it also certainly comes with negative consequences for following the so-called “rules” this god or gods want you to live by. That would be a very difficult change for me.
Also, I think Christians think this is the ONLY reason we atheists don’t convert. I think mostly they are oblivious to the lack of evidence or evidence against, and so they just assume we all want to sin or live a life of hedonism. Well, it sure beats a life of repression.
+1 on that
(If I did convert, I would make a very bad i.e. substandard Christian 🙂
cr
The god concept seems incoherent to me. Supernatural, to my mind, is a synonym for fictional. Almost everything that was once considered supernatural has been explained naturally. There’s no reason to think that the trend will not continue to the point where “almost everything” will just be replaced by “everything”.
I just finished reading “The Black Cloud” by Fred Hoyle. In it the alien life form states: “By and large, conventional religion, as many humans accept it, is illogical in its attempt to conceive of entities lying outside the universe. Since the universe comprises everything, it is evident that nothing can lie outside it. The idea of a “god” creating the universe is a mechanistic absurdity clearly derived from the making of machines by men.”
god revealed to me that he didn’t exist.
My parents were not religious. I remember my father even telling me that we humans came from the sea. Fishes that make it to the land. But at the same time accepted religion as a fact of life. At school I liked a lot old testament stories (as I liked Hollywood movies) and believed in God because the big guys told me so and must knew better than I do. When I was 12-13yo prayed to God to increase my school grades. He didn’t! So I threw him out of the window like a broken toy. Still I considered myself an orthodox Christian until 40yo. Until a politically ambitious fanatic became Archbishop. This was the end.
I don’t like to name myself an Atheist. This implies that God is still in the center (as it was in older times) and I name myself against. I my mind already I live in a place without religion.
I was lucky in my Buddhist practice to experience the lack of any persistent existence of myself, leading me to understand the transient nature of “self.” Continued study in Neuroscience related to the subject of “self” creation helped me understand how we create our notion of “self”.
A Belief in a persistent absolute creator could not withstand that personal awareness. Although my early logical inclination was to discount religious proclamations on god, this meditative experience of no-self, delivered me from any possible notion of god.
It is easy to discount the god notion when one understands how humans come to see themselves as “souls” steeped in permanence. God is partly an extension of that belief.
My answer is similar. I looked for evidence of god and found none. Things we don’t understand are often, in time, explained by science and it is through science that we owe our healthy existence, modern world and prosperity, not god.
As an amateur astronomer (since I was a kid) and citizen scientist (for the past two decades), the misologistic and vengeful character of the god depicted in the bible seemed wholly incompatible with the explainable magnificence and yet pitiless indifference I observed in nature.
A supreme being is the keystone of an authoritarian hierarchic society. So while you can turn either way philosophically, this unwarranted authoritarianism seems to me a sufficient reason to reject it. I don’t believe in gods the same way I don’t believe in inequality.
Only three sentences makes it difficult but:-
1: I assume that you are coming from a Christian starting point and that you agree that Christianity lives or dies by the ‘evidence’ that is in the Bible.
2: I find so much in the OT that is clearly false (Genesis, Exodus etc) and repulsive and much in the NT that is literally incredible (unrecorded slaughtered of the innocents, saints rising from their graves etc) coupled with the general incoherence of the main idea of a benign omnipotent being ( theodicy?) that there is no call to believe.
3: Naturalism seems sensible and resolves so many difficulties for example living on a still cooling planet seems a better way of coming to terms with the odd tsunami than disapproval of our genital habits.
Over to you, theist.
Evidence. The world just makes more sense without the God hypothesis than it does with it. I grew up religious but over time contrary evidence, first with specific doctrines (e.g. global flood, creationism), and eventually with even broader conceptions of God, piled up until it just wasn’t tenable for me. I tried for maybe ten years to stay religious despite what my head was telling me, but ultimately it didn’t work.
I’ve heard of people rejecting God because of theodicy or some such, but I’ve always been able to accept the idea that if there is a God, that God might be an asshole or worse. So I’ve never been even the slightest bit moved by theodicy except in the sense that it highlights the incoherence of certain religious doctrines. That is, theodicy arguments show the poverty of certain religious beliefs, but say nothing about the God hypothesis generally.
It never occurred to me to believe in God–that was something other people did, for reasons I never fully understood other than they were expected to do so.
I just thought going to church or Sunday school was a quaint tradition my grandparents engaged in and some of my classmates were made to do.
Imagine my surprise to learn (around age 50!) that being an atheist made me a member of a small and often vilified minority!
I’ve yet to encounter a coherent definition for what gods are supposed to be.
All definitions fall into one of two categories: entities who can do really impressive stuff we can’t understand, or entities who can do stuff that’s actually impossible.
The former means modern children with smartphones would be gods to anybody who lived a century ago.
The latter is incoherent; if something is allegedly impossible, but that something is actually demonstrated, then that something wasn’t really impossible after all — and we’re back to kids with smartphones. But if it’s truly impossible, then even the gods can’t do it…so why mention it in the first place?
Then, on top of it all, Epicurus recognized centuries before the invention of Christianity that there aren’t any powerful moral agents operating in the human sphere, else we’d have evidence that they were mitigating evil. Even those kids with smartphones can mitigate evil by calling 9-1-1, yet no gods in all of history have ever demonstrated even that little bit of power and / or compassion. Even if some super-powerful beasties exist somewhere, they don’t do anything here on Earth.
Cheers,
b&
Yes, and notice that saying “my god is something that has the following powers: …” is not a definition at all, because it says nothing about what this god *is*. It doesn’t help to say ‘entity’, ‘being’, ‘power’ etc.
I don’t really have a problem with the first definition, but of course it is really clear that that kind of god is not anywhere to be seen.
One type that may be missing from your comment is the mysterious ground of all being god. The problem with that one is that there is no particular reason why it should be called god (with all the baggage that carries) as opposed to something like quantum fluctuations.
The God of Ground Round does the impossible by Grounding the Ungrounded or what-not. It’s pure Aristotle — from nothing only comes nothing, so you need a magical special Something to break the unbreakable chain. And the incoherency in this case is especially transparent, because the Grounder itself doesn’t need to be Grounded, thereby destroying the initial premise that everything needs to be Grounded.
That, or else, as you observe, it’s simply the laws of physics and / or Sagan’s Cosmos, and reifying it is kinda silly.
Mind you, there’s nothing worng with a bit of silliness now and again; the only problem is when you take your silliness more and / or less seriously than is appropriate. That is…the willing suspension of disbelief is an essential part of what it means to be human, but ya gotta recognize when the curtains come down, too….
Cheers,
b&
>
What about the god of roast beast?
Or the God of Beer. He’s the man.
…beer can chicken…?
b&
>
It can! I’ve sen it do it …
A child dies from starvation like every 5 seconds. Free will has fat chance against nature and nurture. Seems odd to have the complexities of biological chemistry, everything from gutural bacteria to light sensitive cells in our eyes, yet this is all either unnecessary or duplicated in the afterlife. Nobody seems to be complaining about their free will not letting them fly by will power alone, or conjure objects out of nothing by magic. Yet, when suggesting maybe god could tone down our desires to do bad stuff it’s suddenly a full-on-attack on our free will. Mourning, sorrow, the feeling of loss when someone loved dies, some us never become the same person again, seems like a cruel thing to do to a person if death isn’t final.
Lastly, I’d rather start a new life all over again, with a new body and mind, than living for eternity. Which kinda is true, as long as new people are born, of course none of them will be “me”, but then if it were “me” then I wouldn’t really have a new mind… err..
I would say something like:
“There is ample evidence *against* the existence of every man-made version of a god or gods, the ones appearing in every organized religion. And there is zero evidence for the existence of some kind of generic or ‘first-causes’ god. I am an atheist for the same reason that you don’t believe a sentient star who likes to be called ‘Bob’ will spontaneously materialize in your toilet next Monday.”
I’m trained in the scientific method, which has proven itself to be a very good way of understanding the world. Using that method shows that there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that any deity or deities exist.
or more simply:
I could see that religion was a ridiculous idea at the age of 12 when I asked a religious education teacher difficult questions about dinosaurs, and got thrown out of class for my trouble rather than any sane answers.
By about age 10, I had noticed that many people from my peers in Sunday School (lutheran) to pillers of the adult church community used their religion-based “moral high ground” to bully people. This lead me to think about the problem of evil, then the similarity between the content of the Bible and Grimm’s fairy tales. It didn’t take long from there to realize that it was all bullshit.
Because it’s the natural position. I mean, everyone is born an atheist… I just never enjoyed the taste nor could I see the supposed health benefits of the BS my culture tried to forcefeed me.
Two possible answers:
1. Because I was raised as an unbeliever – not dogmatically so, but let’s be honest, I have no idea how I would have turned out with religious parents.
2. Once considering the question rationally, it ultimately comes down to a “best fit to the data” situation. Not so much lack of evidence full stop, but given what we know about the size and characteristics of the universe, deep time, evolution, etc., deities just don’t fit in there.
I find the concept of God unbelievable. If taken literally, claims about God violate what we know about how the world works. If the concept is “saved” by retreating to metaphor, the concept becomes ungrounded and thus literally meaningless.
At the age of 12 I determined that my future life would not be influenced by superstition and gobbledegook in all its forms.
I am one of those people who, in the words of Blaise Pascal, are “so made that they cannot believe.” As a child, in church, I contemplated the idea of a creative deity and found it utterly unnatural and bizarre. I didn’t actually consider or call myself an atheist until I was 20, but I always was one, even before I thought in terms of evidence and argument.
As a youth I looked around me at the other churchgoers and the vicar and realised that none of them acted as if there was an all-knowing all-powerful god everywhere.
Were there any evidence for a god, belief would not be necessary. So, the practice of believing in a god (or having faith) has little to do with the reality. I’m an atheist because I find no value in the exercise of belief in the supernatural. All the better angels of human nature (empathy, compassion, humility, propriety, chivalry, charity, perseverance, diligence, reason, etc…) can be cultivated without having to project these qualities onto an idealized being.
+1
I lost my belief in a “loving” god when I realized that a loving god would not have allowed the suffering I saw all around me, in both people and animals. After that, the pieces fell into place. I began to question everything I had been taught and saw no evidence for any of it.
I feel there are almost two questions here; how did you become an atheist (assuming you were something else for a time), and why are you still an atheist?
To the first question I would say that I became an atheist when I realized religion had nothing to offer me. That is, I either rejected, or had no need for, its creation stories (myths), its historical stories (legends), its sense of morality (outdated), its miracle claims (false), its community (non-accepting), its traditions (pointless) and its supernatural claims – heaven, hell and God (no logical support let alone evidentiary support). Once I realized this I left religion.
If the question was why do I remain an atheist, there are also many reasons since religion is many things, but like most people here it boils down to the absence of any supporting evidence.
I became an atheist because I could not accept the idea that new-born children in a South American jungle would be sent to hell simply because they did not know about Jesus.
I have to admit, I had it easy. For whatever reason, I just never believed any of it and stated that to myself for the first time when I was 8 years old. So, I guess not seeing any reason to believe it (evidence) was implicit in that. However, I became aware later that those claiming gawd and spouting off about religion had no idea what they were talking about, which didn’t do a thing to convince me of their side.
I suppose I should also admit that being told I have to kowtow to or worship someone or something rubs me the wrong way and always has and that may have played just as much a role as anything else. Rebellion is one of the few things that come to me almost effortlessly.
Among the unexpected responses to such a question is what Mehdi Hassan said – paraphrased – it’s not interesting to him is god exists or not. As if whether something is true or not doesn’t matter. I got that from an Oxford Union debate he was in.
Another thought – I have read about atheist Hindus on Wikipedia. Can’t remember what led me down that rabbit hole…
I’d like to claim rationality as the cause of my being an atheist, but it is more related to feelings, dreams and the evidence of religious believers unable to truly live their beliefs. Perhaps, I can claim rationality in the perception of how irrational the religious beliefs of others seem to me.
Following are two “poems” I wrote years ago that convey some of my experiences:
PRAYER: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Please attend this supplicant
who can no longer believe.
Prayers lie lifeless about my head,
a congregation of desiccated words,
shorn of faith they are powerless
to wend their way anywhere.
An urge to kneel chokes me with fear
that one more word will bury me
in years of stillborn prayers.
Leave me in peace to journey on alone.
Amen
DEATH OF GOD
In my dream, that morning,
I didn’t go to Sunday School
and was late for church.
As I stood out front,
my brother and a friend
left the building. I went through
the front doors to the auditorium:
no one was there. So, I walked
through the pastor’s office
back into, what used to be,
Sunday School classrooms.
I found myself onstage, behind
the minister at the pulpit,
facing the entire congregation.
All of them shouted at me,
“Go back! Go back! Get out!”
They wildly waved their arms.
It was exceedingly clear that
I was in the wrong place,
I shouldn‘t be there. So, I turn
back the way I’d come:
through office, auditorium,
and out the front doors.
As I step into the bright sunlight
on the sidewalk out front,
the church roof caves in.
In addition to feelings and dreams, over the years I have read many, many books about mythologies, Gods and religions, evolution, etc. that have added to my atheism. I am comfortable living my “truth” and not trying to force it on anyone else.
It is inconceivable that any god in whose image we were made would reward credulity or condemn skepticism. They are, respectively, the weakness and strength of being human. For me, personally, it was the realization that Mark 16:16 is morally reprehensible.
Not only is there a lack of evidence for the existence for any god, it’s also obvious how they were in fact made up by ancient people.
During high school, I was at church, bored with the sermon, and I started thinking about a claim I’d heard that ‘virgin’ was a mistranslation of ‘maiden’ and how I wanted to hear a sermon on that – was that true, what was the evidence for/against it. And then it dawned on me that the problem for me wasn’t the lack of evidence, it was worse than that: no one cared that there was no evidence. Evidence was never a deciding factor. And I was done with religion from then on.
haha love it.
I had a similar experience while in high school albeit, probably, more gradual. This time in my life coincided with reading Philip Pullman’s -The Golden Compass-, which helped me along the process towards atheism.
Second president Bush made me sick to be a fellow Chritian. The hypocrisy sent me through the spiritual but not religious faze. I then read a Bart Ehrman book. Already knew about Ingersoll, and that lead to Hitch, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, etc.
3 sentences? You bet I’ll use all 3.
1) I came to the conclusion that Catholicism–and even Christianity in general–has so many contradictions that it can’t possibly be true.
2) I realized that the conviction I felt towards my religion was just as strong as the conviction felt by people in other faiths, and understood that this means my feelings that my religion was correct did not mean that it was, since the religions of the world contradict each other and can’t all be correct.
3) I realized there wasn’t evidence to support belief in a deity of any kind, and without evidence, I would be just going off a feeling, which to me was not enough to believe anymore.
Throughout the bible, God (supposedly the unfathomable genius that created the universe) is described as angry, jealous, vengeful, loving, intolerant, merciful, murderous and in some cases even fallible. Finally at age 30 (oh, the power of indoctrination) I realised that these are traits of humans and that this God was created in the image of superstitious, frightened, ignorant Homo sapiens. Following this realisation, everything made sense and the floodgates of reason were flung wide open.
Why indeed,
science explained away any doubts that religion had anything useful to say about existence and the universe.
In a personal experience of realisation that was profound (for instance, with the way the solar system works and the earths relationship with the sun) it was about facts and not something culturally made up that do not lie or discriminate, no matter who you are or your own journey to them.
It is the same for everyone and everything, they are not your facts or mine.
Another person raised Catholic here. I started drifting away when I attended (Catholic) high school, but didn’t let myself see it at first. Drifted further away in college, but I figured my problem was with the Catholic church. Attended a Protestant church for a couple of years after that. Finally realized my problem was with Christianity, and ultimately religion in general.
I didn’t quite realize it, but I’d suffered from lifelong depression. That finally got treated when I reached a breaking point in my early 30s. That really opened my mind up to realizing how much BS I could absorb, and started me on the road to critical thinking. All vestiges of religious belief fell soon after.
To sum up: I’m an atheist because there is no convincing evidence for any gods. Period. I simply had to wait until my mind was working properly to realize this.
When I was a young lad of about 10 or 11 years of age (I’m 79 now) I went to Sunday school at the local Christian church. One Sunday the lesson was about heaven and I remember the teacher showing us a picture of Jesus standing on a cloud and on each side of him was an angel hovering nearby. Later that day or a few days later I started wondering why no one had ever seen heaven. If it’s up in the sky, why hadn’t an airline pilot or an astronomer spotted it? I decided that it must be up there (everyone says it is) so it must be invisible. As the weeks passed by and I went to more Sunday school lessons, I came to the conclusion that not only is heaven invisible, but so are hell, God, Satan and angels.
My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word myth as “3: a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence”.
So, to answer your question Jerry, if someone were to ask me, “Why are you an atheist?” I would rephrase their question as follows, “Do you mean, why don’t I believe in God?” They would reply, “Yes”. I would then say, “Because he is a myth!” That answer would most likely precipitate a spirited debate which I would thoroughly enjoy!
I would tell them, home sapiens are incredibly imaginative, this imagination allows us to believe in fictional entities, but for some we are living in an objective reality !
If asked, I would say that I have not been convinced of the claims of any religion. There are some 40,000 different ones on the menu, and they all contradict each other, but none of them offer any evidence to support their claims. So no sale.
I am an atheist due to the following logical conclusion. Since there are many religions, the praised faithful in one group is by definition a despicable infidel for all the rest. Who is right and who is wrong? The only plausible answer is all are wrong.
I quit believing in god when I was 7 and found out the truth about Santa Claus. Another magical being who lives up in the sky and does impossible things, I didn’t think so. Seventy years latter and I have seen nothing that would indicate that realization I had a a child was wrong.
I do not tend to call myself an atheist but just someone who does not subscribe to unsubstantiated claims.
GIVEN the claim that a non-human intelligent intentional agency is responsible for the creation and/or ongoing maintenance of our universe is devoid of any arguments, evidence, data or reasoning that substantiates it, I therefore do not subscribe to that claim.
Atheism therefore is not my worldview or what I am, but a result of my world view and what I am.
There that is three sentences 🙂
I was brought up a catholic and remained a believer until I learned about science. Now I’m a scarred-for-life recovering catholic. It took a while but I came to the reasoning that, because human beings are self-aware, they don’t want to die so they created a g*d that would give them eternal life. The priests then realised how they could control the people with fear and introduced the devil and hell.
Going to catholic schools introduced me to the nasty, vicious nuns, who lied to and abused their charges. They taught us that babies who die without baptism can’t go to heaven; that my best friend’s parents were going to hell because, being Methodists, they were not really married so were living in sin. I could not figure out how a loving g*d would do any of that.
Then we learned about the blood-soaked crusades and witch-hunting. It’s ok to murder and rape if they are not christians. And, of course, “G*d’s on our side”. How can this be?
But I think what really did it for me was the misogyny, I really can’t think of any religion that doesn’t hate women. Why would any loving g*d create women, then direct that they should be treated worse than animals? And that they should be barred from the priesthood? As a female I got no believable answers to those questions.
Add to that the vast numbers of paedophiles in the priesthood of all religions and you just think, if there was a g*d she would just press the delete button.
No sane, rational person would still believe in a higher power if they were able to open their mind and consider it; unfortunately, when you’ve been inculcated from birth your mind has been stolen.
In three sentences? I’d never do it. If you are a believer, you very likely have certain inflexible assumptions about the term atheist. When I think of someone from the Ming dynasty, a Mughal subject, a Catholic, or a Muslim, I make an earnest effort to describe them correctly, understand their mindset, and realize that the cognitive tools and metaphors they employ to make sense their world maybe distinctly different from mine. It is not easy.
However, not once, not even fucking once, has there been an instance where someone who is a Christian or Muslim has professed confidence in their faith and has yet been able to describe “atheist” and get it right. Not even by the supposedly open minded types. Not even by a literate guest being interviewed on Ira Flattow’s Science Friday nor by the Uber liberal Thom Hartmann. It usually goes like this: an atheist is someone who is absolutely certain there is not a God. They are at the other end of the crazy spectrum; the flip side of the religious fundu. The agnostics seem a little nicer. They are not quite as dewy eyed sure.
Whenever I do broach my secularism, I get the person behind something we can all rally behind: If you don’t fully understand anything, it does not mean you may pull stuff from where-the-sun-don’t-shine. If that sounds reasonable, the standard to apply is not to believe in anything unless there is evidence for it. If there is, we can get into verification thresholds and parsimony of explanations. But please please don’t make shit up. And from there I continue…
That bothers me, too. There are many misconceptions about what atheism is, from thinking that not going to church regularly was one’s “atheism phase”, to thinking that atheism is, as you mentioned, a claim to absolute certainty that there are no gods.
Those are both wrong, as are all the other kinds of misconceptions. However, if we think of atheism as the rejection of theistic claims, and if we acknowledge that many theistic claims can be demonstrated to be objectively false, then I think it’s entirely legitimate to say one can be pretty certain about one’s atheism. It’s not as if the scales don’t tip significantly in favor of atheism.
Because since a child I observed injustice and much human sufferings around me for a benevolent God to exist. In addition to that, I noticed that religion always has stories which sound so unreal like fairy tales they can’t be true. Reading my Dad’s book on the history of philosophy also helped me develop logical thinking.
The simple explanation of why I did not come to believe in gods/god is three-fold:
1) I did not feel “touched” or whatever that emotional thing is that religionists feel, unlike say, the emotional feeling I got from music;
2) Western religion seemed very boring to me;
3) It did not explain things to me – that is, I was unconvinced – whereas science explained things and was and is incredibly interesting.
In short, I could not relate to religion emotionally or intellectually, and therefore the god(s) concept had no traction.
Lack of evidence,and the existence of parasitic horrors, that, if there was a God he was a Sadist and doesn’t deserve anyones worship. I also like the phrase attributed to Diderot the eighteenth century French philosopher “If you want me to believe in God, you must let me touch Him”
I started out as an Evangelical, 7-day creationist, born again Christian. My beliefs started falling away as what I encountered in the world didn’t actually line up with anything I’d been taught to believe. Some nebulous kind of god who didn’t interact with us in any meaningful way could have stuck around in my belief system, but one day I realized I didn’t believe in that either and I found so much peace and emotional stability because of it.
Another thought about this question : although it can be dealt with in very sophisticated terms, as shown by the comments – and which I am all for – at the core I think it is making a mountain out of a molehill. I think religion at its core is not about an intellectually elaborate commitment, but originally about appealing to base, impulsive feelings and fears. … easy to go off on a tangent, sorry… also can’t sit still in front of the keyboard very long….
The explanation “all deities are pretend” seems more parsimonious than “all deities (except the one currently popular in the cultural context in which I was, by chance, born) are pretend.”
My short answer:
Of these two propositions concerning God an religion:
1. God made people.
2. People made God.
…then #2 makes is a far more parsimonious, sensible fit for the evidence.
That simple switch from 1. to 2. is what brings forth that sense of “a view being suddenly made clear” and “the world actually making sense” that the de-converted enjoy.
I was a skeptical little kid (maybe it was the influence of Mad Magazine?). And the idea of God/Heaven/Eternal life, along with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, just seemed too good to be true, as well as very unlikely. I was convinced of this at about as early an age as one can be said to hold beliefs – probably seven or eight.
Something that can be used to explain everything, even mutually exclusive outcomes, explains nothing.
To me, not accepting a deity is much more interesting than accepting one. Accepting a deity means that, at some point, we must accept at least one phenomenon in our physical world to be forever and impossibly out of our understanding. I find it to be much more interesting to ponder any type of question without ever having to settle for the answer “God did it.”
1) While I was a believer, I could never honestly answer “yes” to the following scenario that popped in my mind, several times: if I were transported back to biblical times in a time machine, am I confident that I’d see things exactly as described, in the book?
2) I read Leviticus, in its entirety.
3) “Christian Philosophers” (Craig, Bahnsen, etc.) only sounded erudite/smart when they were discussing general Philosophy, but ended up sounding utterly silly/nonsensical when narrowing their focus to Christianity.
Aside: Isn’t there a science fiction story where a time traveler realizes he has to fulfill the supposed historical crucifixion of Jesus in an example of a predestination paradox?
Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man”.
There’s the similar “Let’s All Go to Golgotha” (Robert Silverberg?) where the crowds asking for Barabas to be freed and Jesus crucified are all time-tourists.
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Sorry but I can’t believe your answer unless you never really had a conversion experience or relationship to begin with. I grew up in the church and even though I questioned many things at the age of 15 I had a relationship with the people and faith. Took many years to mourn the emotional death of the faith and sever the relationships. It was like the death of a close friend. I would say something can come from nothing and that the truth does truly free the mind to journey all roads of knowledge. My Idol is Neil deGrasse Tyson
I’m sorry, but that’s just rude to say that you can’t believe people unless that had difficult conversion experiences. There are many ways to give up faith, and yours is not the only “genuine” routs.
Then you’ll probably be disappointed to learn that Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t like to admit publicly to being an atheist.
I was fed up with the hypocrisy within my church (Salvation Army)and the backbiting of people from a different church. Picking on Gays and guilt-inducing ‘Jesus died for you’. they still hate me for leaving!
When I was about nine years old, I read an Old Testament story of Noah and the flood that was accompanied by an image of “World Destroyed by Water,” by Gustave Dore, and I realized the God of the Bible was evil and rejected it.
I was still susceptible to a deistic version of the argument from design until junior high, when I started learning about evolution and cosmology, and also started grasping the immensity of deep time and space.
Since then, as far as religion, I have become more of an anti-theist than a mere atheist. More broadly, my worldview is naturalism, and I do not accept any supernatural or paranormal claims (although some atheists do).
I was once asked by a street preacher if I believe in God, and he didn’t understand some of my words, so I ended up explaining that I didn’t believe in God or anything magic. He asked and gestured, “You mean, like, poof?” When I nodded yes, he objected that God was not a magician, and so I asked him how God created the world. He started his answer, sounding a lot like God poofed the world into existence, and he just stopped mid-sentence and walked away. Lest you think that he went away to ponder the obvious, what actually happened was he abruptly abandoned us to go preach to another group further down the sidewalk.
The god/s capriciousness is all too human, Narnia isn’t at the back of anyone’s wardrobe and no being with the power of ‘creation’ would create a world where one sentient creatures sustenance depended on the consumption of another sentient being.
My answer is:
As someone who was once very religious, I came to the realisation that everything about god and religion is entirely man-made. Added to the genuine lack of positive evidence for any god, there is no rational conclusion other than there are no gods to believe in.
I was in elementary school when I observed the members of my Mother’s church teaching one way but actually behaving in another mode altogether. It wasn’t instant atheism but the thinking got underway. Tried for years to get it to work for me but found that i couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Not an activist atheist but will engage in a discussion if someone takes issue. Like the whole miracles argument. I say “Miracle on the Hudson” carries the same weight as “the miracle of the lorry driver in Nice”. Unexpected outcomes, not intervention.
I was reading the bible at the age of 13 when I realized it just didn’t make sense at all..
That and the fact I was afraid as hell God would call upon me to become priest, ridding me of my chances of having girl friends.. lol 😀