How long have you been an Atheist?

[Jasmine Kozak Gilroy]

I've never believed in God, Godess, God(s), flying spaghetti monsters, so I find it interesting to hear about other people's experience with Theism. If you believed in God at one point, what changed? 

[Emmeline R.]

I'm not quite sure. I certainly haven't always been an atheist- I used to be Christian. I guess a couple year ago I started to question it, but only until a few months ago did I confirm that I was completely atheist.

Really, what made me realise it was an athiest blog on tumblr. :) The posts made so much sense in disproving religion, I can't believe I actually thought it was all real.

[Grace]

I have been an atheist all of my life. From the earliest I can remember I have not believed in god. This is not the way I was raised by my parents. My mother brought us to church every weekend where we had a mostly (if boring) positive experience. My father was the type of dad who never went to church except on Christmas Eve and most of my friends are christian. I do not know where it began. Perhaps it was because I had always been raised on fantastical stories like Redwall, Winnie the Poo, and the Grimm Fairy tales, and I couldn't tell the difference between the tales of the bible and those. They seemed just as not plausible. How could someone tell me that magic wasn't real  when what happened in the bible seemed so like magic? How could the gods of Olympia be in the realms of Myth, yet one god is not? I could not tell the difference. 

The first story I remember really having a problem with was Adam and Eve. I remember I was six when I struck and argument with my five year-old cousin (she was raised an hour away and almost entirely by her very christian, very republican mother) about how the story was impossible. There was no way that the entire human race could be founded by just two people. How I understood these concepts at such and age I do not know, but I think it might have to do with my two older brothers, who were scientific geeks/geniuses. Maybe I picked up the basis of genetics with them? She was so distraught that I was trying to tell her that her bible, something she trusted to be absolutely true, was in fact implausible. Her mother eventually made me apologize, and tell her that I lied (I knew I didn't but I said I did anyway, come on, I was six.) 

Later I got kicked out of Sunday school for questioning the teacher into angry silence over the tale of Noah's ark. And then I actually read the bible, and I realized that it was just that, a story. The faith, the presence I was supposed to feel, the 'holy spirit' I never sensed it. Whenever I stretch my mind out now, to try to emphatic with religious people, I come up empty.

People ask how can everything have happened so complexly...how could such beauty not have been drawn by an artists hand? How could there not be a god? And I just shrug, because I don't know. That is the beauty of being human, and the humbleness. We are not big enough, not wise enough, to know those answers, and by trying to pretend that we do, that we have the answer to life after death, to the creation of life, it is just naive arrogance. 

Hank Green, or was it John? I cannot remember, mentioned something about the universe creating something to observe itself, and that got me thinking. In a very basic know-all of quantum mechanics or physics or whatever, there is a theory that if you are not observed, or if something is not sensually seen, then how does one know it exists. Perhaps life exists only to validate existence itself. So it is my goal in life not to worship a god, goddess, or higher being, but to observe and interact with the 'verse. Because I believe that is our duty to ourselves, to validate that we, as a whole, actually exist/ 

[Mazebook]

My Parents were atheist. My Dad did the hard part of thinking when he was young and left the church.

They always told me that I should choose for myself in what i want to believe in. Growing up i never thought about religion. till I was 18 i thought religion would be dying out pretty soon. I only met older people who were Theist.

When I went by a church I always thought that everything had a depressing weight to it. It was intimating.

Later I wanted to find out why i was an atheist. I did a lot of thinking and discussions with other to define what i think is real and how it relates to me. I think a universe without a deity makes it that more wonderful and gives the nice things in life much more meaning. 

[Ryan Gatts]

I know it's almost a cliche to say that I was brought up without religion (or even spelled out atheism), but when asked in middle school, I said I was Christian. I had so little knowledge about the religions of the world that I thought I was a Christian just by virtue of being around several. It was when I bothered to learn what Christianity was and how it differed from my understanding of the world, that I knew that I was an Atheist. I'm sure that wasn't the moment I became and Atheist, nothing had changed for me, I just learned a new word.

[Genny Baratta]

I was/am being raised in fairly religious home so I was too. That is until right around this March/April when I started to read the bible with my knowledge of critical reading gained in English class. The first thing I felt was deeply ashamed of my self(You see I have a medical condition that I was born with and for a time I believed that it was God's way of pre punishing me for any evil I might do) but my friends convinced me otherwise. After that I was left questioning "If I am not devil spawn then whold an all powerful, all knowing, all loving God punish me with such a horrible disease?" It was then I thought up two very answers. Answer one:"The Christen God is a major ass hat, why would I worship a jerk," or answer two:"The Christen God probably does not exist and praying to him is about as useful as asking my door knob for the things I am asking him for and even if he does he is still the biggest ass hat in all of existence so even if he is real I would not worship him."