I’ve been an Atheist since I was six. Raised in a religious Jewish family, I was sitting in the back of my Mom’s blue Chrysler and it hit me all at once: there is no Tooth Fairy, there is no Santa Claus, there is no God. No cause, no event, just an epiphany.I asked questions at home and Hebrew school and got lame answers. I tried to care about God, but failed because I couldn’t stop thinking of him as mythology. I was Bar-Mitzvah’d and confirmed as an Atheist, against my will. Mom thought it was a phase.Turns out, Dad’s an Atheist too — he just never told me until I was about 30 — the same year Mom realized it wasn’t a phase.Here’s a thread that’s been requested a few times. Post “your story” here. FYI, we’ve got about 1000 members now, but we get 10K hits/day, so there are a lot of lurkers who want to know if their story is unique, or if they are among kindred spirits (pun intended).
Enjoyment of Science Fiction/Fantasy is something else I’ve noticed several of us have in common. I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was young, and have read Heinlein, Tolkien, et. al.
Maybe it helps to broaden one’s perspective?
atomictesting: Very nicely put. Roddenberry was indeed an atheist.
Faith of the heart? Nah, if the song was faith in a higher power , I imagine he’d go a spinnin’.
Clarence Darrow, Thomas Edison, Disney, Mastroianni, Schulz, Gaines, oh the list it does go on.
http://www.jmarkgilbert.com/atheists.html
& it’s growing.
I’ve kind of covered some of this on another thread, but here’s my story.
I grew up in a “token” christian family. Nominally, we were raised methodist (my sister and myself). My father was very big into the “new age” mysticism (primarily through the “seth material” by Jane Roberts. I grew up reading this materiel and being very interested in “occult” matters. I knew from a very early age that I would never be a true Christian, but for many years I still hoped I could find some sort of higher being. In third grade, I joined the cub scouts for a year, and very quickly rebelled against the religious trappings of the organization. I stopped saying the pledge of allegience that year as well. Fortunately, most of my teachers through the years have been fairly open minded.
I also had the double hit against my image in that I have been pretty obviously “gay” since forever. What’s kind of funny about that is that in elementary and junior high, everyone could tell I was gay, but now no one can tell (and most don’t believe me when I admit it). Back to school, my first real experience in true disgust for the christian religion were all the assemblies we would have with famous athletes trying to promote the anti-drug message. They all ended up talking about how religion saved them, bla, bla, bla… I got up during one assembly and walked out, and got suspended for my troubles.
In ninth grade, we had a month of “holocaust” education. I ended up flunking the entire section because I objected to the way it was taught (I am not one of those “the holocaust didn’t happen” people, I just objected to the way it was taught at our school (the whole divine right, return to the homeland stuff). By 9th grade, I had already started researching some of the bible history and came upon some evidence that the “jewish race” concept could not be proven. At this point in my life, I really don’t care, except where the
RR tries to use this to create the armageddon.
In high school, I finally, actually came out as an atheist and as gay, and of course everyone around me tried to get me to repent. I even went to a christian summer camp and joined the “young life” ministries. I tried very hard to have faith, and to believe, but everytime someone told me I should feel something, I only felt embarassment at being around these people. In the Army, when I got out of high school, I started to use religion as a way to get away from the barracks. I joined the Mormon church because they had a 3 hour fellowship meeting, and it took about an hour each way to walk, so we were away from Basic for 5 hours every Sunday. I again tried my best to try to fit in (even denying that I was gay “don’t ask, don’t tell”. I finally gave up when I was about 21, just because after all these years of trying, I could never get the good feelings.
On a kind of side note, I still, to this day, cannot see how anyone who is gay can belong to any of the abrahamic religions. This is the biggest mystery to me.
Anyway, in my life now, my sister is “born-again”, though we still get along for the most part. My dad is still fairly atheistic, but still believes firmly in the Seth material. My mother keeps telling me that there’s nothing wrong with the christian faith, and that there is much good about it (ironically, she has more problems with my being gay than atheist, though she is not happy about either). I just go into “don’t bring it up” mode around her. So, that’s my story, in short form.
raised catholic in an italian family. other than a few good sermons from a priest about once a year, i disliked church. catholic dogma was based on fear of punishment from god if you did wrong but especially if you didn’t confess these evil deeds to the priest.
one such evil deed was eating meat on friday. if you did that and then died before you confessed it you automatically went to hell per the dogma. the turning point for me was at about age 12 when the church suddenly changed the “law” so it was OK to eat meat on friday.
that sunday i asked the brother teaching catechism class what was going to happen to all the people who had gone to hell for this ‘horrible’ offense in the past. HE COULDN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION and didn’t even offer a future answer.
so the bullshit was exposed and i rarely went to church after that except on xmas to make the parents happy. as soon as i went to college, no church at all.
my wife is also an atheist as are my children. we have taken them to church several times to see what it is all about. we have never condemned religious people but only encouraged our kids to think for themselves but follow the golden rule. i would put the moral character of my children up again any xtian any day.
In the begining…….
I believed what I was told by my parents about god and jesus, adam and eve etc….even though I could not phathom any of it. Lucky for me they sent me to bible school with some elderly neighbors…..all alot of fun and all til the peer presure brainwashing moments i.e. memorizing verses. One thing that still is very vivid to me is during one “class” we opened a page in our study work books to some children with smiling faces in a circle with jesus and a cross….then in the opposite corner of the page was one sad lonley boy…without jesus, no smile all by himself…. this was when the instructor asked all of us to decide which we would like to be with jesus, happy or without jesus and sad. Well needless to say we all picked the happy jesus circle. I had to be not much older than around 6 or 7…talk about evil. That always bothered me, the way they used that type of psycology on young children.
My parents never went to church or had us baptized, thank the good lord and the easter bunny. My dad was raised a luthren and my mom methodist and her aunt was a methodist minister “blood and thunder” quite a scary woman. My mom always was very niave and believed in every bs story out there such as big foot or the loch’ness monster and other such nonsense.
I used to ask why every religion thought their’s was the only right one.
I was also very skeptical of magicians… exposing their tricks etc…
At about the time the santa clause myth took a dive, it was like a house of cards.
A skeptic was born.
I then questioned every thing, never getting satifying answers. I slowly doubted the whole god story openly questioning in high school. Joined the army at 17 and was nearly forced to go to church on sundays or cut grass….I cut grass.
By this time, I’m nearly fully convinced I’m an atheist, however when I got married I still got married in a church, had several discussions with the pastor about my doubts but he agreed to marry us anyway, must of been the $ 100.00
My wife had our children babtised luthren…I did not attend.
I am now a very happy atheist, free of the burdens of blind faith. My son openly atheist. My daughter, not sure, but I think she’ll come around. I don’t try to force anything on them and even let them go to bible study with their freinds, thinking if it helped me realize it was all crap maybe it would help them.
Anyway it’s getting late.
Peace be with you.
Comment from: flanonblvr [Member]
“that sunday i asked the brother teaching catechism class what was going to happen to all the people who had gone to hell for this ‘horrible’ offense in the past. HE COULDN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION and didn’t even offer a future answer.”
That’s the religion’s achiles heel.
The status quo is anachronic in today’s society but if they “evolve” like in the case you mentioned then they open up their flank and get shot down by people that can reason strait.
Actually, at first I really didn’t care whether religion was true or not. I figured it no different from any other cartoon muppet seen on television, or kickin’ fantasy book. As far as I was concerned, I thought it was great that all of it was real. If Jesus, and God, and all that other stuff was true, then certainly so was Luke, Han Solo, Kermit the Frog, and Rocky the Flying Squirrel.
Then the day of the great reckoning came. I started seeing how freaky the more devoted people started getting when around sexually explicit material. I started to witness the hateful hypocritical mother from the Virgin Suicides come out. I witnessed the bigoted father from American Beauty, and the outright outrageous atrocity of choir boy molestations, and mideival macabre monstrosity, vile phychosis of people demented enough to take the madness to level of causing so much damage on people who chose not to follow. There was no love in any of these people, only selfish hypocritical manipulation. At least someone who did something vile, but didn’t believe in God was just admittedly being an asshole. Religious people peg themselves as moral uprights, but madly do the opposite. If they’re being good, it’s only because their fearful fantasies twist their arms to do so. At least someone peacenik like Ghandi admittedly did it out of his own good nature. If this man was to go to hell for being proud of being a Super Atheist, Super Rationalist, then so was I.
All these characters I’ve witnessed through whatever media I’ve come across I only use to model what I saw in many people. Then later in life I studied science, and found there was no trumping its logic. All the fanatasy stuff paled in comparison, and the people who still deal ignorantly in life because of it, I’m sickened by a little bit everytime I spot it.
All’s not lost, because I found most smart people to be Atheist. So, here I am helping along the cause. Trying to understand humanity, and reasons behind why it’s so stubborn in refusing to move on to the next level of enlightenment so slowly.
Love the Gene Rodenberry stuff posted above. Truly humanity will never be happy, and free until absurd religious mores are done away with.
“If this man was to go to hell for being proud of being a Super Atheist, Super Rationalist, then so was I.”
To clarify, when I say hell, I mean it in a purely metaphorical way. These idioms are tossed around so much that it takes extra effort to connote the same extra punch in any message without using them.
Here, I’ll rewrite it:
“If Ghandi was to go to be erroneously stigmatized by religious bigots for being a proud Super Atheist, Super Rationalist, then so was I.”
Then again, no. Being stigmatized by religious zealots is still not right. So, I denounce anyone who does so, but only as willful haters.
my story is nowhere as tramatic as anybody elses but i was raised by agnostic parents my mom worked at fontenelle forest as a guide and educator and my dad work at the henry doorly zoo from when i was five years old so growing up in these two enviroments with agnostic parents i was lucky and i got to read so many books on the enviroment nature and so on i learned on my own about speciation , natural seclition,evoultion even about genitics and all by the time i hit
juinior high.
sorry about the errors only typing with one hand have stiches in the other and on tylenol with codene
Roddenberry was such a cool guy. I didn’t know for sure he was an atheist until just a couple of years ago, but I had kind of put two and two together from some of the comments in the different series.
arvadaatheist said: “On a kind of side note, I still, to this day, cannot see how anyone who is gay can belong to any of the abrahamic religions. This is the biggest mystery to me.”
I totally agree. It is puzzling to me as well, especially considering the attitude most Christians have about homosexuality. I’ve found that like so many other theists, if they find one verse in the Bible that can use to reconcile their sexuality with their faith, they seem content. I have a good friend who is gay – not openly but everyone close to him knows it – he tells everyone he and his partner are “roommates”. He and I used to work together and now we’re gardening buddies, sharing plants and advice. He is a very liberal Christian. He and I were the only two people in my former workplace who didn’t vote for Bush. He is a genuinely loving, caring person and it breaks my heart that he doesn’t feel like he can truly be himself. I think his faith is one of the things holding him back, that and the fact that he lives in a small, conservative Southern town. He was raised in a very religious family and I think it’s just hard for him to let all that go, and it saddens me thinking about what must go through his mind every day. Obviously he must still think there is something inherently wrong with being gay, or he would be more open about it. It angers me that he is put in this position to begin with by the attitudes of our society.
Peach63,
Your comment about atheists liking science fiction rings true. I’ve been attracted to science fiction since early childhood and I’ve been an active fan since discovering science fiction fandom at the age of 26. Most of the other fans I know are atheists or agnostics.
BTW J. Michael Straczynski of BABYLON 5 fame, like Roddenberry, is an atheist.
DocShehan
I’m so jealous of your Asimov communications. Asimov rocks!
Doc Shehan
I don’t know how you sat through dinners with Billy Graham and his mama. That would have been a real trial for me. And rubbing shoulders with Thurmond and Helms…Bbrrhhrr!
The Asimov token is a jewel, however! Guard it well.
Pixel
I’m so sorry that you too were abused, and I hope you got some help for it, and maybe some justice even. The latter wasn’t possible for me.
Your dream reminds me that I’ve often thought that Christianity should not be a trinity, but a quad-rune. What do you call an entity with four aspects? It seems to me that the devil is right up there with the other three and certainly has more presence than the Holy Ghost. Maybe he actually IS the HG?
I no longer have the devil dreams, but can’t really recall at what point in my life they stopped. I was still young. But I was also already embracing disbelief by then. I still have the other awful dreams related to the abuse. It’s easy to tell them for what they are now.
My mother used to tell me I was going to hell for things I won’t go into now, cos they are abuse related. I was very young, 4-6. She didn’t know about the abuse(maybe), but found evidence and signs of it that she chose to blame on me and threatened me with hell. I think that’s where my devil dreams came from. That and Sunday school.
I was raised in a Mormon family. I toed the line until I was 18 and then I turned my back on it all.
My reason for leaving was the encouragement of the Mormon Church to build my “testimony of God” by asking all the questions I needed to ask and reading all the literature I needed to read. The catch was that the questions should be asked of the right people (church leaders/good, upstanding Mormons) and the books should be written by the right authors and not come from the library at the local university.
Red flags started flying. If it was all so true and unshakeable, why all the worry about outside information seeping in?
I have been religion free for 17 years. My only belief system is my belief in the “self”. My parents pity me. They love me even though I have forfeited my place in the kingdom of heaven. I pity my parents. I love them even though their acceptance without question seems weak and their life experiences appear narrow from my point of view.
By the way, I was given up for adoption at birth by a college age Mormon mother. My birth father wouldn’t convert to Mormonism. My birth mother gave up her true love and first child for religion. Her goal? That I be raised in a good Mormon family with strong values. The pain she must have felt giving up a child came to naught. Despite my textbook Mormon upbringing, I left her beloved church after all. At least she has God, whatever that means.
Peach63: I’m in the Chattanooga area and so glad to hear I’m not alone. This is such a hostile place for atheists. My story later (I’m on deadline and shouldn’t be reading this or any other blog in the first place!)
2Rubies
Such sad irony in your adoption story.
Have you ever thought of contacting your natural father? Do you know anything about him other than he wouldn’t convert to Mormonism?
Pixel, I suspected you might be a Heinlein fan when you said your user name was the same as your cat’s.
1nation, you’re so right. “Hostile” is a pretty apt description. Not much “Christian love” I’m sorry to say. I look forward to reading your story! I am working as well with unfortunately more to do than scrolling around this blog, so I’d better get busy. It’s so much more interesting reading these stories than working, though.
karen:
I finally got around to answering your questions on the ?Bible Bash: Old Testament? thread. As I mentioned there, I?ll try to answer your earlier questions as time permits.
When I first heard the story of Jean D?Arc it must have gone deeply into my psyche and since then I?ve wondered how people can so easily hurt others so badly, and in the religious name of love. The same thing with other history in school: the European invasion that blew away the Native Americans, those lousy stinking pagan heathen naked savages. When I realized that Xtianity was the CAUSE of virtually endless suffering in the world I knew I never wanted to have anything to do with any religion again, because they are all cut from the same psychotic cloth. Split minds: I will torture you for the sake of my great god, who created and loves you.
It appears, in my family anyway, that my mother was motivated by a love of ritual and traditions, candles, friggin incense, authority and herd crappola, all of which made church very stupid-looking to me: ?Is that all there is, a bunch of candles and cross-topped staffs being paraded about.? Looked like kid stuff then, looks like it now.
I was lucky because my restrained but firm agnostic dad buffered my mother?s religious affliction; I was given permission to question. I have great respect for all those of you who didn?t have it that easy and had to go down a much longer path of brainwashing before you got your mind right. Congratulations and welcome to the world of the sane. Well, relatively sane.
I forgot one more very important thing:
religions are always and endlessly BEGGING for MONEY !!!!!
A gaping maw into which fortunes flow.
ReluctantAtheist,
Thomas Edison is probably not the best guy to look to for inspiration. He electrocuted neighborhood dogs and later criminals given the death penalty with his own home-grown electric chair in order to prove that AC electricity was dangerous. He stole other scientists ideas and the ones he came up with himself were pretty laughable (imagine coming home and plopping down on a concrete couch or taking a snooze in your concrete bed).
Just like Christopher Columbus, the American education system paints a really rosy picture of Edison and it’s not deserved.
Take a look around on Google, there’s a whole lot about the guy that most people never knew.
I grew up in a small town in Illinois. My parents were very moral and taught us right from wrong though we only went to church a handful of times. Most of the time we goofed off and drew or went out an played during service. I do remember having a Catholic best friend at 12 and going to church out of curiousity. The lecture was on accepting JC. I remember to this day asking JC to come into my life and nothing changed. I can picture that day like it was yesterday. When I joined the Navy I had dog tags that said “No Pref” because religion was so irrelevent to me. I had a girlfriend who was Catholic so I looked into it. I had another girlfriend who was Jehovah Witness so I looked into that also. The turning point was when I saw John Ankleburg explain how JW’s were a cult. I bought a tape from him and asked the JW elders to explain it. None would. Exiting college I had an excellent professor that gave me a book, 20 questions: an introduction to philosophy. Thanks Mr. Buenter. From that book until now I’ve learned to read skeptically. I am grateful to Michael Shermer and Dan Barker for their writings.
Natasha,
“religions are always and endlessly BEGGING for MONEY !!!!!”
Even from little children. I remember going to Sunday School one time with a friend of mine to a “Missionary Bapist Church”. All the SS kids were expected to bring at least a quarter each week to send to the missionaries, and the teacher could become quite hostile if they didn’t, according to my friend. She would accuse them of being selfish, etc, and give them a hard time if they forgot their money.
“Comment from: Natasha [Member]
I forgot one more very important thing:
religions are always and endlessly BEGGING for MONEY !!!!!
A gaping maw into which fortunes flow.”
Anyone know if Mat Groening (creator of the Simpsons)is an atheist? Here is one of my favorite quote from the Simpsons:
Reverend Lovejoy in a sermon about the Movementarians: “This so called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools.(Opens his bible) Let us say the Lord’s prayer 40 times, but first let’s pass the collection plate.”
Episode: 5F23, about the Movementarians
Sorry, I meant “Missionary BAPTIST Church”….in case any of y’all are thinking they’ve concocted some newfangled Protestant denomination here.
atomictesting: Thanks for the heads up. I knew there was tension between TAE and Tesla, but I didn’t know he was THAT bad.
Gotta take the good w/the bad, tho.
Xtianity has more black eyes than we do, ’tis true.
I’m not sure if Mat Groening is an atheist, but Homer said “god my favorite fictional character”
and Ned Flanders ran a marothon for the cure of homosexuality. Great show!
Matt is oblique about it:
I haven’t seen the one with the maraton to cure homosexuality, I’ll have to look it up
Gays are always portrayed as being regular people in the Simpsons.
Weither he’s an atheist or not, he’s clearly at least critical about it and not buying into most of what’s in the buy-bull.