ANSWERS: 16
  • It sorta snuck up on me. When I was asked to get my youngest son christened and I realised I didnt want to.
  • Not one yet, too many illogics. +5
  • I've always been skeptical of imaginary beings who demand to be worshiped, and was never dissuaded by commands to ignore the man behind the curtain.
  • It was all of a sudden when I was born. I was gradually turned into a Christian, then my brain grew. At fifteen I returned to the natural state.
  • I was born one. My parents and other adults were pushing me to go to church and take part in those ceremonies that I didn't care about, but I don't remember believing in God or anything like that at all, ever. Just doing what the adults wanted. Later my mother told my that people will look bad at me, if I don't attend the religion lessons at school so I went to them and just basically treated them as lessons of fairy tales and time for relaxation. . And one day I decided I don't want to attend religion lessons at school or go to church anymore, because it was boring and a waste of time.
  • I was born and raised atheist. My parents are both atheists and as far as I know my grandparents were too. I did at one point decide to be Christian but it wasn't for me and I didn't last at it for very long.
  • It's just kind of..... "there".
  • It sneaked up, and I realised it suddenly. I was brought up Christian, but I kept on adding caveats. "Yes, but I don't believe in Genesis. Yes, but I don't have to take the miracles literally" and so on. And one day, I realised that my "Yes but..."s covered everything, and I didn't believe any of it. Then I called myself an agnostic for a decade or two. Then I agreed with Douglas Adams that if you have looked fairly carefully for something for a reasonable amount of time, you can fairly take as a working hypothesis that it doesn't exist, so I changed my description to atheist.
  • There were definitely stages. I left my particular church for some specific reasons, but I continued to attend other churches of the same denomination. Then I started checking out other denominations hoping to find one that would be a good fit for me. I ended up going back to the roots of Christianity to try to find out what was true, what was the real way to follow Jesus's teachings. I ended up making some totally different conclusions that I've described elsewhere on this site, but basically that Jesus (assuming he was a real person) said some wise things, and the religion that sprung up around him added a whole lot of unnecessary stuff and inflated his legend to something very different from what was originally intended. So the next step was leaving Christianity as it is understood today. I never messed around all that much with other religions. I just lived without Christianity long enough that I was comfortable enough to admit that I no longer believed in any of it, or saw any evidence of it in the world around me. So I lost god last of all, in the order of things. But this last step took the longest of all, because I wasn't ready to admit that I was an atheist for a long time, due to the stigma attached to that label and the benefits you get in this society from being considered religious.
  • It was very gradual. I was a firm fundamental Christian for a long time. Upon further learning and deep study into the Bible - which was always touted as the "perfect word of God" - I began to see inconsistencies and to ask questions. When the questions I asked were (often angrily) dismissed instead of answered, and my practice of studying other world cultures and religions touted as blasphemous (lest I be corrupted by the knowledge), I realized that any God who desired mindless sheep as followers was not the god for me. I searched for a new god for a while... but didn't find one. Now, I'm pretty certain there isn't one around - or if there is, it's not particularly concerned with being found.
  • I was fortunate enough to be raised that way.
  • I think it just happened gradually as I grew up and was able to see the world as it truly is with out the ideologies of others.
  • When I was in that portion of the journey of my life, I came to that conclusion after having little else but to accept that all the bullshit that was forced down my throat in my formative years made zero sense with no proof. But I could not live with an ideology that says God doesn't exist because I can't prove that He does. That just as nonsensical. How can I prove He does not? So I spent my life, making sure that the answers I got were proven. And to make a looong story very short, I am satisfied, MORE than satisfied that God is right here right now.
  • It was a gradual realization for me, but in the end, its not really a big issue to me.
  • Up until the age of 17 I was forced to attend church, but I remember myself clearly struggling to grasp the concept of a "god"; and nothing that my dad, a preacher himself, explained to me made any sense. But being too young, I couldn't, at that time, articulate sensible arguments the way I can now after so much reading and researching. So in retrospect, I think I was an atheist all along.
  • I was never religiously minded. In my teens I discovered the word Atheist, and felt it fit me pretty well. So there was no real change at any time, except in the sense of growing up and learning more.

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