What were you before you became and atheist?

[Elessarina]

An inadvertent atheist

[Svartalf]

Non practicing catholic... was raised in it, but my parents never took me to church (even though they encouraged my going)
Then shit hit the fan, and I came to doubt the dogma of a good god, then I decided to do a course of bible study to get more in tune with my religious feelings, and that's when I realized that chretinity was a mess of absurdities heaped on top of falsehoods.

[Ronja]

Yeah - careful study of the bable tends to do that to you. I did to me...

[Bella Fortuna]

Eriku! Where have you been? Good to see you for a change.

Busy with work and just generally not in a forumy vein the past few months ;P

Glad someone's noticed that I've been gone

*pine*

[Eriku]

Eriku! Where have you been? Good to see you for a change.

Busy with work and just generally not in a forumy vein the past few months ;P

Glad someone's noticed that I've been gone

*pine*

No need to pine, I'm back now!

[Bella Fortuna]

Eriku! Where have you been? Good to see you for a change.

Busy with work and just generally not in a forumy vein the past few months ;P

Glad someone's noticed that I've been gone

*pine*

No need to pine, I'm back now!

Well stay for awhile or I'll be cross!

I mean... err...

YAY!

[Ian]

Once upon a time I called myself a Christian, but I don't recall ever taking the bible seriously. When I was about 11, I insisted that my parents not bother taking me to church any more. They were pretty happy to comply, especially my dad who started using Sunday mornings to improve his golf game. It wasn't a very pious household.

[Exi5tentialist]

Can anybody really claim to be an atheist? We are all brought up in an intensely capitalistic world whose ideology is inextricably intertwined, if not founded upon, patriarchal religion. Can we possibly throw off the mantle of indoctrination by religion, even if that indoctrination was not delivered directly by religion itself?

What were you before you became an atheist? Perhaps your question should be, what were you before you pointed your damaged being in what you thought was the direction of atheist discovery? And can such an act happen overnight anyway? Do we ever have an epiphany in such matters? Isn't a more realistic image a slow, growing feeling of impending dawn, rapidly followed by another long, dark night? It's more like the beginning of spring in the polar extremes - isn't it?

[Animavore]

No.

[Jason]

Bacon.

[Exi5tentialist]

No.

I agree. In the final analysis, no-one can really claim to be an atheist. Or at least no-one I've ever come across. Most people claiming to be atheists still retain profound prejudices based on the predominant religion of their parental culture. Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett are the prime example of this at one extreme; I haven't yet found the other... Sartre is a long way away from those four, though, if only because he remembers his own theistic roots, something most people are all too keen to forget.

[Exi5tentialist]

Bacon.

Antisemitic gibes will get you nowhere.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[Jason]

I was bacon before, then cheese, now I'm cheesy bacon. Cardiac arrest in a tasty greasy heap.

[Coito ergo sum]

I went to a Lutheran church until I was 13. What that entailed was going to church fairly regularly, but missing Sundays often. I had to attend "Confirmation Classes" which I loathed. I never felt like our family was part of the church. Everyone else seemed to know each other well, and I felt like an outsider looking in.

I never believed for real, and was cited a couple of times for scoffing and asking impertinent questions in Confirmation Class. I remember asking one time why God would make the Bible so hard to read and understand. I learned pretty early that the Confirmation Class teacher did not have any real answers.

I loathed going to Church, and would jump for joy if mom and dad didn't "make" us go to church on Sunday.

I found the actual confirmation to be a fraud, and I told my parents that at the time, because there was no way to fail to be confirmed. It didn't make any sense to me that there is this requirement, but you could dog it the whole way through and still be confirmed. They just wanted the parents to be proud, stay in the church and keep donating money.

Immediately after confirmation, it was up to me whether I continued. I discontinued, and never returned to that church, not even once. I was basically agnostic from then on, and I wasn't willing to say I was an atheist. I would openly proclaim the Bible as bullshit, and not containing the truth. For a while I tried to rationalize religion, and just view it as man's attempt to explain the inexplicable and all that - metaphors and whatnot. But, I could never real get around the fact that I believed it to be just "not true." And, I didn't think the moral lessons were all that great.

Over time I gravitated toward atheism, but it was independent of others. I pretty much didn't have anyone else to latch onto or get support, so I just went my own way with it, and until the internet became big, I didn't really know anyone else who would identify as an atheist.

I can't say that as a church goer I wasn't a believer. I tried to believe. I felt guilty as a pubescent child about masturbation, thinking that it was a sin and all. I remember as a grammar school age kid being afraid of nuclear war and Armageddon, thinking that I needed to be taken up to heaven before it all happens. I think that's what I ended up hating most about religion - the unnecessary angst that it caused me as a young child, and I assume I wasn't the only one with such guilt and fears.