Personal Experiences that Led you to your Atheism

[SteveB]

I like those epiphany type stories. One moment you're a theist and then something clicks and bang you're not.

Hope it's useful for your essay.

I'm using my own experiences. I'm just interested in other people's 'atheist stories' to get the brain juice flowing.

[FBM]

I like those epiphany type stories. One moment you're a theist and then something clicks and bang you're not.

Hope it's useful for your essay.

I'm using my own experiences. I'm just interested in other people's 'atheist stories' to get the brain juice flowing.

Hope it's useful for that, then. If not, a .45 cal through the temple gets the brain juices flowing, I hear.

[SteveB]

Always wanted to be open-minded.

[FBM]

It sure helped me.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

1. A lack of belief in god(s)
2. Belief in the lack of god(s)

They are not the same. They deserve separate consideration; they deserve separate definitions. 1 = weak atheism (our natural state). 2 = strong atheism (a chosen state).

Does one choose that state (strong atheism) based upon evidence, or upon faith? Because the former is impossible to obtain and the latter is no better than any religious faith

However, what you term "weak atheism" is based upon a balance of probabilites - sure, you can't "prove" there is no god - but why try? It is so stupidly unlikely, that one simply has no need to refute it, no matter that one cannot ever rule out the possibility completely.

A lack of belief is simply the honest atheist position - whereas belief in the lack involves exactly the same pretence of knowledge that the religious are rightly derided for!

[Red Celt]

Does one choose that state (strong atheism) based upon evidence, or upon faith? Because the former is impossible to obtain and the latter is no better than any religious faith

I feel a bit guilty, having this conversation here, as it's a bit of a derailment. On that basis, I'll keep this short. By all means, start a new thread... and I'll copy-paste some stuff from a previous conversation with another agnostic atheist.

And that's something you should remember: this isn't the first time that I've had this discussion. It isn't that I'm close-minded about it... it's that my mind is so open that it's now over-flowing with all of the arguments that I've seen (from both sides) about whether or not we can call ourselves strong atheists. After all, how can we possibly know that there are no gods?

Basically, I leave agnostic atheists alone. They're welcome to that premise, but I don't really feel their position to be entirely praiseworthy.

It's as if they've chosen to be Switzerland, taking the ultimate sitting-on-the-fence position, mocking both sides.

I know that Santa Claus doesn't exist. I know that the tooth fairy doesn't exist. I know that personal gods don't exist. If anyone takes the position of saying "I don't know that Santa doesn't exist, I'm agnostic on that" I then think "oh shut the fuck up, you fence-sitting pansy". They're extending their "gosh, I'm so logical that it hurts" and extending it to everything else, as if their position is superior to anyone who thinks otherwise.

I know there are no gods. Knowledge can change when facts change. If the facts change, I might be in a position of knowing that there are gods, after all. Until that time, I'm a gnostic atheist who prefers the term "strong atheist".

[FBM]

I don't think it's fence-sitting. I think it's intellectual honesty, a useful defense against theists who challenge you to prove that their particular god doesn't exist. Can't be done, so we can't really claim it as knowledge, in the strict sense that theists demand. Of course, they're unwilling to hold themselves to the same standards, but at least we can claim intellectual honesty, whereas they're stuck with blind belief in the face of zero evidence.

[Red Celt]

I think it's intellectual honesty, a useful defense against theists who challenge you to prove that their particular god doesn't exist.

Theists don't care how I think about them... so why should I care how they think about me? Screw them.

Knowledge can change when facts change. I once knew that the Solar System had 9 planets. I now know that it has 8.

I know there are no personal gods.

[Animavore]

It's not 'experiences' which led me to atheism. It's a complete lack of them which did. I've never experienced this thing theists call 'God'. I don't even know what the fuck they're on about half the time. When I see them in a Mosque, Church or temple with their hands to the sky or kneeling on the ground I think to myself, What, in God's name, are you fucking people doing? Can they not see themselves? It just seems to me that they convince themselves these things are real because everywhere I've looked, in every religious text I've read, in every place of worship I've been to, when I've meditated and looked inward, absolutely everywhere I've looked, and by fuck did I try, everywhere I've looked there is nothing there. No miracles, no magic, no unexplainable phenomena. Just pure, unadulterated reality devoid of any metaphysical background one can pick out and point to and say there lies the Ultimate Reality. Nothing.

[JimC]

Sorry, Nib. Birth here as well. I just never believed to begin with. I was never led to atheism. I was always there, even when I didn't know the name for it. Now, why the religious indoctrination didn't take with me, as it did with so many others, I can't say.

This...

[HomerJay]

A lack of belief is simply the honest atheist position - whereas belief in the lack involves exactly the same pretence of knowledge that the religious are rightly derided for!

Does believing in the lack require the same pretence as believing in the thing?

We don't face this problem with Thor or Zeus do we?

The importance of the denial is attached by the theist.

[Animavore]

A lack of belief is simply the honest atheist position - whereas belief in the lack involves exactly the same pretence of knowledge that the religious are rightly derided for!

Does believing in the lack require the same pretence as believing in the thing?

We don't face this problem with Thor or Zeus do we?

The importance of the denial is attached by the theist.

I often wonder will there be a day when people don't believe in Yahweh the way no one believes in those older gods any more. Not even a consideration that he might exist or a worry if they're wrong about that. Where the only people really interested are the nerds and geeks like those of today who read books on ancient legends. Where they'll watch documentaries on older civilisations which begin sentences with - People used to believe....

I'd say so because extinction seems to be the way of every religion. Religions seem to die out when they cease to become relevant to the times and Christianity and its associates are fastly becoming irrelevant and archaic. Already the vacuum of nonsense is being filled in with tons of other nonsense, a reflection on a society which is all about choice. I'm not even sure a religion will be able to sustain itself in a society where everything is a passing fad. I'd imagine the life-spans of religions will get shorter and shorter. Many not living long past their founders.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

...I often wonder will there be a day when people don't believe in Yahweh the way no one believes in those older gods any more...

Quite likely I'd say.

[rasetsu]

It's not 'experiences' which led me to atheism. It's a complete lack of them which did. I've never experienced this thing theists call 'God'. I don't even know what the fuck they're on about half the time. When I see them in a Mosque, Church or temple with their hands to the sky or kneeling on the ground I think to myself, What, in God's name, are you fucking people doing? Can they not see themselves? It just seems to me that they convince themselves these things are real because everywhere I've looked, in every religious text I've read, in every place of worship I've been to, when I've meditated and looked inward, absolutely everywhere I've looked, and by fuck did I try, everywhere I've looked there is nothing there. No miracles, no magic, no unexplainable phenomena. Just pure, unadulterated reality devoid of any metaphysical background one can pick out and point to and say there lies the Ultimate Reality. Nothing.

It may seem silly from the outside, but what's going on in the inside is what matters. Religious rituals often have the effect of changing the chemistry of the blood and the brain, resulting in release of hormones, an influx of dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin and so forth, all of which change the way the brain interprets what it is experiencing, changing the way that memories are made, and just overall making the experience more intense, meaningful, and memorable. I've often wondered if the effect of rituals like singing hymns doesn't in some sense de-activate our reasoning centers such that the content of the hymn or ritual is processed less critically. I don't have any specific evidence of that, but it's clear that these religious rituals put believers in an altered state of consciousness which is experientially different than a normal, unexcited state.

[rasetsu]

I remembered that I gave an extended exposition of my religious experience recently. Not being an atheist, I'm not sure how useful it might be to you, but I'll copy it over anyway.

My growing up stories are complicated by the fact that early on, I developed severe delusions. While they're not strictly religious, my growing up stories are plagued by there being two sets of them. The one, the side I showed to the world, and didn't include the crazy elements (I had paranoid delusions, and this was my way of avoiding detection). The other reaches deep into my madness, in which God and I were on first name basis, and he was clearly my second, yet I owed him for favors given. Somewhere between my early childhood and adolescence, the 'sane' track lost the religious, Christian elements it had. I don't know how or when I lost my faith, but by my early teens, it wasn't there. I always believed that my parents didn't love me, and that after my sisters were born, four years before me, my arrival was greeted as a mistake. I don't think this was the signal event, but once my sisters were confirmed, my mother lost all interest in church and my religious education. Needless to say, I saw this as simply one more example of how I didn't matter to them. If God hadn't been completely gone by then, he was fading quickly. The ice had already frozen by my mid-teens. In the middle of a screaming match with my mother, I made it plain. She told me to go to hell, and I retorted that she could go to hell herself, but that I didn't believe in any of that "God shit."

And so it went, and high school came. I was an extremely shy and retiring person, but strangely enormously popular. I can't count the number of cliques that counted me as one of their own, from jocks to dirts to brains and everything in between. I managed by being witty and weird, using enigmatic presentations to hide my anxiety and insecurity. And I nearly flunked out of high school, as I started having regular depressions my second year. So my final year I had to pour myself into my studies to make up the ground lost the year before or I wouldn't graduate. One of the classes I loved best of my entire high school experience was a class in Asian history. When we came to discussion of China, the teacher read some selections from the Tao Te Ching. After class, I asked him if I could look at the book. I don't recall what initially sparked my curiosity, but he offered to loan it to me, and I accepted. That night, I went home and read it cover to cover, completely absorbed by it. Everything in it struck deep chords in me. Things that I had felt, but had not words for, suddenly had words. I became a Taoist that night.

I'm perhaps not the ideal candidate for Taoism, being both cold and intellectual, in a faith that emphasizes compassion and near anti-intellectual mysticism, but I've never been tempted in the least to choose another path. After flunking out of college, I moved to the big city, Minneapolis. I don't recall the dates, but there was a period of 12-13 years in which I considered myself apostatic. Not so much disbelieving as being puzzled by something I didn't feel could be reconciled with my understanding of Taoism. After 12 or so years pondering the matter, I hit upon a way to patch things up by drawing on parts of Buddhism and parts of Sun Tzu. I'm not sure in hindsight whether my solution was valid, or whether I had just wanted it so badly that I let myself believe it was. You might have noticed that I have not talked about my Hinduism. Part of that is intentional. I'm very insecure about my Hinduism, and parts of it intersect with my madness in ways I'm not willing to share. But what I can share is that my Hinduism began in college. At first, it was just recognizing something essential in poetry and art, something that spoke to a part of me that needed to be acknowledged. Perhaps it's simply my split between being cold as ice and being rageful and uncontrolled. Perhaps it's something more complex. As time went on, and I learned more about the goddess, the more it struck me as something essentially right, just as my Taoism had, but also wholly other. An other that I had been missing. Looking back on things, I think I might have settled my conflict with the Tao by acknowledging the goddess, but at the time, that path wasn't open to me. It's only been recently I've been even minimally open with others about my Hinduism. And there is much I don't know. I feel so ignorant. Perhaps I am reaching back in time to that shy high schooler. Or perhaps I'm just looking for a poetic way to end this.

Maybe I should just end it thus.



Looking back on my previous post, an element of my story that I didn't mention may be of interest to you. Partly because my atheist groups like to read books about the psychology of religion, and part because I have a life long interest in understanding the mind, I've read a good bit about certain theories concerning the psychology of religion this past year. Part of that is spurred by my interest in the mind, but part is that I just love religion in all its dimensions, although metaphysically I am a materialist. But I enjoy learning about and exploring other religions purely for its own sake. I'm currently meeting regularly or intermittently with groups devoted to channeled entities, a group of psychics, mediums, and healers, a heathen bible study group, a "secular bible study group" (a mix of theists & nontheists), and a Buddhist book club. The Buddhist group is motivated by my interest in certain intersections between my own theories of mind and Buddhist doctrine, and while I tell myself that I'm in some of these groups as an observer only, a sort of cultural anthropologist, that would be asserting a degree of detachment that is untrue. Not that I'm willing to give up the mantle of materialism, but I find myself at home in groups with diverse religious or metaphysical views.

Anyway, I promised an interesting bit, and have yet to deliver. As noted, I'm currently learning about Buddhism. However, this is not my first encounter with Buddhism in a deep way. I have "flirted with" Buddhism several times in the past. To say I flirted is an understatement. I drank the Kool-aid. Several times in my life, I went whole hog into becoming a Buddhist. But each time it lasted only a few weeks. Having lived with a mental illness for a long time, I've learned the skill of "self monitoring" which one uses to detect changes in one's thinking to assess whether there are symptoms that need to be treated or watched. As a consequence, I'm a pretty good witness to my own state of mind. And each time that my latest fling with Buddhism had ended, it was clear that my thinking had been abnormal. During those several weeks of conversion, things Buddhist and religious things in general took on a heightened importance for me. An importance that just vanished like a bubble bursting at the end. It was clear in hindsight that my religiosity had been the result of an altered state of mind, some errant brain chemistry that eventually righted itself. I've never considered those episodes to have anything to say about my normal religious experience, but perhaps I should. (If it weren't for that SEP field around my own beliefs. Not coincidentally, that tendency to find meaning in otherwise random data, which was part of those episodes, is called 'apophenia'.)