What caused you to convert to or away from religion?

[saizai]

If you have ever experienced a conversion of your beliefs - whether to or away from religion or irreligion, or between religions or some specific religion - please post a comment describing it.

Please mention:

what you believed before
what you believed after
how old you were at the time of the conversion
who or what convinced you
why/how they/it convinced you (what argument, style of argument, appeal, emotional reason, logical reason, whatever)
how much the reasons for your conversion were emotional vs logical vs ___If you had multiple stages of conversion (e.g. catholicism -> generic christianity -> agnosticism -> atheism, or vice versa) please give them separately so we can better understand the process.


Others: please don't attack anybody's beliefs here; responses asking purely for clarification are OK but ones that ask someone to justify their beliefs or similar are not (please) because they will discourage people from openly answering the question I pose here. Start a new thread if you want to discuss whether the reasons or beliefs are justified, accurate, convincing, correct, etc.

Also, please don't discuss beliefs that you have had for as long as you can remember; I'm only talking about change of beliefs.


What I'm looking for is first-hand discussion of exactly what really caused your shift of belief & why; I am not concerned here about whether your belief is 'correct' or not (I don't want to discuss that).

Thanks!

[l0rca]

I used to be an atheist. I didn't think that a god was possible, because I was never brought up in a childhood where I was taught about god from a very early age, or had these ideas instilled consistantly.

It took me a long time to find my soul, and understand that my feelings, even the most irrational, have a purpose. But eventually I could see that things like luck, and fate weren't based on chaotic events, and I began to see patterns in everything. Now I know that these pattens are design.

I eventually started going to church and I realized that although I disagree with a lot of ideas about god, I know in my heart that my feelings about god can't be wrong, and my idea about what god is, and my personal philosophy must be right. If you think of it, it's really impossible to have feelings about something unless their caused by something more, and are there for a purpose.

It's true. :)

[Stitch]

I was brought up in mildly Christian background. I don't think I ever really believed in the Christian god (or any other) beyond the childish acceptance of taking what your parents say to be true. By the age of 10 or so, I think I'd come to the conclusion that there was no god. I suppose in part due to the observation that my prayers were never answered.

[enjoytheview]

I started as an atheist, i'd been told a bit about god when i was younger and figured that god was just another santa claus or easter bunny but god was too cheap to bring me presents or chocolate.
When i was 12 I went to a catholic school. I spent the first few months listening to all the adults around me explain why it all had to be true and why their religion was the right one and I became a catholic.
A couple months or so later I decided i'd read about the religion i'd adopted and see what more i could learn from it.I read the whole bible (twice) and a few other documents and thats when i decided what i was reading and seeing around me didn't convince me anymore, in fact i felt almost stupid for changing my whole set of beliefs to match what the adults were saying.
I started noticing how the catholic teachers and children around me seemed to always act in such a way that was contrary to everything i'd read in the bible and been told about at schoolso i lost a lot of respect for the whole idea of religion. I've been an atheist ever since.

[H3LL]

I made the mistake of actually reading the bible looking for answers.

It had none only confused stories and contradictions.

Shifted to agnostic (22ish) and then thought that was cowardly and made the shift to atheist (about 7 years ago).

Reasons: The christian god was too powerful to make any sense. Earlier, myths and legends such as the Greek, Roman and Norse gods seemed to make more sense and were more entertaining. The christian god was just plain mean and nasty.

Wishful thinking kept me looking and I examined other world religions for something that made sense. None did. Slide into agnosticism (Pascal's Wager kept me there for a while) followed by atheism.

Now I consider there to be no gods. It is more likely that I can fly to Jupiter on a pencil. Gods are not worthy of sensible consideration.

.

[Garrette]

Roman Catholic ---> Closet Heretic/Blasphemer ---> Closet Atheist ---> Atheist

From Stage 1 to Stage 2 the cause was a realization that the god of the bible is a right bastard and, if real, deserves condemnation and not worship.

Stage 2 to Stage 3 was a result of further self-directed study revealing the nonsensical nature of the claims for god.

Stage 3 to Stage 4 was a gradual shedding of social cowardice.

[Freethinker]

I come from a long line of devout Roman Catholics, with many priests and nuns among my cousins, and an archbishop as a sort of in-law. I went to Catholic schools until college. I was an altar boy from 4th grade through high school.

Probably around 10 years of age, I began to notice that what we were being taught was difficult to reconcile with reality. The fact that worthless a$$wipes could live in luxury even though they were screwing people over every way they could, and the concept of people who had never heard of Jesus being destined for hell seemed so absolutely unreasonable to me that I was concerned there was something wrong with me.

Then around 8th grade, I began doing something that is not encouraged in Catholic schools: Reading the bible. That didn't resolve any of my concerns, but raised many more. I wanted to believe so I could fit in with my family and classmates, and so I wouldn't burn in hell, but I couldn't. I was going to mass at least 6 times a week, and often more because the parish priest was a close friend of my cousin, so he'd call me to fill in when they needed an altar boy for a funeral etc.. The more I heard at mass and in class, the less believable it was. At times I thought I was a really bad person.

Somewhere in high school or college it finally occured to me that religion was just exactly what you'd want people to believe to keep them happy and plodding along in a gruelling, unfair life. A$$wipes living in luxury? They'll be burning in hell while the meek live in heaven with god. Loved ones dying horrible deaths? That's okay, they're in heaven now, and you'll see them when you're dead too.

Along the way, I became agnostic, with the caveat that if god does exist, if the life I've lived isn't good enough for him, then screw him.
The more I've become a grown-up, the more ridiculous it seemed that there could be some magical being in the sky, especially one that demanded worship and praise. The more time I've spent around Christians, the more I'm convinced that many of them would be burning in the deepest depths of hell, if it existed.

I am now firmly convinced that there is zero evidence that any gods exist. I relegate god to the class of things which have been imagined by men, but for which no evidence has been discovered. Leprechauns, witches and wizards, unicorns, demons and god all occupy this category. I believe that if a god does exist, he is not the god of the bible, or Allah or any other god conceived by human minds.

If a god exists, he has not communicated with humans in any way of which we are aware. He has given us no commandments, no demands for worship, and no promise of heaven or threat of hell. I have no fear that such a god would have anything more than a warm welcome in mind for me when my life here is over.

God might exist, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster has an equal probablity of existing until someone can give me some grain of evidence that either of them exists. Only when someone has stepped away from religion and church do they really grasp how absurd the whole concept is.

[Zygar]

Mormon -> Mormon Agnostic -> Atheist

I was raised Mormon in a devout family in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. I was an extremely religious child. I studied the scriptures and attended church weekly, and once I was a teeneager I argued with people over religion constantly. I was also a scientificly minded child, so I studied mathematics and physics and other sciences. But being a bit fundamentalist at the time, I would dismiss science that didn't jive with my religious views. I also was fascinated by other religions and studied them in depth hoping to gain a better understanding of how God thought.

But, around the age of 16 I ran across a few debates on the existence of God. I never really got involved in them, but I always listened intently. And every time, I would hear some utterly ridiculous tripe about how god exists because the world is beautiful and complex. This bothered me, so I started doing research on the subject. Mormons teach specific methods for gaining a "testimony", but being science-minded I decided that this would be my last resort.

Finally, once I gave up on other avenues of research on God's existence, I decided to do the whole "fast and pray" nine yards. I really, desperately wanted to know if God was real or not. Finally, when I started to think about the "answers" I got, I realized that they were only emotional reactions. This frustrated me because I was unable to tell if they were internally generated or externally generated.

After about 5 serious attempts to get anything that I could honestly say wasn't just made up in my head, I gave up and called myself an agnostic. I was 21 at the time.

I started to focus all my research on science. After a while, I realized that I could no longer really call myself an agnostic, and decided it was time to accept that God is an illusion and become an atheist.

[Merko]

Age 2: No religious stance -> Reluctant believer/agnostic
Event: Grandparents proselytizing
Cause: Emotional + appeal to authority

Age 3: Reluctant believer/agnostic -> Atheist
Event: Getting read a story from the Bible and being told it was TRUE
Cause: Logic + reduced belief in authorities

[Marquis de Carabas]

I went from Christian to atheist because I hate God and want to sin, sin, sin!

Seriously, christian dogma just made less and less sense as I learned more and more about the world, kinda like Reaganomics. Hard to identify where the tipping point was.

[cj.23]

My religious path...

Agnostic/Pagan Parents ----> Atheism through childhood -----> ('paranormal experience' at 18) -----> Methodism ---------> Pantheistic Neo-Paganism/ Coven Wiccan -------> (lose faith through academic work on roots of Wicca) -------> Agnostic -------> Charismatic Christian -------> Evangelical ------> Atheist (evangelical, proselytising) --------> Anglican Christian (Church of England).

Things worth noting
1. from 'Methodism' onwards I was involved in 15 yrs Higher Education study (indeed many years lectured in World Religions), and was involved in studying Biblical Crit. etc. My particular interest is Epistemology.
2. I spent some years studying Religious Experiences and the neurological and chemical explanations for these ASCs academically, and that led me to Philosophy of Mind, Conciousness and Personal Identity.
3. So slowly I shifted towards belief. I am by nature atheistic, and my experiences with religious groups was overwhelmingly irritating or disappointing. When I found something I found ridiculous i tended to get out, and i explored various denominations and faiths.
4. In very few cases, except Wicca, can I identify a clear moment of choosing to leave a religious practice.

I reached my current beliefs by a constant process of enquiry. I'm not saying I'm right, and am not afraid to change if the evidence leads me that way.

cj x

[Piscivore]

I've "converted" to a different belief system at least nineteen times, radically so no more than say four. I couldn't possibly begin to relate them all. To be fair, most of them were in college and I had at the time a tendency to jump on bandwagons when I read something really new or interesting.

[ranson]

Stitch's post pretty much hit it on the head for me. I dabbled with agnosticism throughout my late teens, as well as seriously trying to believe. I looked for that "defining" experience that would bring me to god.

Then I decided I was smarter about it at age ten than at age twenty, and have lived happily ever since. FWIW, I think the first time I declared the non-existence of god was at age nine. I recognize now it was the whole "Problem of Evil" argument that turned my mind. I didn't have a name for it then, but that's what it was.

[slingblade]

Assembly of God Pentecostal --> Agnostic --> Pagan --> Agnostic --> Atheist.

My parents were very different, religiously. Both considered themselves Christian, but my father's family were the Fundie Bible Thumpers. My mother's family were far more lax. I don't even know what religion they were, but they were Volga German immigrants just two generations before mine, so maybe Lutheran? Dunno. Certainly not Catholic. Anyway, Mom always thought I should go to church, but rarely ever went herself. She still believes in God, and is distressed that I don't.

Though my parents divorced when I was 3, I stayed in deep contact with my paternal grandparents, who were basically Ozark Fundies. One step (and not a large step) removed from the poison-drinking snake-handlers. Their religion was mine.

Problem was, from the outset, I knew the Bible didn't make a lot of sense; that it was contradictory and brutal. I fought that fight all of my life, convinced I was demon-possessed or something because I simply couldn't take the Bible as seriously as my father's family.

I suffered abuse, and by the time I got married at 18, I was psychologically a mess. That's when the heavy religious abuse began. My then-husband was a lapsed Catholic, who converted to my religion, and then began to abuse me with it. When I finally left him after 13 years, I was agnostic and in full-tilt rebellion. If there was a God, I didn't want to worship him. He hadn't helped me, hadn't helped my family, hadn't prevented the divorce by healing my husband's addictive and abusive nature. He hadn't done chit for me, and I had been as faithful to God as I knew how to be. [Rule 8] him.

I stayed agnostic for a while ("there's something out there, but I don't know what it is"), and then got into the Paganism craze that swept the country in the '90s. Everyone was Pagan, it seemed. At least, everyone I knew. So I started trying to get into that group. But it never felt real to me. It always felt like trying to live out a Renaissance Festival every day. Like play-acting, but with a Goddess instead of a God.

Finally, I just ignored religion, except to get pissed at it. Then after a logic course in college a few years ago, I finally said, "That's it. I'm done. I simply can't believe there is a God, anymore. It makes no sense, is not logical or reasonable, and is entirely emotion based wishful thinking. Religion seems more a method of control and torment to me, and I'll have none of it."

I still remain every so slightly open to the idea of a god, in that if it can ever be proven, I'll accept the proof. But I now require proof. Belief is no longer a good enough reason to subject myself to more torment and doubt in myself.

[crackers]

Ditto what Marquis de Carabas said (except the part about sinning). I was raised generic Protestant, but my family only went to church on Easter and Christmas. I never had any interest in religion as a child. I started questioning religion as an adult (which was when I first actually THOUGHT about it) when I realized that all the religions contradicted each other and they couldn't all be right. The more I read about them, the more I realized that none of it made much sense. So, I ended up as an atheist.

[Tanstaafl]

Christian ----> Agnostic ----> Atheist

I was raised Methodist and assumed that god existed because everyone around me believed. When I first heard about the existence of these strange people called 'atheists' (maybe 8 y/o) I thought it was incredible that anyone could doubt. But as I got older I realized that while I didn't doubt god's existence, I also couldn't quite fully believe much of what I was being taught.

Then I got to high school biology class, where the fundamentalists' worst nightmare happened--I learned about evolution, which gradually made me question more and more whether we really did need god as an explanation. I continued to ponder the contradictions I saw, both in my beliefs and in others', which led me to be an agnostic, though I probably would still have called myself a christian, in my 30s.

As I got into my 40s and realized I was drifting more towards atheism (which was a title that still held something of a stigma for me) I decided to give christianity one last shot at me, so I read the bible from cover to cover. When I got to the end of it, I knew I was an atheist.

I also spent some time reading other religion's scriptures, including the entirety of the Koran and the Book of Mormon. Not surprisingly, I didn't find any of it the least bit persuasive.

[patnray]

Closet athiest --> proudly open athiest

I never did believe, but I kept my thoughts to myself until I discovered JREF and this forum.

[Halden]

Catholic --> Agnostic --> Confused --> Liberal Christian --> Atheist



I was raised a Catholic, but I am not sure if I ever really bought into it probably due in part to my Father (my mother is Catholic, I believe my father is Agnostic though I have never asked), by the time I reached my mid to late teens I had become fairly comfortable being Agnostic and not overly concerned with the existence or non-existence of God. My twenties brought a time of introspection and research into Christianity, Budhism and miscellaneous other forms of Spirituality but nothing really moved me until I got sick. Battling and surviving Cancer brought a certain urgency to my “soul searching” as did the birth of my son. I found myself relapsing into Christianity to find the answers to life, and how to raise a moral and balanced boy. As I sat and listened in the pews and the books the more I felt like a fraud, going to church and singing the hymns was easy but accepting the “truths” was not. The moral teachings I found in the church were either ones I already held and believed regardless of religious teachings or a supernatural being and the ones based on scripture and religious teachings that I could not adhere to.


My search began again by digging through philosophical texts and the proverbial light bulb went off when I read Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” in which he proposes the problem of an omnipotent god. If God were omnipotent then he would be the root of evil in the world and if Humans were the cause of evil then God is not omnipotent. This brought me to the argument of destiny and free will and it snowballed from there. The final nail in God’s coffin was hammered home with the principle of belief conservation. The principle states that we cannot hold something to be true if it requires us to reject too many other beliefs that we already know to be true. For me to accept a supernatural universe I would have to reject too many truths about a natural universe, I could think of no rational reason for me to do this.


One of the major arguments for Religion is that it is the rock on which to base you morals, well I do not think morality comes from religion, I think religion got morality from people. Morality and ethics stem from a human sense of empathy and sympathy for one and another, it is also an evolutionary tool since we would not have reached he heights we have without a moral fabric to hold us together and enable us to work as societies. I also believe that teaching values and morality through the use of empathy is a much better tool that scaring them with eternal damnation, it is more honest and more tangible. A child can relate to the feeling of having his toy taken but not to supernatural repercussions for bad acts.
When I first realized I was an Atheist ( and had been for some time ) I felt liberated. Living for today and basing my life on facts and learning. Putting faith in humanity and our ability to live, learn, evolve and prosper by relying on ourselves and each other. From what I have lived, experienced and read, Atheists are not morose godless people, they are in fact life affirming, humanity praising people that want us to do our best for our own sake not for the Spaghetti monster’s.


I could go on point by point enumerating the various ideas and theories which I believe a scientific and rational view wins out over a simplified religious one but there are people that are far more intelligent and well versed in such debates that I will leave it to the experts. Suffice it to say that I hope people will continue to learn and hopefully one day they too will see the beauty in a natural universe.

[Darth Rotor]

The worm in a bottle of Mezcal. ;)

DR

[Garrette]

The worm in a bottle of Mezcal. ;)

DRNominated.

[Hutch]

Roman Catholic ----> Agnostic -----> Lukewarm Deist

Was born and raised Catholic, went to church every Sunday, meatless Fridays, CCD classes...but I was never feverent about it, probably because my parents weren't. It was just something you did, growing up in Ohio in the 60's and 70's, you had a religion and you did the kneeling and the reciting and ate the wafer and then you could take your tie off and eat a big Sunday dinner..

I think even early on I never quite bought the "there is only one God, but we pray to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost (he was still a Ghost back then before promotion to Spirit). Got involved in the whole 'happy-clappy, gitaur-playing' stuff in the 70's, but never got totally immersed.

Then in 1977 I started going to a Chapel at Ft. Ben Harrison, because it was closest to where I lived at the time. It was multi-use, so there were Bibles in the pews, something you will not see in Cathoic churches (I cannot remember my mother or father ever reading out of the Bible to my brother and me). Since by now I knew the Mass ritual as well as the priests did, I began reading parts of the Bible, and like many of the posters above realized that if this was the Word of the Lord like I had been taught, well, thank you but I'll pass.

That got me to Agnostic (and freed up Sunday mornings to sleep in) and lately I would classify myself as a lukewarm deist, probably tending towards atheism but not quite there yet.

Interesting, isn't it, that so many people here lost their faith by throughly reading the text that is supposed to sustain it?

[roger]

Raised Catholic. A small part of my heritage is Native American, so I decided to research their religions. Which posed the question "which to believe." A bit of thought revealed the answer "None of them".

This happened somewhere around 7th grade, though the process took awhile, as it took awhile for fear of damnation to evaporate.

[Kiwiwriter]

I was raised as an atheistic Jew, in a non-kosher home, so I was never attuned to it.

When I ran the Jewish newspaper at NYU, I was disgusted by the hypocrisy of my colleagues in the school's Jewish organization. They were opposed to racism and anti-Semitism, but made cracks about blacks. They were committed to virginity until marriage, but that only meant intercourse.

But what really turned me off was not that as much as the universal demands of all religions for guilt and money. They inflicted guilt on members. You were responsible for the death of Christ. The synagogue's failure to keep members. The sins of the world.

Then they'd demand money. In Ireland, it was to convert African babies, so they wouldn't go to limbo. In North Carolina, it was to support the pastor's new Cadillac purchase. In New York, it's to benefit the church's real estate development corporation. But mostly, it's to buy your way out of Hell.

Enough of that.

[Darth Rotor]

Then they'd demand money. In Ireland, it was to convert African babies, so they wouldn't go to limbo. In North Carolina, it was to support the pastor's new Cadillac purchase. In New York, it's to benefit the church's real estate development corporation. But mostly, it's to buy your way out of Hell.

Enough of that.
In New Jersey, it's to buy your way out of Newark.

*ducks*

DR

[Meadmaker]

Interesting, isn't it, that so many people here lost their faith by throughly reading the text that is supposed to sustain it?

Book of Ecclesiastes for me.

Catholic -> atheist with variations (variation included Unitarian, Buddhist, and "I'd be a pagan if all the pagans I knew weren't so darned weird")-> Marriage to Jewish woman-> guy who participates in Jewish ritual, but doesn't believe anyone is listening to the blessings. More or less pantheist.

[Zygar]

I'm surprised by how many people were raised in some form of atheistic environment. But I'm from Utah, where even the non-Mormons are very religious.

[fuelair]

I was brought up in mildly Christian background. I don't think I ever really believed in the Christian god (or any other) beyond the childish acceptance of taking what your parents say to be true. By the age of 10 or so, I think I'd come to the conclusion that there was no god. I suppose in part due to the observation that my prayers were never answered.

Mine was 7 or 8 - just as yours (based on description) otherwise.

[Kiwiwriter]

In New Jersey, it's to buy your way out of Newark.

*ducks*

DR

...I write speeches and press releases for Newark's Mayor, Cory A. Booker.

[666]

Church of Scotland > Atheist

My parents sent me to Sunday School as it was the "thing to do" in those days. I think it was a social thing as much as a religious thing.

Later, after being disillusioned by the Tooth Fairy and Santa, I started thinking more critically. By my mid-teens I just couldn't reconcile what I was taught at church with what I could plainly learn for myself in the wider world. I discovered that there were actually other people who were (whisper it) unbelievers!

Intellectually I guess I should consider myself agnostic but the difference between my position and full-blown atheism is so vanishingly small as not to matter.

[El Greco]

Well... I used to be an atheist. One day I said "if there *really* is a God, let me find tomorrow 500 million euros in my bank account".

Next morning, the money was there. As you can see I just *had* to believe.

[Darth Rotor]

...I write speeches and press releases for Newark's Mayor, Cory A. Booker.
Is that a good thing, or the cross you bear? :D As I recall from our previous discussion, it is the former. Please, don't ever write him a speech that makes him sound like Pres Bush speaking in public. It would make Baby Jesus cry. :(

My mother was from New Jersey.

DR

[Cosmo]

Born and raised Jewish. Six years of hebrew school followed by a conservative Bar Mitzvah which required me to memorize pages and pages of hebrew - as well as the right way to sing it all. I realized shortly after the Bar Mitzvah that nobody - not my parents, nor my hebrew school teachers - ever bothered to convince me that god existed. It seemed silly to my 13-year old mind that nobody "checked" to see whether I believed in god before going through with the ceremony.

From 13 to 18, my family didn't go to temple much except for the 2 or 3 major annual holidays and my younger brother's Bar Mitzvah. Religion simply wasn't a big part of my life; I was a true apatheist.

I started liking philosophy a great deal, and I had to get my fix through reading rather than class as my high school didn't have any philosophy courses. When I was 18, a friend told me about a website he thought I might like because of my interest in philosophy. That website was the JREF, and in its forum I met some incredibly intelligent critical thinkers, skeptics, and atheists whom unknowingly "converted" me to their view. That was 4 years ago. The rest is history. :)

[Kiwiwriter]

Is that a good thing, or the cross you bear? :D As I recall from our previous discussion, it is the former. Please, don't ever write him a speech that makes him sound like Pres Bush speaking in public. It would make Baby Jesus cry. :(

My mother was from New Jersey.

DR

The former. And as for Cory's speeches, he's not that difficult to write for, I am finding after six months. His basic take is that he's irritated with Newark's present situation, but hopeful and firm in his belief that the situation can be improved for the better. He uses my material pretty much as background for the speech, which is mostly extemporaneous material. He is an extremely articulate and knowledgeable man, and he can talk off the cuff with ease. He'll never sound like Bush.

Sharpe was different. He only had one speech. Newark was a mess when he took it over. Under his leadership Newark had turned around. The event about which he was speaking was part of that great turnaround, and anyone who dared say that Newark was still a mess was a racist, or ill-informed, and seeking to destroy Newark. Those folks who defamed Newark or made allegations about him were committing a great outrage against Newark. But with the support of all Newarkers, he would defeat the detractors and allegators, the city would reach its destiny.

Of course, Newark is a very fundamentalist town, with much of its land off the tax rolls because it's owned by churches, whose main business is apparently not saving souls, but investing in real estate, which sours me further on religion. However, because it's a fundamentalist town, many of my colleagues regard the Bible as a play-by-play account of the creation of the Universe, so I have to keep a straight face when they get angry about Charles Darwin or the lack of prayer in public schools. At those points, I fervently silently pray that the phone will ring, so I can shut up my interlocutor and be distracted.

All of this, along with religion's nasty habit of fomenting wars and pain, reminds me of the wise words of a Classical Scholar I know: "This is what happens when you insist on going around believing in God." :)

[jjramsey]

I was born of a Jewish mother who was not a Christian at the time and a father who was a Gentile, lapsed WASP. My parents were not particularly observant, and I did not grow up going to church. As a kid, I maybe kinda sorta believed in God but didn't think about it too much. By maybe the middle of high school, I did believe in God but still didn't think about it too much, except that I concluded that he/she/it was a bit strange and had a mildly perverse sense of humor. My mother had become a Christian, and my dad followed suit. Later, so did I. They have gravitated toward churches that are theologically conservative but not looney tunes about it. Curiously enough, my mother's own beliefs aren't that conservative, e.g. she could care less if Jesus really did rise from the grave. Me, I rather did care about that.

What moved me away from Christianity? I had thought to myself, "Ok, I've known from the outset that the first few chapters of Genesis are a crock, but at least the resurrection can't honestly be explained away, right?" I started Googling to check that. On the one side, I found http://infidels.org, which had some arguments that I hadn't seen, and on the other side I found http://tektonics.org, http://christian-thinktank.com, and http://bede.org.uk, which had some good counterarguments, and pointed out where the Infidels had been less than intellectually honest. From there, I had started looking in the local library. On the more moderate/liberal side, I had found Meier's A Marginal Jew, where a Christian writer (!) pointed out geographical problems in Luke's account of Jesus' rejection at Nazareth. That was one minor crack in my beliefs. On the side of the more thoughtful conservative, I found N.T. Wright. The real hit started coming when I finally found Robin Lane Fox's The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. Here was a well-researched and honest critique of the Bible. Taking part in the JREF forums also helped me feel things out. So did getting the hang of what arguments against miracles were doing more than just begging the question. Over time, I've gotten a better feel of where the apologists were less than honest as well. I do feel like I've had to workaround both cleverness of the apologists on one hand and the sloppiness of what might loosely be called the "fundy" atheists, which often made the apologists look better than they might have otherwise.

[President Bush]

Vermouth. Nuns.

[Solus]

I guess I have slightly unique story. I’m atheist now but I grew up in a (partially) Christian family. My mother is a Christian and I later found out my father was an atheist but as a child I went to church and all the other nonsense. I really believed in god until maybe 11 or 12 then I became agnostic.I began to question the idea of god and religion and I wasn’t sure about the whole thing. The more I learned about religion the less I liked. Later I found both my father and step father were non-believers but I would have never known that growing up.

Now is where it gets interesting, what turned me from an agnostic into an atheist. Due to a medication I was taking for my anxiety disorder I had a manic episode. At the time I actually believed I was messenger from god. Everything I saw was a “sign” and everything had a purpose all related to the Christian religion. In full mania (no sleep for two days) I felt like I was connected to “god”, it was this wonderful feeling throughout my whole body. Eventually I ended up in the hospital. I was really nuts, I ripped my room apart and much more, truly a terrible experience.

Later on I felt like my mind had raped by this Christianity nonsense. I had been an agnostic sitting on the fence for years but that experience forced to make a choice. I knew that religion was a farce so why even give it a slight chance? The burden of proof is on religion not on me. And thus I became a full atheist (22 years old).

I can relate to the stories of saints and other religious types and I can tell you they were all probably mentally ill.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_of_St_Theresa
I wish I had the full text that described her experence but it sounded very familar to me.:covereyes It’s strange to think that the major religions might have been all been founded by mentally ill people.

I must stress though that my change from being agnostic to atheist was not based on anger or hate, it was based on evidence. The manic event merely forced me to confront my beliefs directly. I called myself Christian when I was manic and when I came out of it it was time to fully confront what I believed and why. Bottom line, based on what I believed there was no reason to call myself an agnostic, atheist was a much better term.

[Meri]

Catholic --> Atheist

I was raised Catholic, like my father even though my mother is a protestant who does not really believe in organized religion. My father isn't all that religious either, but when we were kids we went to mass fairly regularly and to CCD classes (like Sunday school). I know I believed in God up until I was about 14 or 15. Unlike a lot of people here, I didn't exactly become an atheist because religion didn't make sense. Up until I was 14, I had never really thought there was an option to believe in God or not. I knew what the word atheist meant, but hadn't thought about it as a position a person could hold, but in high school, some of my friends were atheists. It was about a year later I realized I no longer believed in God. So all it really took was being given the option of not believing.

[kellyb]

Evangelical Fundamentalist (childhood and early teens)--------> liberal/new ageish Christian (mid-late teens)-----> Pentecostal (age 20-22)------>sad, confused liberal Christian on the verge of agnosticism suffering from serious cognitive dissonance (age 22-24 )----->Atheist (25-present).

I was just brainwashed as a kid. It messed me up, but I worked my way out in my mid 20's once I came to terms with the fact that I had just been brainwashed. Period. End of story.

Atheism is wonderful. I've worked through fear of death by remaining technically agnostic towards a Deist type god.
Life is good.

[saizai]

JJRamsey - it's unclear from your post what your position is now. Agnostic? Strong atheist? Unsure?

Solus - it seems odd to me that you describe your manic experience - on in which you "felt God" (presumably a good sort of feeling?) as 'terrible'. Is this simply in retrospect, or was the feeling actually unpleasant, or rather an "on the whole" assesment that it basically wasn't worth the highlights? Why would this convince you to be a strong atheist (i.e. "god definitely doesn't exist"), rather than simply being a perhaps more cynical agnostic (i.e. "I have no reason to believe god exists but it might be possible")?

BTW you should be interested in one of the talks at http://beyondbelief2006.org/Watch about temporal lobe seizures.

kellyb - What do you mean by "brainwashed"? Could you describe it from a first-person (rather than third-person analytical) perspective? What was it like to "feel brainwashed" (I presume that's not really possible except in retrospect...)? Any particular current belief about what will happen to you when you die?

[Mr Clingford]

Brought up in devout Anglican family who said that religion addresses why questions and science the how ones. But as a child I remember that I was bored by Church, God and Sunday School and would pretend to sleep in to avoid prayer time at breakfast. Stopped going to church around age of 14 or 15. I had a Christian belief framework but didn't find it relevant to me, and it was boring!

Started going to church youth group and church again at age 16 or 17 because my best friend liked a girl who went to church and I was curious as to what she was like.

At age 18 had a conversion experience on my own in my bedroom and started out on the long road of sorting out what I believed was true. My parents have only ever encouraged me to find out my own beliefs and haven't pressurised me to attend church or 'try and believe'. 18-20 Had my first doubts about the existence of God (still do have them at times). My faith has been 'saved' at times by Christian writers such as Keith Ward, who works propose non-Fundamentalist approaches (which actually are sometimes traditional Christian approaches) that incorporate what modern science, scholarship have to say. I actually met him at a debate at Oxford University where Richard Dawkins was giving his POV too.

The Bible has and continues to be a huge problematic area for me. I studied Philosophy and Theology at Leeds University for a couple of years while attending a Fundamentalist church on Sunday morning and an Anglican one in the evening. There were a lot of conflicting viewpoints going around and I survived by dumping the Fundamentalisn because I thought it was factually wrong.

I had an illness for a year and bit and couldn't face going to church because it just made me feel guilty and depressed. I did go to the Quakers for a few months because there was no liturgy or guilt but I wanted a place and time to try and be quiet with God in the presence of others.

From the age of 24 to 29 I started going to church again regularly and was a member of first the Music Team, where I sang, and then the Drama Team, which was a heck of a fun time. I also from age 25 to 27 went to university again and studied English Literature which has helped me read the Bible a bit more by viewing it as literature. The University Anglican Society was great because we were a bunch of people trying to make sense of life from a Christian perspective, and our meetings were opposite a bar so we could go and have a few drinks afterwards. A special mention to the chaplains who encouraged thinking and challenging ones beliefs combined with a deep spirituality which I respect immensely.

One of the factors that has strengthened my faith is learning about Christianities outside my tradition of Anglicanism, such as the mainstream Catholicism, Orthodox, other more non-denominational places such as Iona in Scotland. Lots of people on this forum have been exposed to Fundamentalist, literalist Christianity and can be surprised that other types exist which actually encourage you to use your brain.

So at the grand old age of 34 I have been a Christian for 16 years and have gone from more literalist Anglican through a Anglican/Charismatic phase to a more liberal Anglican who takes helpful bits from where he finds them, whatever the tradition.

[kellyb]

kellyb - What do you mean by "brainwashed"? Could you describe it from a first-person (rather than third-person analytical) perspective? What was it like to "feel brainwashed" (I presume that's not really possible except in retrospect...)? Any particular current belief about what will happen to you when you die?
Well, the school I went to was very weird. We had chapel twice a week in addition to an hour of bible classes every day. Chapel was mostly about hell, and they'd bring in speakers from other countries who had been tortured for being Christian, and people who claimed to be aborted babies who were rescued from garbage cans outside abortion clinics and lived.
The hour of Bible studies a day wasn't as bad, but I certainly believed it was all the literal truth. Also, every subject was taught in a religious way (history: the founding fathers were Christian, and only meant for Americans to have the freedom to choose which denomination of Christian to be, Pythagoras had demons communication with him giving him Satanically inspired mathematical formulas....crazy stuff like that). The school I attended was located inside the church I went to 3 times a week.

The most insidious theological principal that "got me" was that any thought I might have that disagreed with any of this was actually not my own thinking, but was rather the devil talking to me. I escaped this in my mid teens by reinterpreting the Bible in such a way that it made more sense that, yes, the End Times were near...but actually Fundamentalism was the Antichrist.
So that's when I became a "Love and Light" hippy liberal Christian.
Which was a definite improvement, but when life got hard a few times, the old fundy brainwashing would creep back in, and I'd wonder if I'd fallen for some kind of demonic trick, and maybe god was punishing me, trying to nudge me back towards my roots.
Anyway the thing I never considered was that the whole god/christianity thing might be a lie alltogether. The brainwashing had me by the throat there, coz any time a hint of a thought like that started to surface, the "That's the Devil!!!" thinking kicked in, and I'd banish the notion back into the recesses of my subconscious.
Until one morning driving to work when I realised that "Hey. I can't consider the possibility that maybe god doesn't exist at all because I was brainwashed with a mental trick to prevent me from doing so when I was a kid. I thought I escaped that by leaving fundamentalism, but I didn't. I didn't escape at all. They've actually had me this whole time, really."
Then, the "That's the DEVIL!" thinking tried to kick back in, but this time I could see that it wasn't the "Holy Spirit" warning me of anything, but just religious indoctrination. That's how it worked. And it was probably just a lie.

Anyway, I don't have any firm belief on what happens when we die. I seriously suspect it's just "the end." But I kinda hope maybe there some kind of interconnectedness on the quantum level or something that might mean there's "something else". Who knows? The Deist god doesn't seem necessary to me or particularly implausible, either.

[Tanstaafl]

Well... I used to be an atheist. One day I said "if there *really* is a God, let me find tomorrow 500 million euros in my bank account".

Next morning, the money was there. As you can see I just *had* to believe.

I'd like to see the evidence of that. A mere one million euros in my account would suffice to convince me! :D

[saizai]

Mr Clingford - You glossed the "conversion experience" you had at 18, and that's exactly what I wanted to know about. Please elaborate (what happened & why did it convince you to change your beliefs).

[saizai]

Pythagoras had demons communication with him giving him Satanically inspired mathematical formulas....crazy stuff like that

:eye-poppi Are you actually serious? For my curiosity (somewhat off topic)... how exactly did their argument go? (E.g. how did they know? Any evidence or reasoning given? How can you tell the difference between Satanic math, Deific math, and just neutral math? :confused: )

The most insidious theological principal that "got me" was that any thought I might have that disagreed with any of this was actually not my own thinking, but was rather the devil talking to me.

How much did this actually influence your day-to-day thinking? Did you think yourself schizophrenic? Did those thoughts take on a separate 'voice' or persona?

Until one morning driving to work when I realised that "Hey. I can't consider the possibility that maybe god doesn't exist at all because I was brainwashed with a mental trick to prevent me from doing so when I was a kid. I thought I escaped that by leaving fundamentalism, but I didn't. I didn't escape at all. They've actually had me this whole time, really."
Then, the "That's the DEVIL!" thinking tried to kick back in, but this time I could see that it wasn't the "Holy Spirit" warning me of anything, but just religious indoctrination. That's how it worked. And it was probably just a lie.

I'd like more detail on this part, as it's the particularly interesting bit. Exactly how did the psychology of this go? What created that realization - and why did you not simply dismiss it as yet another Satanic trick?

[kellyb]

Are you actually serious? For my curiosity (somewhat off topic)... how exactly did their argument go? (E.g. how did they know? Any evidence or reasoning given? How can you tell the difference between Satanic math, Deific math, and just neutral math?
I actually got curious about that and tried to find out where they got that idea from a few months ago. Pythagoras was a little odd and had some kind of philosophical/religious group he led, so I guess in the minds of fundy math teachers, since it wasn't JudeoChristian, it had to be satanic.

The mentality of those evangelicals was like binary code. It's either Christian, or Satanic. Discovery Channel = pure evil. Republican party= pure Jesus.

How much did this actually influence your day-to-day thinking? Did you think yourself schizophrenic? Did those thoughts take on a separate 'voice' or persona?
Well, for the most part, it wasn't an issue, coz I was totally, totally Christian.
I totally believed it all. So it was easy to ignore.
And when I went through my initial reformation out of fundyism into hippy liberal christianity, I was at a defiant age, and was angry that my "Christian elders" wouldn't take my theological issues with their doctrine seriously. They just started having people "pray for me". And that just pissed me off. So, it made perfect sense that they were actually the evil ones.
Hey, I was, like, 15.

In my mid 20's when I totally ditched the Jesus thing alltogether, I did start wondering if the deconversion process would maybe drive me insane.
No, there was never an audible voice, but I had some internal dialogues that were fairly interesting.
But just logically accepting that it was all the product of brainwashing and not a "spiritual warfare" between the forces of good and evil over my eternal soul got me through it.

I'd like more detail on this part, as it's the particularly interesting bit. Exactly how did the psychology of this go? What created that realization - and why did you not simply dismiss it as yet another Satanic trick?
I decided it was my Christian duty to become an atheist.
I figured if god was real, and he was a halfway decent guy, he'd understand that I couldn't continue believing in him just because I'd been brainwashed. If god was real, he'd let me consider the world from an atheistic point of view and reconsider his existance from a different perspective.
I figured that Jesus himself told his religion that he was born into to kiss his a$$, and he figured out what he believed on his own terms.
So the most christlike thing I could do was to have the courage to do the same...in a different way.
Sorta.
Anyway, it worked.

[alfaniner]

(Copied/pasted from my previous thread on the subject - Losing My Religion.)

This has been a long process to come about. From my first exposure to the religion, I went to church nearly every Sunday up until a few years ago. I went to Catholic school through the 7th grade, and for various reasons entered public school in 8th grade. I was amazed at the difference, and was pleased at being exposed to a lot of different "types" of kids, rather than the same homogenous group I'd spent the last 7 years with. This was my first exposure to seeing something really "different" in my 13 or so years of life so far.

My mother died in 1999 after a long illness (cancer) when I was about 40. During this time I had ample opportunity to pray and to see my family do the same. None of that worked, she still succumbed and died. No miracles here. Perhaps if there had been a magnificent recovery, I would continue to believe as I had before then.

Sometime in 2000, I was particularly down, and attended my regular Sunday church service, hoping to find something uplifting in the message being sent. The priest chose this week to detail some horrible story about a woman killing another to steal the other woman's baby. The moral was "See what lengths people will go to to have a baby? Abortion is BAD!" Coming at this particular time (it was only a week after Easter or so), and the total illogic of this conclusion actually made me think of converting to another religion after many decades.

The defining factor was 9/11. I realized that these terrorists believed strongly enough in their God to kill themselves and several thousand people. The God I thought I knew should never have let that happen. Therefore, either their God was stronger (and I refused to believe that there was only supposed to be ONE), or it was the case of "there is nothing there".

Around this time I became aware of the phenomenon of John Edward "medium" and "psychic". I was fascinated by his performances, which were similar to several other psychics I'd seen on TV. I've always had an appreciation for the fantastic, but don't believe in UFO's, ghosts, or most of that paranormal phenomena. This guy was amazing though, and I usually agreed with the sitter, wondering how he "always got everything exactly right". Something led me to investigate further, and I came across the James Randi Educational Foundation, and the JREF forum.

This board was highly influential in my learning about critical thinking. Over the course of several months, I learned about the techniques of cold reading, among other things. As I continued to watch John Edward, I realized this is exactly what he (along with most other psychics) was doing. Instead of "getting it exactly right", I saw how he fished for information and twisted reponses around to make it seem like he had been right all along.

During this time, there was the revelation of the widespread sexual abuse by priests, and the subsequent cover-up. I was very distressed that in addition to having been fooled by a psychic, even my own religion was capable of deception. Concurrently, I also found out that there was widespread corruption in the national governing body of the taekwondo group I belong to. In both instances, there had been previously been rumors, but once the investigation and revelation had come about, even though it may have been apparent before, was now impossible to ignore. At this time I found it very difficult to put my faith or trust in anything. Certainly my previous beliefs had been shattered.

Improving my critical thinking has been a long road, but I am now comfortable with the world the way it really is, instead of being afraid of being punished by the magical man who lives in the sky, for an eternity, for possibly some minor offense. I no longer believe in life after death, Heaven or Hell, Purgatory or Limbo (those last two have seemed to been "erased" in the last few decades). I would like to believe that the body's energy goes somewhere after death, even if it's given back to the universe somehow.

I believe that a Jesus-like man very probably existed, and his ideas have been twisted and formed to fit many religions' agendas. I don't deny that there are many good concepts presented by him and in the bible, and most of the ten commandments are still sound knowledge to live by.

Does this leave me sad and depressed? Sometimes. But I now see religion as like a drug (if you've ever seen true fundies you know what I mean), and dangerous as an influence in politics. There is a new trend that if you don't believe in "OUR" God, you are going to be in some big trouble. Sure, most people think it's great, but only because the people of influence believe in the same God.

You might think "Well, if you don't believe in God or sin, what's to keep you from stealing, murdering, etc.?" It's because I'm still a good guy, and I have empathy for other people. This is not brought about by religion (although it may have had some influence earlier in my life).

What would make me believe? Oh, perhaps having God or his messenger actually appear, or seeing a true miracle that would be impossible to explain otherwise (even then it would be subject to my critical thinking magicians do "impossible" things all the time).

I won't denigrate others for believing most of my family still does (and doesn't even know my turnaround yet). But when I went to my goddaughter's Confirmation, I just felt sad because the ritual reminded me of recruiting into the Hitler youth. "If we can get 'em young!" It took me several years to see what was real. It would take something extraordinary to convince me now that something is there.

If God was so desperate for me to believe in Him, why would he ever allow me to change my mind after so many years? I see religion as like a drug now sure I felt better when I had it, but eventually I have to return to reality.

I doubt there's anything anyone could say that would convince me otherwise now.

[Nancarrow]

Not-very-practicing-Catholic -> Atheist -> Unsure but strictly non-religious

First conversion around age 12-13, shortly after taking Communion for the first and only time! Variety of reasons: the stories from the bible sounded ridiculous, contradictory and barbaric. My gradual scientific understanding of the world, which left no room for magical spells (of which prayer is a form).

Possibly amusing self-deprecatory story from that time: there was some computer game I loved playing on my Atari. One day I followed a hacking suggestion in a mag, and ruined the disk. For about a week I consistently prayed to God, 'please please repair this'.

Then one day I just thought... 'Nancarrow, what the F:D :D K are you playing at?' I didn't know the intricate workings of magnetic media then (and still don't to be honest) but I was beginning to grasp the nature of prayer - it 'just ain't the way the universe works'.

Second 'conversion' - well over the last year or so I have been refining my atheism. I guess it's 'atheistic agnosticism' - the view that the existence of a creator is strictly unknowable, but also unnecessary, so let's get Occam to have the last word on that. Basically Dawkins's view AFAICT. But... I am also pondering Nick Bostrom's simulation argument at the moment, which leaves room for an interesting kind of Deism.

[fredcarr]

Third thru sixth grade was Christian though I don't think my Sunday School teachers cared much for my questions.

In sixth grade I ame across the subject of Herman Hesses Siddartha. This, although a work of "fiction", opened the door to a lot more questions and the possibilty of there being some answers. Sixth grade was a tough year but I had a great teacher that helped me out. (Questioning the very nature of existence doesn't go over to well on the playground.)

By 7th grade I had found a few books on the subject of Scientology and applied a few of things I learned and found they worked pretty well as described. Over the next 12 months or so had certain experiences that confirmed what Mr. Hubbard was essentially saying was without a doubt true. (I still consider myself a Christian as well.)

Fred

[Cosmo]

Deleted

[CBVan]

Boy, am I a flipflopper. Raised as a Lutheran, didn't mind god for a long time til guess what happened? My church got a real FUNDIE preacher. Worst thing that can happen to a church, we bled members. So at around 7th Grade I was angry at god for not existing. Relapsed again due to a profoundly emotional experience. Then, after careful reading of the bibble (spelling intentional) I realized I should be thankful that God doesn't exist and now am a full blown hedonist. Because fun is fun.

[supermonkey]

As an atheist I learned that god does not exist as it makes total logical sense and rational thinking is what is needed
I am against all forms of stupidity and psycho nut cases

[supermonkey]

We need more forums of truth like this one

[Fronzel]

Southern Baptist->Hippy Christian->deist->closet atheist

I was raised Southern Baptist. The good kind that believes the Bible is 100% accurate from Genesis to maps and any error I think I see if because god is testing my faith and that if you are not southern Baptist you go straight to hell.

The problem for me was, I never really bought it. I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up and did the Junior Scientist thing and asked evil Satanic questions. I wasn't satisfied with the "It's a mystery" or "Good/evil Deity is responsible". So I kept asking questions, kept getting the runaround and getting heaps of scorn for being one of those Intellectuals. I started looking elsewhere for answers. I read Satanic books like the Koran, The Prince(!), The Hindu books, And realized I was asking the wrong people. That all these beliefs that I considered superstitious, considered my beliefs superstitious.

So I started looking at my beliefs trying to find out why I believed them. Which made me a generic Christian/deist because you have to have god, right? Wrong.

I am in the closet because my family is still fundie(The disowned one relative because he converted to Free Baptist. Almost disowned another because he became Episcopal, but god punished him by giving him AIDS for converting), and My boss is pretty hardcore into the Christer thing. I feel I am intellectually craven for not coming out, for not trying to share the wonders of a world free from supernatural influence but I'm not ready to go there yet.

The worst for me is I've been in meetings at work where they started and closed in prayer. They can't do that, but it is under the radar because nobody has complained. I didn't want to be that guy, but I do because I shouldn't have to sit through their little make believe. I've suffered through enough Muslim prayers that I was very tempted to through my head back and say "ALLAH AKBAR", but I chickened out.

[saizai]

FWIW the phrase is Allāhu Akbar (الله أكبر) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takbir In case you feel like doing it someday.

You may want to get a new job and move somewhere more comfortable. ;)

Also, you didn't explain why you switched from Deist to atheist (or is it agnostic?)...

[Fronzel]

My conversion to atheist wasn't that great. It just clicked that our definition of god seemed like a flaw in our communication ability. The more I read into how things really work, the more and more awe I felt. The more I read into different religions and mythology, the more i realized they are all the same.

I realized that natural laws govern everything around us and "god" is just a place holder for laws we don't know yet. Any deity that is content to reside in our collective ignorance isn't worth our time.

[Mr Clingford]

Mr Clingford - You glossed the "conversion experience" you had at 18, and that's exactly what I wanted to know about. Please elaborate (what happened & why did it convince you to change your beliefs).Sorry!

Recap - I already believed that the Christian God existed but I had made no commitment of my life to God. I was aware at the time that I was going my own selfish way, which involved me being unpleasant to someone, and not following God's way. That evening I had wrung up to talk to them and her mother said that I was not to contact them anymore because I wasn't the type of person she wanted her daughter to know. This shook me up as no-one had told me that before. I saw it as confirmation that going my selfish way wasn't good and that going God's way was the path forward for me.

So after the phonecall I went to my room. knelt by my bed and prayed to God for forgiveness and said I was going his way now. After a few minutes of heart-felt crying out to God I knew that I was forgiven. I use the word "know" because that is what it was like, it was like knowing a fact, that there is a Great Wall of China, for instance. That is the only time on my life so far that I have experienced that "knowing". That was Thursday, June 28th, 1990, about 9:10 PM.

Hope that helps. Ask for clarity on things if you wish.

[Irony]

The story behind my conversion isn't very complicated. I was born Southern Baptist, but neither of my parents were particularly religious. I went to church some Sundays, to Sunday School a few times, and for the most part never thought about religion any other time. Somewhere around 12 I actually thought about God for a bit. After a bit of thought I decided that the two ways Baptists represented God (as a benevolent, perfect being and as a childish, violent teenager in need of constant adoration) were completely incompatible, so I stopped believing in the Christian God altogether. The fact that I was more knowledgeable about science and evolution at 12 then most fundamentalists will ever be probably played a part too.

The old "That's the devil talking" conditioning did kick in, but then I thought about heaven. I thought that any sort of heaven that an evil, jealous, needy God would create would be like Hell anyway (to me at least), so in that case going to Hell wasn't really much of a threat, and a benevolent God would forgive a little thing like not believing he exists. At that point I still held some small sense that some sort of soul and a divine being because I didn't want to give up the idea of an after-life, so I guess you could call me a nondenominational theist.

Believing in something without evidence goes against my nature, so I was somewhat discontent over the deity thing for a few years. At 16 I finally gathered up enough mental courage to let go of the comforting notions of heaven and and an after-life and confront my beliefs head on. At that point I decided to drop the deity belief altogether. Once I finally freed myself of that baggage I felt terrific, and I've never looked back.

[volatile]

What really shook me into real, honest-to-goodness, critically-aware atheism was six months sharing a flat with a Jehovah's Witness - to see such an extreme, uncritical, cultish belief system at such close quarters really brought my own lazy thinking on the metaphysical into sharp focus. In talking to this girl, and from spending a great amount of time in close contact with her, I saw in sharp detail how religion weaves its spell.

After just a few weeks, it was patently obvious to me that the JW mindset (particularly the edicts of the Watchtower organisation, the social control created by the structure of the organisation and the uncritically dogmatic way in which JWs 'study' one very specific translation bible) was problematic and intellectually untenable, and yet it shared so many characteristics with the mainstream Anglican and Catholic faiths I'd been brought up in.

I remember the epiphany quite clearly: the mechanisms of the JW belief system and the structure of the Watchtower organisation were just the belief systems and structures of mainstream Christianity taken to a more extreme level. The more I learnt about this very distasteful ideology (which, for example, casts aside those excommunicated for any tiny disagreement with dogmatic detail and exhorts those still in the Church, including family members, to cross the road to avoid anyone who dares leave the JW movement), the more it became clear to me that my intellectual and social unease with JW theology and sociology was equally applicable to my own fairly mild form of theistic belief.

Seeing how theism worked in extremis gave me the clarity to escape its clutches once and for all.

[Kopji]

Sorry this is long and somewhat rambling. These are still somewhat difficult for me to write, but I will collect them together sometime and do a better job.

RLDS -> Bahai -> atheist-taoist :-)

The flavor of RLDS (a small sect of mormonism) I was raised in does not really exist any more. It has evolved into something more moderate. There is a vestigial remnant that lives on the internet here:
http://www.centerplace.org

Link only provided as an example of where not to go. They were really creepy last time I visited. Sort of a dark spiderweb patch on the internet.

It did not occur to me until recently how weird my religion was sometimes. Sheesh, you grow up around people who believe that Jesus is going to descend from the sky somewhere in the US Midwest. It was considered an act of faith to move to Missouri where he will land so that he can be greeted properly when his foot touches the top of the temple. So what would 'weird'
sound like compared to that?

I carry around these little snippets of 'church memories' I'm even not sure why I remember them. We had some good times too, potlucks were always great.

I hated eating over at a certain church elder's house. He had an outrageously cute daughter, but when he prayed it always took at least 20 minutes - even at meals. It always seemed like the same prayer over and over. She wasn't THAT cute.

Another member felt he had a 'revelation from God' to move his entire family to a small town in Missouri and be a farmer. They knew nothing about farming. A few months later his young son was killed plowing fields on a tractor. Tragic, but it seemed that all they could think of was how they must have committed some sin by not listening to God right.

During one Sunday service a weeping lady came up the aisle and laid a gold necklace at the altar, saying 'gold was not too much' to give for Jesus. A few years later her son's entire family would join a cult and be murdered in cold blood. I can play her act back in my mind as if it were a film.

Nothing could be too much to give. One minister married and divorced several times because he never had time for his family. He always spoke like he was proud to give up his family for what he believed.

Through it all was a pervasive sense of persecution. One family used to share how their grandparents were hunted by Danites (evil militaristic religious fanatics) in 1860's Utah in the dead of night. How their house was burned and they escaped to Arizona with only the clothes on their back. Is any of it true? Who knows. Myth and reality were all the same.

Those churches that get Chick Tracts posted on car windows - that was us. More than once my job was to go out and clean all the tracts off the car windows before prayer service let out.

Unfortunately that was most of my exposure to mainstream Christianity.

I have many such stories with various themes, both good and bad. I am not a very good target for a 'belief is good for you' argument. When you begin to see mentally ill people as victims and tools of religion it is hard to shake that view. So many lives could have been so much better.

I hurt a lot of people who were friends, and I suppose I protect them and myself sort of a mental partitioning. It is a place without love or hate, just a kind of detachment. There are kind people where ever you go, and also those who seem evil only in hindsight. And I know so many people who are pretty normal except for these occasional quirky beliefs. Whatever city we went to, we could look up members and find a welcome or place to stay.

In another time I doubt I could ever have left. I would never even have considered it. The world you know is all you see, so why look anywhere else?

Several things came together to break the protective religious shell. People tend to think the socialist 'all things in common' idea is a good thing, but taken to extreme it can destroy the individual. When I left it felt like I was slowly dissolving as an individual. There was about a two week period where I did not care if I lived or died. Sort of being on the edge of an abyss and not really caring much.

Mostly it was various forms of seeing that there was an outside world that was not evil and did not need to be feared.

Just before the 'end' I was looking for something that would let me respect my lifetime of existing beliefs but make more logical sense. I send my RLDS friends a weird letter saying I was leaving and joining the Bahai's. The Bahai's actually make an attractive case for ex-Mormon types.

So I was a Bahai for almost a whole month or so before deciding I would never make a good Bahai. I sent them a letter saying goodbye too..., and they were nice people.

In all this I did not really run across anyone who was awful to me or dammed me to hell. Well ok, one person, but nobody I knew personally as a friend.

If you are looking for a 'deconversion' experience, well, I suddenly stopped believing everything. The hair on the back of my neck raised and that was it.
My last thought as a believer was something like: 'God must be kidding'. It felt sort of like waking up out of a dazed existence, and there was no way back. I tried really hard to 'believe' again for a while.

The way 'back' was longer but quieter. (I don't think that I make all that good an atheist either.) I view all religion as a broad kind of art: Some is prettier than others, rendered with more or less skill - sometimes moving or inspiring, but always rendered by humans as with paint and canvas, rock & chisel, instruments and notes.

[stupidenglishgit]

I didn't realize this until quite recently. Now I can see that religions have never, historically, made people behave any better than they would do anyhow. The physics of most of them is preposterous and the necessity to abase yourself before a monstrous deity is unnecessary and undignified.
If I see God when I die I shall merely nod and say,''you don't have a very good PR department down below, do you?''.

[Antiquehunter]

I assume I was born an atheist, since I have no early childhood memories of believing in a god.

From about the age of 6 - 10 I was raised primarily in a secular fashion. I remember watching Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' with my dad on Saturday afternoon. I did go to church with my Grandparents on some Sundays - mostly as a babysitting ruse. I went to church on Xmas and Easter with the whole family because it was the done thing. But, no real indcotrination, no grace at mealtimes etc...

At about the age of 12, my parents went through a business failure, and my Grandparents starting dying off. My dad seemingly had some sort of epiphany at this time, and we started going to church. We moved from the 'United' church which was our 'community' church and started going to a fairly 'high' Anglican church. My dad was quite righteous about the selection of the church. If he's going to church its the 'right' church, apostolic succession and all that. I was enrolled in confirmation classes, and was an altar boy (not in the Catholic sense) where I took pride in being able to cook up enough incence to cause emphysemic reactions among the congregation. I also was the backup pianist/organist when the regular one was gone.

My parents started to develop a rather charismatic belief system, including faith healing, belief and study of 'the end times', attending Pentecostal services, speaking in tongues, belief in the Mary/Medjugorje 'appearances' and I swallowed this all uncritically. Until my senior year in high school.

I had written a paper for Composition class which was an (uncritical) report on a tract I'd been given discussing the Mormon faith and pointing out a whole bunch of problems with their belief system. Little did I know that there were a number of mormons in my class. My teacher wouldn't accept the paper, and she assigned me Carl Sagan 'The Dragons of Eden'. Which changed my life - there and then. Talk about an eye-opening.

Once I started to question, I was quickly ostraciszed from the church community, and I stopped going - basically at the request of my parents. I was entering that untractable age of late adolescence / early adulthood anyways, so my parents put it down to rebelliousness.

I devoured all of Sagan's works, and started in on Dawkins & Gould throughout my late teens and early 20's. I first considered myself to be a (weak) atheist by about 24. My atheist position is still a 'weak' one - I'm open to the idea of a god, but I see no compelling evidence to believe in any sort of 'higher power'. Therefore, until I see some evidence, the most logical position to take is one of atheism. But, if a god wants to be worshipped by me, he/she/it is welcome to manifest itself in a repeatable form to me and to the world, and he presto - I'm ready to believe. They'd have some 'splainin to do, but I am open to the idea.

[PixyMisa]

Born atheist -> raised vaguely agnostic/secular/Christian -> devout Christian -> hard-line atheist/skeptic

It was kind of funny, because I can remember going through the last two transitions quite clearly. My parents were not religious at all, but they left us kids to ourselves. We received religious instruction at school (public school!) once a month or so, and back then if you weren't Catholic or Jewish you were Anglican by default. And there was a local children's bible-studies class on Thursday afternoons, and we went to that because it was kind of fun and (I suspect) because our mother was happy to get a couple of hours of peace.

Anyway, I floated along like that until I was 10. Was Jesus our lord and saviour? Well, sure, I guess. I'd sooner be reading Three Investigators or Hardy Boys or, well, pretty much anything, than thinking about religion.

Then at 10 I realised one day that if what the grown-ups are saying about religion was true, it was important. And ping, I went from vague follower to devout believer. Prayed every night, read the bible, went to these Christian Youth Camps. Didn't go to church, because my family had never gone to church; in fact, the whole idea was foreign to me. Even as a devout Christian I never even thought about it.

Forward two years. Age twelve. I can't remember if this was before or after I had the argument with the headmaster of my school about fractions. Anyway, I realised that much of the time grown-ups simply don't know what they are talking about. They were just plain wrong about stuff. They'd tell you things with a straight face, and they'd be wrong. (Yeah, I know, sometimes I'm slow to notice the obvious.)

And the only reason I ever believed that God existed was because grown-ups were telling me so.

And all this time, I'd been reading everything I could get my hands on, and around this time I'd started on the adults section of the local library, and I was reading Greek mythology and science books and worst of all science fiction.

And it just went snap.

I wasn't even annoyed about it. I just went, oh, so that's all made up, and went on with my life.

[Soapy Sam]

Aged about 6 and a bit, I found out the awful truth about Santa.
No, I don't mean Satan, I mean Santa.
I found people lied to little kids.
This didn't fill me with angst or turn me into a suicide bomber, but it did make me start wondering about other stuff that had seemed a bit odd. Because, frankly, the whole Santa thing had never, quite, felt right to me.

My family was much like PixyMisa's. We were not indoctrinated and were encouraged to read anything. We went to church, because you did in the sixties. I hated singing, so when everyone stood up to sing hymns, I read the words. Then I read the rest of the book. If you want a kid to believe in god, don't let him read the words.

I just didn't buy it. Any of it. It was ...silly. I was an atheist at seven, long before I ever heard the word.
So there was never a conversion- just a short spell of going through the motions without really thinking about it, then a few hours, possibly just minutes thought, to dismiss as silly something that the greatest philosophers have wrangled over for centuries.
Either I was very bright, or humans are very silly. And the evidence that I'm very bright is distinctly lacking.

[twistor59]

Christian Scientist -> apathetic -> Christian -> Atheist

Raised as a Christian Scientist in the UK. CS is an American religion originated just over a hundred years ago. They rely on prayer for healing rather than go to doctors. Although my parents were CS, thankfully they had enough instinct to call a doctor when I was ill ! Not surprisingly, I never saw a single instance of healing through prayer (no my CS friends, healings of colds and flu don't count).
Became apathetic for a decade or so, just didn't think about religion. Then suddenly decided I needed to make up my mind about it. Read the NT straight through for the first time (CS people tend only to read selected bits of the bible), and thought to myself "oh is that what the bible says". I believed it, became a Christian, did the sinners prayer bit, got baptised etc.
I never believed the OT, always thought of it as allegory, but I believed the NT. However, there were always things that niggled at my mind:
Why doesn't God sort out the mess that is the world ?
Why didn't Jesus come back when the early Christians thought he would ?
Why the biblical contradictions between salvation through faith and works ?
Eventually, they just chipped away at my faith and I began to look at the bible with an open mind.
Now I'm of the opinion that it's a much neater solution to say God is imaginary and the bible is largely fiction.

[Dogdoctor]

I was raised by parents who were under going conversion from religion to agnostic or atheist beliefs. They wanted to give me the chance to make up my own mind so they took me to church every Sunday. At first they attended with me and then slowly quit leaving me eventually going to church by myself when all my family members had quit going (father, mother, and 3 brothers).
One Sunday short of 2 years perfect attendance, I thought "What am I doing here?" "Do I believe?" "Is there really a god?" By this point I had debunked Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and the Easter bunny and I thought this just seems like another one of those. I asked my father if there was a God and he answered again trying to let me make up my own mind "Some people believe there is and some don't." I pushed him to tell me what he believed and he finally let me know of his agnosticism. He knew I was interested so arranged for me to meet with a priest and discuss religion. The priests said he too had similar questions and that I was much more of a true Christian than many of the members of his church and that I shouldn’t worry about the answer and follow my heart and mind. (so I did)

I quit going to church and started testing to see if I could detect God. I prayed every day for a year for a small bit of help from god concerning some small issue I had that seemed insurmountable by me yet shouldn't be too big a deal for God. No help arrived so I thought perhaps I was selfish so I prayed for a friend of mine (who had many problems) every day for 3 years with no results.

I was angry that I was ignored. I swore at god in my mind. I immediately regretted that since according to my friends who were in Catholic School, I should be struck down by God. I waited and there was no result so consulting my friends they said that if I went out and swore at God up towards the sky then I would for sure be struck by lightning. I thought there is no other way to resolve this issue so I went out and did that half expecting to be smitten by the hand of God. All of a sudden there was a bolt of lightning from the sky and it struck me, killing me (a joke). There was no response. Consulting my friends, I tried it when there actually was thunder and lightning happening and my friends watched or rather ran like the wind when I did what they thought would cause a bolt of lightning to kill me. No response.
I became a full atheist at that point. I thought religion was stupid and pointless. I still had my Catholic School friends and all of my friends were some kind of religion. Still I felt as though there was something missing. I saw the fellowship religious people had and the sense of belonging. At this point my parents became involved in Unitarian beliefs and used to go to Unitarian meetings (no formal church). I attended several of them and did not feel a sense of belonging. I started becoming less certain of my beliefs.
Somewhere during this time I was growing up and starting to get more interested in girls. One girl in particular was involved in Bahai Faith and I went to Bahai firesides to learn about this religion and to be with this girl. I did not find my answers with them and the girl told me she wasn’t interested in me.
I started reading about Hinduism and Yoga and got together with a couple of different Hindu sects but they did not answer my questions. But I liked Yoga and meditation so I continued doing them.
I read the Bible twice cover to cover and it did not answer my questions. I studied Taoism and Confucianism and Buddhism and while closer still no cigar. I met another girl I liked that joined a cultish group. I followed her to the cult although I never made it to the inner circle (I was always an outsider). She let me know she was not interested in me unless I changed so I left. Finally I was beginning to understand that in order to live like that I needed to accept that certain knowledge was uncertain. Certain things will remain unexplained. Once I started on that line of thinking, the need to belong started going away. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
I lived on a commune for 2 years and in doing so went to Sant Mat (kind of a westernized Sikh/Hindu religion) meetings and again no answers.
That leaves me where I am today, an agnostic very slightly leaning toward atheism over theism but not moving at all in any particular direction belief wise (30 years that way).

[saizai]

Recap - I already believed that the Christian God existed but I had made no commitment of my life to God. I was aware at the time that I was going my own selfish way, which involved me being unpleasant to someone, and not following God's way. That evening I had wrung up to talk to them and her mother said that I was not to contact them anymore because I wasn't the type of person she wanted her daughter to know. This shook me up as no-one had told me that before. I saw it as confirmation that going my selfish way wasn't good and that going God's way was the path forward for me.

So after the phonecall I went to my room. knelt by my bed and prayed to God for forgiveness and said I was going his way now. After a few minutes of heart-felt crying out to God I knew that I was forgiven. I use the word "know" because that is what it was like, it was like knowing a fact, that there is a Great Wall of China, for instance. That is the only time on my life so far that I have experienced that "knowing". That was Thursday, June 28th, 1990, about 9:10 PM.

Hope that helps. Ask for clarity on things if you wish.

That doesn't seem like a "conversion experience" so much as a re-dedication to a religion and a set of beliefs in which you already believed. (Please correct me if I misunderstood.) I.e. there was no change in what you believed.

The point of this thread is to look at how/why people *change* their core beliefs - not just changing how much they apply them.

[saizai]

At that point I still held some small sense that some sort of soul and a divine being because I didn't want to give up the idea of an after-life, so I guess you could call me a nondenominational theist.

FWIW, belief in an afterlife (or meta-lifecycle) and/or soul does not require belief in a deity. Viz. most forms of Buddhism.

[Wavicle]

Baha'i --> Agnostic --> Atheist --> Baha'i --> Confused --> Deist/whatever the heck I am now.

I was raised in the Baha'i faith, but at about 7 or 8 years old started asking the dangerous "what if" questions. By high school I was a confirmed atheist. After high school I was looking for more meaning out of life, so I became a card-carrying Baha'i (no, seriously, you carry a card - at least in this country). Then I found the internet and finally got answers to all my Baha'i questions that just weren't asked (c'mon how do you reinterpret "you may take two wives" to mean "you can really only have one"). Then I sort of sat in limbo, and I'm still here. I believe in a higher power that can only be believed in, and you will never find empirical evidence of such. I go to an evangelical Christian church because the wife and kids go there. They even have a 'class' there to convince you that Christ is the one true way. The few weeks I went there they were reading Strobel's "The Case for Christ." After sifting through 4 or 5 chapters all I could think was "is this the best they can come up with?" So, no conversion to evangelicalism for me I guess.

[Roswell-Perseis]

From ages 0-7: I know that I believed in God, but I didn't really think about it.

Christmas 1992: I stopped believing in God because I almost died and didn't get to open my presents. I had an ideopathic purpura and almost bled to death (twice, I believe) from a spinal tap. I survived, but I was put off so I was skepitical. Then my mother had an affair; my parents divorced (eventually) and then my mother remarried. He was a jerk.

During my highschool years (1997-2001) I was so busy trying to deal with the tragedy that was my life that God was something I just didn't think about much. When I was 19 (2002) I wanted to have sex with a good fundy boy so I started going to church with Seventh Day Adventists. The sex was never worth it, but the loving, stable influence of his mother was (let's call her Mrs. R). In many ways my relationship with her was the mother-daughter relationship I had always craved and never had. When I got dumped, I went deeper into the religion thing to keep my relationship with Mrs. R, and I succeeded. Except that it wasn't really me and I could only pretend for so long. Oh, and the fact that I loved my ex-boyfriends mother was pretty weird.

In 2004 I had Bible study and realized how sexist and repressed the Bible was. I stopped going to church and Bible study and realized that Mrs. R would never be my mother, and that she didn't even know me so she didn't really love me.

I became a deist, but I was tormented. I went six months sleeping only two hours a day, eventually quit my job, and then my cat and Mrs. R died in the summer of 2005. I had asked God to prove to me that he cared, but it never happened. Then my atheist brother and I started talking about God and I started asking myself some hard questions.

In an ironic twist: I stopped believing in all things supernatural, and yet have stopped having sex, rarely drink and have resolved many of my bulimic/ anorexic behaviors. I have finally picked a major (Sociology) and have applied for transfer after five years at a community college. Honestly, I think I enabled myself believing that God would make me live the life that was right. Except that I still smoke, I am living a far more "moral" life now than ever.

Hahahaha.