So, why don't you believe in God?

I mean, what is your story.

I am not interested in the "there is no evidence of god"-argument, I am interested in how you came to view the world the way you do.
Where you born in a non-religious family or did you make a conscious choice later on?

My own story is that I grew up in a family where religion was not a very important thing.
Religion and politics where topics which where rarely discussed.

I think my father was a communist (he died before I had a chance to ask him) and my mother liberal (as in capitalist ).
Neither went to church, though my mother was (and still is) a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark.
The funny thing about the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, is that 80% of the population are members, but less tha 5% attend church regulary.
So, as is customary here I was baptized and thus became a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark myself.

The only person in my family I know to have been religious is my maternal grandmother, and I was actually confirmed when I was 13 because I didn't want to disappoint her.

When I grew older I descided that being a member of a church which teachings I disagreed with and which I never went to was silly, and that I should probably leave.
But to do so would mean that I would have to get hold of and fill in a form and hand it in, that is, I had to actively do something.
I just kept putting it off.

It wasn't untill 3 years ago when I was 35 years old that I finally filled in the stupid form and left the church.
The event that triggered it was a silly priest who in an argument claimed that since 80% of the danish people whe members of "his" church his views where backed by the majority of the danish population. I really, REALLY, disagreed with him and became so angry that he would take advantage of my laziness in this way.
Untill then I had always told myself that my membership did no harm and that the little money I payed in church taxes was probably used for a good cause.
So the very next day I dragged myself to the computer, printed out the form, filled it in and mailed it (yes it really was that simple).
I am now officially between religions

I've never believed in any kind of deity.

I was brought up in what I'd call a passive agnostic family though I did go to church (Methodist) via the Scouts for a number of years but none of it ever clicked with me. Other religious beliefs I've learned of over the years have also not clicked.

I personally don't consider such beliefs to be an active choice. On the face on the evidence you're presented with, your brain will process it one way or another. I couldn't choose to believe in a given god even if I wanted to.

I was brought up in a religious environment. Both my parents were devout Baptists and I was raised as a baptized, bible-believing, "born again" Christian. My parents were both religious people, but they always nurtured my love of learning and encouraged me to ask questions. They believed in the truth of their religion and also taught me to value truth. As I got older and learned more about the world, my ideas concerning God changed to fit the new information I was gaining. Eventually I realized that my view of God was much more abstract than other people and that I didn't really believe in the God that my religion promoted. I came to the conclusion that if anything like a God exists, then it probably is indifferent to humanity and doesn't care much about my personal life. I didn't see much point in worshipping my abstract philosophical God. I've concluded that I'm an agnostic in the philosophical sense, but I'm an atheist in practice.

lunakilo said:

I mean, what is your story.

I am not interested in the "there is no evidence of god"-argument, I am interested in how you came to view the world the way you do.
Where you born in a non-religious family or did you make a conscious choice later on?

Click to expand...

I can't remember ever believing in God. I wouldn't say I was born in an actively non-religious family, but my parents never pressured me to believe in anything in particular, and they never pressured me to reject any belief either. My Mom was raised Baptist. She attended church occasionally and sometimes I'd go with her, but it was almost always at my suggestion. I didn't find out that my father was an atheist until after he died. Any religious influence in my life growing up mainly came from my grandmother.

Also, looking back, I think that one thing that really influenced my views of religion (even though I didn't realize it at the time) was that when I was 12 or so, I got really into Greek mythology. When I was exposed more to religion later on, I would see similarities between it and other mythic systems.

Something else that influenced me, I think: I've mentioned that when I was in high school, the "miracle house" started down the street from me: the people two doors down claimed to have a picture of the Virgin Mary that would sweat, and that would supposedly speak to the youngest daughter. People came from all over to see it. It was bizarre to buses (full-blown tour buses!) stop in front of the house so that wheelchair-bound people could be carried down and into the house to be "healed", and then watch these huge buses try to navigate the narrow path between the two lines of parked cars that stretched down the street.

So... while this didn't start until I was 14 or so, with most of my formative years behind me, it probably didn't help my perception of religion that these people - who I generally viewed as credulous loons (in the case of the "faithful" who visited) or dishonest hucksters (in the case of the parents at the house, who I'm still sure kept the picture in the freezer when people weren't over to get the condensation "sweat") made up the vast majority of my exposure to religion in my teenage years.

I was raised in a non-religious household. In fact I'd go as far as to say I was raised in Richard Dawkins' ideal household, God wasn't ever mentioned, not because we were anti-religious, God and religion was just something other people did.

When I hit my teenage years, and later at university, I felt there must be something "more to life" so I explored religion and tried to believe in God. Emphasis on tried, as I failed, I simply couldn't make myself believe in something I didn't feel to be true.

Then I read stuff by Stephen Batchelor, the Buddhist anti-Christ, and got into Buddhism because of him. Then I explored further and met real-life Buddhists from a couple of different traditions (Zen and Tibetan) and rapidly became disenchanted with the superstitions and God-replacements I saw in Buddhism too.

Now I think I've found the meaning I was looking for in philosophy, specifically in the practical philosophy of ethics, though I still believe much of the underlying Buddhist philosophy is true. No God though, just as in my childhood He simply has no place, there is no hole to fill.

lunakilo said:

I mean, what is your story.

I am not interested in the "there is no evidence of god"-argument, I am interested in how you came to view the world the way you do.
Where you born in a non-religious family or did you make a conscious choice later on?

Click to expand...

Mainly, I stopped believing in God when I was 6 when I found out Santa and the Easter Bunny were a lie to make us behave so I wondered if God was too...

Then, after a while, I went on a spiritual confusion, I wanted a religion of some kind, and it lasted from 12 until almost 14, I went through so many belief systems.

Now I'm 15 and I watched Zeitgeist, the Sun thing got me thinking, so I looked into religions more and noticed how closely related to nature they were, noticing how all gods originated either from other religious deities or from nature or from natural events.

I read a book by Bertrand Russell called Why I am not a Christian. It completely spun my thinking around.

I was raised as sort of a liberal Catholic. My father is kind of apathetic Catholic, and my mother practices a sort of New Age religion. I was raised believing in god, and I went to weekly Catholic schooling, and attended church at least every other week, but religion wasn't a huge factor otherwise. I prayed fairly often.

When I was in my early teens I started to question things such as cultural norms, dietary habits, and religion. I decided to try to get lot closer to god, and so I prayed more and learned a lot about religions by reading their texts and studying them online, and the result was that I became an atheist.

Seeing atheist arguments vs. theist arguments was a big factor. Mainly the lack of evidence, etc. In addition, contemplating the violence and callousness of nature pushed me away from the concept of a benevolent personal god. Another big thing was that when I read the Bible, as in really read it rather than just skimmed the few parts I liked as I did before, I determined that the god in there was absolutely not the god I believed in. My vaguely monotheistic loving god certainly wasn't the god of Abraham or anything related, but realized that with my religious upbringing, that was supposedly the source. The god I believed in was based on that god at some point, but changed and altered through a variety of generations to fit personal morality and changing times. So I realized that my god was basically just cherry-picking from religious concepts, and was basically a reflection of myself and my parents rather than the opposite. Plus, during this transition I was attempting to still be a theist and praying about it, but found it completely unhelpful.

So basically in terms of the rational view and the more personal and emotional view, the concept of a deity lost all relevance to me. I found other philosophies to be far more helpful and more in line with reality.

lunakilo said:

I mean, what is your story.

I am not interested in the "there is no evidence of god"-argument, I am interested in how you came to view the world the way you do.
Where you born in a non-religious family or did you make a conscious choice later on?

Click to expand...

For me, making the decision to discard any notion of God fell into place later on of which my decision was borne out of experience coupled with some reflection over how things actually transpire in life as opposed to how I had perceived it. I just decided after a long period ascribing to theism that in light of how things are in actuality, there just simply cannot be no God until something (if ever) comes along indicating the contrary in an absolute fashion of which I cannot possibly dispute. Till such a time occurring, I reflect back that I took no notion of any god when life first started for me, and consequently it now makes perfect sense to continue on with that.

I was never raised in a religious environment. If you were to ask my mother what religion she was I think the answer would be Church of England but then if you asked her what the meant she wouldn't be able to answer you. My first exposure to religious teachings of any description was in primary school when I was subjected to Religious Instruction classes. Because I carried no preconceived ideas about religion the whole thing struck me as slightly silly and redundant. From then on I figured if there are so many people who profess to believe it maybe there is something there that I missed so I looked further into it and what I discovered reinforced my original opinion formed at the age of about 8 that the whole thing was a big fat crock of excrement.

Friend lunakilo,

So, why don't you believe in God?

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Cause beliefs are of the mind and is only a concept, not reality.

Love & rgds

God is a concept. Today I might be atheist, tomorrow agnostic the next theist or all at the same time depending on the present moment.

no-body said:

God is a concept. Today I might be atheist, tomorrow agnostic the next theist or all at the same time depending on the present moment.

Click to expand...

That's a good observation. It can be significant in how we mentally travel like that. I don't have reason to believe in God anymore, but I do still hold conversations with the universe, and myself.

I don't believe anything I am told without evidence. I don't know how early that trait developed, but I don't recall ever believing in "God" - or Santa, or the Tooth Fairy, or unicorns, or any other similar non-evidenced entity - despite regularly attending Christian church (and singing in the choir) for my entire childhood and early adolescence. When I left home I began to move beyond simple lack of belief in the Christian deity I was raised with and speculate that the social impact of patriarchal monotheism is largely negative, especially for women. At that point I flirted with goddess-worship for a little while until I discovered I simply don't have a capacity for theism at all, whatever the form. Now I can appreciate various deities as psychological archetypes that personify various qualities we aspire to (or hope to avoid), and that's as far as it goes.

Alceste said:

I don't believe anything I am told without evidence. I don't know how early that trait developed, but I don't recall ever believing in "God" - or Santa, or the Tooth Fairy, or unicorns, or any other similar non-evidenced entity - despite regularly attending Christian church (and singing in the choir) for my entire childhood and early adolescence. When I left home I began to move beyond simple lack of belief in the Christian deity I was raised with and speculate that the social impact of patriarchal monotheism is largely negative, especially for women. At that point I flirted with goddess-worship for a little while until I discovered I simply don't have a capacity for theism at all, whatever the form. Now I can appreciate various deities as psychological archetypes that personify various qualities we aspire to (or hope to avoid), and that's as far as it goes.

Click to expand...

All this. Except for the part about goddess worship. Unless by goddess worship, you mean something sexual. In that case, all of it.

Actually there is some evidence for the existance of a God in things like miraculus events and prayers that have been answered. The question is can these things be explained away or are they evidence of the divine.

I will give you an example. John Newton ships captain and slave trader was caught in a terrible storm, so bad he was certain he would die and in desperation fell to his knees and cried out to God to save him. To his amazement the storm soon stopped. So impressed was he that he wrote a hymn in God's honour called Amazing Grace.

There is also a case of a man in a coma on a life support machine suffering from septicemia and kidney failure, whose parents had been asked if the life support machine could be switched off as there was virtually no chance he would ever recover. However some christians who had met him earlier came to pray for him each day, he later made a full recovery and was so impressed he became a christian and a preacher. His name is Gram Seed from Middlesborough who was a former criminal and alcoholic.

I can understand why many people are athiests though as such events are extremley rare and happen radomly and the majority of such cases can be rationally explained but there are still many thousands of such events that happen around the world and I don't think they can all be easily explained away.

Hmm...
I think people are forgetting to read the OP.

I asked what your STORY was.
I didn't ask for proof of Gods existence or the lack of same.

I am interested in what events in your life that has made you not believe in god.

And thanks to all the people who have told their story.

My parents are religious, my mom especially, but they never forced us to believe in what they do. They just assumed we would be religious too. It was not a religious atmosphere at my house. But once, during a recital, I started asking questions about god, and my dad answered a few and then got frustrated and told me " It is that way because it is that way!".
I remember thinking that was not a very good reason to believe in something. So long story short, I don't believe in gods because no one has shown me why I should.

Imagine a river separating two pieces of land.
One side of the river is inhabited by people, the other side is empty.
The people's side suffers from Earthquakes and every day someone dies from being hit by a brick.
The empty side doesn't suffer from earthquakes.
So someone suggests to build a bridge which has never been attempted before,
so that people don't have to die!
So they build a bridge after much studying and cross over to live forever without the problem of daily deaths.

Silver