copernicus

SSbyG, a very common family pattern among atheists is being raised Christian by a religious mother and an atheist father, who took little or no interest in religious education. My own father's parents had been Jehovah's Witnesses, and they thoroughly cured him of religious urges. His 4 children were all raised Epsicopaleans by our mother, but I am the only apostate.

Like others here, I never chose atheism. I simply reached a point where I could not sustain belief. I read a lot about religion in high school, because I was interested in reasons for religious faith. Finding no good reason, my faith naturally evaporated in my late teens. Since that time, I have come to think of myself more as a strong atheist than a weak atheist or agnostic.

Wendraich

Lifelong apatheist here, quite literally did not give a shit, until very recently. Religious instruction at school was more like a social sciences class and family is all non-religious.
About a year ago on another discussion board there was a Christian fundamentalist who made me angrier and more revolted than I ever thought possible with her views on homosexuality and abortion among other things (one of her family members was badly hurt in an accident , she asked for prayers "because he is going somewhere I will never see him again if he dies". She didn't say it outright but she was hinting he would be going to hell and her presuming she would be going to heaven kinda chilled me) and I felt I needed to educate myself a little bit.
After coming to these boards and a couple of others, following links and reading the threads I now know I am an atheist. Finding myself being a little militant but that will settle in time.

Simple really and I imagine not that uncommon.

TomboyMom

I won't detail my logic or thinking here as all are explored at length in various of these forums. I will just say that I came to atheism as a result of a lengthy journey, that I tried to discard all preconceived notions and apply the same logic, observation and deduction to the question that I do to other serious questions of life, and the best evidence led me to the conclusion that there does not appear to be any God in the sense of a divine creator. I did not start from the position of being a Christian, as I have never been one.

Looking at it objectively, Christianity is one of the less likely theories that I have heard, and makes less sense than most, although to be frank more sense than either Mormonism or Scientology. I consider it to be basically in the same category, just more popular and older.

Mickie

Although Dad was Atheist I only saw him every other weekend and went to Sunday school the other.

I'm just a "why" person. I always question. If you can't answer my why questions adequately, I'm probably going to take anything you say with a grain of salt. This also goes for the stupid things my Mom used to tell me when I was a child like: "Only prostitutes wear eyeshadow" and "you can't wear tampons until you are married".

However, when it comes right down to it, I can't choose to believe in your god anymore than I can choose to be gay. I tried to buy into it as a young adult and I went though the motions but I knew it was all bullshit.

Now, I'm open to hearing new evidence but spouting what I've heard over and over again didn't work the first million times I've heard it and, I dare, say, I won't consider it evidence the next million times I hear it.

Biff the unclean

I did not choose to become an Atheist. It was forced on me.
I chose to be a Roman Catholic. Roman Catholicism teaches you to honor the truth. I honored the truth of God by attempting to demonstrate the truth of God. I studied for years in my single-minded attempt to do so.
But the truth of God turns out to be that the story is pure bullshit. The arguments of great Christian scholars are no different from those of a Christian madman. It’s embarrassing, they even have to claim that the Bible means the opposite of what it says.
I did not want to be an Atheist; I’d always heard that Atheists were terrible immoral people. Turns out, that isn’t true either.
They told me that the truth would set me free. That’s one thing that did turn out to be true. What they didn’t tell me is that it sets you free of the myth of God.

Biff the unclean

Question SsbyG. Why did you post those URLs from a couple of people with psychological problems? One a crook the other (the anti-intellectual one with the black background) has a big problem with depression. More precisely why did you post them on what is primarily an Atheist web site? Is it an attempt to insult us into becoming Christians? These ridiculous concocted “testimonies�? are written by Christians and mean to be read only by other Christians.
You’ll find no crooks here, but you will find that a number of us are actual scientists. Being a scientist has not had the effect of turning a single one of us into an unfeeling monster. If you want to find lack of empathy on this board then note the blurbs promoting Calvinism.

MBS

I certainly didn't "choose" to become atheist (or agnostic if you like). I had doubts about Christianity, and whenever I tried to look for answers I was drawn farther away from my childhood belief. I asked my self questions. Could the biblical flood story be true? Did Genesis have to be literal for Christianity to be true? What was the real message of the Old Testament?

A straight reading of the Bible didn't give me the answers my church pastor emphasized. There were mixed messages at best. And then there were the instances where this bronze age god demomstrated his cruelty more clearly and shockingly than I had previously imagined. This ultimately made me question the moral superiority of my faith. The more I read, the more unlikely it all became in my mind. Eventually I realized that grasping for straws was futile. At this point I was aware that I no longer believed. There was nothing I could do to bring it back, though I kept this realization private.

Godless Wonder

So is this jordan the same as the jordan mentioned on this page?

If so, it would seem that there is a paucity of athiest -> Christian conversions while an embarassing frequency of Christian -> atheist conversion, especially considering that Christians out number atheists by so much. Simple statistics indicate that if each had equal converting power, then there should be more atheist -> Christian conversions than the other way around, but, the reverse appears to be true. (Not counting infant atheists "converted" (indoctrinated) to Christianity by their parents.)

The AntiChris

In my teens I slowly but surely realised that the indoctrination of my childhood was simply based on myth and superstition. I chose to become an atheist because not to do so would have meant relinquishing my intellectual self-respect.

Chris

DaninGraniteCity

I have a Christian background but that was mostly just on the surface. Underneath that, I was a skeptic. I did not understand that I was an atheist until I started to read Carl Sagan.