MarkT

You're welcome.

I'm Not Ugly

I became an atheist around age 11. My family was methodist before that, but i soon lost my faith because I began to see what a poor example of a christian my mom and dad were, despite their saying they were great examples.

Around the beginning of high school I began actually understanding the world for what it was, as my interest in sciences like astronomy and biology grew. Eventually I became a much more philosophical person, and now I feel I have acheived a full commitment to my beliefs.

Dark Jedi

[QUOTE]Originally posted by jojo-sa:
[QB]To all the atheist and free thinkers.

I would like to know two things please:

1. Why are you ahteist or free thinker?

Because I think for myself, and question what I am told. Questioning religion shows it for a spiderweb of unfounded assertations and dogma.

2. What faith were you as a kid? or what was Your religious ubringing and education in as a kid?

My family are Jehovah's Witnesses. I was raised that way, but from the time I questioned god at about 6, I did not buy in to it.
Creation was what did it. I asked Grandma, who was currently teaching that aspect, "Where did God come from?". She could not answer to my satisfaction. 'He has always been' struck me as a simplistic and implausable answer. Later, it struck me as unnecisarrily redundant. I learned what Occham's razor meant, and my doubt made sense.
I haven't looked back since.

Zenaphobe

I am an agnostic freethinker because I value the traits of honesty, inquiry, and a open mind, and find that organized religion seeks to suppress those things I value and do not reflect the world as it actually is.


I was raised by nominal Catholic parents and sent to Catholic school, then became an apathetic youth then I took a journey through several sects of the Christian faith, including Southern Baptist, Nazarene, Reformed, Church of God (Anderson Indiania), and was considering Eastern Orthodoxy when I began to lose my faith.

Zen

bluefugue

I am an atheist but I would never describe myself as a "free-thinker." My thoughts are far from free, alas, though I'm trying.

I am an atheist because I suspect the empirical evidence for gods is lousy, because I find the idea of "faith" to be problematic (if a quillion Christians have faith in Christ, why do a quillion Muslims have faith in something else?), and because I find the declamatory, my-way-or-the-highway tone of much theism to be depressing. Personality type factors into it as well. I'd much rather hang out with "militant atheist" Richard Dawkins than "militant theist" Jerry Falwell. Though I guess I wouldn't mind splitting the difference with a Bishop Spong or someone like that...

The more I examine philosophy, however, the more I realize that nothing can really be known for sure. I can't claim that my own nose exists with any more certainty than someone else can claim Jesus was risen. Atheism makes sense to me in the context of the nuts-and-bolts, "meat-and-potatoes" empirical attitude I use to navigate the world -- the one that gets me across streets without being run over. Whether it is valid in a deeper or more "ultimate" sense, is probably beyond my intellect and philosophical training to determine.

I was nominally a Christian, but in a rather weird way. My mother was raised a Catholic and (I believe) professed to be Christian all her life, but she also practiced Eastern astrology and believed in reincarnation, so she was hardly your run-of-the-mill Christian. My father is an atheist, as far as I can tell -- I've never asked him point blank, but we have had discussions about Hume etc., and he's obviously a very skeptical guy.

I did believe in God quite strongly as a child, and I filtered this through Christian rigamarole (i.e. I crossed myself quite a lot, said the Lord's Prayer from time to time, etc.). But I never read the Bible (still haven't; it's on my list though) and I don't think I actually gave much thought to the question of Jesus and the Resurrection (apart from a vague sense that he must have been a really swell guy). Skepticism crept in with adolescence. In 7th grade, I studied Greek Mythology and pointed out in class that it really made as much sense to believe in Zeus as in Adam and Eve. Later I was ribbed in the recess yard by a snotty girl who said, "I heard you believe in Zeus!"

One day, when I was around 13 or so, my sister asked me if I believed Jesus was the Son of God. I thought about it, and then simply replied, "no." I simply did not believe, and to this day I still do not believe, however many apologetics you cram down my throat. At the time, my sister said "Then you're not a Christian," and I recall that this realization was initially quite troubling to me. While this was all going on, my mother died of cancer, which might have had an emotional impact on my idea of a God, though I don't recall any really strong connection. I never lashed out against God for taking my mother away, nor said to myself in straightforward terms, "there can be no God in a world where my mother is allowed to die." In fact, attending my mother's funeral, I remember wishing that I was a Catholic so I could be a part of all that pomp and ritual -- so I could belong to something...

I attended a private Catholic school in the 10th grade. I have fond memories of the place, which had some wonderful, brilliant, witty, worldly Jesuit teachers. To this day I prefer Catholics to all other Christians; I'm not exactly sure why. By the time I was in this school I had ceased being Christian, though I still believed in God. You could probably have called me either a deist, or an agnostic theist, at that point. I took a theology class and learned lots about the Trinity, Original Sin, the Prime Mover, and all that mucky-muck, and I studied and passed my tests, but I quite matter-of-factly didn't believe a word of it.

It was around that time that I decided that Carl Sagan was one of the coolest people in the world. I watched "Cosmos" in an astronomy class my Senior Year in high school (I'd left the Catholic school by then) and really felt that Sagan was someone with whom I jibed. I'd always loved science, and science fiction, and I was less skeptical of scientific theories than I am now: I took evolution, big bang, etc., at face value, whereas now I am more guarded in my acceptance of these theories. But I remain a science enthusiast (in a casual, amateur way), and again, simply as a matter of personal preference, I would infinitely rather hang out with the futurist eggheads at <a href="http://www.edge.org" target="_blank">www.edge.org</a> than with your average cleric or theologian.

Around the age of 16, partly under the influence of my older brother, I shed my last vestiges of theism and became "officially" an agnostic. I remained that way for about a decade, until, reading "Atheism: The Case Against God" by George Smith, I decided to change my stance to "weak atheism" on semantic grounds. My attitude about a God or Gods hasn't changed much in the past 12 years; I just found "weak atheism" to be a slightly better label for it, though I still wake up some mornings feeling like an agnostic, or even a deist. I have sympathy for the tenets of strong atheism, but I am not prepared to adopt it -- even with regard to specific gods like YHWH -- because I don't think I have the chops to defend it.

I must confess that, since I have been participating in message-board religious debates, I have become less complacent in my non-theism than I once was. As a youngster, I just figured that anyone who believed in God was irrational, and that fundamentalists, especially, were completely out of their minds. Since then, I have conversed with many theists (including fundamentalists and Creationists) who are certainly not out of their minds, and in fact are very intelligent and articulate people. Still, as articulate as they are, they have not yet persuaded me that a God or Gods exist; far less have they made me accept the idea that a troublesome firebrand preacher rose from the dead in Roman-occupied Palestine 1,970-odd years ago.

So I guess that means I'll burn in hell, but at least I'll have Carl Sagan to keep me company. Hopefully we can have some good discussions about cosmology in between getting impaled with red-hot pitchforks by cackling demons.

cricket

1. Why are you ahteist or free thinker?

It's so apparent, to me. I can't conceive of a god; I never could, though I tried when I was younger. Religion looks, to me, like wishful thinking and mass hysteria and delusion and self-deception.

2. What faith were you as a kid? or what was Your religious ubringing and education in as a kid?

agnostic

idontbelieve

The Resistance

1. I want to know the truth, not some bullsh*t that people push because they're scared of reality.

2. I was Catholic until I was 17.

garraty

1. I was born this way.

2. Agnostic/Atheist

TerryTryon

1a. I am a naturalist, meaning I want no truck with claims that cannot be verified, i.e., untestable hypotheses. If you are making a claim that has no support and relies instead on the will to believe, please stay away from me. Atheism follows directly from this position.

1b. I am atheist because I am gay. Since my experience has been that queerness is innate and since the overwhelming majority of the world's religions have taught with claims to revelation, that it is a conscious evil decision, it is clear that claims to revelation have little validity. Multiply this viseral observation with other evils perpetuated under the hubris of revelation: the degradation of women, corporal punishment, caste, cicumcision, self mutilation, etc., it is clear that those making truth claims based on revelation have absolutely no reliability.

1c. I don't like to follow rules. My brain is big enough and strong enough for me to rely on. I don't need a sky-daddy to provide false surety.

2. I was raised in a Mormon household in a family that traced its Mormonism to the earliest days of that church. I spent way too much time, effort, and pain trying to preserve my identity in that heritage. Refer to 1b for the kick in the pants that made me see it as a lost cause.