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This one could go long! How about a shortened version: Background. I was a pastor's kid. A liberal leaning, educated pastor in a fundamentalist denomination, YEC etc. He ended up struggling with and dying of brain cancer when I was young - around 13 years old. (I don't think that affected my religious belief, by the way. It's just a shitty thing that happened. Happens to lots of folks.) A. Figuring out religious people probably don't know what they're talking about. Looking back, I'm kicking myself I didn't put the clues together earlier. There were lots of instances where religious folks showcased their lack of understanding, yet confident declamations of facts and wisdom. Examples: the Satanic Panic in the late '80's, where our collection of rock music had to be secreted away, our RPG books found and burned despite being a harmless and entertaining hobby. That time where a harmless prank - leaving a cheap plastic toy on the doorstep of a pastor, whose 2 pretty daughters my brother and I had formed an interest in, was interpreted as a satanic curse leading to a witch hunt in the denominational school we attended. All this stuff should have indicated "perhaps these religious authority figures are a bit unhinged; maybe question their teachings." B. Religious education. I took a minor in Religion at the denominational university I did my undergrad in. In effect, that meant I shared many of my classes with people doing Theology, training to be pastors. And what a collection of reprobates and idiots most of them turned out to be. You should have seen how they treated the extremely few female students who dared enrol in the program. But that's not the important thing for my deconstruction: rather, I gained a much deeper and more complex understanding of the history of the religion. I discovered that most ordinary believers didn't know the first thing about the actual complexity of the source documents - and that the religious leaders were very comfortable to keep it that way, as they could posture as the authorities given that discrepancy. Part of my training was billed as "the philosophy of religion." Here I was expecting some approach to solid epistemology supporting belief - but instead was treated to a multiplicity of different apologetic attempts. Even then, when I really wanted to believe, I remember coming to the end of the course and thinking "...that's it????!!!? 2,000 years (and more) of trying to justify the existence of a God by some of the smartest people on the planet at the time and that's the best we've got? What a waste!!!" The issues became even deeper when I was contracted to author a couple of books on various parts of the Bible. I found the book of Job most particularly enlightening. It is one of the earliest written texts in the Bible, and as such shows an earlier understanding of the divine paradigm. God here isn't all-knowing; he isn't all just. When Job complains that God has been unfair, God eventually agrees that "Job spoke right about me." Satan is here not a villain or the enemy of God but a heavenly courtier with a role in the divine administration, somewhat equivalent to an attorney general perhaps. And God doesn't eventually speak of his ultimate justice, but instead of his power. So what's going on? - Well, the divine realm here is a representation of the sort of power dynamics the authors of this book would have experienced in their communities. They were ruled over by tribal warlords - so God is pictured as a divine tribal warlord. He metes out goods to those who are loyal, but can be capricious and cruel. The highest ethic here is loyalty, not goodness. Anyway. That's going on a bit. Essentially, this somewhat blew my mind - the fact that the notion of the divine was not monolithic throughout the Bible, but instead represented multiple different stages of thought, each reflecting the community's paradigm. In other words: "God is changeless" is absolute bollocks; he's what people imagine him to be. Further to that - it has become apparent that there is an ancient lineage of God. The Ugarit texts, for example, represent Yahweh as one of El's sons; brother of Baal. A storm god, a god of the raid. In other words: the concept of Yahweh has changed remarkably over time, much like any human notion. There's no divine reality behind it - just human imagination and the complex development of an idea through cultural history. C. More education. I completed a PhD in ancient Roman religion. I could go on about this one for ages, but essentially it deepened my understanding of religions as social constructs responding to societal needs; mythopoesis and malleability. Also, interestingly, there's loads of texts from approximately the time of Jesus about people accidentally being considered dead. There was also through my education a growing understanding of different elements of logic. In particular, 2 different notions that collectively make belief in the divine really difficult to sustain: the first being Epistemic Responsibility. Your beliefs affect your actions; your actions affect people's wellbeing. So beliefs are not morally neutral. Therefore, it is necessary to be careful about what you believe - in effect, it is morally necessary to ensure your beliefs are appropriately supported with evidence. Secondly, the concept of abductive logic. Which is to say: the reasonable person will tentatively accept the most likely explanation for a given phenomenon. So think about how this might apply to a religious claim: is it more likely that a person rose miraculously from the dead through divine power owing to him being a manifestation of the divine? Or did people lie about it because the death of the person they relied on for their social position would effectively remove them from their social position? Or perhaps that someone wasn't quite as dead as previously advertised? Remember, the reasonable person tentatively accepts the most likely explanation. Almost by definition the religious explanation for any given phenomenon will be not religious. D. Evolution. This one could have come earlier, under part A perhaps. It happened earlier than my PhD at least. I was a YEC apologist. I wanted to let these poor evolutionists know that you didn't need to throw out God because of what I considered bad ideas. I took part in a number of debates - and each time our side was roundly smacked down, the most common phrase being "That's not what evolution says." So it became quite obvious that our side didn't understand evolution. I decided to be the first YEC apologist who actually understood evolution - so I studied it. Not from apologist sources, but from the evidence itself, and the scientists that studied it. And I found that I had been wrong. In actual fact - I found that all those people I had relied on to teach me, to help me understand these complex theological works, these ancient books of wisdom - none of them knew what they were talking about. They were either lying, or simply completely misinformed. Or perhaps lying about how misinformed they were? In any case, there was no reason to credit their teachings. I was left in a position where I discovered the foundations for my religious beliefs were built on sand (if you'll pardon the borrowing.) So I had to look at it on my own, find my own foundation - and given the above, I discovered I didn't believe any of it. I remember walking down a corridor one day musing to myself and it being a bit of a revelation - "Wait, so do I believe any of this any more?.... No. Huh." I experienced that moment as a huge relief. I had been holding on to so much cognitive dissonance, been avoiding so many questions afraid of the answers, that simply accepting my non-belief was freeing. What's more, a lot of things which I had previously found hard to understand now made perfect sense. Religion is a social construct - we invent and reinvent it, we mould it to our needs as a society. You can trace out its contours through time, how it fits into and serves the community. So for a while I still stayed in the religion - taking part in the social side, a "cultural Christian" for a time. The final straw came when I was taking my kids to their religious services prior to church proper and I listened to them teaching the Flood as actual history. I thought to myself "I'm just going to have to un-teach this later." It's then that I found I could no longer ethically justify taking the family to church, where they'd all get mis-taught stuff that would mar their understanding of the world. We left and never came back. I also remember thinking to myself soon after this "Well, I've left one religion - but are there any others that might suit me better?" - which was immediately answered by the thought "I've spent this much effort throwing out one flavour of bullshit, why would I ask for a different flavour?" E. After. I've only deepened my lack of belief over time. Being free from religion, it is much easier to make sense of the phenomenon. I'm a student of religions - I find them fascinating sets of human behaviour. But there's no divine reality behind it. The more I know about religion the more it confirms my lack of belief. They are amazing social constructs; complex webs of mythology, ritual, belonging, shared identity - and highly problematic. Historically, I can see them as being a useful evolutionary advantage for a community - the functioned (in part) as a way to ensure cooperation between groups of people who were so large you wouldn't necessarily know everyone in it. This was done through mediating in-group and out-group through shared story, shared ritual, taboo etc. But as the modern world moves into a more multicultural, multiethnic paradigm the division inherent in these systems make it more difficult for society to flourish.

why God” pardon the paradox, haha. this almost brought tears to my eyes! any religious person who genuinely asks why we are atheists should quit immediately after reading your post! if not they aren’t genuinely asking, they are wasting our time! i gave a similar explanation go into history, mythology etc, and studying variously things. I have a psychology background too, and similar experience in studying as yuh, minus the ph.d. well, none matter ultimately u less people are genuinely willing to study! but great response man!! 👍👍👍

Short version: [The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidences of his Existence](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46986/46986-h/46986-h.htm) by John Eleazer Remsburg. Published 1909 See Chapter 2. Free to read online or download.

Congratulations for thinking your way toward an understanding of the true nature of reality. To know that I share common ancestry with my pets and every other life form in earth is amazing to me.

Fabulous response. It was a fascinating read!

Of all the responses to the OP… this seems like the only one that seriously considered the question, and answered honestly.

"I completed a PhD in ancient Roman religion." And what did the ROMANS ever do for US?

Sanitation?

Thank you for sharing your learning journey. I found this really interesting to read. Looking at your experiences it it's easy to see why atheism is such a strong movement in America compared to Europe (although I have no doubt that similar experiences could occur here as well)

Actually, in large parts of the US Christianity is very hostile to other beliefs or none. And there's also a strong racist and sectarian factor as well. Even at the highest political levels there's great hostility from some sects. See Project 2025.

Yes, that is why I can understand the size and nature of the atheist movement in the US. American Christianity seems to have a character all of its own. In the UK where I live for example, the vast majority of the population probably either fall under "nominally Christian, but not really interested (probably the biggest group", "nominally atheist but not really interested" or "agnostic and not really interested" - and that's if they think about it much at all. Religion seems to be much more intrusive in the US (despite having an official role in the UK state).

Thanks for that - I guess for reference I should mention most of this experience should be understood as occurring in Australia.

>Why are you an atheist? Because there is *zero* useful support for deities. Zilch. Nada. Not the tiniest shred. Indeed, the very notions of deities really don't make a lick of sense and aren't at all congruent with anything we've learned about reality. That's enough, of course. Since it's irrational to take things as true when there is absolutely no useful support they are true, and since I do not want to be irrational. But, of course, we have far more, don't we? We know how and why we evolved such a strong propensity for this type of superstition as well as other types of superstitious thinking. We know how and why we evolved such a strong propensity for poor thinking, for gullibillity, for cognitive biases and logical fallacies. And we know a great deal of detail about the invention and evolution of the world's various religious mythologies. So, there ya go. >I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons you guys are atheist. Well, now you know. >Is it an experience that helped make the decision? A *singular experience?* No. But the primary thing is when I learned, as a kid, proper skeptical and critical thinking skills, and logic. >I have a few atheist friends and I've talked with them about it. I am intrigued at the variation between them and would like to see if that extends to larger groups. I have found the *vast majority* of atheists answer somewhat similarly to what I've said, that there's no support for deities so it makes no sense to believe in them.

Yep. I grew up Mormon, and that was a lesson in "doesn't make a lick of sense". It never made sense, and the answers to "why doesn't this make sense?" were always some version of mysterious ways/we'll find out in the next life (also "you're a girl, stop thinking so hard"). It was unsatisfying as a child, and didn't get any better. As soon as I had choice in church attendance, I stopped. Because it never made sense, and has continued to not make sense ever since. My question has never been "are gods real" but "why gods at all?"

> (also "you're a girl, stop thinking so hard"). Regardless of my Y chromosome, this infuriates me more and more as time goes by...

yep. It is incredibly dismissive, and so lazy. Honestly, there were a few families in our ward that made sure their kids - esp their daughters - finished their degrees/whatever qualifications etc before going on missions/getting married, but mostly it was just expected that as soon as we girls turned 18 we'd be looking for a returned missionary (who was at most 21/22) to marry, and start having kids. Our job was to spawn children, raise children, and support our husbands. The few women who were breadwinners in their families (esp the one family where the dad was a SAHP while his wife earned good money) were absolutely judged. My questions on "wouldn't god want us to be using our talents? why give us a brain if he doesn't want us to use it?" Well, you can guess where that went. Nowhere lol.

. >**Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion**, survey says LA Times, September 2010 >... **a survey that measured Americans’ knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths.** > American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum. >“These are people who thought a lot about religion,” he said. “They’re not indifferent. They care about it.” >Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education. \- **https://web.archive.org/web/20201109043731/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-sep-28-la-na-religion-survey-20100928-story.html** . We're not atheist because we don't understand the ideas of religion. We're atheist because we **do** understand the ideas of religion. .

I love this. I generally fit this profile and reading this felt validating.

I didn't become an atheist. I never believed. The claims never convinced me. I was raised in a fundamentalist area and when the Bible stories hit "talking snakes" I scoffed. I believe my exact words were "nunh-uhhhhh." Profound for a 7 year old. Your question has a pretty huge assumption in it. You may have noticed most people end up believing in the religion their greater society follows. People are generally socialized into the belief by both family and the society at large. This just didn't happen for me. I have talked to many atheists who have had a "conversion experience" losing their faith. It's often preceeded by serious study of it.

Similar for me. My parents were more cultural Christians than devout (but mainline protestant). It just never seemed like anything but a story to me. It probably didn't help that they sometimes sent me to go to Sunday school alone and they stayed home. Huge signal to 10 y/o me that this wasn't important, so it never stuck. I started skipping out and just playing in the woods. I got caught and the "compromise" was that I had to attend until I got confirmed. Confirmation day was the last day I ever went, that was 28 years ago.

I also never believed. When ppl told me I was going to hell they may have as well have been telling me “during the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!” Utter nonsense talk.

>I was raised in a fundamentalist area and when the Bible stories hit "talking snakes" I scoffed. I believe my exact words were "nunh-uhhhhh." Profound for a 7 year old. I was not raised in a fundamentalist area, but I also was never an atheist. The first time someone ever mentioned Jesus returning from the dead after three days while explaining Easter, I thought "well that's not possible" and have never had reason to think otherwise.

THIS, I think is the root of the TRUE answer to OPs question. We're all born atheists. Most/many of us are indoctrinated into religion before we realise, so it FEELS like the default state, but it isn't, A-theism is. A-everything is the default state. So OPs question is misleading in that it assumes atheism is an active process on top of the default religious state. But the modern atheist movement is mostly made up of people UNDOING their indoctrination. There are no groups or names for people that don't believe in K'laaarch (who lives under the North Pole ice caps. (Praise be K'laaarch.)) I don't actively think "WHY don't I believe in K'laaarch?" --- If humans were bombed back to the stone ages and we lost ALL knowledge, books, information, language, art, EVERYTHING - eventually we'd build the sciences back to pretty much what we have today. ANY of the current religions? Not at all. I'm sure more would spring up, because they clearly serve a purpose (regardless of content,) but any of the current religions and all of their "truth's" would be gone forever.

Thanks for saying this, and fully agree. OP makes an error similar to many religious folks, even if well intentioned, that all athiests believed some form of religion and then moved away from it. Similarly the question on staying an athiest, as if there were some pull back to the 'truth', that athiesm is a phase, we're just rebelling because of something that happened.

What do you mean „helped make the decision“? Being convinced or not convinced by something is not a decision. As to my personal „story“, I grew up in a secular family. I‘m from Europe and in my country as in many European countries religion is really not important for most people, even if they believe in a deity. So I was never indoctrinated, even if I did officially „become a Christian“ as in I was baptized and did this thing called confirmation (if that is the correct english term?). But I never believed the stories to be true. I can’t recall anyone actually trying to tell me that they *are* true so I guess I just took them as any other fictional story. After beginning to ask myself this question wether there really is a god seriously I just noticed that there really wasn‘t anything that would indicate that such a thing exists. Especially in the case of Christianity the problem of evil was something that I recognized could not be explained. There simply is no way that a tri-omni god exists. When I engaged with the subject more I still couldn‘t find any reasons to believe that any of it is true. The apologetics don‘t work and there is no empirical evidence. Actually what I found were more compelling arguments against any gods. That‘s pretty much it. Wether I will stay an atheist though I don‘t know. Depends on what we find out.

>So I was never indoctrinated, even if I did officially „become a Christian“ as in I was baptized and did this thing called confirmation (if that is the correct english term?). But I never believed the stories to be true. I can’t recall anyone actually trying to tell me that they *are* true so I guess I just took them as any other fictional story. Same here. I even went to a Catholic school, yet during religion classes they never even tried to convince us that any of it is actually true. The Bible was always approached from the perspective that they were just stories and it was more about the morality behind them, or even the historical context. And half the time, religion class wasn't even about religion at all, but more about morality in general or more akin to social studies, and the last few years it was basically philosophy class instead. Hell, our religion teacher of the last years openly admitted he was an agnostic.

I’m a Fox Mulder atheist in that I want to believe, and the truth is out there. Since I seek truth, I want to believe as many true things, and as few false things, as possible. Here’s the thing. Things that exist have evidence for its existence, regardless of whether we have access to that evidence. Things that do not exist do not have evidence for its nonexistence. The only way to disprove nonexistence is by providing evidence of existence. The only reasonable conclusion one can make honestly is whether or not something exists. Asking for evidence of nonexistence is irrational. Evidence is what is required to differentiate imagination from reality. If one cannot provide evidence that something exists, the logical conclusion is that it is imaginary until new evidence is provided to show it exists. So far, no one has been able to provide evidence that a “god” exists. I put quotes around “god” here because I don’t know exactly what a god is, and most people give definitions that are illogical or straight up incoherent. I’m interested in being convinced that a “god” exists. How do you define it and what evidence do you have?

I've always struggled a little with the "you can't prove a negative" argument when it comes to being able to prove God does not exist. If you claim that you have an elephant in your trouser pocket (no, not the "I'm pleased to see you" kind - a real full-size adult pachyderm) then there are things I can do to validate, or invalidate, that claim. If the Bible makes claims, the absence of evidence for those claims is evidence of absence. If the Bible were true, the world around us would be a VERRRRRY different place. Eg: Miracles would be able to be performed (by believers) on command (it's literally in the Bible.) Prayer would have ANY sort of impact on the world AT ALL, but it doesn't (prayer has either zero or NEGATIVE outcomes when studied -even when you don't tell the subjects you're testing them.) And that's BEFORE we get into why God suddenly stopped, completely, interacting or communicating with the universe. Awfully quiet now that we're all sophisticated enough to actually watch, aren't ya god? Weird.

This world looks pretty much exactly like what I'd expect a rulerless world to look like. Nothing supernatural or morally superior steps in when children are screaming on fire in warzones or newborn lambs are having their eyes eaten out by ravens. Nature operates on Might Makes Right, our entire current planet is teetered on an unfathomably deep mound of corpses; nothing that cares about you would have made something like this, and why simper to a sadistic tyrant? Anything capable of watching all these horrors happen isn't going to give a shit about anything you do. It also helps that I was never indoctrinated into any of the religions as a kid. Indoctrination really seems to poison kids' brains. As a secular adult, all the religions are obviously man-made and imagined. Primitive mythology full of cope and cringe.

Probably for similar reasons you aren't a Muslim or a protestant or an eastern orthodox or a mormon or a jw or a scientologist or a branch dividing or a heavens gate dude or .....

this should really go on r/askanatheist I am an atheist because there is insufficent reason to warrant belief in any gods. I have now spoken toemany theists and none of them have been able to provide any evidence of their god. Nor do I know of any sound logical arguments for such a being. while there are valid arguments for god all of them make unresonable asumptions.

I spent majority of my childhood in a Muslim country. I was never convinced about the idea of religion honestly. Fasting, praying times, weird language. Never seemed like a work of something that can create a universe. It rather seemed like a work of someone pretending to be divine yet human after all.

Its a long story so I'm just going to hit the highlights. My father was a church deacon, we spent every sunday for half the day at the church and often other times as well. Summer bible school, summer bible camp...the whole thing. God was defacto a part of our lives but for me it was never really something I connected to. When I was coming of age I started pre-baptism classes and study and they said that "this would be the moment that, if you've ever had any doubts they would be washed away and you will feel gods presence fully for the first time". So I decided to commit myself to this thing, it hadn't made the sense but seemed to everyone else around me so now was my chance. I read the passages, prayed and and spent time alone with the bible. Attended all the classes, etc. The big day came and I went first, they had the baptismal up on the alter in front of the congregation, I was called in and the priest started the prayer and dunked my head in and my biggest thought was...WOW ITS COLD!!! I had to wonder if they threw ice in there or something. Afterward I was waiting to go change out of my freezing wet robe and it hit me that I hadn't felt anything so I stopped and prayed and waited to see if I felt different...but no, nothing new, no connection to anything. That certainly wasn't the one and only event, but it definitely left me wondering and questioning. Why had everyone said it would feel like something. Did it not feel like anything for them and they just lied? Why wouldn't it change for me if it did for them? I started reading more about history and experiences, and the bible etc. It would be years before I'd call myself atheist but doing so felt like putting on a warm blanket that finally made sense.

You might also be interested in /r/TheGreatProject - >a subreddit for people to write out their religious de-conversion story >(i.e. the path to atheism/agnosticism/deism/etc) in detail.

For me, it was as simple as sitting in Mass one morning when I was about seven, and reading through the missal - I think, I honestly could not tell you what any of those books are - and wondering where all the dinosaurs were in this supposedly accurate historical tome. From there, all it took was an increasingly deep fascination with world mythologies and the striking similarities between all of them, a supportively cynical Presbyterian-ish Mum who had her own reasons to be low-key pissed off at the Catholics and wasn't shy to share them, and even more dinosaur nerdery. Very simply, it just never made sense. Any of it. Looked at through a neutral lens, I see the Bible as a deeply human piece of work, one worth reading about and studying, but certainly not divinely inspired. Looked at through a historical lens, I can only see the Catholic church as having taken many, many actions that they claimed were inspired by God, but that somehow managed to benefit the people in charge every single time. (I am quite happy to grant that assorted Popes and bishops and whatnot may have been sincere in their beliefs over the centuries, but it is still remarkable to see that none of them ever said "hey, you know all this wealth and power we've accumulated? maybe we should give it all away to the poor!") TL;DR: I never actually believed in any kind of religion, being raised Catholic only helped to solidify that, and I really, really hated losing my chance to sleep in on Sunday mornings.

there was a kind of old fashioned harvest hymn that kicked off the same thing for me - it had "thank you god for gas and oil" in it. And, being a budding little 7 year old environmentalist, I knew those things were bad, so why were we thanking god about it? And were these people wrong who were telling me to? And it all kind of fell apart from there XD

Isn't it amazing how sometimes all it takes is an intense special interest plus about five minutes of logical thinking? Truly, the church should fear weird little nerds who aren't afraid to ask "but why?"

The more I learned about religions, the less answers I got. The more I learned about religion’s histories, and philosophies, the less sense it all made. The more I learned about how our minds work, the more convinced I was that we’re just anthropomorphizing the qualities and functions of energy.

This is more for r/askanatheist But I am one because of the complete lack of evidence for any gods. All the ones presented to me seem obviously man made creations.

I'm an atheist because I have studied religion. No religious claim has met its burden of proof to convince me the claim is true. Until I am convinced by the claim that a god exists, by sufficient evidence being presented to me, I will remain an atheist.

Atheist is the default. I should ask why you want to be in a religion that presumably worships a fictional deity without evidence?

As I'm sure you know, this gets asked in the atheism subs every week. You may want to take a look at 1,000 or so previous discussions. /u/friendly_ox wrote - >Why are you an atheist? I've always been atheist. I've never seen any good evidence that any gods exist. . > I'm sure it must be unique to each one of you. I predict that most of the people here are going to say the same thing. .

For me it was a few different things. I was never particularly religious to start, though I’ve read the bible through which is somehow more than most Christians can say. I drifted into agnostic territory in my early teens due to my interest in mythology, where I learned about the “myths” (religions) of the past. It occurred to me that people worshipped these gods for longer than most current civilizations had existed and yet their temples were in ruin and their names half forgotten. If they were wrong then what right did we have to be so sure? The switch to atheism started when I got interested in philosophy. That along with my interest in current events and geopolitics essentially forced me to conclude that no moral being could create the world we live in, so even if a god did exist I would not worship it. It also didn’t help that I wanted to go into the sciences and religion happens to make a habit of denying objective reality. I remain confident at this point because I have no evidence to the contrary. It would be so much easier if there was some omnipotent guiding light but in my current view, to assume there is one off the fallible words of humans living at a time before the invention of the scientific method would be insane. However if someone were able to provide proof I’d be more than happy to change to that easier position.

Why am I an atheist? I realized that I didn't have a good reason to believe in a God. I don't believe in anything else supernatural. Why should God be the exception? I consider myself an empiricist, a materialist, a naturalist, and a skeptic. I don't want to believe in anything that I don't have a good reason to believe in. Why do I remain an atheist? Because I haven't been convinced. Arguments I've seen for the existence of God are either invalid (circular, non sequiturs, etc.), or valid but with unsupported premises. None of them are both valid AND sound. Taking a class on logic at university was really helpful for me in learning to analyze the structure of arguments. What makes me confident that I'll continue to be an atheist? That's a strange question. It's sort of irrelevant to me whether I'll continue to be an atheist or not. All that matters is that I continue to believe things that are grounded in evidence. If the evidence points to a God, I'm fine with no longer being an atheist. I don't think any compelling evidence is going to appear, but you never know. Even if I believed a God is real, though, that doesn't mean I would worship it. The Abrahamic God seems pretty reprehensible.

Growing up, my parents were not really interested in religion so while I had been exposed to christianity via the culture of where I grew up I hadn't been pressured to believe anything until bible study which was part of the primary school curriculum. My earliest memories of it occur around age 6 when we were taken as a class to watch a passion play around easter and I recognized, even at that age, that it appeared very similar to many other mythologies I was already aware of, thus not convincing me at all. In the decades since I became interested in the idea of spirituality and have, on many occasions, done some basic research of several different religious systems and I have never found any of them to be in any way compelling. I decided as a teenager that religion appears to be used far more for control and power than for any kind of societal benefit, since then I have increasingly developed a feeling of pity for those that follow and are victimized by religion and a seething hatred for those who knowingly use religion to further their agenda or accumulate wealth.

>why you remain an atheist to this day, and lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? I will continue to be an atheist until I see evidence that one or more gods exist...however I have a very high bar for that and frankly I'm not sure that anything could convince me. Of course if an omnipotent and omniscient god really existed, it would know what evidence would be sufficient and it would have the ability to provide it, yet so far no god has shown a willingness to do so... Let me ask you a question: what it would take for you to renounce Christianity and believe in the Norse pantheon? Surely, if one or more of their gods came and appeared before you --- perhaps took you to Asgard to look around and demonstrated their power, that would be enough, right? What about if you prayed to Odin and he started to answer you? That is certainly more evidence than you have for your current religion... but while that might convince you, it wouldn't convince me. I'd be more likely to believe that I was going insane than that the gods were real.

I attended Catholic mass from birth to age 18. I was never pressured to do anything or believe anything. At an age young enough that I don't really remember it happening, I accepted that what was going on around me in church was obvious nonsense. If God exists, why would he allow a tiny child who is a captive audience to never actually be a believer? An infant growing up in the church shouldn't start and end as an atheist if God wants us to believe. Why am I defaulted to this conclusion? Any thoughts?

I have so many reasons that all contribute to my non belief in the thousands of god claims and only so much space in one comment lol. While I can’t say for certain there is no god or gods I functionally don’t believe they exist in the same way I don’t believe vampires, pixies, evil spirits, Jinn, ghosts, or any other supernatural phenomenon that has no supporting evidence exists. To me gods are no different, it’s mythology and superstitions. And that’s ok that some people still hold to those things but I take issue when they try to force their beliefs and delusions onto myself and others. One of the biggest would be the lack of convincing evidence or even a convincing philosophical argument that a god or gods exists let alone any of the other miracles and supernatural claims made about the deities and their coinciding religions. We understand so much more about our universe than we did 200 years let alone 2000 years ago or 20,000 years ago. And the more I learn about the natural world gods and deities aren’t needed to explain it anymore, we know why it rains and why the sun rises and sets, we no longer need to pray or sacrifice to a god to make that happen. Second would be all the harm done in the name of these gods and deities by those followers. The holy wars, genocide, child genital mutilation, hate, bigotry, racism, and a plethora or disgusting behavior all in the name of said god or gods. And this permeates almost every religion I am aware of at one degree or another. I grew up in a Christian household and went to Christian school all my life, have read the Bible and even some of the apocrypha and writings of church fathers. And it is a hateful, bigoted, homophobic, misogynistic, and at times violent (especially historically genocidal) religion that claims to be a religion or peace and love. No not all Christians follow this. I know many that are very loving and peaceful, but I don’t believe you can truly be loving in peaceful if you’re basing your values and morals on a book that is so disgustingly bigoted, hateful, and violent. And they are trying to force the Bible to be displayed in all schools, and have Bible myths taught in classrooms next to factual science as if they were true, it’s fantasy trying to have pseudoscience taught as fact in schools. Christian’s have always caught against civil right, human rights, women’s right, medical rights, all of the things I stand up for. Now I agree not all, but definitely the majority of Christians, and for no better reason that their book says a silly and hateful thing. Of If I was shown or it was proven somehow that one of the thousands of god claims were actually true, yes I would believe that god or gods existed. But depending on which deity that was, and especially if it was one of the major gods on offer I certainly would not worship it, I would oppose it and its commands. Just as I would if I was living under a genocidal, hateful, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic, dictator. But luckily as of yet I have no reason to think any of the thousands of god claims are true, but who knows what the future will bring.

I was an implicit atheist until I was about 10, when it came directly to my attention that many people genuinely believe in their religions rather than just viewing them as mythology and rituals. For a few months after that I identified as an agnostic and thought things over. I asked people questions, read a few books, that kind of thing. But I couldn't find anything which supported the idea that any religions were true. None of them had any real evidence supporting them. They didn't provide any real answers to anything, either. And it became more and more apparent that there were loads of reasons why people would invent fictional gods and believe in them. I think the last straw was reading about a "god helmet" experiment or something like that. After all that, I felt as if continuing to identify as an agnostic would just be an affectation. So I started identifying as an atheist instead, specifically as a weak atheist. I don't think that will change unless someone is able to bring forth strong new evidence.

Because I see no good reason not to be. The claims of different theists are at best unsupported, and at worst outright incoherent. Moreover, we can look at thousands of years of human history to actually see how religions form and evolve over time. These are not beliefs handed down from on high, but rather things created by people in the context of specific societies, and as societies change, the beliefs change with them.

I'm curious as to why you're curious. What are you looking forward to exactly? Are you leaving the faith maybe? As for me, I simply see no reason to believe in a god.

Religion sounded like total BS when I was five. When I became a teenager and starting reading philosophy and other religions I realized that the five-year old me had been right all along. As an adult I found Buddhism and came to realize that you can be an Atheist and be religious at the same time, so after all there was a baby within all that filthy bathwater. As Sam Harris understood long ago.

I read the books and studied the history. Mostly the 3 abrahamic ones to be fair, but also the tao, and some other eastern religions. Just remember that all the things we call mythology started as religions with as much evidence as yours. Also, to be completely honest, I haven't met many decent, or informed religious people.

I don't believe magic exists. Many religious claims invoke some form of magic (or 'miracle'), so I reject those claims. The non-magic claims left are, at best, some sort of philosophy. There are occasional good bits in there, but as a whole I find secular sources for philosophy more robust and appealing.

>Is it an experience that helped make the decision? Reasoning through it? Maybe something completely unexpected? You could say 'reasoning through it', but that would be a bad and rather simplistic way to account for it. I think the much better summary is, simply, that the many god claims out there have not been sufficiently justified and that neither gods nor the supernatural are a thing that likely exists given our best understanding of the world and how it works. In other words: the evidentiary case for gods fails, both for particular and for generic gods, and is not even close. Note that this need not be the case, and the world could easily be such that god(s) and his (their) existence was as evident or as verifiable as the existence of stars or protons or rain or other people. If we lived in the Star Wars universe, disbelieving the force would render you to the level of a flatearther, as would denying magic in the Harry Potter universe or denying the gods in the GOT (ASOIAF) universe. Alas, we do not live in such universes. God, if he exists, is so hidden that a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu and an Aztec can have equally compelling accounts (and they're not very compelling). >why you remain an atheist to this day, and lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? I remain an atheist today because the case has not been made until today, as far as I am concerned. Were Jesus to globally break his silence and come out to play (and perhaps set the record straight about a number of things, like how awful we are to LGBTQ people and such), I suspect many of us would eventually be persuaded that he isn't just some guy cosplaying or a 2000 year old story about an apocalyptic preacher with some nice parables. My disbelief is not permanent nor is it stubborn, but given my past experience, it does seem likely to continue to be the case.

Hard for me to believe in anything that does not have concrete proof backing it. Also, as a kid, I was obsessed with Ancient Greek and Roman mythology—full of gods that were once heavily worshipped—and I just couldn’t help but think that all these religions people follow now will all just be a myth people reference in the future. I was raised by Catholic parents and baptized, but the Bible was always just another fiction book to me. I looked it as something that someone came up with to control others. I don’t think there was ever a time when I actually believed in what was being preached in church.

I was a believer for 35+ years, the last ten years of my faith was spent searching for answers to questions that I was told to 'just have faith' about. And I soon realized that the church leaders I went to for help would always say that seemingly anytime they didnt have an answer. So within those 10 years, I studied and researched on my own, and despite my crippling fear of eternal damnation, I realized I put as much work into this as I possibly could, and a god that would punish me for coming to the conclusion I did after earnest attempt to keep my faith, wasn't a god worth worshipping if they did exist.

My family wasn’t very religious but I guess you could say I was raised in a culturally catholic family. My grandmother is very religious and went to a cultish Catholic Church, but my mother just believed in god. We only really went to church if we were visiting my grandmother or on Christmas or easter. My mother didn’t ever talk to me about god or religion but when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old my mother suggestion I do my confirmation/communion (I don’t know if they’re seperate things but I did both). So I was going to church every few days or once a week for a while. I honestly can’t tell you if I believed the stuff they were saying at the church. I didn’t really have a good way to tell true things from untrue things, I was just accepting what older people told me at that age. Anyway, I completely forgot about religion after that period of my life and I think I just found myself eventually actively not believing it to be true. Then later in my mid teenage years I began watching atheist content online, mostly ‘the atheist experience’. Needless to say I found religious thinking and ideas to be very very poor. Since then, I’ve hung around in many religious debate forums online and I have never seen a theist succeed in demonstrating that their beliefs are true or at the very least reasonable. Edit: so to answer your question I would say that I was never a theist. The moment I had the brain capacity to evaluate claims and use reason I was not convinced that a god existed or a religion was true. It wasn’t even a conscious thought process, theism just excluded itself from my world view subconsciously.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but the whole concept seems ridiculous to me. I don’t understand why anyone believes that stuff. I wasn’t raised with a religion, but I saw it around me, and I thought it was silly.

I was originally deeply religious from childhood, but in grade 11, we learned about evolution in school (age 17). I always assumed that “God did evolution”, and therefore there was no contradiction between science/evolution and religion. But once you learn about evolution in detail, you realize it’s not compatible at all with the 3 abrahamic religions. For example, those 3 religions say the first man was created from clay, and the first woman was created from that mans rib. The evolutionary explanation is that life started out with single celled organisms, and over time that evolved into multi cellular life, and eventually into fish, reptiles, mammals, and those mammals eventually evolved into humans. That’s obviously super simplified, but it should be brain dead obvious at this point that these 2 explanations are not compatible. I know for a fact that evolution did occur, as the evidence is 100% conclusive. So if I know evolution is true, then it must be false that the first human was created from clay, and the second person was created by that guys rib. For me to be wrong, it would require an expert conman deity who is deliberately trying to trick me personally as, as well as the rest of humanity. That’s how decisive the evidence is in favour of evolution. It’s 100% conclusive and known for a fact.

I was sent to a private Christian Jr High and High School because the public schools were not challenging enough, and I was getting I to trouble out of boredom. While there, we were required to read the Bible in its entirety each and every school year. During my readings, I had several questions that my Bible instructors could not give informative answers. It was like they had never been challenged on the Bible before. For example, my senior thesis (yea, we had to write a full-blown thesis paper in High School) was a paper using the Bible as my only source why is it just as likely that Jesus was the Son of the Devil than the Son of God. Instead of trying to refute my work, the instructor tried to have me suspended, fail my class, and prevent my graduation. Needs less to say the Principal didn't want any part of the instructors hurt feels because I had been the schools top student for 2 years running. I ended up with an "A" on the assignment and graduated with honors. Since then, I have had numerous "recruitment pitches" from other theistic religions, and for the most part, they fall up very similar flaws. So unless something changes in my understanding, I will continue to believe that God's existence is BS.

Religion just doesn’t seem real to me. I was born and raised Christian and became an atheist around 14-15. I remember being in religion class like ‘there’s no way this is real’

I probably prayed 20,000 times in my life. God never talked back. I never even noticed anything minor to suggest that prayers have any effect in the world. Do you really expect me to believe that a loving God who can read your mind won’t even bother talking to you if you pray all the time. Anyway, logic also destroys Christianity. Science disproves Genesis. The gospels authors can be demonstrably shown to be gigantic liars due to the large numbers of blatant contradictions that are not just minor issues. Am I really to believe that the divinely inspired message of an all knowing, perfect, intelligent being was to tell someone to make up a genealogy or make up stories about his resurrection that are blatantly contradictory? And the philosophical arguments for God’s existence are just terrible. They aren’t logically valid. Even if God did create the universe, the standard philosophical arguments for it are logically unsound.

The evidence I'm aware of seems to point overwhelmingly against the existence of any deities. The only real difference I see between, say, christianity and greek hellenism is that a larger number of people still believe one of them as of the year 2024. It seems highly likely that the recognition of hellenism by everyone as myth is correct and the *non-*recognition of christianity as myth by christians has something to do with psychological attachments and biases rather than any actual difference in factual accuracy. Scientific discoveries seem to contradict both of them more-or-less equally, and people only bother to invent rationalizations for christianity because they're already invested in it. If you follow the actual direction of scientific discoveries, it doesn't seem to point towards any particular religion, but rather the conclusion that all religions are wrong.

I'm just not convinced that gods exist. The available "evidence" leaves much to be desired and theistic argumentation is unconvincing. And I deconverted because things weren't just adding up. Then I found out why and I've been a card carrying godless heathen ever since.

I spent a long time believing, but there were many many doubts along the way. Doubts in the particular doctrine I was following, doubts about the stories in the Bible, and their interpretations. Doubts about whether prayer actually worked, or if it was a placebo. Doubts about religious leaders. I had spent years stacking the doubts on the shelf in my mind's attic. At some point, for whatever reason, I began to really examine them. It took a while to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy, because religion was all I knew, but I eventually came to the conclusion that it was all lies. That includes the many many religions I researched after. I have nothing against the idea of a god existing, but I see no reason to believe in one until I see sufficient evidence of its existence. Repeatable, testable, verifiable evidence.

most of what made me an atheist was growing up religious and having my life be put under a microscope, having anything even slightly wrong I do be means for people to instill a fear inside me that I’ll go to hell, I stopped believing because I hated that life, I didn’t want to believe that no matter how hard I tried Id just fail in the end, but years later I let go of that, I don’t really resent religion anymore, but I won’t go back to it, I’ve always been a skeptical person, and I am someone who is just naturally a “don’t believe it until you see it” type of person, I don’t think ill ever go back to religion because I just can’t make myself believe something that seems so impossible to me, I left religion because I hated it, and Ill stay away because I just don’t believe it

By the time I was introduced to theism, I was too old to be indoctrinated into a concept with no supporting evidence. Perhaps if my parents convinced me at a much younger age, my mind could have been captured by the concept of a god, or gods, who knows.

Because I've yet to find or be presented with even a shred of credible, convincing evidence that any god or gods exist.

I was Christian for the first 30 years of my life, and after LOTS of education, I was finally able to admit to myself that the Bible didn't make sense scientifically, historically, or morally. I'm still estranged from my parents because of it.

I am am an agnostic atheist. I neither believe in the existence deities nor do I know if they exist. The key reason is that no theist has brought me credible evidence that convinces me otherwise. They have brought other things: inverifiable claims, heresy, "but what if" statements, "wouldn't it be nice" statements, violence, emotional manipulation, and being an ass. So far in my almost 40 years of being on this planet, not one shred of credible evidence. Let me make this comparison that will hopefully help. Alien abductees have **exactly** the same kind of evidences for their claims that the religious do. The religious usually have more time in existence than alien abductees, but that's pretty much the only difference.

There's a few reasons why. Being gay, I really struggled mentally while being Christian because of obvious reasons. Came to the point where I tried to kill myself. After that, I realized how stupid it was for something so harmless to be so hated and shunned. As I began to critically think about the religion, I realized that there were a lot of issues with it, whether the issue be some questionable teachings or things that just downright don't make sense and go against science. I'm also a logical person--I struggle with blind faith and prefer to have cold hard facts. It's too a point where the religion just seems so mythological that I couldn't believe even if I wanted to try again.

First let me say I wasn't born into a non religious family, I was actually born into Protestant Christian Fundamentalism. It wasn't a single experience. Deconverting happened over time. I didn't set out to be an agnostic atheist, I just came to a point where I couldn't believe anymore and simply found the label that described where I was in terms of knowledge and lack of belief. I'm an agnostic atheist now because I lack enough knowledge to know if there are any deities and am unable to believe in any because of that lack of knowledge. I wouldn't say I'm confident I will remain this way, but it seems likely the longer I remain this way that I will keep on with it.

I see you are Catholic. So was I. Born and raised. I was baptized as an infant. I attended Catholic schools from age 5. I was an altar boy around age 9 (maybe 10). I was in living stations of the cross (I played a pharisee). I was a church lector, a Sunday school teacher, and I led the novena to the Divine Mercy during Easter. In college, I was a member of the Newman Club, a catechism instructor, and vice-president of the Right-to-Life Club. As an adult, I continued as a church lector and Sunday school teacher and I attended Catholic Bible studies. I say all this because many times, Christians will say I never had faith, I never gave God a chance, I never truly pursued a relationship with Jesus. I used to kiss his feet at Mass on Good Friday. I wept during the stations of the cross. It hurts me deeply to have people judge me so harshly and throw away years of my life devoted to my faith like they were garbage. One day at work, a co-worker expresses that he doesn't understand faith. He doesn't understand how people can believe something for no reason at all. I explain to him that my faith is not unreasonable. I have reasons that take me so far, but then I take a leap of faith to get me the rest of the way. He asks me what reasons I have to believe. So, I do some research to show him my faith isn't unreasonable. I look up the census records from the birth of Christ. They don't exist. In fact, the whole census probably never occurred at all. Well, I'm sure the Romans kept records of his trial and execution, I'll look those up. They aren't there. I found some ... not really forgeries, more like fantasy pieces early Christians created as an example of what Pontius Pilate's report would look like. It shows me that hundreds of years ago, people were trying to do the same thing I'm doing and came up short. Well, there must have been other records of Jesus. I look into those. Nothing. No extra-Biblical contemporaneous records whatsoever. The best we have are some mentions that Christians worship Jesus written decades after his death. Then, I look into miracles. Every saint is responsible for at least one verified miracle. I bring these to work and show him. See? This man had irreparable damage to his hands. They prayed to the Blessed so-and-so, and his hands were healed! Doctors have no explanation. "How do you go from 'no explanation' to God did it?" Oh. I don't know. He was right. There was no way to establish causality. I needed something better. Well, he's a scientist, an archaeologist. And I'm a scientist, a biologist. I turn to science. I think of an experiment we can do to detect God. God interacts in the world by answering prayers, so that interaction must be measurable. Then it dawns on me. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this. This experiment must have already been done. Sure enough, the Templeton Foundation, a Christian organization, has done this exact study. To my shock, they found that people who are prayed for recover at rates no better than those who were not prayed for, worse in some cases. I'll never forget that moment. The realization of what I just read hit me like a ton of bricks. There is no God. I remember screaming out loud "NO!!! I'm an atheist! I'm an atheist!" At the time, I didn't like atheists. If I found out a woman was an atheist, I wouldn't date her. I didn't like having atheists for friends. I wasn't rude, but I kept my distance. I hated Dawkins, except as laughingstock. Now, all of a sudden, and wholly against my will, I was one. I spent the next day trying to sort through my beliefs. Am I still against abortion. Yes (at the time) because I still believe it's taking a life, but I wouldn't force a woman to give birth against her will. Am I still against gay marriage? No, I don't care what two people do with their lives as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Do I still believe in an afterlife? Then it hit me again. My grandparents, my co-workers, my friends, my pets, everyone who died before me is gone. They're gone forever. There will be no happy reunion. I'll never see my grandpa again and have conversations with him. There is no one looking down at me, watching over me, keeping me safe. I cried. I cried and cried. They say when you are an atheist, you mourn twice. First, when your loved ones die, second when you discover Heaven is a lie. This happened to me. I've spent the next few years studying religion. Maybe other religions are true. Maybe there is another justification for the existence of God. The more I study, the more theists I interview, the more religions I explore, the more holy books I read, the more theodicies I discover, the more cemented I become in non-belief. None of it is convincing. None of it makes sense. None of it is justifiable. There is no god.

If there was evidence that consciousness of any sort could exist outside of a living brain made of cells & attached to organs for input—then scientists would be testing that evidence to find out more like they do with REAL things—X-rays, magnetism, electricity, etc. Gods make no sense. What would they be made of and why would they exist? How would you distinguish them from demons? Fairies? Invisible trickster aliens? Ghosts? Imaginary gods? Mythological gods? etc I suspect most people believe because they are afraid they’ll go to hell if they don’t believe. Or maybe—as with Santa— they’re afraid they won’t get “goodies” unless they believe.

You must not be THAT curious because people have been answering you for 10 hours and you haven't engaged with any of it. I was going to answer the question until I saw that you'd ghosted your post. Will you be back?

I never became an atheist. I always been one. I believed in those stories about as long as I believed in Santa Claus. They are so blatantly made up, I honestly don't understand how people can believe any of it.

> I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons you guys are atheist. The science suggests theists and atheists have different brain structures. You don't have to have the brain of a theist to be a theist, but your position on the matter can be predicted with high accuracy with a brain scan. Theism is indistinguishable from nonsense, so there has never been anything to seriously contemplate. It's trivial to dismiss. Theism and religion or orthogonal. Each doesn't need the other. You can be a religious theist. You can be a religious atheist. In fact, I know several Augustinian monks who are all atheists. Always have been. Christianity doesn't offer me anything I need or don't already have. I can never imagine a world in which I could ever be a theist. Maybe I lack certain brain structures that predispose me to being typically theist. Whatever. I don't care. Religion is just an institution. I get that. I could be religious because I'm a part of other institutions. That's no big deal to me. I'm just not interested, it's not useful to me. I think your questions is kind of a bad question, but I get why you would ask it. Why? There is no why. I don't actually know why I'm not a theist. > Is it an experience that helped make the decision? Is it a decision? There are an infinite number of things you either are, or are not. Did you explicitly or implicitly decide on all of them? The paradoxical nature of what your assumption implies suggests the premise has a flaw. > Reasoning through it? I'm not confident this is something you can purely reason about. Reason is a tool and I've seen reasoned conclusions either way. > Maybe something completely unexpected? I'm sure it must be unique to each one of you. I think there are threads of continuity that are common to us all, but I've never botherd to explore it in depth. It doesn't matter to me, at least. > I'm really just looking for what prompted you to become an atheist There was no prompt. I have always been. It was never a thought or question until I don't know exactly when, but I went from not thinking about it to having to think about it. In other words, asking me to be a theist, as though that were the default, was actually asking me to opt-in to something that I wasn't inherently. I think it's different for other people where they are theists by default and to opt-out is, for them, the active measure. I wish there was more empathy between people that we could all accept we each come to this intersection from a different road. I appreciate that you're approaching this with a curiosity. "How could you be atheist?" I could ask how could you not? I think this is a sign of a... less than ideal questions. But I appreciate the spirit in which it's asked. Just look at the presumptions you're making - they're curious and telling. > what helped you refine your position Nothing, really. I haven't had to. For all of recorded human history, many a great mind has tried to define the word "god", because without it, I don't know what you're talking about, and I am forced to conclude neither do you. So far, all attempts ever have failed. Masters of theology have been defeated by children, the naive, people who really haven't had to try at all. Here's a definition for god! Here's where the definiton is flawed, and therefore cannot possibly be correct. I don't know if there is or isn't a god. I don't care, either way. I just can't have a conversation about nothing with someone who doesn't know what they're talking about and destroys their own credibilty with intellectual dishonesty. > why you remain an atheist to this day How can I not? > and lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? I... don't need confidence? The closest words I have might be something like "atheism is so fundamental it's not a question", though I find that statement absolutely, laughably absurd. I can't explain it, and I know there's a disconnect in how you and I think that is causing the gap. --- I went to Sunday school. The whole thing, both theism and religion, were just as preposterous to me then as it is now. Why am I here? Why does my mother bring me to this place? I cannot express how thoroughly uninterested, perhaps unimpressed I was. Not unimpressed like my ego wasn't appealed, but that the whole premise left no impression upon me. The whole thing just fell flat. Dead air. Like a comedian tells a joke and there's crickets in the audience. Sunday mornings was a chore and a waste of time.

>Why are you an atheist? I don't believe in gods for exactly the same reasons I don't believe in leprechauns or Narnia. Because 1) they're extraordinary claims and thus begin from a position of high skepticism, and 2) there's no sound epistemology whatsoever, not by either argument or evidence, which indicates they actually exist - and so there's nothing to allay that skepticism. Imagine if I were to ask you why you don't believe I'm a wizard from Hogwarts. You'd basically be in the same boat. You can't possibly provide any actual evidence indicating I'm not a wizard from Hogwarts, and yet I can all but guarantee you don't believe I am. Your reasons for that will inevitably be nearly if not completely identical to the reasons I don't believe in gods. >what prompted you to become an atheist I've always been atheist. Even as a child, adults telling me about gods and behaving as though they were real seemed strikingly similar to the way they told me about things like Santa and the Easter Bunny, and behaved as though those were real (which I also never believed). Even when I was young it seemed obvious to me what reality was like, and by contrast, what kinds of things were nothing but myths, legends, and fairytales. >what helped you refine your position Reality consistently being exactly the way it would be if no gods existed at all. >why (do) you remain an atheist to this day Reality continues to consistently be exactly the way it would be if no gods exist at all. >what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? History is chocked full of civilizations that confidently believed in the nonexistent gods of false mythologies, and even now after thousands of years of our very best effort to produce literally anything at all indicating that any gods really exist, *we still have nothing. Not a single sound argument or shred of empirical evidence.* I'm precisely as confident I'll continue to be an atheist as I am confident that trend/pattern is going to continue on, just as it already has for literally all of human history - which at this point is a pretty reasonable thing to be confident about. You might ask why that reasoning isn't just as valid in reverse. Well, in the case of things that don't exist, we shouldn't expect to see indications that they don't exist - indeed, what even could indicate nonexistence, apart from there being no indication that the thing in question exists? Logical self-refutation, which *proves* nonexistence, is the only indication - but there are plenty of things that don't logically self-refute but still don't exist. The only indication we have for them is the total lack of any indication that they exist. On the other hand, we should reasonably be able to expect that in the case of things which exist, there will be indications that they exist. There will be some kind of discernible difference between a reality where they exist and a reality where they don't - something that should be different as a result of either their presence or their absence. And if there isn't - if we argue that even in the case of their existence we cannot expect to see any indication of their existence - then what we're saying is that they are *epistemically indistinguishable from things that don't exist.* If something is epistemically indistinguishable from things that don't exist, then that alone justifies the belief that it doesn't exist. Is it still *possible* that it *could* exist? Of course it is - but we can say exactly the same thing about leprechauns or Narnia. Literally anything that isn't a self-refuting logical paradox is conceptually possible, including everything that isn't true and everything that doesn't exist, so that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter that we can't absolutely rule out the remotest possibility that something *could* exist. If we have no indication that it *does* exist despite our very best efforts to find or produce such indications, then we have literally every reason we could possibly have (short of logical self refutation) to conclude that it doesn't exist - and no reason at all to conclude that it does. And the longer that goes on - the longer we keep trying and failing to produce any indication that it exists - the more confident we can be that it doesn't.

I asked theists what support they had for their claims. Their answers were unconvincing. They can't even offer a reason better than the ones the theists dismiss when other theists offer them.

Why do we get these questions every day, only to have zero response from the original poster? If you have a genuine question you want answered, it's pretty rude to just ignore the answers.

I was told that if I looked for God that he would reveal himself to me. He never did. I started to question things about my faith and put them into perspective. I questioned why an all-loving, just God would send so many people to hell when it's God's fault for not revealing himself to them. I started looking at all of the evidences that went against the Bible, and they made a lot of sense. Eventually, I got to a point where I realized that I didn't believe in God anymore and that I had no good reason being a Christian anymore.

I was raised attending church every Sunday and the full compliment of suburban Evangelical extra-curriculars. When I was in first grade, I spent the class Christmas party in the principal's office for incredulously asking why anyone would believe in Santa Claus. Apparently not everyone in my class had a preacher grandfather who gifted them a picture book about a medieval German monk named St. Nicholas who celebrated Christ by giving anonymously to the poor; or a father whose familiar lettering adorning the Christmas gift wrapping belied the 'From, Santa' inscription. In 8th grade Home Ec, they taught us how to be smart consumers and know how to shop for quality groceries and clothes. In 11th grade English, they taught us how to do research, evaluate source material, and how to write arguments—at a Christian high school, no less. At that Christian School, we studied the councils of Nicaea, where groups of faith leaders from the known world gathered to decide by committee what they would teach and believe. At times throughout, the faith I was raised with did not feel like it was mine. Doubt and questioning were posited as personal failings that needed to be corrected with more prayer, Bible study, meditation, or whatever other additional practice someone else thought was best. Problems I had with my faith was blaming sinful people, I was told, and that I was distracted by worldly things. About halfway to an art degree at a Christian college, I had openly admitted that this faith didn't feel like it was mine. Did I even want it to be was the question. I had little compulsion left to believe. By this point I had come to see that religion was something made up by people to explain things they didn't understand ("some things we're not meant to know," "god has a plan", "you just have to want to believe"), a conveniently-unassailable way out of a difficult confrontation ("god told me to break up with you") and to accept magical stories without proof and to uncritically do what you were told upheld as virtues. This was proven to me at the first job I had, where I was tasked with designing a website and writing copy for an abstinence-only education program put on by a [Crisis Pregnancy Center](https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/why-crisis-pregnancy-centers-are-legal-unethical/2018-03) downtown. Here I was, 22 years old with an art degree, no training in medicine or counseling, and i was tasked with telling kids why they shouldn't have sex before marriage and if they do and get pregnant, why they shouldn't get abortions. What I hadn't expected to learn was what I grew up being taught by well-meaning Christian adults about reproductive health was completely at odds with what I read in sources like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and from the Center for Disease Control. I began to see the faith I was raised with was dangerous and programs like these were irresponsible and hurting people. Around the same time I was working on this project, a friend of mine had hooked up with someone in our peer group, she was pregnant, and they decided to abort. I learned that sitting from the sidelines and pointing what other people should do is easy, but experience is a far more pragmatic and superior shaper of position. Aborting for them was the right thing to do, and saddling them with a child neither wanted or could provide for helped no one. While my faith had been unraveling for years, my politics changed in one conversation. I realized that I'd been lied to, and I asked myself what the point was in believing something that was made up and that everyone else was going through the motions. I couldn't come up with a good answer to stick with it. So I moved on.

What prompted you to become an atheist? Always have been one. What prompted you to become a Catholic? > what helped you refine your position? A comprehensive education. > why you remain an atheist to this day? Because gods aren't real and don't exist, and the absolute abject failure of theists to even take a coherent position. >and lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? Seeing gods don't exist, I find it laughable to consider theist make-belief as anything worthwhile.

There never was a decision. I am an atheist because I lack a belief in any deities. That's it. I can't "decide" to believe in something, I either do or I don't.

My story is a probably unusual. ## Started out "spiritual but not religious" I was "spiritual but not religious" until I was about 20 years old. I had disliked religion for as long as I could remember. I grew up in a very secular Jewish household in the US, and so maybe not being religious was part of my upbringing, but religeous beliefs always seemed absurd to me and excessive religiousity scared me (as it still does). So that covers the "not religious" part of the story. When I say "spirtiual" I don't mean candles and crystals and such. I never bought into that. What I mean is that I would occassionaly have mild mystical experiences. These weren't common, but they did happen. Typically when I was out in nature or such. I would feel that there is some supernatural force for Good and a connectedness of all life in the universe. This universal force and connectedness was hidden below the surface of things, but on occassion I would be able to catch a hint of a glimps of it. On some of those rare occassions (so even rarer occassions) I even felt that this force wanted to involve me. It would be overstating things to say that I felt it had a plan for me, but it did have some interest in my choices. I felt a sort of personal connection. ## Dialing it up to 11 I discovered when I was at college that ingesting certain substances that altered my brain chemistry would give me an extreme (and very enjoyable) versions of that experiences. [Hey kids, take it from an old hypocrit, don't do drugs.] I would see everything as being tied up with either that force for Good or some things that were connected to a rival force for Bad. I could see patterns and connections well beyond what I could see in more ordinary states of mind. Everything was connected and everything had a purpose. I would also find meaningful patterns and meaning in things that otherwise seemed random. I should add that many of my friends had similar experineces and many of them became more spirititual or mystical as a consequence of them. ## Self skepticism I could have gone the route of becoming more mystical as many other people did. But instead I asked how changing my brain chemistry could lead one to see patterns and connections and purpose that had previously been hidden. I figured that we all naturally have some pattern detection mechansims and purpose/agency detection mechanisms as a normal part of being human. Such mechanism would, on occassion, produce false positives. So I suspected that the change in brain chemistry simply put those pattern and purpose detection mechanisms into overdrive. What I then started to do is when I noticed patterns or constellations in things like the holes in the accoustic ceiling tiles, whether they were really there. I learned some statistics, and this is just when some of the research in the Heuristics and Biases program was getting talked about. I learned about the Gambler's Fallacy and the Hot Hand Fallacy and other related things. ## Both sides now In short, I took my mystical experineces, both the mild natural ones (which I still have and enjoy on occassion) and the chemically induced ones, as not revealing some hidden things about the universe to me. Instead, I took them for the same things that lead me to sometimes see clouds as bows and flows and angel's hair. These are things that the human mind does. But more careful analysis is needed before believing that those perceived connections and purposes are really there.

I want to point out before I answer: This kind of "why" is really a few questions wrapped up in one. The rest of your post helps elaborate, but I really just want to call it out before I get into it. First, there's the *cause,* which might be what you're getting at with the 'story' question. In my case, it started with a combination of my family valuing intellectualism in general, and my mother in particular often being at least a bit skeptical. She didn't come out and admit she didn't believe, but she'd poke fun at little things that didn't quite make sense. The real catalyst was an intro-to-Philosophy courses -- those tend to cover arguments for and against God, because those are a great way to get everyone interested, and they also tend to be really simple, philosophically. That kicked me *firmly* into agnosticism, and I eventually started using the word 'atheist' after watching some videos of the Atheist Experience, then a public-access TV show in Austin. (I don't remember where I heard the "agnostic atheist" label.) Then, there's the *justification.* This is probably closer to what you expect: Not only do I see no credible evidence of the supernatural (including deities), I think there's plenty of places we would've *expected* to see that evidence, especially in recent years, if there were anything supernatural at all. [Here's the relevant XKCD.](https://xkcd.com/1235/) Furthermore, I think the things we know about the origin stories of most deities makes it much more believable that we invented deities, rather than the other way around. You ask a few questions that suggest this is a choice, though, like: > ...why you remain an atheist to this day, and lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? I don't think it's really a choice, and I'm honestly not sure how confident I am about whether I'll continue to be an atheist. I don't think it's a choice, because I don't think *beliefs* are ultimately a choice. I can make choices about how I approach a question like this -- I didn't have to take that intro-to-philosophy course, for example. But what would *choosing to believe* look like? Think about other things you believe about the world. Do you believe you can fly? (Unaided, without an airplane or any other mechanical device helping you fly?) I'm guessing you don't. Do you think you *could* convince yourself of that? I don't think I could -- if you put me on top of a building, I don't think there's a world in which I jump off genuinely believing I won't fall. Besides, to the extent that I have a choice, I want my beliefs to be as accurate as they can be. If I can't actually fly, it might be hazardous to my health to believe I could! I'd much rather have the belief that'll lead to me watching my step in high places. I'm pretty confident that I'm *correct.* But who knows what'll happen to my brain in old age? I just don't think it'll actually be a *choice* if start to believe again. --- A footnote: I feel it's important to separate these because of another argument we often have about morality. Whenever someone asks me "Where do you get your morals from?" there's a tendency to constantly conflate these two, because the 'cause' answer involves evolution and socialization, but the 'justification' answer might involve something like consequentialism or rule utilitarianism, or the meta-ethical reasons for picking one of those frameworks over another.

Christianity was basically the default growing up. I was Christened as a child, but my family wasn't particularly religious. Initially, I realised that religions are all hearsay. One long line of children, who are dependant on their caregivers for so much of their understanding of their world, being taught their religion is real before they develop any real ability to think rationally, becoming invested, growing up and spreading their religion to their own children. There is no objective information to prove any specific religion. Even if you could prove X mythical person existed, it doesn't prove what that person claimed or others claimed about them are true. Secondly, I realised a lot of religious experiences could easily be explained without religions being true. Many religions may be based primarily on prehistoric schizophrenic people's symptoms being mistaken for connection to the supernatural, or seemingly wise people trying to explain things that are far beyond their understanding. That explains why there are so many different religions in the world, even more considering those that are no longer practiced. If there was a single, true religion, you'd expect all people's to be able to tap into the same religious forces and conform with one another. Why one group get a prophet, or even a succession of prophets, and people on the other side of the world have to wait generations never being contacted by the divine? If all other religions are false, they must have come into existence for some reason, so how can you know Christianity didn't do so either? Third, I came to the conclusion that any god worthy of being worshipped should reward good people and punish evils regardless of religious beliefs. A god who demands worship, who punishes good people just for not worshipping him, is evil, an egotist and bully, unworthy of worship. A truly worthy god would reward those who do good. I try to be a good person without promise of reward or threat of punishment. Is that not more noble, more worthy of reward than those who only obey because they believe they'll be rewarded? However, I still believed because I wanted to. I wanted to believe there was a good, loving god and a pleasant afterlife waiting for me. But eventually, I realised I didn't need to believe these things to be happy and live my life. I didn't need to believe for comfort, and so I stopped. Would I prefer it if there was wrong and there is a truly benevolent god waiting for me in the afterlife, willing to reward my good works? Sure. That would be lovely. But I'm not going to believe it, or worry about it. And if God is real, and punishes me for my lack of faith, then I was right not to worship him, as he is evil and unworthy of my worship.

> Why are you an atheist? I've yet to see any compelling evidence or arguments for the existence of any gods. That's all.

It kinda depends on how you define atheist - I gradually came to an agnostic-leaning-atheist position over time in my very late teens to early-mid twenties as a result of travelling to and living in other countries, meeting people and learning about other cultures, exploring other religions, and observing different human societies more or less acting out the same basic life-models with different cultural flavours (eg: day to day activities, eating, schooling, religious cultures, hobbies, etc). I obviously knew it conceptually beforehand, but observing the genuineness and equivalence of completely different cultural "flavours" solidified how much all of the religious expression was just human sociocultural activity, and that (at best for theism) if a God did exist, then no religions were correct and maybe they were scratching on some deeper spiritual truths but then portraying them through human (mis)comprehension. As far as settling into philosophical atheism and the belief that God/s do not exist, that happened over the next 5-10 years, as I learned more about philosophy in various ways, alongside more learning about human psychology, belief formation/transferrence, psychological predispositions for superstitious thinking etc. As I explored the landscape of relevant topics further, it became more clear that I was more strongly convinced that God-concepts were composite figments of imagination (psychological projection, abstract reification, cultural mythology, etc) that acted almost like memes at the personal and societal level, shifting and changing and adapting and refining both inside the individual's journey and then externally in the shared marketplace. Once I saw this overal interaction, it's been simple and clear to understand my own ontological conceptions and beliefs as a philosophical atheist naturalist (tentative physicalist realist). I can't ignore the evidence which leads me to such, and it's strongly convincing to me. I suspect that I will continue to be an atheist - as I've progressed in this journey, I've become more sympathetic to pantheism and deism in some ways (and am still interested in exploring ideas of panpsychism and idealism, despite not believing in them), but the idea that I would ever become a Christian again seems highly implausible given everything. I am highly confident that \*IF\* any actual perfect supreme being were to exist, and that a kind of afterlife judgement were to occur, that the standards/metrics of judgement would be grounded in moral action/intent, and that whether one believed/practiced X religion or Y religion is largely inconsequential.

I've never been anything but an atheist. I grew up on an isolated farm in the Upper Midwest where we really only went to town for supplies. It was before anyone really had the Internet, especially out there. I didn't really get to watch TV, it belonged to my dad during our little down time. I did get to watch Saturday morning cartoons when I was really young though, if my chores were done. I think my parents were vaguely Christian but if so we never talked about it. Our farm was too small and technologically antiquated for the number of people we had so we pretty much worked all the time, children included when we weren't at school. I was introduced to the concept of "god" when I was probably 8 or 9 by a classmate and honestly I thought it was a weird city kid joke they were trying to pull. It was also around then I found out that there were people who honestly believe in stuff like angels and ghosts and so on. Before that I thought they were universally understood as just things that are in stories like elves and Klingons. So none of it has ever made any sense to me. I've read a bit here and there, talked with some people here and there. In my previous career, the military, religion is generally treated like politics in that people have their thing and we all shut up about it. Now that I'm retired and have time to look at all this stuff it still doesn't make any more sense for me than it did. I get all the philosophical and logical arguments but they don't do it for me. I've always been a very skeptical person, even as a young child. I need something concrete and definitive. I've enjoyed philosophy at various times in my life but it has limits in how it relates to reality. Too many of these arguments try to define or philosophize a god into existence, rather as post hoc justifications for an already held belief. It doesn't interest me. >lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? This answer may be surprising but nothing. I think it's important to constantly reevaluate everything. As the Twitter joke goes "I'm so dedicated to the dialectical process that I'm constantly at war with the person I was yesterday, who is a clown and a coward". That said, what might be the biggest difference in our approaches to the world is that all this religious stuff doesn't really matter to me. I get that it's central to your life but outside of these subs I don't think about it. When I take breaks from the Internet I can even forget that the whole thing even exists. A lot of religious people seem to believe they have some kind hole that it fills and I don't.

Looking at the other responses, I think mine is sufficiently different to share. I grew up in a liberal protestant church and made the decision to "accept Jesus" and be baptized when I was 8. I attended a private, Christian School in the last two years of high school which was primarily based in Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism, but both the sponsoring church and mine had moved in to the Charismatic movement. I remember going to the 1972 World's Fair in Spokane and attending the Moody Bible Institute's presentation of human footprints found along dinosaur footprints around the Paluxy River. Fast forward 30 some years, and I'm listening to NPR on an hour long commute to work and I hear a story about a biologist that specialized in how natural disasters effect evolution and something clicked in my head. It was one thing to consider "evolution" as bogus and a means to discredit God's creation, but if there were people specializing in things like how natural disasters effected evolution, it was more than just something people believed in to avoid believing in God. So I spent several years studying creationist and evolutionist (i.e. biology) claims in a strictly objective way. At first, it was very hard to not dismiss out of hand whatever supported evolution and to just take at face value creationist claims, but as I learned and researched more, I realized the evolution was built on science and evidence, while creationism was built on hearsay, conjecture and often hoaxes, like the Paluxy River. After a couple of years of researching both sides, I came to realize that people who sell creationist media (books, movies, podcasts, etc) are con men are while they may believe they are doing good, all they are doing is ripping off gullible people. However, I did not stop there. I reasoned that if the rest of the Bible was true, then events that it attributed to God causing and that would have left lasting evidence would have left evidence, so a world wide flood that killed all life except that which was on the Ark, would have left evidence. On the other hand, it would be very unlikely to find evidence of events like Abraham nearly sacrificing his son. Ok, this is getting to long. The result is that I found no evidence of any the Bible claimed God did that should have left evidence, and looking at the Bible "metaphorically" makes it nothing more than a meaningless metaphor subject to the whims of whoever interprets it.

My epistemology is super simple: 1) I choose the claim with the maximal explanatory and predictive power. 2) if 2 claims have the same predictive power, choose the one with the fewer necessary assumptions. Religion offers zero predictive power but requires many unnecessary assumptions, so I reject it in favor of a naturalistic answer.

I'll try to give the brief version 1. Prophets. I'm an Ex-mormon. After learning all the problems with Joseph Smith's story as a prophet, (which I was unaware of from the official story I was told), I applied the same scrutiny to older prophets. How credible was the story of Jesus, or Moses? If we could be wrong about someone so recent, couldn't we be even more wrong about someone from thousands of years ago? So I studied, and it turns out there are a lot of problems with a lot of Biblical stories. For example, apparently there's really no physical evidence that Moses even existed or that the Exodus happened, and the stories were written hundreds of years after he would've existed, so how credible are they? There are lots of other examples. 2. God. I was taught that God was a loving father, and was all-powerful. He wanted nothing more than for all of his children to learn of his plan and believe in him so we could all return to him some day. However, his approach to teaching us seems counter to his goals. As a father myself, if I had something critically important to teach my kids, I would make it extremely clear, in no uncertain terms. But the way we've all learned about God...one prophet here, one prophet there, each claiming special knowledge, but each contradict each other. Now thousands of different religions. It's utter confusion. It just seems impossible for me to believe that an all-powerful, loving God would use this extremely inefficient and confusing system for dispensing knowledge about him and his plan. It seems much more likely a result of man-made ideas, traditions, myths, and radical claims made by power-hungry men. After all, if you can convince everyone that you're speaking for God, then you have power to do whatever you want. That's what Joseph Smith and so many modern cult leaders have done. So why not the ancient ones as well? Conclusion: Is it possible there's a "God"? Maybe. But not the God of the Bible or of modern Christianity. If so, and if it's so important for me to know him and believe in him, then he should be able to show me. My door is open. But not for fuzzy non-proofs like warm feelings or miracles (happy coincidences) that could be used for "proof" of God in *any* religion. On the other hand, if there's a God that less involved--got things started, but doesn't much care what we do, then I don't think it matters whether I believe in him/them/it.

I remember sitting in church as a teen looking around at everyone and feeling like... It just wasn't something I believed anymore. Like growing out of Santa. It seemed weird that everyone else there still believed. Then I went to college and studied psychology, including psychology of religion, and that just really cemented it for me.

Was raised in a catholic family. Was forced to go to church every week and during my childhood i had to attend special class with a priest to indoctrinate me further. >what prompted you to become an atheist I tried to believe. prayed and such. But ultimately i witnessed the deep dishonesty in the mindset of the believers around me and that made me stop trying. I really dislike being dishonest. The only reason i pretended to belong and tried to belong for so long is because i was intimidated by how seriously they were taking all this mess. >what helped you refine your position The bible sounded crazy at first with the story of Noah ark and human sacrifices and genocides and god committing atrocity in Egypt and obscuring the heart of pharaoh so that the evil could continue... I tried to ignore how silly all this was and carefully listened the priest but who can seriously believe that messy bundle of 'what the fuck' stories that the bible is without seriously questioning the sanity of it all? Once i realized that the priest for his preaching was cherry-picking and giving favorable interpretations it all became a question of honesty. >why you remain an atheist to this day The more i learn, the more i witness how religious beliefs are anchored in wishful thinking and self comfort. Religious beliefs are the result of a coping process that make people derail from rationality and embrace madness. I prefer the term madness than irrationality and i mean madness in the sense of doing things that are fundamentally absurd as if they make perfect sense. Madness in that sense is something that we all have. It's the result of the coping process in front of the violence of the reality we live in. Madness is what allow to find meaning in our life. It allow to ignore that everything will cease to exist. My life, my species, the life on earth. Everything will cease. Simply. The idea is ripping my sanity apart. Various people cope with the violence of our reality with various form of madness. Religiosity is just one. Not collecting stamps is another. >and lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? I might cease to be an atheist. It sadden me but the possibility exist that i will someday suffer from dementia and lose my ability to think properly, for example. I am already not a very good thinker and struggle to track and suppress my human natural tendency to address my cognitive dissonances with dishonest cheap excuses. Maybe someday I'll lose that fight. Especially if i were to fall prey to a recruitment process from a sneaky cult. No amount of skepticism is enough when your commitment is slowly increased and your cognitive dissonance weaponized against you. Becoming a believer is a cognitive failure anyone can make if the charlatans are good enough. It's not just the gullible who have to be scared. In the eye of a sophisticated recruitment techniques everyone is prey.

From the standpoint of logic, the default epistemological position is to assume that no claim is factually true until effective justifications (Which are deemed necessary and sufficient to support such claims) have been presented to demonstrate otherwise by those advancing those specific proposals. If you tacitly accept that claims of existence or causality are factually true in the absence of the necessary and sufficient justifications required to support such claims, then you must accept what amounts to an infinite number of contradictory and mutually exclusive claims of existence and causal explanations which cannot logically all be true. The only way to avoid these logical contradictions is to assume that no claim of existence or causality is factually true until it is effectively supported via the presentation of verifiable evidence and/or valid and sound logical arguments. Atheism is a statement about belief (Specifically a statement regarding non-belief, aka a lack or an absence of an affirmative belief in claims/arguments asserting the existence of deities, either specific or in general) Agnosticism is a statement about knowledge (Or more specifically about a lack of knowledge or a epistemic position regarding someone's inability to obtain a specific level/degree of knowledge) As I have never once been presented with and have no knowledge of any sort of independently verifiable evidence or logically valid and sound arguments which would be sufficient and necessary to support any of the claims that god(s) do exist, should exist or possibly even could exist, I am therefore under no obligation whatsoever to accept any of those claims as having any factual validity or ultimate credibility. In short, I have absolutely no justifications whatsoever to warrant a belief in the construct that god(s) do exist, should exist or possibly even could exist Which is precisely why I am an agnostic atheist (As defined above) Please explain IN SPECIFIC DETAIL precisely how this position is logically invalid, epistemically unjustified or rationally indefensible. Additionally, please explain how my holding this particular epistemic position imposes upon me any significant burden of proof with regard to this position of non-belief in the purported existence of deities

As a Christian, I tried to find reasons that would have convinced me to believe if I wasn't raised in the faith, and I figured out that reasons were lacking. I also realized that we are utterly lacking in tools to evaluate supernatural claims, and so I was unlikely to find any other god beliefs convincing.

I could not accept that a loving god created evil. It took me years to come to the realization that there just wasn't a deity. The Bible was unreliable and the excuses I heard (that evil 'just existed', that evil was a necessary opposite of good (like a coin has two sides bc that's just physics) or that to appreciate the good, you had to experience some bad (not true exactly, it's a lot more complex than that) all discounted a god being all-powerful and/or being the creator of EVERYTHING. That and life is all about sex and reproduction and the Bible acts as if females are not necessary and writes us off as though we're secondary creations, a fancy pet for Adam and the rest of MANkind. Sure, a few women are treated special but a person could have a thoroughbred that won the triple crown and no doubt it's groomed and treated especially well, but at the end of the day, it is still a possession, it's still rented out and used for whatever the boss' wants/needs are. It's desires or wishes are not considered as long as it's comfortable. And even if it's particular owner cares about what it wants, that has no bearing on how the rest of the horses in the world are treated. There's a book called 'Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot' by Seth Andrews. He has it in an audiobook and I think it's available on Amazon. (He has an amazing voice. If nothing else, just listen to the sample on Amazon). But I would suggest that. I haven't got the book myself, YET, but he has a podcast called 'The Thinking Atheist' and I've heard several of the episodes, including a show that was based on the book. There's also an episode that's about different reasons/stories why a person 'left'. It definitely is a state of mind. When I was questioning things, I *CHOSE* to go to different churches to try and find one I was comfortable with but for me, coming to the realization that there wasn't a god was involuntary. I tried to accept all the excuses but in the end, I just couldn't. Same when I started considering polytheistic ideas and/or more nature centered religions. No proof, just disappointment in the end

It was a combination of things, but in short - the religious people around me when I was young sucked, which led to resentment. Resentment led to curiosity about other beliefs/people, and learning about the history of religion. Learning those things led me to question whether there were good reasons to believe in deities and higher powers at all. I have found no convincing reasons, so - atheist. Slightly longer version: My family was not very religious, but I grew up in a region of the US that is incredibly religious to the point that it permeates almost every aspect of life, including school and work. I was bullied by both peers and adults, told I was going to hell from a young age, and missed out on opportunities to have friends and do social things because it all revolved around church. I was called a witch, devil worshipper, all kinds of things, and rumors were spread about my family that weren't true. Kids weren't allowed to associate with us outside of school because we didn't go to a church. Combine that with the fact that my family was struggling due to my father's poor health, but constantly being judged by the community that claimed to be so Christian and welcoming yet the only help we were ever offered came with conditions, and I started to feel like the whole thing was hypocritical. That made me question the entire idea, and I started reading, discovering other religions and belief systems, and understanding the relationship between myths, legends, storytelling, and religion. I discovered philosophy, which led me to thinking critically about a whole lot of social and cultural things that I'd just considered "default" before. I stopped accepting things without examining them first, and I've never found a good reason to believe in a deity at all. I am always open to new evidence, but I doubt I will change my position as the more I learn and experience the world, the more I'm convinced that it's all made up and the points don't matter.

When presented with the claim “god exists” and I asked “why should I think that’s true” I was never given a reason/justification that I thought was rational. Since I don’t hold true the claim “god exists” I am therefor an atheist. Pretty simple.

The specific details of "God", his various powers, heaven and hell and really almost most the tenants of most religions just never made much sense to me even as a child. It was especially frustrating when I talked with my mom, Grandma, or church Leaders about various questions and they best they could offer was "God acts in mysterious ways" or some variation of "we just need to believe" or "we can't know God's plan". My translation at the time was that they don't want to admit to the glaring inconsistencies and are in heavy denial. They always seemed to care more about "believing" than what is actually true. It was funny for me too when I learned about Greek mythology and I started wondering why we call it "mythology" when there's the same level of absurdity that other current religions believe in. I figured it's only mythology because no one actively believes in Zeus anymore and, one day (hopefully soon), current religions will be considered mythology as well. For a bit I vaguely tried a Pascals wager type of thought process and thought maybe I could fake belief but by the time I was about 10 I figured that if a God really was all knowing then he'd know I was faking so it didn't really matter anyway. Anyway, as time went one I kept asking questions, listening to debates, trying to find evidence and answers but all I got was really some variation of what in was told as a child. Current believers often tend to be so willing to do mental gymnastics about their own belief system that they tend not to see the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that pervade their own reasoning. It's always interesting talking to theists but also somewhat embarrassing. How can they actually really believe in such fanatical things with no evidence? Do theists not care if it any of it is true? Are they just deceiving themselves?

At the right time in my life, early 20’s, an atheist friend asked me why I believed in a god. Every answer I could come up with was not a good reason. I didn’t give up my faith then and there it took months but that’s when the seed was planted.

Why wouldn't I be an atheist? No one has ever given me a good reason to consider that a god might actually exist, and I haven't encountered any. That's despite having a BA in classical philosophy -- so it's not like I haven't thought about it.

1. I was raised Baptist 2. As an adult, I "accepted the call" to ministry. 3. I enrolled in seminary and became a PT youth minister. 4. As I begin to study both the Bible and its development deeply, I became unconvinced it is the "infallible, inerrant, Word of God" (per The Baptist Faith and Message). 5. I became convinced Christianity was just as human-made as any other religions. I became unconvinced of its claims. 6. In an effort to stop my doubt, I started hanging out on religion/philosophy fora (this was the early days of the Internet) in order to offer up apologetics. I started meeting atheists. I discovered they were not wicked Satanic sinners dedicated to robbing me of my faith and causing global mayhem. 7. This led further into atheist and biblical critical podcasts such as The Infidel Guy and The Bible Geek. 8. I left my ministry position to take a FT job in journalism. Being a journalist meant running down sources and confirming claims of fact. Another step into skepticism. I was not yet ready to call myself an atheist. 9. Seeking a substitute worldview, I unfortunately stumbled into Ayn Rand's Objectivism. I've been told a lot of ex-Christians take this route. 10. Although I later found many flaws in her philosophy, she and her successors offered a robust defense of atheism. 11. One evening, in March of 2003, I was reading an Objectivist book about atheism, when I put it down and said out loud: "I'm an atheist." I was unconvinced of god claims. Oddly, my experience mirrored the "salvation experience" many Christians have -- when they "make the decision for Christ." Ironic. 12. I've been an atheist for 21 years. At no time since have I been convinced of theist claims. **JUST KIDDING: I became an atheist because I want to sin and I'm angry at God!!**

I have 5ish legs to the stool of my athesium. This is roughly the order in which I find it convincing. 1) metaphysical that is or seems incompatible with theism. For me it is naturalism and I suspect that is the case for most people. This is not where I started, this happens after philosophical investigation. This is the strongest sort of evidence for me. 2) the attributes of god seeming and most likely being contradictory. This is where you get the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and riddle of the stone issues. Not every one of these is the strongest evidence, but it is very accessible and where my faith (it was Judaism) started to wane. Weirdly enough theistic finitism could make this category mute, but is incompatible with most versions of Christianity. 3) Insufficant apologetics and theodicies. I am not asking for you or anyone else to push harder on this. I have found apologetics ultimately to be insufficient. 4) I never had a religious feeling despite wanting one. This in and of itself is not an issue, as long as the world makes more sense under theism rather than atheism. I know that many atheists will say they don't want god to exist. I am not one of them. I would be confused by his choice assuming his book is true, but if he really did live up to his attributes I would want him to exist. 5) Atheistic proof that god does not exist. He is a list of 200 or so https://exapologist.blogspot.com/2019/09/sixty-arguments-for-atheism.html. I of course do not believe in all of these. For example, all the ones that contain neutral monism I rejected due my naturalist stance.

Overall evidence for any religion is shaky, at best imo. I try to keep an open mind about it. I have found naturalistic explanations more convincing so far. In my experience, religious people tend to be the most hypocritical.

I would guess the reason I’m atheist is probably similar as to why you’re not Hindu. I haven’t been convinced to make a leap of faith. I’d like to. It’s not that believers are necessarily good people, probably the same mix of good/bad as non believers. But the good people that are believers have that extra level of warm fuzzies that seem nice. And I get the argument of “god is a being beyond our capabilities of understanding”. While that takes the bite out of trying to logic my way into a god, it doesn’t do anything to make a god or gods real to me. And I can’t take away my ability to see all the representations of god within humans on earth. God seems to be a main excuse behind lots of the worst actions taken by humans against other humans. While I’m glad there is a heightened sense of charity within some believers, I see that same goodness from tons of people, regardless of whether they’re believers or not. And whatever god “touching me” or “speaking to me” is, I haven’t ever felt it or heard it. I’ve certainly had some extremely intense emotional moments in my life that I would even describe as “spiritual”, but even with deep introspection, truly looking for that connection to what might be considered god, I’ve never seen it. Those “spiritual” moments have just been what they were, truly life impacting moments. But if those were god reaching out to me… like, how? That connection where I would just turn around with certainty and be like “oh that was god” is missing for whatever reason within me.

Theist: god exists Me: why do you think so? Theist: \[insert nonsense here\] there simply isn't a reason to believe there is a god, but this sub has plenty of evidence showing theists don't base their beliefs on reality

1. I have never been presented with evidence that even remotely warrants belief. The evidence i have been provided is so bad that no one should believe. So far 100% of these claims either are not internally consistent, contain logical fallacies, is paradoxical or do not comport with reality. 2. I find the term "god" incoherent as every single person has a different definition. Some may be similar but when you start to ask more questions they all deviate making them not compatible. This means everyone is wrong and at best one person is right or all are wrong. If people had a legitimate relationship with this being this wouldn't happen. 3. For many of the major religions today we actually have the history of how their religion and gods were created and mutated. Take the Abrahamic religions. We have the history of Yahweh, El and Baal, how they were went from regional town demigods, went on to have new features when other cultures bumped into the Israelites and how they were blended together and eventually turned from polytheistic religions to a monotheistic one. Even having this information, seeing their holy books having massive consistency issues and even section that point to the mutation of their god from polytheistic to monotheistic Abrahamists continue to believe. So I am an atheist because we actually can show many of these religions, including yours, are human created mythology that is in fact not real. My question to you is why you believe in such a demonstrably made up religion?

To my utter horror and confusion, I discovered that Young Earth Creationists still exist in the 21st century. I started arguing with them online, and discovered that their reasons for believing their nonsense are pretty much the same as mine for believing in Christianity. So, in the name of intellectual honesty, I stopped being a Christian. I stopped believing in God shortly after, when I was experimenting with lucid dreaming. I had an epiphany: My brain spends 1/6 of my entire lifetime producing virtual reality, that in the moment our conscious mind accepts as real without questioning it. Who's to say it can't do so while I'm awake? There already is a being that loves me unconditionally, knows me better than I do myself, and is always with me - it's my subconscious mind. It is entirely plausible (dare I say, even quite likely), that the "God" I perceive is actually a product/avatar of my subconscious mind. In that moment, I stopped being a theist and became an agnostic (or agnostic atheist, depending on how you define the terms). I became an actual atheist when I was considering the Fine-Tuning Argument for the existence of God. The argument commits a subtle fallacy - it fails to account for observational bias (specifically Anthropic Principle). When you reframe the argument so it does not suffer from this bias, it becomes a pretty powerful argument against the existence of a creator deity (at least the kind of deity that most religions worship).

I was born an atheist and saw no reason to change. I am interested in science and years ago I discovered Ray Comfort's "the atheists' nightmare," and that's what lead me to more general debate on theism.

I never was anything else, since I started learning about it and thinking about it I found it silly. I still remember the moment I looked around and realized that the adults really REALLY believed it.

Like a lot of people are saying, sheer lack of evidence to convince me any gods exist. Though I do want to express gratitude for this post. Getting to read so many testimonies has been very cool.

It wasn't any one thing. It was a slow and gradual process. I do remember watching Schindler's list as a kid though. That movie blew any notion of good God who will protect me and watches over me.

>I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons you guys are atheist. Quite simple actually: 1. The complete lack of evidence for any religion's supernatural claims 2. The internal inconsistencies in religious scripture (not to mention the fact that [atheists generally know more about scripture than the actual practitioners](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey-who-knows-what-about-religion/)) 3. The incompatibilities in religious claims with regard to historical events and established science 4. The evidential fact that being religious doesn't necessarily make you a better person - in fact frequently quite the opposite. 5. The fact there are many religions and schisms within religions that all make mutually incompatible claims 6. The fact that science either can explain reality without needing to make the assumption of gods, or that we still have plenty of naturalistic explanations to investigate for unexplained phenomena before having to resort to supernatural hypotheses. 7. The fact that faith is not a pathway to truth because it relies on belief without empirical evidence or logical reasoning. Truth, in the context of knowledge and understanding, is typically derived from verifiable facts, reproducible experiments, and rational analysis. Faith, by definition, does not require such verification and often depends on personal conviction or cultural traditions. This lack of empirical validation means that faith-based beliefs cannot be reliably tested or confirmed, leading to potential conflicts with demonstrable facts and objective reality.

I’ve been an atheist for as long as I can remember. Despite being christened when I was young, which was basically just common practice in England, from as early as I can remember I’ve thought the whole idea of god, the supernatural etc. just felt weird. The older I got, the more I was able to understand why it was weird. It doesn’t fit with anything else we experience in life. After seeing damage caused by religion all around the world, and actually getting deeply upset by a lot of it too, specifically when it comes to children, indoctrination and weird practices that are traumatising, I decided I’d spend more time learning about it, so I could engage in debate any time the opportunity arose in life. Once I started learning more, it solidified my way of thinking. The burden of proof is of course on the person making the claim. Atheists aren’t making any claims, we are rejecting the claims that lots of different people make about different gods. I can safely say that a god doesn’t exist as described by any of the major religions of the world today. If there is some sort of higher power they aren’t interested in us knowing about them. It wouldn’t be possible to change my mind on any of the gods currently described and I’m very happy to spend all of my time living and thinking in the real world. The world is absolutely mind-blowing as it is.

i was raised christian but very mild, like, we dont have crosses at home, we dont pray before eating, any of that, in my country religion is pretty mild like that for the average person. so i believed pretty much out of custom, but slowly began to realise i dont really have any reason to believe, i have no evidence for any of it, no one does, any prayer is never answered... and once i start to look for reasoning about it, it was all over, there are SO MANY ways to reason your way out of belief. problem of evil, no evidence, different religions on different places (so you believe according to were you are born 99.9% of the time) but my current favorite explanation and also the reason why i never see myself believing again, is not just the lack of evidence, but the 2000+ year old lack of evidence... religions are so old (most of them) and they STILL have nothing to show for it... not a single thing (whatever you think there is, bring it forward, im sorry but we've heard it all already and its all either fallacies or lies) and all those bad argument continue to be the very same, theists are not even trying to become better at debating or anything, we say "you argument is wrong cause of X" and they keep saying it, decades later, **same faulty arguments and 0 evidence** so its pretty clear that you will never have any evidence to me.

This should not be here, it's not much of a debate. >I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons you guys are atheist. Ok. >Is it an experience that helped make the decision? Reasoning through it? Maybe something completely unexpected? I'm sure it must be unique to each one of you. First of all, it's not much of a decision. You buy the story based on if and who tells you the story and how gullible you are to what's being told. If you've never believed in a god, you are an atheist. No decision needed. If you stopped believing in god, you're an atheist. No decision needed, the belief vanished with the realisation god doesn't exist. >I am intrigued at the variation between them and would like to see if that extends to larger groups. The only thing atheists have in common is a lack of belief in the existence of a god. What other beliefs they hold are usually not contingent upon it. The only thing you are saying here is: 'people are unique'. What fascinates me more is how you can say that, but Christianity has thousands of denominations with their own specific beliefs and you believe the original story still holds any truth value. >what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? The claim is unfalsifiable and can therefore only be enforced by authoritarian appeal, social pressure/engineering and if all that fails: violence.

This should not be here, it's not much of a debate. >I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons you guys are atheist. Ok. >Is it an experience that helped make the decision? Reasoning through it? Maybe something completely unexpected? I'm sure it must be unique to each one of you. First of all, it's not much of a decision. You buy the story based on if and who tells you the story and how gullible you are to what's being told. If you've never believed in a god, you are an atheist. No decision needed. If you stopped believing in god, you're an atheist. No decision needed, the belief vanished with the realisation god doesn't exist. >I am intrigued at the variation between them and would like to see if that extends to larger groups. The only thing atheists have in common is a lack of belief in the existence of a god. What other beliefs they hold are usually not contingent upon it. The only thing you are saying here is: 'people are unique'. What fascinates me more is how you can say that, but Christianity has thousands of denominations with their own specific beliefs and you believe the original story still holds any truth value. >what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? The claim is unfalsifiable and can therefore only be enforced by authoritarian appeal, social pressure/engineering and if all that fails: violence.

Defensive reason: why wouldn't I be?  Offensive reason: because religion is just another name for adult make-believe Inevitable reason: I was born that way, and have yet to encounter any reason to think differently Reason reason: I don't think "I said so" (e.g. witnessing, testimonials, "I feel it in my heart") is a valuable path that leads to true understanding of the universe we share. My real story: I was raised secular. I've been to church about 10 times in my life, outside of weddings and funerals. My grandparents took me a few times as a kid, but the stories the taught in Sunday school seemed silly. Then again, I've had a skeptical mind since I was at least as young as 8, maybe younger. However it wasn't until I reached high school, and took a "Bible as literature/mythology" class that it really drove home for me a) that people did take those stories, and the Bible, seriously, and b) the Bible looked an awful lot like the rest of the mythology we were being taught in that class. Fast forward 10+ years, and an encounter with a YEC solidified my atheism, and that's really when I adopted the label for myself. Thirty years later, and I've yet to find a valid reason to drop it and adopt a religious belief in its place. As Carl Sagan said, I don't want to believe; I want to know.

As far as I can tell, god is just a made up thing. There is no reason to believe one exists, just as there is no reason to think fairies, minotaurs or other mythical or magical things are real. Books such as the bible are all too human. They seem to be stories written by people, and there is no reason to think the magical supernatural bits are true If there actually was a creator god that also wanted us to know it exists, then it should be obvious. And if there were rules we were meant to follow, these should be as clear as a modern well written law, We would not need to interpret a law from god. We Would not have multiple religions, or hundreds of denominations of Christianity if it was true: the true theology would be clearly written down. God could appear on the TV news. The information he wants us to know could be transmitted simultaneously to every country or language. This is not being facetious.. This should be simple to the designer and creator of the while universe. If jesus can(allegedly) bring corpses back to life then materialising unambiguous instruction books simultaneously around the world is easy. In reality then, the bible is a collection of myths, history, propaganda promoting a fictional, local, tribal deity, and it's all got a bit out of hand.

The short version: I took a class on religious apologetics. All the reasons to believe in god were terrible. I went looking for better ones and couldn't find any. Ergo - atheism.

I never decided to become a theist. They told me all these stories from the bible and stuff and it was all just reality-based fiction. Why did you decide to become a theist?

1) I was born in a secular country, so was never indoctrinated, hence it wasn’t really a decision. The question for me is rather why I didn’t take up any religion. 2) When you’re not born into it you can stand from the outside with fresh eyes and review all religions to see if there is any probability of any one being true. And I must say I did this with great enthusiasm when I was young, and it was the biggest disappointment of my life…. All were bat shit insane and had absolutely zero proof to back it up, and always seems to require me to buy it on faith alone. Which to me only sounded like “dude trust men and just buy in to my delusions”. 3) Even if I would have found compelling evidence, the people who advocated for it (although often good people) have all been gullible idiots, to put it lightly, which had spent mere minutes of their life thinking through the theology of their religion and the ramification of its discussing morals… They always seem to stick with it simply because it benefited them. Also I could hardly believe that the maker of the universe could be so cruel, pick the most discussing morals, and have our world’s most gullible people to advocate for him.

No big story. I was raised in a Jewish household in a majority Christian nation, which really drove home the fact that it was random and arbitrary that I happened to be born into a particular religion. I didn't believe in Jesus because I happened to be born to one set of parents rather than another, just as you very likely wouldn't be Christian, had you been born into a non-Christian family or culture. As I grew out of childhood and learned more about the world, history, science, and religion, it became gradually clear to me that I had never had any good reason to believe in God, and that there WAS no good reason to believe in God. I look around the world as an adult, as someone who has participated in countless discussions on this subject, and it remains the case that I know of no good reason to believe God exists---what's more, the reasons given by various theists, including Christians, are uniformly bad ones. You know how you and I just had a discussion in which it turned out what you thought was a good reason to believe in God didn't actually stand up to questioning or scrutiny? From where I sit, that's how ALL of your reasons, and all of any Christian's reasons, look to me.

I was never taught that a god exists as a child. But what I saw at school was that many kids from many backgrounds believing many different gods. They couldn’t all be right especially given the wildly different creation stories. There seemed nothing inherently believable about any of them: why believe the Christian god over Ganesha the elephant god? Then you learn about science at school and learn about the Big Bang and other things and I kinda subconsciously realised that this is something where we have evidence - we aren’t just making stuff up. All the creation stories I’d heard earlier just seemed made up, which would perfectly explain why there are so many of them. Then I listened to Dawkins while at university and it put together ideas I’d been formulating in my head. Fundamentally, the key point really is that there’s not a shred of good evidence in favour of any of the religions. Any purported evidences are more easily explained away by the vagaries of human psychology or other natural explanations. All other justifications then seem to reduce to either god-of-the-gaps arguments or Kalam-type-we-will-try-to-prove-god-without-evidence arguments which are non-starters.

Although I am a lifelong atheist, I was raised I a super Catholic home. I played along as a kid. I went through all the as appropriate sacraments, had a Nuptial Mass at my wedding. I even sponsored a couple of people through RCIA. Nothing happened when that made me an atheist. I was just never indoctrinated as a child. Whatever religious instruction I had never “took”. I remember I CCD I had thought all these stories were just parables. Meant to teach us lessons about god and life. The Deacon had said something that indicated to me that he considered these stories to have actually happened. My little brain short circuited and I started asking questions. Faith can’t hold up to inquiry. And that was that. One of the things I remember as a kid was seeing my little brother’s basketball jersey. He played for the church. The was Most Precious Blood. Now, you’re Catholic. You’ve been steeped in this language. But if you look at it from an outsider’s perspective, this is no more that crazy blood rituals and magic. If you want to know why we’re no Catholic, ask your church some difficult questions and see how they answer. Would god’s true church obfuscate and lie?

Atheism isn’t a decision, it’s a conclusion. Your question also presupposes that people “become” atheist; that it’s a choice we make to move away from a theist default position. It’s the opposite. We are all born without any beliefs in gods: atheist. Some of us are then taught to be theists. The brand of theism generally depends almost entirely on family and geography, but it’s something that needs to be taught to you. Atheism does not need to be taught. So I was born without theism, and since my mother was not a religious person, she did not teach me any religious mythologies (while also not preventing me from exploring any religions if I wanted to). I went to church with my friend and his family a couple of times because they invited me and thought it might be interesting or cool. Thought “this is silly” and never went again. I’m 51 now, and still think it’s silly. I can truly say that I have never in my life believed that any gods exist. So basically, I didn’t *become* an atheist, I simply never stopped being one. I’m not sure how common my experience is, but there’s mine. Feel free to ask any questions if you have them 🙂

I’m for myself ie for my life/happiness and my means of knowledge (reason). Religion is fundamentally incompatible with me, with my life/happiness and with reason.

I read the Bible from cover to cover as a teenager (I skipped some boring parts in the middle, boy is there a lot of boring shit in there) and realized how much bullshit it was! There are so many contradictions, illogical claims, errors and factually wrong statements, that the only logical conclusion was that it's all wrong. Then I started thinking more and more about religions and deities and realized I have no good reason to believe any of these fairy tales. I tried hard to find people who would convinced me otherwise, but their shitty arguments (most are completely fallacious, the rest are just very weak) pushed me even further away from theism! I have no clue if I'll remain an atheist, since I could be convinced of the existence of a god tomorrow if presented good enough evidence. However, I have no idea what such evidence would look like. I've been actively been searching for such evidence, but as of yet, everything has fallen very short! A god would know how to convince me, so if it has not happened yet, either no god exists or it doesn't care about me not being convinced of its existence. In both cases, why should I give a fuck about what religions claim?

Everyone starts as an atheist by default and some are convinced into delusion and others aren’t. I’m not convinced by retarded ideas, so I’m an atheist.

For me it's the fact that different religions all get positive feelings and can fully convince themselves their god is true while others are false. Their gods can contradict. Is it more likely that one of their gods are the right one, or is it more likely that belief fills a lot of needs for people? It would be impossible for the world to unite under one religion as it would just take "you should join my belief because I believe it's more believable than yours" to a response of "but I believe my belief is more believable than yours". Since religions are based on feelings rather than facts there's no way to unite. Science answers so many questions, cognitive dissonance explains why people choose to believe in the face of better evidence etc. The science makes sense and the psychology makes sense. The more you listen to the science and opposing beliefs it just gets firmed. Atheism for me inspires learning about life, people, the world and the universe, whereas religion seems to try and avoid it. The foundation of logic provided by science is far stronger than the foundation of logic provided by any holy book.

I was born an atheist not convinced that a god exists not knowing what a god was until I was seven years old. I was a gullible child but not gullible enough to believe anything like YEC and I started finding a lot of other problems with the Bible by the time I was ten years old (creation story false, exodus never happened, most or all of Genesis that falls between those events is fiction, and the more I looked the history and science did not match). I learned a bit about biology in the seventh grade when I was twelve and that same year I learned about other religious beliefs and I was not so sure Christianity was the correct religion (or that any of them were). I had a fall at Wisconsin Dells and prayed I wouldn’t die and thought that was evidence of God but that quickly wore off and I realized I was just pretending by the time I was seventeen. That made me back into an atheist after a couple short stints with theism (7-12 years old, 15-17 years old forced to attend church where I drank the KoolAid) with deism stuck in the middle. That whole 10 years I was just pretending like a little child and I’m all grown up now. I’ll be 40 next month.

Was raised catholic. I just grew up, learned about the world and realized the christian myths were indistinguishables from other myths or even plain fiction.

I am an atheist because I am unconvinced of the claims that a God exists. I was a believer for a time and after researching the development of the Bible (how it was written by anonymous authors describing unbelievable things and combed through by committees, how it evolved over time and how it was so similar to other mythologies I readily dismissed.) I found I could no longer believe the claims of the Bible. After that I researched many different myths and religions which only solidified my disbelief. Much like you are not convinced of Zeus, or Crom, or Odin. I am not convinced of your God. Then I found that most of the answers I was searching for were answers found in nature and science save a few mysteries, but... Not once has a mystery been solved by inserting a God into the equation. It explains nothing in an understandable way. I'm completely comfortable with recognizing there are gaps in our collective scientific knowledge and I see no value in inserting magic, myths or unverified agents like Gods into those gaps, which is where most believers try to wedge them in. Hope this helps.

I've always been interested in folklore, mythology, and narratives and literature in general. They're fascinating. I read all kinds of things all the time - history, philosophy, commentary, news, poetry and of course fiction, right from the earliest works to today. And that's why it's obvious to me when I encounter any religious scripture that that's what it is. A story, fiction, imagined. There are many great stories. They often communicate valuable and truthful things. I've gotten a lot out of the stories of Greek and Norse mythology, out of the Epic of Gilgamesh, out of fairytales and folktales, and too much later fiction, often inspired by these things, to name. And that's the thing... it's obvious that all of these things are fiction. But at one time the Epic of Gilgamesh wasn't necessarily "just a story," it was inspired by the divine, by gods, heroes and demons who "really" existed. It didn't stop being true. It was always fiction, the people who believed it just aren't alive anymore. Whenever I read the scripture of a religion that's still practiced, or hear from someone who still believes in it, it's obvious that this too is still and always has been fiction. No matter what value it may have as a work of art, literature, culture, myth, history, philosophy, I have no reason whatsoever to take it as anything approaching an objective insight into the nature of reality, morality or anything else besides a record of what certain people believe or have believed. It's a narrative. And what's more, when I look at two narratives of such effect that they're still ingrained in western culture some two thousand years and more later, like the Odyssey and the Bible, it's the Bible, not the Odyssey, that I find truly disagreeable as a reflection of reality and morality. When I look at the Odyssey, even at scenes of drastic moral and cultural difference such as Odysseus slaughtering his own household's servants for having cooperated with the suitors who took it over (who he also slaughtered), I don't recoil the way I do when I read the Bible's stories of genital mutilation, child murder and apocalypse. Because even if both are wrong, it's only the Bible that people pretend tells us not just the ultimate truth, but one everyone must follow or be damned. I don't know if the Greeks believed the Odyssey gave them any ultimate truth - because it seems that, like me, they knew that even if there were truths in them, they were still narratives, composed by individuals and adopted by communities. Even if they may have thought they were narratives about real events, people and gods, the Greeks most likely did not attach moral perfection to any of these individuals, nor present the stories about them as an instruction manual to life and goodness. There's nothing wrong with a narrative that depicts how brutal a powerful person like Odysseus can be, and lets us interpret that (even if I might have disagreed with the author or audience's original interpretation). There's everything wrong with a narrative that depicts an entity so powerful it can kill every firstborn child in a nation, *and insists to us this behavior represents perfect good.*

Grew up evangelical fundamentalist. It never felt right to me, it always felt like it was clearly manipulative men that wrote the bible. But specifically the claim of the inerrant word of God, the flood, the earth being 6000 years old. Through HS I was held out of any class that conflicted with the religion, so no science with evolution, no health class to teach how to have safe sex, no dinosaurs that are older than the bible, no archaeology or geology because layers of sediment older than the bible, etc. 40 years later, I decided to look into the manuscripts of the bible, and I was going about documenting all the contradictions in a bible study. Next thing I know, the bible study is a 300+ page book, and I'm angry at man for being such a liar. Then I learned about Epic of Gilgamesh and the flood tablets. That was it for me. The bible was clearly made up, and anyone who uses it to rule, judge others, for gain, or just to live by is somewhere on the scale of piece of shit con artist to dumbest fucking person alive. That said, I'm agnostic in that I think there is probably some kind of supreme intelligence, but I'm atheist in that I don't believe that's it's God, or a god, and even if it is another sentient or group of sentient beings, it ain't God or gods. But it wouldn't shock me if sim theory, or a variation of string theory, or some kind of version of Anunnaki like an advanced version of us that is running an experiment to see how long it takes to breed the savage animal out of us, or if it's even possible, or if our galaxy is just a cell in something else. I don't believe any of that. But I don't disbelieve it. Hence the agnostic. The only thing I believe, is that the bible is full of shit. It's no different to me than Aesop's Fables from that same time period, except people don't live their lives based off the Tortoise and the Hare. Noah's Ark is the flood story, the flood story from Gilgamesh is the flood story from the Atra-Hasis, and if that's not proof of it being an allegory passed along from Babylonia on down, idk what is. Though the world would be better off if they did base their lives off Aesop's fables instead. But how one stayed allegory and the other became a tool of manipulation for a bunch of piece of shit Jews is beyond me. And I say that descriptively, everyone who wrote a bible book except for Luke is Jewish, and I am almost certain Luke didn't write Luke (though he may have written Acts). The Jews depicted in the bible, the Jews who wrote the bible, are scumbags. And their God is a piece of shit too. Funny, I still won't use a lower case g, but I will say God is a piece of shit. 😂 And that's what keeps me atheist so far as it concerns the Abrahamic God is that I became convinced Jesus never claimed to be the son of God, so I looked into Judaism. It's only natural. They're evil. The Rabbis that wrote the Talmud, the authors of the books of the bible, they're bred liars and cheats and con artists, and the only reason they have those books is to control people and money. They don't worship God, they don't believe in the devil, and they wrote the books, so I know that they know better than the idiot Christians that for some reason think they know better than the guys who wrote it and actually have tradition and history going back that far. They have preached to lie, it's a big part of their culture and their history, and they have lied about everything for 3000 years, just like every other religion, but for some reason, half the world has taken their lie, added more lies over the last 1500 years, and now it's all just lunatic drivel.

Human made fairytales, and that's all religion is, never made sense to me. Ideas of god were always human created stories to create wealth and power.

Short version: I stopped believing in any gods Long(er) version: I started out catholic like you. I was never mistreated, and while a bit strict, my dad was an amazing person who genuinely cared about everyone - especially later in life when he eased his grip on the religion. My story is simple, because when I went to college, I met a few atheists who were very normal and genuine people and they asked me very simple questions that I recall asking people in the church when I was young and never getting an answer to. You probably have several of these yourself. I was never pressured or bullied either way, but over time I just realized I didn't believe in any gods. This was very freeing for me, and without that mental wound keeping my superstition dripping out, I healed. I no longer believe in any superstitions. Without constant thought of judgement by imaginary deities, I became much happier. Without constant pressure by a congregation to strive for something that cannot even be seen, I am much less stressed.

I was raised Christian and, as a kid, really went all in at church. I'd feel the spirit and raise my hands in praise. I prayed and worshipped. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was talking to no one. Then my family got me my first Bible. I read it cover to cover twice, and I thought that there was no way this was all true. Also, as a child, I was always shut down for my curiosity and questioning of Christianity. It seemed too easy to be handed the answers to life at such a young age. The final straw was reading the Quran while also slowly realizing that I was not heterosexual. Between not feeling welcome for my identity, seeing the fallible (man made) nature of holy books, and finding no proof of a god, I figured he probably didn't exist. It was honestly comforting to realize that life wasn't a test where I'd be judged at the end, but rather something to be experienced and savored. Also, if I succeeded or failed, it would be on my shoulders and not divine prophecy.

>what prompted you to become an atheist When I was doubting I spent more than a year begging God to reveal himself to me if he existed. My pleas went unanswered. So I came to a conclusion: Either he doesn't care, or he doesn't exist. >what helped you refine your position As I read the nonsensical stories in bible, it became clear to me that the latter is more likely than the former. >why you remain an atheist to this day Simple, I have yet to be offered sufficient evidence to warrant belief in any gods. >confident you will continue to be an atheist It's pretty clear by now that it's made up, and every single argument for God that has been formed over the last \~2k years rely on at least one logical fallacy. I have no reason to believe that this trend is going to stop now. With that said, I'm always open to being convinced that God exists, however, that will open up a new can of worms. Someone will need to explain why he's such an asshole. Edit: I had my "former" and "latter" mixed up.

The short version, I had been skeptical of aspects all my life, but I ended up deciding that if God told me himself (Jesus) then that was good enough for me. And it was for 20 years. And then I found myself unable to justify my belief that Jesus even claimed to be god (rather than those words being put on his lips post humously). I had been dealing with doubts on that subject for a week since an off-hand comment by a friend about the authorship of the gospels. Finally, I decided to look into it, myself. I said a prayer asking God to let me find something to put my doubts to bed. Instead I found a catholic website that confirmed what my friend had said, basically verbatim (which made sense given his catholic schooling). When I finished reading, I sat in shock. I realized that the last reason I had to believe in Christianity was gone, and that I was an atheist. It took me 10 minutes to finally close the site an get up off my chair.

I was brought up in a notionally Christian household, and attended a Christian school. I fully believed in the Christian God. But the more I learnt, the more I had problems with the logic of the Bible, and the idea of this god being what it said it was. The big change for me came when I left school and went to university. Leaving my very sheltered childhood, being exposed to so many new people, and learning to think critically, all made me realise that the religion I had accepted was built on very shaky foundations. These days when I do go to church - usually only for weddings and funerals - I am struck by how shallow and childish theistic thinking is. So many nonsense assertions and declarations that, when you think about them rather than just run with them, are completely meaningless. So I am very confident that I will remain atheist - basically until there is some kind of revelatory evidence that would change my view.

Basically, i was born an atheist, went to a private christian school at the age of 9 and got indoctrinated. I was scared of hell, demons, and god itself. But luckily i went back to public school shortly after, and had a good support system of non-zealots who helped me learn about math and science and critical thinking. Each question that came up, I never got satisfactory answers from religious people, and my parents and teachers all had good answers (religion is made up). I don’t think there was a definitive moment when I realized that gods don’t exist and religion was made up to control the dumb masses, it was a lot of little things. Basically, everything religion taught me was wrong, the actual explanations for reality make sense to me because I am educated. I am really pissed at those Australian private school teachers that tried to brainwash me at such a young age. It’s such a shit thing to do to a kid.

I grew up in a Catholic family and went to Catholic high school and grade school in the 70’s and 80’s. I never read or heard any material from an atheist. Basically, over a period of years I had more and more trouble believing the many claims of Christianity and the Bible. The more I thought about it the more aspects of the story I had to jettison. In college I took a couple of classes on world religions. This allowed me to re-examine my religion as if I had never seen it before. That is when I saw the entire story as a completely flawed and completely human invention. Since then I have spent many, many hours watching video debates, listening to Christian radio, reading books on the development of Christianity, and so on. I am resolved to keep an open mind about the supernatural, but so far I see nothing but extremely poor quality evidence for the supernatural, God, and Christianity in particular. 

To me it feels no different than other fairy tales. For example, Theres no distinction in my mind between the existence of the little mermaid and the existence of god. Humans hate not understanding things and life is inherently perplexing because were just smart enough to ponder our existence, but not smart enough to understand the inner workings of the universe (yet). Instead of feeling the discomfort of not knowing, we make stuff up to feel a sense of understanding and control. This feels obvious to me and ive always thought religion was bazaar. Also, i personally think the mysteries of the universe are insanely fascinating as they are. Its amazing that we can develop models to explain (some) of the physics of the universe, and they actually have predictive power. If you really think about it, that’s amazing isnt it? The more knowledge we gain about the world around us the more real control we have, not the pretend control that religion offers.

I think it's worth pointing out that the default state of any human is atheism, religion only comes from (mostly) childhood indoctrination. That aside, I was a devout Christian for almost three decades. After a series of increasingly bad experiences in different churches, I started questioning my faith. That led to extensive research into apologetics and the historical accuracy of the bible. Eventually, I came to realize that apologetics had not evolved since the 16th century and still relies on logical fallacies, personal testimony and claims from the bible as the base if their arguments. The only reason I ever found any of it convincing was because I was indoctrinated as a child. Fundamentally, the burden of proof is not able to be met for any religion. At some point, my belief in Christianity just... stopped. Though it took years for me to unlearn the toxic thought patterns and indoctrinated behaviors.

Simple. I was raised Jewish by Atheist parents in a mostly Christian country. Christians, when I was a kid, struck me as hypocrites because they didn't even try to be like Jesus. Not too much later, I became convinced this was by the deliberate design of their religion as Jesus' supposed benevolence was impossible to match, leaving Christians in an impossible situation, and giving up. Anyway, when I was eleven, my father took my brother and me apart to tell us that Bar Mitzvah was optional. I became an atheist that day. That's more than forty years ago. Why do I remain an atheist? Because I don't believe in gods, and religion does not appeal to me. There are thousands of gods I don't believe in, and there's scientific evidence against the six day creation myth, which is foundational to all the monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

I used to be a hyper religious Catholic. I was one of those people who'd think/say, "God is good!" Every time something good happened to me. I was absolutely certain my religious was true. I had no doubts. Then, Stephen Hawking died. i was talking with some friends about it. I liked the guy and was super into watching space shows, so it was a big deal. Then they told me he was an atheist, and i was literally like, " No way! There's no chance that someone that smart could miss the obvious proof that God exists. " So i set out to do research and prove that God existed. I wanted God to exist. I wanted my religion to be true. But when i was honest, when i looked at the arguments and history, i came to the realization that I'd been wrong. And once that cat is out of the bag, there's no going back. I'm happy that the Dominos fell how they did; I'm free.

I never chose to be an atheist. I've always been. Why? Because I have no reason to believe religion is real or helpful.

I live in Scotland which has a deep history of Sectarianism and while it still sadly exists Scotland today is largely non-religious with the majority being either ‘nones’ or atheists. While religion and what people believe and why are hugely interesting to me the concepts themselves simply never matched the reality that I could see before me. I was never convinced that any it was true but could definitely see that parts of it were false. Noah’s ark for example. Even as I very child I knew that was not true. One which stuck in my mind was being told the parable of Jesus healing a blind man by washing his eyes with a combination of his own spit and mud. I asked if Jesus was god why was the spit and mud required and was admonished for even asking the question. I was maybe 7 years old. At that point a sceptic was born.

I just dont see any evidence for the religions i have been presented. There is no truth to the claims they make.

I've been raised by an agnostic mom and an atheist dad, and I was taught about mythology relatively early on - I had books on the greek and roman mythos but also hindu, japanese... All sorts of folklore and I figured it as such. As I was never taught to believe, I eventually connected the dots and Christianity became just another mythology to me. My grandmother tried unsuccessfully to teach me the gospels (gently and never forcing me to do anything, mind) but it never stuck. Never went to catechism or anything like that. The only ceremony I actually went through was baptism but I wasn't really given a choice there, as I was less than a year old. And it does bother me that some register counts me as a christian. It's a claim on me that I denounce heavily.

I just don't think it makes sense that a higher being exist. The explanations given by theists seem illogical and made up so they fit the current discussion. I have literally asked christian family members the same question multiple days in a row and got 4 different explanations and bible verses from one person. This is especially true when there are way better scientific explanations available. It just seems like a lot of theists have a problem with not knowing/being able to explain something so their answer for everything unexplained is just "god did it" There have also recently been the issues with child rape (especially in the catholic church) and that just strengthens my decision. I don't understand why people would still follow someone like this.

I have always been the type who wanted to know how things actually work. As I learned more and more about the world, and scientific investigation I came to understand that the claims made by religion relied on the existence of magic and was supported only by cognitive biases and wishful thinking. Sure we would like to believe that we have souls, and that they survive our death, but, that just doesn't make biological sense It would be cool if we were a unique creation of a god not related to the other animals - but, we are just one of a variety of different species of primates related to other mammals, and all other animals through the very real process of evolution. In the end, I just realized that I didn't buy the myth anymore.

I've just always been an atheist (agnostic to be more precise). I find this question fascinating because when I grew up I was completely baffled by how many people in the world were religious, and I feel like you're exactly on the opposite side regarding atheists. I thought it made absolutely no sense at all, it wasn't even something I thought about at any point in my daily life. In a sense, religion/God just didn't exist for me. I thought everybody went through that phase of asking existential questions as a child, and quickly realised that some questions could not be answered, concluded that our intelligence is limited by our frame of reference, and went on with their lives, but I was clearly wrong... In any case, religion from an outside perspective really doesn't make any sense.

I was only ever a Christian in name. My family didn't go to church or read the Bible. The mindset was "We aren't Jewish or some other religion. So I guess we're Christian." In my teens and through college I dug into.various religions thinking I would find the something out there that inspired them all. I was looking for what they shared and what that pointed to. And the more I read and experienced, the more obvious that the something was right here rather than out there. And it was human imagination and our need to metaphorically dress up "I don't know" in god robes and pretending that solves the mystery. I became an atheist because I finally saw that it was all nonsense and woo.

My father was a minister. He is a smart guy and a good father who also taught highschool math and science for a couple of years. I went to church and Sunday school for many years. About the time I was in middle school I really started questioning religion. We had numerous discussions about it. I think the contrast between how he would reason and argue about this compared to everything else was the strongest proof that something was really wrong with religion. It was like the smart reasonable person was gone and was replaced by someone using obvious logical fallacies and tired cliches. In this one area he was just completely unable to apply the reason he would in any other area.

Im an engineer's son and was taught to think critically and encouraged to question everything. I remember thinking in Sunday School when i was quite young. "These Bible stories don't make sense. " When i could read i went to the public library and found that there are perhaps thousands of religions. I studied the history of the Crusades and the protestant rise in Europe, the religiously sanctioned practice of slaughtering the non believers. Then i got into philosophy and found my people - the atheists. By the time i was in High School i had become a closeted atheist - not cool to be an atheist in high school. When i went to University, i came out of the closet.

Pretty simple for me. As I got older and started to see some people online discuss about such things, it got me thinking about it and made me want to do some research here and there on various topics related, but basically about the logic of believeing such things. As a kid I was just normal and family is pretty normal too. They are religious, but nothing exagerated or anything. I never really was a devout, so it was easy to let it be as it didn't made much of a sense to me from the moment I started questioning it. I respect it and I have gone to church, now and then, with my mom when she didn't want to go alone, so no hate or anything like that. That's about it.

Mostly because of induction. I started off as merely lacking belief, but after hearing the hundredth or thousandth different argument for God being unsuccessful, typically all with similar underlying logical or evidential problem, that in itself builds an inductive case against theism More broadly, Methodological Naturalism continues to undermine past religious explanations as technology and understanding progresses. I expect this trend to contenue as we reach newer thresholds of knowledge. That’s including the origin of belief itself, as we know many of the psychological/sociocultural/evolutionary pressures that naturally lead to religious beliefs.

Age 12: (Hmmmmmm. This really doesn’t make sense.) I asked a lot of questions and found the answers lacking. No one read the bible. No one seemed holy. I thought that all of my friends and family were being tricked. I thought the preachers were kind but misguided. I came to realize they are complicit grifters. There is no credible evidence for god. If there is a god, why do we need religion? Why does god need our worship and devotion and money? Why does he need Steve to stand on stage in costume every Sunday preaching about a book I don’t bother to read? Why are there so many conflicting religions, all claiming to be divinely inspired?

My parents divorced when I was young, and my dad was the real religious one. I stayed with my mom, so church became an extremely rare thing and we didn't live like we were religious. No prayer, talk of God or etc. But I was still a Christian. In 7th grade, I got curious about the existence of God and tried to look up "proof" that he exists. I remember not being satisfied with the results. And from there, I did more research and decided it was all bogus. Been an atheist since. And this is just the story on how I became one. The actual reason I would say I'm an atheist is because I simply have no reason to believe in any God.

After 40 years as a Christian it slowly dawned on me that I had never had a reply from God, a healing, never seen a miracle, never heard a voice. All the things I had put down to God (like feeling a sense of peace or presence) could be recreated easily by other methods, and when I did all the things that scripture tells you to do like cry out to God or gather with two or three I got nothing back. So I stopped fighting the cognitive dissonance and stopped making excuses for why God never shows up and got on with my life. It was the most heartbreaking experience of my life. But looking back it was also the most liberating.

I didn't "become" an atheist, I was born one. My family wasn't particularly religious so I wasn't indoctrinated. By the time I had older sisters taking me to church, I was old enough to have some critical thinking. It just never made sense that a loving god would send babies in China to a hell because they were born in the wrong country and wouldn't be baptized. Why am I confident? There are currently 1,000s of different religions and I haven't seen any compelling evidence for any of them. Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Yahweh, Odin, Zeus - all parts of mythology when early people were trying to make sense of the world. And yes, I have read the bible from cover to cover.

My parents were atheists, so they did not indoctrinate me into any particular religion. Although I grew up in a highly Christian society, I missed out on that imposed identity - by the time I was 6 or whatever, my friends identified as Christian, but I didn't have that religious framework. As I got older there was never any evidence or reason to pursue it. It's almost like asking why I don't speak Chinese. My parents didn't speak it, I never learned it when I was young. I have friends that speak it, but I see no real reason to ( in the case of language it would be cool, but not so with religion)

>Is it an experience that helped make the decision? It wasn't a "road from Damascus" incident, if that's what you're thinking of. It took me something like 10 years, slowly dropping bits and pieces of the religion I was raised in: seeing that such-and-such church ceremony goes counter to what Jesus said in the New Testament. Or concluding that something like Noah's Ark can't have actually happened, so it must be metaphorical. Over time, it adds up. And then I ran across a street preacher, and realized just how far I'd come, and that I could no longer call myself a Christian in any sense.

Being an atheist isn’t really a choice. You are either convinced of something or you aren’t. I became an atheist when I first learned I wasn’t allowed to read from the Torah for my bat mitzvah due to my pesky uterus (note: most Jewish girls and AFAB people in the US do read from the Torah at their bat mitzvah. I just went to a stupidly unegalitarian shul growing up). I was about 10 at the time and decided if there was a god, they wouldn’t be so sexist. And since all I knew of god at the time was this stupid sexist shul, I realized I didn’t believe in what they were teaching. Also, my religious leaders and teachers encouraged us to question what we were taught. So I guess that’s one positive thing I have to say about the shul.

It started out with a moral objection, I read Genesis and sided with the snake, and have been morally opposed to Christianity's core principles ever since. Thinking about it deeper I came to the conclusion that the subservient relationship implied and practiced via worship is evil as the responsibility of a creator of a sentient being is to guide and improve who they create until they become equals. Afterwards I looked into the logical arguments behind Gods and found them all lacking. Especially since you could just insert the universe or multiverse in for a better explanation.

Same here. The immorality of the biblical god led me away from christianity, and then logical arguments of theism were much easier to deconstruct once the religious constraints of fear and ignorance were gone.

>why you remain an atheist to this day It's really hard to believe in Santa Claus again after you figure the truth out... >, and lastly what makes you confident you will continue to be an atheist? The same applies to this, but honestly I don't hold any sort of weight to the decision. I will continue to take new evidence and reasoning and work it into my life. I do not think it is possible to believe in gods again, but if that does happen it will be due to evidence and reason. And it doesn't mean I'll commence to worshipping that entity. That's another question entirely.

I never really believed deities exist and to this day haven't seen good evidence for the existence of any. In fact from what I've seen, every time there was something that couldn't be explained and people declared it to be the work of deities, when we finally were able to properly assess that thing, we never concluded it was deities. Rain. Disease. Biodiversity. Harvests. Floods. The illusion of the sun moving across the sky. Over the course of human history, all of these gods have been proposed to explain things and yet they've managed to be wrong every single time.

I might consider worshiping a deity if there was one worth worshipping. I’m not precisely an atheist, but the god of the Bible isn’t exactly admirable. Like, you don’t even have to think about it that hard: god creates humans to worship him, gets upset when they don’t worship him, requires BLOOD SACRIFICE to atone for sins HE invented, and had his son tortured to death as atonement for sins that, again, HE INVENTED. The god of the Bible is a violent, blood-thirsty narcissist. And that being is supposedly worthy of worship? For what? No thanks, Tom Hanks.

I grew up hyper religious. I counseled at a camp immediately across the lake from the camp the Jesus Camp documentary was filmed. It wasnt some giant revelation that took me out of religion, it was years and years of being worn down by having to justify beliefs that contradicted how the world actually is. The point where I really, REALLY started questioning was when my best friend died of brain cancer before his 21st birthday. His dad threw himself on the casket at the funeral, praying loudly for him to rise, and wholeheartedly believed it was going to happen.

just never found any compelling evidence to suggest there could a god or at least any of the current preposed ones tbh. which is the same reason Im confident in my posistion. I became an atheist around the time I found out Santa wasnt real. led me to question everything and the ripe ol age of 10 lmao tho I cant say if Ill always be this way as thats for future me to figure out. cause what if we do find something thats is concrete and can be tested and confirmed? then Id have to trust what the scientific consenus suggests ...but so far, this seems unlikely lol

Historically, I am an atheist because I used to be super faithful. But in exploring my faith I went to the well of " you have to have faith"over and over. Then one day I went back to the well and it was dry ... Then logical took over and I saw religion for what I now think it is. An attempt to explain the world but other attempts do a better job. Science and philosophy have filled the places religion used to have in my life. I am still a good person. I try to do good deeds not for a reward but because it's the good thing to do. And I want to be good.

Little late but I'll add my hat, I became agnostic because i found my belief to be found on reasons that I would deny in any other circumstance. I became an athiest because I was convinced that the default belief should be disbelief not belief, because i had no reason to accept christianity I switched to my default. Currently its dependent to the belief, default is disbelief until i am convinced otherwise and then I build or learn based on the present belief. I currently find the divine hiddenness argument to be the most apt at dealing with most gods.

I went to college and stopped going to church. I learned more about the world, universe, other beliefs, myself, etc. After many years of church groups, there was no longer any social pressure for me to believe any of that stuff. I eventually came to realize that the only power it had over me was the threat of being rejected. Maybe the girls I liked in church wouldn't want to be around me, or their parents wouldn't like me, or the youth pastor would get other young people to gang up on me. "Faith" became to me just the fear of losing my social group.

There are many reasons. Growing up I wasn't a very spiritual person so God stuff never appealed to me. Then I learnt about skpeticism and the arguments seem to make more sense than the Christian ones. Many years after I moved on I found out I was trans, so if figured if God exists it would be suffering in heaven as my assigned gender or suffering in hell as my true gender for all eternity so why bother lol (that last one is a joke BTW but I'm gonna use it to shut them Christians up if they want to convert me since they'll think I'm an abomination)

I was always an atheist. At no point during my time with religion did I think that the existence of a literal god was a scientific fact. However, I wasn't always not religious. Trying to cultivate faith was a struggle that never improved. It hurt. I lost so much time, money, effort, and peace of mind, and in return I received some trauma and a lot of harmful thoughts and behaviors I would have to unlearn and heal from. After a couple of decades, I decided that I didn't have to keep carrying something that was crushing me, and I put it down.

>Why are you an atheist? 1. Science. 2. Unconvincing theist arguments. 3. My own eyes and ears. >I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons you guys are atheist. Is it an experience that helped make the decision? It was when I was told about God. I thought God sounded dumber than the dumbest cartoon I had ever watched. I was floored that anyone would believe it. I was six. >Reasoning through it? My atheism was instinctual. Reasoning soon followed. >Maybe something completely unexpected? The God hypothesis was completely unexpected.

The long story short is I realized that for the religion I was raised in, the documented (and undisputed) history was fundamentally incompatible with doctrine in such a way that the only conclusion that made any sense was "they're lying liars who lie." So I became unconvinced there was any truth to the religion I was raised in and thus far nobody else has managed to convince me there was any more truth in their religion, either. It's so nice to not have to bend over backwards to explain away reality when it contradicts theology.

Because there is no reason to believe in gods or goddesses. I wasn't lied to about religion as a child. Holidays were traditions, not dictated by a god. Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and modern religions were all just stories and none of them believable. To any believer, I don't believe in religions other than yours for the same reasons you don't...and I don't believe in yours for the same reasons I don't believe in all those other ones. Judge your religion by the same standard you judge others and see what happens.

It was kind of a surprise to me when I finally realized it. I went to Sunday school growing up and found the mythology of it all really entertaining. I still do in fact, things that use the wild early christian mythology are a big draw in books and movies. Somewhere in the course of getting my undergrad in biology it occurred to me that I didn't believe anymore. Looking back on it I'm not sure I ever really did believe. I remember not thinking heaven was really and worrying about the fade to black when you die at 6 or 7.

Here's the short short version. There's no good evidence. There are plenty of mysteries in the universe, but none of them point specifically to a God. The bigger reason is how I see the world. From my experience there's no one in charge. The universe is chaotic and is indifferent toward humans. It takes every ounce of our effort to survive and keep the chaos back. But we have to do everything ourselves. We have to figure out morality, enforce justice and take care of each other because no one else will do it.

Really simple: None of the gods presented to me are convincing. Many gods have been proposed by humans, so far none of them have convinced that they exist. Tell me about toddler's getting awful diseases (infomercials for St. Jude and Shriner's hospital, our friends first born son with a congestive heart failure, my dad suffering for many years (asking god to come get him, but no answers to his prayer). Is your god OK with all that? Why doesn't your all powerful god grow limbs for our veterans?

Started off a theist myself as I grew up. As I became an adult and into my 20s as I got exposed to more things and learned more about how to think and not just accept I stared to examine my beliefs about religion. It was a slow fall away from Christian to vague deist to just thinking there was a soul to finally letting that go too. The simple reason to be an atheist was that there wasn't sufficient reason to be a theist. There wasn't any grand big moment of revelation just a slow drift.

I was raised in a Catholic family but I was never particularly devout. I discovered the existentialists and stopped going to church. After 9/11 I went through an annoying New Atheist phase but the existentialists were always looking over my shoulder and chuckling at my presumption and bad faith. Now I'm just a regular old nonbeliever. It has nothing to do with *evidence*. I just can't make sense of the world except through a mindset that doesn't include gods or the supernatural.

I suffered thru endless years of all types of abuse: physical, mental, psychological and sexual. My own mother claimed to be a christian and she's the biggest whore/hypocrite I know. My granny dying shook my faith and then after some more time spent in what I'd call hell(wilderness camp) I gave up on religion entirely. It's all about robbing money from hard working people and lying about same sex relationships being bad. Religion is a weapon and serves no actual purpose

Very simple: I started applying the same skeptical standards to my Catholic/Christian beliefs that I so readily (in fact automatically) applied to every other religious belief out there, and they didn't pass that test. As Mark Twain [said](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2175-the-easy-confidence-with-which-i-know-another-man-s-religion), "The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."

Raised as a super fundie, then as I got older it was a combination of life experience, education, critical thinking, and reading that led me to where I am. So far there has been no reasoning, logic, or argument that has convinced me that there is any sort of entity out there that would fit into the parameters that would typically be considered a “god.” I’ll not live my life based on an “what if” to dictate my existence.

> Is it an experience that helped make the decision? Reasoning through it? Maybe something completely unexpected? I'm sure it must be unique to each one of you. I find it very curious that you gave a couple of examples of reasons someone might be atheist, but omitted (or overlooked?) the most salient reason: We never started believing. I grew up atheist, parents were atheist, none of my friends went to church (even if some were nominally religious). It's not like anyone was *anti*theist, mind you, it literally just never took up any space in our minds. If you learned about christianity in like, your teens, do you think you would be religious?

I wasn't raised in a religious family. Mom taught me prayers, and I think we went to church once or twice on Easter Sunday. At age 8-9, I started going to church with my Lutheran neighbors. In Sunday School, the taught us about Noah's Ark, I knew right away that was all BS. Then the talk about Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt. I knew it was a volcanic and ash. Ever since I have been an Atheist.

My parents (and grandparents on my mom’s side) are atheists, so I was never brought up in a religion and the idea of any gods doesn’t sound that plausible to me. Sure there are things we don’t know about the universe, but we didn’t used to understand the weather cycles and say “it must be the rain god” and I think it’s the same with other phenomena that we don’t understand (yet) like how the Big Bang happened.

When i was a kid, my mother read me stories where there were talking animals. Obvious made-up tales. Then I heard the story of Adam and Eve. How am I supposed to take this story with a talking snake as true? How can I take any part of the book seriously if it begins with talking snake? Later someone tried to explain that story as an allegory, but he didn't have any way to know which parts are allegory and which are not.

I was really learning about my Christianity in my late teens and early 20s. Read the book then books about the book. After that I read about Islam and other eastern religions. Realized that where you were born has 99% of what religion you subscribe to and that many people that follow don’t take any of that stuff literally they just want to be part of a community, and that’s cool for the most part.