How old were you?

TravelJunkie

Out of curiosity - how old were you when you decided there was no God?

I'm trying to see if age has any relation to this life decision.

Also, if in your teens, could it be because of Catholic schools and what they teach being off?

The Mad Hatter

Not this again. There are several threads on this topic already.

I don't know if anyone here has "decided there is no god"; we've just noticed a distinct lack of evidence for any.

nozzferrahhtoo

I never believed it so I guess age 0 for me. It certainly was not "because of Catholic school". It was not "because" of anything. I just never realised from the start that it was even MEANT to be true.... let alone actually was.

I always thought Bible Reading in primary school, when at least one story from the NT was read to us a day, was just “Story Time”. I was 12ish maybe 13 when it first occurred to me “Hang on… people believe this stuff is real????”

I have read, and been read, many stories all my life. Fiction is fun after all. That a massive group of people have taken one piece of moral fiction over all the others and decided, based on nothing that I am aware of, that it is true and the rest is not…. has been a constant source of bafflement for me ever since.

And aside from an almost innate need for these people to make me believe it too, and they do try, not one of them has ever managed to give even the first piece of argument, evidence, data or reasons for lending it a modicum of credence let alone believing it at all.

Ickle Magoo

I was born without a belief in a god and nothing I've heard or read has so far convinced me otherwise...

I was four or five when I first said I didn't understand the notion of god, it just didn't tally for me. I then had a great chat with my dad (an agnostic) about religion, faith, belief and what it meant to different people - my dad said I spent the entire time looking at him like he had three heads and just couldn't understand the concept at all. Still a bit like that, tbh. :pac:

Kooli

I went to a Catholic school and used to go to mass every week with my buddy (my folks didn't really go). I used to pray at night too. But I'm still not sure I ever really believed anything, I just didn't really question it.

When I got to secondary school I became the arrogant smart-arse who kept questioning the religion teacher (I thought I was deadly, but I'm sure I was just a big butt-pain).
The year of my junior cert I decided I would never go to mass again. People challenged me that I should wait until after my junior cert - 'just in case'. The fact that I didn't even consider that was a real eye opener for me as I realised I didn't have a single shred of belief in me.

So the short answer is 13. The longer answer is a slow process which ended at 13.

Malari

TravelJunkie wrote: »

Out of curiosity - how old were you when you decided there was no God?

I'm trying to see if age has any relation to this life decision.

Also, if in your teens, could it be because of Catholic schools and what they teach being off?

I started having doubts when I was about 9 or 10. I was told that the whole Adam and Eve thing was just a story and I thought "wait a minute...what else is just a story??"

I was probably fully atheist by my early teens.

If you mean if I was sent to a protestant school or whatever I feel I would also have rejected the idea of a god. I've always been the questioning non-traditional type and suspect I would have come to the same conclusion no matter how I was raised. It's not just a catholic god I'm rejecting, it's any old god!

strobe

Sometime between my first communion and my confirmation as far as I can work out. It had nothing to do with those specific ceremonies, I just remember praying to God at my communion and not believing in God by the time my confirmation came around. So it was between 6 and 10 ish.

I'm not sure what you mean by "because of Catholic schools and what they teach being off"? But I went to a catholic primary school like most people in the country and being thought the story of Genesis in religion class I'd say had a pretty big influence on me questioning the whole deal. Then I read the whole Bible through on my own time and it turned out the whole thing was full of that kind of stuff from cover to cover.

Dades

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

Not this again. There are several threads on this topic already.

Yeah, but since I can't find any of them and some people have already given thoughtful responses...

goingpostal

I was quite devout til I was 13 or 14, then I slipped away. It lost any real relevance for me. Then in my early twenties, I tried again to find a belief in God that tallied with everything else I knew. I would say that for long periods I have wanted to believe in God and wished that it was true that there really was something there that could influence my life. But I don't think I am one of those people who can believe. About a year ago I decided to just accept that I am a non-believer and get on with it. A friend convinced me to read The God Delusion by the Dawkinizer, and I loved it. It was like a breath of fresh air to finally learn that I didn't HAVE to believe in anything. It opened up a whole new way of thinking for me. I hadn't practised religion for a long time but the vestiges of my indoctrination prevented me from really questioning the need to believe in something. Now I am alot happier in myself.

c-note

to be pernickity; nobody "decides" if theres a god or not.

i always had a feeling but was about 14-15 when i realised the overwhelming irrationality of A god.

i still think there are things beyond the capability of human understanding

HavingCrack

Can't put a precise date on it but weirdly enough it was when I realised that Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism all started on the same continent. I just remember thinking why didnt Jesus/Mohammed/Abraham, Vishnu decide to appear in Africa, Europe, North America, South America or Australia. All those choices and God just decided to pick this tiny corner of the world and I just thought sounds a bit ridiculous to me and that was that. Weird decision but true.

bnt

Despite years of being taken to Catholic Church, I never really decided that there was a god. So, in that sense, the question doesn't apply to me. It took years before I knew that "atheist" was the best word to describe my status.

ColmDawson

Eighteen.:(

Not that I was anything more than a vague believer. It all crumbled as soon as I subjected it to some rational thought. I'm just embarrassed that it took me that long. I still feel sort of violated ... my poor innocent childhood brain was made to think that it's completely reasonable to believe in god. Argh, this makes me angry whenever I think about it.

rainbow kirby

Probably about 12 when I first actually said to someone else "I don't believe in God", but I don't think I ever had faith.

King Mob

First had doubts around my confirmation. So was about twelve.

Flirted with various new age and other woo woo stuff for a while before really coming to rationalism and stuff around 19.
Didn't really describe myself as atheist then cause I didn't really understand the word or concept, but eventually came around soon after.

generalmiaow

I was never told there was one. I had a granny who said she believed in god, but she also said that your tongue turns black when you lie and that chocolate before dinner makes you sick.

I didn't know that other people were religious (I may have been vaguely aware that old people were) until I noticed all the other kids receiving loads of communion money and buying BMXes. Later on I noticed they were full of opinions about it and there was a word for it, but was an "atheist" all my youth and nobody but close friends have even asked about it.

Organised religion looked (looks) to me like a bunch of weird rituals based mainly about having somewhere to sit down for a while when someone dies, and nobody I knew seemed that much more interested in it than me despite being baptised.

Surely there must be someone else in that situation! I have asked around and never met anyone.

Zombrex

TravelJunkie wrote: »

Also, if in your teens, could it be because of Catholic schools and what they teach being off?

Being "off" what?

The true loving message of a deity who occasionally likes to genocide the odd civilization?

Anyway, I really rejected religion when I was around 12 or 13, and since I didn't go to a Catholic school it didn't have anything to do with that.

It was a combination of things when I started to read up on skeptical and critical thinking, becoming much more skeptical in all aspects of my life, spurred by me seeing how many adults around me were placing myself in a position of happy delusion that had no correlation with reality.

The crystallizing period for me was when my grandmother was dying and I really noticed how the more religious members of my family where simply in denial about what was happening.

It really made it clear to me how humans will embrace beliefs that lead to understandable outcomes. In reality my grandmother had cancer and whether she would live or die would depend on the very complex reality of cancer. But those in my family who were religious preferred to believe that it was down to the will of God. It wasn't that they wanted God to make my grandmother better, but rather that they seemed to really want the fate of my grandmother to be decided by something they understood, not just chemical reactions in my grandmothers cells.

I remember thinking how odds and how transparent that was, questioning how they could not see they were doing that. It was pure wishful thinking. But it seemed to be completely acceptable wishful thinking, none of the other adults were correcting them.

This really made me realize that this is basically what religion is. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a big proud or even smug when years later actual scientific research seems to be confirming what I had suspected since my early teens.

AssaultedPeanut

Going to mass and praying etc was just the done thing in my family, my dad is very religious and we were all made go to mass. By 16/17 I was pointblank refusing to, I never said "I'm an atheist" I just didn't see the point in going to this place every Sunday to hear the same thing over and over.

Then at 18 I started seeing a girl who was very religious, after a year or 2 I started looking in to it a bit more and seeing what all the fuss was about.
But it just wasn't for me, funnily enough trying to "get into it more" made me lean towards atheisim.

The whole idea of religion is just ridiculous to me...

WanderingSoul

Well, I never really believed in a god, even when I was 7 making my first communion I didn't what I was being taught as true. I started to think about it properly when I was around 12 and I would have consciously believed myself to be an atheist from about the age of 13.

Shenshen

TravelJunkie wrote: »

Out of curiosity - how old were you when you decided there was no God?

I'm trying to see if age has any relation to this life decision.

Also, if in your teens, could it be because of Catholic schools and what they teach being off?

In my later twenties.
I had grown up not in Ireland, but in a very Catholic country and society nevertheless, and my school was run by a convent.
The funny thing is, as long as I went to school, I actually wanted to believe. It seemed the normal thing to do, and I was very lucky in that the nuns who ran our school were extremely liberal (we got taught everything there is to know about contraception, nobody ever tried to talk us out of sex before marriage, on the contrary, we were taught about other religions in some depth, protecting the environment was a big issue to nuns and students alike, in short, it was all very individualistic and free). I left that school thinking that even though I wasn't a very spiritual person and all things considered could care less about whether or not god existed, this was what Christianity was about and that wasn't a bad thing at all...

As time went on, I started to get some doubts. I met more Christians, I saw what the church said and did, and the doubts grew. I became agnostic. I still didn't mind if god existed or not, but I decided that I couldn't comment any more.

I finally fell away from faith on reading the bible in my late twenties. I decided two things :
1) It's unlikely that this god exists
2) IF he should in fact exist after all, he is most certainly not worthy of worship, considering his intents and actions.
I turned completely atheist the more I debated Christianity and other faiths with different people.

condra

Like everyone else in the world, I was born without any belief in any god.

I was indoctrinated into a religion called "Christianity" between the age of around 3 and 4.

I realised that I had been deceived when I was around 24, so I was back to square one - no belief in anything supernatural.

This hasn't changed since, though I do quite like Paul The Octopus.

jurgenscarl

I used to believe in Santa until I was 9.

When I found out Santa didn't exist, I realised God didn't exist either.

Santa and the Easter Bunny and maybe the Tooth Fairy are the Blessed Trinity of Childhood.

amacachi

I don't think after I was about 7 or 8 I really believed anything to do with Jesus or anything else. Found it all stupid, wondered why miracles rarely happen and when they do they happen to crackpots. :pac: Also remember when I was about 4 or 5 I couldn't sleep one night because I wondered what happened to my grandparents when they died and went to the sitting room in tears to ask my parents. :pac: I'd been told about heaven and all but that was probably the first sign that my mind was kicking out the virus it had been infected with and would doused in for the next 13 years.

irishh_bob

im an agnoistc as opposed to an athiest , have been since around the age of 22 , i simply dont know whether thier is an afterlife or a god

i grew up in a devoutly ( and i mean devoutly ) catholic god fearing family , i also grew up in a very dysfunctional family , years of being ground down by this and baschically not getting a half decent break in life led me to believe that not only do i have no interest in whether thier is a god , if thier is , i see absolutley no reason to believe he ( or she ) is a nice guy in anyway shape or form , you only have to tune into the nightly news to see evidence of this , what most puzzles me about believers is how they can with a straight face , claim that god is all loving

jurgenscarl

irishh_bob wrote: »

im an agnoistc as opposed to an athiest , have been since around the age of 22 , i simply dont know whether thier is an afterlife or a god

i grew up in a devoutly ( and i mean devoutly ) catholic god fearing family , i also grew up in a very dysfunctional family , years of being ground down by this and baschically not getting a half decent break in life led me to believe that not only do i have no interest in whether thier is a god , if thier is , i see absolutley no reason to believe he ( or she ) is a nice guy in anyway shape or form , you only have to tune into the nightly news to see evidence of this , what most puzzles me about believers is how they can with a straight face , claim that god is all loving

Exactly.

I challenge anybody to read this quote from Epicurus and still claim to believe in the Christian god:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”

I first read that little gem when I was in college and I loved quoting it to my religious friends. I turned them all into godless pagans like myself:D

Metalfan

i guess i started having doubts when i was 11 or 12 and by the time i was 13 or 14 i was pretty much athiest

drifting

irishh_bob wrote: »

im an agnoistc as opposed to an athiest , have been since around the age of 22 , i simply dont know whether thier is an afterlife or a god

i grew up in a devoutly ( and i mean devoutly ) catholic god fearing family , i also grew up in a very dysfunctional family , years of being ground down by this and baschically not getting a half decent break in life led me to believe that not only do i have no interest in whether thier is a god , if thier is , i see absolutley no reason to believe he ( or she ) is a nice guy in anyway shape or form , you only have to tune into the nightly news to see evidence of this , what most puzzles me about believers is how they can with a straight face , claim that god is all loving

Yes its a major stumbling block, but the issue that you are really raising is that God is not how you would want him to be, which is to say, he is not a God after your own image so you feel uncertain.

The real difficulty with God, is that God is not made in the image of man, or how man would want to perceive him or fashion him, but that man was made in the image of God. Therefore the notion of the real God is a terrifying prospect, as he is not subservient to men's desires, and also has the evidenct and undisputed right to destroy what he creates.

The only way to solve the notion of the untameable God is to study Christ.

Turtwig

drifting wrote: »

The only way to solve the notion of the untameable God is to study Christ.

Waa???

MagicMarker

God is a lion, raar!

monkeypants

I never had any faith. I tried really hard as that's what people around me seemed to want, but it never worked. Couldn't express this as it would have just got me a slap.

drifting

monkeypants wrote: »

I never had any faith. I tried really hard as that's what people around me seemed to want, but it never worked. Couldn't express this as it would have just got me a slap.

Faith comes with understanding, not trying.

Luk 18:34 And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.

1Cr 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Malari

drifting wrote: »

Faith comes with understanding, not trying.

Luk 18:34 And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.

1Cr 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Exactly, mate!

drifting

Malari wrote: »

Exactly, mate!

When you really grow up, you read the atheist propaganda books, by Dawkins et al., and you find yourself asking questions like, "are these people capable of even putting together a sensible argument?" And then you realize they are not. Mind numbing stuff.

robindch

drifting wrote: »

When you really grow up, you read the atheist propaganda books, by Dawkins et al., and you find yourself asking questions like, "are these people capable of even putting together a sensible argument?" And then you realize they are not. Mind numbing stuff.

Out of interest, have you read these "mind numbing" books yourself and in a position to be able to comment upon what's inside them?

MagicMarker

drifting wrote: »

When you really grow up, you read the atheist propaganda books, by Dawkins et al., and you find yourself asking questions like, "are these people capable of even putting together a sensible argument?" And then you realize they are not. Mind numbing stuff.

You should go on tour man, comedy gold!

drifting

robindch wrote: »

Out of interest, have you read these "mind numbing" books yourself and in a position to be able to comment upon what's inside them?

I have obtained from a library, persued, and scanned in some of this drivel, but I've not paid money for it.

Malari

drifting wrote: »

When you really grow up, you read the atheist propaganda books, by Dawkins et al., and you find yourself asking questions like, "are these people capable of even putting together a sensible argument?" And then you realize they are not. Mind numbing stuff.

I was an atheist before I read the extremely educating and fascinating natural history and evolution books written by Richard Dawkins et al. and I'm currently asking myself if you can understand a sensible argument?

Turtwig

drifting wrote: »

Faith comes with understanding, not trying.

Isn't that a contradiction*? How can someone understand something without trying to understand it??


Rob/Sam, please enlighten us about the correct term for this.

robindch

drifting wrote: »

I have [...] scanned in some of this drivel, but I've not paid money for it.

I trust you're not referring to you violating Dawkin's copyright here? For that would violate the "Thou shalt not steal" commandment!

Anyhow, do you feel that you invested sufficient time to understand his reasoning, appreciate his point of view and put a bit of effort into putting together a sensible argument?

drifting

Malari wrote: »

I was an atheist before I read the extremely educating and fascinating natural history and evolution books written by Richard Dawkins et al. and I'm currently asking myself if you can understand a sensible argument?

Casting stones at other people, which is the hallmark of Dawkins, is the worst place to start. It can never prove anything. Always he avoids talking about the fundamental questions, such as the fact that if there is no God, then of necessity there can be no morality. In fact every argument he pompously propounds is based on his own intrinsic belief that his version of the truth is greater than those of others, thus demonstrating his belief in the truth God. His affirmation of human morality demonstrates a belief in the God of morality. His only purposes in writing his books, it seems, is to set himself up as God, in place of the true God.

The history in the bible is really a reiteration of countless numbers of people doing before exactly what Dawkins is doing now. History just repeats itself, as the bible indeed points out in Ecclesiastes.

robindch

Malty_T wrote: »

How can someone understand something without trying to understand it?

Not difficult, I suppose, if one understands that thing already, or something that's close enough that one can see the connection or similarity without any conscious effort.

Malty_T wrote: »

please enlighten us about the correct term for this

I think that drifting may be trying to refer to "justification through faith" which, in broad terms, is the belief that one's beliefs are justified because one believes that they are justified.

It's not the kind of thinking that would be marked very highly if one were examined by a real philosopher.

robindch

drifting wrote: »

Always he avoids talking about the fundamental questions, such as the fact that if there is no God, then of necessity there can be no morality.

I think what you mean to say is that if there is no religion, then there can be no religious rules.

Most people here would think that's quite a good thing.

Zillah

drifting wrote: »

In fact every argument he pompously propounds is based on his own intrinsic belief that his version of the truth is greater than those of others, thus demonstrating his belief in the truth God. His affirmation of human morality demonstrates a belief in the God of morality. His only purposes in writing his books, it seems, is to set himself up as God, in place of the true God.

Seriously? This is how your brain works?