Atheists: What was your religious BG, and why did you give it up?

St. Mark's Methodist Church (Christian).

My parents and public school system taught me how to read and write, and then how to intelligently come to my own conclusions about things.

I believe that people shouldn't be violent. I believe that some of the teachings about how people should behave in The Gospels are correct, like don't be a hypocrite, turn the other cheek, let ye without sin cast the first stone, yada yida yoda, however...

I also know from simply paying attention in science class when they were discussing Human Anatomy that as long as our hearts pump blood through our veins and our breathing continues and we get some food every now and then...

...we stay conscious and alive. When that system breaks down, your consciousness ends. There ain't no consciousness without a working brain, so the afterlife is a ridiculous concept, since we are not spirits, we are biological beings dependent on the good workings of our biology. That is a fact.

There is no ghost in the machine of the human body. You are your body.

Second, I came to the conclusion that not only were the Greek gods fake, and the Inuit Eskimo Indians gods were fake, but also the Judaism and Islamic and Hinduism and Buddha gods, all of them a fiction of human imagination without a shred of physical evidence created from the cultural mind of man. There aren't any gods at all, and if there were even one god, then there would be more than just one, and the whole concept and idea and most of the supernatural scripture babble are generalities that don't make a lick of sense.

I wouldn't say I'm an atheist, maybe more of a deist. I'm thirteen, so maybe I'll change my mind later.

Now, my parents are Southern Baptists. I'm from Georgia, so they basically drill religion into you and stuff.

I don't like how we can criticize other religions by saying that their God isn't real, but ours is. We have no scientific proof that any God was here, but deism makes more since than anything.

God has no control over anything on the planet, or say in what people do.

He just appears when you die, maybe seeing if you've done enough to go to heaven or hell, or even stay on the earth plain as a ghost or some ****.

Forgive me, but the question itself is a tad flawed. Since atheism is a conscious lack of belief in the existence of a god, or gods, no one 'starts out' as an atheist. One first has to hear about the idea of a god or gods, and then determine whether or not one believes in such an idea.

I realized at around age 7 that while many people apparently believed that a god or gods existed, I did not. Why didn't I believe that a god existed? No idea. It just seemed to me to be a ridiculous, unbelievable notion akin to a belief in santa claus, the easter bunny, fairies, dragons, unicorns and leprechauns. I didn't believe in any of those things, and I still don't.

I was 8 or 9 before I realized that (some) adults actually believed the religious nonsense they'd been teaching me. Before that I just assumed it was like santa or the tooth fairy...stories for children.

It was like realizing some adults truly believed a bunny delivered candy eggs all over the world once a year.

I went through a brief phase in my mid teens where I tried to believe...but it was impossible.

I was raised non-religious. Not in the sense that my parents taught me to not believe in god, but they didn't tell me to believe in him either. They simply made it clear if I wanted to believe I could, and they would help me with what I needed (finding a good church, respecting my beliefs, etc). Around 3rd grade I became interested in religion and started to hang out with my religious neighbor a lot, and he and his dad helped me get informed about Christianity and go to church, and read the bible. I tried my hardest to believe, but it was like trying to trick myself into believing it. I was trying to force a belief onto myself that I simply couldn't believe because of all the crazy stories. I prayed a lot and hoped god would respond in SOME way, but I got nothing. After I while I got over it and now here I am.

Like everyone else, I was born an atheist. However, not only my parents didn't brainwash me into any religion, they also let me read a lot of mythology as a child.

Norse, Greek, Slavic, Egyptian, African, Indian, I read them all. So when I came to reading the holy books of Abrahamic faiths, I recognized the patterns right away.

I was raised catholic but i was mostly agnostic for most of my life i tried evangelical christianity for a while but that didn't work out ive read the bible quran bhagavad gita and the upanishads i found no evidence for god in any of them i eventually became a buddhist with atheist views.

well, i was a christian, lived in a strict household, my family were super religious, and my mother got ill, i prayed to god and he didn't make her well, and i thought "i'm a good christian, and my mothers a good christian, why isn't he answering y prayers" now, since then she has become very very ill and is progressing in her illness, and also children still suffer and world peace hasn't happened yet, so god hasn't answered any of my prayers, then i was gonna be a minister and thought "i'd better do y research on jesus" turns out there isn't any evidence for him, i was distraught when i realised there wasn't a god, infact i cried, like alot, so trust me, i'd lie a god, but it just isn't probable.

I started out a Southern Baptist and then didn't really see the need for a god and the whole concept seemed ridiculous so im atheist. Life is great.

My parents told me that they had an imaginary friend who hides up in the sky, but I guess I was always a realist and never believed that nonsense. Your brain has to be wired to accept baseless nonsense as fact to believe in an invisible God thingy in the sky. My mind is very logic based so I could never fool myself into believing in one of a thousand similar ancient myths. To my rational mind it is more than obvious that humans created their Gods in their image. Not vice versa.