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Question 37

How many of you have never been religious and/or never had a belief in a god or gods?

• I was firmly an atheist by the time I was 12, and gave it no thought before that. I was sent to Sunday School, and went through Lutheran Confirmation, but it was always viewed as a chore. I constantly argued with the priest about the nonsense we were reading in the bible, and at one point, he said to me, "There is a god! Whether or not you believe it, he exists!" He was quite angry, and obviously saying that to himself, since I must have been doing something terrible to his faith in the way I was picking apart everything he attempted to teach me and the other kids.

  I would have to say I was never religious, since the only time I accepted the notion of a god, it was in the same way that I accepted the notion of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I gave up on Santa when I was 3 (caught my parents in the middle of the night). The Easter Bunny went with him, along with the Tooth Fairy, and anything else that might have been mentioned. I would have to say that's probably when I first doubted the god thing. I didn't make any firm decisions for a while because unlike with Santa et al, the adults were very serious in saying their god existed. I was still of the opinion then that adults knew a whole lot more than I did (which I know now to be merely in quantity from more experience, not related to truth).

  I remember one time when I was maybe 7 or 8, I was talking to a friend and mentioned the god thing. I followed through with what I was taught, making him omniscient and omnipotent. He was making us say everything we were saying, even the discussion about him. Every action we made was directly caused by him. At that point, I would think, I first decided that what I was saying was nonsense. From then on, I became very skeptical of religion, finally deciding before I was 12 that it was absolutely full of shit.

  I spent the next six years believing that everyone was stupid, that I was the only one who could see how ridiculous this religion thing was. It wasn't until I was 18 that I got the first clue that I was not at all alone in my way of thinking. Every year since then, learning more and more about what religions has done over the ages, I am more and more affirmed in the truth of what I decided. I see now that religion is not only ridiculous, but evil, something I didn't consider at all when I became officially an atheist (before I knew the word existed, incidentally). This is, of course, using the definition that "evil" is something that works to the detriment of humanity.

  So, no, I was never religious, and consciously chose atheism over the noise of religion that I was being inundated with while growing up. I knew no other atheists until I was 18, so there can be no question of the view being forced on my by someone. It was forced on me by reality, and nothing else. (Mike Ruskai #1106)

• I'm an nth generation atheist - never taught deities even as a childand never had a reason even to consider believing. (Christopher A. Lee #105)

• Lifelong atheist. The non-belief in god(s) was handed down by my grandfather. He was adopted into a ministers home as a child. His views on religion were to say the least "colorful". (Steve Knight #855)

• I was raised not to oppose my parents, and my parents insisted I go to church and Sunday school. I did. But I knew from my earliest memories of church (3 or 4 years old?) that everyone was just "playacting". I guess my firm atheist feelings developed during my 2 years of confirmation classes when I was age 12 and 13. (Bob Haynes #8)

• This would be me. Never believed at all. My parents sent me to Sunday school for a few months when I was four, but they tell me that it was just to expose me to religion so that I'd have a choice. What it did instead was bore me. I never learned a thing about xtian mythology, but instead spent many a Sunday morning wondering why I was being forced to waste a perfectly good morning in school when I could have been outside playing. The end result was that I never realized that anyone even took the stuff seriously until I was 13. Until then I thought it was just some weird fairy story that people told others just for kicks. (Frank Wustner-The Deadly Nightshade- #119)

• Count me among that fortunate few. My parents were atheists, as were my mother's parents. We learned a lot about what religions were, with the constant reminder that the multiplicity of mutually exclusive myths implied that they were all simply human constructs. We were encouraged to think about religions as products of and frameworks for the societies in which they evolved.

  My sisters and I were always excused from religious instruction conducted by the itinerant bible thumpers that roamed the countryside in those days, and I was the first student in my high school to protest being forced to stand during daily P.A. recitals of the Lord's Prayer. We were viewed as oddities, but there was no ostracism that I was aware of. Had we lived in the U.S. (or at least certain sections of it) I'm sure our experiences would have been somewhat different :-(

  During early adulthood I dabbled in Zen, and the I Ching as well as the philosophies of Carl Jung. They were interesting, but once you've had your protective coating of spiritual Teflon applied, nothing sticks :-)

  Now my two nieces are atheists as well. Fortunately, most of their friends are atheist or agnostic, so it's just not a big deal any more. There's evidence of evolution for you! (Paul Chefurka #1029)

• I've never belonged to any particular religion. My parents called themselves agnostics. My father, I think, was theistically inclined when I was a child, but he never talked to me about it. My mother wanted desperately to believe in God, and had researched a number of religions, not liking any of them. I can't remember how the topic first arose, but at some point she explained to me that some people believe in God, and some people don't, but that she and my dad simply didn't know what to believe. I felt that if *they* didn't know then *I* could hardly be expected to. However, I was bombarded with Christianity at my primary school, and I went through a rather pious stage, which my parents largely ignored ("Don't worry, it's just a phase she's going through.") It probably wasn't helped by the fact that I was picked *twice* to play the Virgin Mary in the school nativity play (two different schools), and I may have had delusions of saintliness.

  Before that, when I was about three years old, I was taken by my mother to see a friend of hers, who had a son who was suffering from muscular dystrophy. He was in a wheelchair, and very thin, and very pale. Allegedly, when we got home I asked my mother if he was God. I haven't a clue what possessed me to think of such a thing. My mother told me that he wasn't God, and I was too young to think of asking, "But how do you know? He could be, couldn't he? That's no more ridiculous a hypothesis than the one about the white-bearded old man in flowing robes sitting on a cloud surrounded by angels playing golden harps." That was also round about the time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (we didn't call him Santa Claus in those days).

  When I was twelve my mother finally found a religion she liked: the Society of Friends. She and I went to Quaker meetings for a few years, and I went to Quaker summer schools. At one summer school there was a debate about the existence of God, and a vote. I was a "don't know", but I was surprised to discover that the majority of the twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds there did *not* believe in God, despite having Quaker parents. This got me thinking. When I was sixteen I finally admitted to myself that I didn't believe in God either, and plucked up the courage to call myself an atheist, which was what I really had been for some time, if not always. Now my parents call themselves atheists, too. My sister married a man who had a Plymouth Brethren upbringing, and is now a non-specific Christianish theist. (Eveline Bron #1147)