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Skeptics, Atheists, Agnostics: What was the first thought that made you doubt?

ZPowers

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Most of us started off believing in Santa and ghosts. And then there was that moment that said... maybe not. Not necessarily comparing the two, but I think there are parallels for non-believers.

For me, it was considering the idea that maybe the afterlife is wrong (this started in roughly 5th grade). It terrified me (I stayed up for hours on end tormenting over it, before realizing how much of a non-concern non-existence really is months or years later), but I couldn't find any evidence that afterlife existed or was plausible.

But the reasons doubt starts are legion (no religious implication intended). Perhaps you saw that there are many religions, and no one could be right. Maybe you felt the moral ideals of the whatever text were dubious. Maybe the concept of God was suspect. Maybe you felt that the answers in your religion were wrong scientifically or didn't add up. Maybe you saw people using religion for oppositional reasons. Maybe some religious story was just silly to you. Maybe you saw darkness in the world God shouldn't allow. Or someone told you AIDS was God's punishment and that didn't sit right. Hell, maybe your parents didn't believe to begin with.

So non-believers. What was that first little nougat of questioning that blossomed into your current ideology?
 

Simi

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I think I full-on believed in "God" and loved Him at one point, but I think I just woke up one day and wondered WHY I believed in Him when I was about 9 or 10... So then I started "testing" this God by my so-called prayers. Then, I decided it was silly about at age 12. I started listening to Atheists talk and watch Atheist videos, and it made a lot more sense to me than religion and whatnot did. So, that was pretty much my turning point. It wasn't anything too big or story worthy, though :p
 

tinker683

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The moment I started questioning my faith and what had been told to me or the moment I began to doubt the existence of God? I ask because they are two separate events that happened years apart.
 

Red Herring

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According to my parents, I shyly approached my father at about age 3 and asked: "Daddy, I have been thinking about this a lot and come to the conclusion that there is no Santa Clause, is that true?"

But I also remember my confusion as the parents of some friends played the whole "Santa has just been here" thing for them. I was confused because what I knew or thought to know and what these grown-ups said didn't go together. Who was I to believe - my own reasoning or those grown-ups?

Religion was similar in certain repects. My Mum is an atheist and my Dad an agnosticist, so they never told me that there was a god. But I heard other people talk about it and remember having to draw pictures of Jesus at elementary school. When I came home and told about what we had discussed at school, my Mum explained that, yes, some people believe those things, but she didn't think they were true. So I grew up knowing that the majority of people around me thought things that probably weren't true. But that was at an age when fairy tales and reality aren't clearly seperated. While I was still learning to seperate story books from reality, god and Jesus weren't much different than, say, characters of the Brothers Grimm or Pippi Longstocking. It sort of overlapped in my mind. They were just one more cultural icon and cultural reference point.

And yet just as there are moments where you wish and hope that you can fly if only you try hard enough and move your arms fast enough or that maybe, just maybe, magic exists if only you believe hard enough, there was an age when I did something you might call praying in that I expressed hopes and thoughts to the universe, deeply, deeply hoping to be heard (need I say to no avail?). As I got older, fact and fiction seperated even further and I became an ardent rationalist.

Then in my early twenties, I started to envy religious people for the cozy safety net and sense of pupose they had. So I read and thought a lot about religion and god and all the usual arguments for or against the existence of god. And I tried really hard. I really tried, did the whole "if you are there, please give me a sign" thing. Nothing. And whenever I read the arguments for the existence of god I just couldn't help but discover logical flaws and loopholes everywhere. It just didn't work. I couldn't do that leap of faith.

Today I am 99,9999999999999% sure there is no god, so I use that as my working hypothesis and accept the remaing risk. I do not believe in the supernatural either, but I say nothing when my hyper-esoteric ENFP friend talks about how she visits a fortune teller or offers to lay the cards for me or prays to mother earth before every meal. I just let her be, as I do with my Catholic friend who participated at parade during Semana Santa in Spain and was enthusiastic about how after en entire day on an empty stomach and hours of carrying a heavy wooden cross in the Spanish midday sun at over 40° C he started to have visions.
 

Jessica

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Getting heavily into science, specifically astronomy at first, was a big moment for me. Especially when I learned that my favorite star is eight thousand light years away and most Protestants believe the world to be 6,000 years old. Astronomy happened at about 8 years old, finding out creationists believed the world to be 6,000 years old happened at about 11 or so.

The next major thing was getting duped into believing in the Planet X thing of 2003. Supposed alien contactee Nancy Lieder suggested that a brown dwarf was going to swing by the Earth in May of 2003 and cause all sorts of disasters. May of 2003 came and went, and I came out of that a new person. I adapted the basics of skepticism after that, where I decided to question everything. I had been scared shitless by something that couldn't have possibly occurred, and it wouldn't happen again.

After my studies of evolutionary science and supposedly controversial subjects like the big bang, I lost all semblance of religiosity by the age of 15, in 2005. I came out as agnostic in 2005 (but fit the descriptor of atheist), and declared myself an atheist in 2006. I consider 2005 to be the year I moved into atheism as opposed to 2006, however.

Six years godless and happier than ever because of it. ;)
 

Southern Kross

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Religion was similar in certain repects. My Mum is an atheist and my Dad an agnosticist, so they never told me that there was a god. But I heard other people talk about it and remember having to draw pictures of Jesus at elementary school. When I came home and told about what we had discussed at school, my Mum explained that, yes, some people believe those things, but she didn't think they were true. So I grew up knowing that the majority of people around me thought things that probably weren't true. But that was at an age when fairy tales and reality aren't clearly seperated. While I was still learning to seperate story books from reality, god and Jesus weren't much different than, say, characters of the Brothers Grimm or Pippi Longstocking. It sort of overlapped in my mind. They were just one more cultural icon and cultural reference point.
I had a similar experience. My parents are both atheists but they never sought to persuade me to believe one thing or another. I was encouraged to do this on my own.

I experienced no revelations in regard to religion. I think as a child I saw the arguments for and against playing out in my head like an extended court case. I was pulled back and forth by either side. There wasn't a single nail in the coffin for me. It just got to a point where I just felt it wasn't proven beyond reasonable doubt, so to speak. But at the same time logical arguments didn't hold much sway over me. I feel like evaluating religious belief with logic is missing the point. I was looking for a clear feeling, an instinct that would guide me. This took time to develop properly and eventually I settled on the position of agnostic atheism.

Superstition is different, however. My skepticism towards it is based on logic, not instinct.
 

Such Irony

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For me it was a combination of several things.

I remember when I first learned about the theory of evolution how much logical sense it all made. It just made more sense than the theory of creationism.

I've wondered alot about why God would allow bad things to happen to good people and why some people have to endure more pain and suffering than others. Why would thousands of innocent people be victims of war or disease or natural disasters while others were spared? As I learned more about the world, I realized that good wasn't always rewarded and evil people often didn't "pay" for it. This contradicted what I was raised to believe about God.

There are thousands of religions. Some have beliefs contradicting each other. They can't all be right, yet they like to think they are. I just couldn't believe that most people would go to hell for having a different set of beliefs. If God was truly a loving and merciful God, wouldn't God accept people for different beliefs?
 
S

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For me it was largely learning about other religions that first lead to my atheist stage.
 

Within

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So non-believers. What was that first little nougat of questioning that blossomed into your current ideology?

I don't remember what sparked my reasoning, it could be the fact that my class were going through the bible in school. I can't find myself remembering ever believing in a deity, my parents are strictly atheists and they simply left that kind of truths for me to figure out on my own.

I do remember that I was lying in my bed at the age 8 and after thinking things through I concluded that there's no god. When going through things again older, and with a wider perspective I only find myself reinforcing that belief.
 

Qlip

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Non believers.. hah. I think that the title is supposed to exclude me. I believe a lot of things that by the book 'skeptics' would flame me for, but I am ultimately a skeptic. I started out by questioning a line of faith that was fed to me, started from a blank slate and explored from there.

Skepticism is a useful tool. It's supposed to be used in a process of finding truth. It seems like people use it as a way to define some sort of canon of what to believe or not to believe.. the non existence of God for instance. I can respect people who have arrived at that conclusion using their own reasoning and understanding. There are far to many who take 'What all skeptics know' and just buy it wholesale as if it is just another religion.
 

Xenon

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The moment I started questioning my faith and what had been told to me or the moment I began to doubt the existence of God? I ask because they are two separate events that happened years apart.

Yup, same here.

My parents split when I was very young, and I grew up living with my mother and her parents. They were all Catholic. My dad, on the other hand, scorned organized religion and had lots of new agey beliefs. I don't ever remember a time when I didn't question the Catholic stuff. My dad's beliefs stayed with me much longer. He believed in telepathy, speaking with the dead, reading auras, astrology and tarot readings and other sorts of divination, the healing power of crystals, reincarnation, a vague 'God is energy' sort of belief in the divine, etc. He believed we could "know" these things were true because they "felt right". Did he ever believe that. And he spoke with such conviction and authority, so much more than my mother's family, that I was convinced of these same things until my late teens.

Then, when I was eighteen...I experienced a terrifying mental state. It was a form of mild dissociation called depersonalization, and it stayed with me for about three months. During that time, I felt very detached from my body and my experience of the world. Like my mind was a million miles away. When I moved, I felt like my body was moving on it's own, and I was watching it from far away. Food stopped being pleasurable, because I felt disconnected from my lips and tongue. I'd spend time just staring at my hands, wondering how these strange appendages could be mine. At times I was gripped with the strong sense that my mind, my 'self', was about to fly away and disintegrate, that this could happen as easily as a feather could be swept off the back of my hand on a windy day. Like most others who've experienced this, I became obsessive about "checking" myself to make sure I was still there. I'd repeatedly run my fingers along the back of my other hand to make sure I could still feel, shift around my feet to make sure I was still connected to the ground....it became a full-time job.

The experience also made me obsessive about questions of the soul, the afterlife, what happens when you die. More than ever, I desperately wanted to be assured that I would continue to exist after death. If I could feel this bizarre while I was still alive and still myself and still in this body, then how could I possibly expect to feel anything like myself after death?? I just couldn't let go of trying to imagine all sorts of possibilities of just how the soul could be real and what 'came next' after death, and trying to intuitively "know" the truth by which possibility "felt right" as my dad had taught me. But it led me to no clear answer. I went around in circles, saying to myself, 'This!', and 'No, THIS!' and 'No, not that, this!'.

I eventually found an internet forum for people with depersonalization (DP, they all called it). One woman had recovered after being in this state for many years. She would stress, over and over, that obsessing about the experience, how you feel every moment, what it all means, 'checking' yourself all the time...was one of the worst things you could do. It kept you locked in that state. Better to focus outward, as much as you could, no matter how difficult that was. Slowly and gradually, I returned to feeling like myself.

But the glue that had been holding my faith in the supernatural together - the idea that I could "just know" what is objectively true based on my intuitive feelings - that was never the same. After all, it was so very wrong throughout that whole experience. I had felt a strong intuitive sense that my mind was just about to fall apart...and it turned out I was never in any danger of that (it had not happened to anyone on that message board, although many felt like it would and feared it like I had). I had felt a strong intuitive sense that I needed to focus on myself to hold my mind together...and that turned out to be one of the worst things I could do. I had felt a strong intuitive sense that there was something physically wrong with my brain, that this just had to be a physical health problem...and all the tests had come back clear. My father had been so keen to make me understand that authority figures could be wrong, and that people should question and challenge them at times. He had never told me that our own feelings could lead us just as astray, and that we should question and challenge them also. He never realized that himself.

So, "I know it because I feel it" was no longer a valid argument in my mind. And really, that was all I had against everything that told me that god and an extracorporeal soul and paranormal phenomena etc. probably did not exist. Once I let go of that idea, I was able to hear and seriously consider all the rational arguments against all of that. I didn't want to at first. The idea of being alone in the world without any higher power, and the idea of ceasing to exist after death..those still frightened me. After I recovered from the DP I just shoved all that stuff in the back of my mind and tried to put the experience behind me and just focus on living my life. Years later, I was browsing the internet and came across an interview with a well-known psychologist was asked if he believed in the afterlife. He bluntly replied that the probability was very low, and people believed in it mostly because they were afraid to die. I was shocked and horrified...because I had no argument against what he'd said. Nothing. Years before I would have smugly thought, I know it because I feel it. These people may be blind to the truth, but not me. Not anymore.

I've pretty much made peace with it all now, but it for a while it was painful and difficult to accept. That's one of the reasons I normally stay away from these types of discussions: all the assumptions that atheists and skeptics are "closed-minded" and have never considered other points of view and just follow along with whatever science tells them piss me off. To an extent that sort of thing is quite natural when people encounter those who disagree with them, but it gets to me when it comes to this topic. This was somewhere my mind really didn't want to go at first, and I went there anyway. That is the opposite of closed-mindedness. Whatever anyone may think of my conclusions, I sure as hell didn't arrive here through closed-mindedness or refusing to question things.

Well, that was quite the wall of text, wasn't it?. I think I'll just make short posts for a while.
 

Nicodemus

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I really cannot remember if there ever was a defining moment in the becoming of my worldview. Thanks to my parents, who went to church with us on christmas but had no faith to speak of, I have never had any religious belief to doubt. In school I learned about god and his son's adventures, but those were just stories to me. I think I have always had my own philosophy and accepted influences only insofar as they would confirm or expand on already existing notions and convictions.

I guess that sounds terribly biased; but the truth is that my convictions are very basal and can be called in question if there is something resembling evidence to contradict them.
 

Mae

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I don't think I ever believed in God, even having been born into a heavily Christian family, even when I was going to church twice a week, and playing the part being forced upon me. I just do not remember a single time at any age that I believed in God. I actually think Santa Clause was more plausible.

I do not feel like I have to explain myself. I do not feel like I should be expected to have gone through some journey or process. I have always been surrounded by believers and have always been different from them. Getting older and learning more about the world, science, and religion only reinforced how I felt.
 

Patches

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I never had the belief to begin with. Religion wasn't a common topic of conversation in my household. I knew of religion, but I don't think I ever 'bought it'.

When I was around 12, I decided myself that I wanted to go to church. I was curious. I walked to church alone every Sunday morning. I joined the church's youth group. I went to summer Bible Camps for youth. I even joined a competition called "Bible Quizzing". (And I was a pretty fucking awesome bible quizzer.) I went all-out and became really active. But throughout it all, I never really understood why people had faith in it. And to be honest, I think I was envious. I wanted that faith. It seemed to give people comfort/happiness. I tried, I really did.

I stayed involved despite my lack of belief until I was 17-18. At that time one of the churchgoers who was my age got pregnant. The whole young, unmarried, premarital pregnancy thing didn't fly well in church. She was forced to step down from leading bible studies for younger kids, and was pretty much excommunicated from the church by the older congregation. I was pretty disgusted by how they treated her. She DID have that faith and belief, and she was in a really hard place where she needed that support system more than anything else, and they weren't there for her. My disgust with how they treated her caused me, and several other younger people to leave the church.

And at this point I've stopped trying to understand. I'm happy for the people who have that faith and comfort in their lives. I can't be one of those people.
 

kelric

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I don't think that there was a single moment... I do distinctly remember that even although my family never went to church as I was growing up, I'd learned in my mind that the word "Christian" was synonymous with "good person" (everyone else in my family was, and is, Christian today). So I considered myself a Christian without really knowing what it meant (yeah, I was young :p).

So in a real way, I never had "faith" in the way that it's generally understood with respect to religion. I wanted to be (and tried to be) a good person, that was it. As I got older, I started to think about things more... specifically:

  • Why is it that people with such varying religious beliefs are so certain that they are correct? What evidence is there that one group is more correct than another? What evidence is there that *any* of these groups is correct?
  • Why is it that when something goes favorably, religious authority (ie, God) can be given credit, but when something goes wrong, this is not appropriate? The most iconic example of this is when people suffer through a natural disaster, and say things like "I'm so thankful to God that I'm okay" -- when so many of their neighbors were killed. Did God not like *them*?
  • Religious explanations always seemed "tacked on", or the result of making hasty assumptions about hard questions. When thinking about why people believed certain things with respect to religion, the answer always seemed to be "because I want to believe it -- it makes me comfortable."

The words "religious", "faith", atheist", and "agnostic" are so prone to differences in what people mean when they define them that it's hard to use them descriptively when comparing one person's thoughts to another's. So I don't really consider myself an atheist ("There is no God, God Damn It!"), or an agnostic ("there may be a God, but for any number of reasons, I'm not sure, so the question is still open").

So I guess I'm just "nonreligious". It's okay to not have answers to everything, for the great unknown to be something that's only partially explorable, to know that learning more and finding logical explanations for more doesn't mean that every question has an answer. Some things fall under "can't be adequately and reasonably addressed." And that's okay.


Patches said:
And at this point I've stopped trying to understand. I'm happy for the people who have that faith and comfort in their lives. I can't be one of those people.
It would be nice, wouldn't it? But it's just not for me.
 

jimrckhnd

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I was brought up catholic and got the whole religious instruction bit. Now for you non-catholics this may seem a bit strange but the one thing you learned in those days is you did not put your filthy sin stained hands on a consecrated host. EVER. If the priest drops it you got the hell out of the way and let him deal with it - don't try and pick it up. And... the priest put the host in your mouth - you didn't take it from him. We were told all kinds of horrible tales by the nuns about what happened to people who did.

At some point the hierarchy decided this was a bit unsanitary (the Vatican finally accepted "germ theory" or something :shrug:) and lo!! they decided you had the option of taking it from the priest and putting it in your own mouth. I was thinking "what the f*ck"? I mean if you can change that what can't you change? Is this all arbitrary? What about the people who DID commit a sin by touching it - does St. Peter come down to purgatory and hell and say "my bad - you are free to go"?

That was first time I really started to question and after that whole religion thing just fell apart. A one point I tried to read a reason based defense of theism and Christianity (Mere Christianity I think) but even at my age (14 or so) I spotted a couple of what I felt were critical logical errors in it. After that it was pretty much game over. It took awhile to replace the metaphysical underpinnings of my belief system but one thing I was pretty sure of – that theism wasn’t reasonable.
 

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I was raised Catholic, attended Catholic school, went to mass but I never felt part of it. More like observing from the outside and I didn't like what I saw from a young age. I think when I realized that religion...all religion, was the cause of so much suffering, so much hate, so much hypocrisy and worst of all, responsible for so much ignorance and allowing it to continue, I came to the conclusion that religion only existed as a way to control people and I wanted no part of it. No amount of good can wipe away the astronomical level of bad in religion. I knew religion was based on interpretation and nothing more. What made anyone's interpretation better than mine or someone else? I guess I'm happy for people who find comfort in it but I can't grasp how or why they do.
 

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I might've been seven, or eight. I was in school I think, and we were reading about spiritual beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, and I recall clearly a child saying "That's so stupid. How can they believe things that ridiculous?" And then, I thought to myself, well, plenty of facets of Christianity are just that ridiculous. So I didn't start off immediately rejecting the idea of God, per se, more the Bible. But then from there, it was a pretty natural progression for me to start questioning the existence of God. I think I was ten when I decided "What are the chances of this idea of God actually existing? It makes being struck by lightning seem like a plausible fear!" And then after that, I took a philosophy course where we engaged in all kinds of fun discussions on that very topic, and it was all shot to hell.
But then again, I was not raised in a particularly religious family. My parents were Catholic in name, I suppose, but my father carried on about his life rather as an agnostic would, and worrying about "God" really did not blip his radar. My mother....she has a very Japanese concept of spirituality if you will, all kinds of beliefs mashed into a spirituality that's comfortable to her. If anything, she's the closest to Buddhism. She is very serious about the idea of reincarnation.
 

sui generis

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In one of my psych courses in college, the professor (himself an out skeptic) talked about how stimulating the brain in certain ways can cause the owner of the brain to have "spiritual" experiences. I'd never considered before that there didn't have to be an actual "god" involved at all! :shock:
 

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Not a non-believer. Not a believer. I doubt atheism because the universe is too big. I doubt religion because it tries to simplify everything.

The universe is too big to know everything.

What we know through science is what we know through science.

What we don't know through science is left to interpretation.

It doesn't stop me from disagreeing with the Jewish/Christian/Islamic God.
 
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