how did you become an atheist?

Grew up in the UK. It's kinda the default position I think over here.

god told me to do it.

Parents are both atheists, every kid bar one at my primary school (Church of england) thought the idea of believing in a god was ridiculous. Thats it really, didn't so much become an atheist at any point, just never became religious.

My parents were nominally Christian, although never went to church or anything like that. We sang hymns and stuff and said prayers in school, but apparently when I was about six a friend of mine and I said we decided that God was made up, like Father Christmas.

From primary school onwards there was basically no one religious at all, or who believed in God apart from a couple of the Muslim kids (although most of the Muslim kids didn't either - only one didn't drink, for example).

Atheism is pretty much the default position here, finding a Christian is always something of a real rarity. I was chatting to a friend of a friend in the pub a few weeks ago and she said something about being Christian and I just assumed she was joking, and joked along with her. Later on she said that honestly she was Christian, but I still thought she was taking the piss and it took a while before I realised she was actually a Christian. That's pretty much how rare it is. At least around my social circles.

A few of my work colleagues who aren't white and are in their 40s plus are religious, mind.

Grew up atheist, now ignostic with some neopaganist/pantheist leanings. Which is just a less boring way of saying "yep, still an atheist".

@krink

For some reason, I thought that was the perfect post/profile pic combo...

Im agnostic because of the natural existence of DMT in your brain

Que? But does the existence of the appendix, does nothing for decades then kills you, not counter that?
Agnosticism is a bit of an odd position tbh. I mean you either believe in gods or you don't. Even if you're open to the possibility of their being gods so long as you don't believe in them then you're an atheist.
If you are 'agnostic' about the existence of gods then you must be agnostic about there being fairies, leprechauns and to the possibility that the sky will be made of custard tomorrow morning.

Brought up a Cathlolic lost my faith at 12 when my father died.

Forming my ideas on religion was an accumulative process. Nether of my parents were in the least interested in religion and they never discussed theology unless my sister or I brought it up. We children both went through a religious phase due to the influence of primary school. Our parents expected us to grow out of it, which was what happened.

The first crack in my bland acceptance of protestant ideas was following the death of our family dog. I asked my mother if it had gone to heaven and was told that if there was a heaven then surely our wee dog was up there. I could not have though this ambiguous answer was definitive enough so I asked my infant teacher, who informed me that animals had no souls therefore only humans could be saved and go to heaven.

At home I told my mother I would not wish to go to heaven because our dog was not allowed in. For the first and perhaps only time my mother contradicted a teacher (she had an over respect for the teaching profession – her own father had thought education could damage a female’s brain), and told me my teacher was only repeating something she had read in a book or been told, she could not possibly know as she had never been to heaven. So the first chink of light: some ‘knowledge’ is speculative and some ‘authorities’ feel free to pontificate on things of which they know little.

My parents were atheists but I was sent to schools in Norway, Scotland and England where we had to pray and got lectured on religion (also my grandparents are full on Catholics). I was one of those that hated 'organized religion' but still thought there was some benevolent being up there. I studied Jewish scripture for A level and that made me wonder even more because of how the Old Testament is constructed exposes the fact that there are loads of different gods and versions of gods in it and religious ideas changed over time. But I still thought that there might be some metaphysical Goody until I was 21 and did an online undergrad course in physics and quantum physics and then realised just how unnecessary the whole idea is. Then I started reading up on all the arguments against it and was frankly embarrassed that I had ever had any metaphysical leanings at all. It was also at about this time that I became a full on libertarian communist as well. "The critique of religion is the essential precondition for all criticism" as Marx rightly points out!

I don't think it does counter that. Maybe it is not that it doesn't have a need, but rather, we just have not found the need yet ? For DMT, I think it must have a need, because of the sheer intensity and size of what it can do and what it can you let you experience. All your doing when you take DMT as a drug externally is stimulating the natural DMT to be released in bigger quantities. I have read the book on DMT, DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman.

I may of misunderstood the meaning of the word agnostic, because your first point seems to make sense. But I do not think just because some one is agnostic they have to go against all reason, rationality, logic and science as you seem to be suggesting. There are many scientists that are agnostic or thiestic because of what they have discovered through science

that conflict is more based in rival nationalisms than rival religions (i.e. British loyalism [predominantly Protestant] and Irish nationalism [predominantly Catholic]).

pretty much everyone here does Christmas, and a lot do Easter but yes they are more commercial family festivals than religious ones.

I'm guessing this is an issue with English not being your first language, but in the UK/US "fag" is a derogatory term for homosexuals, so isn't acceptable on this site.

Yeah, don't worry I never thought you meant anything bad by it. It is common in popular culture to use words like "gay" as meaning something generally bad. And amongst friends using the term in this way can be fine, but publicly on a political website we decided we should not allow it, because it looks like we think it is acceptable to use "gay" or "fag" as an insult i.e. that we think there is something bad about it. Similarly, with friends you can use the word "n*gger" in a way that isn't racist, but we wouldn't allow it here because being viewed by the general public not knowing the person who says it it may appear racist. Anyway, back to your original question!

Grew up in a mainline US Protestant church (think the church on the Simpsons, basically), which most kids who attended were compelled to by their folks until after confirmation (a ritual at 15 where you say you take classes about what they believe and say you definitely want to keep doing it on your own, after which 70% of the confirmed disappear for good). We got a new pastor who was very evangelical and that whole world was a lot more exciting than what religion had been before (also at 15 I was looking for some easy certainty) so I became a born-again after that and even went to a religious college to study religion. On a bit of a dare I took a course in Liberation Theology and got really interested in christian anarchism, and eventually just plain classical anarchism, at which point the Christianity didn't really have a place anymore (and by then I'd learned enough about the Bible and church history to realize that as a defined faith with a defined founder-figure there really is no such thing as "christianity" it's just whatever people want it to be, which fits in a lot with the whole Feuerbachian critique of religion), so I dropped it. Getting into situationism, and then Pannekoek/Gorter only strengthened this rejection.

Oddly though I still have a few religious friends--mostly like Catholic Worker types.

Just a very short comment regarding Scots sectarianism. Being born and living my first twenty-five years in Scotland, I found even with left-wing atheists a deep fear and distrust of Roman Catholicism.

After relocating to London the racism I encountered there with my workmates regarding black people, was very similar to the anti-Catholic prejudices I was familiar with from Glasgow: ‘they don’t want to work’; ‘they take all the jobs’; ‘they fill up the prisons because they’re basically anti-social’; ‘they bread like vermin’, etc.

Nationalism may play a part though it has similar hallmarks to racism. I once heard a Scots workmate say he could tell a Catholic ‘just by looking at them’. Very strange!

edit: bread should read breed, what would Freud have made of that slip?

Religion doesn't provide certainty, it lives on doubt (or faith). Holbach rejected the label atheist (which was coined by his religious opponents, so its a form of stigmatisation) because it's the religious who are the real atheists as they disbelieve in the world and its laws. Also ethically, see Euthyphro's dilemma.

Of course there are lots of stages you go through, but Deism is a big one. I think the 'respectable' position for a religious person today is something between existentialism and/or Kantianism.

p.s.

An anarchist's persistent efforts convinced me, by which I mean repeatedly beat me up.

Nice to see Noa Rodman adding some flavour to the mix (I am not dissing btw, I genuinely like your post Euthyphro's paradox is great).

I was bought up an atheist, now I don't even care to call myself that. I think that has something to do with the 'new atheist' movement being full of dicks....

I concur with Steven that religion in England is not a big thing for a large number of people*, but would add that it is really important for others. I have noticed over the past sort of ten years since this 'war on terror' shambles that there has been a lot more people in the public eye willing to associate themselves with Christianity.

I know a few Christians and I think they are mostly genuinely sound people. I have only ever met one person who fulfilled the stereotype of religious zealot. She told me George Bush was a good man. But ya know. I have a rudimentary knowledge of the scripture, I'm pretty sure Jesus would have condemned the war on terror....

*Also worth pointing out the shared history 'atheism' has with protestantism.

I wasn't heavily indoctrinated by my parents, although they had Protestant background (my Uncle was a minister). I wasn't baptised and we didn't attend church, except for funerals and weddings. At school, though, we were made to pray every morning and there were weekly Christian assemblies.

It was school that made me Christian, but it was a fairly basic sort of Christian. Morals came from God, if you prayed then God might listen and intervene, good people went to heaven, and bad people went to hell. I knew there were Catholics and Protestants but I had no idea what the difference was because no-one ever told me. Catholics were few, went to different schools, and got spat on or beaten up! Somehow I didn't buy sectarianism and I had Catholic friends.

What made me lose my belief in the Christian god was the unreliable way in which He answered my prayers. I was bullied at school and He did fuck all about it, despite fervent petition. (I had yet to hear The Doors' "The Soft Parade".) I had a relapse when He worked a miracle for me, curing a wound sustained in Onanism. My part of the deal was to stop spilling my seed, an arrangement that lasted a week, as did that final flicker of faith. I got into Norse Paganism for a bit, the stories were better, but I knew it was all myth and just a bit of fun. I ended up being "vaguely spiritual" and I've not believed in God as a separate entity since I was about 12.

I actually had a brief Hare Krishna moment but when I noticed the cult-like aspects I gave up on organised religion completely. Talking of cults, I had a fling with Castaneda's Toltecism that went on for a bit too long. When I dropped Christianity it left some kind of void and I filled it with more nonsense. Entertaining nonsense, mind you.

Nowadays I would describe myself as either atheist or pantheist, and I think they might well be the same thing. I believe in the Universe. Identifying the universe as "god" is just saying that I care about this thing that we are...

It's an interesting read but a hell of a lot of what Strassman says is his own self-serving speculation filling his own void. It's clear from a careful reading that it's speculation, as he doesn't make claims that he can't back up, but he does make a lot of suggestions that he doesn't back up. There is no evidence that DMT is released upon dying, but Strassman really wants (you) to think that. I don't remember him saying that taking DMT stimulates endogenous DMT excretion, I'll have to have another read.

It's fascinating though, that, with no scientific knowledge, Amazonian shamans took the leaves of one plant (Psychotria Viridis) which contains DMT - completely inactive orally as the DMT is destroyed by enzymes in the gut - and found another plant (Banisteriopsis Caapi) which inhibits those enzymes, and made what is by many accounts the most powerful psychedelic brew in existence by combining them (into ayahuasca).

Like many people here I just grew up in a situation where religion and religious belief was more of an exception. Actually I remember when I was younger I couldn't comprehend that a person would actually believe in that stuff, I sorta just looked at it like any folk belief. My family was fairly staunchly atheist though. My grandfather came from a catholic background, however he turned his back on the church when he had gout at the age of 11 or 12 and spent a year with nothing to do except lie in bed and read. The way his family treated him after this I think just cemented his hatred of the church; the sent priests to tell him he was a terrible person, that he would go to hell when he died (keep in mind we're talking about a young boy who was already in hospital and very sick). He was a big influence on me, he gave me my first Kropotkin book when I was a teen, so I just sort of agreed with whatever he thought. At his funeral earlier this year it was a unique service in that it was totally non-religious and everyone was encouraged to wear red as a tribute to his socialism. With a grandfather like that atheism was a fairly natural position for me to take.

I never 'became an atheist' but I did become anti agressive liberal atheism. Coming from a 'don't really care but am very interested by the intellectual traditions' approach to religion, with all the attendant attention to details of philosophy and history that implies, the militant 'atheism' of the enlightened liberals pisses me off. It's both usually factually wrong (or so simplistic as to be effectively wrong) about it's main claims and almost always resolutely pro-capitalist in all sorts of insidious ways. I think the communist position on actual theology is to not care any more than we care about cartesian dualism or whatever, where as the communist position on religion organising in the political and economic spheres is to call bullshit on it just as much as corporations, the state and so on.

edit: plus I live with two christians who have vaguely lefty politics, sleep around a bit, do disibility rights stuff, are queer/queer friendly and so on. Which just makes it harder to give a shit about religion necessarily being some evil force for bigotry or however the narrative is supposed to go.

When I was twelve, my (catholic primary school) teacher was giving a talk about what it would mean to be more adult after our confirmation. She said something about working hard and getting into heaven, and a thought popped into my head: "Holy shit, God is the adult version of Santa!" …Exactly in those words.

From there it was a slippery slope from agnosticism to atheism by 14. Then I became one of the more annoying atheists that give everyone else a bad name – I don't simply disbelieve, I have to argue and cajole and an arsehole about it. I have a few religious friends but it's an effort to shut my mouth. How can they live their lives being so. damned. wrong?

It's 4chan parlance for christian, just like Australians are Ausfags, gays are gayfags, etc. It's usually used with some affection rather than maliciousness. I don't think it translates well outside 4chan though.

Ugh, can't you see that they are the worst ones!? Like people who go to those churches that have a drumkit up the front. They need to fuck right off. Exactly the kind who think they're spiritual for tolerating people they think will go to hell.

Me old RE teacher, gawd bless his dog collar, helped destroy religion for a generation of children by by teaching us the importance of all religions (and thus that none had special value). In a weird way he was the most effective advocate of atheism I've ever come across.

Cheers! It's not the first time it has happened on libcom either!

I was raised at catholic schools from 3-18. My secondry School was a Christian Brothers school, and so I was still taught by brothers etc... Its a strange one, I always remember being interested in religion. Like I can remember being sat in wednesday masses when I was 6-7 listening intently to the stories etc and actually thinking about them, however I also come from a long family line of socialists so my experience with Catholicism was largely a revolutionary variety (for my grandads generation that was largely located in Ireland), while my Dad is probably the least "pro revolutionary" of that side of my family its fairly obvious thinking back to my youth that I was taught the whole "jesus as the first communist" idea.

I think I was probably about 14 before I really started to get interested in Athiesm, and it wasnt out of any hatred for religion (personally I have very few "bad" experiences of it) but it was out of a growing interest in Ideas. I started to interrogate the ideas of Christianity on lots of levels and it just didnt make sense. My parents have since said that even when I was younger they'd always get comments about being too "questioning" from teachers.

I suppose really it was my Christian Theology A level that cemented my views now. Although I was already activley calling myself an athiest it was much more in the vien of knowing I didnt believe rather than knowing what I did believe. My A level theology teacher was an ex Trainee priest from the tennements of Glasgow, who had given up the vocation (after training at the vatican) because he just felt it was wrong. He was an out and out catholic, but again he was big into his liberation theology/ marx/ feuerbach etc... He never tried to force anything on me and obviously got my growing Marxist analysis (in many cases he was giving me stuff to read).

I dont quite know where this fits in, but I got "Tao Te Ching" at some point during my GCSE's and that pretty much destroyed any semblance of residual christianity left in me, and has since provided a fantastic framework for the whole Nietzche/ Marx project. Infact my distrust of the answers of christianity led me into Taoism/ Marx/ Nietzche/ Friere so I had that backdrop while I was studying A level Theology with a liberation theology proponant. Its not that suprising really. We still keep in touch as well.

I recently watched an interview with Bruce Springsteen where he says that being exposed to Catholicism at 5 was a big part of his life, and while he knows its not right etc that to provide a 5 year old with all these huge "ideas" like redemption, justice etc.... allows you a huge canvas to work on. Theres something in that I think, to some extent the more people tried to explain away my reservations with it, the more it cemented that I simply didnt have it in me, but there are still times when I find "atheists" much more objectionable and all the other things than I do religious people. I suppose having grown up around lots of them I've seen the good, bad and ugly of it.

I hope this is not your idea of a normal lefty and more seriously, what does the sleeping around a bit have to do with things ?

I actually think if we're trying to provide a thoertical and practical critique of religion stuff like that matters quite a bit. As I said I grew up in an Irish Catholic community, however it was also a community that was split within that, between the "fundamentalists" (that conjures up images of terrorism, but I dont mean it like that, maybe "dogmatists" might be better) and the "progressives" for want of a better word. WIthin that dichotomy there were yet more and more, and often they revolved around the ideas of "authority" and "politics".

Personally I feel that there are large parts of my upbringing that contributed to the views I now hold and a sizable part of that was the influence of religious people who were effectively anti religion, and to treat them to the same critique as the pro religious seems a bit trite, and also mysteifies the issue.

For instance the debate on abortion within catholicism is a great example. Within "cultural religions" like catholicism, Judaism, Islam etc the existence of a "religion" doesnt always imply a following of thier practices, morality or even world view, it can simply be the sort of identity that they have felt isnt worth giving up, maybe out of disinterest, or ease or whatever. The idea that you can be pro choice but catholic seems quite sensible and reasonable to many of the religious people I grew up with, many equally feel it abhorant and simply impossible. But the ones that feel it acceptable have already made a step in questioning the order of the world they exist in, and for a catholic denying the papal authority isnt just something you do for a laugh. It might seem small change (and its one of many examples) but I think it illustrates that the ability to analyse social relations doesnt have to start from a pure marxism/ anarchism/ any ism.

Now its true to say that part of that is no doubt down to bougeois ideology, but it shouldnt be seen purely as that and from my own personal experience (not me, as I was never really "religious") I have seen people move from "religious" to "socialist", in effect they just dropped the pretence of being "catholic" and made the break, but there are plenty of "religious" people, who are not bound up in the same chains that we tend to associate with organised religion, and I feel that an effective critique of that is worth having. Its topical now in relation to how we can build a working critique of Islamism and no doubt each religion is difficult...but to recognise that within the homogeneous "religion" there are multiple differing tendencies and rationale (much like our own movement) I think will make for a stronger critique.