Freedom Through Reason

At what point did you know you were an atheist? Why did you become one, what were the factors leading up to the decision, if you weren’t always one?

I think, in my heart of hearts, I was an atheist a long time before I realised that I was. The notion of God was always quite alien to me; I was religious as a child, but with each birthday less so. The more and more I learned about the world and about how it worked - scientifically - the more skeptical I became. But indoctrination is difficult to resist - and indoctrinated I was - so I wasn’t quite able to ever reject my religion.

It was actually an exam, in school, when I was young that made me actively question my beliefs. I had done very well on the exam; a good friend of mine, who was a wonderful person from a very devout Christian family, had done very badly. We had both prayed before the exam, yet I had done well and they had not. And it made me ask: why would God favour me over them? And it was this simple thought that led me down a path that resulted in my rejecting religion, strengthened by a five-year education in the three sciences at secondary level. I did explore other religious philosophies in the intermediate part of the story, but I rejected them all.

I couldn’t say exactly when I became a profound atheist, but it was certainly around the time I left secondary school - and then I went on to meet, for the first time in my life, other atheists who had been on or were partway through similar journeys. They helped me to move on from my remaining religious hangups. I became an atheist - or to be more precise went back to being one, as no child is born religious - simply because my understanding of the universe and how it works, which is based on science, does not require a God to function, and in the absence of evidence for God’s existence, that makes it logical to presume that God does not exist for all intents and purposes. I reject religion because it serves no purpose and is utterly at odds with my social and political philosophies.

jackie9009:

That’s like saying “Here is a free car, but I demand that you pay for the keys.”