Since birth, I was raised as a Catholic. I look at my life as through 3 periods so far: nonreligious Catholic, very religious Catholic, Atheist.

As a young child, I often never thought about religion. Nobody else did either. I hated Church because it was boring, and God was a subject I didn’t take seriously. I didn’t believe in God because I was convinced, it was because that’s just how it is here. Belief is the norm. We all believed in God, but we weren’t religious. I did, though, have a kids Bible I especially liked.

I was raised very scientifically. Evolution, old Earth, etc. My beliefs were God and Science exist together.

As I got a little older, my mom seemed to realize we were’nt religious enough, so starting in 3rd grade, I attendied youth class every week. I started studying Christianity, (the good parts anyway.) I was fascinated. Jesus died on a freakin’ cross for us! I learned the Bible stories and ate them up without question.

I had an odd Christian history. I was baptised Catholic, but the group I was with was mostly evangelical, or whatever. My dad’s side of the family was Nazarene, and we had fun with our church. These were the magic days of religion.

As I grew up, I learned about Atheists. I regarded them as people who were intelligent and moral, but lost in their own arrogance, blinded from God, worthy of pity. As a Christian, that’s just how I looked at it. I wanted to be a Scientist…until I heard most were Atheist.

Starting in 5th grade, I attended Catholic school now and went to a Catholic chruch. This is when my faith got serious. I really started analyzing Christianity, and in my naivity, held on to it. I always invented foolish reasons as to why God MUST exist.

Catholicism is very weird. Christianity was never the same when I attended the Catholic church.

I found myself very close to God. I prayed whenever the thought came to my head. It was all very peaceful.

Until last summer.

It was on the night of a meteor shower, how cool. Me and my cousin and a friend were outside, watching the stars go flying by.

I got into a small argument of evolution with my cousin, who was Nazarene. I was shocked. I had always believed that evolution was common knowledge, and all Christians believe in it Whoops, turns out only Catholics do. My acceptance of evolution helped me to atheism btw.

We started talking about spirits, ghosts, and God. Now, I will not share everything that was said, but it was very eye-opening. I had always been an open Christian; it just happens I had never heard the Atheist argument and never the Christian one. This was the Buddhist argument, actually. The friend was a Buddhist. Strange, that Buddhism pushed me to Atheism.

From then on, my beliefs were modified. And I got thinking. Applying rational thinking through it, and not what I was taught, and in time, I became a deist. I considered myself a deist of the Christian God.

But as months went by, my rationality and knowledge of Science had grown greater. I just thought about it for a change. I abandoned faith and still held to Christianity, that was the method of my questioning. i had questioned God before, but used faith in the process. Without the delusional emotion of faith, the obvious truth is a lot clearer. It was very strange. I considered my own religion. I even tried out Buddhism.

I don’t know exactly when I was fully realized as an Atheist, but I am sure that by Halloween 2007, I acknowledged my Atheism.

It didn’t end there, though. Even after I was Atheist, I still “prayed”. If God would show me a miracle, I would believe. I didn’t, but I reasoned “If he DOES exist, he’ll answer me whether I believe in him or not.”

Like every Atheist who makes this prayer, I got the same answer. I kept looking out for a miracle, hoping for it, but it never came. Eventually I gave up on it.

Since then, my Atheism is strong. Well, no. I’m a broad Atheist with strong confidence in my belief. I’m not a “strong’ Atheist. That’s irrational.

After seeing various argument, I’m sure more than ever before. I’ve studied religion, and I’ve found the bad side of it. I’m glad I’m no longer Christian. (Though for a while, I tried out Shinto, but it never hit off. Logic, reason and science had enslaved me.)

And that’s my story, in a nutshell.

Shortly after I found Science, in my teens I found the courage to be an Athiest, and now with Secular Humanism in tow I start the road to a pHD in Physics…thanks aunt Harriet

Fast forward to sophomore year in high school. My liberal political views had been firmly consolidated, and I was getting pretty sick and tired of fundie churches condemning Harry Potter, evolution and gay marriage. Being a fervent YTMNDer, I was also getting really sick of the Church of Scientology, which had made legal threats to the site the previous summer (which thankfully were not followed by anything else). In researching the Church, I soon learned the extent to which people will debase themselves and ruin their lives for the sake of a delusion. Being in an AP US History class, I also learned a little about the history of Mormonism. I found it odd that people would be so willing to follow what a single man suddenly decided was the holy word of God. Being a rational human being, I came to realize that my criticisms of Scientology and Mormonism could just as easily be turned toward Christianity. People did ruin their lives for my religion, and my religion really was based around what one person suddenly said was the holy word of God. And one fateful day, I decided to watch Jesus Camp. That film really made me ashamed to call myself a Christian.

I spent an entire weekend philosophizing about the existence of God and how justifiable the Christian religion really is compared to all the other religions I was so willing to deny. One of the key breaking points was when I realized that if I was to go to heaven realizing that some people were in eternal punishment in hell, heaven could never be a place of perfect happiness for me. It was roughly 10:45 AM on May 21st, 2007 when I rejected the Christian religion and became an atheist.

I spent five months in the closet, going to church and pretending to be a Christian. I think the reason I broke so quickly was partly because I could not continue to feign belief in the messages I found so repulsive and wrong, but also because I really hated the hymns (no joke, I had even hated them when I was a Christian). In any case, I found myself IMing things like “ever have those days when you’re pondering in the back of your mind whether you want to just up and go insane?” on Sundays. October 21st was the last Sunday I ever spent in church, because that Saturday I finally told my parents. We don’t talk about it, and it works fine. The rest of my family and my church still doesn’t know the truth.

The unspeakable vileness was not hers, it was Christianity itself.

The actual moment of realizing I was an atheist came much later, and wasn’t really spectacular – it was just during a moment of reflection about my belief, and it was along the lines of “Well, I haven’t even entertained any belief in any kind of god for a long time now. I guess I just need to admit it to myself – to just say it out loud. I am an atheist.”

I’ve never been a religious person, though I spent a lot of years being “spiritual” and “philosophical” and assuming that there was some overarching purpose and direction in life. That things happened for a reason.

What killed it for me? Realizing that I blamed this unnamed, undefined “force” for my friend getting all the girls and I didn’t. I clued in suddenly that the only thing stopping myself from getting the girls was… well, myself, and the longer I held to some idea of greater power, the more chance I had to blame it rather than solving my own problems. Didn’t help me get the girls, but gave me some perspective.

Reinforced by an astronomy class in university, which exposed me to ut how self-contined, predictable and understandable. I didn’t need a God to tell me that these things were far away but acting on the same forces that powered me. That for there to be a “God” in any theistic sense, one who is active and observational would destroy the careful balance of the system. I remembered Stephen Hawking writing abot how the universe existed in our dimensions because it was the only way it COULD exist, and that made so much more sense. It didn’t happen ’cause someone wanted it, but happened because it could. That made so much sense to e.

I was raised Catholic, but have had doubts going back to childhood. By college, I was not really practicing religion, but still considered myself a believer. When my first child was a couple years old, my wife and I decided to start attending church again. Partly to help provide a moral base (we thought) for the kids, and partly because it was what was expected by family/society. But eventually we both became disillusioned with religion and started feeling like hypocrites, especially dealing with sacraments for the kids, etc. About 1.5 years ago we stopped attending altogether. It’s just been within the past year that I’ve been honest enough with myself to admit I don’t believe in god. Then I kept putting off the whole “coming out” part until I finally did it out of frustration from an online “discussion” with a fundamentalist Christian.

I come from a WELS family. This meant baptism at birth, Sunday school and Bible study regularly, and Everyone Else Is Heathen lessons on the side (called something else, but that was the content). Also present: Creation Magazine and Answers In Genesis.

There were several factors, I think, in my deconversion – firstly, there aren’t many conservative Lutherans in the Pacific NW, so after hearing how I was the only kid in town who was saved, things seemed a bit fishy. Secondly, my parents encouraged a love of reading and exploration by sending me to all sorts of places – science camps, art classes, world culture exhibits – while giving me fairy tales to read. By the time high school hit, I had a diploid world view – the earth was young, science worked, biology was a scam, and astronomy was fascinating and awe-inspiring for how insignificant it made human history. This led to some odd behavior, like purposely avoiding taking any more biology than necessary because it might make me lose my faith. Interning with scientists and engineers only exacerbated the dissonance.

So, after graduating high school, I decided to suck it up and research my faith, rather along the lines of the early scientist theologians who researched the natural world in search of the divine. Found lots of nature, lots of history, lots of points nobody’d ever called attention to in church – and distressingly little divinity. For several months, I’d cry at night after reading something particularly eye-opening, because I wanted the security blanket of an afterlife, I wanted a second chance where I couldn’t screw things up. Eventually it sank in, though, and life has been about the same, minus the guilt over not being perfect and proselytizing everywhere or the self-censorship of research into topics that might lead to hard questions.

There’s been surprisingly little backlash, but that’s because only immediate family and friends know. The religious ones ignore it – apparently, I’m either a believer who doesn’t know it, or not worth trying to save, or they’re hypocrites. Most likely they know it’s all baloney, but are too invested in the fantasy to critically examine it for what it is.

Around the same time, I was taking a course called “Faith of Catholics” at my liberal Catholic high school. It was basically an apologetics class. Being strongly inclined toward critical thinking, I looked at the apologetics arguments and compared them to the counter-arguments I had found on the webpage. I found the counter-arguments winning out at nearly every point. However, the argument for pantheism, I thought, was rather poor.

I quietly left it at that, until I later found the atheist blogosphere. Only then did I think of myself as atheist. Less than a year ago, I “came out” quietly by changing my facebook profile. Sometimes I wonder which of my friends have actually seen it, but other times I don’t care.