I come from a family of Christians who, while devout in their beliefs, are also quite private about them. My parents read children’s versions of Bible stories to me and occasionally took me to a church service, but we didn’t pray together and we rarely talked about God. This changed when I was about nine or ten years old. My parents experienced a sort of spiritual revival and we began to attend church every week. I prayed for what was probably the first time. I started praying every day in fact, at least once before bed and usually several other times throughout the day. I read daily devotionals. I talked to everyone about God, always looking to share the Good News with anyone who would listen. I looked forward to going to church every week and listened intently to the sermons. I started going to Bible study on Wednesdays and resolved to read the entire Bible.

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I do not just want the truth; I demand it. This natural universe, so full of wonder, has a natural explanation. I know not what it is, but to believe it is the work of a God would rob it of wonder. In science, we see beauty and truth. In God, we see death and judgement. Besides, how do you believe in something that is not there?

David Lever

I am an atheist for many reasons but I think the one that possibly sealed it from a young age happened one Sunday when I was a child.  The sunday school “teacher” asked all the kids present to write down the initials of the person who was their best friend on a piece of paper.  One by one we were asked to read out what they had written and one by one each and every one read out J C.  It happened that there was one girl there with the initials J C.

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I am an atheist because when I was about four or five years old, my father brought me down to this little stream at the bottom of our garden and he made me put my hand into the clear cold water and told me about Heraclitus and the concept of panta rhei (everything moves and nothing stays the same). And when I was ten years old, our teacher marched us to a big mosaic/mural in our school depicting Plato’s analogy of the cave. Well, I knew then as much as I know now (45 years later) that I want to always search and find what is real and what can be known and to discover how everything always changes and evolves and not get stuck with some fixed idea/image reflecting from a wall.

Sabine
Germany

It is difficult to explain why I am an atheist without starting at the beginning. I was born in the mid-70s in rural Oxfordshire, England. My parents where Born Again Christians of the ‘burn your Beetles records’ variety, and believed with all the passion and transparency of youth that they where blessed and anointed to do the Lord’s work. They met at a Christian youth event and that has set the tenner for the rest of their lives together. Needless to say, my siblings and I where raised to treat Jesus as the other member of our family, albeit an invisible and all-powerful one. Jesus was firstly the saviour of our family, and only then the saviour of our church, country and the world. It was an intensely personal faith. Our parents believed in strict parenting. Child-rearing and the training of working dogs could be accomplished using essentially the same approach, although children seemed to have longer memories and where better at dissembling than hounds, and while the dog got a newspaper on the nose, we got the cane. It was enough to know that we had done wrong; there was little need to explain why. They loved us dearly (and still do), but I felt we always came a distant third behind Jesus and my parents to each other, in that order.

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There are questions religion cannot answer.

When I was very young, I’d occasionally attend Sunday school. This is not a proper school at all, in spite of the devious label. Instead, it’s a place for inculcating vague doctrines and incoherent models of reality, faint echoes of the thunderous fears of ancient superstitions. The pastors and senior pastors and youth pastors practiced their miseducation through sermons and rituals and the threat of hell and the promise of heaven and the singing of songs, songs accompanied by an amateur organist and consisting of ridiculous lyrics like, “God’s love is like a circle.” Whatever that means.

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At the age of fifteen, the fetid stink of religion became unavoidable.  Every rotten iota of institutionalized religion became unignorable and unavoidable.  My faith doubled down to brace for this assault.  I read the Bible cover to cover and my philosophy changed to one of personal behavior.  I could no longer believe atheists went to Hell when so many horrible Christians went to heaven.  This was, for me, my first run in with the hypocrisy of belief and religion.  My once firm and indomitable belief that the Bible was the literal word of God had been undermined by the behavior of its followers and the text it contained.

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Like so many my weltanschauungen is the progeny of my familial roots. 

My father, who passed away in 1982, had few passions in life, one was watching football and another was to castigate any and all religions. I now watch little to no football but I still have my father’s disdain for all things religious. My next birthday is number 57, the same age my father was when he died, his death-day was also his birthday. I have long ago surpassed him in the sheer amount of vitriol, sarcasm, and opprobrium directed at that farcical folly called religion. 

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I am an atheist,

• not because I am angry at God.

• not because I’m rebelling against organized religion.

• not because I enjoy sinning.

• not because I’ve been brainwashed by college.

• not because I’ve been possessed by the devil.

• not because I like offending people.

• not because I’m any less of a good person than I was.

• not because I’m just going through a phase.

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Dumb luck.

Really, the dumbest.

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