Hereinafter is what is actually a continuation of my series When and why they became Atheists Project which is a list of 133 Atheists which I will update with those which follow.
For the original project I actually wrote a review of each of the 133 but hereinafter I will simply break down the replies that Atheists posed to The Thinking Atheist form wherein someone posted the following question, “What was your path to Atheism? Well? I’m curious. Were you always atheist? Did you grow up religious and have an epiphany? Eager to see your responses.”
The patter is basically that Catholicism results in a LOT of Atheists, they consider themselves to be smarter than everyone else (often based on Christians’ failure to answer tough questions or the Atheist subjectively deciding that the answer is not good enough), often emotional issue (problem of evil as the result of the death of a loved one), rebelling against mommy and daddy (as well as against oppressive manmade religion) and generic and fallacious appeals to “science” (actually, scientism). I also find that Atheist love to boast about just how early in life they became Atheists, how young they were, which only results in the conclusion that it was mostly if not entirely based on childish reasons such as lack of knowledge of logic and actual science as well as the aforementioned emotive excuses such as rebellion.
In this case, I again encountered the following claims, “I have always been atheist…I’ve always been one…Everyone starts out an atheist…I had always been an atheist…always an atheist”…Lifelong Atheist.” Then the somewhat different “I was never a believer” and one with which I self-identify, “Some of us seem to be born natural skeptics with extremely good bull[****] detectors.” Now, of course, this pertains to one’s definition of “Atheism,” see Natural Born Atheist, Natural born atheist or theist? and VIDEO: Are we born presuppositional theists that have to be taught to deny God? (Justin Barrett lecture). Interestingly, someone replied as follows to this claim by Atheists, “Lies. Everyone starts out primate. It’s not even a useful lie as it implies natural automagically better. As my Gwynnies has been told, it’s not.” Well, I certainly cannot understand not agree with all of it but the main premise is a good one.
Many claimed that they were “raised” or that their family was or that they attended this or that religious school and church which tells us nothing about what any of that means. I could claim that I was raised a soccer team X fan since my family was and I attended that team’s matches yet that is about as meaningless. Within this particular group we get the following breakdown:
“raised as a Methodist… raised a Methodist.” “Grew up in a Missionary Baptist home…grew up Baptist…Grew up a devout Southern Baptist, evangelical Christian.” “Was a Christian… conservative CoC” referring to the Church of Christ. “raised as a Pentecostal fundamentalist.” “raised Presbytarian [sic.].” “LC” likely referring to the Lutheran Church. “Catholic religion…went to a Catholic school…raised Roman Catholic…Raised Roman Catholic…“raised Irish Catholic” even though “My godmother is a witch” One “I got dragged to church and Sunday school” and I bet they dragged them to school and restaurants as well. Then there is, “Religion wasn’t a thing in my house growing up. Never even talked about it. Didn’t even know what it was. Just was a non issue…parents were indifferent theists…Religion was never mentioned to me by my parents.”
Let us now consider the specific claims.
true scotsman
“I was raised as a Methodist, I had doubts even as a seven year old, as got older I made a rational examination of what I’b [sic.] been taught in church and I found that it wasn’t true. So, I stopped believing in it.” This is generic but gets slightly specific with “It was pretty much a gradual process taking about 5 years but the real moment of epiphany came when I learned of the issue of metaphysical primacy. Once I integrated that knowledge my conversion was instant” which is actually just as generic.
JesseB
This one is about as arrogant and generic as they get, “Grew up in a Missionary Baptist home, religion is stupid. It wasn’t that there was a path to Atheism, it was that religion is sooooo stupid there was no path to religion, even growing up all around it with parents who graduated seminary, uncles who were pastors. Lets just say my family is full of stupid” and that is literally all there is to their statement.
ResidentEvilFan
“Was a Christian about 35 years, raised in a very conservative CoC environment.” Now, this one was a Christian about 35 years and it “took almost 10 years of chipping away” so that guessing a Christian from birth scenario (which as per John 3:16 is impossible) results in circa 45 years old. Now, along the way, they were “a very hardcore, conservative believer who believed in a literal bible up until my mid to late 20s” when in keeping with the peculiarities of the CoC they would get into “disagreements with more liberal christians [sic.] about issues like drinking alcohol and various denominational issues like instrumental music” which eventually, and not surprisingly resulted in that they “ended up finding out the positions I was taught were ‘100% the truth’ were pretty much 100% opinion/interpretation.” Note that non-biblical CoC specific hang-ups lead to “Well if that stuff was opinion, what about other things” which resulted in “what if everything about the bible/faith is bull[****]” and that is when “I discovered Seth Andrews, Aron-ra, and various other YouTube/internet atheists and started listening to them” which means that they are not very serious about logic, science, worldview issues, accuracy, etc., etc., etc.
I mean they write that “I find out how all the objections to evolution given by creationists had been long debunked, the truth about archealogy [sic.] and how it most certainly does NOT back up the bible, and just the general information we know about how the bible even came to be….all things that were never told to me or flat out lied about in the church” (ellipse in original). So, apparently, “the church” either never told them certain things or flat out lied but YouTube/internet Atheists are infallible.
Dom “Read the entire bible at age 10. Filed it away with my fairy tale books and moved on to mystery books. Never gave it much thought for decades, until my husband died a few years ago and people said the most inane things to me…which caused me to find this place to vent.” So a tragedy was compounded by inane statements which is doubly tragic. Dom states, “Science is the process we’ve designed to be responsible for generating our best guess as to what the [****] is going on.” Yet, in order to be historically accurate, that statement should have been “Science is the process” and theists, mostly Bible believers, “designed…” upon theological premises. There was also an instance at around 10 years old” regarding “thinking about whether my recently deceased last grandparent was ‘up there’ or somewhere, watching … the after-death thoughts I had been mulling over for a while already. I decided that it was unlikely” (ellipses in original).
Dom then notes that “And then there was, around the same time…my first ‘unexpected’ sexual encounter” which was “around 10 years old” mind you, and the tragic nature of the event is compounded by the statement that this was “a life-lesson in personal security and an absence of a divine protector.” Then “a little later” than the age of 10, “I was given a geology lesson and introduced to the concept of evolution” a form of indoctrination with which Atheists have no problem (in fact, they insist of in and litigiously so).
Hyperhealer
Talk about does art imitate life or life imitate art!!! This person states, “For me, the movie The Matrix plays a part” as it “showed some pretty deep philosophical ideas” but I wonder if they are aware that the originator of the Matrix (and Terminator) mythos meant it as a story about the Second Coming of Jesus? (see see here).
They “decided to do some light reading into the world of philosophy” and “pretty much came to the conclusion that you could make up a bunch of metaphysical ideas to justify almost anything. Thus led me to my own personal philosophy: Question Everything” including “Question Everything”? Sadly, this is another case of being generic as they conclude with “If the ideas hold merit, then great. If not, then get new ideas. Religion did not pass this test” a test which, I will note, was subjective.
Thoreauvian
“I was raised a Methodist but dropped Christianity when I was still a teen, primarily because of its anti-monotheistic trinity doctrine” which is odd as monotheism is the very foundation of Trinitarianism. They “read The God Delusion in late 2006 when I was fifty. That, if anything, was my epiphany, since it immediately made sense of many of my confusions. I was an atheist by the time I finished the book, and all my readings and discussions since then have only strengthened my position.” This is quite astonishing and only proves that they are not acquainted with theology, logic, history, science, etc. as Dawkins has been proven wrong on such issues and devastatingly so.
TheInquisition This one gets somewhat specific regarding issues of the Bible and science. “I was raised as a Pentecostal fundamentalist, I loved science and ultimately the bible didn’t square with science. All believers are given a choice when they read Genesis, you can: 1. Dismiss it as metaphorical and play the ‘it’s still a source of truth’ game and lie to yourself as you cherry-pick your way through it’s [sic.] flawed version of reality. 2. Play interpretational games with what it says to get it to match science- and lie to yourself. 3. Call it BS and recognize it is not a good source for science or anything else for that matter- this is the honest option.”
This person “settled on option 2 for over 25 years…until I decided to get clarity…” so that now “The 3rd option is the only truthful and honest one.” Note that they presuppose that truth exists, that it is important to ascertain it and that honest is a virtue: my point is that an Atheist worldview cannot establish truth and honesty is an option. Also, they likely confuse actual scientific evidence with Atheist worldview based interpretations of scientific evidence. They also write, “Using the supernatural to explain events in your life is a failure of the intellect to comprehend the world around you” about which we could state, “Using the natural to explain events in your life is a failure of the intellect to comprehend the world around you.”
GirlyMan
This is a two liner which simply states, “Nihilism and existentialism. Nietszche, Sartre, Camus and the like when I was 14yo. Good times. Any promise of a postmortem preservation of personal identity is preposterous. (read in Daffy Duck voice)” thus, generic references followed by a “faith” based assertion.
Grasshopper
This three liner is just about the same, “I read Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell in my freshman year of college, and that pushed me permanently over the edge. But I was already on the edge by then anyway. I had figured out years before that most of what the Catholic religion had taught me was pretty silly” thus, generic references followed by a “faith” based assertion even if I agree with the Catholicism being pretty silly thing.
jennybee
“I was raised Irish Catholic” whereby they “did the whole praying on rosaries thing and prayed to dead saints” which are two anti-biblical things. Jenny then “spent a short amount of time in high school as a witch. My godmother is a witch.” Subsequently, “in college, I started hanging out with some pretty hardcore Christians and got really into that level of Jesus freak crazy. When I actually read the New Testament in its entirety, I got to the part about the dead saints getting up out of their graves and marching around the city…my reaction Shocking WTF is this bull[****] they’ve been feeding me for years???!!!!” (ellipses in original). That may sound reasonable, but it is stated as it was merely a subjective assertion and one which is generically stated. And something else which is generically asserted is that they also reacted against, “the hate, misogyny, and control that was spewed by my church.”
big green mouth “I was raised Presbytarian, but by the time I reached my teens I was an atheist.” Yet, “At 17” they read the Tao Te Ching, which is Chinese divination “and instantly converted to Taoism” because “it just rang so many bells for me” which seems indicative of the emotive manner in which thy deal with intellectual issues.
Then “In my 40s I embraced Hinduism in the form of the goddess Kali” who got so drunk on demon blood that she murdered her own husband. Yet, they found they had to decide on whether “To learn more about Hinduism or not” and gave “up my belief in the goddess Kali.”
Julep “I grew up Baptist…I believed what I was told, but also read the Bible cover-to-cover a number of times and came to be repelled by the god character of that book. By my mid teens, I’d decided I’d have to go to hell, because I couldn’t worship the Bible god.” But we are not told how or why they were repelled and also this implies that they had some unstated ethical standard upon which they judged.
They also “Had awful experiences with real-life Christians whose faith didn’t make them better people” which is like stating that they had awful experiences with real-life vegans who ate meat. It their “faith didn’t make them better people” it is possible that they were not “real-life Christians” or had a lot of growing up to do spiritually.
In college they were exposed to a diversity of backgrounds, religions, philosophies, etc. and concluded that “no personal god can exist” which is a “faith” based assertion without evidence. They also concluded that “absolute certainty is impossible and unnecessary” even though they are absolutely certain that no personal god can exist. However, from college until however much time has passes since, they not state, “I’m not going to declare there’s definitely no god, but I’m going to live as if there’s no god.” And I am not going to declare there is definitely no Great White shark in the water, but I’m going to swim as if there is no Great White.
treefireguy
This one claims to be a “Lifelong Atheist” and “it was when I went in the Army” which could be as early as 18 years old that they “put ‘No Preference’ on my dog tags.” This was after “Religion wasn’t a thing in my house growing up. Never even talked about it. Didn’t even know what it was. Just was a non issue.”
Rachel “Both parents were indifferent theists…I decided to join the same church my friends were attending. Societal pressures and all. And yes, at age 8…” She subjectively asserts that “Christianity never made much sense to me” which is as generic as it sounds. Then “At age 14, my mom got cancer on top of her pre-existing condition, Parkinson’s. She was in so much pain, it caused me physical pain. I kept praying for god to take her pain away. I figured if she was going to die anyway, let Jesus be merciful and take her quickly or without pain. Either one” but the reply was “Nothing. Not even crickets” after which “There was no turning back after that.” Now, this is clearly emotive and rightly so.
She write, “Once the brain is engaged, there’s no turning it off. It’s like trying to unsee something” and yet, if this is about the brain then she must admit a few things such as that God being loving does not necessarily result in God being forced to answer an either or proposition: biblically the prayer was answered in a different way and the Bible makes statements such as “though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 13) and “our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace…But if not” they will still be loyal (Daniel 3). Also, the only, Atheist, alternative now is that a temporarily and accidentally existing hairless ape whom Rachel called “mother” ceased to be animated.
mordant This one premised their statement upon Rachel’s “In my case the person dying was my wife, in a similar slow, baroque fashion to your mother…I realized it was going to end badly, end of story.” However, as for the wife “my wife had no malfunction with it” apparently referring to her being faithful and remaining so since “I returned the favor by allowing her to cling to her illusions” which according to an Atheist worldview is not only irrelevant but we are all under some or another illusion and delusion. They refer to “the cognitive dissonance of my faith of origin” and since his first wife had “contracted severe mental illness” it was the “start of the notion that maybe god did not give a useful damn.” Other family members died and the conclusion is that God is somehow supposed to save and heal all people. This is where one needs to be empathic but within this context point out that this is playing theologian whereby the Atheist (or the person on the way to Atheism) reasons thusly, “If God was then God would ___________ and since God does not ___________ then God is not.”
This one ends by stating “My current understanding of reality, grounded in rational, empirical, evidence-based thinking, is FAR better in that department.” So basically, this is another case of taking comfort in realizing that clumps of animated cells ceased to be animated: no explanation for yesterday, no reason for today and no hope for tomorrow.
houseofcantor
This one appears to have been written by someone whose first language is not English as they wrote, “The LC in my mind casts off aspects” whatever that means and with LC likely referring to the Lutheran Church. And they only wrote two more sentences, “Every revealed god has been an aspect. I’m down to love, entropy, and of course tao.”
Cheerful Charlie “I have always been atheist. I went to a Catholic school until the 5th grade, and it just never took.” One thing with which I agree is “As a small child I was infuriated by the lies about Santa Claus etc.” so that it is never a good idea for parents to deceive their children since “I didn’t like being tricked and lied to.” Yet, the make a classic category error and correlate Santa with “and I found religion more of the same.” Add to this that “In the first grade” he was “told the legend of Saint Christopher and the baby Jesus, how Saint Christopher tried to carry Jesus across a stream and by the time he got to the opposite bank, Jesus had become so heavy he could no longer carry him. Proving Jesus was indeed, Son of God. So said the nun. At that point my mind rebelled, and I never trusted anything any nun told me thereafter.” Nor should he believe such un-biblical tales.
Then, at some point, “I became the class skeptic…I learned to question these claims, and to look for books that debunked religion.” But these are the same sorts of people who are then told very Santa-like tall tales about evolution and believe it as if it were dogma that they never once question.
mordant This person also replied to Cheerful Charlie regarding “Some of us seem to be born natural skeptics with extremely good bull[****] detectors. Why this is so, I cannot guess. Maybe it’s genetic?” The reply is “I wasn’t born yesterday and I’m not dumb…But I was born with a terrible, nay, near nonexistent bull[****] detector” hence the belief in Atheism. They then note, “It must be a genetic roll of the dice” wherein you can discern the evolutionary worldview. And another iteration of the important point, “Others here, like me, said it never occurred that the adults in their lives during their childhood would lie to them.” However, we are then told that “a child should be able to assume they are in the hands of competent caregivers and mentors…” wherein we see that the Atheist is making ethical demands but these are, of course, based on mere personal preferences at least on an Atheist worldview.
They also state that rather than doing the “hard work of gathering evidence and following it impartially wherever it leads. Religion has always offered people the easy way out by just telling you what is supposedly true and promising you the moon if you’ll just accept it without question.” Well, there is literally many millennia’s worth of evidence against this.
Thoreauvian This one replied to mordant regarding being “taught certain religious ideas at such an early age that you think they are your own ideas” and this actually goes for any and all ideas such as look both ways before crossing the street.
Also, “I believed at the age of six that I had an immortal soul” but “many years…I spent a much longer time trying to confirm it for myself through mystical studies…I finally had to abandon the idea in the face of what I learned about brain science” which surely resulted in the belief that all of it, including brain science, is merely interpretations of random bio-chemical neural reactions.
Mary L. Mand
This is another generic three sentence assertion “I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools for eleven years. In my very early teens, I thought my way out of god beliefs. The things I was taught simply didn’t add up; they rarely coincided with reality.” But since this is a mere conclusion without argumentation then it is another throw away comment.
Astreja “I think I fall into the ‘never adequately convinced’ category. I was familiar with the Bible…I never saw the Bible stories as particularly relevant to the real world, with the sole exception of Matthew 25:35-40 (‘I was hungry and you fed me…’).”
This turns out to be another conclusion without an argument as “The epiphany that led directly to my current stance as an agnostic atheist was the question ‘Would I testify under oath in a court of law that {name of god} was real?’ The answer was an emphatic no, and here I am. I’m sorry, but your beliefs are much too silly to take seriously. Got anything else we can discuss?” Yes, how does your Agnostic Atheism even provide the prerequisites for truth, logic, ethics, etc.?
Robvalue
“I’ve always been one…Religion was never mentioned to me by my parents…I was surprised to learn there was a word for ‘not thinking there’s an invisible man in the sky listening to me.’” And that is about all. Now, I would love to learn the word for that since, at least on a Judeo-Christian worldview, we claim no such thing as an invisible man “in the sky.”
RocketSurgeon76
This one “Grew up a devout Southern Baptist, evangelical Christian. Every word of the Bible literally true….As part of my apologetics training, I was taught how to disprove all the other religions of the world.” They then generically jump to the claim that due to a “deep interest in real science…I realized how wrong the Creationism” was and from whatever that was “I realized that the claims of the New Testament, which depended on a literal Genesis, were unsupportable. Since the Jesus character clearly thought the Genesis stories were real, he couldn’t be God. None of the human claims about deities held up under examination, and I was too honest to pretend otherwise.” Again, this is great red meat for Atheists but it is a merely asserted conclusion.
unfogged – Aggressive Secularist
This was a reply to RocketSurgeon76 “It is amazing how rational theists can be when looking at the claims of other religions. As for me, I was never a believer. I got dragged to church and Sunday school as a kid but never paid much attention” see what I mean about the vagueness of the “I was raised…” or “My family was…” Then there comes a slippery dichotomy, “The mythologies were all ‘this happened’ and the science was all ‘this happened and here’s the evidence we base that on’. Christianity never stood a chance.” This is the sort of generic assertion that cannot stand up to critical thinking. For example, I would clean up the mess by stating, “Some mythologies were all ‘this happened,’ some so called mythologies such as the Bible is all ‘this happened in this place, at this time, under this ruler, with these witnesses, and you can check the historical and archeological evidence for much of it.’” Then “the science was all ‘this happened and here’s the evidence we base that on’ except when science is dealing with intangible evidence such as arguments in favor of certain conclusions such as subatomic particles and also keeping in mind that some people use the term ‘science’ when really just referring to Atheist-evolutionist worldview interpretation of science and also that many so called evidences have been found to be mistakes, jumps to conclusions, hoaxes, frauds, etc.”
Chas
This is the one who stated, “Everyone starts out an atheist” and also “Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims” with which I agree along the lines of the skeptic Apostle Thomas.
Rahn127
This one also claimed, “I had always been an atheist, but I didn’t know the word existed until I was in my 40’s and watched a few episodes of The Atheist Experience.” Also, they were “surprised to discover that people were creationists” for some unknown reason. And as for arrogance, “it wasn’t until I was in my 40’s that I discovered just how gullible the general public was.”
mordant
This one chimed in to the gullible point by noting, “I didn’t fully figure that out until my 40s but the difference is that I also had to figure out just how gullible I had been! That is not a pleasant experience, when you were socialized to think you don’t suck as much as everyone else, because of your special-snowflake status with god” whatever that means.
Commonsensei
“Raised Roman Catholic. Knew nothing of other religions or that there were other religions that didn’t accept God as the answer. Always had questions, but not enough answers” and a huge key “Left my parents House went to College. Learned people believed a [****] load of different stuff.” This disjointed comment appeals to the comedian George Carlin as some sort of inspiration and states, “Tom Cruise. Scientology. What the [****]?! How could anyone believe this? What else have people fallen for” well, evolution and Atheism to name two things. And if a comedian was not a bad enough role model they also list, “Aronra, Hitchens, Amazing Atheist, Thinking Atheist, Dawkins” which is scraping the underside of the barrel’s bottom. This is another “Agnositc Atheist” which seems like an escape mechanism for sidestepping having to, you know, actually prove anyting.
Skyking
This one merely stated, “always an atheist. Don’t remember ever believing in Santa either” which is a classic category error and if you want evidence that this is a category error then, pray tell, how many Atheists have written books titled, “The Santa Delusion” or “The End of Santa” or “Santa Is Not Great”?
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