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No, atheist for life... |
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Yes, I did believe... |
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Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 4:42 pm
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Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 9:35 pm
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Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 10:22 am
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Well, when I was a little kid my parents introduced me to God, and me, being a little guilible child, belived in their word, beacuse parents are always right! (a kid's ideology, you know), but as I grew up so did my intelligence and perspicacy, so I started asking questions in order to get answers to those things I didn't understand, and the "Beacuse God wants it to be like that" answer just didn't do it, not anymore.
When I finally decided to read the bible (or at least a really small part of it) to see if I could find the answers to my questions, well... the results were ironic.
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Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 12:32 pm
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Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 2:13 pm
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Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2009 3:19 pm
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I'm a very suspicious, questioning, skeptical person. When I was little, I thought that the priests' real motive to get people to come to church was so that they could blow it up someday with all the people in it. I was a very diligent student and always got good grades in religion class. I really tried VERY hard to understand Catholicism. Finally, in middle school, I fell under a severe case of depression. I didn't know why the world suddenly seemed so dark. I considered suicide, and while I was thinking about that, I wondered what would happen afterward. Looking around the Internet, I found some great arguments for the Void; that is, when you die your soul ceases to exist. I was kind of scared to die then, and I'm glad I didn't drown myself like I planned. Doing some more inquiry on those same websites led me to Atheism. Not needing to believe in God was the most liberating feeling I had had in a long time. I'm proud of myself for seeing the truth, though I was raised in a Catholic family that goes to church every Sunday and sends me to Catholic schools. Kind of a strange discovery story, but there you go.
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Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2009 10:43 pm
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![User Image - Blocked by "Display Image" Settings. Click to show. User Image - Blocked by "Display Image" Settings. Click to show.](https://graphics.gaiaonline.com/images/s.gif) I grew up in an Episcopal church, was baptised when I was 6 and confirmed at 12 or 13. I went to church camps and weekend retreats and was very comfortable with my beliefs, but never remotely fanatical. Church was something I enjoyed doing, and it was a serious thing to me, but it didn't consume my existence and I didn't judge others who felt differently.
In the first couple years of high school, though, I got really depressed... borderline suicidal. I wanted to die so, so much - but I was afraid of killing myself because I hated the thought of that much pain. So I used religion as my crutch. For a few years, this was not too big of a problem. Then in my last year of high school I started going to Bible study with this group of Southern Baptists I knew from school. Then, I started going to their prayer meetings they had during the morning break. I figured since they were studying the same Bible, they must be good to hang out with. rolleyes
They brainwashed me to think that the Bible should be taken literally (yes, I became a creationist!) and to think that questioning these beliefs was wrong and would send me to hell, and to think that listening to too much secular music would corrupt me, and to think that I needed to work God into every conversation I had. I thought atheists were the devil and people who believed in other religions were confused and needed to be saved from their folly. I freaked out other Episcopalians with my fundamentalism.
Then I went to college, stopped seeing those Baptists from high school, became best friends with a pagan, and gradually started to see where my narrowminded ideas had been wrong. I'm not sure exactly how it all happened. I realized in my junior year that Christianity wasn't working for me, so I started looking at pagan religions. I was scrambling to find something that felt right; religion was like a drug and I thought I needed to find one to replace Christianity.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I didn't actually have any real reasons to believe in any gods. I had an emotional desire for them to be real, and I had a fear of eternal punishment of some sort or other. That was it. And emotions without any evidence backing them up are never a good thing to base important decisions on. I decided that I'd start from square one: looking for evidence that any of these gods existed - I'd believe in whichever one(s) had the strongest evidence.
Three years later and I still don't have any reasons to believe. I do notice what seems to be a lack of divine presence, however.
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Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 3:14 am
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Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 8:52 am
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I was born with in a family that was pre-dominantly Christian, and had a LOT of disappointments in my life.
First there was the bullying, I got my a** beaten EVERY single damn day because I was weaker than all the other kids (and white in a poor, pre-dominantly [wow I like using that word, hm?] black neighborhood) I prayed for it to stop but to no avail. Then there were the sicknesses, I have ALWAYS been incredibly thin because of my high metabolism, as such I get sick and weak very often...I still do... I used to pray for it to stop but to no avail.
Eventually I grew a hatred for this deity I once believe existed, and reformed myself to Satanism, vowing complete revenge on the Christian god (Mental torment mixed with teenaged hormones, whatcha gonna do?). I remained Satanist until one faithful day on Cartoon Network, Toonami aired the final episode of the ENTIRE dragon-ball series (GT). Now I grew up as a little kid feverishly watching this show so it was very traumatic for me when it's eventual end came. When the words "The End" popped up on the screen I had a realization, it was probably the most brilliant moment in my entire life (says a lot about how smart I am, hm?): Everything ends! Nothing can keep going on forever, there could be no existence beyond this one because what happens to our old one? Is it one we could look back on or do we continue on forever into the depths of madness? Dragon Ball ended right then and there and the concept of death reached me, I mean the LITERAL concept of it. It finally hit me that one day I'm going to die and I'm not even going to know I'm dead...
It frightened the ******** out of me. I was bawling tears and everything.
Eventually I got to live with the idea of there being an end to everything, and Darwinism PLUS the primordial soup theory's made MUCH more sense to me than the whole "god made this" crap. I started thinking of god as nothing more than a tooth-fairy or Santa Clause made up by crazys who didn't know what science was.
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Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 4:38 pm
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Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 4:44 pm
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Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 8:19 pm
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Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 12:03 pm
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