Now you've compelled me.

Wow, what a story.

Looking back like you, I've been an atheist for 20 plus years. Some of our experiences are quite similar. I too denied science in favour of religious nonsense without ever truly believing my erroneous choice.

I'm not bitter though, I met the love of my life in the church, so I'm thankful for that. But, damn, I threw away so much money. I wonder if I can sue the church to get it back? I can only wish.

Daylight atheism has been fundamental in me being honest with myself.

Without giving the guys a head the size of a pumpkin, this site is doing a top job and I'll continue visiting it while it exists.

Or just treat every day as blasphemy day ;-)

When is blasphemy day? I think it's time for me to fully come out.

My story- it's too long! All I can say is that rationality won in the end.

From the time I was a young boy, I apparently never took religion all that seriously. My mother tells me that at the age of seven or eight I used to argue theology with my grandmother (her mom), who readily encouraged me to think freely and question things.

I went through the motions as a kid and into my teens, doing things like going to church when my mom made me (a liberal Methodist church it was, home to our local PFLAG chapter), getting baptised and confirmed and going to church camp each summer.
But I never bought into the whole thing.

When I got a little older, into my late-teens and early-twenties, and was going through the start of my sexual coming out process, I briefly entertained the whole Wicca thing, and went through the motions on that for a couple years (including reading a laughable book on the subject. I recall a spell they mentioned for getting a job that involved doing some tricks with pennies and water and candles and prayer and then putting a whole lot of job applications. Guess which part was more relevant to the task at hand?), but lost interest. I went through the whole Buddhism thing for about three weeks as an effort to get down someone's pants (it failed, thus pointing out that while there may indeed be many valid reasons to change religions, doing so to get someone in bed is not one of them).

Eventually I sort of drifted in my late-twenties to my current state of total atheism. I'm much happier this way. It's certainly a lot less complex. :)

First time this has been written down anywhere. I'll see if I can avoid rambling too much (yeah right).

My family moved around a lot when I was young. It wasn't until my mother married my stepfather that I began going to church with any regularity, the Episcopal church he belonged to already. I believed what the priest told me: God loves me, He became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ to save me (though how exactly that worked, I didn't think much about at the time), He also appears as the Holy Spirit, blah blah blah. The church was moderate and mostly apolitical, as far as I was aware, so early on I was sure that the Bible wasn't meant to be taken literally. I believed that the message of love and compassion I was told was in there was the most important thing, not the specifics. It was Christianity of convenience. Going to church was something I did because it was what people I knew did, unless they're lazy and want to sleep in on a Sunday so they weasel their way out of it.

I got full tuition to college, fulfilling the dream my mother had for me since I was young, and went off to school to study psychology. Halfway through freshman year, I realized I hated the psychology program, and felt deeply unsatisfied with my life. All that work for all those years...and that was it? But I wanted (still want) to help people, to be a source of comfort and support, and I thought my Jesuit priest and nun professors were awesome. Hey, I thought, I'm Episcopalian! They have women priests! So I changed my major to dual in English and Theology, with the intention of going to seminary after I graduated.

Six months later, I'm home for the summer, reading Karen Armstrong's 'A History of God.' Now, I'm aware of Ebon's criticisms of her, and I think they're well founded and I agree with them. The "all the religions are the same deep down, really" namby-pamby wishful thinking she promotes is naive at best and deluded at worst. However, I didn't know about her philosophies at the time. Her book was the first more or less neutral description of how Judaism, and Christianity and Islam following it, arose in the peoples of the Middle East that I had read up until that point. So it got me thinking.

I had read Augustine in my freshman Philosophy class, and he hinged a great deal of his theology on Original Sin. But I was coming to realize that Adam and Eve probably never really existed. If there's no Adam and Eve, if that story is just a metaphor for an ancient writer to express his thoughts about the human condition. then there is no Original Sin. If there is no Original Sin, what did Jesus die for? The idea that he died to save me from naughty acts I committed or would commit seemed patently silly. If this is God dying and rising again, anyone who believed should through his divine magic woo automatically not sin. He's freaking GOD. But obviously that's not the case.

I just couldn't come up with a good answer for why God had to take human form and be crucified. To understand us better? He supposedly made us in his image. What was there for Him to understand that he didn't already put there? (So I thought at the time.)

So if Jesus died for nothing, maybe he wasn't really God.

That pretty much ended me being Christian right there, which also put an end to my plans on being ordained. Once I was over the Jesus hump, I did some bouncing around and dabbling to figure out just what I did believe concerning God or gods. I was taking classes on Buddhism as part of my Theology requirements, which as many here may know, is not theo-centric. The Buddha accepted that there were gods, but claimed that they were on the same wheel of samsara as everybody else. The fact that Buddhism lives side by side or is integrated with the religions that preceded it in many parts of the world was a sort of model for me. I was also reading up on various neo-Pagan religions. What emerged from all that was the general idea that there were beings out there, they were more powerful than me in some ways, but not all powerful. Some were benevolent, some were malicious, but we were all reincarnating again and again, with enlightenment as the ultimate goal. This is in a nutshell the belief system I held for several years.

Then I became pregnant by a guy I had only known for about six months.

After my parents divorced, my father saw less and less of me until he just quit altogether - that was seventeen years ago. I know first hand how easy it is for a parent to simply leave. Yet here is this man I'm just getting to know who's willing to marry me and raise our son together.

On top of that, pregnancy is a crazy thing. It seems like you're just dragged along for the ride by these chemical processes you can't see and only know about when they make you throw up or burst into tears. Yet I ended up with this absolutely amazing kid.

Why did I get a great family out of a careless night, when other people get abandoned? Why did my son get to be born to parents who love him and can financially take care of him, when other children suffer, are abused, or starve? It's not just. It's not right. Yet it continues to happen, perpetrated by people that delude themselves into thinking they are not bad, because it's not really their fault, or because they are better than those they are hurting.

This is, of course, the classic 'problem of evil', which is usually addressed from the basic premise of an all powerful yet somehow all loving God. I had already moved on from that idea, but now I was beginning to see that I couldn't accept that there were little-g gods around, either. Cruelty and suffering are just too widespread. People convert to new faiths or become more entrenched in their supposedly "good" religion, but it's just a facade and their interior motivations don't change. If they do good things, it's because the impetus to do good was already part of them, not because of some higher being. There's no evidence anything is influencing us other than measurable, detectable physical factors. So why believe in any gods? The idea that there are beings out there that somehow need our worship, the idea that we have to worship anything, now seems silly and a waste of time.

I'm pretty sure if anything is discovered that could by any stretch of the imagination be called a god, it's completely uninterested in human beings. However, I choose the label "atheist" over "agnostic" because I'm not just leaving the question up in the air, but actively living and making choices on the premise that there isn't one. I live Without gods. I'm happier for it.

Sorry this is so long. Thanks for providing a place to share, and thanks to everyone for your stories. They are a pleasure to read.

I was confirmed a Lutheran at a nice midwest liberal church. Not the pushy types, and real nice people. I went to camp and enjoyed all of it. When we moved to NJ my mother tried to find a similar church, but couldn't and just gave up. Dad was the type that said religious belief was important, but always seemed to have an important golf game "for business" on Sundays. There was a girl next door who was one of my first new friends in NJ and she invited me to be a part of her church's youth group. I remember the kids meeting at my house one time and discussing how you can't go to heaven unless you accept Christ. For some reason, a question popped into my mind and out of my mouth, "But what about the people who were born before Jesus or never heard of him through no fault of their own?" Well, the quick answer was that all these people would go to a kind of waiting area after death and then be judged by their life deeds during the second coming and go to heaven or hell then. I thought, "That's not fair. That's not the God I believe in." So I told my mom. She handed me a book by James Kavanaugh entitled "The Birth of God". He was a priest who left the church. That convinced me that church was not important for belief. Several years later, she suggested a book by Elaine Pagels entitled "The Gnostic Gospels". That had me wondering why those books weren't in the bible, and how did all this Christianity stuff come about anyway? So I read the history of Christianity and the whole bible. All of that made Christianity very easy to walk away from, but then I wondered where I could find my "God". I got into reading about Native American beliefs and really thought that was it. God the Great Spirit. I blended that in with New Age stuff- holding crystals, reading The Celestine Prophecy, squinting my eyes in order to try to see auras, etc. I still wasn't quite sure I had found the tradition that fit my idea of "God". Then I got an job at a high energy particle physics facility and a whole new world opened up for me- quantum physics. Maybe my "God" could be explained by that! I read Edgar Mitchell's The Way of the Explorer and joined the Noetic Sciences Institute. I loved their articles. I read Deepak Chopra who loves to use quantum physics to explain God. But after awhile, I read some of the works of physicists who were very upset by this science/religion blend, and I began to see their point. So I decided that the "God" I believed in wasn't there either. Then a change in my life caused me to move to Kentucky. Suddenly I was immersed in this in your face christianity all the time, and struggling to maintain my personal belief. One day a thought came to me (maybe from god?!Only kidding). Maybe the reason I still could not find the tradition or philosophy that explained my "God" was because my "God" was all in my head! God was imaginary!! Why it took 30 years to figure that out, I don't know. Last year, I bought Julia Sweeney's DVD of her stage show, "Letting Go of God". Not only is it funny, but she went through many of the same phases I did. And I love her little scene of god sitting by her front door with his bags packed ready to leave looking small and insignificant. It really fit what I felt. So that's it folks. Now I gotta work on afterlife thing. It is much tougher in many ways to let go of that than letting go of god, but I'm not going to take 30 years this time! Thanks to everyone for sharing and listening!

I was married in the church at age 23, and my daughter was born when I was 26. She was baptized in the church and my wife and I attended mass fairly regularly. When my daughter turned 2, and I was 28, several different paths in my life seemed to converge all at the same time:

PATH 1 : All my life, I was always casually interested in astronomy. I liked black holes, nebulae, relativity, etc. I'd read science articles here and there, watched science shows on TV. And I simply thought that God created the universe with the Big Bang, and was undecided in the whole "Teach the Controversy" issue (at the time, I had a very poor understanding of evolution)

PATH 2 : My daughter, who was just beginning to speak, would sing Christian songs with my mother. At the time, her favorite was "Joshua fought the battle at Jericho and the walls came tumbling down..." and my daughter would very cutely yell "BOOM!"

PATH 3 : I discovered Podcasts. As a fan of Penn & Teller Bullshit, I started listening to Penn Radio Podcast, which then made me aware of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Point of Inquiry, Astronomy Cast, etc. I loved the skeptical community, I loved how well everyone used logic to tear down ridiculous claims. But every so often, these smart people that I respected would take a jab at God, and it angered me and really puzzled me, "What did they have against God?"

THE CATALYST: Since my daughter loved the Jericho song so much, I decided to take a refresher and read the book of Joshua again. It was then that I read something completely shocking to me, a glorified story of genocide! Not only did the Israelites destroy Jericho, but even made a point to mention that they brutally murdered all men, women, children, infants and livestock at the command of God!

At that very moment, it was as if my own walls crumbled and everything that I was listening to (but not fully understanding) from the skeptic community had just smacked me in the face! From that moment on, for the past 2+ years, I've not been able to stop reading. I've learned and absorbed more information about world religions, science, history, art, politics and culture then I ever had before. It truly was an awakening along the lines of Ingersoll's Vow.

My entire worldview has changed. I no longer live to ensure that my family and I get to spend eternity together. Rather, I live to enjoy them everyday, here and now. I'm not an atheist that's out to deconvert others, but I relish the opportunity to smack down believers with logic, my favorite argument is the Problem of Heaven. (If free will is the cause of sin, and there is no sin in Heaven, then is there no free will in heaven?)

I've come out to my family and it has caused some turmoil. My wife had a hard time with it for a while, but I think she's now turning the corner of disbelief. My parents still struggle with it, but have accepted that I'm not going to change. I might come out to my Facebook list for blasphemy day, haven't decided that yet though. =)

One of the more significant events on that timeline, though, happened when I was roughly 9: my mom and dad divorced, and my mom's church (Church of Christ) kicked her out not long thereafter. Despite feeling bewildered by the idea that my parents were divorcing, I was indignant at the church's action since it was clear that no good could come of forcing them to stay together against their will.

A few years after that, shortly before my 13th birthday, I started getting a clue that I was gay -- not a good thing to discover about yourself when you're growing up in Kansas. I couldn't help feeling alienated by society, especially the more religious quarters of it: even though the vitriol was not aimed at me (I was too geeky to be seen as gay), I couldn't not hear the abuse, and I couldn't not take it personally. If I'd had any tiny bit of trust for organized religion after what happened to my mom, this eradicated the remainder quite effectively.

Despite all that, though, I still maintained vague theistic beliefs for some while afterward. At one memorable point when I was 16, I even had a religious experience while praying for the fulfillment of some emotionally meaningful wish. However, even at that point, doubt was already at work in my mind: I increasingly felt the nagging suspicion that God was impersonal, miracles didn't happen, and prayer was wishful thinking. Indeed, by the time I entered my Freshman year of college, I was a deist who disbelieved in any divine influence in the physical world from the Big Bang forward.

The final phase of my deconversion had surprisingly little to do with the concept of God, and instead had to do with dualism. Despite believing in a non-interventionist God, I'd managed to cling all this time to souls and afterlives and notions vaguely resembling Universalism. Alzheimer's Disease disabused me of that. In roughly my mid-teens, my grandmother was diagnosed with the early-onset form at a shockingly young age -- barely older than 50. Early onset Alzheimer's tends to be the most rapidly progressing form of the disease, and my grandmother was no exception. Throughout high school, she had been increasingly absent-minded but nonetheless clearly the same person. However, in the time I was away from home attending college, she progressed drastically and starkly.

When I dropped out of college two years into my four-year degree, I returned home just as she was losing the last remnants of her personality. She shuffled and wandered endlessly. At one moment she was cheerful, the next crying, and the one after that furious -- like a two year old in an adult's body. She babbled constantly, as her brain replayed the familiar words from a lifetime of repeated thoughts and experiences, but there was no longer any meaning behind the empty syllables. Rarely, in brief but precious moments, her face would light up with recognition at the sight of a familiar face... then vanish an instant later.

With a grim acceptance, I gradually realized that the soul-hypothesis was inconsistent with the evidence in front of me: if her soul were there, then her personality should be there as well; but if her soul had left her, she shouldn't be able to recognize anyone, even for brief glimpses. The reality of her disease left me with only one explanation: her personality -- the part of her that made her uniquely her -- was a mere function of her brain, and thus vulnerable to the disease. The pieces of her that were left weren't worth preserving in an afterlife, and yet at no point had there been a moment when her soul had been suddenly spirited away while still intact -- if a soul meant anything at all, we would have seen it if it had. Without a soul or an afterlife, I no longer felt any reason to continue believing in a God: there was nothing left for a God to do.

By the time of her death in February 2002, I finally and truly deconverted to atheism at age 21.