Switching to atheism: is it difficult?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman · Post by **Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman** » 2005-03-20 05:46am

Well, there are people uncontaminated and being raised as atheist.

But what about people who have been raised with religion? What kind of difficulties you had when switching, and how did you overcome it?

As for myself, the most difficult part is overcoming the human need to worship something bigger than us. Funny, I just can't stop praying, and sometimes swearing to the Guy Above when things get difficult. Old habits die hard (especially when you have been living it for almost 30 years).

Care to share some tips?

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2005-03-20 05:54am

Just develop some apathy.

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2005-03-20 06:27am

Care to share some tips?

Realise its just a figure of speech and it doesn't matter.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman · Post by **Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman** » 2005-03-20 06:30am

Zac Naloen wrote:
Care to share some tips?
Realise its just a figure of speech and it doesn't matter.

Figure of speech? You mean those things written on Koran?

2000AD · Post by **2000AD** » 2005-03-20 06:48am

Not difficult at all for me. The UK isn't very religious and the only contact i had with the church was once a month with cub scouts (where i was bored out of my mind) and the annual Christingle (sp) on Christmas Eve.
Then there was a healthy dose of "why didn't God stop all those people from dieing" and an attampt to actually read the Bible with an open mind.

Chris OFarrell · Post by **Chris OFarrell** » 2005-03-20 06:53am

Well I was raised as a Catholic. Went to many Catholic schools and was brought to church on Sundays all the time. I was hardly a fundie or anything. But I guess I did believe in religion. Then I went to a Christian Brothers school for year 11 and 12. I hated it. It was like stepping back 50 years with their attitudes. I went to a Marist Brothers school for 7-10, they rocked. Only two Marists there, but they were both very easy going and remarkably effective. They also didn't try to push anything on anyone, outside of the normal stuff you would expect in a school run by a religious order.

So when I changed schools, it sort of made me confront where I stood. And as I went through higher school education (in Aus, 11 and 12 are the final years of school, excepting Tertiary education like Uni) I came to realise it was complete bullshit. At the same time in year 11 I started to become quite active on ASVS and being almost forced to think scientifically changed my mindset around quite a bit. I mean before then, if you asked me what Conservation of Energy meant or what the difference between Newtonian and Einsteinium Mechanics was, I would have just stared at you. But it changed my outlook to the point that I realised if you took science as true, religion simply couldn't be, at least as it had been shoved in my face all my life.

So that’s where I am. I wouldn't call myself an Atheist, more an agnostic. I don't categorically refuse to believe in the possibility of a deity. But absolutely nothing that has been presented in any religion leads me to believe anything points that way, thus it does not exist.

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2005-03-20 07:55am

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:
Zac Naloen wrote:
Care to share some tips?
Realise its just a figure of speech and it doesn't matter.
Figure of speech? You mean those things written on Koran?

no no, swearing to god and the like.

it doesn't make you religious that you do that, its a figure of speech and means nothing. IF you're religious doing it is a sin anyway.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2005-03-20 08:01am

For myself, my religion just sloughed off in layers over a period of about five years. A combination of a family tragedy, a growing sense of independence, reading Carl Sagan and a couple of other writers, and some bad moves by the Catholic school I went to trying to frog-march us into the Faith toward the end of my time there. I ultimately reached a point where I realised I didn't really believe in the Invisible Cloud-Being anymore and I felt like a hypocrite continuing to go to church to make a pretense at a faith I no longer had. So I just stopped. I've very rarely set foot in a church since that time. I toyed with Deism once but found it inadequate, and I sort of waver on the line seperating agnosticism from atheism. But as far as religious faith is concerned, it just ceased to be important to me personally.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman · Post by **Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman** » 2005-03-20 09:01am

Well my biggest problem is I just couldn't stop praying when the thing's going bad. Is it some human instinct or what?

What do you people do when facing problems? Can you stop praying and keep telling yourself, "there's no such thing as God"? How to get rid of this praying habit?

Psycho Smiley · Post by **Psycho Smiley** » 2005-03-20 09:15am

I never had this problem. I didn't need to tell myself "there's no such thing as God". As I learned more about religion and science, I believed less and less of what I'd been taught about God. One day I realized "I really don't believe any of this. I don't even believe in a god. I guess that makes me an atheist."

If you still keep falling back on religious reactions, either it's just a habit, or part of you still wants to believe. If it's the latter, find out what part that is, and educate it. Either way, it'll disappear with time.

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2005-03-20 09:22am

Can you stop praying and keep telling yourself, "there's no such thing as God"? How to get rid of this praying habit?

When I stopped believing in God, I realized that prayer often exemplifies one of the worst aspects of Christianity: a belief that a human, or humanity as a whole, is incapable of something.

For myself, I simply realized that I possessed the power to alter or adapt to my surroundings, and that I could survive or make the best of any situation, and I didn't need to draw on some "spiritual energy" doled out by God. Similarily, in hard times I have family members I love and friends I trust, so I don't need the support of a mythical entity.

The Spartan · Post by **The Spartan** » 2005-03-20 09:45am

I've found it fairly easy to "lose my faith" it was a gradual process until one day, quite recently, I realized that it was more or less gone and that I wasn't a really a Christian. An agnostic or diest perhaps, but not really a Christian.

As for prayer, I never prayed that much even when I did have my faith. I had usually stuck with the credo, "God helps those who help themselves." So to stop prayer altogether was relatively simple.

Perinquus · Post by **Perinquus** » 2005-03-20 10:04am

As others have said, losing faith was a gradual process. I was indoctrinated with fundamentalist Baptist Christianity all throughout my childhood. In high school I started asking troublesome questions and reading things like Thos. Paine's "Age of Reason". By college my faith was mostly gone.

The biggest problem you are likely to have with your deconversion is dealing with your still religious family, who will now be convinced you are on the express elevator to hell, and will most likely pull out all the stops to bring you back into the fold. (Ask me how I know.)

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman · Post by **Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman** » 2005-03-20 10:14am

Perinquus wrote:The biggest problem you are likely to have with your deconversion is dealing with your still religious family, who will now be convinced you are on the express elevator to hell, and will most likely pull out all the stops to bring you back into the fold. (Ask me how I know.)

Guess I have to ask then. How?

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2005-03-20 10:16am

(Ask me how I know.)

How do you know?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman · Post by **Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman** » 2005-03-20 10:20am

Actually it's not only my family. In fact, they're pretty much liberal about it (althogh with some reservations). What bothers me most is almost everyone else in my surroundings: co-workers, ex-university classmates, friends, etc. Not only moslems, but those of other religions as well. It started with a co-worker wondering why I stopped do the shalat. When I told him the reason, they start looking at me like I'm some kind of aliens or such.

Funny thing in Indonesia; while each religion seems to be in prejudice with each other, they all share mutual disdain for atheism.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2005-03-20 10:31am

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:Actually it's not only my family. In fact, they're pretty much liberal about it (althogh with some reservations). What bothers me most is almost everyone else in my surroundings: co-workers, ex-university classmates, friends, etc. Not only moslems, but those of other religions as well. It started with a co-worker wondering why I stopped do the shalat. When I told him the reason, they start looking at me like I'm some kind of aliens or such.

Funny thing in Indonesia; while each religion seems to be in prejudice with each other, they all share mutual disdain for atheism.

That's because they cannot understand atheism. They can understand someone belonging to a different religion; they can relate to it. But they cannot understand why someone would be an atheist; it really is alien to their primitive way of thinking.

As for deconversion, Rebecca is a good example of a deconversion. I never tried to push her to become an atheist, or sell it to her, or anything like that. I merely reminded her whenever the minister or some other religious figure in her environment would say something stupid or hateful toward atheists (which is pretty much most of the time if they're discussing values; when speaking amongst themselves, Christians are virtually incapable of discussing values without assuming that anyone who lacks belief in any gods must also lacks any values).

In any case, this eventually caused her to lose respect for the local church leaders, so she decided to research the Bible herself. That was, of course, the killing blow for her faith. The more she learned about the Bible, the more she became convinced that it was too stupid to take seriously. By the end, she talked of how she could not take it as a basis of faith, but rather, as "the wisdom of the ages" despite what she now acknowledged to be serious moral flaws (it's amazing what impact it has for a Christian woman to realize that the Bible says she should murder her own husband for his heathenism). Then she read Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible" and learned of the politicking between rival priesthoods over the content of the Bible, and decided that she could not even take as that; it's just crap.

Anyway, that was her sequence. To recap:

Lost respect for the clergy
Lost belief in the Bible's accuracy
Lost belief in the Bible's moral authority
Learned too much about the Bible's authorship

After this, she went on an exploration mission, looking at other religions. But after a while, she confided to me that all of the other religions were stupid too; every one of them had some absolute goofball belief that you could only take seriously if you were indoctrinated with it and stopped thinking critically. So she decided that it was better to have some kind of "spiritualism" than an actual religion. That's technically atheism, although most people have exaggerated the definition of atheism so they would not classify it as such.

The Spartan · Post by **The Spartan** » 2005-03-20 10:48am

In retrospect, as I now think about it, I think it was learning about the Council of Nicea (sp?) that was the killing blow. If a group of men nearly 2000 years ago decides what gets to go in, then how do I know any of it is accurate... well, you can see where this line of reasoning lead me.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman · Post by **Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman** » 2005-03-20 10:56am

Interesting.

My respect for religious "leaders"/"clerics" had weared-off many years ago, particularly during university, when fundie Moslems endlessly tried to pollute freshmen's head with their twisted definition of Islam.

Still, my faith stayed. I did believe in God and interpreted Koran according to logic and conscience. Also, it's pretty hard to get rid of something you've been taught since very early childhood.

But years of more and more disappointments had made me questioned the benevolence of The Guy Up There. The final blow came about several months ago. I wouldn't go through details, but it brought me to this conclusion:

(1) Either God is not exist, and the whole world is pretty much chaos where we either can or cannot make differences.

(2) Either God is exist, but everything's been written in Koran (or Bible, Tarot, etc) about His Benevolence is a FUCKING LIE.

I have to admit, though, it's like having a "broken heart" with God. I've been clinging to my faith for years, believing that God is benevolent and everything would end well. However, eventually the faith wears off. Thus, the above conclusion.

Regardless of whether God really exist or not, it is like being disappointed by something you've been believing for decades. Sounds silly? Yes. But this is about something I've been taught since I could speak and walk.

Frankly, I don't know whether this kind of disappointment is a good basis to build a strong atheistic belief. I often question myself: am I really ready to be an atheist, or this is just an escape from my own bitterness?

See, if you guys think I would make a bad atheist (because I go for it out of disappointment), then just stop me now. Regardless of anything, I'm still interested in atheism and I don't want to enter it out of despair.

Post by **NecronLord** » 2005-03-20 11:15am

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:But what about people who have been raised with religion? What kind of difficulties you had when switching, and how did you overcome it?

You just decide you don't believe in god. There - ZAP! POW! - you are now an atheist.

As for myself, the most difficult part is overcoming the human need to worship something bigger than us.

I have never felt such a need.

Funny, I just can't stop praying, and sometimes swearing to the Guy Above when things get difficult. Old habits die hard (especially when you have been living it for almost 30 years).

It doesn't mean you're anything but an atheist. God damnit, etc is simply a figure of speech.

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2005-03-20 11:37am

I never really had that much faith to begin with, more I just accepted what my CoE school was telling me about Jesus and God and stuff. Around 8 or so I learned Santa wasn't real by finding my xmas presents. That was completely gutting at the time because I knew I'd been lied to, and felt like I'd been manipulated because Santa could supposedly see you all the time and knew whether you'd been good or not (that's 1 omniscient pseudodeity down). Anyway, time passed, and around age 12 I was threatened with hell by a classmate because we were doing something and he said "do you swear on the bible?" and I stuck 2 fingers up at a pretend bible.

Then I came to the realisation that that's all it was. An empty threat. Likewise, heaven was an empty bribe. God was just like Santa, made up to control people. So for a brief while (much before I found the goodness that is heavy metal) I dabbled with the old witchcraft and drawing upside-down pentagrams everywhere.

When the spells failed to work, I worked out (probably 13 or 14 or something) that magic, like christianity and the other "proper" religions but the burden on you to interpret your god or spells into existence. They didn't actually effect anything real, it was all internal, you had to see god's work, and you had to see your magic spell working. Deluding yourself, in essence.

As for praying, according to the BBC program, "what the world thinks about God," apparently 30% of atheists pray, even if it's in no deities in particular. It's just asking for help from anything that may be listening. It's just human frailty, just like wishing.It's superstitious, but it's not really bad. I mean, I guess I sort of pray a lot when I will the traffic lights to stay green and that sort of thing. Willing it doesn't change it, of course, but it's just a way of expressing your wants.

So in summary, it was realising that faith in itself is irrational and delusional. The most popular religions, based on faith are social control. Then there's the Epicurus riddle; with the unpleasantness in the world, God is either unable to intervene, or does not want to, or doesn't exist in the first place. The only answers people give to it are unconvincing, pithy remarks about it being free will, or the Phelps/Falwell-esque harken back to the "vengeful, angry gods" days. Both pretty silly.

If you listen to someone talk about God, imagine they're talking about Santa. Is it really any different?

So yeah, after a while though, I( found atheism in and of itself fairly unfulfilling, I don't actually like people that much, so humanism didn't really work out. Then I worked out that "spirituality" and such, that traditionally religions had a grip on, didn't actually require spirits, souls, gods and stuff. It's emotional attachment. That same emotional attachment can be found with nature and the universe. I thought I was on to something new that would revolutionise religion; but then I found out it already existed, and was called pantheism. So I now identify myself as a scientific pantheist, though as I'm sure you're aware, I'm definately atheistic too.

Pick · Post by **Pick** » 2005-03-20 11:44am

My parents taught me critical thinking. What else could follow than antheism?

And I remember, the one day that started a very fast path to losing my faith was a long, loooong time ago, and very simple. They were talkig about how Jesus brought back Lazarus, and I thought, "I don't think that happened." And from there, I wondered why I thought any of it happened. And if you don't think any of it happened, what's the point?

I never found it that hard. I'd rather deal with a cold, harsh reality that I can see than think I live on a happy, fuzzy Godtastic world --while the real world sits there and kicks my ass.

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-03-20 11:57am

Well, I was raised by an agnostic and an atheist, so there was nothing for me to escape, fortunately.

However, I've found that people do usually end up with something greater than themselves to look toward, even if not in a sense of worship. A prime example would be DW's utilitarian 'needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' principles. Despite being a diehard loner and halfass libertarian, I tend to follow along a similar path of ethic myself.

I've found that few people are truly content if they don't have something greater than themselves to be concerned with, be it family, society, or religion.

The big differences lies in approaching such concerns rationally vs. the massive SoD required to partake of religion.

Robert Walper · Post by **Robert Walper** » 2005-03-20 12:51pm

Well, I consider myself very lucky. My father has no religious beliefs, but never pushed anything on me either way. If I ever had a question about religion, his response was just an honest "Don't give a shit about that crap."

My mother was raised Catholic I believe, but again, she never pushed anything on me either. Currently, she's an agnostic.

I still remember back when I was quite young, I decided to ask my mother that question "Why am I here? Why do I exist?". Thankfully, she didn't give me any religious answer or anything, but answered honestly she didn't know, no one really has an answer to a question in that context and people have been trying to answer it for as long as people could think.

Before joining up SDN I considered myself an agnostic, but never pursued or looked up religion. Once I became familar with the arguements and idiocy of religion in general, I became the full atheist I am today.

sketerpot · Post by **sketerpot** » 2005-03-20 01:57pm

Well, here's how it was for me:

1. After I lost faith in Christianity, I vaguely labeled myself as "an atheistic-agnostic", whatever that meant. It was just a silly wishy-washy "don't get mad at me, I'm not taking sides" label.
2. I then made the shift to looking at the world in a scientific way (this had already begun before I deconverted) and I learned a lot more about the philosophy and content of science. This was the key step for me: distancing myself from the religious worldview.
3. I looked back at religion and realized how alien it all felt. I decided to just call myself an atheist, and I've been pretty peaceful and content with it ever since.

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Switching to atheism: is it difficult?

Switching to atheism: is it difficult?

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