Your Stories of Atheism: Getting Rid of God

This is an ongoing series featuring your stories of how you came to identify as an atheist. If you want to send me your story, you can submit it here. To read past stories, click here.

The first story this week comes from Joseph:

I’ve been a full-blown atheist for only about five years now. Don’t get me wrong, I was never a bible-thumper, but my ascent to reality was a long and straight road. I had trouble with the whole concept early on. When I was around ten, I remember being in church on some Sunday, waiting for communion. Chatting with a friend, I said, “Jesus’ body would go down a whole lot easier if they spread some peanut butter on it.” My ear still hurts from when the nun pulled me out of the pews.

Even during communion class, I had a problem with the whole limbo thing. (Not the dance, although I have a problem with that too, as I am not quite that flexible.) I asked the nun why would god send babies there if they died before they were christened. I told her I didn’t think that it was very fair as they had not done anything wrong. She told me, in her wisdom, to stop asking stupid questions and got cross (no pun intended) with me.

Interestingly enough, the Catholic Church has not too long ago changed their decision on this and said that they do indeed go to heaven. I guess my comment 30 some odd years ago finally got to the Pope’s ears.

Next, we have Owen, a man of few words:

My folks told me at 7 years of age religion was all bullshit and I believed them.

Finally, Dirk had this to say:

I prayed and nothing happened 😉

Grew up in Namibia, on a farm, which meant boarding from first grade. Only went home for school holidays, so on normal weekends I was stuck in boarding school as well. To make things worse, we had to go to church every Sunday, even got 20 cents for the offering. Thus I prayed night after night, ‘please get me out of this hellhole’, but I guess he waited a bit too long 😉 In grade 3 things got even worse with Miss Höflich. She was our religious instruction/inddoctrination teacher. In her late fifties, probably would’ve liked to’ve been a dominatrix, but ended up torturing children instead. Whenever we had some spare time in the lessons, cause we’d finished the religious junk for the day, she liked to read us some, in her world, horrible stories about drug related deaths. Basically all famous actors and musicians were evil, cause they all took drugs and of course end up in hell…the whole schmuck! The twist: The woman’s surname “Höflich” is also an adjective in German and actually translates into “polite” or “civil”, now how cool is that! “God is going to punish the wicked” she used to remind us every so often…and in the end she died of some ugly form of cancer. Now I don’t believe in God, but when that witch got cancer he nearly had me 😉

…and now I’m a much happier godless dad 🙂

If you want to send me your story, you can submit it here. To read past stories, click here.

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