Your Stories of Atheism Part 1

Last week, I asked you guys to send me your stories about how you came to identify as an atheist. I got an insane response. I haven’t even been able to read through them all. I was so pleasantly surprised by how many of you want to share this stuff! If you missed that post and you want to share your story, the form is on this page.

I’m going to try and share a few different stories each week.

This one was from Frost Blade:

I was born into a Jewish family, but we weren’t very religious. Up until then, I was pretty much on the fence about God, and I was pretty much neutral. When my grandmother passed away, however, I began to question the same-old “she’s in a better place” that I heard. I hated the hard truth of death, and I truly wanted to believe she was in a magcal paradise. I eventually discovered The Amazing Atheist, mrrepzion, Jaclyn Glenn, and others through the wonders of YouTube. Atheism piqued my interest, so I watched a couple videos, and I was hooked immediately. They spoke to me in a way nobody has before, and I’m now a proud Atheist. 

This is a common theme that has come out through a lot of these stories: the internet playing a role in the rise of atheism. The internet is a near infinite source of information, leading me to believe strongly that religious indoctrination and dogma can only be fought with education and information.

The following story was really interesting as well, in that Deconverted Man was originally a Christian YouTuber named Infinite Hope until he started to finally listen to the questions atheists were asking him:

This story was sent to me by J, and I thought it was great because it shows that religious people rarely help their own cause. Their actions can and have played a heavy hand in helping people discover the truth:

I became an atheist when I was eighteen years old, after an upbringing as a Lutheran. Writing has always been a passion of mine, and with it, reading. When I was a teenager, I read Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials series, in which, at the culmination (SPOILERS) they kill God.

This idea seemed heretical to me, but, as much as I hated to admit it, I was growing away from the idea of God. Slowly it was making less and less sense to me.

Coincidentally, I started smoking marijuana the year I stopped believing. I was driving around and smoking, and then it occurred to me: I didn’t believe. I called my Christian friends, the ones that I felt were most pious, and they rebuked me. One even went so far as to call me egocentric, that I “couldn’t believe in anything higher than myself.”

I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish, but they may have saved my faith if they hadn’t acted so rashly. The ideas were cemented in my head and my dislike of organized religion was off to a rolling start.

What’s your story? Send it to me here.

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