Atheists, agnostics, etc: What started your journey to unbelief?

Inconsistencies between what was taught in church and the bible. Also inconsistencies in the bible. The harder I tried to sort it out, the more I found and it all unraveled. By the end of my teens I was agnostic, took a while longer to rid myself entirely of almost 2 decades of brainwashing.

I think I was born skeptical, though I journeyed though the belly of the cockroach as an adult. My issue with religion began when my mother terrorized me once by telling me what would happen to me if I continued being a bad little girl, that is Hellfire and the Devil. Only a religion could cause an otherwise loving parent to do that to their child. It is not the faith, rituals, mythology, or even God or Jesus I object to, it is the hate, fear, and ignorance religions like Christianity and Islam spread. 


 

Disappointed there weren't enough cats?

The thing that's supposed to happen during my brief period of believing never seemed to happen to me. I was Holy Ghosted.

It's a bit of a convoluted journey for me.

When I was a teenager, I started to question the Catholic faith I was raised in. I realised the things I believed were determined not by sound argument, but by circumstance - my Catholic father wanted me to be raised Catholic and so the Catholic schools I went to taught me Catholic beliefs as fact. Had my Protestant mother pushed harder, I probably would have taken Protestant beliefs as fact instead. And then had I lived in another part of the world, I probably would have been a Jew/ Muslim/ Hindu/ Shinto/ whatever instead.

I still believed in a God of some sort based on the rather simple notion of 'well, how can there be anything with no intelligence behind it?', but I pretty much felt I knew nothing about this God and I certainly didn't think Jesus was anything more than one of many preachers who in his case was just lucky enough that his cult caught on.

As I moved into my late teens and early twenties, I gradually gave up that belief in God as I figured religious cosmological answers were no better than natural. At this age, I was quite outspokenly atheist.

In my mid-late twenties, I had a few encounters with religious types who surprisingly had actually thought about the various philosophical objections to religion. I don't think any of them convinced me but they gave me food for thought though I remained quite resolutely atheist.

Then I studied a degree in philosophy which included a module on philosophy of religion and I was actually surprised by how robust some theist arguments were. Some of them even convinced me momentarily, but further investigation generally found them wanting.

I did however become more convinced that most theists and atheists were largely missing the point about religion - they were so focused on religious claims' explanatory power or lack thereof that they missed the psychological and emotional aspects of faith which are generally what drive people toward God rather than any supposedly logical proof. I became convinced that religious belief could be justified purely on faith and indeed justification by faith was the only legitimate reason to believe being particularly convinced by the likes of Kierkegaard and, a contemporary favourite of mine, Mary-Jane Rubenstein who I discovered accidentally on YouTube.

I have then toyed with trying to develop a faith myself in at times Hinduism, Christianity and, for one crazy weekend, Wicca. But ultimately I just haven't developed such a faith. So until I find such faith, I consider myself agnostic.

What always fascinates me about stories like this is they're so different from my experience where Hell and damnation were barely mentioned and the focus was very much on God's love. I imagine if my experience had been more similar to yours, I'd be a lot more hostile to Christianity than I am.