I PossibleInstability, am starting a club where fellow Atheists can meet each other and talk. I have met few Atheists and I would like to meet some more.
I think I had a rather unique view of religion growing up. My mom was Catholic, my grandfather converted to Judaism for a time, my dad while born catholic eventually ended up I think Buddhist then later took a more agnostic stance. I also spent time learning and participating in a variety of other religions. As a matter of fact my time learning about the Wiccan religion played a role in my choice of online names (Mage).
I was told all the time how the Bible was a good moral guide. But the parts that were suppose to be real and the parts that were suppose to be interpreted were never made clear. I would see people clearly use there religion as a mask for there own bigotry, then be regarded as good Christians for it. I began to notice similarities between people who had been brainwashed in cults and the way many Christians spoke. This put a bad taste in my mouth and the bigotry became my own, and I began to hate the religion. But yet I still held on to the 'moral' parts I grew up with learning.
Now I didn't take the Bible or any religious text for that matter literally. Rather I figured each religion had there own piece of the truth in them. I couldn't tell you how long I spent trying to piece it all together, trying to figure out which part of what religion made sense and which didn't. Every time I came across a new religion the puzzle seemed to make less and less sense. At this point I would say I was agnostic.
I began to read the Bible more in depth and seeing how much had to be put aside to get to the moral parts was amazing to me. I began to wonder how this became a moral guide to begin with, with so mcuh cruelty in it even from the "all loving" God. I would have ended up an atheist sooner with this line of reasoning but I was misinformed of what an atheist really was, and believed it to be just as single minded to absolutely say there wasn't a god as it was to say there was a god.
My major turning point was with one of the last conversations I had with my dad before he died. My dad was talking about what he personally believed and asked me if I thought there was a god. I had pretty much stopped talking about what I believed and didn't believe at this point and was taken back a bit by the question. I sat there thinking about it for a minute and said "I don't know".
I guess because it was one of the last conversations I had with him before he passed away it stuck in my mind, but I began to do research on the internet and really challenge what I believed against hard facts. I learned that what I thought an atheist was, was not correct. As I learned more about Christianity from a factual basis I began to stop hating the religion. I watched the debates between atheists and Christians on Youtube, much of it seem to mirror the questions I had been asking myself. I learned it was okay to say "I don't know". As a put each thing I believed against reality and it got shot down I eventually ended up coming to the conclusion I was an atheist.
One last thing, this forum is the first place I have come out and stated I was an atheist in a public way. So I know how you feel Flippin. I have only told a couple people in my family and my girlfriend. I'm not going to tell my grandmother though. I think she would just feel hurt by it. If I lived with her and she was forcing me to go to church every Sunday it might be a different story. So I just don't see any reason to do that to her.
