Beliefs are ever changing, and science is still learning, but the theory of gravity remains 'valid' just as the theory of evolution remains 'valid'... "(Some) Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov"

I was raised a Christian and believed by due to that, but when I began to question it. Religion makes no sense when looked at in relation to tall the religions of the world and what we know objectively.

Up to about 10 I was a firm believer. After that I began to question. By 14 was the first atheist I knew. I have never read any atheist materials etc. I have remained an atheist ever since and I am now 49.

I was born an atheist and raised christian. after 22 years i finally got tired of making excuses for doctrinal inconsistency and accepted that many questions only answer themselves satisfactorily when you admit there is no reason to believe in a god. a perfect example: 'the problem of evil.'

what blocked me from accepting reality all those years was my own emotional needs. the need for consolation, a need to place order behind worldly and universal chaos. something to help with the realization of man's nakedness in a barren wilderness of astonishing beauty and intolerable cruelties. no. the universe does not exist for my pleasure. I'm am not at it's epicenter, and my feelings are not a consideration with regard to its truth and the facts of human existence.

really im more agnostic than anything. i believe god can never be proven or disproven so there really is no point pondering his existence. the point is we have a universe, we should learn all about it wether there is a god or not. if you were to ask me instead of giving you this spiel i would say im either atheist or plainly a skeptiic. i wouldnt say ii believe in god but wouldnt say 100% i doubt his existence.

I often take on the title of atheist as a way to fight the negative connotations it has in our society, although I'm as much of an atheist as I am a Pantheist.

God was a way of making sense of the things people could not understand. Put simply, God is nature Anthropomorphized. Nature is given human characteristics....exaggerated human characteristics, not just any human characteristics but those of a parent. Babies instinctively believe that parents are all-knowing, and are all-powerful. The similarities don't end there. Babies appeal to their parents for things they want. The parent is seen as a protector, a guide, a moral compass, and a loving figure who sometimes punishes us. We have simply given these parental attributes to unseen forces, given it a personality, and called it God. Even religions with many Gods there are often one or two Gods that have distinctively parental characteristics and are regarded above other Gods.

Humans as it turns out are not all that good at understanding processes, we have a strong cognitive tendency towards agency. That is to say we are more quick to understand something as the caused by a person or thing (an agent), than something as a result of a process. Humans believed rain was the result of a divine being before we believed it was a result of evaporation and precipitation.

Stories and myths were one of the primary means of human relation in early human history. People entertained each other with these stories, and sometimes these stories would attempt to explain things people didn't understand. "Where did that come from?" Was often the plot of these stories. It was only natural that these stories would incorporate this divine parental figure. Many of the rules found in religion are just cultural customs and rituals that were absorbed into the religion.

I believe that perhaps there is some organizing force in nature that we don't quite understand yet, but I wouldn't call it God, I wouldn't even call it divine, but nonetheless is ever present in our reality. Something ancient peoples attempted to understand with their primitive minds and did the best they could to understand such a complex thing. We would do best to move past bronze age superstitions.

I consider myself to be an agnostic person, but if I were to vote whether there to be or not to be a God, I would vote for to be.

Until I find out the truth (if I ever do), I stick to not bother with this kind of things or to being a skeptical person.

I have basically always been an atheist even though my mother wanted me to go to church for several years as a child. The reason why I started as an atheist was because my mother didn’t force anything on me, my refusal to participate in and accept the religious ideas was sufficient reason to my mother to allow me to remain home. My parents didn’t force anything and wanted me to learn and be rational as a person

A a child there was little thought about god and religion because it didn’t matter.

By age 15 I had learned a few things about religion and had discussed religion and belief in god with my parents and friends. My parents were both agnostic in their view, trying to actively refrain from influencing my beliefs as much as they could. The idea didn’t make sense to me as a reasonable way to understand life and the world. I was definitely cognizant of my disbelief.

By 20 I was even stronger in my beliefs, I had learned more about the effects religion has on the world and saw first-hand some of the negative elements. One of my friend’s good friends had committed suicide and a believer said to my friend “I am sorry for your loss, but your friend is now burning in hell” (paraphrase). This pissed me off something terrible. I couldn’t believe that people are so deluded to think that religion is any true comfort. I was also aware of the hatred religious people had for one another, and toward homosexuals as well as the conflict with scientific understanding.

By 25 I had become a philosophy major which gave me the skills to understand the debate and ways of thinking on a very deep level. My atheism grew and grew and by that time I had become an anti-theist, actively regarding religion as a degrading phenomenon. I wanted so much to understand why people believed that I took philosophy of religion and learned about how belief was started and progressed throughout the past ~3000 years.

I am only 28 now, but at this point I have come up with a synoptic philosophy in an attempt to account for the nature of existence such that I understand all phenomena. This has given me some insight into the nature of belief and of conceptual perpetuation (god as a meme).

The origin of human life is evolution from the material processes that resulted in abiogenesis. Differentiation and recombination are the two principles that resulted in what we are today and it also describes how human ideas have come into being. If you want to know more about what I think on this, you should visit the facebook page The Order of Harmony, and read the theory of Ontological Harmonescence.