From PZ's Place: Lucas Parker, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

I grew up in poor neighborhoods around people who didn’t value critical thinking and like most people from her generation, my mother had grown up with a smattering of religion. She was a regular Sunday church-goer when I was a boy and she would dress me up and cart me off to sit on the wooden pew, daydreaming about action and adventure while a boring man droned on in monotone from the front of the room. About halfway through the monologue, we small children were brought downstairs into “Sunday school,” a place that I only remember for its truly extensive set of Legos. For all that I wasn’t predisposed to pay much attention to religion, I was as surrounded by it as any other kid. My parents were moderately religious. My grandparents were definitely religious. All of my aunts and uncles were religious. My peers and their parents; my schoolteachers; my bus drivers; my babysitters; friends; acquaintances; playmates; bullies; pretty much everybody I knew was at least a little bit religious and most definitely believed in God. People talked about it all the time. This was 1985, a very WASPy time for my hometown of Everett, Washington.

I was six years old and I was in trouble. I didn’t understand the scope of my dilemma at the time, but I was finding it more and more difficult to believe in God. Every night at bedtime, left to my thoughts, I would obsess about it. I would try to force myself to believe, to have faith in something that I couldn’t see or feel. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anybody about it for fear of what they might say or do. One night, it just happened: despite all of the pressure from pretty much everyone I ever interacted with, I finally had to admit to myself that I did not and could not believe in God, Jesus or the rest of it. At first I felt a terrible guilt, but as that washed over me I began to feel a little bit liberated. The only way to really have faith is to obsess over it, since it has no momentum of its own and is entirely the creation of the imagination. Now, my six-year-old imagination was freed up to explore new ideas and concepts without the underlying fear of some oppressive deity judging my thoughts and actions.

This certainly wasn’t the end of my exploration into religion and faith, as my teen years were as full of attempts to identify as anybody’s, but this was certainly the first time that I’d been that honest with myself and in the end, better represented my actual stance on the matter than my later youthful meandering. I had never heard the word “atheist” before and so I didn’t know that there was a name for how I felt and thought. I felt very alone, a feeling that has been a theme throughout my life probably because of that very event. But there was certainly no going back.

Lucas Parker
United States

Parker makes these points:

1. Despite a somewhat religious background and environment, he found by the age of 6 years old that he couldn’t believe in something which he “couldn’t see or feel”.

2. Religion is entirely the creation of the imagination. It involves obsession.

3. Disbelief set him free: “Without God, Jesus or the rest of it” his “six-year-old imagination was freed up to explore new ideas and concepts without the underlying fear of some oppressive deity judging my thoughts and actions.”

Summary: Parker adopted disbelief at the age of 6 years old. He needed to see or feel something to believe it. Disbelief set him free from obsession and fear of judgment by an “oppressive deity”.