From PZ's Place: Natasha Krasle, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

I suppose my journey to atheism started with spirituality. When I was a kid, I attended a Unitarian Universalist church in Seattle. We had both a Solstice and a Christmas pageant, celebrated Easter and the Equinox. My parents sought not to force an ideology upon me, but to expose me to many traditions so that I could piece together my own collage of beliefs. I remember one day, standing in my living room, when someone inquired as to my religion. Bewildered, I said “I don’t know…” and turned to my mother, who replied “Good.” When my sisters were born, though, our house and traditions were suddenly too small.

We moved to a cohousing community about half an hour away when I was nine or ten, and my father moved back to Seattle soon afterward. He was and is a very scientifically minded person, fascinated with the acquisition of any kind of knowledge he can get his hands on, and I believe his transition to atheism came soon after my parents split. I began attending a New Thought church with my mother (and later my stepfather). In this place, I was taught that god is just a word for some spiritual thingy that makes up everything, a person’s natural state is perfection, that our thoughts affect what happens to us, and that heaven and hell are merely states of mind. After a while, though, I became disenchanted with that fat box of joy. They started asking people to tithe after every service. They acquired a new TV spot, associated themselves with Deepak Chopra, and built a new “celebration hall” with the money they constantly milked their audience for…. The average wealth of the people attending rose visibly, and not because the church was making anyone richer. Our old holding-hands-during songs tradition was abolished without a word. Not to mention the fact that we were building ugly new buildings instead of, say, helping people through devastating world crises. Attached to my previous participation in the music program and to the friends I’d made there, I dangled on for a little while before I gave up.

As I began my college career last year, I discovered my fascination with anthropology and psychology; the reasons people are how we are, and how we perceive the world around us. And in the light of my recent split from the New Thought movement, and the insight I was being given into humanity, I turned my questioning nature upon my own beliefs. I’d read Pharyngula before, and was already better versed in biology and the scientific method than most people my age, but had held tightly to my vague, earthy spirituality. Under closer scrutiny, I was shocked at my conclusion:

None of the important values I was holding onto and associated with spirituality- self-fulfilling prophecy (a well-known psychological phenomenon), respect for life, empathy, getting to know oneself- needed to be assigned to any sort of supernatural being or force. There was just no reason I had to believe something quite frankly silly to be a whole, happy person living on a fascinating speck in a vast and astounding universe.

So I did. And now I’m an atheist.

Natasha Krasle
United States

Krasle makes two points:

1. Science, specifically anthropology and psychology, inform her insight into humanity.

2. Values don’t need any grounding other than personal conviction.

Krasle’s thought process brought to mind my own suspicions as to why the philosophy of science is not taught prior to teach science itself: understanding the basic limitations of science would undermine its authority and the intellectual hegemony it provides to its practitioners. Understanding that science is a limited tool, not an ideology would be a blow to many of the Scientism persuasion.

And the lack of training in logic allows the rejection of grounding as a necessity for one’s beliefs. She now has the sole moral authority to develop her own value beliefs.

Summary: Krasle came from rootless ideologies into Scientism as a freshman in college.

From PZ's Place: Matthew Donica, USA, on Why I Am An Atheist:

I was born into a Christian home, and sent to a fundamentalist Christian church. I never even thought to question Christianity until I was about 14, I just accepted every Christian premise I heard without question. When I was about 14, a deacon at the Southern Baptist church I was a member of, filled in for the youth pastor who was out sick. He asserted that the world was only 6000 years old, and that dinosaur bones were planted in the ground by Satan to trick scientists into leading people away from Yahweh. The first thing that shook me up, was the fact that he was not some random guy who just attended church sometimes. He was a deacon and a pretty high ranking guy in the church. I quickly turned the same rational eye that I had on his arguments onto my own beliefs and realized that they were just as silly. I told the regular youth pastor that when he got back. He challenged me to read the Bible cover-to-cover. I read it over the course of about ten days.

One day, I was taking a shower after returning home from a church service. While I was cleaning myself, I formed sort of a mental Venn Diagram of everything I had read in the Bible. I realized that almost everything in the Bible fit into a set of things which were horrible, or a set of things which were nonsense, and that most of it fit into the intersection of those sets. When I got out of the shower, I came to the conclusion that Yahweh did not exist, the Bible was a useless book of nonsense and that every Christian premise or argument I had ever heard was false.

A little later, I encountered Kent Hovind videos and a now famous Youtuber named VenomFangX. This was back when he only had about a thousand subscribers, and would respond to people’s private messages to him. I pointed out some of the flaws in one of his videos to him, and he replied with something to the effect of “Nu-uh, magic”. I refuted that argument, and he blocked me. While reading through the comments on another one of his videos (or maybe a Kent Hovind video), I found a link to the Skeptics Annotated Bible. The SAB (Wonderful resource when debating Christians) helped to solidify my conclusions about Christianity.

My explicit rejection of all other religions came after reading The Iliad. I enjoyed the book, and realized that it was pretty much the same thing as the Bible. A chain of events, some probably based in history, others completely fabricated with arbitrary deities from the region it was written inserted throughout. Reading it caused me to view religion on a more global scale and realize that every religion I knew of was pretty much isomorphic to Christianity, which I had already established a solid basis for rejecting.

I don’t think I have to justify my rejection of the sort of “New age” spirituality stuff. Anybody who has been exposed to it, and not immediately seen it as meritless garbage is a mental deficient.

tl;dr: Some Christian beliefs crazier than the Christian beliefs I held, got me to look at religion rationally.
Matthew Donica
United States

Donica makes just one point and one sub-point:

1. EvilBible; therefore No God.

A subpoint is that because the Iliad demonstrates the possibility of fiction, then:

2. Fiction exists; therefore No God.

He was driven to it by a YEC literalist. He apparently remains a literalist.

But he does not address actual theism, its propositions or logic. He merely makes his assertion and declares it “rational”. Assertions are not known to be rational until they are fully examined for flaws. His assertions, if they really reduce in the manner they seem to, are non sequitur as can be demonstrated by restating them thus:

1. IF [the Bible is obnoxious to my sensibilities], THEN, [there is no first cause agency].

2. IF [the Iliad demonstrates fictional gods in literature], THEN, [there is no first cause agency].

These conclusions were made at an inauspicious time in the intellectual life of humans: adolescence. For example, Donica, as a teenager, assumed for himself both (a) the moral authority to derive a personal ethic by which to judge God – and then judged God; and he (b) assumed the rational ability to reject portions of the texts as irrational.

There is likely no living creature less rational than teenagers. It appears that Atheism is adopted during the human rebellion years in a great many cases, and it is presumed rational without any subsequent examination as an adult. That is why I recommend that every adult learn classical logic, its application to rational thought, the philosophy of science, and the First Principles of Thought, and then reassess all the components of their worldviews using these tools of rationality.

Donica’s rejection is a normal reaction in teen years. That doesn’t lend it credibility as an adult worldview. If truth is desired in one’s worldview, then education in the processes of actual rationality must be learned and used with rigor.

Summary: Rejected the Bible and Christianity as a teen, with God as a subsidiary casualty.