Believing in God In Your Youth

[KUJustin]

I'm interested in getting as many perspectives as possible on this as it's something I've been giving a lot of thought.

Did you believe in God (or a higher power) as a child, if so, when did you stop believing (I know for most this was a gradual process, so feel free to walk us through it).

I know that as a pre-teen/teen I was extremely skeptical as to the existence of a higher power to the point that you could possibly call me an atheist. Prior to that though it seems like I either just had an innate sense of a higher power or the evidence of His creation was too overwhelming for me to deny. Obviously I was also exposed to the idea of a God before I was old enough to remember it so that surely played some role.

A bonus curiousity I have is I wonder if you raised chilren in isolation of the mention of a higher power if they would develop (or begin with) a belief in one anyway. Obviously that would be an extremely difficult experiment (would have to be either in near total isolation with your family or at least in a very different culture).

[madnak]

I believed in God as a child, and that ended relatively abruptly at the age of 14 (when I started to actually think about religion).

[MidGe]

Same here... about 13-14 to shed my faith in christianity. Earlier in the case of father xmas. Probably mid thirties by the time I had managed to undo all of the christian education effect, and that took a lot of work.

[FortunaMaximus]

Easter Bunny, Santa, God. I think shedding those beliefs were necessary before I was allowed to enter puberty.

<shrugs> I'm re-questioning the whole ultimate observer thing. But that's more along the lines of boredom and not a real need to establish a deadman's switch for my existence.

[Darryl_P]

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A bonus curiousity I have is I wonder if you raised chilren in isolation of the mention of a higher power if they would develop (or begin with) a belief in one anyway.

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This is pretty much how I was raised. At home there was never any mention of anything remotely religious, except a nutty old nanny I had for a while whose words I never took seriously. The schools I went to were culturally diverse and totally secular. There was very little mention of God or religion pretty much everywhere I went.

Up until the age of 30 or so I thought all religious people were wackos.

Then I became a wacko myself in my own unique way (through a mid-life crisis type period with depression, lots of meditation, a major career shift and a divorce) and now I see atheists as people in denial. I still think the religious folk are wackos in a lot of ways, but not in the most fundamental way.

[bunny]

I was raised by passionate atheists and always adopted the view that religious people were ignorant of science and too insecure to accept the world as it is.

The anti-religion feeling in my family is very strong (I have no relatives even amongst my extended family who share my belief in God) and this was something I adopted without conscious thought. I doubt very much that someone raised in that environment would be a believer.

[AthenianStranger]

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I was raised by passionate atheists and always adopted the view that religious people were ignorant of science and too insecure to accept the world as it is.

The anti-religion feeling in my family is very strong (I have no relatives even amongst my extended family who share my belief in God) and this was something I adopted without conscious thought. I doubt very much that someone raised in that environment would be a believer.

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Same for me, except my mother was always Catholic and my father was an atheist. I was pretty much raised by my atheist siblings however and sharted your feelings about the ignorance of religious people. My father has since become a Christian (at over 50, after I left the house).

Funny how everyone saw the light and made their decisions to not believe in God/be agnostic at the ages of 13-18. Not the age to which we would normally ascribe well-thought out rational decisions. It is just the opposite, in fact. Kid thinks everyone should take him seriously; he's an adult, etc., but he's just a stupid kid rebelling at what makes him uncomfortable. Of course you don't want to go to church, it's not entertaining. Later in life he ascribes this to his abnormal adolescent brilliance, wherein he was able to escape the traps of religious ignorance set by his parents at such an early age. Later in life he realizes that his parents were right about a lot of things and comes to respect them, understand that they went through a lot of the same experiences, but he never attributes this same realization to his understanding of religion.

[madnak]

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Funny how everyone saw the light and made their decisions to not believe in God/be agnostic at the ages of 13-18. Not the age to which we would normally ascribe well-thought out rational decisions. It is just the opposite, in fact. Kid thinks everyone should take him seriously; he's an adult, etc., but he's just a stupid kid rebelling at what makes him uncomfortable. Of course you don't want to go to church, it's not entertaining. Later in life he ascribes this to his abnormal adolescent brilliance, wherein he was able to escape the traps of religious ignorance set by his parents at such an early age. Later in life he realizes that his parents were right about a lot of things and comes to respect them, understand that they went through a lot of the same experiences, but he never attributes this same realization to his understanding of religion.

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Of course a 50-year-old is better qualified to consider such questions than a 13-year-old. But a 13-year-old is sufficiently qualified to answer this question. And honestly, the level of debate from teenagers to adults doesn't typically evolve much. Some adults manage to envision a synthetic God, rather than the piecemeal God most people today accept. That is, a God that is savage as well as kind, and that represents the most horrible things as well as the most beautiful things. A God, in fact, that can be no other way. (I don't mean to suggest here a God that is neither good nor evil, nor that has dual aspects) With such a God the level of discourse can rise above the norm. But more often it's the same arguments around again, more refined but unchanged.

You yourself said that according to pure reason, atheism is the correct conclusion (major paraphrase, feel free to clarify if I'm misinterpreting). And, according to you, it's the "heart" that matters. So this reasoning about age isn't very valid - the mind and the heart will both become better-developed with age, but it's largely the relative emphasis, rather than the specific level of development, that determines one's position. I have other ideas on the heart/mind process of decision-making, but they're tangential.

And my parents have been wrong about plenty. One thing I do admire about them is their ability to admit when they're wrong. It's for that reason they're still growing - rather than clinging to the ideals they grew up with, they've revised them. And at any rate, it would be shameful if I, at their age, didn't know more than they do. Even if I were half as smart as my father, I should know twice as much as he did at my age. Given the new ease of communication, with the Internet etc, and the advances over the last 26 years in every field, I'd have to be downright lazy not to. Dad did very well given what he had available - but I have more knowledge at my fingertips. And if, as some people suggest, human understanding is really progressing at an exponential rate, then the thinkers being born today should know much more than I ever will by the time they die. Taking your "respect the parents" ideal to its logical conclusion, I should believe exactly what my ancestors believed 1000 years ago.

One interesting thing I'm noticing is that the trends here are the reverse of what I'd expect. Ordinarily the atheists I meet were raised outside of a religious context, and the Christians I meet were raised within a religious context. So why, on this forum, did the atheists grow up religious and vice versa? Maybe gamblers are more independent than most?

[AthenianStranger]

Sorry for not quoting, but you wrote a lot and I don't know what I am responding to specifically, except maybe this:

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Even if I were half as smart as my father, I should know twice as much as he did at my age. Given the new ease of communication, with the Internet etc, and the advances over the last 26 years in every field, I'd have to be downright lazy not to.

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It just seems like you have so much faith in the wealth of information to produce wisdom, or at least knowledge in individuals. Have you considered that most of the Internet is pronography and other degenerate things, or even wrong information, stupid blogs, personal pages, shopping etc. Perhaps we have more access to info., but maybe we don't know how to use it, or find it.

Second, you should consider that the scientific progress has worked in such a way that individuals know less than they used to; the knowledge is contained in the whole of the enterprise, while on the particular level it is highly fragmented, specialized, etc. If you pursued every scientific development just in a few fields, you would not have time for anything else, let alone the endeavor of innovative science of your own. I suggest you read Francis Bacon's Novum Organum. The time of Renaissance men, who were masters of most every field of knowledge is over, and the top thinkers know less and less; they are more specialized and consequently more ignorant of the whole body of knowledge.

Finally: you're a college freshman. Unless you took two years off to 'find yourself,' you're still basically under the influence of the adolescent narcissism I was talking about. You do write better than the average college freshman, and perhaps you do have a sharp mind. But there are kinds of understanding of which you just don't know, and about which I'm sure your ancestors of a millenium past would be able to school you.
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About the atheism 'conclusion,' I said that most people, when examining the facts, etc., would conclude that there is no God, and that this is a sensible conclusion. But the activity itself, of examining the existence of God in this way, is totally irrational. If God exists, He is the reason and basically the formal mode of our understanding. We cannot turn the content of that understanding back around and contain the mode, like a snake swallowing itself.

[FortunaMaximus]

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It just seems like you have so much faith in the wealth of information to produce wisdom, or at least knowledge in individuals. Have you considered that most of the Internet is pronography and other degenerate things, or even wrong information, stupid blogs, personal pages, shopping etc. Perhaps we have more access to info., but maybe we don't know how to use it, or find it.

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Good post. Should've stopped right there though.