Study: Atheists are Made By Their Parents

Exactly right. This video is EXACTLY right -

I believe humans have a hard wired susceptibility to accept folk lore explanations and mysticism. That's just a base line though. It makes society building easier than imperical evidence does. A strong cohesive tribe tends to ensure the survival of its genes. It's a factor. I very much disagree with 'nuture' arguments that treat new human babies as empty vessels. We are extremely biased even at birth.

Santa for me. I was a very young Atheist - my parents are Christian. My mom's Grandpa was a priest, and her parents were very religious. My dad believes but is not really a good Christian.

Santa the jolly fat bearded man, secretly watching and judging you all the time, and if your good he gives you gifts. Same day I realized he was not real I also realized:

God is the same guy - A different jolly fat bearded man, watching and judging you that give you gifts after your dead.

Santa is testable since he needs to give you gifts once a year - God is untestable because he gives you gifts after your dead.

Felt deeply ashamed of my parents for still believing in God (adult Santa) - and that I could never trust them for what they say, and that I am on my own in this world.

Years later as an adult my mom confronted me saying she thinks she knows I don't believe, but why - don't I want to see my grandparents again one day. I told her I think about them all the time, and their love and care helped make me who I am - I don't need to see them again one day.

When I'm asked, "Why am I an atheist?" I reply with, "I don't know which religion to choose." This gets confused looks roughly 90% of the time.

I’m an Atheist because I woke up from the religious Christian cult!

Monkey and the tiger is also called the donkey and the rider right? Where the rider is our subconscious and we are the donkey going where ever the carrot is, and when we ask ourselves "why did i move forward? Oh because i wanted the carrot" in reality we do things then post hoc rationalize and our brain reverses it in our memories. Our brain blocks out quite a bit. Your nose is right in front of your eyes. But you dont see them unless you think about it.

Atheists are no more better than religious people. Just like good politics does not mean good person. Ive met many religious people who were much kinder to me than atheists. However the reason that religious people are kind is less noble than if people who do not think theyre being constantly judged. Whereas atheists just do it for purely social or for their principals backed up by no judgemental deity. As much as the Pope has gotten based lately. (literally calling for marxism to mix with christianity to make a moral system for the world to try and live by. It had my mom googling marxism lmfao)

Next episode: Why are the majority of atheist men ? Why are there different various rates of atheism in different ethnic communities. ?

My belief, let everyone believe what they may - as long as they don't do harm or try to push it on to others 💯

As a Christian of about 50 years (70 yo now) I want to say that you are one of the most courageous and fair atheists that I have heard. Since that courage and fairness is directed to an audience who doesn’t know you and might feel threatened by a highly rational analysis, I congratulate you on your love for others. In the 20 years before I followed Jesus, I had come to an uneasy conclusion that most people in my religious circle (Presbyterians) felt good when they followed Jesus, especially if it didn’t interfere with their lives. So food drives and serving in soup kitchens were good, as was contributing to missions. Personally, when I was young, I needed someone bigger and wiser than myself, because I could see splits in my parents’ relationship. I didn’t see love as much as I saw common purpose in raising us. It went far enough that my older brother and I talked about who would go with whom if/when they split up. I had heard that God is love, so I figured that He could fix the love between mom and dad. And I prayed for that every night after an Our Father (the only prayer that I knew). When things seemed to get worse, I prayed it twice a night. When nothing happened, I changed my prayer to just that they would be happy, healthy, and safe. And I eventually stopped praying, since He was supposed to be an “almighty” and loving God.

This ended up with a strange reinforcement when I was 16. One Saturday night I had this overwhelming sense that I had missed something at church, so I asked my mom to make sure that I was up in time for church, which was almost unnecessary as I woke up the same time every morning. But as it turned out I did oversleep by 2 hours, which didn’t matter since when my mom got up she found out that the church had been destroyed by fire in the night. So I began to entertain the thought that I was displeasing to God somehow which I didn’t think about again until much later.

So I went to college and comparative religions / psychology had similar wonderful effects, I was free to be real about not having a clue as to where I was. The classes were popular, but I had a slight charlatan feel to them. What felt good wasn’t atheism or rationalism, but the freedom to explore and not be judged. I believed that the faculty members did try, but couldn’t escape their own belief/brain states. And I didn’t see them changing the world with love. So, I felt a certain level of helplessness.

But I loved to play badminton, and in my stem classes was a son of Christian missionaries to Pakistan. He talked about Jesus talking to him. He said that most Christians only dip their toe in the water of believing Jesus and never interact with Him enough to really trust Him. Ray certainly lived a different life. He was kind, respectful, loving, and loving enough to ask people if they wanted to talk to Jesus, assuring them that Jesus cared, loved them, and wanted to talk to them. People’s reactions were generally to shame him, make fun of him, or threaten him. But he lovingly, and respectfully continued being kind, in word and deeds. I had never met someone with such courage, conviction, and love. But he also made me really uncomfortable, so I joined in mocking him. Still, he was the suite mate of my debating partner, in some of my classes, and always up for badminton so I saw him a lot. He asked me that if I died that night, if I knew where I would spend eternity. I rejected him and his beliefs until we graduated.

Shortly after arriving at graduate school, I was in a situation where I thought that I was going to die that night. I was alone, and had OD’ed. I knew was sin was, and my life was a mess. But I knees that Jesus died for sin and forgave sin. So I offered Him my life, and He actually came to me and cleared the drugs from my system.

The next day, two things happened. I had an insatiable desire to read the bible (so I went out and bought one) and as I read it, I immediately started looking for loopholes about Jesus being my Lord as well as my savior. It took 7 years to get out of that, and surrender came when the father of a girl that I was interested in at church publicly admitted to spending years trying to avoid Jesus’ lordship, and how much better it was when he stopped struggling and surrendered. So I followed his path, but part of his path was listening to and talking to Jesus.

Then a woman came to our church to talk about praying for healing for each other. Delores had quite a life too. She had a terminal degenerative disease, with pain so bad that they eventually surgically severed her spinal cord. She also had a young teenaged son, who she didn’t want to leave. She had the disease for over 10 years and things were just getting worse. She had made her own funeral arrangements. And then a friend took her to a service led by a woman who listened to God, and prayed and spoke with Him for hours a day. And God healed her. Eventually, the people from her church, who had prayed for her for years, asked her to leave. They couldn’t assimilate that God intervened supernaturally in her life. (What did it mean that God answered that prayer and not their other prayers - and what was prayer anyway?)

God sent her out to teach that it takes no special qualifications to talk to Him. Jesus opened the way, and says that His sheep, hear His voice.

I dabbled in listening for quite a few years, until He initiated talking about the church burning incident. I had been living from a secret motive of feeling that I had to do something special for Him to be pleased with me, because one of the awful things that I had done was especially awful to have kept me from His church/ presence all those years ago. It was about me, but not especially about me. I had just received grace to believe then, and God has opposition on this earth, and sometimes uses the opposition itself to forge even stronger bonds, which is what He did with me.

Then I began the long arduous task of finding Christians who related to Jesus through heart and head and listened to Him like little children, unashamed of their own frequent ignorance, unashamed of the amount of practice it takes to finally get something . It is a true relationship. It doesn’t take seminary training, or intellect. Children and people with challenges are welcome. Because it is about the capabilities of His heart, and His design in us to receive.

I remember asking my dad one day: "Who's god?" And he told me: "There is no god". He's yet to be proven wrong. I'm a Buddhist-Taoist these days, so whilst I do allow a possibility of many many different gods (just one sounds pretty silly to me), I don't believe they contribute meaningfully to our existence, what with being preoccupied with their own godlike hobbies in their own godly realms, so I don't give them any mind.

Hot take: Incest is not inherently morally bad, only often found in tandem with different immoral things (i.e. abuse, imbalanced power dynamics in relationships, etc.)

Atheists believe in some thing and that is a problem. Just damaged from the system.

My parents were Christians (American Baptist) but were totally supportive of me when I “came out” as an atheist at age 16. They were wonderful people; I was lucky that (and even their church which was quite liberal) they created an environment where I could reach my own conclusions. And this was in the ‘70s!

You are delusional if you think Jesus would ask you to make yourself sick. Vaccines are not inherently good for health, they are a troll-based medical science way of 'healing people', just like blood transfusions. And you know what the bible strictly forbids? Blood transfusions. For context, I have no problem with wearing masks out of concern for health. Just because people agree on one thing doesn't mean they'll agree on things that are considered to be similar.

I was faithful as could be growing up, and my parents "walked the walk". While I have logical reasons for being Atheist, I will absolutely admit that there are vastly more powerful emotional reasons behind the logic.

The “monkey on the back of a tiger” analogy irritates the hell out of me. It’s not wrong, but leads to bad arguments because it oversimplifies. In your Covid vaccine example, the anti-vaxxers were, in fact, swayed by argument. On Fox News. They didn’t have a knee-jerk emotional response before that. Afterward, they reject reason, but only because they’ve been solidly indoctrinated first.

I was raised atheist, BUT my mother fed me a load of malarkey about astrology. I swallowed it because it made me feel special, and felt offended when challenged. At some point in my teenage years I figured out it was BS.

Astrology doesn’t have the moral baggage that comes with religion, so hypocrisy is a non-issue. It’s thus easier for me to point to this and say “this is a change in beliefs I made through intellect.”

What about "When are atheists?"

The countries example is not the best counterpoint. The borders came after the religions. The Bangladesh-India example is particularly bad since Bangladesh was once part of India, then Pakistan. The borders didn't determine the religions, it was the other way around. Social contagion may be a perfectly valid cause for religious adherance but causation is factually backward from what was presented here. Also this sort of map deliberately flattens the real geography. This case could be made with a map, maybe even this map, but not in this way.

Why I am an atheist...

I was an active churchgoer for more than half my life. The church I went to emphasized "feeling the spirit" and blessings predicated on obedience. I pretended like I experienced these things - but in the back of my mind, I knew it was a lie. I never once "felt the spirit" nor could I point to some outcome and say it was a "blessing." On top of that, I knew that who I was deep down was not acceptable by church standards. So I quit and embraced the fact that there was never any evidence of God in my life.

And you know what...? My life only got better when I embraced Atheism! The 10% drain on my finances was gone. The religious guilt was gone. The pressure to conform was gone. I started making more money than I ever dreamed I could make. If "blessings" are really a thing, then I'd say I was way more blessed after I stopped trying to believe in God. To me, this was evidence that God never existed in the first place.

Of course, there's that nagging worry that just being who I was and not being accepted by the church is why I moved towards Atheism. But even if that is true, if heaven can't accept me as I am - the way I was born into this world - then I don't want to go there. Fuck God if he can't accept who he made me!

(I can say that because God doesn't actually exist to take offense, btw.)

Even as a kid I didn't like the way our religion had different rules for girls and boys. But when the stories about the church covering up child sexual abuse came out I was totally done with it. So yeah, hypocrisy contributed.

All atheists I've known are ex christian, myself included
Most of my religious friends are of the same religion as their family but a great amount of them maybe a third, grew up in atheist households

The bit at the beginning (that emotion precedes reason) is frankly why I think a lot of political debates are pointless. Two people trying to use their post hoc justifications for their gut responses to things to convince the other: they're not even the reasons they believe things *themselves*, so why should they have any effect on the other person? And then they get angrier and angrier that it's not working. It's all rather absurd when you think about it.

It is not intuitive to look for sources in a video’s transcript_. “Transcript” implies to me a textual representation of exactly what is said in the video. A viewer looking for sources (studies, articles, etc. mentioned) is explicitly looking for something that’s _not said in the video, so they wouldn’t be looking at something labeled “transcript”.

As I grew aware of how detached from reality my uber religious father was, my connection to the religion withered. I remember from my childhood his library having a book about the Illuminati.
When he started on about the holocaust not being real I realised how deranged he is. I didn't turn out any better, mind, but at least I took my shots and gave up that human hating fundamentalist YEC bullshit.

Many of my friends seem to have been atheists throughout my life.

I grew up in a Mexican-American Catholic family, and I really think Catholicism for us is more cultural than religious, if that makes sense. Like, my parents and family believe in a God, but they don’t go to church for anything other than weddings, funerals, and baptisms; and while they don’t agree with my atheism, they don’t do much to push back on me for it as long as I’m participating in said weddings, funerals, and baptisms as part of the family. As for how I wound up the only atheist in my family, I only remember as a kid realizing I didn’t really believe in God like my family did and then learning there was a word for it.

"A fucked up pile of electric meat that cannot be trusted" is the most accurate description of the human brain I've ever heard.

Why people won’t get vaccinated …her electric meat thinking comments have not aged well with her superior rationale.

This is just sad. The thing about beliefs is you can’t make a conscious decision what you believe. You just do or don’t there is no try. So no one but your mind and you are going to have control over that fact. I came from a very very very very very religious family. So religious every third son from each family joined the clergy out of duty. I being a third child was sent to seminary like I should have been due to family tradition. And within 2 years of actually studying the religion cover to cover and the history of the church and all the rituals and teachings I became an atheist. At 14 year old after many many years trying I left. I told my parents I didn’t believe and I wasn’t going back. And after 2 years of countless fighting and crying from cousins aunts and uncles about my duty I still said no. I was and still am the only third son not in the clergy. I since have studied hundreds of religions and countless different cultures and historical texts and traditions. And all of them read the same they are all man made and all are set up to give great power to a select few.

Didn't happen to most atheists

Unless your parents are complete fundamentalists, you will always find hypocrisy in them. That's pure confirmation bias

Are you the that woman from the big bang theory? The one dating sheldon?

Good presentation! So as we are merely a product of our experiences, we should not be calling each other stupid?

I was always skeptical about religion and God. I did realize that everytime I was in a spot I talked to God but everything else I reasoned away. The Bible was written to keep people under control is one example. I eventually became a Christian at 40 years bur it wasn't entirely faith. I read the words in the Bible that were attributed to Christ. That was what git me onboard. Those were good words to live by.
I don't think they live by those words these days.

I grew up in a fairly liberal, progressive catholic environment. My parents were both religious when I was very young, and participated in insane amounts of community outreach, volunteer work, and fiscal support for church-based programs that helped the community (as well as direct tithes) despite being financially insecure. We were food insecure, and got by in large part by reciprocal outreach from a small number of more wealthy and generous members of the community. By all measures of credible displays of faith, my family walked the walk.

Then my father was diagnosed with a deteriorating brain tissue disease that was affecting his motor control, and had something of a crisis of faith. He never openly disavowed his faith, but it was clear by his actions that he was no longer religious. I was about seven when this really started to become apparent, so I was quite young. At first this didn't really affect my faith very much. I continued with CCD (sunday school for catholics), and was in fact more open to faith in general, until about ten or eleven. I'm not sure what it was specifically, but I saw a pretty clear disconnect between the activism my parents were doing, and the lack of activism most of the church body was doing. I saw that my father stopped participating in the church-based outreach, but attempted to do his own interpersonally, and I started to realize that faith was not a factor in this behavior. By thirteen I decided that I was not going to participate in church anymore, which was a big struggle for my mother to accept. At first our relationship was punitive- she would punish me for my blatant disregard for the church (I one time walked home after being dropped off at CCD, and she took away my videogame consoles, that sort of thing), and I would try and feebly find ways to punish her back (Openly mock the church's record and show how political of an institution it is) that seemed appropriate when the opportunity arose. By 14 she stopped trying, and I was ridiculed by my peers for 'not accepting free money' when I decided to not get confirmed, and only after people stopped being aggressive against my decision to leave the church did I start to openly call myself an atheist, though I never told my grandparents before they passed.

So I wonder, would I be classified as leaving the church for emotional gut reasons? Or analytical ones?

Interesting that you start by asking the question of whether a religion is “true” rather than whether it's “helpful”. I don't ask whether other social institutions are “true”, indeed, I'm not even sure what that means. Why is this one different?

For myself, I'm inclined to believe that most positions on this point are rationally unsupportable. The idea that if there is a God they would therefore “exist” (in the sense that physicists use that word) betrays at best ignorance about the definitions of the terms or the way logic works. And … both my parents were priests. Thoroughly sincere ones. With academic qualifications from solid universities.

But grownups arguing about which of them has the better subjective experience or the more empirical metaphysics? Absurd. Let's just be nice to each other, because it's nice. Who you favour as your teacher of niceness, well, do be careful, but the choice is ultimately yours.

To paraphrase, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without explanation. Atheists should not be on the back foot to explain our stance, including blaming (or crediting) our parents.

I just completely bounced off of the concept of original sin. I didn’t see the point of the holy trinity either. I think the universe is a pretty fantastic place without needing a bunch of rigmarole surrounding it.

My parents, huge extended family, "good" clergy, all enveloping and hoping for me ( or my brothers) to become the next Pope. But through all the love and charity shone the sheer barking madness of the ideas.

I used to think Atheist's were born out of immaculate conception.

my parents didn't make me an atheist I became one on my own

I went to church until I was in 4th grade when my parents stopped forcing me to go and I never went back since then. After that I was never religious but if you'd asked me if I was a christian I would have definitely said yes but I wouldnt really have a reason why. Religioin was just mostly a non factor in my life. It wasn't until I was around 25 or so that i was like "oh no, wait why am I lying to myself. I definitely don't believe in this." It definitely felt like I came to that conclusion because of the hypocrisy I saw from many EXTREMELY devout christians in my home town. The most hateful, homophobic, racist people I knew were all there at church every week and claimed to love jesus. Seeing them post on social media and then thinking back on my interactions with them from highschool and such was basically the catalyst for making me question things more.

Personally, all organized religions are just cults on a money grab, imho!

For me it wasn't really my parents. My household was more of a "live and let live" kind of household. For me it was the general inconsistency of it all. An omnipotent god that simultaneously loves all people but committed planetocide and still condemns some of them to eternal torture by a pure evil being. One that has the power to end all suffering in the world, yet chooses not to. Then 9/11 happened and everyone started praying as if it would bring those people back, as if their god of choice didn't just "let it happen". First grade me came to the conclusion that this God they were talking about had to be either malevolent or simply could not exist as we were being told. The creepy old men running churches and religion classes didn't help really either.

But look at the trees! I love how people think the universe is fine-tuned while living on a hostile planet, where every solution we come up with to survive creates a new problem to solve.

It's a false dichotomy. Parental hypocrisy can trigger rational evaluation. Both are perfectly compatible. People really need to stop forcing monocausal explanation on everything.

There are times that I find it astounding how people can fool themselves. One example is a friend of mine that claimed I could not give an example of Donald Trump lying. I said that Trump misspoke and included Alabama as part of the huricane prediction, but when challenged to that, Trump showed a computer generated prediction map with white lines showing the predicted path, and an obviously drawn in line with black sharply including Alabama. I said, “Here, Trump literally drew this line in to make his claim appear true, but it is obviously bullshit”. He said, “where? I do not see anything wrong”. I thought, how is this level of self deception even possible?

The thing about "believable displays of faith" says a lot.

First of all that we live in a world where the rarity/non-existence of the supernatural is more apparent than ever. Health used to extremely interlaced with faith, now we know better. As such, people are less compelled to give the Almighty(/ies) their due.

Secondly, call me pedantic (but don't, I'm very sensitive) but not wanting to let go off a strong religious community just because there's a deity at the helm of that mutual aid (and the fulfillment that comes with it) kinda shrinks the importance of that deity and makes it more of a means to an end.