What is your highest level of formal education?
If you attended university, where did you go?
Do you think having a formal education played a role in your being a freethinker/atheist/agnostic?
Undergrad degree. I don't think it changed my views on faith in any way.
33 hours of liberal arts at Westminster in Fulton MO. My most vivid memory is dragging a warm half filled keg out of a cornfield at 5 am. Alone I went the wrong way and ended up 2 miles from my car. I remember telling my mother that I could quit college, make $5 and hour along with my wife and be rich. Yeah. She never let me live that down.
Studies theatre in college but did not graduate. My thinking on religion is a result of being very religous by choice as a teenager and experiencing hypocrisy. Form then I've grown and learned and where I stand now came in time. Seeing more hypocrisy. Believing in science. Watching the world. I believe in god but religions are made of people and they are used for human purposes. Power. Money. Etc.
Technically I am a High school drop out. I was essentially Atheist in Elementary school. It was my own self-directed studies that led me to my conclusions not the formal education by any stretch.
I was an atheist/agnostic pretty much as soon as I heard about the entire concept of gods, thinking right from the start that it all sounded a bit unlikely, a long time before I went to university. However, the fact that my university was the first secular university in England (and, in addition to being the first to admit students regardless of their religion or lack thereof, the first to admit female students) may have cemented my lack of religious belief.
I have a associate degree. Nothing special.
Went to uni to qualify as a social worker,
But I've always been an atheist. Even at primary school I could't accept the supernatural stories that didn't make sense. Who made god? If he was always there, what did he do in the eternity before earth? Why did he keep killing people?
My dad had always told me to ask questions and make up my own mind, so in some respects, yes, education made me an atheist.
Was in college it was not doing a lot for me, kept baffling the professors. I would ask such complex questions they would say, I will have back to you on that one. Found that I taught myself a lot more than what I had to learn in a text book or a lecture. Was agnostic at a very early age never believed the unbacked up teaching of a mysterious force that had no foundations in reality.
Autodidact who was a voracious reader of literature and philosophy with a keen interest in science. I had the good fortune to work with some of the most brilliant people in the world, one, a geneticist with a 11 articles published in Nature the other a game theoretician and philosopher. I was offered membership of MENSA many years ago but declined it.
Of course, being a freethinker, sometimes people were upset by some of the questions that I asked them. A dear friend who has a masters degree in psychoanalysis thinks that I have read more books that anyone she knows. Personally, I do not know, I never counted them. I excelled in elementary mathematics when I was five years old and I was moved up a class every two weeks until I was doing mathematics with those who were preparing to go to high school. 2^120+1 now find the first prime divisor in two steps in your head (no calculators), Ah! The answer is 257. Oh! I was married to a woman who held joint professorship in neurology and psychiatry. Apparently, she married me for my brains....LOL
Educated, but an Atheist since 11, so no, education did not play a part. Let's not forget that institutional education is itself an indoctrination and can stifle some forms of critical thinking.
As a lifelong Atheist since the day Walt Disney died I found Drake University full of religious liars and closet Atheists 1970-1981 then I left the so called liberal arts and pursued secular law study. ...my career has educational formalities but the so called doctors of divinity continue today dominating public and private collegiality. ...I am their mortal enemy debunking their very credentials
I graduated for the UHK - University of Hard Knocks. After HS I went into the Air Force served and served four years, one of which was in Viet Nam. Then it was off to work place to support my family. Now that I have retired, I am back in school and I will graduate this summer with an Associates Degree in Philosophy. Woopee!!!!
Received B,A, in Sociology from Franklin Pierce College(University in Rindge, NH
Studied for Masters in Special Education, Keene State College, Keene, NH.
As a Liberal Arts Major social theories, marriage and the family, anthropology and criminology helped reinforce my beliefs as a freethinker.