The entire premise is ridiculous.

What definition for God should be used as a standard for acceptance or rejection?

The God of my deist avatar, Thomas Paine, would IMO be a good start, if only the religions of the world were to move in that direction. Deism rejects the concept of a personal god who answers prayers and interferes with nature's causes and effects by performing miracles. To the deist, the almighty created the universe and its laws, and then moved on to other more important matters, never to be seen or heard from.

How much better might the world be if everyone who wanted to believe in a deity were to adopt Deism and just moved on with their lives without prayers, miracles, worship, churches, dogma, clergy, divine reward / punishment, prophets and holy books!

I see lots of people talking about logic, reason, and verifiable facts, but nobody talking about wisdom. One of the very few traits that distinguish humans from other animals is our capacity for metaphor. When we abandon that... what are we?

Children gain the capacity for abstract thought usually by age 12. I’m slow. I was 14 before I could see that certain religious truth-claims just didn’t add up. It wasn’t hard for me to abandon a god that I found unbelievable by reason alone.

That didn’t solve all my problems though. I still had unanswered questions. Speaking of slow, it took me most of the rest of my life to figure out that the ancient writers of scripture weren’t talking about physical, external, objective reality. They were writing more than a thousand years before the scientific method, as we know it, would be invented, and objective worldviews would be popularized for the masses.

They were writing when people still experienced life intuitively and expressed their inner experiences in language that others of the time could understand - the language of allegory.

If reason is the standard by which we should proceed, what is reasonable about interpreting ancient mythology through an Enlightenment mindset which wouldn’t be invented for another sixteen centuries?

What finally laid the literal god to rest for me was reading about the philosophy and history of science in general, particularly as written by Carl Sagan.

What resurrected that fallen god, some fifty years later, as metaphorical truth about human psychology, was my reading about evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell, and my own personal struggles to make sense of life.

Thanks for asking. Welcome to AgnosticDot Com.

Not one experience but cumulative learning and education with a little common sense and logic.

We have no proof of Santa Claus. We also have no proof of any gods. Why does mankind continue to think that a god left different evidence for himself in the sacred writings of many different books - all written by man? This all makes no sense. If you point it out to a believer they act stupid as if it means nothing. Logic and evidence (or the lack of it) mean everything.

I was reared strictly Catholic and believed in the faith dogmatically, but I attended a Catholic college and learned a lot in my coursework about early Church history, how theological conflicts were resolved, and what went into the foundational Christian ethics. The man-made nature of the religion is what stuck me, first with the deontological ethics that I disagreed with and, later, with the political way certain Church dogmas had been decided. I found I couldn't believe that these were divinely inspired, and my faith in Catholicism and, by extension, Christianity eroded. I still held on to a belief in God for a while, and halfheartedly looked to other religions, but eventually realized after studying foundational philosophy that I didn't believe in God/gods, souls, or life after death. The lack of evidence led me to an agonistic mindset but, within a short time I embraced agnostic atheism, meaning I didn't believe but I couldn't prove it was impossible. All of that happened within a few short years, and rapidly deprogramming 20 years of childhood indoctrination was especially difficult and painful for a time. But I pulled through, and I'm more at ease now without trying to make sense of all of the fanciful metaphysics that came bundled with my upbringing.

The existence of god doesn't make sense... And religious writings are stories and myths made up by men...

what made one decide whether their is a Santa Clause or not ?

Education and the fact that the story makes no sense at all.

Welcome to the site, no one thing it's all bullshyt, use logic and reason.

It can be one profound experience or a series of small experiences over years that lead to one shaking off their indoctrination.

For me it was my university education. For the first time in my life every course I was taking did not infuse religion in to them. I was required to take 3 critical thinking courses which taught me that skill. Going to Catholic school all my life religion was thrown at me everywhere and we were never taught critical thinking skills. And then suddenly more than halfway through my studies I had an aha! Moment that born again Christians have. It was after a philosophy class of all courses (I mainly took sociology and criminology courses at that time) that I thought I don't know if there's a god. Nothing in life is 100% certain, so why should religion be any different. Suddenly I was an agnostic and felt this deep sense of contentment and relief as finally I had truly found myself.

No experience brought me to disbelief...I never believed in the first place because I was never indoctrinated as a child. I was encouraged by my parents to read, ask questions and to decide for myself if I believed god or not...in my case it was not.

I know why there is ....why there isn't any.
Not question or trying to change anybody's mind to old for that just looking for answers.

Had open heart surgery and a divorce from wife. Went thru some traumatic experiences that I was having difficulty dealing with. Prayed for 2 years in church with no results. Was told hypnosis would help. Did 1 session of hypnosis and did more good than 2 years of praying. So I decided to study it. Somewhere in my studies I had the Aha moment. Religion is nothing more than hypnosis and the preacher has programmed me to believe in god when in reality there is no proof.

Then I decided to do research and I watched Marshall Payn “Christian dilemmas” that pointed out all the contradictions in the Bible. It was eye opening to see all of them

The people. Pretty simple.

Randomness of pain and sorrow

Nothing is ever Protected, saved, or corrected, it is all fuck over!!!

Pray in one hand and shit in the other to see which fills up first!!!

It all a mindless wasteland anyway!!!

Only went to church from about 7 until l was 14. I just kind of drifted away from belief in my early 20s.

no special experience, not directly anyway. i didn't decide. i realized. not the same thing.

g

I have not had such an experience. But, I ask, If a God slapped the $#!¥ out of you, would you still say, "nope, there is no god. "

LOKI exists:
Every time you can't find your keys: LOKI.
Every time that thing jumps in front of your foot: LOKI.
Every time the coffee spills:: LOKI.

Correction is necessary, I think. First, maybe this is the part of me that is a determinist speaking (i.e., I reject libertarian free will and I'm not convinced that compatibilism is a viable compromise) but I don't actually think that I or really "decided" whether there is a god or not so much as realizing what I had been convinced of. And admittedly, I could be splitting hairs on a semantic issue here, as that process of having become convinced may arguably be termed a "decision". But somehow that feels wrong as there was never a point where I really actively made a decision. It was what I realized had already happened.

And in my case, it wasn't even a singular experience -- it was a fairly long drawn-out process starting with a recognition while sitting in church several different times in my mid twenties that some things that were being said had an air of absurdity, that the preacher was doing an awful lot of divine mind reading, that some things that were being asserted were things that couldn't possibly be known. That led to reading the denomination's literature on doctrine and why we purported to believe whatever it is we believed. Most Southern Baptists (and other Christians for that matter) do have a whole slew of doctrines that they are handed over time but without any systematic justification -- sure, one sermon or another might sort of address some bit of this one or that one, but you don't ever really go through all of it one by one and fully rationalize how they were derived. But I found that they do periodically teach such a class and there is a sort of mini-textbook that goes with it. Try reading that when you're already finding a bunch of things you're hearing to be problematic. The doctrines pretty much presuppose a certain lack of skepticism and certain core concepts to be taken as axiomatic, but what if those presuppositions aren't true? The doctrinal guide is going to look pretty ridiculous then. If you were sort of halfheartedly clinging to the laundry list but didn't really know why, and you're skeptically-minded and questioning already, this is a sure way to figure out that you're in the wrong place and your beliefs are not very well grounded.

That's how I moved into the category of "freelance believer" and went on a quest to see what else is out there, and eventually moving on to "is any of this true at all?" along with lots of reading (my bookshelf still has a ton of stuff, including some Josh McDowell and others), and it wasn't so much as one day hashing over it and deciding all at once as it was recognizing at some point that I don't think I actually believe ANY of it anymore, and what sort of label that implies for me. By then I was right at 28, so I guess that process from noticing how skeptical I was becoming during church to recognizing that I had somewhere along the way stopped believing all of it must have been a couple or several years. I also visited a bunch of different churches along the way -- including the most UNCOMFORTABLE of all, an Apostolic Pentecostal church at the invitation of a neighbor, which was a fully charismatic bunch complete with people running laps around the church in the middle of it, full-on glossalalia all over the place, and being dragged up to the front with like 10 or so men gathered around me putting hands on me waiting for ME to start speaking in tongues. There was no second visit.

But messing with the timeline here, I will have to go back to well BEFORE my mid twenties because it isn't like I didn't already have something in my brain wiring which was a bit incompatible with all of the religious beliefs. I had some number of episodes all through life where little questions occured to me that I would ask and receive scorn for, like "how do we know we're right and the others are wrong" and "how can we be so sure there really IS a god there and if there is, that it's ours and not the one the Hindus believe in" (nevermind my lack of understanding at 12 years old of polytheism), and questions about Adam and Eve's and incest, and questions about the age of the earth and where dinosaurs fit into the picture, etc. I was the disruptor in Sunday School, and I wasn't a secret atheist trying to create problems, I just asked what came to mind. Sunday School teachers just happen to be poorly trained for these things. I also should have recognized a problem because in all those years where I was supposed to be sensing God's presence at certain times, I always felt utterly alone, and I was never one who actually prayed because... well, I always felt like I was talking to myself. The feeling that there was another party to the supposed conversation just wasn't there.

And back to 1998, after I realized that I had come to no longer believe any of it, there was a short time where I shifted to a sort of anger phase where I was pissed off that I had wasted so much time in a religion that had no apparent validity and that I had been lied to for all of these years. I still regret the wasted time but I've moderated my view of having been lied to. I now see that I was told a lot of things that weren't true, but "lied to" is too harsh because those telling me these things really did believe them to be true. That differentiates between lying and being honestly mistaken, and I do think there were a whole lot of people along the way who were honestly mistaken and passing on those falsehoods to me and others without full knowledge that these things are not likely true.

That's basically my story.

Poverty, as a child.

Because we are indoctrinated to believe or not .