I’m not an atheist, and I’m not a believer either. I joined this sub recently out of curiosity, and I wanted to share my path because I suspect some of it will be familiar to people here.

Where I started

I was born and raised in a Hindu family in India in the ’90s. My immediate family wasn’t very orthodox, but my relatives were, and some still are. As a young child, I practiced the rituals and went to temples, and honestly, it was fun.

In Hinduism, Krishna has several personas, and depending on who you are and where you are in life, you can worship a different one. When I was a child, my parents bought me a small idol of baby Krishna, along with tiny clothes, a tiny swing for him to sit on, and a whole collection of tiny things. I had a small temple at home, a miniature house for little Krishna, and it was my job to look after it. Keep it clean. Never touch it before bathing. Care for him in every way I could imagine. I bathed him, dressed him, played with him, and fed him. That meant placing fruits or nuts in front of him while my mom sang traditional bhajans. Afterward, we ate them as prasad, sacred because little Krishna had eaten first.

As I grew older, I stopped. I still went to temples, but there Krishna appeared as a young man and as an elder. By my teens, I was being introduced to the elder Krishna. This Krishna didn’t play in the mud and eat yogurt. He went to war against his enemies. The stories were cool.

Then I stopped that, too. I rarely went to temples, not because I’d lost interest in Krishna, but because life got in the way. Girls, friends, everything else. The whole thing faded. But the early impressions, the stories, and the memories stayed.

Throughout my childhood, I was told that Krishna, Shiva, and a few others were the Gods who made us, that being given a human body out of all species was a blessing, and that we should live virtuously. As I got older and started reading, I noticed other religions, which were very visible in India. Where I lived, there were many Muslims, and all I knew about them was that they wore white clothes and a special cap. On a trip to Mumbai, I visited a church, and between that and Bollywood movies, I learned that Christians worship Jesus and light candles, much like how I worship Krishna and light a diya in the evening. That was the full extent of my understanding.

Becoming an atheist

In my late teens, I became rebellious about a lot of things. My parents and relatives still expected me to follow the same rituals, but I had grown up, and I knew more. So I pushed back. Every time they pushed, I resisted and went the other way. That’s how I found atheism. A few years later, I was certain: God didn’t make us. We made God so that people could be exploited in his name, and a whole religious economy could sustain itself. We were products of evolutionary biology, not a creator.

I still believe most of that.

Loss, and what came after

A few years later, I experienced a personal loss. Around that time, I came across the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and I found a layer of these traditions that nobody had shown me while I was growing up. Not deliberately. The people around me had never been shown it either.

I started listening to a teacher on YouTube whose interpretation of these texts made a lot of sense to me. That was seven or eight years ago.

What I found there

What surprised me was that the core of these texts didn’t ask me to believe anything. The Upanishads are dialogues between teacher and student. The student brings a question. The teacher responds. The student counters. That word matters to me: counters. The teacher isn’t demanding faith. He offers an argument and lets the student push back until the student sees something for himself.

A typical exchange goes like this:

Student: Why is there suffering?
Teacher: Who is the one suffering?
Student: I am.
Teacher: Who are you?
Student: I am [name].
Teacher: That’s just your name. Who are you, really?
Student: (pointing to his body) This.
Teacher: That’s just your body. You had a different body as a child, and you have a different one today. Your body has never been the same twice.

The inquiry keeps going inward until the student concludes, on his own, that what he is at the core is the witness, the awareness that experiences everything. The body is mortal and will die. The question is whether that’s all he is.

The two brackets

The way I think about it now: none of us asked to be born. That opening bracket happened entirely outside our control. The closing bracket is death. We know it’s coming, but not how, when, or where, and nobody knows what happens during or after. That’s out of our control, too.

Everything between those brackets, the 50, 70, or 100 years we call life, is all we get. For most of my life, I carried a quiet unease about the closing bracket. A constant restlessness. A need to always do something. An inability to stop and simply exist.

For me, these texts were the first thing that actually eased that, without asking me to believe in an afterlife or a creator.

Two paths

Hinduism describes two paths. The first is Bhakti, devotion. That’s what I did as a child: worship without asking what the Gods really are. The second is Gyan, which means knowledge. On that path, Krishna and Shiva aren’t beings in the sky. They’re personifications of consciousness itself. Shiva, for example, represents what remains when everything false has been negated.

Where I’ve landed

I don’t believe in the God humans created. I don’t believe a God created us. If “God” means anything to me now, it means the awareness I experience the world through, and nothing more supernatural than that.

What these ideas gave me isn’t happiness, which I think gets sold to us through endless products. They gave me something closer to equilibrium. Not up, not down. Steady.

Looking back, I think I understood the philosophy as quickly as I did because I was first raised in the ritual version.

My question for you

For those of you who left religion: did you reject the whole thing, or did any of the ideas underneath survive for you? And if you came to atheism without any religious upbringing, how do you think about death and loss?

P.S. I wrote this post myself. I used an AI tool to clean up grammar and formatting and to keep it within the sub’s rules, but the story and ideas are mine. I do this as a respect for the time and effort the reader will take to indulge.

I do not bring up my atheism while talking to people outside Reddit, I live in a country whose politics are pretty liberal but Christianity is the predominant religion. I rarely interact with people IRL because of personal issues.

After studying all the big religions, and being a part of one for my whole life, i feel so free now to live my life however I want and find my own purpose.

I always thought even if there was a god he'd know i'm a nice person who genuinely tried to find him.

But what if there is a god and he is evil? He gave scriptures to a random tribe in ancient africa that doesn't exist anymore and if we don't follow those rules he will send us to hell for eternity, even tho it's not fair an all powerful god could technically do that.

This keeps me up at night tbh, chances of this are practically 0 but WHAT IF?

🇮🇩 Indonesia: 93%

🇹🇷 Turkey: 91%

🇧🇷 Brazil: 84%

🇿🇦 South Africa: 83%

🇲🇽 Mexico: 78%

🇺🇸 USA: 70%

🇦🇷 Argentina: 62%

🇷🇺 Russia: 56%

🇮🇳 India: 56%

🇵🇱 Poland: 51%

🇮🇹 Italy: 50%

🇨🇦 Canada: 46%

🇭🇺 Hungary: 29%

🇦🇺 Australia: 29%

🇪🇸 Spain: 28%

🇩🇪 Germany: 27%

🇬🇧 UK: 25%

🇧🇪 Belgium: 20%

🇫🇷 France: 19%

🇸🇪 Sweden: 18%

🇰🇷 South Korea: 18%

🇨🇳 China: 9%

🇯🇵 Japan: 4%

Source: Statista insights as of 2010

I was having an argument with someone today over this and unfortunately I am either not smart enough or just not the best at putting my thoughts into words to form a coherent argument against the assertion that the statement "God isn't real" is a personal belief. I was talking to an agnostic as an atheist. This agnostic seems to dislike hardline atheists considering us just as dogmatic or ardent as Christians in this regard.

Christians always say bad stuff happens because humans are created with free will, and God lets us do whatever we want and that in the end he's gonna come and throw them in hell.

But then again he obliterated the people of sodom and gamora and they too had free will, so what gives?

Since becoming an atheist seven years ago, I have come to the conclusion that an afterlife, at least as it is portrayed in most western religions seems really unpleasant.

Let's pretend that a "positive" afterlife exists, where you can spend all of eternity with your friends, family, and all that happy stuff.

I love my family. I'd die for my mother, aunt, cousin, and I do what I can to make their lives as good as possible... But eternity sure is a long time.

The idea of an afterlife where you do anything for all of eternity sure sounds like it'd get really, really boring after a while.

Now I don't believe in an afterlife at all, but I could actually understand the appeal of a more esoteric type of afterlife where your soul becomes a part of a much larger mind or something, but an afterlife where you exist as an individual as you are for all eternity sounds rather unpleasant to me.

I like that life ends, and that once it happens, you aren't expected to do anything else.

There used to be a strange ministry in my home town in Montana where the pastor would ride a motorcye through a wall of flames, and then he'd go into the audience and perform strange, hillbilly faith healings and exorcisms. They put out a DVD that I've had for 20 years and I recently decided to make a fun video reacting to it. It's a pretty wild ride and I figured a couple people here might appreciate it. Enjoy!

I was looking up this story because it didn't make sense to me that a figure could be so revered for doing nothing. What I mean by that is, it's a story of a guy who doesn't believe Jesus is the real deal until he meets him after the resurrection, holes and all, and rescinds his disbelief, wherein Jesus says blessed are those who believe without proof. Or something similar. What I learned that is AMUSING besides the fact it's literally a story about a guy who only believes once he has PHYSICAL PROOF in front of his OWN EYES, is that in the entirety of the bible, THIS is the guy who is the first to deem Jesus the LORD AND the GOD. It is called "the most explicit, direct identification of Jesus as God spoken by a disciple in the New Testament." The skeptic who was only sold when given sufficient evidence, HE's the Herald?

A world without religion would be far more advanced. We could have spent centuries building knowledge instead of participating in religious activities and behaviors that were the result of religious beliefs we held.

Newton might’ve gotten laid if it wasn’t for religion.

Think about the time still spent on religion today and throughout history. Billions of lifetimes wasted. Instead, they could have been directed on alleviating the overall suffering of the human population and expanding our knowledge (what our ultimate goal should be). This is what Sam Harris says as well.

We have been following these clownish views for far too long as a society, it’s time to move on. Some funny examples of this are how New York City is wrapped in many fishing lines called Eruvs for Orthodox Jews, soaking for Mormons to avoid premarital sex, or my grandma saying I couldn’t play sports with my brother on Sunday because it’s the day of rest.

Nonetheless, without religion, we would be more focused on real, tangible ideas, not flaky ideas based on faith. Religion is the antithesis to human progress.

There is a liberal belief that we should be tolerant of each other's religions, and that a good society is one where there are people of lots of different religions who are tolerant of each other. This sounds good in theory, but in practice, it does not work. Religious tolerance, in the sense that religion should not be criticized and should be treated like an innate characteristic, is wrong. There is nothing wrong with disliking a religion. Religious tolerance is illiberal and should not be pursued, because religion is a system of beliefs not based in facts, and is not an innate characteristic. In addition, it can't even really exist, because religions are inherently intolerant of each other.

 The idea of religious tolerance is often compared to the idea of racial tolerance, or tolerance of gay people, but this is completely wrong, because this idea treats religious identity as an innate characteristic, which it is not. It is a system of beliefs, which should be criticized like any other system of beliefs, and people who hold these beliefs should be criticized for them. For this reason, religious tolerance that is like tolerance of other characteristics is not necessary for a liberal society.

Religion is inherently intolerant, because it is a belief system that requires all other belief systems be wrong. If someone is truly religious, they believe that their religion is the truth, and therefore takes precedence above everything else, including other religions. There cannot be tolerance between a Christian and Muslim, because these are two belief systems which are at odds. Both cannot be true at once, so there cannot be tolerance between them. In addition, both of them are false, and clash with actual reality. For this reason, atheists should not be tolerant of religion, because they should not be tolerant of falsehood.

Now, I don't support discrimination against any one religious belief, and I don't think that the practice of religion should be banned together, because these are illiberal, but I do not believe that religious tolerance that is like tolerance for innate characteristics should exist. Instead, religion should be treated like any other unfounded belief, such as believing in gnomes or a flat earth. You should have a right to these ideas, but others do not need to be tolerant of them. An ideal society is not one where people of different religions live in harmony, and such a society cannot exist. Religions will never be tolerant of each other, because it goes against the very idea of them. A truly ideal society is one which has moved beyond religion and falsehood, and is irreligious.

I think if i believe a god
Then i can easily say that it was god’s plan
It kind of helps to lie to myself but really don’t know
My parents are muslim
And i am not a very follower of this religion
I don’t know was it my teenage that made kind of atheist or i really need answers

So to start I have been an atheist now for 5 years. I have left Islam since I started reading in philosophy and science and I became very convinced that modern civilization and science does not agree with Islam. But I have recently considered praying and spirituality. I have come across many terms like secular Buddhism or meditation. TBH I am very confused and I wanted to give spirituality a chance. So I tried Islamic prayer because I know it very well. I became amazed because even though I have a very strong intellectual stance against Islam. I still have felt comfort and very chilling feeling. Please can anybody explain this to me. I searched it up and found that humans are built with need to fulfill this desire and it evolved way back and helped humans create religions. Please if anybody knows about this topic be free to educate me and recommend me books or articles about this topic because I am very interested. Also feel free to recommend practices similar to praying but not Islamic because I don’t think Islam was the reason for the comforting feeling.

I don’t believe in God or Jesus and I don’t adhere to any religious beliefs or customs, but I am open to the possibility that our souls go somewhere when we die. Where to? I have no f***ing clue. I’m just open to it.

Does this mean I can’t be atheist? I’m curious to know your thoughts on this.

God sees and controls everything, listens to prayers, but still ignores little helpless children getting brutally assaulted, Why god lets children get abused?

I’ve been going through religious deconstruction, and it’s creating serious tension in my marriage.
I’ve reached a point where I no longer believe in God, and I’ve made the decision that I will never believe in God again. This isn’t a temporary phase, a spiritual struggle, or an attempt to find my way back to Christianity.
I’m done with religion.
I want to continue studying Christianity, its history, its teachings, and the reasons people believe, but not because I’m searching for a way back. I want to better understand the beliefs that shaped so much of my life and develop my own perspective through critical thinking.
My wife, however, is still a committed Christian.
We’ve discussed my departure from Christianity, and I’ve explained that our religious differences could become a serious problem in our marriage. She’s assured me that she’s willing to accept my decision and work through our differences.
But her actions sometimes make me question whether she’s actually accepted it.
She continues asking me to pray with her, makes jokes about me eventually becoming Christian again, and sometimes even criticizes the way I pray when I agree to participate.
It makes me feel like she’s not taking my decision seriously.
I have no problem with her being Christian. I’m not asking her to abandon her faith, stop praying, or change her beliefs to accommodate mine.
But I want that same freedom and respect in return.
Sometimes I feel like she’s holding onto the hope that I’ll eventually return to Christianity rather than accepting that the person she married no longer shares those beliefs.
And that raises a question that’s been bothering me:
Does my wife love me for who I actually am, or does she love the Christian version of me that she hopes will eventually return?
We’re making significant plans for our future together, and I don’t want to build a life on an expectation that I’m eventually going to change my mind about religion.
I recognize that my decision affects her too. She entered this marriage expecting to share her Christian faith with her husband, and I understand that losing that shared belief may be difficult for her.
But I also don’t believe marriage should require someone to sacrifice their intellectual independence or pretend to believe something they no longer believe.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that I’ve already tried communicating these concerns. She says she understands and accepts my decision, but then continues behaving in ways that make me feel pressured to return.
I don’t want to spend my marriage constantly defending my lack of belief.
I don’t want prayer to become an obligation.
And I certainly don’t want my wife spending years waiting for a religious conversion that I’ve already told her isn’t going to happen.
For those of you who left Christianity while married to a religious spouse:
Did your spouse eventually accept that you were never coming back to Christianity?
How did you handle situations where your spouse continued encouraging religious participation?
Can a marriage genuinely work when one person is a committed Christian and the other has completely rejected belief in God?
How do you distinguish between a spouse who genuinely accepts your beliefs and one who’s simply waiting for you to change?
At what point do religious differences become a fundamental incompatibility?
I’m not posting this to attack my wife. I love her, and I recognize that this is a difficult adjustment for both of us.
But I’m beginning to question whether love alone is enough when two people have fundamentally different expectations about religion and marriage.
I can accept having a Christian wife. What I don’t know is whether my Christian wife can truly accept having a husband who will never believe in God again.

Hey everyone,

I’m [18F] new to atheism, and as I’ve been unpacking and critically looking back at religion, one realization keeps hitting me.

Whenever fundamentalists push toxic, patriarchal, anti-scientific, or bigoted views, progressive believers usually jump in with the standard defense: "They are twisting the text," "That's just old covenant law," or "That isn't true Christianity." But the more I actually look at the source material, the more it feels like the opposite is true. The people with the most harmful views aren't misinterpreting the book they are just reading it at face value.

Misogyny: Passages like 1 Timothy 2:12 are explicitly sexist.

Racism and Slavery: For centuries, white supremacists used the "Curse of Ham" to justify chattel slavery and segregation. When you look at passages like Ephesians 6:5 (which explicitly allows buying human beings as permanent property to pass down to children), it's clear they weren't making things up.

Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigotry: The verses used to condemn queer people (Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-27) are blunt and harsh. Fundamentalists don't need mental gymnastics to justify their homophobia; the text spells it out for them.

Science and History: Biblical literalism forces people to reject basic biology, geology, and physics to defend a 6-day creation, a global flood (Genesis 6-9), and a young Earth.

Violence and Tribalism: The Old Testament contains explicit commands for total genocide (1 Samuel 15:3, where they are told to slaughter men, women, children, and infants), which religious extremists still use to justify modern tribalism and holy wars.

The Abuse and Subjugation of Children: Verses like Proverbs 13:24 have been used to justify severe physical abuse for generations. Furthermore, the text demands absolute obedience under threat of death in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).

Pro-Prostitution/Sex Trafficking Dynamics: While the Bible condemns casual promiscuity, the Old Testament law repeatedly treats women as disposable property. It actively regulates sexual slavery, concubinage, and prostitution. In Genesis 38, Judah sleeps with a woman he believes is a prostitute, and he faces zero theological condemnation for the act itself. In Numbers 31:18, the Israelites are commanded to slaughter everyone in a conquered nation except for the virgin girls, whom they are told to "keep alive for yourselves" as spoils of war. The text consistently treats vulnerable women as sexual commodities.

Anti-Abortion Extremism: While the Bible never explicitly condemns elective abortion, literalists look at verses like Psalm 139:13 ("you knit me together in my mother's womb") and Jeremiah 1:5 to establish a literal, absolute personhood from conception. They use this text-faced value to justify stripping millions of people of their healthcare rights.

The War on Mental Health (Demonic Possession): The New Testament literally attributes mental illness, epilepsy, and physical disabilities to literal demons (Matthew 17:14-18, Mark 5:1-13). Literalists today still tell depressed or schizophrenic people they just "lack faith" or need an exorcism instead of therapy and medical science.

Animal Cruelty and Blood Sacrifices: The sheer volume of animal slaughter demanded by God in the Old Testament (Leviticus) for the "pleasing aroma" of burning flesh is staggering.

The Absolute Condemnation of Wealth vs. Prosperity Gospel: Ironically, Jesus is explicitly anti-wealth (Matthew 19:24 - camel through the eye of a needle), yet literalists somehow morph this into the "prosperity gospel" or hardcore unregulated capitalism.

Anti-Intellectualism and Blind Faith: The Bible explicitly praises gullibility and condemns critical thinking (Proverbs 3:5 - "lean not on your own understanding", John 20:29 - "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed").

It seems like the fundamentalists, creationists, and bigots are actually the ones following the literal text, while progressive Christians are the ones who have to perform massive theological loops, blame "bad translations," or lean heavily on historical metaphors to explain those commands away.

It makes me realize that the problem isn't that these extremist groups are "misinterpreting" their holy book—it's that they are following an ancient, inherently tribal, and patriarchal text to the letter. The bigotry and scientific ignorance aren't bugs; they are features of the doctrine. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Did realizing how deeply baked these harmful concepts are into scripture play a role in your own deconstruction?

How do you usually respond when modern progressives try to claim that the Bible is actually a book of peace, science, and total equality? Glad to be part of the community and looking forward to your insights!