Did you ever believe in God?

Red Nissan

I was an extremely witless child, was afraid of my own shadow and believed EVERYTHING. I still suffer psychologically today.

As a young child I was absolutely terrified as they crucified Christ and at three o'clock on the dot of his death, the dark clouds came over ~ theatrical at it's best but, real.

I was so freaked out, like I was almost a babbling idiot, somethings might not have changed, but however.

That was my fist ponder, about seven I was I'd say, back in the old days at the turn of a new decade called the sixties, I pondered, if we love Jesus so much why do we kill him every year?

So I pondered a lot after that and before I made my Confirmation, I was already a non believer and well on the road to becoming and atheist.

SpaceTime

I'm sure my teachers thought I was really annoying. I remember trying to get a primary teacher to explain infinity with endless probing questions.

I remember asking her what was before the Big Bang too and how the matter got squeezed up in the first place.

She told me to do a degree in physics and stop annoying her!

(I'd add she also brought me in books and stuff on the topic and let me go browse Encarta...lol)

Frank Bullitt

As a boy I did. Went to a C.B.S and we had a principal who would take what seemed like extra attention to the religion section of class.

As I got older and could see how useless and fake Catholicism is, I began to refer to myself as Atheist.

Oddly enough, I get more raised eyebrows here in Canada at it than I did at home in Dublin.

forgotten password

oh god

SpaceTime

Gintonious wrote: »

As a boy I did. Went to a C.B.S and we had a principal who would take what seemed like extra attention to the religion section of class.

As I got older and could see how useless and fake Catholicism is, I began to refer to myself as Atheist.

Oddly enough, I get more raised eyebrows here in Canada at it than I did at home in Dublin.

I'd say it would very much depend on where in Canada though.

I found some USAmericans quite horrified when I said I wasn't religious though and it seemed to be taken as quite a negative thing by them. Hard to generalise though as it's a huge and diverse country. There is definitely a more fundamentalist and vocal kind of religiosity there though that you'd rarely encounter in Ireland or most of Europe these days.

DazMarz

I was a proper Holy Joe growing up. Largely due to the influence of the family. My nana (mother's mother) was the biggest influence, methinks. She was a great woman. Absolutely brilliant. Strong and convicted. Made the best damn soda bread ever, too. She was one of the people I would term "properly Christian"; a strong believer in all things holy, yet at the same time was never cruel or malicious towards others for differing beliefs or things that allegedly went against religion. She had the whole "God loves everyone, regardless" thing down to a tee. She was a deeply moral and kind woman, but I would wager anything that even without a deep religious belief, she would have been the same.

When my grandfather died, I was about 8 or so. I used to go into my nana's every weekend to keep her company and stayed with her over the weekend. From Friday afternoons after school, up to Sunday evening, I stayed up in her house in Bray. Every Saturday evening, we'd go to mass and I actually enjoyed it a bit; meeting all of her similar sweet-old-lady friends, meeting other kids, etc. It seemed like a big social meeting more than anything. 40-odd minutes later, it was back home for tea and to watch the Big Big Movie on RTE. Simpler times...

I was instilled with a deep sense of reverence, respect and appreciation for the Church and religion and god. And I did believe... for a while.

I think it all started when I hit around age 12/13 or so. That's when I started questioning things. I had been told sometimes that the reason I had a great brain (I was a precocious, intelligent child and I read a lot and so on) was because of god. Up until then, I believed that god smiled down on me and made me a smart kid. But then, I reasoned, was it not because I read a lot and was constantly expanding my knowledge? Just maybe...

It was also around this time that it all started coming out about priests molesting kids and the Church covering it all up. That dented my faith... severely. And then getting into trouble in religion class in secondary school for daring to bring up such a subject. I never used to get into trouble in school, but I was incredibly bitter and got a proper stroppy teenager-y "Fúck you!" attitude about the whole thing when I was severely reprimanded for daring to bring up the topic of clerical sexual abuse in a religion class. I felt like screaming Basil Fawlty's line, "This is exactly how Nazi Germany started!!!" over it.

From then on, it was just a descent into becoming a godless heathen. My trips to mass became less and less frequent (becoming the traditional Irish catholic way of: Christmas, Easter, funerals, weddings, christenings). Then it devolved to the current state; avoiding church like the plague apart from funerals, weddings and christenings.

Another thing that stuck in my mind a lot was from my primary school days; it was a form of slight, subtle discrimination. I only see that now, but back then I was slightly more innocent and didn't realise it. The school I went to was a Catholic school and I'd assume that 99.99999% of the pupils there were Catholic. In the school, one of my closest friends growing up was from a Protestant family. We were like brothers; inseparable for the most part (it actually hurts me when I think how quickly and dramatically we drifted after primary school...). For religion classes in school, he was sent from the classroom. When we were getting ready for our First Communion and Confirmation, he was also sent from the classroom. I didn't fully understand why back then... maybe his parents had requested it. But at the time I thought it was very harsh and unfair. Still do to this day. Only a minor thing, but I found it a bit odd that if god loved us all so much... why did my best friend have to leave the class while we talked about him and stuff?

By the time I was about 16, there were tenuous links to believing in god and religion and all that, but they were hanging by the thinnest of threads. I think it was watching a documentary about Magdelene laundries and the abuse that went on there was the final straw. I finally said to myself that if there was an all powerful god up there, he would have done something to stop this shít. He didn't. So he's either a useless and semi-sadistic thing, sitting up on his cloud, looking down and relishing the suffering and pain... or he simply is not there at all.

By the time I started university, it was totally gone and I became a full blown atheist, openly. I was accosted while walking through the campus one day by a religious group. Totally unprovoked; I was walking along, Megadeth blaring in my ears, when a guy leaped at me. The pamphlet was wielded like an assassin's blade. He began a spiel about it all. I fired back, "Hold on, there's no poker or heavy metal in heaven... it's not for me!"

So yeah... that is me... sorry it's so long...

Lithium93_

Believed in ''GOD'' up until around the age of 14 or 15, then all of a sudden stopped going to Church in either 2009/2010, (seriously sat in the seats listening to the priest babble on about an invisible being and how his son died for our sins for 30 minutes every Saturday,biggest waste of time)..... Safe to say after 2010 i just gave up altogether, and I've been a heathen since then






(Only time I'll ever set foot in a church is for Christmas Day mass and anniversary's)

Duggy747

Came from a normal Catholic family but I never did believe in a God, it just never clicked with me. I had to do things like pray in primary school or before bed along with the sister because I thought it was something you were supposed to do, I never actually believed prayer did anything or that there was someone there to listen to them.

When it came to Mass I absolutely detested the entire concept of kneeling and chanting prayers I had no idea how to say. The priests' garbs, all the crosses, paintings, and statues used to spook me out too.

I used to get clipped by aul wans for not blessing myself or for not saying a prayer along with everyone else. My work-around was to mime "Mars Bar" because that's what I thought people's lips looked like when they murmured during Mass :pac: I didn't have interest in Mass not because I thought it was cool but because I really had no interest in it or that someone was up in the sky looking out for me.

What really did it for me was my 2nd class teacher, who was a brilliant guy,
who brought us out to this specific plot of badly kept land that was hidden way, way outside of the town.

Turned out it was a graveyard for unbaptised and born out of wedlock babies, imagine a wild garden belonging to a house nobody has lived in for 30 years with nettles and branches all over it. They just had little headstones to mark their graves, some had fresh photos and flowers on them so people were still visiting them at the time.

Anyways, the teacher explained what they were there for and that they were supposed to be stuck in limbo because of how they were treated by the church and people in the town.

I thought it was a horrible and unfair thing to happen, to be stuck out in a graveyard that was unkempt and were forgotten about (beside the parent(s) who were still going out there) because they didn't get a splash of water on their head so they could join the club like the rest of us.

After that, I was one of those kids who asked millions of questions but the answers either dodged them or were half-arsed. I was usually told to not ask those types of questions because you're not supposed to.

Once I learned that other religions existed in the world that was my "Ah now, come on....." moment towards Catholicism and religion in general.

I'm a very chillaxed guy so other people's beliefs don't bother or phase me, I do find it funny when some people got annoyed at me when I said I don't believe (and I'm only ever forced to admit that, I never bring it up just for the sake of it) and they turn into that "Oh, so you're an atheist, then? Well....." where they assume I'm going through some sort of rebellious phase because I must listen to "the Prophet, Richard Dawkins".......though I don't read his books or ever mention him.

meoklmrk91

I don't think I ever really believed, not really, had absolutely no interest in any of it, got out of going to mass as soon as I was allowed, lied to the priest to get out of serving mass, didnt really want to make my confirmation but felt that I had to, it was to me as an 11 year old like there was absolutely no choice in the matter. I tried to believe for a while when I was around 13 but that didn't last too long and pronouced myself an atheist not long after, to those day my father and I cannot have a conversation about it because it upsets him and he doesn't want to even try to understand because the church is so important in his life. Another of my siblings would be agnostic but came to that realisation much later and the other is somewhat catholic I think, doesn't go to mass but would probably balk at the idea of a child not being baptised.

smacl

Kiwi in IE wrote: »

My parents are atheists too though which undoubtedly goes a long way in avoiding religious indoctrination.

Likewise, both parents atheist and raised an atheist myself. Never believed in any of the mainstream Irish Catholic deities including God, Jesus, Santa, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth fairy. Felt a mild stirring in the Force after watching Star Wars on the big screen when it came out in '78, but after a day or so of trying to move objects using telekinesis, gave up on that too.

DazMarz

Duggy747 wrote: »

What really did it for me was my 2nd class teacher, who was a brilliant guy,
who brought us out to this specific plot of badly kept land that was hidden way, way outside of the town.

Turned out it was a graveyard for unbaptised and born out of wedlock babies, imagine a wild garden belonging to a house nobody has lived in for 30 years with nettles and branches all over it. They just had little headstones to mark their graves, some had fresh photos and flowers on them so people were still visiting them at the time.

Anyways, the teacher explained what they were there for and that they were supposed to be stuck in limbo because of how they were treated by the church and people in the town.

I thought it was a horrible and unfair thing to happen, to be stuck out in a graveyard that was unkempt and were forgotten about (beside the parent(s) who were still going out there) because they didn't get a splash of water on their head so they could join the club like the rest of us.

That was another thing that really swayed me, and I was only reminded of it when I saw what you posted.

The whole idea that innocent children could be so forsaken and ignored. The idea that their families (who were most likely fervent believers) would be tortured forever in anguish at the knowledge that their little son/daughter would never get into heaven because they were not baptised. I mean that is just evil.

Add in the amount of people that were not allowed to be buried on "consecrated" ground because they committed suicide. Even worse.

The town I live in has been blighted in the past few years. At least 3 young people (all aged under 30) have taken their own lives in the past 5 years. Two were Catholics. At their funerals, which I attended, the priest was stoic, cold and emotionless. You could sense it that he wanted to rail against suicide, call it an evil act and possibly revert to form and forbid them being buried in a Catholic graveyard. But, for obvious reasons, he didn't. But there was a real... undercurrent... or something there.

It has even touched my own family. And again, I only thought of this now.

My aforementioned grandmother often told me stories. Right up until just before she passed away (she passed away in January, 2012), she would often tell me stories from her own life and of her relatives. I was always enraptured. It was always interesting. The way in which she described things meant you could almost see the story unfold before your eyes.

Anyway...

The story she told me concerned what would have been a cousin of hers, a young Catholic girl, whose surname was McGuckan. They were growing up in Antrim at the time, and this would have been in the 1930's or 1940's. This girl fell in love with a young man from a Protestant family. At the time, this was an absolute scandal. The parents of both families united to stop such a "sacrilegious" union happening. The young woman was forced to emigrate to America, to stay with relations of the family in Upstate New York. The young man stayed behind. Before she was forced away, she promised that she would write to him.

Years passed, and he never received a single letter from her. He married and had a family.

In America, the girl arrived and discovered she was pregnant. She kept the child and raised him. She got married and had more children.

She constantly wrote letters to her old flame back in Ireland, but received no reply.

Years later, the sons and daughters of these two families reunited, meeting "relations" that they had never even known about. Sadly, by this time, the man and woman who had been forced apart had long since passed on. It was discovered that the man's mother had been intercepting the letters coming from America, but instead of destroying them (as you would imagine), they had been hoarded away.

I saw one of these letters that my grandmother had. Listening to the story, I was in tears. Absolute tears. I was only about 15 or so (so maybe the details are a bit fuzzy; but that's the bones of it). Through the tears, looking up from the letter, I asked my grandmother, "Why?"

She replied with a sad shrug, "Blind faith and ignorance." was her reply.

Shook me to my core.

bnt

I don't think believing as a child counts as really believing, since you were a child and pretty much clueless about everything. It's when you grow up that you put away childish things, and in my case religion was one of those childish things. It faded in to the past, along with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't remember "really" believing at all, not sure I ever took religion seriously.

nozzferrahhtoo

I have not one single memory of ever even once subscribing to the idea there was a god. I simply never believed it. I was even slow to realize that any other people actually did either, and it was not just a big part of role play, fantasy, story telling and more.

seamus

bnt wrote: »

I don't think believing as a child counts as really believing, since you were a child and pretty much clueless about everything.

I think we're getting into philosophical territory here, but I disagree. I think childhood belief (in anything) is the closest most of us ever get to truly believing (again, in anything).

"Suspension of disbelief" describes a cognitive effect whereby someone is immersed so wholly in a story that they forget where they are and what they're doing, and their consciousness has been superseded by their imagination. It's the end of goal of all great storytellers, from the old seanchai right up to modern movie making; to make your viewer/listener forget who they are and what they're doing, if even for a few minutes.

Most children can do this pretty much at will. If you ever watch a 3 or 4 year old playing at anything, they are completely in the moment, their reality is whatever they are imagining in their head.
As you get older, this kind of pure escapism gets harder and harder to achieve.
The word "suspension" perfectly describes the nature of the effect. You're not ignoring your disbelief, in your mind disbelief is actually suspended. You don't watch a good movie thinking, "This isn't real". When you get really into it, belief & disbelief don't even come into it. Like a vivid dream, you unconsciously accept the story (and therefore your imagination) as being "reality" if even only for that temporary period.

So on the topic of religion, I think children get into it in a way that few adults can. It's a pure acceptance of religion as reality. As you get older and the nature of reality becomes more apparent, you have more disbelief to suspend in order to maintain the "old" picture of reality in your head. I think you will find very few adults who absolutely and completely believe, without doubt or hesitation. Most children of religious parents will though. "Little Johnny has gone to heaven" are much more soothing words for a child than an adult, because the adult always has the lingering doubt.

Vote 4 Pedro

I've never felt the need for any religion at all,
I was raised in care by several different foster family's from the age of 3 who all tried to make me believe - they had no chance as i thought it was all a joke and i couldn't understand why they just could not accept the fact that i did not believe in god.
They all tried i can tell you.
Then i married a girl from a Catholic family and they are still trying to convert me even to this day.
They think i'm some sort of "one off" as in there eyes it's not possible to be happy without god in you life.
Over the years my wife has now stopped believing as well but i have had nothing to do with that, religion just seems to have warn off her,
The other day we were driving somewhere with my son who is a total none believer and his friend who is a Catholic and we drove passed a few churches and the friend crossed himself as we drove passed.....my lad asked his friend why do you cross yourself passing a church and the friend said "because my mother slaps me if i don't" :eek:

Zubeneschamali

I believed when I was a child because I was taught to by people I had reason to trust when they told me about God, Santy Claus and Australia.

As I grew older, I decided they were right about Australia, wrong about God and kidding about Santy.

I never bought the whole "believe based on faith just because", as soon as I heard that was why other people believed, not any actual valid reason or evidence, that was the end of that.

rainbow kirby

Kinda, but given that I decided I didn't believe in (G|g)od at roughly the same time that I decided that Santa didn't exist... the sort of faith that you have as a small child (I was 10ish when I stopped believing) isn't the sort of faith that someone who practised their faith as an adult would have.

iDave

Yeah suppose I did if I'm honest. Realised it was preposterous well before the Leaving Cert.

swampgas

Believed in God well into my teens. Even when I was sure that organised religion was a contradictory mess it took a long time for me to shake off the feeling that there was still some sort of "Big Brother" God watching my every move and thought, which in turn inhibited me from thinking things through properly. Once I was free of the delusion that my every thought was being observed (and judged) everything fell into place for me.

I find that it gives me an insight into why religion can be very hard to shake off for many people, especially if it has been embedded deeply into your consciousness as a child.

Akrasia

"And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray to God my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray to God my soul to take"

Those words still send shudders down my spine (and not because of the Metallica song)

I used to say them at night, sometimes I'd be almost about to tall asleep when i remembered that I forgot my bedtime prayer so I jumped out of bed to say the prayer in case I died during the night and went to hell.

I believed when I was very young out of fear but it never really made any sense to me. As soon as I allowed myself to start asking questions I stopped believing pretty rapidly.

Also, Father Ted might have played a big role cause it became ok to laugh at religion and how silly it was.

PopePalpatine

When you think about it, even if Father Ted was proposed in 1985-1990 rather than 1995, it would have gone down like a lead balloon.

Anyway, to answer the thread title, I was the average Irish a-la-carte Catholic until I learned what an agnostic was (at 15). The only times I really felt pious were:

• On the day of my Confirmation, when I vowed to not say anything more severe than "crap" (i.e., I couldn't say "bastard", "bitch", "fuck" etc.)
• At about 10pm on some random night, when I was about 13 years old, I vowed to never say the N-word. I still don't, not because of that oath, but because it's a fucking vile word.

That's all I can remember, really. I had a brief period of losing my belief in God when I was 7, when I didn't see any angels when rising above the clouds while flying over to England. Looking back at when I did believe, there were two events that stood out to me as really creepy - firstly, a retreat to somewhere in north County Dublin, I remember one line in a song: "No turning back." I remember the woman, who looked as if she was c.50 years old, having a very hypnotic-sounding voice when singing it - of course, we were supposed to parrot her words.

The second was when this group of young people came into my school when I was in third year in secondary school, we spent the whole school day with them. At the time I thought nothing of it, other than, "Yay, a day free from lessons!" One thing that one of them said that stood out was that Jesus wanted him to wait for marriage before having sex. This was at the time when a lot of noise was being made by some pop stars (e.g. Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers) about how "pure" they were - I even remember the South Park episode taking the piss out of chastity programmes, too!

lazygal

I was a very compliant child so belief in god came very naturally to me, it was the same as learning my times tables and spellings for the tests every Friday. Really got into the confirmation and communion preparations and was the first female alter server in my parish. Secondary school was a different story. I don't know how I came to have serious doubts but when I was 13-18 years of age the Brendan Smith story broke, then all the abuse in the orphanages (Dear Daughter really affected me), and a few 'whacky' retreats from down with the kids hipster try hards were where my faith and belief took a hammering. It was very, very hard to shake off though. I remember being very opposed to divorce being introduced and abortion was never, ever ok. Even in college I was quite conservative about social issues.
I think travel and being in the working world really caused my outlook to change. I spent some time working abroad and in different jobs and studying different postgrad stuff. I can't pinpoint when I really stopped believing any of it, but now I can't believe it took me so long to shake it all. The power of indoctrination at a young age is very, very important to religions.
I'm determined my children won't need to shake off a belief system like I had to. I'm very glad my husband is on the same wavelength and even if we have to send our children to a religious school I am absolutely determined to stand firm with teachers about indoctrination. I've had some tell me the AliveO programme is benign, that children don't mind learning about being nice and friends and nature and whatever, but its a programme designed by the Catholic church in an attempt to make the whole indoctrination system as touchy feely as possible and something no one would object to, which makes it even more insidious.

Hotblack Desiato

DazMarz wrote: »

I felt like screaming Basil Fawlty's line, "This is exactly how Nazi Germany started!!!" over it.

And you'd have been right. Adolf of the funny hairstyle was brought up in the catholic tradition and learnt well how it uses symbolism and empty rhetoric and vague scriptures and pomp and ceremony and deference to authority to control the masses. He employed these tactics expertly. There is no real difference between a papal mass and the nuremberg rally, both require mass suspension of reason and blind deference to an idiot ideology.

Lithium93_ wrote: »

(seriously sat in the seats listening to the priest babble on about an invisible being and how his son died for our sins for 30 minutes every Saturday,biggest waste of time)

30 minutes??

SATURDAY???

You got the Catholic Lite (tm) upbringing!

(Only time I'll ever set foot in a church is for Christmas Day mass and anniversary's)

Um, why?

Hotblack Desiato

DazMarz wrote: »

I felt like screaming Basil Fawlty's line, "This is exactly how Nazi Germany started!!!"

It's a great line, so I'll quote it again and one whose true significance is rarely recognised.

Conformity above all is deeply valued in Irish society as in many others. Logic and freedom trail in way behind.

"You wouldn't want your Joe to be the only child in class not doing holy communion" is exactly akin to "You wouldn't want your Hans to be the only boy not going to Hitlerjugend."

ryan101

ninja900 wrote: »

"You wouldn't want your Joe to be the only child in class not doing holy communion" is exactly akin to "You wouldn't want your Hans to be the only boy not going to Hitlerjugend."

Yep, exactly akin.

Hotblack Desiato

It is yeah. Kids didn't actually get arrested for not going to Hitler Youth but the chatter of their mothers and desire to conform was enough. Catholics don't actually have a higher power to fear apart from self-guilt and the chattering of aul wans.

kylith

I believed when I was a kid. Heaven, hell, everyone on earth my brothers and sisters, the whole shebang. Then, around the age of eight, I started spending my free time on mixture of David Attenborough and Terry Pratchett. One taught me about evolution and the other introduced ideas like all gods exist or none do, and that there's no need to 'believe' in things that are real. Couple that with realising that priests were casting themselves as experts on things that they obviously knew nothing about, and I was done with religion by about age 12. I didn't stop attending mass until I left home ("While you live in our house you'll live by our rules"), and I was even the public face of the church choir for a few years!

endacl

I've no idea OP. Depends by what you mean by 'believe'. When I was a kid, I accepted what I was told by grownups. This of course included my dad telling me he was the best footballer in Ireland and that Fats Domino was from Bunclody. Weird man, my auld fella...

Once I reached an age when I started to figure stuff out for myself - I had access to many many books - I certainly didn't.

Do you mean actively believe, or passively accept?

Lithium93_

ninja900 wrote: »

And you'd have been right. Adolf of the funny hairstyle was brought up in the catholic tradition and learnt well how it uses symbolism and empty rhetoric and vague scriptures and pomp and ceremony and deference to authority to control the masses. He employed these tactics expertly. There is no real difference between a papal mass and the nuremberg rally, both require mass suspension of reason and blind deference to an idiot ideology.




30 minutes??

SATURDAY???

You got the Catholic Lite (tm) upbringing!




Um, why?

You sound very surprised about mass lasting only 30 minutes on a Saturday.......... Kinda glad i only got the ''Catholic Lite'' upbringing, don't know why i only got to church for Christmas........ The anniversary's part has been kicked to the side of the kerb.

Hotblack Desiato

Lithium93_ wrote: »

You sound very surprised about mass lasting only 30 minutes on a Saturday..........

I wouldn't know. By the time the thing about satisfying the Sunday obligation on Saturday evening came in (yep. the RCC can be populist when it feels like it) I was pretty much done with mass attendance anyway.

Given the average pace of a Sunday mass out our way (45 mins give or take) they might save 5 mins tops on a Saturday evening with fewer communicants, so still 40 mins or so.

There was one priest though who was very popular as he was well known for doing a 'fast mass', barely over the half hour including dispensing a few hundred wafers was some going. It was your lucky day if he was saying mass.

The latest Sunday mass in the nearest church was 1pm, but that was regarded by my mother as a bit lazy, we usually went (as in, were made go) to 12. But the odd time we went to a neighbouring parish that had a 4pm mass, it was never less than an hour two lengthy sermons IIRC, or perhaps it was lots of hymns using up all that time, but it's well over 30 years ago now.