-Update-
My story


I was a kid raised up in a brahmin Hindu family, its one of those most 'pure' casts you could find in the Hindu society, offcourse every branch of the brahmin cast claims to be such but 'Chatterjee' or 'Chattopadhyay' s are the top ones - or so I ve been told.
So with that backdrop you can pretty much say that I had the most stringiest of religious teachings one could ever get.

Being a brahmin kid, traditionally you have to go through a ritual or a sort of rite of passage called 'poita' in bengali or Upanayana in sanskrit. This has to be done before the age of 15 and no earlier than the age of 7.

So I remember as the days went by my parents were beginning to talk more & more about this rite of passage how my father had to go bald and stay with a step mother (part of the ritual - no that mother has no relationship with the father of the pupil) and has to beg around and eat only boiled vegetables through out these days. Obviously this was getting kinda scary for me, I was already the odd fat kid in school and the thought of getting more attention because of a bald head was nerve wracking for me. Among all the discussions that my father and I had I remember him vaguely mentioning that only when I go through this ritual would I be called a purified soul reborn on earth worthy of going to heaven.

That got me thinking, it was a bewildering fact for me which I couldnt get my head around. I and only all the other brahmin kids had a free ticket to heaven while the rest are automatically considered unworthy ? What about my best friend who had a surname of Moitra ? What about that girl I had a crush on with a surname of Kundu, wait a second, "what about mom?" I asked my father.
I remember this distinctly as my father explained to me that girls dont have a caste, they belong to the man they marry and since my mother was married to him she will be worthy of going to heaven with him. But what if she married a muslim ?? Dont remember if I ever asked this back then but I certainly did have this thought from around the same time.

This did not sit well with me, I began questioning every aspect of 'Poita' my tantrums got so bad that my parents eventually considered to not force me to go through this ritual. However, my tantrums back then were fueled by the desire of eating chicken.

But this small victory of not getting the poita was a good enough spark in my mind to raise questions on all aspects of religion.
Then at the age of nine, I got the greatest gift I ever thought I could get in my life; Cable TV and with it the Discovery channel.

Hence began my journey into the world of science, off course we had physics chemistry maths in our schools but for the first time all of it actually meant something to me. I was fascinated by how gravity works. I was spellbound when I first saw an animated version of the milky way. I found out that there was a real person named Pythagoras. Basically cable TV was the fuel that my spark required to become a full fledged atheist.

.. and that is my story.

Everything that your heart says is wrong, its wrong. Like you said your religion say you to "If one doesn't go to the Church on every Sunday, he is a sinner". its wrong because your heart did not believe on it. Because NO one religion bound you to pray. There are out comes if you dont pray, but not the boundness.

You ask why rational people try to engage theists into critical thinking, then go on to detail how you, like most atheists, began as a child being conditioned to believe the theist myths of your parents until you discovered the skills of critical thinking and objective reasoning.

So you prove that theists can break their conditioning but then question why we bother trying to free the minds of others who, like us once, were brainwashed.

Atheists don't hate religion. They simply don't recognize that the Atheism that they love is really a religion in disguise, and that they are the gods of their religion.

Atheism is similar to Bible religion because, both Old Testament and New Testament say that people are gods.

Atheism is different than Bible religion because, both Old Testament and New Testament say that it is only people who accept Bible religion who are gods.

Even if this is true, atheists can force themselves to believe the things about God and salvation, and so be saved.

A person who loses an arm or a leg in life can still function. Life is simply more difficult.

People who lose the religion part of their brain can still believe God and be save. It is simply more difficult.

Considering someone mindless might be rational, hating him for it is not. Atheists (also represented by nazis and communists, who replaced God with an idea of "collective good") might be just as militant as their religious neighbours. The point is, that you cannot judge person by ideology he was brought up in.

Far worse than that, all this mindless shit resulting in fighting over the "Holy Lands", "Mecca", "Jerusalem", blah blah blah.

What does that have to do with anything I've said? I said that a theists views are largely dictated by what's said in their holy books, at least when concerning the three abrahamic religions, while an atheists views are not restricted by such a medium. Someone who self identifies as "Catholic" for example, cannot be against treating women as being less than men, because of things like this:

"Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." (I Timothy 2:11-14)

Yet, we see Catholics all the time treating women as equals, but why? According to the bible women are less than men and should be treated as such.

This just goes to show how clueless Theists are about their own faiths. #dumbpeople

Makes sense. So here is a bunch of rational evidence that God exists. And there is much more when you think about how everything works.

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/737322.msg10718395#msg10718395

This is not a fact but an almost impossible act to follow. It's like trying to touch the horizon. You can't. But you have a path to follow, a direction the needle of your inner compass will point to... Some people have it naturally, others need guidance and a reminder why they are more than a animal, IF they chose to...

Same with judging. you cannot NOT judge at every moment, every time you breathe... Since those "orders" are impossible to follow to the letter, being the nature of human we will forever be sinners... I haven't open a bible in centuries but that is how I interpreted it.... I could be wrong, of course.