Halcyon said:
have you always been atheist or have you 'converted' from some form of theism?
To describe my background I used to be a very active churchgoer. I also was politically active in the local church community, for example substantially contributing to election material for the Church of Sweden (Evangelical Lutheran) church board elections and was elected to what my dictionary says corresponds to the 'vestry'. In the secular community, I belonged to and held positions for the rightmost party there was. Accordingly, I believed in women's rights to decide on their body (pro-choice in the USAmerican language), and if the question would have been brought up I would have supported same-gender marriages. I wasn't really a fundie, because I for example already in those days regarded Genesis as a set of parables for ancient Semites, but I thought that my faith was adequately described in the Symbolic Books of the Church of Sweden.
Have you/did you explore alternative religions such as Buddhism or Taoism before opting for complete atheism? If so, what about these religions did not appeal to you?
At the time of conversion, I was familiar with the major religions and a few more. I was especially interested in South Asian religions. Some facets of them seemed just ridiculous: Gods leaving their invisibility to walk on Earth, new lives after death etc. I couldn't accept that. I never considered the other Abrahamic flavours. Too much rules on how to behave outwardly, and as a healhy Swedish male the thought of genital mutilation, compulsory or for traditional reasons, was and is unthinkable to me. I hadn't looked very much into Daoism. Catholicism was ruled out because of the Transubstantiation. I'm a chemical engineer.
If you have 'converted', was it specifically issues with the God(s) of your old religion that you had a problem with?
I started doing Religious studies. One reason was that I wanted to get a scholarly view of the sympathetic Sikhism. But fortunately, I had an OT teacher who somehow made me draw a new baseline and think independently of what I had been taught and believed previously.
I found out that my Church believed in Consubstantiation, which I found to be at least as weird as Transubstantiation. I realized that I thought that (at least 1/3 of) God had walked on Earth. I believed in another life after this one. And I discovered the supposed atrocities described in the OT. There is of course no proof that any of those genocides and large scale murders ever happened, but including them and interpreting them as being acts of a (loving?) God turned me off even more. So, scrap that. Because of rebirth/reincarnation/metempsychosis, Buddhism and Sikhism were out. I was attracted by ancient Daoism, but didn't find any gods there, and gradually understood that I could live an ethical as well as fulfilling life without a religion.
