I was not "converted." I was never religious. My parents were atheists and at least one of my sets of grandparents were also. I'm a third-generation atheist on at least one side of the family.I was always an atheist. I never heard of gods and religion until I was about seven. Some little kid on the playground started talking about this guy named God who lived up in the sky and I assumed it was a big joke and fell on the ground laughing. Then when he started acting disappointed I figured it must be one of those stories kids make up and I was supposed to appreciate his creativity. Then when he got downright angry I realized it must be a Santa Claus-Tooth Fairy thing and his parents hadn't gotten around to telling him the truth yet. When I told my parents about it they said that some adults believe in God because their parents had never told them the truth. Then I thought they were joking, because if nobody tells them the truth, everybody eventually gets smart enough to realize that there's no such things as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy... don't they Momma? Momma???I never thought of it as a "philosophy." People who believed in gods were simply retarded. I easily became something of a misanthrope when I learned that grownups really do believe in an illogical, unobservable supernatural universe, the only evidence for which is the ravings of people who lived in the era before science and rationality. I mean, how the heck are you supposed to develop feelings of kinship and community with them?Having always been an atheist, I only attracted friends who were also atheists, or who at least were religious only for the ceremonies and didn't give the supernatural crap much thought. So those people treated me like I was normal. I was academically oriented as a kid, a science and math major. I went on to college in an era when that was unusual, and I became a computer programmer when the field first opened up. So I was always in milieus where religion was not predominant. It wasn't until the Religious Redneck Retard Revival in the late 1970s that religious people began to infiltrate scholarly and technical disciplines, and the first generation of the "born again" folks were so bad at scholarly and technical work that there was never any question of who looked down on whom. I had a gal working for me who claimed she wanted to be a programmer. She sat at her desk with her eyes closed and her elbows resting on an unopened program dump. I asked her when she was going to start debugging it and she said her preacher had told her than if she just kept praying an angel would come down and show her where the bug was.
Most of the religious people I encounter on SciForums have continued that tradition. Good old Sandy comes to mind. And then there's Sam, who insists that communism was invented by atheists, when "To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability," is a quote from the friggin' bible.
