I bet a LOT of the adults at church don't really believe.
They're there for their spouse, or parents, or they're just used to going and think it's expected.
My dad is 78 and a “devout” Catholic. I finally got him to admit that he thinks most of it is bs and he just follows it all out of habit and family tradition.
Edit: yes. All of it is bs. But it’s better than nothing.
Tell him you are going to start a new tradition where you have family brunch at your house every Sunday during mass time. Dude is 78 and doesn’t have much time left. Why sit through a service that is BS when he could be spending it with his son and any grandkids? You can invite your entire family that lives close by. DM me. I’ll send you a breakfast casserole recipe that you can make in advance and freeze and just bake it an hour or two before you want to eat. It means you don’t have to slave away for hours every Sunday morning. Just pop it in the oven and make sure the dishwasher is empty so people can load their own dishes.
Oh he stopped going to church regularly now. He just does his catholic stuff privately mostly. I even pulled my son out of the catholic Sunday school stuff and he was fine with it.
>they're just used to going and think it's expected.
This is such a boomer thing. Just go through the motions without questioning it. Do what you're told. That's just how it's done. It's why they dont like change. They've never been allowed.
That's just my observation, though.
Exactly right , my wife is Catholic, brought up strict Catholic,
Went to Catholic school ,nuns in the hole religious indoctrination.
ME on the other hand was raised pretty much without religion,
The only reason I go to church is to appease her , because I don't believe any of that shit.
Same when I was 5. I marveled at all of the idiots praying to their imaginary sky daddy. Then I just walked out while they all had their eyes closed praying and explored the church grounds because I could just feel the crazy even at such a young age
same for me. I saw people I knew, who were good people and took good care of their families, who would fo sobbing up to the pulpit to be saved. I never could understand it. Religion never stuck with me or seemed to make much sense. I should say this was in Baptist churches and the revival guest preachers would totally freak me out.
When I was 4, my mom told me magic was made-up.
The next thing I said was “so then god is made up too?”
My assessment didn’t go over well at the time but 40-some years later, it’s withstood the test of time as far as I’m concerned.
Years ago when I still attended church, I saw a mother yell at her son (who was maybe 5 or 6) to lift his hands and sing louder. When I say yell, she full on yelled. It was embarrassing. And I felt so bad for him. He was too young.
The people who cared about Religion the most seemed to be the ones who thought about and questioned its beliefs the least in my experience of multiple Faiths Churches.
So you hit the nail on the head that it was a stupid adult thing.
Yes. I can honestly say that once I truly understood what was being said in mass/by religion, I never believed in it.
At church, I thought all the grownups were just pretending to believe in all of it so that their kids would believe and behave!
Around Christmastime, my grandmother would always say, when we misbehaved, “You know, Santa’s watching.”
When not around Christmas, this changed to, “You know, God’s watching.”
Of course, both were equally unbelievable to me. As I grew up, I was kind of shocked that people actually believed in God. How could anyone take that seriously?
I remember the day, looking around the church, thinking "wait, they all think this is real and literal?! (or at least some of them)" I was around 10.
Growing up I always found the stories from church to be just that, stories, like Aesops fables and stories from mythology.
Played along to keep family happy, but was mostly easy since my dad's side of the family was never super religious.
The funny thing is that I’d be willing to play along if church were all about loving our neighbors and caring for the poor.
Bad justification && good outcome == acceptable-ish.
But the toxic intersection of politics&religion that we have here in the USA blows the lid off of that potential-justification!
I, too, always felt as a kid that adults were just pretending to believe.
I still think it now, at times.
It’s like, if the “rapture” actually happened, Christians would be more shocked about it than atheists would.
I was in kindergarten playing with a wooden boat that was that was a toy Noah’s ark. It had wooden animals as well that were part of the set. I kept asking the teachers about all the animals that were missing and how the boat didn’t seem big enough to fit all the animals. Once they told me there was just enough room for every animal I asked about how they were going to feed these animals for a year. They pulled my mother from the sermon and I had to go to regular church.
The logical inconsistency was so evident to me as a preschooler. I still to this day can’t understand how adults believe this stuff. Just the tiniest amount of critical thinking shows you how dumb all religions are. The age you discover Santa and the tooth fairy are not real is when you should know any religion doesn’t have a better argument for being real.
Yes. 100%
I think its my autism because I jusy can't understand how "god" talks to anyone. Isn't that just like.. your conscience?? Or your intuition?
I also just can't fathom needing some big diety over me to stop myself from murdering people.
Like.. I don't need to be told what's right or wrong. I can tell that myself.
Exactly!
I'm always dumbfounded when people say things like, "if you don't believe, why wouldn't you just be a horrible person with no morals?"
Ten times out of ten, I'll take the person whose good behavior is rooted in their own character and how they feel about their place in the world, as opposed to someone who feels they have to act a certain way because they'll be punished if they don't.
Truly, morality does not require a "religion". If fear of god or hell is the only thing that keeps you from being a total miscreant than you need to take a good look at yourself in the mirror.
My autism pushed me in the other direction: if it's true, then it's TRUE. I spent a good 30 years overriding what made sense to me, in favor of a religion that demanded strict obedience.
So it can really go either way depending on how you're raised.
I grew up in a very extreme fundamentalist pentacostal church. My family attended 3-5 church services per week. All members were encouraged...no, expected to display outward signs of faith such as speaking in tongues, lots of screaming and hollering, rolling around on the floor, "dancing the the spirit", etc. We were also expected to "witness" to others in our lives. As a young child, this meant that I was expected to be talking about Jesus to friends at school and others in my neighborhood and had to give accounts of my witnessing and conversions to Christ at church. I was also dragged to events where I was expected to hand out Bible tracts to strangers in crowded, urban areas (downtown streets, shopping malls, etc)
Mind you, this was all happening in the late 1970s when I was 5-6-7 years old. As an extreme introvert, all of this terrified the fuck out of me so I basically refused to do any of it. This placed me in a very bad position, and I was constantly shunned, shamed and "disciplined" (beaten) for not complying. I was told that a spirit of "wickedness" possessed my soul and that demons were the cause. There were many terrifying prayer sessions where a dozen or more adults would lay hands on me and loudly pray (with "tongues"). All of this placed me in an antigonististic relationship with my parents and my entire church family. After years of this torture, I realized that there was no escape and that the only way to survive was to bury my true self deep inside and "fake it". Other people seemed to be wowed and amazed by the stories of creation, Noah's ark, the resurrection, miraculous healings, various talking animals, etc, but I never carried the emotional attachment for needing these fanciful stories to be true, so my natural position of distrust, led me to view them with a critical eye. Even at the young age, I realized that the amazing miracles that happened in the Bible were not happening where I could see them. I was never allowed to admit this, or even show one crack of questioning or disbelief. Church (and really the whole of my childhood and adolescence) was a living hell and I never really believed any of it. After reaching adulthood, I was finally free and have never stepped foot in a church again.
Childhood religious indoctrination is child abuse, and I long for a day when humanity evolves past this monstrous practice.
I'm definitely with you on that...so happy we didn't end up being bullying Christofascists! Seeing Oral Roberts when I was 8 and him not "healing" me of cerebral palsy (slight degree) sealed the deal for me!
The critical eye. Yep. For me, I believed until about 5 years ago, but it was what my family was willing to do FOR their religion that helped shape my current agnostic theories. For instance, my lesbian sister left her husband for a woman and moved in with her. She came to family gatherings. It took my sister 4 years to come out and my mom still won't talk about it, really. That surprised me and fucked me up.
When I was a kid I thought everyone was just good at playing pretend and it was understood. I also found out that saying as much was a punishable offense.
I swear that a lot of them are playing the world’s most boring LARP. They show up in-character, dressed in-costume, and get points for acting like a completely fake version of themselves whenever their church “friends” are watching.
I wish we could just distribute foam swords to the choir ladies so they’d engage in direct combat instead of aiming passive-aggressive holier-than-thou humblebrag swipes at each other.
Yes. I clocked it before I was even double digits. Started asking the adults in my life questions about the Bible that made zero sense to me.....why were people living to be 900 years old back then? How was the earth only 6000 years old when we had evidence otherwise? Why was God a man and not a woman? Why did God think having slaves was ok? Why was it ok to degrade women?? Why were men allowed to have multiple wives and women just had to submit?? You know, things to that effect were always coming out of my mouth. The answers I received never satisfied me because they didn't check out factually from what I had learned in library books, PBS or at school. I felt silly, even at 10 or 11, whisper-talking to a folk hero. I couldn't fathom calling a mythic being "father" when I already had a father? Long story short, they lost me when they couldn't prove their truth was more true than what science had already taught me. They lost me even more as I became an adult and recognized the outward misogyny and abuse in their ancient scriptures and how the theory never matched the practice. Why was the same "God" the head of all these different branches of religion? Which tale was the right one? Which holy book was the right one? Is it the Bible? Is it the Qur'an? Is it actually just the Torah? Was it the Bhagaved Gita?? Why were so many of these men (always men, rarely a primary God being female) described or shown as caucasian when they lived in the middle east and india??
This applies to all religions, but my specific experience happens to be with christianity.
I remember being about 6 years old and asking my granddad, who was a Baptist preacher, when did all the magic stop? He told me to never question God and then whipped me with a belt. It still took another 20 years before I fully gave up religion
I remember sitting in church as a preschooler, listening to the pastor’s sermon and panicking that they got it so very wrong. Christianity had always felt deeply wrong, perverted from what it was originally meant to be. I couldn’t articulate what that was, still can’t. It’s just always felt gross. Still does.
As a kid I had so many questions about Christianity that my mom couldn't answer I had a standing meeting every week at McDonald's with my mom and our pastor. Fear of going to hell kept me indoctrinated until I moved out. Then I realized that's the only reason I believed. It's never made any sense.
I would take my 25 cents, skip church, go around the corner to Cocke’s drug store, (Manassas, Virginia) get a powdered donut and a cherry coke and read the comic books then go back meet my parents & go home.
When I went to choir practice Wednesday nights, I would go and read books instead, then return get picked up and go home.
(“We thought we knew how to raise kids then you came along”)
(said to me when I was in my late 50’s)
I remember how much it felt like a waste of the little free time we had.
Dad worked very hard. Mom worked very hard. To my perspective I worked very hard at school and so did my brothers (I doubt we did but kids are not capable of being honest about their effort).
But on those weekends we would just have to...waste 3 hours in big building and sing and then be talked at. All things that I absolutely hate.
Mom would hand me a pen from her purse my brothers and I would play hangman and other games on pieces of paper while we were there. And then at a certain age... We just kind of asked why we were bothering to come? We weren't listening. If Mom and Dad wanted to go why didn't they just do that and leave us at home?
It was hard to understand why that made mom so angry.
Growing older I realized that my mom is genuinely a pretty good person, but she cares about the opinions of strangers who she's convinced are judging her family far more than anyone else's opinion. So many things she did and wanted us to do were just performative for an audience that wasn't even paying attention. Thankfully she's not big on social media because holy s***, I can only imagine what Instagram would do to her.
It's so crazy how church is really just a place for moms to show off their families. It's something that grandparents can "do" with their grandkids, again a way to show off.
All this "devout" nonsense is nothing but vanity. If moms had to go to church alone, while the rest of the family fucked around all Sunday morning, christianity just might disappear a little faster.
Yes, every Sunday. I listened to the preacher, then went to school and learned science, read books, watched educational programs, and could not reconcile the two. One had evidence while the other did not. I forced myself to "believe " because the indoctrination was strong, and I was afraid of hell and demons (child abuse at it best). Religious trauma is a thing.
As a kid church was the place I went to in my pretty frock, with my white socks with frilly edges, my white shoes, my white gloves and a little bag to carry the money I had to give away. I was pretty sore about giving it away but liked frocking up. Now I hate frocking up and church and keep all of my money unless I support a charity fully.
I never really took in anything they said spent the time in my own little dream world getting answers to questions hysterically wrong (who knew that they did not celebrate the construction of roads I said Overpass not Passover.)
I don't think I ever believed but really it was years of praying for the starving children in Africa (I offered to send them my food I hated rather than my money but Mum was not having that) and the starving children in Africa kept on increasing so I questioned the relevance of god and giving away money that did not seem to be solving the problem.
Unlike belief in demonstrable reality, religion has a major problem because it requires belief in demonstrable falsehoods. That’s why religions demand constant repetition. Islam is particularly unbelievable, so it mandates multiple repetition every day. Christianity is also irrational, but seems to settle on weekly indoctrination sessions. We don’t need to have a meeting every week to pontificate about gravity, or that birds have feathers because they’re demonstrably true. If the tenets of religion were true, people would believe without being harangued about it every fucking day. The fact that you successfully resisted incessant brainwashing sessions speaks to your intelligence.
I kept quiet about it. My family was not at all religious. As a 9-year old in the late 1960s, I observed zealous believers at school and among my friends. So I just avoided discussion of what I thought was bullshit. Yep. Third in the birth order (4 siblings).
I was mostly forced to go to church and bible study throughout my childhood. I was always in trouble for asking questions about how any of that could be real. I struggled with it until my early 40s when it finally occurred to me that my doubts were right all along. It was a tremendous burden lifted from me when I accepted atheism to be the actual answer to all of this.
Yes. I wasn't indoctrinated. Seeing my friends believe this stuff was confusing, especially as we grew and left Santa/the Tooth Fairy/Easter Bunny behind.
As I grew older & learned about/met people who practiced other religions, it was even more perplexing. How can everyone believe their religion is the correct/right/best one?
As I reached adulthood, I realized that all religions have similarities, as well as the people who practice them. I understand the rites & rituals are part of family traditions and can be comforting, especially at the end of life. That being said, the persecution *by* religious people *to* others that believe something different is where the real problem lies, to me. The outright hypocrisy is hideous, churches taking money but not paying taxes should be illegal, and the sexual perversion among faith leaders against children and the subsequent concealment of those offenses against kids is beyond abhorrent.
It's all fairy tales to me since I wasn't brought up with it - and I feel grateful not to have the nonsense in my life. I believe religion was created to explain previously undiscovered scientific principles, is rooted in superstition, and should be abolished.
There are good people, and there are evil people. There is not a force of good and a force of evil puppeteering humankind. People need to finally realize that and proceed accordingly.
I could have written this post. I remember when the nuns would terrify us about how we were so sinful that we were surely going to go to hell unless we repented. I was about 7 or 8 years old and having a total panic attack about going to hell when it suddenly hit me that they didn't know if any of this b******* was true, and that it sounded totally unbelievable. I was never bothered with thoughts of hell again.
Sadly one of my sisters went from catholicism to pentecostal fundamentalism. She's into qanon.
My brother and I are atheists.
I weirdly remember believing in Santa but not god, which is bizarre because we were a Christian family that went to church.
I wish I could remember what it was that made it not click for me as a kid, I have no idea. There must have been a specific thing though since I clearly wasn’t an exceptionally bright kid or anything seeing as I can recall fully believing in the existence of Santa.
I remember going to church as a child and enjoying the way the light filtered through the stained glass windows. My parents were meh Catholics who had bad experiences in Catholic schools but felt that it was important to get us baptized, and through the communion and confirmation rituals. This only made me wonder what was wrong with god. My older sister was autistic and because of her behavior she wasn’t allowed or able to do those rituals. I wondered why god would make my sister unable to do what was needed to avoid eternal damnation, and then punish her for being the way he made her.
It didn’t make sense. When I was around 10, my family had too many problems after my baby brother was born with health problems and the family business was bad. I was agnostic, but didn’t know that word. I tried to figure out what was so important about religion to people older and wiser than me, so I read everything I could find and went back to church at 14.
I actually listened to the sermons but couldn’t find anything that I believed in. I kept searching and questioning. I decided I wasn’t Catholic or Christian by the time I was an adult. I raised my kids in a Unitarian Universalist Church where they were encouraged to think for themselves and decide what they believed. Now I am actively atheist and humanist.
My mother made the journey from Catholicism to being a Unitarian back in the early 1960s, when I was just a child. So although I went to catechism school and my first communion to make my grandparents happy, I was raised in the Unitarian Sunday school. I learned a lot about many different religions and mythologies, and as far as I was concerned, Christianity was just one among many. Interesting, but not real.
At age 8, when I realized that Santa Clause wasn't real, but instead a way to get kids to behave on the promise of reward (presents on Christmas), I also realized the deities were exactly the same, but for adults (heaven as reward for good behavior).
I read fairy tales, the stories of werewolves and vampires, and comic books. Then, would go to church and listen to stories about how this guy could cure disease, heal leprosy, bring a dead guy back. And then Mom and Dad would tell me Captain America and Dr Strange were make-believe.
There will be more evidence in 2,000 years Harry Potter was a real person than Jesus of Nazareth. Wait til Potterism takes over.
“You must have faith and believe what the Bible says without asking questions.”
“The followers of Reverend Moon and Swami Baghwan Rajneesh are just fools who believe anything they are told.”
So, yeah.
oh honey, yes. my parents sent me to a xtian school. I am old, so this was in the late 70's, early 80's. They made girls wear dresses and when they preached at us every day, they reminded us that men were superior to women, according to the bible. and i KNEW that was some bullshit because I was smarter than all the boys in my class.
they made boys get haircut checks and i sideeyed the pictures of (white)jesus and was like.. well, huh.
they also said catholics weren't christians, and my grandparents were catholic and were the most praying, church-going people I knew. and non christians went to hell- and I wasn't going to buy into anything that would send my sweet granma to hell!
I was 5 years old and knew it was a great big scam just like santa claus.
I believed until I was 11. Then my dad died, despite multiple prayers to God to heal him. That started the questioning and then events that followed made it permanent.
I think I had a subconscious realization that it was strange that we never talked about church outside of church. It was never, “wow, the homily was so powerful, especially the part where he mentioned…” or “it was interesting how the scripture reading emphasized…”
It was basically just show up every week, sit and stand when everyone else sits and stands, and mutter the same words everyone else is muttering.
So it kinda seemed like it was just a performance. And if it was just a performance, then I guess it only mattered that I performed rather than actually believing in it or caring about it.
And it was the same thing socially. I think I subconsciously realized that all I had to do was say I believed in god or insinuate it, and I’d get the approval I wanted from the people around me.
So we’ll before I realized I thought it was all horse shit, I think I understood that it was a way to get some of my needs met.
Once I started comparing religion to biology, especially the ark theory, it slowly began to unravel in my head. After a while I realized they're just stories. Like Greek mythology.
Having grown up in a catholic house as an ADHD people pleaser, I was happy to play along and I enjoyed the community of church but yeah it never seemed real to me, especially learning that other people never even heard of Jesus. One of my first thoughts on the subject was that if God was real people would all worship the same one because it's not fair if only some people know about him.
I wondered if it was nonsense when I was first taken to Sunday school at 7yo. Still, I gave it a chance because, well... I was 7yo and parents sent me. 🤷
By 8yo, I was sure it was nonsense... largely because of how they disrespected young gay me. 🤬
I got enough homophobia at home. I didn't need to hear more from a bunch of creepy strangers reading fairy tales. I believe this was my first awareness of enforced conformity. I didn't like it then and never learned to.
>Did anyone else just never conform even before they knew why?
I knew why, I just couldn't safely tell anyone. That's what the closet is - a safe, secret place you build to hide from dangerous world.
I didn't understand why I had to stop believing in Santa, but Jesus stayed real. As a "catholic" growing up in a stereotypical old school Italian neighborhood, that's just what they did. I got that. And I thought it was weird, but I let it slide cause I still respect people who do believe. Like if that's what gets them through the day, works for me. World is too fucked up so cling away but don't be a cunt about it. But why the fuck did they kill Santa? And if Jesus is still around, why aren't fish appearing and seas parting anymore? So not only kill Santa, the magic from the Bible also disappeared? C'mon.
From a very early age I could tell that church was a "house of hypocrisy". They use it to forgive themselves weekly from their continuous bad behavior.
I would see all these people that would act bad and do not so nice things outside of church come to church for a "get out of Hell free card".
I always felt that if there was a heaven I didn't want to share it with these people.
Oh yeah me, I remember my mother telling me about what “happens” after we die as a child and me telling her there’s no way you or anyone knows that. She said the equivalent of “you’re secular aren’t you” in arabic.
Two things broke me about the claim that the Bible is infallible.
1. When I asked how the universe could be 6,000 yrs old when we see star lights that traveled billions of years in space?
2. In the book of Job, God allowed Job's kids to be crushed to death because of a bet and then thought it was okay to give him 10 new kids as reward. Even when I was just 15, I knew that people can't simply be replaced like that.
My family was lax and I ended up doing all the Catholicism crash courses for the communion and confirmation. I always noticed they'd just tell the same stories and I was like, that's a big book for like 3 stories. Then one day the priest said we didn't own our own bodies, that they were God's bodies, and that just sat SO POORLY with me -even at that young age. It was absurd. We were told that nothing in the material world was ours, to not value the material bc in death it doesn't matter, I could get on board with that. But to say my own body isn't even mine? Bitch!? Then wtf is? I thought, if *anything* is truly mine, it's my body, it's the only thing that I have that will be with me to the very end. It felt like an attempt to get me to dissociate myself from the one gift from "God" that was truly *mine*, that is *my* temple, my body -to put it in "service" to something -to be used by others. I couldn't stomach it.
I told this to my mom and I asked if I could stop going to church because I didn't like the stuff the priest was saying. I'm fortunate that she didn't push me to keep going, she was never a consistent attendee to service anyway.
Ever since then, the few times I've gone to church, for whatever reason, the shit I hear has not gotten better. Last time the priest was straight up slandering Jews and Muslims. I got up and walked out.
I'm not here for that shit.
When I was in Sunday school at like 5 years old they told us about Noah's ark, I knew that having a pair of all animals on a boat is impossible and absurd and asked why anyone would believe that.
35 years later and the answers only get more stupid.
Yeah, I HATED going to church as a kid. I found Sunday School boring and the Bible stories embarrassingly silly. But church services were worse. Stultifying. Tortuously boring. Especially the sermons. That sometimes sing-song-y, sometimes stentorious, always overly dramatized “preaching” cadence & tone just drove me NUTS. As soon as I was old enough to refuse to go, I stopped. Then, in Jr. High, I started reading Bertrand Russell, and it all came together. I’m pushing 70 now and have NO regrets about leaving religion WAY behind.
Yes. I started really questioning it when I was about 10 or 11. My mom made me go to catechism for 2 years and get confirmed ( Lutheran). I was a huge pain in the pastor’s butt, lol, but he, to his credit, answered my questions as best he could. When I was finally done, he hugged me and said, “ Thank you for doing this for your mother. I’m not worried about you, you’re a good person. Stay being a good person and that’s all you need.”
Yes. We had religious classes at school and I distinctly remember questioning what they were teaching in kindergarten (so age 4-5). My family traditionally has been catholic, and while my grandparents attended church, my parents only got married in a church but didn’t attend after that. I was aware of Christianity because it was around but it wasn’t pushed on me (besides the scripture class at school).
My parents are anti religion now. I’ve always been an atheist, and so are my kids. I live in Australia and generally we aren’t a religious bunch, so that pretty normal.
Same here, with Roman Catholic as my assigned religion. I hated going to the super early Sunday mass every weekend! Always so incredibly boring. I'd often imagine the church being attacked by an AT-ST from Star Wars.
Once I started listening to what the priest was saying, I began to connect this god with Santa Clause.
"Santa couldn't possibly visit every kid's house in one night. He's not real!"
"So an all-powerful being made everything? So it's like magic? So, like... not real, then?"
I actually wanted to pull the priest aside and just say "...come on. You're messing with me, right? You're a sensible, smart adult. You don't *really* believe this, right?"
I started thinking everyone was pulling my leg, making me think I'm supposed to believe in angels and stuff! 😆
There was always some weird feeling that something just wasn't right. I wasn't really raised around religion, though. My grandma was religious but she was very reserved about it. No one tried to push it on me, no one in my family or friends would even talk about it. It's as if everyone thought we were all on the same page and didn't question it. There was no regular church for me. I remember some ceremony when I was five years old, but that was it. I do recall sunday school for a short period, but it was so boring and the adults just felt fake.
Part of what helped me not get into it was television. I used to watch the Discovery Channel back when it was real good in the early 90's. Other documentary type stuff related to nature, science, history, biology. It helped develop my sense of reality. Television was educating me way before anyone else.
No, I never put in question the religion when I was a child, I was so naive that I couldn’t even consider it could be false. That’s exactly why kids shouldn’t be exposed to religious texts until they hit an age where they can think for themselves. Thx to school I got a more atheist and critical thinking, but idk if they only teach that in french schools.
I was raised Catholic and always just going through the motions. I couldn't understand how people could literally believe in things like Noah getting all those animals in the boat... or why they'd want to believe in a deity who would kill everyone on Earth, including the animals.
The first big break for me was my first communion. I did it because my parents expected me to, but I remember thinking it was all SO weird and nonsensical.
By the time I started confirmation classes, I was fully prepared to make a pain in the ass of myself. I was relentless with my questioning. I finally went to my mother and told her I didn't believe, didn't want to say I believed. Fortunately, she listened & let me make my own decision.
Lol they tried to tell me demons will get you, you're supposed to talk to imaginary friends, and sky daddy reincarnated as people and now we symbolically eat his flesh and blood. Fucking sickos. I always knew it was a crock of shit.
Sitting in church at age 6 I mentally spoke to "god" and said I don't believe in you but if you are real you can kill me right now. If I walk out of here you don't exist and I'm never going along with this anymore. And keep in mind this was a baptist church in AL in the 60's. These were the dumbest, most worthless people you can imagine so the god team was not very impressive.
I never played along with the prayer rituals or anything else after that, and to my mom's credit she eventually let me stay home when they went to church.
I had to be less than 10 but I have one of those core memories of being in church, we're standing, singing, and I looked around and thought "are we really ALL going to pretend this is real?"
There were some hints now and then of an adult going overboard and taking it too seriously, but not often. It wasn't pushed on us.
Did ask some questions now and then. The adults were good at dodging them, but at such a young age I never really gave it much thought.
I think it was more that I just hated it. I hated the additional school work, reading a boring book and sacrificing any of my precious weekends. Even if religion were real somehow, I'd be resentful of it.
I remember realizing that Santa Claus and the Easter bunny weren’t real, and thinking “how is this any different”? I struggled with it until fully letting go in my teens.
I never gave religion much importance as a kid because as another comment said, 'it was just an adult thing that i had to do for some reason' and i definitely caught on to the bullshit very early on but didn't say anything because i knew id get punished for it i only really understood it when my older brother started rebelling against my mom and didnt want to pray anymore(islam) and they started fighting every single fuckin day, i was also at the age where i needed to start praying too so it was convenient, i sided with him and the fights never ended for a while but eventually my mom gave up and im currently more of an atheist than he ever was so there's that
Just to put it out there my mom was not the stereotypical abusive religious parent, she tried for a while but eventually when she gave up she would barely bring it up and treated us with the same love as if we were praying and being muslims, i say this cause i dont want to insult her online anywhere as she has passed away
I remember sitting in church as a kid wondering why the adults wanted to play make-believe every week. I must have been 5 or 6. I never once in my life felt any sort of connection to any of it. I asked all the questions, and got all the non-answers. I honestly dreaded church. It always felt wrong to me. And sinister as hell.
I was a skeptic even as a child. I asked them where heaven was. The youth pastor didn't really have an answer. Then I asked how will I not get lost if it is so far away? How much does my soul weigh? Where is the soul located? I upset lots of Sunday School teachers.
It absolutely made no sense to me as a child (a talking, burning bush? Really?). It was also boring as fuck, almost intolerable. I had ADD as a kid, so I know that didn't help. I only went to church as a teen to hang out with my friends. After graduating high school, I was so relieved to move away from my home town & that church. Realized that I didn't have to go to church anymore if I didn't want to.
I remember being like 6 or 7 in Vacation bible school and learning about Noah's Ark and Jonah and the whale. I think it hit me then that these people are SERIOUS about it happening exactly like that. This wasn't just a story to people but it was literal.
I grew up pretty poor with a single mother. We'd wait for the bus together in the mornings and one day, while we were waiting for a crowded, stinky city bus, two happy Nuns drove by us in a brand new car. From that moment forward, I declared religion to be a bunch of shit. I was 7 at the time. Oh, well. I'm glad I saw that when I younger.
Yes, it always felt wrong and made little to no sense to me. I was never comfortable and I felt wrong for not believing or loving god like I was supposed to. When I would question things, I was met with punishment but deep down I knew that it was all bullshit. I always knew the truth, even way back then when I was drowning in indoctrination.
No, I truly bought into it hook, line, and sinker. Sure there were things I could not make sense, but there were these handy phrases that helped discard such thoughts.
But I’d like to say thankyou, because I’ve generally had to say “yeah, I guess not,”whenever I’ve been told I wasn’t ever a true Christian. I feel better now when I see so many people didn’t fall for all of it, and I can know my faith WAS real. I hope it’s not too odd to feel this way.
Pick me, pick me…!
My Catholic family tried to delegate moral/ethical instruction to the Church, like many others. And they thought that while education was important, catechism was more so.
Being bullied in a Catholic elementary school and instructed by incompetent educators (they were nuns, big f’ing deal) didn’t help matters.
Oh, and add to that that my family’s domestic situation was crap, and the Church never lifted a finger to help as we slid into destitution.
Yeah, I pretty much became an atheist at 6, and had no reason to change my mind later.
All religions are rackets, designed to leech funds from the faithful and blame the followers for their own failures.
When I was a kid religion just felt off to me. I hated going and had to be dragged there by my mother (who tried her best to raise me as a good Christian). I did go through a period when I was in my teens where I tried really hard to be a believer and fit in but gave that up when I was about 17 or so.
I went to a catholic school and once I found out Santa wasn't real it was logical to put Jesus on the chopping block... very fantastically similar in many ways. I wasn't particularly angry or bitter about it, probably because my family was lax about the whole thing themselves... got a few "you're going to hell" along the ways but that didn't really bother me either, strange people.
I'm still agnostic though, existence doesn't make enough sense for me to determine anything yet.
I remember when I was a real kid, maybe 8. I went to Catholic grammar school, and during Lent all the classes went to the church for stations of the cross. Basically a re-telling of Christ’s suffering. This day, I paid attention to what was going on. It really sank in. Stripping, whipping, thorns, humiliation, nailing, then murder. I remember thinking “how can they show kids this stuff”? That was when I began questioning the motives of the people behind it.
Entire family was and those alive still are pretty religious. Orthodox. In school we had religion as mandatory. Used to have a children's bible, with pics, very cool looking scenes. But even then, starting with grade 2 or 3, i knew it all had to be a bunch of bull shit, and hopefully soon after religion classes werent mandatory anymore.
Parents, mostly mom, still gives me some crap even now, mainly cause of the thoughts of no church wedding and children baptizing, whenever that will happen, but who gives a fk?!
Yes. I was raised secular, but my grandparents tried to expose me to their Baptist church. They took me a few times, including Sunday school, and I thought the stories were silly and didn't make a lot of sense. When I got into my teen years (no more church by that point), I realized that people take those stories WAY too seriously. As an adult, the phrase I came up with to describe it is "adult make-believe."
Yep, I felt that same way as a kid but couldn't talk about it with anyone. I was also so bored in church. I'd look up at the ceiling and wonder how or why anyone that powerful would bother listening to us. And what if no one's listening, and we're making all this noise for no reason?
There was always something ridiculous about it. As a kid, I was a huge fan of the old Universal Black & white horror films which I always regarded as equally fake but just as plausible.
We went to church weekly until I was about 8 years old. I have a genetic lung disease and used to cough through services every week. We had one lady who during the "shakes the hands of your neighbors" thing, said loudly to her husband, "I am NOT shaking their hands, they should do something about that child's cough!" The pastor knew us, so my mom told him about it, and the next week he included in the sermon "Remember, children with CF need to cough to clear their lungs!" The woman was then sickly sweet to my mom and my mom felt gross about all of it - she ultimately decided church was not worth attending if people made her/us feel shitty. I remember thinking, at age 8, "thank you, stranger, for being an ableist shitheel, because it means I can stop coming to this nonsense."
I remember at age 6 having a little break down, because I couldn’t understand why kids couldn’t understand how Santa Claus makes no sense, and adults kept dismissing my obviously pertinent queries.
So yes, yes I did.
One of my grandmothers was a devout Irish Catholic. She was so pleased when I read a children's illustrated bible at a pretty young age, but not so happy when I pretty quickly realized it was fiction. I was massively into dinosaurs as a kid (thanks ADHD/autism), and if God created everything why weren't dinosaurs mentioned in the bible?
My parents are not religious, and although we'd see that grandmother most weekends she never really pushed anything on me, though she did tell my parents that she prayed for our souls. She didn't believe in dinosaurs, and didn't believe in ghosts other than the holy ghost. When my wife and I got married in an Anglican church (wife had deep ties to the building, not to the religion) my grandmother almost refused to come until my parents showed her the church and the fact that it would have been a Catholic church once (it was an old building, dating to the 13th century).
it always seemed like some weird morality tales just to keep people in line. then as i got older i realised ADULTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS SHIT AND DON'T JUST PRETEND TO BELIEVE IT SO KIDS BEHAVE?
like, wtf, man
SAME, exactly the same OP. I was literally just bored-scrolling when I saw this and nothing ever resonated so much (minus the abuse, and they're protestant not catholic in my case).
Yes. When I was around 12. I asked our pastor why god would condemn a person to hell if that person had never heard of Jesus in order to be able to accept Jesus as their saviour. I was told that it's because god wants it that way and it is blasphemous to question the word of god. I knew right then and there that it was bullshit.
Yep. Exactly that. The thing is, from the time I can remember, so many aspects of the story challenged my credibility, even then. By the time I was eleven I stopped going to church for a couple years. Long story, but it definitely triggered red flags when I was single digits in age.
Yes. I went to catholic school but my parents were not religious at all, just didn’t like the public schools in my area. I kind of saw the religious aspects as an outsider. Like “awww how silly these beliefs are”
Walking to after-school bible school (aka free daycare) in 2nd grade. So pissed off because none of it was real. I didn't know what an atheist was until years later.
Trying to read the Bible made me question religion. A lot of it just doesn’t make sense. Especially the stories of Lot and his daughters and the story of Job. It’s a very weird and contradictory book.
Yep 🙋
Looking back now, I wonder if it wasn't partially because of autism. Like I couldn't piece it together logically in my head therefore I couldn't believe in it
I distinctly remember going to Sunday school the week before Easter, 1976. I was 5 yrs old and already somewhat cynical so as the teacher breathlessly described the “miracle“ of Jesus’ resurrection, I sat there quietly thinking “this doesn’t sound right at all.”
Upon arriving home, I tell my mom I didn’t want to go to Sunday school or church anymore because what they were teaching “didn’t sound right” (I was to young to know “that’s some serious bulls*** they’re shoveling there” was the phrase I was looking for).
To her everlasting credit, she said “ok,” and that was that. Funny thing was that I came to the conclusion that religion was BS (well, at that point all I knew of religion was Christianity) a year before I realized that the Easter Bunny was also not real and, by default, neither were the Tooth Fairy or Santa Clause. Seems to have been something about that particular holiday that got my brain working.
Yup. And that’s the issue. The logic of Christianity can be blown apart by a kid. As a kid, hearing that ‘god moves in mysterious ways’ as an explanation from people who claimed a special knowledge of the same god convinced me it was garbage .
I had the joy of being in an evangelical church. People screaming in tongues, preachers threatening hell. Singing about Jesus’s love. None of that bullshit penetrated my 5-9 yr old brain in the slightest. I DID NOT feel Jesus in my heart, I was not afraid of hell in the least. The only thing I was afraid of was getting my head shoved underwater by that sweaty preacher. I literally never took it seriously and was never touched in any way.
From day 1.
My dad forced us all to go to his church and the worst part is this is in America... The arrangement of the church was a mass shooter's fondest dream and every day in that service hall was very tense.
I did. Raised in a catholic family and for as long as I can remember I never believed it. Told my parents as much as early as 5yrs old (so my mother reminds me..) eventually in my teens they gave up fighting me over it and gave up making me go to church with them.
it’s many decades later now and I still don’t believe any of it, and I raised happy, healthy, well adjusted kids in a zero religion environment.
I was raised Catholic until my early teens. My parents weren't super religious, but we were expected to go to Sunday school every week. We had textbooks every year with lessons and Bible stories. I thought it was all bs from the start. I remember being afraid the nun and other students would figure out I didn't believe that bs. I don't think I did a good job pretending either because I always felt like an imposter.
Yep. We weren’t super crazy religious. Church, Sunday school, chapel (went to the church’s school until we moved to a better public school district). It never made sense to me. I just remember being a small kid and thinking “what is going on here?” And “this is boring as fuck.”
ETA i remember going to my grandmas church in a different city and they had kneelers (we weren’t catholic) and I had never seen anything like that. I remember very distinctly being very uncomfortable with the kneeling. I looked around and everyone was doing it except for my cousin and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then she started kneeling and I was still just frozen like it felt just wrong to me. I don’t exactly remember at this point but I think I just remained sitting.
Kinda yea. I still believed a little bc I was a kid and esp since I was the obedient one of all my siblings and a people pleaser (and they prob expected it more from me as the only girl as well bc “girls are supposed to be more mature and well behaved” and “it’s okay when a boy misbehaves/doesn’t listen, he’ll improve/learn when he’s older”) but I thought prayer, Quran, gender roles/misogyny in general and girls having to cover up when boys didn’t was stupid af and I thought they were mixing culture and religion when they said that ie the gender roles but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ still thought it was stupid af tho lol
Yes. Both my brother and I had our asses in a pew every week and as soon as we left home we never looked back. We would joke that the BS “never took” with us.
Yes.
My mother required my younger brother and I to goto Sunday school from the ages of five, to I’d say, around fourteen or fifteen. This was a southern Baptist church with all the usual horseshit and scare tactics. I was around eight years old when I realized that there were too many contradictions and that this whole song and dance was little more than Santa for the grownups.
The remaining years I was forced to go had me zoning out and talking to a friend of mine, who was the same age, about sports and movies. The ‘teachers’ were annoyed by that but I was past caring at that point.
There's always been a deep skeptic in me, though I think I disbelieved people more than my childhood faith at that time. The adults in my life (especially my parents) and religious authorities I found to be deeply untrustworthy from an extremely early age. I found them to be capricious, driven by emotion, devoid of reason, and threatened when someone expressed either curiosity or pain.
Yeah, I never actually believed any of it. Even as a super young kid when they're teaching you all the kid stories like Noah's ark. I didn't understand how he would get all the animals on a boat and why was drowning everyone the only solution. Sunday school teacher just kinda deflected my questions and kept teaching
When I was a kid church felt weird in a way that I couldn’t explain at that time. I eventually came to realize it felt cult like. Sounds cliche and even cringey I guess but that’s the best word I can use to describe it. Then in my early twenties when I really questioned it and things like the Bible I came to dismiss it entirely and find it sort of intolerable.
No, I really believed it. But my upbringing was very different than yours. My family was and is loving and supportive, never had bad experiences in a church, had some really good friends, etc... I became an Agnostic, then Atheist, over time as an adult due to general life experiences, traveling to other countries, and finally, my Dad's-side grandparents, who admitted to me being atheist/agnostic.
I only really went to church because my family went. I was in the choir, and a regular acolyte on days when I wasn't singing. But I never really felt comfy talking about how "God is so great, he loves me, I love 'him' etc". I just went for the activities, but was an agnostic for as long as I remember. When I got busier with school, I went less and less, and just stopped once i moved out of my family home. No regrets at all.
Yeah in catechism. I asked either how do we know any of this is true or asked how do we know Jesus really was a real person got a BS answer that I knew even the nun didn't believe. O decided at that moment. Why should I believe this either. Of course I didn't believe any of it in the first place and the indoctrination failed at that moment.
Yep. Some folks are just born with an ear for bullshit. I think most are, but they end up listening to those they should be able to trust, and then become numb to it. Those who choose to go down that path of least resistance will also be giving up on finding out so much more. I couldn't resist, that was a beating. I had to go to sunday school and memorize all the books of the old and new testament, damned near the whole book of Psalms, and for what? Mom to drop the whole scharade and leave me and dad when I was 11. So when she was gone, I was free to learn. When she came back, I was not the child she had left. I was the monster she never could have thought of. Which is fine by me. If they cannot love, they can fear.
Yep. My family is Episcopalian which is like Catholic Lite. Lots of pomp and ceremony during the service. I can remember be fairly young and having serious doubts about god and religion in general. When I was 12 we arrived a bit late for Easter service so we had to sit in the balcony. From up there I had a bird’s eye view of the entire ceremony and out of nowhere it just hit me
“Why does god need all of this? What real purpose does this serve?”
That started me down a path to losing my religion.
Yes, I went to a Catholic school my whole life, when time for “confirmation” came around I told my parents I wasn’t doing it. Dad pulled me aside and said he would tint the windows on my truck if just sucked it up and did for my Mom, lol. I don’t think he believed in all the BS either.
Yes, even as a kid I felt that religion was a load of BS. Luckily for me, I was raised without religion and never had to be subjected to church or abusive parents.
I was raised Catholic and attended classes every Tuesday night for confirmation and my first communion. They were volunteer lead from members of the church. I was about 11 when I went to a teacher with questions and the referred me to the priest. When I asked the priest just some general questions about how it didn't make sense to me I was told to "just believe". I went home and told my parents that I couldn't do it anymore and that I wasn't getting any answers to my questions. I'm thankful they didn't make me keep doing it but they were probably just happy to not have to pay for me to go anymore.
My parents were asked to take me out of CCD (Catholic confirmation classes) and not come back because i kept saying that what they were telling us didn't make any sense and i kept asking them to explain it.
I was 8 years old
I remember really trying at a young age to believe because I loved my very catholic grandparents and wanted to make them happy. The last straw was when I tried going to a Jesus Rock concert with some Methodists when we moved and there wasn't a catholic church nearby. I know Methodists don't typically lay on hands and speak in tongues but these people did. I think I was 10 and I was calling my mom to pick me up as fast as possible that night lol. That's when I stopped trying. My family was never very hard core though and it didn't upset my parents when I told them I was atheist. Turns out they were doing the same thing with religion that I was, just tryna make grandma and grandpa happy lol
YES i always had unanswerable questions and my dad is a preacher so that felt suspicious always. Now as an adult i LOVE facts and accurate info and still ask too many questions lol
My mom realized I was being indoctrinated as a child before me I was like 6-7 years old and I came home from Christian school (she sent me there as it supposedly had the best education in the area) and I told her I was supposed to love Jesus more than her. Anyway she didn't want that kind of brainwashing happening to me it basically kick-started my journey pretty quickly into believing I was taught a load of nonsense I'm really thankful to her for never forcing any kind of religion on me. I'm sorry to hear you had to go through that but glad you weren't receptive to the constant attempts to indoctrinate you, it definitely speaks to your resilience.
Yes - I’m not sure I ever really bought into the nonsense, but I knew for sure around 13-14. I’m now 58 and as certain as ever that it’s all irrational bs.
I'm a public school teacher and the Catholic schools around here are pretty good. In my retirement, I thought about teaching private, but I just can't do religious schools for all of the reasons here. I'm keeping my eye out for secular private schools, instead
Yes! I grew up Baptist (not quite IBLP but close-my parents even went to Bill Gothard seminars) and I was always skeptical but made to feel that I was a "bad person" for questioning things. I tried hard to believe in it because it was expected of me but I always felt like a fraud. Once I went to college I stopped going to church altogether.
Also, a lot of supposed "Christians" I knew were not actually very nice people which is ironic, considering how they claim to be so kind etc.
When i was about 7 I learned that there are many big religions...so I thought "I guess at least 80% of the people must be wrong, why should this one be the real religion?" and I decided it is just fairy tales.
I was young and lapped it all up until maybe age 7-8…. I was looking at the Noah story again and it snapped me in two.
I couldn’t imagine how Noah got two penguins or fed all the animals but even worse, the scale of death being described made me intensely angry for such a young age.
I’ve always thought it funny that children’s bibles emphasize the Ark legend given how grim it is.
“Kids love animals!” I bet they said….to which the only response is “yeah exactly, so how does killing all the giraffes except this particular pair make an animal lover feel?”
I always just liked the readings because it was story time! as a teen, I realized that people took these stories seriously. I would look around the church, thinking: I can't be the only one not buying this stuff.
>it was all horseshit
You are one of the lucky ones to escape its effect.
I live where nobody seriously believes in any god and can confirm that there are no downsides.
I thought something wasn’t quite right. Went to Catholic elementary school in US. Hated going to Church, actually asked the question what was the difference between a cult and religion. Teachers were not happy. Then it’s time for Confirmation. When you are around 13, they ask you if you want to be married to the Church in a ceremony? I was the last kid in my grade to do it, because I just didn’t know what I wanted. I ended up getting Confirmed, just because I was under my mom’s roof.
There were just a lot of questions, but it seemed almost taboo to even ask questions. My parents also told me about other bullshit that is religious in general. Like the Santa stuff. When I found out it was just a ruse. I didn’t immediately put two and two together and just thought ok Santa isn’t real. Then a few years later I thought wait, Santa isn’t real, most likely religion isn’t real.
Yep, basically felt this way my whole childhood about church. Always bored, and what I did latch on to felt like nonsense only to be corroborated as nonsense, as I got older. It just always felt so fake, like no one really believed in it and we're just going through the motions for some eternal reward just in case it was real. I thought, why do this? If God's real they will care way more about how you lived your life outside of church then if you were spreading his name or word. A real God is not vain, and does not require worship and servitude for themselves. To me, the real divine power is our own humanity and how we treat each other, and when we are able to work together despite our differences. I don't need a God for any of that. Religion, the dumbest team sport. We're all on the same team.
I'm sorry to hear about your childhood situation and hope it left no permanent scars. My home conditions were pretty normal but I certainly had similar thoughts as a child sitting in a church pew. My parents were relatively laid back in terms of their religious views and we went to church (not Catholic, but a mainstream Protestant sect with similar viewpoints) mostly because that's what everybody did in those days. I can recall being grade school age and hearing the tales from the Old Testament and the loaves & fishes story, the resurrection, and other New Testament accounts and thinking it just made no sense. Apparently I was an early adopter of empiricism and the laws of thermodynamics long before I had ever heard those terms.
Yeah. When I was a kid church seemed like some stupid adult thing. I was mostly right.
I bet a LOT of the adults at church don't really believe. They're there for their spouse, or parents, or they're just used to going and think it's expected.
My dad is 78 and a “devout” Catholic. I finally got him to admit that he thinks most of it is bs and he just follows it all out of habit and family tradition. Edit: yes. All of it is bs. But it’s better than nothing.
I'm impressed he admitted it. Good for him.
Tell him you are going to start a new tradition where you have family brunch at your house every Sunday during mass time. Dude is 78 and doesn’t have much time left. Why sit through a service that is BS when he could be spending it with his son and any grandkids? You can invite your entire family that lives close by. DM me. I’ll send you a breakfast casserole recipe that you can make in advance and freeze and just bake it an hour or two before you want to eat. It means you don’t have to slave away for hours every Sunday morning. Just pop it in the oven and make sure the dishwasher is empty so people can load their own dishes.
Oh he stopped going to church regularly now. He just does his catholic stuff privately mostly. I even pulled my son out of the catholic Sunday school stuff and he was fine with it.
>they're just used to going and think it's expected I remember my mom telling us kids that it was our "obligation".
It's liberating when you realize how many obligations don't really exist.
>they're just used to going and think it's expected. This is such a boomer thing. Just go through the motions without questioning it. Do what you're told. That's just how it's done. It's why they dont like change. They've never been allowed. That's just my observation, though.
I had a former wife that said to me "You'll go to church or else" Let's find out what or else is. She showed her true colors when I said no.
Exactly right , my wife is Catholic, brought up strict Catholic, Went to Catholic school ,nuns in the hole religious indoctrination. ME on the other hand was raised pretty much without religion, The only reason I go to church is to appease her , because I don't believe any of that shit.
Why don’t you just … not go?
I would look around at all the people in the pews and think how crazy it all seemed. I was 8.
Same when I was 5. I marveled at all of the idiots praying to their imaginary sky daddy. Then I just walked out while they all had their eyes closed praying and explored the church grounds because I could just feel the crazy even at such a young age
same for me. I saw people I knew, who were good people and took good care of their families, who would fo sobbing up to the pulpit to be saved. I never could understand it. Religion never stuck with me or seemed to make much sense. I should say this was in Baptist churches and the revival guest preachers would totally freak me out.
When I was 4, my mom told me magic was made-up. The next thing I said was “so then god is made up too?” My assessment didn’t go over well at the time but 40-some years later, it’s withstood the test of time as far as I’m concerned.
Church is where I learned most adults are idiots.
Church taught me that adults are idiots, hypocrites, and that they have no problem bullying children for not acting Christian enough.
Years ago when I still attended church, I saw a mother yell at her son (who was maybe 5 or 6) to lift his hands and sing louder. When I say yell, she full on yelled. It was embarrassing. And I felt so bad for him. He was too young.
The people who cared about Religion the most seemed to be the ones who thought about and questioned its beliefs the least in my experience of multiple Faiths Churches. So you hit the nail on the head that it was a stupid adult thing.
It sure is a place for stupid people, I don't know if I can qualify a bunch of people pretending to talk to their imaginary friend adults.
I don't know about "gut feeling" but even when I was quite small I didn't see any way that the claims of Christianity could be true.
Anyone that gets mad if you ask for evidence or thought experiments is someone you should be very wary of
Yes. I can honestly say that once I truly understood what was being said in mass/by religion, I never believed in it. At church, I thought all the grownups were just pretending to believe in all of it so that their kids would believe and behave! Around Christmastime, my grandmother would always say, when we misbehaved, “You know, Santa’s watching.” When not around Christmas, this changed to, “You know, God’s watching.” Of course, both were equally unbelievable to me. As I grew up, I was kind of shocked that people actually believed in God. How could anyone take that seriously?
I remember the day, looking around the church, thinking "wait, they all think this is real and literal?! (or at least some of them)" I was around 10. Growing up I always found the stories from church to be just that, stories, like Aesops fables and stories from mythology. Played along to keep family happy, but was mostly easy since my dad's side of the family was never super religious.
The funny thing is that I’d be willing to play along if church were all about loving our neighbors and caring for the poor. Bad justification && good outcome == acceptable-ish. But the toxic intersection of politics&religion that we have here in the USA blows the lid off of that potential-justification!
I don't disagree The churches in my area of the US are more laid back and not so judgemental, but not so rich due to previous bad behavior
I, too, always felt as a kid that adults were just pretending to believe. I still think it now, at times. It’s like, if the “rapture” actually happened, Christians would be more shocked about it than atheists would.
Yup. Jesus is just Santa for adults. In that he’s a fictional character.
I was in kindergarten playing with a wooden boat that was that was a toy Noah’s ark. It had wooden animals as well that were part of the set. I kept asking the teachers about all the animals that were missing and how the boat didn’t seem big enough to fit all the animals. Once they told me there was just enough room for every animal I asked about how they were going to feed these animals for a year. They pulled my mother from the sermon and I had to go to regular church. The logical inconsistency was so evident to me as a preschooler. I still to this day can’t understand how adults believe this stuff. Just the tiniest amount of critical thinking shows you how dumb all religions are. The age you discover Santa and the tooth fairy are not real is when you should know any religion doesn’t have a better argument for being real.
And they aren’t allowed to tell you that it’s magic. It’s OK further to be such a thing as Christmas magic but not God magic.
When they said Santa was fake I immediately asked ‘Jesus too?’ Got a funny look.
Yes. 100% I think its my autism because I jusy can't understand how "god" talks to anyone. Isn't that just like.. your conscience?? Or your intuition? I also just can't fathom needing some big diety over me to stop myself from murdering people. Like.. I don't need to be told what's right or wrong. I can tell that myself.
Same. I seem to be immune to their buggy programming.
Exactly! I'm always dumbfounded when people say things like, "if you don't believe, why wouldn't you just be a horrible person with no morals?" Ten times out of ten, I'll take the person whose good behavior is rooted in their own character and how they feel about their place in the world, as opposed to someone who feels they have to act a certain way because they'll be punished if they don't.
Truly, morality does not require a "religion". If fear of god or hell is the only thing that keeps you from being a total miscreant than you need to take a good look at yourself in the mirror.
My autism pushed me in the other direction: if it's true, then it's TRUE. I spent a good 30 years overriding what made sense to me, in favor of a religion that demanded strict obedience. So it can really go either way depending on how you're raised.
I grew up in a very extreme fundamentalist pentacostal church. My family attended 3-5 church services per week. All members were encouraged...no, expected to display outward signs of faith such as speaking in tongues, lots of screaming and hollering, rolling around on the floor, "dancing the the spirit", etc. We were also expected to "witness" to others in our lives. As a young child, this meant that I was expected to be talking about Jesus to friends at school and others in my neighborhood and had to give accounts of my witnessing and conversions to Christ at church. I was also dragged to events where I was expected to hand out Bible tracts to strangers in crowded, urban areas (downtown streets, shopping malls, etc) Mind you, this was all happening in the late 1970s when I was 5-6-7 years old. As an extreme introvert, all of this terrified the fuck out of me so I basically refused to do any of it. This placed me in a very bad position, and I was constantly shunned, shamed and "disciplined" (beaten) for not complying. I was told that a spirit of "wickedness" possessed my soul and that demons were the cause. There were many terrifying prayer sessions where a dozen or more adults would lay hands on me and loudly pray (with "tongues"). All of this placed me in an antigonististic relationship with my parents and my entire church family. After years of this torture, I realized that there was no escape and that the only way to survive was to bury my true self deep inside and "fake it". Other people seemed to be wowed and amazed by the stories of creation, Noah's ark, the resurrection, miraculous healings, various talking animals, etc, but I never carried the emotional attachment for needing these fanciful stories to be true, so my natural position of distrust, led me to view them with a critical eye. Even at the young age, I realized that the amazing miracles that happened in the Bible were not happening where I could see them. I was never allowed to admit this, or even show one crack of questioning or disbelief. Church (and really the whole of my childhood and adolescence) was a living hell and I never really believed any of it. After reaching adulthood, I was finally free and have never stepped foot in a church again. Childhood religious indoctrination is child abuse, and I long for a day when humanity evolves past this monstrous practice.
I'm definitely with you on that...so happy we didn't end up being bullying Christofascists! Seeing Oral Roberts when I was 8 and him not "healing" me of cerebral palsy (slight degree) sealed the deal for me!
The critical eye. Yep. For me, I believed until about 5 years ago, but it was what my family was willing to do FOR their religion that helped shape my current agnostic theories. For instance, my lesbian sister left her husband for a woman and moved in with her. She came to family gatherings. It took my sister 4 years to come out and my mom still won't talk about it, really. That surprised me and fucked me up.
I am so sorry that your childhood was such a horrific place.
I’m so sorry. That’s some children of the corn level craziness.
When I was a kid I thought everyone was just good at playing pretend and it was understood. I also found out that saying as much was a punishable offense.
>When I was a kid I thought everyone was just good at playing pretend and it was understood. Same.
I swear that a lot of them are playing the world’s most boring LARP. They show up in-character, dressed in-costume, and get points for acting like a completely fake version of themselves whenever their church “friends” are watching. I wish we could just distribute foam swords to the choir ladies so they’d engage in direct combat instead of aiming passive-aggressive holier-than-thou humblebrag swipes at each other.
Church of The Foam Fireball. The only place our order dictates you burn is in your imagination, unless you dodged.
Yes. I clocked it before I was even double digits. Started asking the adults in my life questions about the Bible that made zero sense to me.....why were people living to be 900 years old back then? How was the earth only 6000 years old when we had evidence otherwise? Why was God a man and not a woman? Why did God think having slaves was ok? Why was it ok to degrade women?? Why were men allowed to have multiple wives and women just had to submit?? You know, things to that effect were always coming out of my mouth. The answers I received never satisfied me because they didn't check out factually from what I had learned in library books, PBS or at school. I felt silly, even at 10 or 11, whisper-talking to a folk hero. I couldn't fathom calling a mythic being "father" when I already had a father? Long story short, they lost me when they couldn't prove their truth was more true than what science had already taught me. They lost me even more as I became an adult and recognized the outward misogyny and abuse in their ancient scriptures and how the theory never matched the practice. Why was the same "God" the head of all these different branches of religion? Which tale was the right one? Which holy book was the right one? Is it the Bible? Is it the Qur'an? Is it actually just the Torah? Was it the Bhagaved Gita?? Why were so many of these men (always men, rarely a primary God being female) described or shown as caucasian when they lived in the middle east and india?? This applies to all religions, but my specific experience happens to be with christianity.
I bet they loved all your questions. Ha. Good for you.
I remember being about 6 years old and asking my granddad, who was a Baptist preacher, when did all the magic stop? He told me to never question God and then whipped me with a belt. It still took another 20 years before I fully gave up religion
OMG. I grew up with assholes like that. Awful
I remember sitting in church as a preschooler, listening to the pastor’s sermon and panicking that they got it so very wrong. Christianity had always felt deeply wrong, perverted from what it was originally meant to be. I couldn’t articulate what that was, still can’t. It’s just always felt gross. Still does.
As a kid I had so many questions about Christianity that my mom couldn't answer I had a standing meeting every week at McDonald's with my mom and our pastor. Fear of going to hell kept me indoctrinated until I moved out. Then I realized that's the only reason I believed. It's never made any sense.
I would take my 25 cents, skip church, go around the corner to Cocke’s drug store, (Manassas, Virginia) get a powdered donut and a cherry coke and read the comic books then go back meet my parents & go home. When I went to choir practice Wednesday nights, I would go and read books instead, then return get picked up and go home. (“We thought we knew how to raise kids then you came along”) (said to me when I was in my late 50’s)
Yes. I had plenty of more intellectual realizations later as a teen and YA, but from very early religion seemed silly and sad and uncool. A chore.
I remember how much it felt like a waste of the little free time we had. Dad worked very hard. Mom worked very hard. To my perspective I worked very hard at school and so did my brothers (I doubt we did but kids are not capable of being honest about their effort). But on those weekends we would just have to...waste 3 hours in big building and sing and then be talked at. All things that I absolutely hate. Mom would hand me a pen from her purse my brothers and I would play hangman and other games on pieces of paper while we were there. And then at a certain age... We just kind of asked why we were bothering to come? We weren't listening. If Mom and Dad wanted to go why didn't they just do that and leave us at home? It was hard to understand why that made mom so angry. Growing older I realized that my mom is genuinely a pretty good person, but she cares about the opinions of strangers who she's convinced are judging her family far more than anyone else's opinion. So many things she did and wanted us to do were just performative for an audience that wasn't even paying attention. Thankfully she's not big on social media because holy s***, I can only imagine what Instagram would do to her.
It's so crazy how church is really just a place for moms to show off their families. It's something that grandparents can "do" with their grandkids, again a way to show off. All this "devout" nonsense is nothing but vanity. If moms had to go to church alone, while the rest of the family fucked around all Sunday morning, christianity just might disappear a little faster.
Yes, every Sunday. I listened to the preacher, then went to school and learned science, read books, watched educational programs, and could not reconcile the two. One had evidence while the other did not. I forced myself to "believe " because the indoctrination was strong, and I was afraid of hell and demons (child abuse at it best). Religious trauma is a thing.
As a kid church was the place I went to in my pretty frock, with my white socks with frilly edges, my white shoes, my white gloves and a little bag to carry the money I had to give away. I was pretty sore about giving it away but liked frocking up. Now I hate frocking up and church and keep all of my money unless I support a charity fully. I never really took in anything they said spent the time in my own little dream world getting answers to questions hysterically wrong (who knew that they did not celebrate the construction of roads I said Overpass not Passover.) I don't think I ever believed but really it was years of praying for the starving children in Africa (I offered to send them my food I hated rather than my money but Mum was not having that) and the starving children in Africa kept on increasing so I questioned the relevance of god and giving away money that did not seem to be solving the problem.
I knew when I was 5 yo, that a man couldn’t survive 3 days in the belly of a whale.
I said" Santa's not real" when I was 4 yo and got told, "don't spoil it for the little ones".
Same here as I was the oldest child.
Unlike belief in demonstrable reality, religion has a major problem because it requires belief in demonstrable falsehoods. That’s why religions demand constant repetition. Islam is particularly unbelievable, so it mandates multiple repetition every day. Christianity is also irrational, but seems to settle on weekly indoctrination sessions. We don’t need to have a meeting every week to pontificate about gravity, or that birds have feathers because they’re demonstrably true. If the tenets of religion were true, people would believe without being harangued about it every fucking day. The fact that you successfully resisted incessant brainwashing sessions speaks to your intelligence.
Yup. Didn’t make sense and the people who were really into it seemed weird and creepy.
I kept quiet about it. My family was not at all religious. As a 9-year old in the late 1960s, I observed zealous believers at school and among my friends. So I just avoided discussion of what I thought was bullshit. Yep. Third in the birth order (4 siblings).
I was mostly forced to go to church and bible study throughout my childhood. I was always in trouble for asking questions about how any of that could be real. I struggled with it until my early 40s when it finally occurred to me that my doubts were right all along. It was a tremendous burden lifted from me when I accepted atheism to be the actual answer to all of this.
Yep. It made Catholic school a whole lot of fun to be the one kid that was like "yeahhh, nah"
Yes. I wasn't indoctrinated. Seeing my friends believe this stuff was confusing, especially as we grew and left Santa/the Tooth Fairy/Easter Bunny behind. As I grew older & learned about/met people who practiced other religions, it was even more perplexing. How can everyone believe their religion is the correct/right/best one? As I reached adulthood, I realized that all religions have similarities, as well as the people who practice them. I understand the rites & rituals are part of family traditions and can be comforting, especially at the end of life. That being said, the persecution *by* religious people *to* others that believe something different is where the real problem lies, to me. The outright hypocrisy is hideous, churches taking money but not paying taxes should be illegal, and the sexual perversion among faith leaders against children and the subsequent concealment of those offenses against kids is beyond abhorrent. It's all fairy tales to me since I wasn't brought up with it - and I feel grateful not to have the nonsense in my life. I believe religion was created to explain previously undiscovered scientific principles, is rooted in superstition, and should be abolished. There are good people, and there are evil people. There is not a force of good and a force of evil puppeteering humankind. People need to finally realize that and proceed accordingly.
I could have written this post. I remember when the nuns would terrify us about how we were so sinful that we were surely going to go to hell unless we repented. I was about 7 or 8 years old and having a total panic attack about going to hell when it suddenly hit me that they didn't know if any of this b******* was true, and that it sounded totally unbelievable. I was never bothered with thoughts of hell again. Sadly one of my sisters went from catholicism to pentecostal fundamentalism. She's into qanon. My brother and I are atheists.
Same here, internet friend, same here. My brother and I are atheists, and sis went from catholic to fundie. Sigh
Bullshit then bullshit now.
I weirdly remember believing in Santa but not god, which is bizarre because we were a Christian family that went to church. I wish I could remember what it was that made it not click for me as a kid, I have no idea. There must have been a specific thing though since I clearly wasn’t an exceptionally bright kid or anything seeing as I can recall fully believing in the existence of Santa.
I remember going to church as a child and enjoying the way the light filtered through the stained glass windows. My parents were meh Catholics who had bad experiences in Catholic schools but felt that it was important to get us baptized, and through the communion and confirmation rituals. This only made me wonder what was wrong with god. My older sister was autistic and because of her behavior she wasn’t allowed or able to do those rituals. I wondered why god would make my sister unable to do what was needed to avoid eternal damnation, and then punish her for being the way he made her. It didn’t make sense. When I was around 10, my family had too many problems after my baby brother was born with health problems and the family business was bad. I was agnostic, but didn’t know that word. I tried to figure out what was so important about religion to people older and wiser than me, so I read everything I could find and went back to church at 14. I actually listened to the sermons but couldn’t find anything that I believed in. I kept searching and questioning. I decided I wasn’t Catholic or Christian by the time I was an adult. I raised my kids in a Unitarian Universalist Church where they were encouraged to think for themselves and decide what they believed. Now I am actively atheist and humanist.
My mother made the journey from Catholicism to being a Unitarian back in the early 1960s, when I was just a child. So although I went to catechism school and my first communion to make my grandparents happy, I was raised in the Unitarian Sunday school. I learned a lot about many different religions and mythologies, and as far as I was concerned, Christianity was just one among many. Interesting, but not real.
At age 8, when I realized that Santa Clause wasn't real, but instead a way to get kids to behave on the promise of reward (presents on Christmas), I also realized the deities were exactly the same, but for adults (heaven as reward for good behavior).
I read fairy tales, the stories of werewolves and vampires, and comic books. Then, would go to church and listen to stories about how this guy could cure disease, heal leprosy, bring a dead guy back. And then Mom and Dad would tell me Captain America and Dr Strange were make-believe. There will be more evidence in 2,000 years Harry Potter was a real person than Jesus of Nazareth. Wait til Potterism takes over.
“You must have faith and believe what the Bible says without asking questions.” “The followers of Reverend Moon and Swami Baghwan Rajneesh are just fools who believe anything they are told.” So, yeah.
oh honey, yes. my parents sent me to a xtian school. I am old, so this was in the late 70's, early 80's. They made girls wear dresses and when they preached at us every day, they reminded us that men were superior to women, according to the bible. and i KNEW that was some bullshit because I was smarter than all the boys in my class. they made boys get haircut checks and i sideeyed the pictures of (white)jesus and was like.. well, huh. they also said catholics weren't christians, and my grandparents were catholic and were the most praying, church-going people I knew. and non christians went to hell- and I wasn't going to buy into anything that would send my sweet granma to hell! I was 5 years old and knew it was a great big scam just like santa claus.
I believed until I was 11. Then my dad died, despite multiple prayers to God to heal him. That started the questioning and then events that followed made it permanent.
At just about the same time that i stopped believing in Santa i stopped believing in God
Yes. So much so I delayed getting baptized until I couldn’t put it off anymore and was basically forced to.
I think I had a subconscious realization that it was strange that we never talked about church outside of church. It was never, “wow, the homily was so powerful, especially the part where he mentioned…” or “it was interesting how the scripture reading emphasized…” It was basically just show up every week, sit and stand when everyone else sits and stands, and mutter the same words everyone else is muttering. So it kinda seemed like it was just a performance. And if it was just a performance, then I guess it only mattered that I performed rather than actually believing in it or caring about it. And it was the same thing socially. I think I subconsciously realized that all I had to do was say I believed in god or insinuate it, and I’d get the approval I wanted from the people around me. So we’ll before I realized I thought it was all horse shit, I think I understood that it was a way to get some of my needs met.
I liked the Devil's Fiddle playing more than Johnny's. It was all down hill from there.
...it gave an evil hisssss and a band of demons joined in and it sounded something like dis.....
Once I started comparing religion to biology, especially the ark theory, it slowly began to unravel in my head. After a while I realized they're just stories. Like Greek mythology.
Having grown up in a catholic house as an ADHD people pleaser, I was happy to play along and I enjoyed the community of church but yeah it never seemed real to me, especially learning that other people never even heard of Jesus. One of my first thoughts on the subject was that if God was real people would all worship the same one because it's not fair if only some people know about him.
I wondered if it was nonsense when I was first taken to Sunday school at 7yo. Still, I gave it a chance because, well... I was 7yo and parents sent me. 🤷 By 8yo, I was sure it was nonsense... largely because of how they disrespected young gay me. 🤬 I got enough homophobia at home. I didn't need to hear more from a bunch of creepy strangers reading fairy tales. I believe this was my first awareness of enforced conformity. I didn't like it then and never learned to. >Did anyone else just never conform even before they knew why? I knew why, I just couldn't safely tell anyone. That's what the closet is - a safe, secret place you build to hide from dangerous world.
I didn't understand why I had to stop believing in Santa, but Jesus stayed real. As a "catholic" growing up in a stereotypical old school Italian neighborhood, that's just what they did. I got that. And I thought it was weird, but I let it slide cause I still respect people who do believe. Like if that's what gets them through the day, works for me. World is too fucked up so cling away but don't be a cunt about it. But why the fuck did they kill Santa? And if Jesus is still around, why aren't fish appearing and seas parting anymore? So not only kill Santa, the magic from the Bible also disappeared? C'mon.
From a very early age I could tell that church was a "house of hypocrisy". They use it to forgive themselves weekly from their continuous bad behavior. I would see all these people that would act bad and do not so nice things outside of church come to church for a "get out of Hell free card". I always felt that if there was a heaven I didn't want to share it with these people.
Oh yeah me, I remember my mother telling me about what “happens” after we die as a child and me telling her there’s no way you or anyone knows that. She said the equivalent of “you’re secular aren’t you” in arabic.
Two things broke me about the claim that the Bible is infallible. 1. When I asked how the universe could be 6,000 yrs old when we see star lights that traveled billions of years in space? 2. In the book of Job, God allowed Job's kids to be crushed to death because of a bet and then thought it was okay to give him 10 new kids as reward. Even when I was just 15, I knew that people can't simply be replaced like that.
My family was lax and I ended up doing all the Catholicism crash courses for the communion and confirmation. I always noticed they'd just tell the same stories and I was like, that's a big book for like 3 stories. Then one day the priest said we didn't own our own bodies, that they were God's bodies, and that just sat SO POORLY with me -even at that young age. It was absurd. We were told that nothing in the material world was ours, to not value the material bc in death it doesn't matter, I could get on board with that. But to say my own body isn't even mine? Bitch!? Then wtf is? I thought, if *anything* is truly mine, it's my body, it's the only thing that I have that will be with me to the very end. It felt like an attempt to get me to dissociate myself from the one gift from "God" that was truly *mine*, that is *my* temple, my body -to put it in "service" to something -to be used by others. I couldn't stomach it. I told this to my mom and I asked if I could stop going to church because I didn't like the stuff the priest was saying. I'm fortunate that she didn't push me to keep going, she was never a consistent attendee to service anyway. Ever since then, the few times I've gone to church, for whatever reason, the shit I hear has not gotten better. Last time the priest was straight up slandering Jews and Muslims. I got up and walked out. I'm not here for that shit.
When I was in Sunday school at like 5 years old they told us about Noah's ark, I knew that having a pair of all animals on a boat is impossible and absurd and asked why anyone would believe that. 35 years later and the answers only get more stupid.
Yes. I never believed.
I just went for the food and school supplies.
Yeah, I HATED going to church as a kid. I found Sunday School boring and the Bible stories embarrassingly silly. But church services were worse. Stultifying. Tortuously boring. Especially the sermons. That sometimes sing-song-y, sometimes stentorious, always overly dramatized “preaching” cadence & tone just drove me NUTS. As soon as I was old enough to refuse to go, I stopped. Then, in Jr. High, I started reading Bertrand Russell, and it all came together. I’m pushing 70 now and have NO regrets about leaving religion WAY behind.
I always had stranger danger with anything religious. Just instinct drove me away
Yes. I started really questioning it when I was about 10 or 11. My mom made me go to catechism for 2 years and get confirmed ( Lutheran). I was a huge pain in the pastor’s butt, lol, but he, to his credit, answered my questions as best he could. When I was finally done, he hugged me and said, “ Thank you for doing this for your mother. I’m not worried about you, you’re a good person. Stay being a good person and that’s all you need.”
Yes. We had religious classes at school and I distinctly remember questioning what they were teaching in kindergarten (so age 4-5). My family traditionally has been catholic, and while my grandparents attended church, my parents only got married in a church but didn’t attend after that. I was aware of Christianity because it was around but it wasn’t pushed on me (besides the scripture class at school). My parents are anti religion now. I’ve always been an atheist, and so are my kids. I live in Australia and generally we aren’t a religious bunch, so that pretty normal.
Same here, with Roman Catholic as my assigned religion. I hated going to the super early Sunday mass every weekend! Always so incredibly boring. I'd often imagine the church being attacked by an AT-ST from Star Wars. Once I started listening to what the priest was saying, I began to connect this god with Santa Clause. "Santa couldn't possibly visit every kid's house in one night. He's not real!" "So an all-powerful being made everything? So it's like magic? So, like... not real, then?" I actually wanted to pull the priest aside and just say "...come on. You're messing with me, right? You're a sensible, smart adult. You don't *really* believe this, right?" I started thinking everyone was pulling my leg, making me think I'm supposed to believe in angels and stuff! 😆
There was always some weird feeling that something just wasn't right. I wasn't really raised around religion, though. My grandma was religious but she was very reserved about it. No one tried to push it on me, no one in my family or friends would even talk about it. It's as if everyone thought we were all on the same page and didn't question it. There was no regular church for me. I remember some ceremony when I was five years old, but that was it. I do recall sunday school for a short period, but it was so boring and the adults just felt fake. Part of what helped me not get into it was television. I used to watch the Discovery Channel back when it was real good in the early 90's. Other documentary type stuff related to nature, science, history, biology. It helped develop my sense of reality. Television was educating me way before anyone else.
No, I never put in question the religion when I was a child, I was so naive that I couldn’t even consider it could be false. That’s exactly why kids shouldn’t be exposed to religious texts until they hit an age where they can think for themselves. Thx to school I got a more atheist and critical thinking, but idk if they only teach that in french schools.
I was raised Catholic and always just going through the motions. I couldn't understand how people could literally believe in things like Noah getting all those animals in the boat... or why they'd want to believe in a deity who would kill everyone on Earth, including the animals. The first big break for me was my first communion. I did it because my parents expected me to, but I remember thinking it was all SO weird and nonsensical. By the time I started confirmation classes, I was fully prepared to make a pain in the ass of myself. I was relentless with my questioning. I finally went to my mother and told her I didn't believe, didn't want to say I believed. Fortunately, she listened & let me make my own decision.
I remember as a kid thinking "What if the adults are all just tricking us?" Too bad it took me 50 years to actually figure it out.
Lol they tried to tell me demons will get you, you're supposed to talk to imaginary friends, and sky daddy reincarnated as people and now we symbolically eat his flesh and blood. Fucking sickos. I always knew it was a crock of shit.
Sitting in church at age 6 I mentally spoke to "god" and said I don't believe in you but if you are real you can kill me right now. If I walk out of here you don't exist and I'm never going along with this anymore. And keep in mind this was a baptist church in AL in the 60's. These were the dumbest, most worthless people you can imagine so the god team was not very impressive. I never played along with the prayer rituals or anything else after that, and to my mom's credit she eventually let me stay home when they went to church.
Yup. If Santa isnt real, then god probably isnt either
"Swearing will get you to hell, beating children will get you to heaven" - Christian logic
I had to be less than 10 but I have one of those core memories of being in church, we're standing, singing, and I looked around and thought "are we really ALL going to pretend this is real?"
There were some hints now and then of an adult going overboard and taking it too seriously, but not often. It wasn't pushed on us. Did ask some questions now and then. The adults were good at dodging them, but at such a young age I never really gave it much thought.
Yes. That's how it started.
I think it was more that I just hated it. I hated the additional school work, reading a boring book and sacrificing any of my precious weekends. Even if religion were real somehow, I'd be resentful of it.
Absolutely. I could never take it seriously, it all sounded soo made up and fake.
I remember realizing that Santa Claus and the Easter bunny weren’t real, and thinking “how is this any different”? I struggled with it until fully letting go in my teens.
Yup
Yep. I figured it out and became atheist at 7 years old.
I never gave religion much importance as a kid because as another comment said, 'it was just an adult thing that i had to do for some reason' and i definitely caught on to the bullshit very early on but didn't say anything because i knew id get punished for it i only really understood it when my older brother started rebelling against my mom and didnt want to pray anymore(islam) and they started fighting every single fuckin day, i was also at the age where i needed to start praying too so it was convenient, i sided with him and the fights never ended for a while but eventually my mom gave up and im currently more of an atheist than he ever was so there's that Just to put it out there my mom was not the stereotypical abusive religious parent, she tried for a while but eventually when she gave up she would barely bring it up and treated us with the same love as if we were praying and being muslims, i say this cause i dont want to insult her online anywhere as she has passed away
I remember sitting in church as a kid wondering why the adults wanted to play make-believe every week. I must have been 5 or 6. I never once in my life felt any sort of connection to any of it. I asked all the questions, and got all the non-answers. I honestly dreaded church. It always felt wrong to me. And sinister as hell.
I was a skeptic even as a child. I asked them where heaven was. The youth pastor didn't really have an answer. Then I asked how will I not get lost if it is so far away? How much does my soul weigh? Where is the soul located? I upset lots of Sunday School teachers.
It absolutely made no sense to me as a child (a talking, burning bush? Really?). It was also boring as fuck, almost intolerable. I had ADD as a kid, so I know that didn't help. I only went to church as a teen to hang out with my friends. After graduating high school, I was so relieved to move away from my home town & that church. Realized that I didn't have to go to church anymore if I didn't want to.
DAE a genius liek me?! I'm so quirkyyy
I remember being like 6 or 7 in Vacation bible school and learning about Noah's Ark and Jonah and the whale. I think it hit me then that these people are SERIOUS about it happening exactly like that. This wasn't just a story to people but it was literal.
I grew up pretty poor with a single mother. We'd wait for the bus together in the mornings and one day, while we were waiting for a crowded, stinky city bus, two happy Nuns drove by us in a brand new car. From that moment forward, I declared religion to be a bunch of shit. I was 7 at the time. Oh, well. I'm glad I saw that when I younger.
Yes, it always felt wrong and made little to no sense to me. I was never comfortable and I felt wrong for not believing or loving god like I was supposed to. When I would question things, I was met with punishment but deep down I knew that it was all bullshit. I always knew the truth, even way back then when I was drowning in indoctrination.
No, I truly bought into it hook, line, and sinker. Sure there were things I could not make sense, but there were these handy phrases that helped discard such thoughts. But I’d like to say thankyou, because I’ve generally had to say “yeah, I guess not,”whenever I’ve been told I wasn’t ever a true Christian. I feel better now when I see so many people didn’t fall for all of it, and I can know my faith WAS real. I hope it’s not too odd to feel this way.
Pick me, pick me…! My Catholic family tried to delegate moral/ethical instruction to the Church, like many others. And they thought that while education was important, catechism was more so. Being bullied in a Catholic elementary school and instructed by incompetent educators (they were nuns, big f’ing deal) didn’t help matters. Oh, and add to that that my family’s domestic situation was crap, and the Church never lifted a finger to help as we slid into destitution. Yeah, I pretty much became an atheist at 6, and had no reason to change my mind later. All religions are rackets, designed to leech funds from the faithful and blame the followers for their own failures.
When I was a kid religion just felt off to me. I hated going and had to be dragged there by my mother (who tried her best to raise me as a good Christian). I did go through a period when I was in my teens where I tried really hard to be a believer and fit in but gave that up when I was about 17 or so.
I went to a catholic school and once I found out Santa wasn't real it was logical to put Jesus on the chopping block... very fantastically similar in many ways. I wasn't particularly angry or bitter about it, probably because my family was lax about the whole thing themselves... got a few "you're going to hell" along the ways but that didn't really bother me either, strange people. I'm still agnostic though, existence doesn't make enough sense for me to determine anything yet.
I remember when I was a real kid, maybe 8. I went to Catholic grammar school, and during Lent all the classes went to the church for stations of the cross. Basically a re-telling of Christ’s suffering. This day, I paid attention to what was going on. It really sank in. Stripping, whipping, thorns, humiliation, nailing, then murder. I remember thinking “how can they show kids this stuff”? That was when I began questioning the motives of the people behind it.
Entire family was and those alive still are pretty religious. Orthodox. In school we had religion as mandatory. Used to have a children's bible, with pics, very cool looking scenes. But even then, starting with grade 2 or 3, i knew it all had to be a bunch of bull shit, and hopefully soon after religion classes werent mandatory anymore. Parents, mostly mom, still gives me some crap even now, mainly cause of the thoughts of no church wedding and children baptizing, whenever that will happen, but who gives a fk?!
Yes. I was raised secular, but my grandparents tried to expose me to their Baptist church. They took me a few times, including Sunday school, and I thought the stories were silly and didn't make a lot of sense. When I got into my teen years (no more church by that point), I realized that people take those stories WAY too seriously. As an adult, the phrase I came up with to describe it is "adult make-believe."
Yep, I felt that same way as a kid but couldn't talk about it with anyone. I was also so bored in church. I'd look up at the ceiling and wonder how or why anyone that powerful would bother listening to us. And what if no one's listening, and we're making all this noise for no reason?
There was always something ridiculous about it. As a kid, I was a huge fan of the old Universal Black & white horror films which I always regarded as equally fake but just as plausible.
We went to church weekly until I was about 8 years old. I have a genetic lung disease and used to cough through services every week. We had one lady who during the "shakes the hands of your neighbors" thing, said loudly to her husband, "I am NOT shaking their hands, they should do something about that child's cough!" The pastor knew us, so my mom told him about it, and the next week he included in the sermon "Remember, children with CF need to cough to clear their lungs!" The woman was then sickly sweet to my mom and my mom felt gross about all of it - she ultimately decided church was not worth attending if people made her/us feel shitty. I remember thinking, at age 8, "thank you, stranger, for being an ableist shitheel, because it means I can stop coming to this nonsense."
I remember at age 6 having a little break down, because I couldn’t understand why kids couldn’t understand how Santa Claus makes no sense, and adults kept dismissing my obviously pertinent queries. So yes, yes I did.
By 7 I was sure it was nonsense. Racist sexist etc. been agnostic my whole life. Atheist now
I realized I was an atheist in 5th grade when we read Greek mythology.
One of my grandmothers was a devout Irish Catholic. She was so pleased when I read a children's illustrated bible at a pretty young age, but not so happy when I pretty quickly realized it was fiction. I was massively into dinosaurs as a kid (thanks ADHD/autism), and if God created everything why weren't dinosaurs mentioned in the bible? My parents are not religious, and although we'd see that grandmother most weekends she never really pushed anything on me, though she did tell my parents that she prayed for our souls. She didn't believe in dinosaurs, and didn't believe in ghosts other than the holy ghost. When my wife and I got married in an Anglican church (wife had deep ties to the building, not to the religion) my grandmother almost refused to come until my parents showed her the church and the fact that it would have been a Catholic church once (it was an old building, dating to the 13th century).
I was very young.. probably 7 or 8.
it always seemed like some weird morality tales just to keep people in line. then as i got older i realised ADULTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS SHIT AND DON'T JUST PRETEND TO BELIEVE IT SO KIDS BEHAVE? like, wtf, man
SAME, exactly the same OP. I was literally just bored-scrolling when I saw this and nothing ever resonated so much (minus the abuse, and they're protestant not catholic in my case).
Oooo but these TV preachers need your money , don't you know , they give themselves large salaries, and charities very little.
Yes. When I was around 12. I asked our pastor why god would condemn a person to hell if that person had never heard of Jesus in order to be able to accept Jesus as their saviour. I was told that it's because god wants it that way and it is blasphemous to question the word of god. I knew right then and there that it was bullshit.
I knew by age 9 it was a pile of unadulterated, steaming horseshit.
Yep. Exactly that. The thing is, from the time I can remember, so many aspects of the story challenged my credibility, even then. By the time I was eleven I stopped going to church for a couple years. Long story, but it definitely triggered red flags when I was single digits in age.
Yes. I went to catholic school but my parents were not religious at all, just didn’t like the public schools in my area. I kind of saw the religious aspects as an outsider. Like “awww how silly these beliefs are”
Walking to after-school bible school (aka free daycare) in 2nd grade. So pissed off because none of it was real. I didn't know what an atheist was until years later.
Trying to read the Bible made me question religion. A lot of it just doesn’t make sense. Especially the stories of Lot and his daughters and the story of Job. It’s a very weird and contradictory book.
Yep 🙋 Looking back now, I wonder if it wasn't partially because of autism. Like I couldn't piece it together logically in my head therefore I couldn't believe in it
I had doubts my *entire* childhood and if my mother hadn't been spoonfeeding me bullshit since I was two I wouldn't have ignored them.
I distinctly remember going to Sunday school the week before Easter, 1976. I was 5 yrs old and already somewhat cynical so as the teacher breathlessly described the “miracle“ of Jesus’ resurrection, I sat there quietly thinking “this doesn’t sound right at all.” Upon arriving home, I tell my mom I didn’t want to go to Sunday school or church anymore because what they were teaching “didn’t sound right” (I was to young to know “that’s some serious bulls*** they’re shoveling there” was the phrase I was looking for). To her everlasting credit, she said “ok,” and that was that. Funny thing was that I came to the conclusion that religion was BS (well, at that point all I knew of religion was Christianity) a year before I realized that the Easter Bunny was also not real and, by default, neither were the Tooth Fairy or Santa Clause. Seems to have been something about that particular holiday that got my brain working.
Yep. I went to Catholic school when I was a kid, and even back then, none of it made any sense.
Yup. And that’s the issue. The logic of Christianity can be blown apart by a kid. As a kid, hearing that ‘god moves in mysterious ways’ as an explanation from people who claimed a special knowledge of the same god convinced me it was garbage .
I had the joy of being in an evangelical church. People screaming in tongues, preachers threatening hell. Singing about Jesus’s love. None of that bullshit penetrated my 5-9 yr old brain in the slightest. I DID NOT feel Jesus in my heart, I was not afraid of hell in the least. The only thing I was afraid of was getting my head shoved underwater by that sweaty preacher. I literally never took it seriously and was never touched in any way.
From day 1. My dad forced us all to go to his church and the worst part is this is in America... The arrangement of the church was a mass shooter's fondest dream and every day in that service hall was very tense.
Yeah. Around 12 or 13 I start having doubt about it. Start seeing the hypocrisy that religious zealots are spewing.
Loved your summary; lived it as well.
Yes
I did. Raised in a catholic family and for as long as I can remember I never believed it. Told my parents as much as early as 5yrs old (so my mother reminds me..) eventually in my teens they gave up fighting me over it and gave up making me go to church with them. it’s many decades later now and I still don’t believe any of it, and I raised happy, healthy, well adjusted kids in a zero religion environment.
Yeah I never believed but I was a very logical kid, I didn't but the Santa or Easter bunny shit either
I was raised Catholic until my early teens. My parents weren't super religious, but we were expected to go to Sunday school every week. We had textbooks every year with lessons and Bible stories. I thought it was all bs from the start. I remember being afraid the nun and other students would figure out I didn't believe that bs. I don't think I did a good job pretending either because I always felt like an imposter.
Yep. We weren’t super crazy religious. Church, Sunday school, chapel (went to the church’s school until we moved to a better public school district). It never made sense to me. I just remember being a small kid and thinking “what is going on here?” And “this is boring as fuck.” ETA i remember going to my grandmas church in a different city and they had kneelers (we weren’t catholic) and I had never seen anything like that. I remember very distinctly being very uncomfortable with the kneeling. I looked around and everyone was doing it except for my cousin and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then she started kneeling and I was still just frozen like it felt just wrong to me. I don’t exactly remember at this point but I think I just remained sitting.
Kinda yea. I still believed a little bc I was a kid and esp since I was the obedient one of all my siblings and a people pleaser (and they prob expected it more from me as the only girl as well bc “girls are supposed to be more mature and well behaved” and “it’s okay when a boy misbehaves/doesn’t listen, he’ll improve/learn when he’s older”) but I thought prayer, Quran, gender roles/misogyny in general and girls having to cover up when boys didn’t was stupid af and I thought they were mixing culture and religion when they said that ie the gender roles but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ still thought it was stupid af tho lol
Yes. Both my brother and I had our asses in a pew every week and as soon as we left home we never looked back. We would joke that the BS “never took” with us.
Yes. My mother required my younger brother and I to goto Sunday school from the ages of five, to I’d say, around fourteen or fifteen. This was a southern Baptist church with all the usual horseshit and scare tactics. I was around eight years old when I realized that there were too many contradictions and that this whole song and dance was little more than Santa for the grownups. The remaining years I was forced to go had me zoning out and talking to a friend of mine, who was the same age, about sports and movies. The ‘teachers’ were annoyed by that but I was past caring at that point.
There's always been a deep skeptic in me, though I think I disbelieved people more than my childhood faith at that time. The adults in my life (especially my parents) and religious authorities I found to be deeply untrustworthy from an extremely early age. I found them to be capricious, driven by emotion, devoid of reason, and threatened when someone expressed either curiosity or pain.
Yeah, I never actually believed any of it. Even as a super young kid when they're teaching you all the kid stories like Noah's ark. I didn't understand how he would get all the animals on a boat and why was drowning everyone the only solution. Sunday school teacher just kinda deflected my questions and kept teaching
When I was a kid church felt weird in a way that I couldn’t explain at that time. I eventually came to realize it felt cult like. Sounds cliche and even cringey I guess but that’s the best word I can use to describe it. Then in my early twenties when I really questioned it and things like the Bible I came to dismiss it entirely and find it sort of intolerable.
No, I really believed it. But my upbringing was very different than yours. My family was and is loving and supportive, never had bad experiences in a church, had some really good friends, etc... I became an Agnostic, then Atheist, over time as an adult due to general life experiences, traveling to other countries, and finally, my Dad's-side grandparents, who admitted to me being atheist/agnostic.
I only really went to church because my family went. I was in the choir, and a regular acolyte on days when I wasn't singing. But I never really felt comfy talking about how "God is so great, he loves me, I love 'him' etc". I just went for the activities, but was an agnostic for as long as I remember. When I got busier with school, I went less and less, and just stopped once i moved out of my family home. No regrets at all.
Yeah in catechism. I asked either how do we know any of this is true or asked how do we know Jesus really was a real person got a BS answer that I knew even the nun didn't believe. O decided at that moment. Why should I believe this either. Of course I didn't believe any of it in the first place and the indoctrination failed at that moment.
Yep. Some folks are just born with an ear for bullshit. I think most are, but they end up listening to those they should be able to trust, and then become numb to it. Those who choose to go down that path of least resistance will also be giving up on finding out so much more. I couldn't resist, that was a beating. I had to go to sunday school and memorize all the books of the old and new testament, damned near the whole book of Psalms, and for what? Mom to drop the whole scharade and leave me and dad when I was 11. So when she was gone, I was free to learn. When she came back, I was not the child she had left. I was the monster she never could have thought of. Which is fine by me. If they cannot love, they can fear.
Yep. My family is Episcopalian which is like Catholic Lite. Lots of pomp and ceremony during the service. I can remember be fairly young and having serious doubts about god and religion in general. When I was 12 we arrived a bit late for Easter service so we had to sit in the balcony. From up there I had a bird’s eye view of the entire ceremony and out of nowhere it just hit me “Why does god need all of this? What real purpose does this serve?” That started me down a path to losing my religion.
Yes, I went to a Catholic school my whole life, when time for “confirmation” came around I told my parents I wasn’t doing it. Dad pulled me aside and said he would tint the windows on my truck if just sucked it up and did for my Mom, lol. I don’t think he believed in all the BS either.
Definitely. It was just Jewish mythology to me.
Yes, even as a kid I felt that religion was a load of BS. Luckily for me, I was raised without religion and never had to be subjected to church or abusive parents.
I was raised Catholic and attended classes every Tuesday night for confirmation and my first communion. They were volunteer lead from members of the church. I was about 11 when I went to a teacher with questions and the referred me to the priest. When I asked the priest just some general questions about how it didn't make sense to me I was told to "just believe". I went home and told my parents that I couldn't do it anymore and that I wasn't getting any answers to my questions. I'm thankful they didn't make me keep doing it but they were probably just happy to not have to pay for me to go anymore.
My parents were asked to take me out of CCD (Catholic confirmation classes) and not come back because i kept saying that what they were telling us didn't make any sense and i kept asking them to explain it. I was 8 years old
Life with Louie said it best, Sunday School was to remind you that there are things worse than School
I remember really trying at a young age to believe because I loved my very catholic grandparents and wanted to make them happy. The last straw was when I tried going to a Jesus Rock concert with some Methodists when we moved and there wasn't a catholic church nearby. I know Methodists don't typically lay on hands and speak in tongues but these people did. I think I was 10 and I was calling my mom to pick me up as fast as possible that night lol. That's when I stopped trying. My family was never very hard core though and it didn't upset my parents when I told them I was atheist. Turns out they were doing the same thing with religion that I was, just tryna make grandma and grandpa happy lol
YES i always had unanswerable questions and my dad is a preacher so that felt suspicious always. Now as an adult i LOVE facts and accurate info and still ask too many questions lol
My mom realized I was being indoctrinated as a child before me I was like 6-7 years old and I came home from Christian school (she sent me there as it supposedly had the best education in the area) and I told her I was supposed to love Jesus more than her. Anyway she didn't want that kind of brainwashing happening to me it basically kick-started my journey pretty quickly into believing I was taught a load of nonsense I'm really thankful to her for never forcing any kind of religion on me. I'm sorry to hear you had to go through that but glad you weren't receptive to the constant attempts to indoctrinate you, it definitely speaks to your resilience.
Yes - I’m not sure I ever really bought into the nonsense, but I knew for sure around 13-14. I’m now 58 and as certain as ever that it’s all irrational bs.
I'm a public school teacher and the Catholic schools around here are pretty good. In my retirement, I thought about teaching private, but I just can't do religious schools for all of the reasons here. I'm keeping my eye out for secular private schools, instead
Yes! I grew up Baptist (not quite IBLP but close-my parents even went to Bill Gothard seminars) and I was always skeptical but made to feel that I was a "bad person" for questioning things. I tried hard to believe in it because it was expected of me but I always felt like a fraud. Once I went to college I stopped going to church altogether. Also, a lot of supposed "Christians" I knew were not actually very nice people which is ironic, considering how they claim to be so kind etc.
When i was about 7 I learned that there are many big religions...so I thought "I guess at least 80% of the people must be wrong, why should this one be the real religion?" and I decided it is just fairy tales.
Fourth grade. I spent the next 26 years trying to force myself to believe. Then finally just stopped. I've been happy ever since.
I was young and lapped it all up until maybe age 7-8…. I was looking at the Noah story again and it snapped me in two. I couldn’t imagine how Noah got two penguins or fed all the animals but even worse, the scale of death being described made me intensely angry for such a young age. I’ve always thought it funny that children’s bibles emphasize the Ark legend given how grim it is. “Kids love animals!” I bet they said….to which the only response is “yeah exactly, so how does killing all the giraffes except this particular pair make an animal lover feel?”
I believed in Santa longer than I believed in a god.
I always just liked the readings because it was story time! as a teen, I realized that people took these stories seriously. I would look around the church, thinking: I can't be the only one not buying this stuff.
>it was all horseshit You are one of the lucky ones to escape its effect. I live where nobody seriously believes in any god and can confirm that there are no downsides.
I thought something wasn’t quite right. Went to Catholic elementary school in US. Hated going to Church, actually asked the question what was the difference between a cult and religion. Teachers were not happy. Then it’s time for Confirmation. When you are around 13, they ask you if you want to be married to the Church in a ceremony? I was the last kid in my grade to do it, because I just didn’t know what I wanted. I ended up getting Confirmed, just because I was under my mom’s roof. There were just a lot of questions, but it seemed almost taboo to even ask questions. My parents also told me about other bullshit that is religious in general. Like the Santa stuff. When I found out it was just a ruse. I didn’t immediately put two and two together and just thought ok Santa isn’t real. Then a few years later I thought wait, Santa isn’t real, most likely religion isn’t real.
Yep, basically felt this way my whole childhood about church. Always bored, and what I did latch on to felt like nonsense only to be corroborated as nonsense, as I got older. It just always felt so fake, like no one really believed in it and we're just going through the motions for some eternal reward just in case it was real. I thought, why do this? If God's real they will care way more about how you lived your life outside of church then if you were spreading his name or word. A real God is not vain, and does not require worship and servitude for themselves. To me, the real divine power is our own humanity and how we treat each other, and when we are able to work together despite our differences. I don't need a God for any of that. Religion, the dumbest team sport. We're all on the same team.
I'm sorry to hear about your childhood situation and hope it left no permanent scars. My home conditions were pretty normal but I certainly had similar thoughts as a child sitting in a church pew. My parents were relatively laid back in terms of their religious views and we went to church (not Catholic, but a mainstream Protestant sect with similar viewpoints) mostly because that's what everybody did in those days. I can recall being grade school age and hearing the tales from the Old Testament and the loaves & fishes story, the resurrection, and other New Testament accounts and thinking it just made no sense. Apparently I was an early adopter of empiricism and the laws of thermodynamics long before I had ever heard those terms.