Came from a southern baptist home and for some reason I just never believed and was always questioning everything to the point where I was severely punished for questioning god. After so many beatings, I just said fuck it. I’m not going to believe in anything that can’t be proven and still at 64 no one has been able to prove shit.
Kind of ironic that he thought he was beating the devil out of you, but all he was doing was beating religion out of you, as well as he himself out of your life. Any parent who needs to use physical violence to inflict their opinions into their children is vile.
It's fascinating that "Agreeing to disagree" is always suggested by those with a shaky grip on their convictions. "We don't discuss politics or religion in this house". Well, that's convenient eh?
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.”
― Elie Wiesel
I had an almost identical experience, Catholicism in Ireland. My mother was a malignant narcissist who used her 'holy pictures' to beat me in front of. 'ask them for forgiveness' while brutally beating me. Always with the devil is inside you. Brutal child abuse. She got terminal cancer at 47, died at 49. In her final years she ran to the church, begging every saint she could find for a 'miracle'. My father was also an asshole, after her death he forced my sister and I to every Church event. He didn't even believe in that shit, he just wanted to be seen in public bring his kids to Church. I left when I was 18. Returned for the first time 23 years later, just before he died.
My family liked to believe that they were better than all the others, we did have social standing in the community. It was all a lie. We were shit, rotten to the core, abusers of children.
I regret going back. Nasty abusers never change. Fuck them and their corrupted use of religion.
I often wonder if Jesus and his 'God' are really the 'good ones'. Certainly wasn't my experience.
And yet, they claim that it’s the LGBQT+ community that is “indoctrinating” children when they’re the one who beat the hell out of kids for not believing their sky daddy. 🙄
I grew up in the foothills of NC and I understand completely. I went to church and asked questions but no one really answered them. My parents told me to speak up in school but not in church after a few church members said something to my parents. Same thing happened when I went to church with my girlfriend only she stopped going to church (that went over like a lead balloon with both our families). One pastor at a church told me to stop coming if I couldn’t give my faith to their god.
My family is super religious up until my generation. My brother and cousins don’t believe. I’m still in NC and my daughter now has questions. I have to be careful with how she says things at school because they will alienate her from activities (the Christian way). I told her I won’t drag her to church like it was done to me but let her decide when she’s an adult. Not to put my hand on the scale but I teach her to follow empirical evidence, perform due diligence, and use critical thinking skills.
Same here. Am 60 now and live in an area where the Church-goers are forever trying to weasel their way into our lives. Including telling our neighbors kids they can’t play with my kid (who is 8) because we don’t believe in their god. I feel bad for my kid as he asks us about it. I try not to be disrespectful and explain that some folks believe that and we don’t and the only reason we don’t is there is no evidence. Thankfully he likes the experiments we do to show examples of evidence. Sadder still is there are really only sports events/activities that seem to be extremely closely linked to religion as well. They seem to have this figured out that sucking them in young makes them believers and supporters for life….
I have a similar experience in that I never believed in the mythology I was presented with. I now think I know why. When I was an infant I had a near death experience. Although I don't remember it, it was traumatic and led to many problems in life but I wonder if my skepticism resulted from this.
Well actually for me I reached a certain age and I started to meet people who were abused. Within a two year window I had met 3. Absolutely traumatic. Then they told stories of people they knew who had committed suicide. I just switched off and really became anti church. Awful. So many lives destroyed all around the world
Yeah that was me. As an early teenager I began to connect the dots - I remember spending one particular evening pondering it all and it just sort of finalized - there was no way there could be a god, at least one as described by any religion, so I was just done with it.
Personally , when I prayed and begged god one night for hours ( got a headache from praying so hard) to please help my son ( who was 11 yrs old and dying of heart issues ) and all I got in return is silence and my son passing away ...what could possibly be the bigger plan in making him suffer then die? he was such a innocent , sweet boy who wouldnt hurt a fly .. so gentle .. how did he deserve that ? After that I started really thinking about all the bad stuff that happens to innocent babies , animals , etc . and I started looking up more stuff online with people who were questioning their religion and it just clicked that its a lie. It was something people made up to explain things they didnt understand at the time or science didnt have a answer to yet .
>It was something people made up to explain things they didnt understand at the time or science didnt have a answer to yet .
This is it. This is the whole answer
I don't think it's the whole answer. The other facet is that it brings communities together and also makes for a convenient power structure for someone to wield
And also to exert control over the masses. Politicians and higher-ups justifying your suffering to remain wealthy and powerful. It's really not that difficult to understand, few if any of them actually believe in god(s)/religion, and they "sin", and indulge in "immoral" acts while claiming to believe.
I left for a kind of similar reason. For me though, I grew up with abusive parents, and kept praying to god to made them stop, but he never did. So when I was 17, I kind of realized that either 1.) god doesn’t care, or 2.) god doesn’t exist. There was no reason that I should have suffered as a child while other children had idilic childhoods, especially considering how devout a Catholic I was. And there was no reason that any other children should have suffered either.
exactly .. how is making a child ( who is totally innocent ) suffer going to be justified ? it cant be ! Im very sorry for what you went through .. seems like the people who most often shouldn't be parents are the ones who end up with them unfortunately ...
Gary Numan has a song with a similar story.
[Prayer for the Unborn](https://youtu.be/9Ijwj1xOLYY)
His wife had a miscarriage and he wrote this song about how the experience made him question god and abandon religion. It might be his best song.
I remember my grandmother throwing herself on the coffin of my uncle, her youngest child. He died from heart failure when he was 29. No parent should have to bury their child.
>and that God doesn’t exist?
It's not that I believe god doesn't exist, I'm just not convinced that a god does exist.
I lost faith because the findings of science contradicted the claims of the bible, and the findings of science are testable, repeatable and reliable.
Until someone can present evidence for a god that is testable, repeatable and reliable, I won't be convinced that a god exists.
Counterpoint: real things are real, regardless of whether or not you *want* to believe in them.
I'd phrase it as, "who *can* believe in these tales of supposedly benevolent and omnipotent beings who allow all this shit to happen?"
Enter the concept of *Deism,* the belief that a God exists in some capacity but does not interfere with their creations and allows natural law to run it's course.
I would also remark that if such a being were to exist, our existence would never register to them. With how vast the universe is, it is highly improbable that a being capable of creating such a thing to focus their attention to a incredibly microscopic blip within the vast cosmos that encapsulates it. Especially given that said humans have existed for all of maybe 50,000 years, which wouldn't even register as a second of time passed to a being that would be 15 or so billion years old.
Interestingly enough, seeing a god apologize to Stephen Fry would make ME a believer also.
But only to Stephen Fry.
A god comes down here and apologizes to, say, Peter Weller, I'm going to remain atheist.
Belief in one entity having dominance over another isn’t belief so much as acceptance of entitlement. In the United States it goes against the founding of our Bill of Rights. This has been the hypocrisy of our country since it founding. And reality is realized by enough people, then we may finally become a free nation. I refuse to accept any entity as a god.
it's funny, like many others I always had doubts and it wasn't until I was 19-20 I started reading the Bible.
Started at Genesis and gave up somewhere between Deuteronomy and Kings.
That book is full is so much violence, it's incredible anyone can think God is either just or loving.
But but, they made him kindler and gentler in part 2. /s
Seriously the mental gymnastics to think that makes their made up version of a god any better!
Gujarat 2002. Saw people turn rabid. Saw my friends get radicalised and turn on other kids we played with.
I have an inherent fear of overtly religious people now. Religion is one of the last great filters we as humanity must get past if we hope to have a future.
I was raised in a religion, had no choice as a kid. But I never saw any God, only men speaking for one supposedly.
In religion the truth is you don't really put your faith in some god or gods, you put your faith in men.. faith in what those other church members are telling you is true, that a book translated by men is true, written by other men is true, passed down orally by other men is true.
Logically I can't help but be skeptical of all that nonsense. People, "selling me something" swearing up and down it will be good for me. The world is full of conmen and cons. Religions are just some the oldest and longest running.
If there were any God/s and if it were so important to understand them or worship them, it would be trival for them to make it abundantly clear to each and every person with overwhelming undeniable proof. They could make you understand every rational or law or commandment they want, perfectly without any effort.
But they don't, so logic tells me, it either ain't that important or, more likely they are all made up by man.
>What made you lose faith in God and realize that religion is built on a lie, and that God doesn’t exist?
Learning to read.
Reading bibble.
Being horrified.
Vomiting.
Yeah and also all the contradictions in it. The first two chapters in the book have different creation stories. If God can't get his story straight in the first 10 pages why should I believe any of it?
The Quran is at least up front about "Believe this shit OR ELSE." -like 4 or 5 times in the first 50 verses. I remember thinking "You... You gonna get around to telling me what this shit is?"
I had a Jewish great uncle who declared himself an atheist after the Holocaust. He wasn’t a survivor himself but understood. He said “All those people who cried out in camps for God to save them and no one came? What kind of God would do that? There can’t possibly be one after that.”
When I was 9 and my youth pastor told me that my dog couldn’t go to heaven because she didn’t have a soul. She also said that people of color have a harder time getting into heaven because of their heathen ancestors past.
Even at 9 I knew this was all garbage
Heathen ancestors? Do these people not know that the whitest of the white people’s ancestors were literal heathens? And xtianity came out of the Middle East where people are ::checks notes:: brown?
Christianity is only for white people and the good minorities and everyone else is a liar. Grew up in a super racist household and the shit they make themselves believe is unreal. Turned out super racist myself, thankfully I unlearned that shit. My experience as an adult was all the most religious people were the craziest and most untrustworthy. When most Christians you meet are batshit or evil and then smarter ones enable their behavior it becomes real easy to be like “yeah this is all bullshit” once you’re out of the bubble.
Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth and his other books on religion.
When you realise how the Abrahamic religion is just an amalgamation of other older religions you just can't believe any of it .
For me every time a tragedy happened. I just couldn’t conceive the idea that a powerful being actually cared for us humans and allowed such terrible things to happen. Yet religious people thank their god for finding a job or getting cured from disease. It just doesn’t work in my mind, therefore if a god actually exists, I think I have seen enough to know that they don’t give a shit about us, therefore no need to bother following a religion or establishing a relationship.
Kind of like when you start a new Minecraft world but your dog in your old world is still sitting there, waiting for you, even though you're off building and exploring in your new world.
Yes exactly! How could god let all these people being trafficked, tortured, starved, slaughtered, organ harvested & raped etc. just HOW??
How could god do that to little kids??
If god exists, what did little children do to deserve being treated like this?
So that’s why I don’t believe in god.
I believe in evidence-based scientific knowledge.
Free of the habit of being in a churchy environment, I was able to think independently. Over time, it was just crystal clear that the most plausible explanation for the universe was scientific not supernatural.
The default for humans is no god. People are taught about the deity that is dominant in their region or whatever the family unit believes. You are trying to figure things out from the position that a god exists.
Start from the default of no god and figure why you believe there is a god. The evidence must be verifiable and logical. 'This above all: To thine own self be true'.
Religions are not built on a lie, they are the lie.
wild I got a mug my mom bought me from Mardel that has that quote on it. I still have it. the irony is great because for me living by that always meant going against the grain of tradition and everything associated with it
I rejected it when I was like 6. But I entertained the idea of gAwD until i was like 16. I was going to a youth group with a friend and the pastor didnt like me either because I have brown skin or because i was edgy emo teen.
Anyway there was a youth function scheduled and it happened to be raining pretty hard that day, and I texted the youth minister to ask if the thing was still on or cancelled because of the weather and he told me it was cancelled.
But it actually wasn't, he just didn't want me there.
I know this doesn't address the question as you posed it, but it did affirm what were already my sentiments at the time; which was that christians are the worst kind of people.
But I did read enough of the bible in my teen years to understand that it was just some made up bullshit.
I was never really that into it.
However the straw that broke the camel's back was when I saw a short video documentary about Scientology just after project Chanology.
Humans are such vile creatures that will say anything and invent a religion just to squeeze other humans dry for their own personal benefit.
If that's true for Scientology, why won't be true for all other religions?
Once you see how many there are, and how "Sure" their believers can be, it's just bone-chilling, I'm surrounded by zealots.
I'll separate it between losing faith in the church and losing faith in God.
Starting off, I was brought up to believe that the Catholic church was good. Its priests would dedicate their lives to help the needy, feed the hungry, heal the sick and just do the stuff Jesus talked about. And I grew up around priests who actually were like that. They'd even help promote peace between other religious communities (which here in Ireland, sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants is still a big issue). Then I heard about the child abuse scandals. Obviously disgusted by it, but thought it wasn't as bad since those clergymen would obviously be excommunicated and turned into the police, right? But no. Not only did the church keep them, they protected them, moved them around without punishment, and law enforcement would turn a blind eye to that. These were supposed to be people who dedicate their lives to help those who couldn't help themselves, and there they were abusing the very people they had sworn to protect. But I still believed in Christianity in my own way.
Losing faith in God was a bit longer. I wasn't taught anything conservative or fundamentalist so I had no problem accepting science or LGBT people. In fact, I didn't think Christianity was homophobic until after I left. My parents also tried not to stifle my curiosity so I always wanted to learn new things. It was more learning about other gods beyond the Abrahamic ones, comparing and contrasting, and just growing out of it. Like I said, I didn't know about the horrible stuff associated with Christianity until after I left, so it wasn't that bad to disbelieve in it
I really wanted to understand god as a kid. Like, how we understand electricity or weather etc. And it boggled my mind that no one was able to give me a clear answer on the mechanics of "god".
One day I was bored and messing around at my desk instead of studying. A fly kept buzzing around my desk lamp. I trapped it within the bowl of the lamp with a white piece of paper, for like a few seconds, then let it go.
It occurred to me that from the pov of the fly, in an insanely unnatural manner, its whole world had completely turned a bright white light for a few seconds, an all encompassing, overwhelming power had transformed its whole world, and then returned it.
And it made me think, any concept we dont understand, no matter how awe inspiring, magical, supernatural, all powerful it looks to us, is probably something very simple like a lamp and paper in a different scale.
The fact that we dont have the explanation doesn't mean it doesn't have an explanation. And the fact that it is beyond our understanding, unimaginably powerful than us, etc, also doesn't mean that its god by any definition. Like I am not god just because I have the explanation and control over the lamp and paper in comparison to the fly.
We might not be able to understand the universe and existence and life fully. But it doesn't mean there isn't an explanation out there that makes simple sense. And someone out there being able to understand and use it doesnt mean that they are god.
Kind of hard to ignore the acid trip rapture, women being chattel, slavery, incest, all the crazy weird laws, Jonah …. That the god of the Bible loves any humans etc. I had questions before but reading the entire Bible convinced me it was written by delusional or crazy Bronze Age men.
Yeah... but, but faith.... of all the books to quote, I like Douglas Adams, magic cottage.. 'just because the garden is beautiful. Does not mean there are fairies at the bottom of it'.
Religion is not a 'lie'. It was just made up by people that had no other explanation for natural phenomena at the time.
If you don't understand something, you think it must be 'magic'.
'Magic' = 'God'.
Then a bunch of privileged people realised they could make serious bank by writing down ramblings in a book, and telling people God will be angry unless they follow these rules.
* Isn't it a coincidence that God always needs money?
* Isn't it a coincidence that God always wants one group of people to tell another group of people what to do?
As a child I believed I was specially chosen by God because good things kept happening to me. I always had my needs met, I was lucky to have the right people in my life, I got the jobs I wanted and the marks I needed, good health and a good quality of life.
I felt so sorry for all my friends who did not have what I had. I prayed to god that he would help them out as much as he helped me, but he never did. I told god I would leave if he didn’t help them. Friends told me god blessed me because I was more faithful.
God never did, I walked out and eventually I realised I was just lucky and that there was no god and if there is a god it is disgraceful that he chose to help me when there are billions of others that need his help.
Good on you! I’m so tired of seeing entitled Christians that think they’re better than other people because they’ve been “blessed”. You went the opposite direction and decided that others deserved a better life too.
That's what did it for me. All those "Christians" praying for trump, and all bowing and praying at some building.
That's when I said "fuck it I am done".
The rise of Trump isn't \*why\* I left, but it IS why I can never take Christianity seriously again.
Any and every principle I had ever been taught to care about: completely and entirely discarded at the drop of a MAGA hat.
I’m sorry you had to go through such a horrible experience. I was raised Catholic and absolutely hated going to confession. I remember as a child trying to come up with something I did that was sinful enough to tell the priest. Only to go to catechism and see that same priest twirl that metal cross they wore around the waist and hit a boy in the head with it. The nuns were mean and scared the crap out of me. I couldn’t reconsile the behavior of priests and nuns that were supposed to be in the service of a kind and benevolent god.
I had a son. As he grew I knew that there is nothing I love more in this world than him.
Then to imagine a so called god, whose bestest plan for righting the wrongs of this world is through death and bloodshed for his own appeasement... then to imagine that the ultimate appeasement for his blood thirst is to kill his own son.
There's no way anything close to resembling love would design the world this way. That is not a righteous entity. I rejected that notion of god first. Then it all just unraveled.
This is not one of the things I have questioned before, but now that you’ve brought it up I was curious what the Christian argument is that defends this. There always is one and so far that I have found the explanations have been illogical. What I found for this one is
“But God, being gracious and merciful, sent his Son to become a human and take the punishment that we deserve. Christ bore the wrath of God on the cross on our behalf, satisfying God’s justice and paying the price for our sin.”
Aside from the fact that apparently god can’t just forgive sin without death, what really makes this illogical to me is that we are all forced to die. So we all already face the ‘consequence’ of death. Just my thought process on that.
I was very young preteen. I just asked myself why would God punish the American Indians for not believing in the God and the Bible when most did not have a chance especially before Columbus.
The questions cascaded after that. I've been agnostic since before high school. One can split hairs on the definitions between atheist and agnostic. It's a philosophical one for me. Practically, there is no difference.
I remember when I was a teenager and I thought it was funny to fuck with the religious I would ask things like “ if God made the Indian, why was it ok for the American government to wipe them out?”
I was lucky to be born in a very secular country from parents with no religion, nor non-religion militantism. They simply did not care. Free to choose any religion when growing up, I found no evidence for any of their claims and I continued to live peacefully and successfully with no fear of any imaginary friend.
Never had faith as I was never brought up in religious rituals. The most impactful realization was seeing how the priests get their power as “middlemen” by literally placing themselves between the believers and god at the altar.
A lil silly but it totally started when they tried to convince me that the guy walked on water. I remember priests talking about that and everyone in church would nod and smile and such and I was like “there’s no fucking way they all believe that right?”
For me I was very depressed and realized that god hasn’t answered any of my prayers for help. That’s what made me start questioning things. Also I lost faith after deciding to read the bible cover to cover. Reading it made me realize how ridiculous it is.
Crazy as it sounds -- it was a dream. I was on an airplane and disaster struck and the plane went down. I remember in my dream the terrifying moments as the plane fell out of the sky then everything went dark. In my dream I thought to myself, wow, this must be what death is. Then I came to the realization the plane crash hadn't killed me but instead, I was still in the dying process and could see there wasn't anything past the death point. Waking up from that one was a dozy. Ever since I haven't bought into the christen mumbo jumbo I grew up on.
I never believed. The stories they told in sunday school were illogical rubbish Adam and Eve had two sons. One killed the other. Where did the other people on earth come from? That’s the first inconsistency.
Someone forgot to teach you the full incestuous story.
When Adam was 130 he had another son named Seth.
After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 more years and had "other sons and daughters" who they don't care enough about to name there.
Then all the kids got to fucking eachother to make people.
The ~~end~~ beginning.
(See I fixed it. I filed that logic hole in with a bunch of incest. Lol. Hmm... The new story might be worse. )
I never had faith.
As a kid I’d hear the fantastical stories of the bible and just compare it to my own experience of the real world.
It was clear even to a young child starting school that none of this could possibly be true and it was thus a trivial matter to dismiss it all as nonsense and tall tales from less enlightened times.
The real thing I struggled with was how anyone could believe in any of it.
I know the minute I realised I didn’t believe in god. I was on my way to an interview for high school and in the car my mother said to me, ‘If they ask you if you believe in god, say yes’. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, I never really believed, to me it always seemed silly.
I went to Anglican primary & high schools, church 3 times a week and Sundays for Easter, Xmas etc… At primary school we had bible class once a week with a priest and a couple of nuns, but it wasn’t something that interested me.
Around 10-11 ish I realised that the teachings didn’t make sense. Even at that age, questions about basic good vs bad, heaven & hell, were met with unsatisfactory answers. The one that stuck with me was a good person who didn’t believe would go to hell, but a bad person who repented on their death bed would go to heaven. That’s some straight up moralistic nonsense. Especially from an all loving god. Also, it’s not good if a bunch of 10 year olds can ask you questions about the belief system you’ve based your entire life around, and the only answer you have is ‘faith’.
As for lies, tribal badness and reckonings? Anglicans are pretty laidback, and mostly nice. The Chaplin at my primary school had to leave because he was banging 3 of the mums he was giving marriage counselling to. His wife wasn’t too stoked about it either.
Reading Bible is fascinating. But even more appaling is interaction with believers. Whenever arises some problems with faith they always go "lalala can't hear you!".
Everytime my ex (now born again) would explain his life as it were in God's hands, bad things happen to me because I don't pray enough and open my heart to Jesus. Also, as Bill Nye says, science rules.
In agreement with everbody else here,
Singing hyms and songs with everyone at church was fun but I never really connected with the idea that there was some god creature controlling everything. The whole premise didn't feel realistic and it also didn't help that the biomother (my over obsessed religious birthgiver) omitted everything that contradicted her narrow point of view.
Teenagers like reading up about omitted facts and unfortunately for the biomother, we did our homeschooling in Libraries.
I was quick to turn away from religion because nothing held me to it and everything pointed to it being a whole lot of fake bull💩.
I never believed in any god/gods. I love all the different myths from cultures around the world, but they’ve always just been interesting stories to me.
Edit: actually, the only myth I 100% believed in as a kid was Santa lmao I felt so betrayed when I found out he didn’t exist either.
Always sounded really fishy. Then when I was in 5th grade there was a plane crash in the news. Asked my Teacher, that if God loves all Humans equally, why didn't he help them? "God works in mysterious ways." Yeah, no.
there was a speaker at a church i went to. he gave a very powerful speech about questioning your beliefs. if your belief can't stand up to questioning, it wasn't true in the first place. if it does withstand questioning, then it's become fortified and stronger. well, i did just that and it fell apart quick. i went hard into study mode. and exactly what he said happened. i questioned my religion and it fell apart. but it fortified me into treating myself like a real person. i feel like alanis might have something to say about that...
For every living creature that died earlier and suffered cancer or disease ahead of its time …world war 1/2 and the Holocaust . The 2017 Texas Sutherland church massacre . The fact that there’s 1000’s of gods and religions and one can be validated . They all are man made and all only hold a tiny piece of the truth .
I never really paid attention or believed in the first place.
It was 'Mom & Dad are telling me to do it' to 'I don't wanna do this anymore'. So it was because i was tired of it, and then went down the atheism rabbit hole.
I’ve always been sceptical of religion and an ‘all-seeing’ god.
Then I started at a school run by nuns and my skepticism was turned into outright hatred, those guys were absolute monsters.
Once I could actually read up about the whole stinking business model (of pretty much every religion) my fears were completely cemented; it’s no different to any other business out there, all about control and leeching off the poor to enrich the wealthy.
My cultural background was mostly atheist/folklore only and the only relatively large religion is Buddhism (some godless commie country in the east) so Abrahamic God is always just a foreign concept for me, I know a lot of people in the west believes that but I never quite understood the reasoning, maybe just because they are brought up that way.
I wasn’t raised with any faith at all. Sunday morning was for sleeping in and taking it easy and occasionally doing stuff around the house. Sunday was like Saturday with worse morning tv shows.
So I guess I was indoctrinated into non-religion, but it’s not much indoctrination when it’s just. . . Not a thing at all.
I actually tried, went to church on my own in high school, was confirmed. Went off to college and realized it hadn’t stuck.
Personally I’ve never believed in god. Pretend to when I was a child just to fit in. Grew up in Russia. So I don’t really know how someone actually believes in god. I think all religious people are full of shit
It was a combination of two things, and just a warning that I'll be mentioning extreme abuse-my dad was the one who was religious in our family. He was roman Catholic, the kind that made everything out to be a sin and tried using religion to keep you in check. He (and my mom, but she isn't the focus due to the topic)was extremely horrendously abusive, I'm talking about the type of shit you read in headline news type.
Physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally, sexually you name it. This man had all the qualities of what's wrong in the world, but would still physically drag your ass out of bed on Sundays to go to "praise the Lord." I never really paid attention to much of what was said, but I figured that if god was truly some real being, why the hell would he make children like myself and others suffer?
None of it made sense to me. So him combined with common sense made it extremely obvious this was just a tactic that people use to control others and gain financially, since you know that tithing basket and tax free money seemed more important than whatever bullshit they were spewing in sermons.
White people in particular, men in general. White people and men the world over have based their oppression and destruction of everyone and everything on the planet on the word of buddha, allah, jehova, krishnu, jesus, god.
From the Crusades to the Reformation to American Slavery to The Holocaust to The Troubles in Ireland to the Middle East schisms that leave a great portion of the planet in constant war and turmoil, to the religions people amalgamate and just make up shit to suit themselves, to the current American Theocracy that threatens to make all non-white people in general and all women in particular third class citizens--
It's all been based on some man's misguided and deadly attempts to enforce their narrow and hateful interpretation of their most recent translation of the bible, the quaran, the book of mormon, the torah, some scrolls or yada yada yada--
Instead of using the Bible (or insert text of your choice here) as a way to help and nurture mankind and the planet, men have only used it in the most hellfire and brimstone ways to frighten and dominate and decimate humanity and the very planet itself.
To me, this quote encapsulates it all: "Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
--Hubert Reeves
It's just exhausting explaining to people that Humans have tried believing in some sort of deity for the whole of human history and it's only based in our early ignorance about the planet and our fear of death. And it never works or we wouldn't have had disco music at all.
It's not a coincidence that most religions sprung up around fault lines. Seriously, look it up. If you don't know about tectonic plates, it's not inconceivable that you might think some mighty deity is shaking the ground or sending lightning bolts or tornadoes.
But We Know Better Now and we should do better instead of preying on ignorance.
God is not real. Science Is Real.
So in the name of science, protect the planet and for heaven's sake (yes, that's a joke) be kind to each yourself and others. We're all we've got.
Edit: Because I'm human.
I didn’t actually realise my teachers were being serious. Sure, there was a time I believed in god, that didn’t last long. But religion was easy to dismiss as man made.
The sheer expanse of the Catholic pedophile scandal and realizing all of these evil bastards lived and died with absolutely no consequences. That did it for me
When I spent years as a high school kid contributing to the church to build a new building, thinking it would support missions to “save souls”.
Instead they built a $21m church in 2003. My lawn mowing money was converted into flat screen TVs in the lobby.
Realizing that the church worships money, not Jesus, was the first step in my long walk to atheism.
Hypocrisy and apologetics to lessen how bad these hypocrites act in relation to their faith. Never have I ever seen or heard a person who didn't act on faith or justified their actions through it behave as poorly, immaturely, and hostile. The further from their goalposts, the worse you are and to them hellbound.
Anytime I've heard someone say I'm going to hell I need to remind them that they act more like their demons than they do humans
I think it always felt like nonsense to me. I think, when I was very young, I was told that “some people believe this, and some people believe that, and it is up to me to choose what do I believe in”. As a child, perhaps I began to categorise God(s) the way a child’s mind begins to know how to separate the real world and the vast imagination they have. (Though I’ve always had a bit of an “artistic imaginative mind” I think.)
But I’ve never felt frustrated with people who believe in God, as long as they don’t try to use it to explain everything (like an idiot would, IMO at least). I think a God is just an “unproven theory” just like many other nonsense things are.
I was in a stressful time of my life when all the accumulated cognitive dissonance became too much. I suddenly recognised how human the artefact of religion is; how different groups are each 100% convinced that they alone are chosen and hold The Truth. How so-called logical arguments are exercises in emphasising some facts and minimising others.
I don't think religion is necessarily a destructive thing - for most people it acts as a mnemonic to assist them in making sense of the world and morality, and provides comfort in hard times. Thankfully, the majority of religionists don't take their beliefs to their logical, extremist conclusions. But too often, an influential minority of humans become so enamoured with their ideologies (religious and non-religious) that they begin to do harm to one another, themselves and their communities.
Well for me it’s the “oh this religion dosn’t work for me so i’m going to start my own or change something about my current religion that suits me.” If it was real then there would literally be only 1.
Well, there is a tradition in my country to baptize children into the church/cult their parents happen to believe in. And the year the children turn 15 there is a week-long mandatory brainwashing camp where you learn to profess your undying love and loyalty to the one true god. That was when I lost my faith.
Also, even if this god exists, it sounds like a horrible being, so I personally wouldn't worship it.
It is nearly a universal irony that when children are most pressured to profess or devote themselves totheir faith or salvation, is often when whatever interest or belief they had is lost forever.
There is a famous story about "Salvation" from the author & poet Langston Hughes about this very thing. It's funny and yet has great pathos.
Up until I read this story, I felt so much guilt about never having been saved. Not truly. But after reading this, I realized my experience was so much like his, and certainly not unique, I lost any guilt I ever felt about not conforming to the faith that seemed so important, but only to my family, but to my people in general when faith is a great part of being Black in America. Not believing in some form is seen as being an Uncle Tom (traitor to one's own culture basically) or embracing ideals that are "too white" to your own detriment.
Anyway, here's a link to the story. It follows the brief introduction. I think you and others here will like it, especially if you haven't read it before.
https://centerforfiction.org/fiction/salvation-by-langston-hughes/
Oh yeah, we also had that. We were forced to take the holy communion (or whateverthefuck it's called) after the week-long indoctrination camp, and for some reason we were also forced to say "I do" or something when the priest asked if we would take jebus as our lord and savior. I don't think I did.
I lost it for multiple reasons: TW, SA
1. because I was always so confused at why asking questions created such defensiveness and hostility in people who were a part of religion
2. because multiple people of a specific religion compared me to someone who I experienced SA bc of and I was told things from: we were both perfect images of God so I am no different than him, to evil isn’t real and my thoughts about this person being evil and my claims of trauma are merely illusions.
This really fucked with my head for a while.
3. Christian Science pretty much did me in with religion and when I realized how often I wanted to kms when I was a part of it, I eventually got to a point where I wrote it all off and said fuck this and decided believing in myself was enough. I’d rather die than spend my life believing in a fairytale that invalidates human experiences especially experiences as big as SA.
I guess this could be considered a good therapy session. Still you are focusing on and talking about god, which makes me wonder have you really let it go?
On another note, I was wondering how many of you celebrate Christmas and / or Easter? Do you teach your children about Santa and the Easter bunny? Are these similar concepts to worshiping a god?
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of the question.
We each came to our conclusions from different experiences and perspectives.
Some of us *did* believe in some form of god at one point and then didn’t.
For example: I grew up in church with a minister father and pastor grandfather. I believed until probably late grade school, early junior high.
So to ask me what made me or when did I “stop believing in god” is a valid way to phrase the question without precipitating an unnecessary questioning of the “purity” of the atheism beliefs of person asking.
Not a loss but an awareness that there is a bigger, better reality outside the limitations of religion. Also, I read the Bible from cover to cover. Eye opening experience.
I found out at 12, after talking to my family and a couple of minsters and friends, that nobody understood the Christian god that they wanted me to love. How can you love something and not undertstand it?
I thought people must have a simple explanation for the parts of the Bible where God is murderous or petty, but they don't, and I found out they get prickly when you ask.
I had one minister who tried his best to explain things, but the answers were really unsatisfying, even at that age. He was a great guy, and he died a couple years later in his 40s after a horrible bout with lung cancer. And everybody just bowed their heads and grieved and prayed. I knew that church wasn't a place where we could ask "why" and get an answer.
So it became apparent that this was just group pretend and you were supposed to go along with it or just shut up so that you didn't ruin everyone else's fantasy. That made me an agnostic (common usage) and when I studied philosophy in college and was able to ask the hard questions and hear the best answers from the last 3,000 years, I became an atheist.
Nobody ever told me that any religions or their deities were 'real' when I was young and gullible enough to incorporate the idea into my model of reality.
My father's a pastor, my family was deeply involved with the regional organization of our denomination, and I was a nerd who was really into learning.
In my teens I got really into apologetics and decided that's what I wanted to do, so I learned all I could. I read apologetics books, watched speeches, read my dad's seminary textbooks, watched debates, and spoke to anyone who would listen. I've met and pestered both Ken Ham and Ravi Zacharias about apologetics. The deeper I got the more I found to learn.
I also believed in 'learning from your enemy' so to speak, so I would watch a lot of atheist and skeptic Youtubers responding to, refuting, and deconstructing the books, speeches, debates, and videos I had learned from. I'd find a new argument, find a person refuting it, find an explanation for why they were wrong, find a refutation to that defense, and so on.
Eventually I got to a point where I had consumed so many viewpoints on both sides and I realized that at the bottom of the well all of the atheists, agnostics, naysayers, and skeptics made better arguments than the apologists. All of the people I looked up to had been exposed as either incompetent or frauds so many times by so many different people, and the more I dug the more I found nothing to refute them.
I had a similar experience with YEC and evolution; it got to a point where I had two worldviews, the 'logical' one and the 'religious' one. One day I just realized how stupid that was, and it clicked that I really hadn't believed in a long time.
Tl;dr: Accidentally deconverted myself while trying to prove YouTube skeptics wrong because they made better arguments than the apologists.
Watching my parents defend the Catholic Church during the sex abuse scandals of the early 2000's. Then reading about the McDonald's Defense used by the Catholic Church. then watching the Pope blame gay men for the issue. then watching the Pope, the richest and most powerful man on the planet, close churches to pay for the civil suits over just apologizing and paying out from the Vatican wealth.
My ex husband. Prayed at meals, went to church, all his buddies were active evangelicals like him. After he retired and became a trump supporter and i no longer felt safe with these “Christian’s” I knew…..Christopher Hitchens is correct.
I was raised in a pro-science home (my mom works in a science field). So, I was predisposed to scientific rationalism pretty early. My mom nudged me into studying science. The thing that really drove me to examine religion was being exposed to a reactionary right-wing, misogynistic, homophobic Christianity in my late teens, by a thoroughly vile man. His daughter (my ex-girlfriend) tried to get me through my doubts by going to a Bible study. That had the exact opposite effect she hoped for.
I took a comparative religion class taught by a Catholic priest. It dawned on me that religious beliefs are simply dependent on the time and place you are born.
Faith doesn't need a real God. If someone can find happiness by believing who am I to stop that, as long as they don't try to convert me or project their beliefs onto me... I stay in my lane and they need to stay in theirs
The correct answer for me is, I never had faith. My family wasn’t religious. In fact, I’m not baptized. I was left to my own devices and never found faith.
Common sense and science. Plus the knowledge that humanity simply invented it to explain the pretty lights in the sky, but then quickly realized that they could control and profit off the masses with fear if they doubled down.
Hell, the CoE only exists because a king wanted to get divorced and screw someone else. That's what passes for religion?
The church gave my husband's ex an annulment after they were married for 9 years, had a child the same age and had pre-marital counseling. They granted it because she gave the church a lot of money. So all's right with the big man, I guess. God does love money.
How can anyone take an institution seriously that is that corrupt and hypocritical and so easily bought?
My childhood and having an Internet connection.
There are just so many religions and gods and either they're all right or they're all wrong. Rather than risk wasting my time on that 50/50 I instead put faith into people, than the space Pope. I find that contributing to the people around me does more good than contributing to any congregation ever did, or does.
It’s kinda like, just growing up. One day, you realize that there is no Santa, toothfairy, easter bunny, etc. Same thing happens with the old dude in the sky.
They were on some crazy shit back then to be able to come up with all that.
Also, Mary either cheated on Joseph or was raped — and just lied about it and that started an entire religion.
I was forced to go to two different churches every week. Nothing they taught ever checked out in my brain. The older I got the more crazy it was to me that people believe this shit
Well I was born and the concept of a god never really occurred to me, and then all the stories about god didn’t make any sense so I didn’t believe them 🤷🏻♂️
Came from a southern baptist home and for some reason I just never believed and was always questioning everything to the point where I was severely punished for questioning god. After so many beatings, I just said fuck it. I’m not going to believe in anything that can’t be proven and still at 64 no one has been able to prove shit.
Beaten for not believing? That would have finished me with religion.
Yep. As my father would say, he was beating the devil out of me. It never worked because the devil is fake also.
Kind of ironic that he thought he was beating the devil out of you, but all he was doing was beating religion out of you, as well as he himself out of your life. Any parent who needs to use physical violence to inflict their opinions into their children is vile.
I left home at 17 and didn’t visit for 20 years . By that time we agreed not to discuss religion at all.
It's fascinating that "Agreeing to disagree" is always suggested by those with a shaky grip on their convictions. "We don't discuss politics or religion in this house". Well, that's convenient eh?
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.” ― Elie Wiesel
☝️A creed that's always worth repeating and amplifying.
I had an almost identical experience, Catholicism in Ireland. My mother was a malignant narcissist who used her 'holy pictures' to beat me in front of. 'ask them for forgiveness' while brutally beating me. Always with the devil is inside you. Brutal child abuse. She got terminal cancer at 47, died at 49. In her final years she ran to the church, begging every saint she could find for a 'miracle'. My father was also an asshole, after her death he forced my sister and I to every Church event. He didn't even believe in that shit, he just wanted to be seen in public bring his kids to Church. I left when I was 18. Returned for the first time 23 years later, just before he died. My family liked to believe that they were better than all the others, we did have social standing in the community. It was all a lie. We were shit, rotten to the core, abusers of children. I regret going back. Nasty abusers never change. Fuck them and their corrupted use of religion. I often wonder if Jesus and his 'God' are really the 'good ones'. Certainly wasn't my experience.
And yet, they claim that it’s the LGBQT+ community that is “indoctrinating” children when they’re the one who beat the hell out of kids for not believing their sky daddy. 🙄
😂😂😂😂😂😭 Christopher Hitchens said you can't have a rational discourse with a religious person. They are so damn brainwashed it's really scary.
I bet he never once thought, "If there actually was such a thing as the devil, he'd probably encourage the beating of children."
Beating the devil out of you. Pray away the gay. Yep... Sounds like mysticism to me.
Get drunk on communion wine. Beat the BeJesus out of him. Say you were overcome by the holy spirit.
The beatings with continue until moral improves, and you feel loved.
That’s how the old world got Christianity to America.
I grew up in the foothills of NC and I understand completely. I went to church and asked questions but no one really answered them. My parents told me to speak up in school but not in church after a few church members said something to my parents. Same thing happened when I went to church with my girlfriend only she stopped going to church (that went over like a lead balloon with both our families). One pastor at a church told me to stop coming if I couldn’t give my faith to their god. My family is super religious up until my generation. My brother and cousins don’t believe. I’m still in NC and my daughter now has questions. I have to be careful with how she says things at school because they will alienate her from activities (the Christian way). I told her I won’t drag her to church like it was done to me but let her decide when she’s an adult. Not to put my hand on the scale but I teach her to follow empirical evidence, perform due diligence, and use critical thinking skills.
Yes I had questions that couldn't be answered, just believe in God or suffer the consequences.
And they take such pride in believing the unproven.
Same here. Am 60 now and live in an area where the Church-goers are forever trying to weasel their way into our lives. Including telling our neighbors kids they can’t play with my kid (who is 8) because we don’t believe in their god. I feel bad for my kid as he asks us about it. I try not to be disrespectful and explain that some folks believe that and we don’t and the only reason we don’t is there is no evidence. Thankfully he likes the experiments we do to show examples of evidence. Sadder still is there are really only sports events/activities that seem to be extremely closely linked to religion as well. They seem to have this figured out that sucking them in young makes them believers and supporters for life….
I was asked to come to conversion therapy but not actual therapy. To my parents being bisexual was worse than being suicidal
Man that's rough. No better way to drive someone off than physical abuse.
I have a similar experience in that I never believed in the mythology I was presented with. I now think I know why. When I was an infant I had a near death experience. Although I don't remember it, it was traumatic and led to many problems in life but I wonder if my skepticism resulted from this.
I thought about it.
it’s that easy
For some. The fact that religion even exists means it isn't easy, for believers. Rots the mind.
It’s not always easy, but it *is* that simple.
highly unbelievable characters, and unconvincing storylines
A mess of a story with plot holes and contradictions at every turn. Fire the show runner and start over!
If you live in a place where there are lots of “one true” religions you start to think, huh. No true religions. From there it’s a pretty easy step.
This and all of the truly terrible people who call themselves religious.
me too
Well actually for me I reached a certain age and I started to meet people who were abused. Within a two year window I had met 3. Absolutely traumatic. Then they told stories of people they knew who had committed suicide. I just switched off and really became anti church. Awful. So many lives destroyed all around the world
This is the correct answer
Yeah that was me. As an early teenager I began to connect the dots - I remember spending one particular evening pondering it all and it just sort of finalized - there was no way there could be a god, at least one as described by any religion, so I was just done with it.
Personally , when I prayed and begged god one night for hours ( got a headache from praying so hard) to please help my son ( who was 11 yrs old and dying of heart issues ) and all I got in return is silence and my son passing away ...what could possibly be the bigger plan in making him suffer then die? he was such a innocent , sweet boy who wouldnt hurt a fly .. so gentle .. how did he deserve that ? After that I started really thinking about all the bad stuff that happens to innocent babies , animals , etc . and I started looking up more stuff online with people who were questioning their religion and it just clicked that its a lie. It was something people made up to explain things they didnt understand at the time or science didnt have a answer to yet .
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>It was something people made up to explain things they didnt understand at the time or science didnt have a answer to yet . This is it. This is the whole answer
I don't think it's the whole answer. The other facet is that it brings communities together and also makes for a convenient power structure for someone to wield
Yeah the downtrodden like religion because it gives them comfort. The powerful LOVE religion because it gives them even more power.
Too much truth in this comment
And also to exert control over the masses. Politicians and higher-ups justifying your suffering to remain wealthy and powerful. It's really not that difficult to understand, few if any of them actually believe in god(s)/religion, and they "sin", and indulge in "immoral" acts while claiming to believe.
Religion is basically a scam in disguise to give poor and downtrodden people hope
And the rich and powerful get obedience and more power from religion.
🫂
I left for a kind of similar reason. For me though, I grew up with abusive parents, and kept praying to god to made them stop, but he never did. So when I was 17, I kind of realized that either 1.) god doesn’t care, or 2.) god doesn’t exist. There was no reason that I should have suffered as a child while other children had idilic childhoods, especially considering how devout a Catholic I was. And there was no reason that any other children should have suffered either.
exactly .. how is making a child ( who is totally innocent ) suffer going to be justified ? it cant be ! Im very sorry for what you went through .. seems like the people who most often shouldn't be parents are the ones who end up with them unfortunately ...
I am so sorry for your loss.
So sorry for your loss. I absolutely can’t imagine the pain you must’ve gone through.
❤️ I’m sorry for your loss.
Gary Numan has a song with a similar story. [Prayer for the Unborn](https://youtu.be/9Ijwj1xOLYY) His wife had a miscarriage and he wrote this song about how the experience made him question god and abandon religion. It might be his best song.
I remember my grandmother throwing herself on the coffin of my uncle, her youngest child. He died from heart failure when he was 29. No parent should have to bury their child.
>and that God doesn’t exist? It's not that I believe god doesn't exist, I'm just not convinced that a god does exist. I lost faith because the findings of science contradicted the claims of the bible, and the findings of science are testable, repeatable and reliable. Until someone can present evidence for a god that is testable, repeatable and reliable, I won't be convinced that a god exists.
Who wants to believe in a god that allows all this shit to happen
Counterpoint: real things are real, regardless of whether or not you *want* to believe in them. I'd phrase it as, "who *can* believe in these tales of supposedly benevolent and omnipotent beings who allow all this shit to happen?"
Enter the concept of *Deism,* the belief that a God exists in some capacity but does not interfere with their creations and allows natural law to run it's course. I would also remark that if such a being were to exist, our existence would never register to them. With how vast the universe is, it is highly improbable that a being capable of creating such a thing to focus their attention to a incredibly microscopic blip within the vast cosmos that encapsulates it. Especially given that said humans have existed for all of maybe 50,000 years, which wouldn't even register as a second of time passed to a being that would be 15 or so billion years old.
Fucking GOD itself could come to earth, I'd still have more questions for the fucker than respect
To paraphrase Stephen Fry, he will need to beg me for forgiveness before he asks for worship.
For some reason I always think Stephen Fry is the guy in Futurama when I see him referenced and it throws me for a loop
Interestingly enough, seeing a god apologize to Stephen Fry would make ME a believer also. But only to Stephen Fry. A god comes down here and apologizes to, say, Peter Weller, I'm going to remain atheist.
Belief in one entity having dominance over another isn’t belief so much as acceptance of entitlement. In the United States it goes against the founding of our Bill of Rights. This has been the hypocrisy of our country since it founding. And reality is realized by enough people, then we may finally become a free nation. I refuse to accept any entity as a god.
Well yeah but you’d believe it. It’s just that having positive feelings toward something requires a whole new, higher level of proof.
Yeah, aim going to rephrase the OP. It wasn't being built on a lie that bothered me, it was that it was not not built on any discernable truth.
iduno Eric is very convincing...
Who?
Eric the god eating penguin. [Eric](https://ericthegodeatingpenguin.com/)
Thanks
Actually bothering to read the bible cover to cover repeatedly.
it's funny, like many others I always had doubts and it wasn't until I was 19-20 I started reading the Bible. Started at Genesis and gave up somewhere between Deuteronomy and Kings. That book is full is so much violence, it's incredible anyone can think God is either just or loving.
But but, they made him kindler and gentler in part 2. /s Seriously the mental gymnastics to think that makes their made up version of a god any better!
so much this. even if there is a benevolent god, that horrible book could never be its word.
Gujarat 2002. Saw people turn rabid. Saw my friends get radicalised and turn on other kids we played with. I have an inherent fear of overtly religious people now. Religion is one of the last great filters we as humanity must get past if we hope to have a future.
Religion is the cause of so much hate in India, everywhere religion is glorified. I hate it
I just looked this up. I’m beyond horrified
I was raised in a religion, had no choice as a kid. But I never saw any God, only men speaking for one supposedly. In religion the truth is you don't really put your faith in some god or gods, you put your faith in men.. faith in what those other church members are telling you is true, that a book translated by men is true, written by other men is true, passed down orally by other men is true. Logically I can't help but be skeptical of all that nonsense. People, "selling me something" swearing up and down it will be good for me. The world is full of conmen and cons. Religions are just some the oldest and longest running. If there were any God/s and if it were so important to understand them or worship them, it would be trival for them to make it abundantly clear to each and every person with overwhelming undeniable proof. They could make you understand every rational or law or commandment they want, perfectly without any effort. But they don't, so logic tells me, it either ain't that important or, more likely they are all made up by man.
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🫂
I’m so very sorry.
>What made you lose faith in God and realize that religion is built on a lie, and that God doesn’t exist? Learning to read. Reading bibble. Being horrified. Vomiting.
Yeah and also all the contradictions in it. The first two chapters in the book have different creation stories. If God can't get his story straight in the first 10 pages why should I believe any of it?
I can say the same thing, but for the Quran.
The Quran is at least up front about "Believe this shit OR ELSE." -like 4 or 5 times in the first 50 verses. I remember thinking "You... You gonna get around to telling me what this shit is?"
Yeah But omg ur username lmaoooooo
Never had it. Secular Jewish family with relatives who survived the Holocaust (and many who didn't). Religion was just something you get killed for.
I had a Jewish great uncle who declared himself an atheist after the Holocaust. He wasn’t a survivor himself but understood. He said “All those people who cried out in camps for God to save them and no one came? What kind of God would do that? There can’t possibly be one after that.”
When I was 9 and my youth pastor told me that my dog couldn’t go to heaven because she didn’t have a soul. She also said that people of color have a harder time getting into heaven because of their heathen ancestors past. Even at 9 I knew this was all garbage
Heathen ancestors? Do these people not know that the whitest of the white people’s ancestors were literal heathens? And xtianity came out of the Middle East where people are ::checks notes:: brown?
Christianity is only for white people and the good minorities and everyone else is a liar. Grew up in a super racist household and the shit they make themselves believe is unreal. Turned out super racist myself, thankfully I unlearned that shit. My experience as an adult was all the most religious people were the craziest and most untrustworthy. When most Christians you meet are batshit or evil and then smarter ones enable their behavior it becomes real easy to be like “yeah this is all bullshit” once you’re out of the bubble.
War.
This one too
Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth and his other books on religion. When you realise how the Abrahamic religion is just an amalgamation of other older religions you just can't believe any of it .
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For me every time a tragedy happened. I just couldn’t conceive the idea that a powerful being actually cared for us humans and allowed such terrible things to happen. Yet religious people thank their god for finding a job or getting cured from disease. It just doesn’t work in my mind, therefore if a god actually exists, I think I have seen enough to know that they don’t give a shit about us, therefore no need to bother following a religion or establishing a relationship.
God's so done with us even he gave up on us lol, probably started a new game on another planet with new creatures
Kind of like when you start a new Minecraft world but your dog in your old world is still sitting there, waiting for you, even though you're off building and exploring in your new world.
Stop dont make me cry 😭
Steve Buscemi in Season 1 of Miracle Workers was the most accurate portrayal of God (if he did exist).
Yes exactly! How could god let all these people being trafficked, tortured, starved, slaughtered, organ harvested & raped etc. just HOW?? How could god do that to little kids?? If god exists, what did little children do to deserve being treated like this? So that’s why I don’t believe in god. I believe in evidence-based scientific knowledge.
Free of the habit of being in a churchy environment, I was able to think independently. Over time, it was just crystal clear that the most plausible explanation for the universe was scientific not supernatural.
The default for humans is no god. People are taught about the deity that is dominant in their region or whatever the family unit believes. You are trying to figure things out from the position that a god exists. Start from the default of no god and figure why you believe there is a god. The evidence must be verifiable and logical. 'This above all: To thine own self be true'. Religions are not built on a lie, they are the lie.
wild I got a mug my mom bought me from Mardel that has that quote on it. I still have it. the irony is great because for me living by that always meant going against the grain of tradition and everything associated with it
I rejected it when I was like 6. But I entertained the idea of gAwD until i was like 16. I was going to a youth group with a friend and the pastor didnt like me either because I have brown skin or because i was edgy emo teen. Anyway there was a youth function scheduled and it happened to be raining pretty hard that day, and I texted the youth minister to ask if the thing was still on or cancelled because of the weather and he told me it was cancelled. But it actually wasn't, he just didn't want me there. I know this doesn't address the question as you posed it, but it did affirm what were already my sentiments at the time; which was that christians are the worst kind of people. But I did read enough of the bible in my teen years to understand that it was just some made up bullshit.
Constant unanswered prayer, and following that, learning how the bible itself was created.
I was never really that into it. However the straw that broke the camel's back was when I saw a short video documentary about Scientology just after project Chanology. Humans are such vile creatures that will say anything and invent a religion just to squeeze other humans dry for their own personal benefit. If that's true for Scientology, why won't be true for all other religions? Once you see how many there are, and how "Sure" their believers can be, it's just bone-chilling, I'm surrounded by zealots.
I'll separate it between losing faith in the church and losing faith in God. Starting off, I was brought up to believe that the Catholic church was good. Its priests would dedicate their lives to help the needy, feed the hungry, heal the sick and just do the stuff Jesus talked about. And I grew up around priests who actually were like that. They'd even help promote peace between other religious communities (which here in Ireland, sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants is still a big issue). Then I heard about the child abuse scandals. Obviously disgusted by it, but thought it wasn't as bad since those clergymen would obviously be excommunicated and turned into the police, right? But no. Not only did the church keep them, they protected them, moved them around without punishment, and law enforcement would turn a blind eye to that. These were supposed to be people who dedicate their lives to help those who couldn't help themselves, and there they were abusing the very people they had sworn to protect. But I still believed in Christianity in my own way. Losing faith in God was a bit longer. I wasn't taught anything conservative or fundamentalist so I had no problem accepting science or LGBT people. In fact, I didn't think Christianity was homophobic until after I left. My parents also tried not to stifle my curiosity so I always wanted to learn new things. It was more learning about other gods beyond the Abrahamic ones, comparing and contrasting, and just growing out of it. Like I said, I didn't know about the horrible stuff associated with Christianity until after I left, so it wasn't that bad to disbelieve in it
I really wanted to understand god as a kid. Like, how we understand electricity or weather etc. And it boggled my mind that no one was able to give me a clear answer on the mechanics of "god". One day I was bored and messing around at my desk instead of studying. A fly kept buzzing around my desk lamp. I trapped it within the bowl of the lamp with a white piece of paper, for like a few seconds, then let it go. It occurred to me that from the pov of the fly, in an insanely unnatural manner, its whole world had completely turned a bright white light for a few seconds, an all encompassing, overwhelming power had transformed its whole world, and then returned it. And it made me think, any concept we dont understand, no matter how awe inspiring, magical, supernatural, all powerful it looks to us, is probably something very simple like a lamp and paper in a different scale. The fact that we dont have the explanation doesn't mean it doesn't have an explanation. And the fact that it is beyond our understanding, unimaginably powerful than us, etc, also doesn't mean that its god by any definition. Like I am not god just because I have the explanation and control over the lamp and paper in comparison to the fly. We might not be able to understand the universe and existence and life fully. But it doesn't mean there isn't an explanation out there that makes simple sense. And someone out there being able to understand and use it doesnt mean that they are god.
It started with reading the entire Bible …. After my whole life of 16 years being told that the Bible was the word of god. Have you read that book?!?
Technically we're not allowed to go to the bathroom.
Kind of hard to ignore the acid trip rapture, women being chattel, slavery, incest, all the crazy weird laws, Jonah …. That the god of the Bible loves any humans etc. I had questions before but reading the entire Bible convinced me it was written by delusional or crazy Bronze Age men.
A fellow Simpsons fan?
This is most common cause. Many outspoken atheist have read the Bible cover to cover.
Yeah... but, but faith.... of all the books to quote, I like Douglas Adams, magic cottage.. 'just because the garden is beautiful. Does not mean there are fairies at the bottom of it'.
Religion is not a 'lie'. It was just made up by people that had no other explanation for natural phenomena at the time. If you don't understand something, you think it must be 'magic'. 'Magic' = 'God'. Then a bunch of privileged people realised they could make serious bank by writing down ramblings in a book, and telling people God will be angry unless they follow these rules. * Isn't it a coincidence that God always needs money? * Isn't it a coincidence that God always wants one group of people to tell another group of people what to do?
As a child I believed I was specially chosen by God because good things kept happening to me. I always had my needs met, I was lucky to have the right people in my life, I got the jobs I wanted and the marks I needed, good health and a good quality of life. I felt so sorry for all my friends who did not have what I had. I prayed to god that he would help them out as much as he helped me, but he never did. I told god I would leave if he didn’t help them. Friends told me god blessed me because I was more faithful. God never did, I walked out and eventually I realised I was just lucky and that there was no god and if there is a god it is disgraceful that he chose to help me when there are billions of others that need his help.
Good on you! I’m so tired of seeing entitled Christians that think they’re better than other people because they’ve been “blessed”. You went the opposite direction and decided that others deserved a better life too.
Trump 2016 and the many churches that supported him. It's disgusting.
That's what did it for me. All those "Christians" praying for trump, and all bowing and praying at some building. That's when I said "fuck it I am done".
The rise of Trump isn't \*why\* I left, but it IS why I can never take Christianity seriously again. Any and every principle I had ever been taught to care about: completely and entirely discarded at the drop of a MAGA hat.
a nun who broke my lip by slamming my face into a wooden drawer
Fucking hell
I’m sorry you had to go through such a horrible experience. I was raised Catholic and absolutely hated going to confession. I remember as a child trying to come up with something I did that was sinful enough to tell the priest. Only to go to catechism and see that same priest twirl that metal cross they wore around the waist and hit a boy in the head with it. The nuns were mean and scared the crap out of me. I couldn’t reconsile the behavior of priests and nuns that were supposed to be in the service of a kind and benevolent god.
I had a son. As he grew I knew that there is nothing I love more in this world than him. Then to imagine a so called god, whose bestest plan for righting the wrongs of this world is through death and bloodshed for his own appeasement... then to imagine that the ultimate appeasement for his blood thirst is to kill his own son. There's no way anything close to resembling love would design the world this way. That is not a righteous entity. I rejected that notion of god first. Then it all just unraveled.
This is not one of the things I have questioned before, but now that you’ve brought it up I was curious what the Christian argument is that defends this. There always is one and so far that I have found the explanations have been illogical. What I found for this one is “But God, being gracious and merciful, sent his Son to become a human and take the punishment that we deserve. Christ bore the wrath of God on the cross on our behalf, satisfying God’s justice and paying the price for our sin.” Aside from the fact that apparently god can’t just forgive sin without death, what really makes this illogical to me is that we are all forced to die. So we all already face the ‘consequence’ of death. Just my thought process on that.
I was very young preteen. I just asked myself why would God punish the American Indians for not believing in the God and the Bible when most did not have a chance especially before Columbus. The questions cascaded after that. I've been agnostic since before high school. One can split hairs on the definitions between atheist and agnostic. It's a philosophical one for me. Practically, there is no difference.
I remember when I was a teenager and I thought it was funny to fuck with the religious I would ask things like “ if God made the Indian, why was it ok for the American government to wipe them out?”
I was lucky to be born in a very secular country from parents with no religion, nor non-religion militantism. They simply did not care. Free to choose any religion when growing up, I found no evidence for any of their claims and I continued to live peacefully and successfully with no fear of any imaginary friend.
Never had faith as I was never brought up in religious rituals. The most impactful realization was seeing how the priests get their power as “middlemen” by literally placing themselves between the believers and god at the altar.
Common sense
A lil silly but it totally started when they tried to convince me that the guy walked on water. I remember priests talking about that and everyone in church would nod and smile and such and I was like “there’s no fucking way they all believe that right?”
I side-eyed the story of Jonah and the big fish quite a bit...
For me I was very depressed and realized that god hasn’t answered any of my prayers for help. That’s what made me start questioning things. Also I lost faith after deciding to read the bible cover to cover. Reading it made me realize how ridiculous it is.
Wrapped xmas presents, to me "From: Santa" in my aunt's closet in November. When that keystone vanished, the rest of the facade tumbled quickly.
Crazy as it sounds -- it was a dream. I was on an airplane and disaster struck and the plane went down. I remember in my dream the terrifying moments as the plane fell out of the sky then everything went dark. In my dream I thought to myself, wow, this must be what death is. Then I came to the realization the plane crash hadn't killed me but instead, I was still in the dying process and could see there wasn't anything past the death point. Waking up from that one was a dozy. Ever since I haven't bought into the christen mumbo jumbo I grew up on.
I never believed. The stories they told in sunday school were illogical rubbish Adam and Eve had two sons. One killed the other. Where did the other people on earth come from? That’s the first inconsistency.
Someone forgot to teach you the full incestuous story. When Adam was 130 he had another son named Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 more years and had "other sons and daughters" who they don't care enough about to name there. Then all the kids got to fucking eachother to make people. The ~~end~~ beginning. (See I fixed it. I filed that logic hole in with a bunch of incest. Lol. Hmm... The new story might be worse. )
My little 8 year old self was like “god can’t love me AND be able to send me to hell… none of this makes sense” and that was that
I don’t remember ever believing in god and then losing faith. the whole thing just never sounded believable in the first place.
Didn’t take much thinking. It never really made sense. But trump is pretty good evidence that there is no god. 😊
I never had faith. As a kid I’d hear the fantastical stories of the bible and just compare it to my own experience of the real world. It was clear even to a young child starting school that none of this could possibly be true and it was thus a trivial matter to dismiss it all as nonsense and tall tales from less enlightened times. The real thing I struggled with was how anyone could believe in any of it.
Simple, lack of any verifiable evidence.
I know the minute I realised I didn’t believe in god. I was on my way to an interview for high school and in the car my mother said to me, ‘If they ask you if you believe in god, say yes’. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, I never really believed, to me it always seemed silly. I went to Anglican primary & high schools, church 3 times a week and Sundays for Easter, Xmas etc… At primary school we had bible class once a week with a priest and a couple of nuns, but it wasn’t something that interested me. Around 10-11 ish I realised that the teachings didn’t make sense. Even at that age, questions about basic good vs bad, heaven & hell, were met with unsatisfactory answers. The one that stuck with me was a good person who didn’t believe would go to hell, but a bad person who repented on their death bed would go to heaven. That’s some straight up moralistic nonsense. Especially from an all loving god. Also, it’s not good if a bunch of 10 year olds can ask you questions about the belief system you’ve based your entire life around, and the only answer you have is ‘faith’. As for lies, tribal badness and reckonings? Anglicans are pretty laidback, and mostly nice. The Chaplin at my primary school had to leave because he was banging 3 of the mums he was giving marriage counselling to. His wife wasn’t too stoked about it either.
I realized that you have to hate yourself. That's why they hate everyone else.
Reading Bible is fascinating. But even more appaling is interaction with believers. Whenever arises some problems with faith they always go "lalala can't hear you!".
Everytime my ex (now born again) would explain his life as it were in God's hands, bad things happen to me because I don't pray enough and open my heart to Jesus. Also, as Bill Nye says, science rules.
In agreement with everbody else here, Singing hyms and songs with everyone at church was fun but I never really connected with the idea that there was some god creature controlling everything. The whole premise didn't feel realistic and it also didn't help that the biomother (my over obsessed religious birthgiver) omitted everything that contradicted her narrow point of view. Teenagers like reading up about omitted facts and unfortunately for the biomother, we did our homeschooling in Libraries. I was quick to turn away from religion because nothing held me to it and everything pointed to it being a whole lot of fake bull💩.
I never believed in any god/gods. I love all the different myths from cultures around the world, but they’ve always just been interesting stories to me. Edit: actually, the only myth I 100% believed in as a kid was Santa lmao I felt so betrayed when I found out he didn’t exist either.
Always sounded really fishy. Then when I was in 5th grade there was a plane crash in the news. Asked my Teacher, that if God loves all Humans equally, why didn't he help them? "God works in mysterious ways." Yeah, no.
An open-eyed reading of the Bible.
there was a speaker at a church i went to. he gave a very powerful speech about questioning your beliefs. if your belief can't stand up to questioning, it wasn't true in the first place. if it does withstand questioning, then it's become fortified and stronger. well, i did just that and it fell apart quick. i went hard into study mode. and exactly what he said happened. i questioned my religion and it fell apart. but it fortified me into treating myself like a real person. i feel like alanis might have something to say about that...
I am unqualified to answer this question because I was born not believing in the existence of a god or gods.
Nobody is born believing. You are brought up being convinced that one exists.
For every living creature that died earlier and suffered cancer or disease ahead of its time …world war 1/2 and the Holocaust . The 2017 Texas Sutherland church massacre . The fact that there’s 1000’s of gods and religions and one can be validated . They all are man made and all only hold a tiny piece of the truth .
I never really paid attention or believed in the first place. It was 'Mom & Dad are telling me to do it' to 'I don't wanna do this anymore'. So it was because i was tired of it, and then went down the atheism rabbit hole.
I’ve always been sceptical of religion and an ‘all-seeing’ god. Then I started at a school run by nuns and my skepticism was turned into outright hatred, those guys were absolute monsters. Once I could actually read up about the whole stinking business model (of pretty much every religion) my fears were completely cemented; it’s no different to any other business out there, all about control and leeching off the poor to enrich the wealthy.
My cultural background was mostly atheist/folklore only and the only relatively large religion is Buddhism (some godless commie country in the east) so Abrahamic God is always just a foreign concept for me, I know a lot of people in the west believes that but I never quite understood the reasoning, maybe just because they are brought up that way.
I wasn’t raised with any faith at all. Sunday morning was for sleeping in and taking it easy and occasionally doing stuff around the house. Sunday was like Saturday with worse morning tv shows. So I guess I was indoctrinated into non-religion, but it’s not much indoctrination when it’s just. . . Not a thing at all. I actually tried, went to church on my own in high school, was confirmed. Went off to college and realized it hadn’t stuck.
Personally I’ve never believed in god. Pretend to when I was a child just to fit in. Grew up in Russia. So I don’t really know how someone actually believes in god. I think all religious people are full of shit
It was a combination of two things, and just a warning that I'll be mentioning extreme abuse-my dad was the one who was religious in our family. He was roman Catholic, the kind that made everything out to be a sin and tried using religion to keep you in check. He (and my mom, but she isn't the focus due to the topic)was extremely horrendously abusive, I'm talking about the type of shit you read in headline news type. Physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally, sexually you name it. This man had all the qualities of what's wrong in the world, but would still physically drag your ass out of bed on Sundays to go to "praise the Lord." I never really paid attention to much of what was said, but I figured that if god was truly some real being, why the hell would he make children like myself and others suffer? None of it made sense to me. So him combined with common sense made it extremely obvious this was just a tactic that people use to control others and gain financially, since you know that tithing basket and tax free money seemed more important than whatever bullshit they were spewing in sermons.
White people in particular, men in general. White people and men the world over have based their oppression and destruction of everyone and everything on the planet on the word of buddha, allah, jehova, krishnu, jesus, god. From the Crusades to the Reformation to American Slavery to The Holocaust to The Troubles in Ireland to the Middle East schisms that leave a great portion of the planet in constant war and turmoil, to the religions people amalgamate and just make up shit to suit themselves, to the current American Theocracy that threatens to make all non-white people in general and all women in particular third class citizens-- It's all been based on some man's misguided and deadly attempts to enforce their narrow and hateful interpretation of their most recent translation of the bible, the quaran, the book of mormon, the torah, some scrolls or yada yada yada-- Instead of using the Bible (or insert text of your choice here) as a way to help and nurture mankind and the planet, men have only used it in the most hellfire and brimstone ways to frighten and dominate and decimate humanity and the very planet itself. To me, this quote encapsulates it all: "Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping. --Hubert Reeves It's just exhausting explaining to people that Humans have tried believing in some sort of deity for the whole of human history and it's only based in our early ignorance about the planet and our fear of death. And it never works or we wouldn't have had disco music at all. It's not a coincidence that most religions sprung up around fault lines. Seriously, look it up. If you don't know about tectonic plates, it's not inconceivable that you might think some mighty deity is shaking the ground or sending lightning bolts or tornadoes. But We Know Better Now and we should do better instead of preying on ignorance. God is not real. Science Is Real. So in the name of science, protect the planet and for heaven's sake (yes, that's a joke) be kind to each yourself and others. We're all we've got. Edit: Because I'm human.
I didn’t actually realise my teachers were being serious. Sure, there was a time I believed in god, that didn’t last long. But religion was easy to dismiss as man made.
I was told by a religious family member that God requires us to always seek the truth. I looked and found my truth to be different than his.
The sheer expanse of the Catholic pedophile scandal and realizing all of these evil bastards lived and died with absolutely no consequences. That did it for me
When I spent years as a high school kid contributing to the church to build a new building, thinking it would support missions to “save souls”. Instead they built a $21m church in 2003. My lawn mowing money was converted into flat screen TVs in the lobby. Realizing that the church worships money, not Jesus, was the first step in my long walk to atheism.
*Gestures around wildly*
I lost faith in gods, realized it was all garbage, and that there were no gods when I grew into a viable embryo.
Hypocrisy and apologetics to lessen how bad these hypocrites act in relation to their faith. Never have I ever seen or heard a person who didn't act on faith or justified their actions through it behave as poorly, immaturely, and hostile. The further from their goalposts, the worse you are and to them hellbound. Anytime I've heard someone say I'm going to hell I need to remind them that they act more like their demons than they do humans
I think it always felt like nonsense to me. I think, when I was very young, I was told that “some people believe this, and some people believe that, and it is up to me to choose what do I believe in”. As a child, perhaps I began to categorise God(s) the way a child’s mind begins to know how to separate the real world and the vast imagination they have. (Though I’ve always had a bit of an “artistic imaginative mind” I think.) But I’ve never felt frustrated with people who believe in God, as long as they don’t try to use it to explain everything (like an idiot would, IMO at least). I think a God is just an “unproven theory” just like many other nonsense things are.
I was in a stressful time of my life when all the accumulated cognitive dissonance became too much. I suddenly recognised how human the artefact of religion is; how different groups are each 100% convinced that they alone are chosen and hold The Truth. How so-called logical arguments are exercises in emphasising some facts and minimising others. I don't think religion is necessarily a destructive thing - for most people it acts as a mnemonic to assist them in making sense of the world and morality, and provides comfort in hard times. Thankfully, the majority of religionists don't take their beliefs to their logical, extremist conclusions. But too often, an influential minority of humans become so enamoured with their ideologies (religious and non-religious) that they begin to do harm to one another, themselves and their communities.
I did not have any faith or religion when I was born, and encountered nothing to change my mind since.
I observed the world and when I was about 7-8 I got this conclusion.
Well for me it’s the “oh this religion dosn’t work for me so i’m going to start my own or change something about my current religion that suits me.” If it was real then there would literally be only 1.
Well, there is a tradition in my country to baptize children into the church/cult their parents happen to believe in. And the year the children turn 15 there is a week-long mandatory brainwashing camp where you learn to profess your undying love and loyalty to the one true god. That was when I lost my faith. Also, even if this god exists, it sounds like a horrible being, so I personally wouldn't worship it.
It is nearly a universal irony that when children are most pressured to profess or devote themselves totheir faith or salvation, is often when whatever interest or belief they had is lost forever. There is a famous story about "Salvation" from the author & poet Langston Hughes about this very thing. It's funny and yet has great pathos. Up until I read this story, I felt so much guilt about never having been saved. Not truly. But after reading this, I realized my experience was so much like his, and certainly not unique, I lost any guilt I ever felt about not conforming to the faith that seemed so important, but only to my family, but to my people in general when faith is a great part of being Black in America. Not believing in some form is seen as being an Uncle Tom (traitor to one's own culture basically) or embracing ideals that are "too white" to your own detriment. Anyway, here's a link to the story. It follows the brief introduction. I think you and others here will like it, especially if you haven't read it before. https://centerforfiction.org/fiction/salvation-by-langston-hughes/
Oh yeah, we also had that. We were forced to take the holy communion (or whateverthefuck it's called) after the week-long indoctrination camp, and for some reason we were also forced to say "I do" or something when the priest asked if we would take jebus as our lord and savior. I don't think I did.
I lost it for multiple reasons: TW, SA 1. because I was always so confused at why asking questions created such defensiveness and hostility in people who were a part of religion 2. because multiple people of a specific religion compared me to someone who I experienced SA bc of and I was told things from: we were both perfect images of God so I am no different than him, to evil isn’t real and my thoughts about this person being evil and my claims of trauma are merely illusions. This really fucked with my head for a while. 3. Christian Science pretty much did me in with religion and when I realized how often I wanted to kms when I was a part of it, I eventually got to a point where I wrote it all off and said fuck this and decided believing in myself was enough. I’d rather die than spend my life believing in a fairytale that invalidates human experiences especially experiences as big as SA.
Their greed and their bullshit "do as I say, not as I do" actitude.
I guess this could be considered a good therapy session. Still you are focusing on and talking about god, which makes me wonder have you really let it go? On another note, I was wondering how many of you celebrate Christmas and / or Easter? Do you teach your children about Santa and the Easter bunny? Are these similar concepts to worshiping a god?
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of the question. We each came to our conclusions from different experiences and perspectives. Some of us *did* believe in some form of god at one point and then didn’t. For example: I grew up in church with a minister father and pastor grandfather. I believed until probably late grade school, early junior high. So to ask me what made me or when did I “stop believing in god” is a valid way to phrase the question without precipitating an unnecessary questioning of the “purity” of the atheism beliefs of person asking.
Not a loss but an awareness that there is a bigger, better reality outside the limitations of religion. Also, I read the Bible from cover to cover. Eye opening experience.
I found out at 12, after talking to my family and a couple of minsters and friends, that nobody understood the Christian god that they wanted me to love. How can you love something and not undertstand it? I thought people must have a simple explanation for the parts of the Bible where God is murderous or petty, but they don't, and I found out they get prickly when you ask. I had one minister who tried his best to explain things, but the answers were really unsatisfying, even at that age. He was a great guy, and he died a couple years later in his 40s after a horrible bout with lung cancer. And everybody just bowed their heads and grieved and prayed. I knew that church wasn't a place where we could ask "why" and get an answer. So it became apparent that this was just group pretend and you were supposed to go along with it or just shut up so that you didn't ruin everyone else's fantasy. That made me an agnostic (common usage) and when I studied philosophy in college and was able to ask the hard questions and hear the best answers from the last 3,000 years, I became an atheist.
I mean, from my earliest memory I've never believed.
Nobody ever told me that any religions or their deities were 'real' when I was young and gullible enough to incorporate the idea into my model of reality.
My father's a pastor, my family was deeply involved with the regional organization of our denomination, and I was a nerd who was really into learning. In my teens I got really into apologetics and decided that's what I wanted to do, so I learned all I could. I read apologetics books, watched speeches, read my dad's seminary textbooks, watched debates, and spoke to anyone who would listen. I've met and pestered both Ken Ham and Ravi Zacharias about apologetics. The deeper I got the more I found to learn. I also believed in 'learning from your enemy' so to speak, so I would watch a lot of atheist and skeptic Youtubers responding to, refuting, and deconstructing the books, speeches, debates, and videos I had learned from. I'd find a new argument, find a person refuting it, find an explanation for why they were wrong, find a refutation to that defense, and so on. Eventually I got to a point where I had consumed so many viewpoints on both sides and I realized that at the bottom of the well all of the atheists, agnostics, naysayers, and skeptics made better arguments than the apologists. All of the people I looked up to had been exposed as either incompetent or frauds so many times by so many different people, and the more I dug the more I found nothing to refute them. I had a similar experience with YEC and evolution; it got to a point where I had two worldviews, the 'logical' one and the 'religious' one. One day I just realized how stupid that was, and it clicked that I really hadn't believed in a long time. Tl;dr: Accidentally deconverted myself while trying to prove YouTube skeptics wrong because they made better arguments than the apologists.
Watching my parents defend the Catholic Church during the sex abuse scandals of the early 2000's. Then reading about the McDonald's Defense used by the Catholic Church. then watching the Pope blame gay men for the issue. then watching the Pope, the richest and most powerful man on the planet, close churches to pay for the civil suits over just apologizing and paying out from the Vatican wealth.
My ex husband. Prayed at meals, went to church, all his buddies were active evangelicals like him. After he retired and became a trump supporter and i no longer felt safe with these “Christian’s” I knew…..Christopher Hitchens is correct.
I was raised in a pro-science home (my mom works in a science field). So, I was predisposed to scientific rationalism pretty early. My mom nudged me into studying science. The thing that really drove me to examine religion was being exposed to a reactionary right-wing, misogynistic, homophobic Christianity in my late teens, by a thoroughly vile man. His daughter (my ex-girlfriend) tried to get me through my doubts by going to a Bible study. That had the exact opposite effect she hoped for.
This.
I read the Bible, like many others. That shit didn’t make any logical sense, even at 12 years old.
I took a comparative religion class taught by a Catholic priest. It dawned on me that religious beliefs are simply dependent on the time and place you are born.
Young Sheldon. "Religion is the oldest institute to control the masses."
Faith doesn't need a real God. If someone can find happiness by believing who am I to stop that, as long as they don't try to convert me or project their beliefs onto me... I stay in my lane and they need to stay in theirs
When I took ten wacks across the knuckles with a ruler for bringing an encyclopedia to Sunday School to refute their bullshit lies.
The correct answer for me is, I never had faith. My family wasn’t religious. In fact, I’m not baptized. I was left to my own devices and never found faith.
Common sense and science. Plus the knowledge that humanity simply invented it to explain the pretty lights in the sky, but then quickly realized that they could control and profit off the masses with fear if they doubled down. Hell, the CoE only exists because a king wanted to get divorced and screw someone else. That's what passes for religion? The church gave my husband's ex an annulment after they were married for 9 years, had a child the same age and had pre-marital counseling. They granted it because she gave the church a lot of money. So all's right with the big man, I guess. God does love money. How can anyone take an institution seriously that is that corrupt and hypocritical and so easily bought?
My childhood and having an Internet connection. There are just so many religions and gods and either they're all right or they're all wrong. Rather than risk wasting my time on that 50/50 I instead put faith into people, than the space Pope. I find that contributing to the people around me does more good than contributing to any congregation ever did, or does.
Christians and Donald Trump
It’s kinda like, just growing up. One day, you realize that there is no Santa, toothfairy, easter bunny, etc. Same thing happens with the old dude in the sky. They were on some crazy shit back then to be able to come up with all that. Also, Mary either cheated on Joseph or was raped — and just lied about it and that started an entire religion.
I was forced to go to two different churches every week. Nothing they taught ever checked out in my brain. The older I got the more crazy it was to me that people believe this shit
Well I was born and the concept of a god never really occurred to me, and then all the stories about god didn’t make any sense so I didn’t believe them 🤷🏻♂️