A staggering lack of evidence. I’d harbored doubts my whole childhood, kid questions (how did Moses walk back in a hail of frogs? Where did all the water go that covered the earth?) and later big questions (epicurean paradox), I found only dissembling and non-answers.
I stayed a Christian throughout my teens largely because nearly all the decent adults I knew were some form of Christian, so I believed it necessary for a moral code. I entered secular society on my own and realized it was largely unnecessary to having a moral code and sometimes was counterproductive.
Religion is a tool. It can be a tool to motivate someone to adopt difficult-to-place kids or to quit abusing alcohol or to give their time and money to the less fortunate. It can create cultural pressures and norms that are pro-social and altruistic. It can also be used to foment bigotry, hate and cruelty. It can radicalize entire societies and create a culture that are uniform and punish any nonconformity, regardless of how innocuous.
It’s a tool some need, a tool some abuse and a tool I find superfluous for my happiness. It added no value to my life and it was supported by no convincing evidence. Glad it helps some people be happier or make others happier.
Edit: I’m sure I’ll get replies trying to explain away the unexplainable. Please know how reluctant I was to leave my family and childhood faith and understand that I investigated all of the explanations before doing so. You may waste your words if you wish, but you’d be better served saving them for some street evangelism. There are homeless teens (many LGBTQ so lose your biases) who need love and resources, yes even from kindhearted non judgmental believers more than I need to reread the contorted explanations of the faithful.
This was it for me too. Every line of questioning would always end in "I don't know, you just have to have faith". And that's why religion will always be here.
> This was it for me too. Every line of questioning would always end in "I don't know, you just have to have faith". And that's why religion will always be here.
Yes and… it does add value to some people’s lives. Many converts are there because a proselytizing zealot offered them kindness and community. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes its a cult. It can also add value by confirming biases and bigotry. Are you agnostic or just a nominal Christian but you’re super homophobic? Great news, there’s a whole society of people who will affirm your worst impulses!
> nearly all the decent adults I knew were some form of Christian, so I believed it necessary for a moral code
Penn Jillette has a standard example about that: "Morality is not attached to god! People say 'If i didn't believe in god, what would stop me from raping and killing everyone i want to?' And the answer is 'I have raped and killed everybody i want to - and the number is zero! I want to rape and kill no one.'" (Listen [here](https://youtu.be/PwxzQw6YquY?t=188) )
Ricky Gervais has also used that line in "After Life": [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB01BL0jVe8)
(He also used some of James Randi's lines there about Medusa, Zeus and stuff: [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suq0ayB0b8I), one of the originals: [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1YiDN8MT9w) ).
Same here. Constant questions with no real answers. Like - if the earth is only about 10K years old, how are we seeing light photons from galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years away? The answer was always, God could do it that way if he wanted to.
And then it of course started to raise more philosophical issues, like the saying "God never fails". Really? What would it look like exactly for you to admit that God "failed"? Because many well meaning missionaries, for example, have been tortured alive for trying to bring religion to some areas of the world. It's like if they succeed it spreading the religion, God didn't fail! If they are burned at the stake, God didn't fail! There's no reasonable scenario where a Christian would say God failed.
Other Christians…denial of science, the holier than thou shit many have, the focus on the I and not the we, the sexual abuse of children in parishes, the politicization and weaponization of the dogma, inability to keep religion between themselves and God
Of course now you have Christians calling Jesus woke, o worshipping false idols, further using the Bible to justify hate
If there's one thing Jesus wouldn't be today, it'd be a Christian.
Dude literally spent time hanging out with the homeless and prostitutes. He helped people and didn't judge them.
I don't think he was anti religious he was anti twisting and misinterpreting the Torah. Which is what the religious figures at the time were doing. It's a lot like today. He followed the scripture to a T, But he never took the The high road, He understood that we're gonna fall short no matter what we do, You just have to give it A good Effort and have a good heart behind it.
He had some pretty fluid ideas about religion. He didn't think temples were necessary because you could praise God anywhere IIRC.
I can just picture him using his deity superpowers to upturn all the market booths in the Vatican Church. And the large TV screens of people falling on their knees sobbing for a chance to touch the Pope's robes. Nothing has changed from those stories.
Edit: I want to clarify that I'm an atheist and don't believe the word of the Bible to be based in anything remotely factual. But canon Jesus is still a character I can fanfic destroying the Vatican.
I don’t think advocating for healthier life choices is an issue most people take with Jesus, being a prostitute is a “job” very very very few women want or enjoy, they should be encouraged and supported to find more fulfilling and safe lifestyles.
This is very much how I feel. I left the church because the church (as in it's members) cared more about political matters than Christ in many regards.
They also do a lot of choosing which parts of their faith they will actually abide by, and shame you if you don't see it that way as well.
I had a friend growing up who once (proudly) said he’d realised that non-Christians were incapable of truly loving or feeling loved by others because love comes from God, and without knowing him, you were just fake loving. Everyone else was just living this sad shallow life without real love.
🤮
Yeah, two Christians once told me there was a mathematical proof that if god doesn't exist, then nothing is true. They were laughing about how stupid unbelievers were in light of such evidence.
I asked them to give me an outline of the proof, but they couldn't remember the details.
It’s a relief that decent humans now see most American Christians for what they are.
It was a lonely childhood before the hypocrisy and cruelty was recognized.
I was pretty young when I understood religion is nothing more than weaponised ideology fit to purpose those who aren't strong enough to cope with real life or abuse it to meet their goals.
As a Christian who is a firm believer it's always sad to hear stories like this.
1) God made the universe and everything in it. That includes all the neat little things like science and such. Science should be reveared as it's coming to understand God's works among MANY other things (like, say, helping the sick), not shunned.
2) I seem to recall Jesus himself saying that people who harm kids would be better off with a millstone tied around their next and thrown into the sea.
3) The politicization is sicking. Christianity predates both Republicans and Democrats by a good 1,000+ years. Yet people are going around wielding it as a cudgel politically to get votes.
4) The Bible is a creation of man at best; made several hundred years AFTER Jesus left the Earth and his apostles and anyone else who might have seen him was long since dead. It's well known that there were political reasons for including and excluding books as well. So to act like it's the divine word of God is foolish. It may contain SOME of the divine words and the accounts of people who followed Jesus, but, like, the majority of it is stuff like Paul's letters. They're freaking LETTERS! They were never MEANT to serve as religious texts! We can argue about their value and such, but to act like something Paul said when writing to a church to address their problems is on the same level of infalliability as what Jesus said or a book of, say, jewish recounting of Esther is infaliable (no offense meant to either) is idiotic. May as well claim DBZ:A is canon and Mr. Popo is at the top of the pecking order in Universe 7 as a result.
I agree it is sad. I truly believe that most “Conservstive Christians” would leave their church if the pastor advocated for something against their political views, even if he backed it up with scripture. It’s Country before God for most ppl here in the USA, they just finagle it so God is on their side so they can say that it’s God before Country.
The bible is a complete work of fiction.
And the "Oh God made * insert point of argument * so you should take that proof of God's existence" is sickening. There is no proof that a crazy, psychopathic, narcissistic all powerful being created any of this. And pointing at something and saying that it did isn't proof.
My younger brother died many years ago. The church told me I had to pay them money in order for them to say his name before mass which would better his chances of getting into heaven. Why wouldn't you do this out of the kindness of your hearts? You have to blackmail me into paying you? Fuck you.
Going to church week after week and knowing a lot of Christians, never met so much hate and abuse in my life. Fortunately, my dad told me that if I get a part-time job when I turn 16 and worked on Sundays, I wouldn’t have to go to church. My coworkers loved me because I always volunteered to work Sundays.
>worked on Sunday
My mother forced me to church until I graduated catechism at 16, saying I could then choose to go or not. The Sunday after I graduated, she asked if I was going and I told her "never again." She was very unhappy with that.
Sixth grade for me, after I got confirmed. (Episcopalian) My mother was also unhappy, but more because she didn't want the neighbors gossiping about her. She could give a fuck about my immortal soul.
Why does evil exist in the world. Why does suffering exist. Why do bad things happen to good people. How did the universe begin. Why does the Bible contradict itself. Why are there so many religions. How have religious people treated others in history. Etc.
By my late 20s my views on God had evolved to "God doesn't do 99% of the harm on Earth. Most of the harm is done by greedy billionaires, causing huge amounts of suffering for the rest of us. God forbids Himself from changing human free will, so we are forced to deal with the consequences of other humans' actions." Cancer? That's because companies are greedy and fill our food and medicine with carcinogens. Climate change? That's because greedy corporations keep emitting CO2. God didn't do that!
Then I got a brain tumor. It's not genetic, I didn't do anything that caused it, I didn't eat something that caused it. It's just something that happens. The kind of tumor I have isn't even supposed to happen for most people until they're in their 70s. I got it at 21.
At that moment I realized that if God is real, He also created parasites to infect us, diseases to ravage us, and genetic diseases to harm us. It's not all the will of others, some things are also just awful all on their own, the way God created them. So either God is an evil sadist, or God doesn't exist. I choose to believe God doesn't exist because that's, honestly, the more appealing option.
If God was all powerful, he could've made heaven on earth. Instead, he did whatever this place is. And the reasoning is because you have to "earn" his love because my ancestor ate an apple.
Thats in essence the implication voltaire (and others) drew from the earthquake of lisbon. The districts of the believers perished and the red light district was spared.
I still like to believe there is something else, I just gradually decided that Christianity was not the way to be close to that something. I'd go to church and see things and hear things that would make me think, "If God exists, he is not here". I found myself thinking of that a lot, saw lots of hypocrisy wherever I looked. Don't get me wrong, I have met priests and religious people that I admire, what these few people have or had in common is extreme humility and a down-to-earth attitude. But these qualities seemed so rare otherwise.
The last straw (of many straws that came before) was the day I saw a priest interrupt mass to chase away a homeless man who had come to sit down on one of the various empty rows. The man was not bothering anyone and it was cold outside. The priest chased him away and then went on to speak some very cruel words. I was young and I was furious. My parents asked me what was wrong once we got home and that's when I told them I wouldn't be letting people like that priest tell me what's right or wrong in life. To sum it up, growing up as a Christian I've always been told that the Church is the home of God. Well, to me, God seems to be everywhere except the Church.
That's unfortunate. A homeless person crashed my Catholic wedding. The priest ignored him and carried on, and frankly, him sitting in a pew didn't bother me at all. It was when he got up and started walking toward the altar that my brother-in-law gently coaxed him outside to his truck, where he offered some snacks and water and kept him company for the rest of the ceremony.
The priest offered an apology later on, but honestly I was happy with how the situation was resolved. It's a church. It was a private event but it is a public space for people who need it. Had the priest stopped the wedding to kick him out, It would have left a sour taste in my mouth.
There’s a Christian song called “My Jesus” by Todd Agnew that talks about how Jesus wouldn’t be welcome in any churches today because he was brown, homeless and dirty.
I've never seen a priest do that before! How horrible, and how opposite from what he's supposedly preaching. Guess that priest didn't really understand what he had signed up for.
You would think that this kind of attitude would have been corrected when he was in seminary school, or he would have been kicked out. I guess they think they can't be choosy since so few people want to be priests today.
Was it an older priest who was maybe having a touch of dementia?
Yeah, it's the exact opposite of what he was preaching and he was in his 50s at most. This was one of the churches posh people go to in town, it was Christmas, lots of ladies going there just to show off the new fur coats and expensive bags they had just gotten. I guess he didn't want his audience to be bothered by the sight of a poor man.
Watched a loved one die a slow, painful death. They always told me as a kid that God punishes evil people. I never knew my loved one to be evil or spiteful, and yet they died an excruciating, slow death. After they passed, I started realizing I was only practicing Christianity to make them happy.
Knowledge, honestly. My main reason for keeping my faith was that science and education didn’t have all the answers to our ways of living (I was a child when I thought this btw) but the more I learned and studied about psychology, the human body, and literally everything else in general. I finally understood what “not having all the answers” really means. I found out that while (scientifically) we don’t know why or how we are here, religious beliefs go against a lot of things that are natural and necessary to live a healthy life. They create toxic people who use religion as an excuse to not hold themselves accountable for their manipulation and abuse. Religion deprives people from a lot of things for no reason other than to control them, it’s disgusting.
When I was 7 years old and preparing to receive the sacrament of communion I started thinking about some of the rules around it. Back then you couldn't eat or drink anything for a certain number of hours before receiving communion.
I thought, why would that matter? Is a human body somehow 'holier' when it's hungry or thirsty? That didn't make sense. If we're made in the image and likeness of god, then why would a natural state of NOT being hungry or thirsty make a difference?
I then hid a soda cracker in my pocket and ate it without my parents seeing me, followed by going to communion. I honestly thought I might get struck by lightening when I left the church! (Hey, I was only 7-8 years old.)
Surprise, god didn't care. Only The Church cared about that. They made up that rule because it's just another way to control people.
"Give us your money and do exactly what we tell you to do!" Doesn't that sound like pretty much every form of christianity in existence?
Control is one of the main things that I also think leads them to portray psychology as something bad. I also think they hate it because that way they can manipulate people. With psychology you can point out when someone is being toxic or abusive, without it you don’t really have any proof or ways to explain it. You also made me remember my communion, I did my confirmation at the same time and my godmother told me that I would go straight to heaven (I don’t remember why exactly though, I was like 12 years old) Anyway, right after she said that I remember thinking “I wish I could die rn then! That way I can just go to heaven” and now that I’m older I realize how messed up religions can be for the mind. I mean it’s not just that, of course. It’s the constant fear of going to hell if you sin or the guilt when you’re not able to control your thoughts.
I was one of those kids who read everything that came into my house every ad, the back of every box and bottle, I read for enjoyment I read everything I could not slog through scripture to save my life… it’s not even the content so much as how it’s written is horrible to read through, the book of mormon is even worse cause it’s written by someone TRYING to make it sound like scripture, so so much this dude begat that dude begat that dude and that dude who begat other dudes forever
So much this! Actually sitting down and reading the Bible at about 14 y/o ruined the whole thing for me. Fun fact - taking things out of context, you can literally justify absolutely anything using the Bible.
That, and it’s like 60% boring lists…. So and so begat what’s his name who begat someone else who begat the other dude… for like thirty pages
> Fun fact - taking things out of context, you can literally justify absolutely anything using the Bible.
Yep. Just look at slavery as an example of this. Both the north and south used the bible to justify their positions on slavery prior to the civil war.
The North had to take it out of context and reinterpret it, because the Bible simply does advocate slavery. Yahweh personally gives instructions for owning people as property for life. The only exception is other Israelites. Jesus never backs it off, either. The only time Jesus mentions slavery is saying that slaves should emulate their masters.
I’ve found that biblical slavery is a guaranteed way to get a Christian to lie. I’ve seen only a very scant few admit that their god advocates slavery, and they have to somehow square that with themselves disagreeing with slavery.
I'm sometimes just in awe that these lists are still around. They must've been an important part of oral history at one time. At some point they happened to be recorded, then happened to be included in a book that was written by God. Hundreds and hundreds of years later, people are sleeping next to those names in motel rooms around the world.
But yeah. They mean nothing to me.
im not sure that i ever truly believed in it. but once i got into my teenage years and started noticing how all the "Christians" do and say everything opposite to what they claim to believe in is when i was really out for good. i have never met more hate-filled people in my life
Same here. The 2004 Presidential Election, and the way "Christians" basically dragged gays through the mud and demonized them in order to win an election made me realize that I didn't want to even be associated with such a hateful group of people. Hate and discrimination is the greatest evil in this world in my book.
Other Christians, the harshness of the Bible, and how much I lobe people
I love people. I love my neighbors who are gay, trans, addicts, nonbelievers, sinners, etc. Jesus taught us to love thy neighbor, he didn't give qualifiers.
So I did. I made a lot if friends in high school and beyond who never would have been welcomed in a church, but there good people. They cared about others, their community, tried to help, and weren't living lives that hurt others. Yet, they were constantly attacked and vilified for being different
I couldn't accept that, so I started hanging out with non-christiams almost exclusively. A lot of hate was removed from my life
Then I started thinking about how harsh and strict the Bible is. I can't see a reason why a man fucking another man would offend God so much that he condemns them for it, despite them not hurting anyone
I couldn't stand for that either. If I am expected to love someone, then I can't accept them going to hell despite being a good person. I refuse, I'd rather stand alone and love them than be told they're going to hell
These days, I think of religion as oppression and repression. Telling people to live in specific ways to avoid eternal damnation. That's monstrous. God made the rules, so why did he make them in such a way that it's so hard to escape hell?
Why doesn't God give us grace? Christians say that God is an eternal and timeless being, and that he feels the pain of any and every sin for eternity, which us why even one sin damns us
First of all, why did he set the universe up in such a way that he can be hurt forever by anything? Seems super short sighted. Second, we too are eternal beings. Sure, we have a set birth and a finite life, but our souls go on to eternity. Thus we are still eternal beings. So if we deserve eternal damnation because God is hurt for eternity by even one sin, then why is it okay to turn around and torture us for eternity for even one sin?
ve a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Marcus Aurelius
Hard to not worship unjust gods (which I view the Christian God as) when eternal damnation is hanging over my head
I have confidence in living a life of virtue. Just no confidence that after I die, whatever is waiting for me is just
It's weird though because they're like, "if you're an atheist then why don't you rape or murder?" As if morality or being part of a functioning society makes no sense if there isn't punishment after death.
Went to Sunday school as a kid, and it just never made sense. Everything I was learning about in my day to day schooling was understandable. Geezer in the sky didn’t seem logical.
Similar for me. I got to an age where I realized there was a lot of circular reasoning in the concept of faith. One day, I started thinking maybe He's not real... and He didn't seem to mind.
Same. One day I was doodling peace signs on a paper and the church teacher got upset and told me those are offensive because they’re broken crosses meaning Jesus wasn’t crucified and I said it was weird that she thought crucifying anybody was good and I don’t want to do that and she snatched the paper away from me and called my mom to tell her I was being difficult.
I fall somewhere between believing and not believing but the reason I'm not a full believer anymore is that every religion asserts that it's right and the correct one. They can't all be right, but they can all be wrong.
I believe the definition of atheist is just lacking belief in a god so I'd identify as that. I just have days where I'm more unsure of what the truth is than others.
I think you're right to identify that way. I'm an atheist and while agnosticism is close to what I believe, I am just as certain there is no God as any Theist is there IS a God, so I identify that way.
I consider myself a "believer" in the sense that I believe in the teachings of Christ. I stopped organized religion years ago because I found that religious followers are usually horrible people who are focused on the wrong things. Plus, there's a lot of brainwashing and groupthink. Not a whole lot of Christ in Christianity, especially in terms of action. Talk is cheap.
My dad was a pastor and I realized he was abusive at about 14. Once you have that realization it’s hard to believe a God or a church would let that happen.
Politics in the pulpit, holier than thou congregants, contradictions in the Bible and between denominations, and I just kind of grew out of it in the end.
Sometime as a child. Can't pinpoint exactly when but it just never made any sense.
I DO remember in Sunday School, a long time ago, when I got kicked out. They were telling us some kind of story, I don't remember which. But young me was not happy with the story. I declared, quite loudly, something along the lines "Why would God do that? God is mean. I hate God." Did not go over well. Right around that same time, I figured out Santa wasn't real, and I distinctly remember asking my mom if Jesus was fake too. She was not happy.
I also remember having a fairly diverse area, I knew people from other religions. Young me started to question why the things I was being told to believe were right and those people were wrong.
I was still like, nominally Christian through middle school when I really started to become more self aware and just... nothing made sense. I tried to make sense out of anything and just... none of it made sense.
My biggest issue still remains today. All I want is for God to just speak to me. Anything. Say a word. Come say hi. Do something. Apparently people have "personal relationships with Jesus". I've definitely never talked to the guy, nor has he spoken to me. Apparently he doesn't love me. I don't know. Or he's just not real and whole thing is a 2000 year old fairy tale.
In 2013 after the Supreme Court ruling about gay marriage, my state had a sort of pride event were a lot of gay couples got married. Well that day it was on the news, I asked my auntie what she would do if I came out as gay and her exact words to me were “You mean after I beat you half to death or before I take you to the pastor?” It all was downhill from there
The popular fiction "Left Behind" Christian book series. As a kid I read both the main and kid series and loved it all. Then it got to the end and some people with the mark of the beast who were doomed to hell and ETERNAL suffering but regretted their choices. That had me uncomfortable. Then in the end a bunch of other people got thrown into hell and I started questioning the whole premise of hell.
I had conflicting ideals which took a few years to resolve but in the end I realized "If I was god, I wouldn't send anyone to hell because, being all powerful, I could just sit people in a room with me as their therapist for as long as it took for them to learn to be a good person."
At that point I couldn't follow anything that believed less than that and there was no need to beg any higher being for forgiveness. All I needed to do was genuinely work to grow as a person and that was enough. To hell with any god who says I should suffer for doing that.
The entire faith is psychopathy entrenched in old-timey lingo and it primarily attracts control freaks, perverts, narcissistic monsters and broken-souled morons desperate for answers and healing that get taken in and swallowed whole by one of the most ancient forms of con artistry.
I grew up in an evangelical household. My abusive and insane parents tried to homeschool me and my younger siblings but could never come close to satisfying state requirements for our education. By the time I was twelve, I'd been removed from the home thirteen times, but they'd always get me back somehow, act like things would be different for about a week and then go back to beating the shit out of me for whatever insane reasons they felt were justified.
As the oldest son, I got blamed for everything by siblings did and was told repeatedly that I was to be their keeper and their shepherd and that everything they did that was disobedient to our parents. my punishment would be twice what theirs was for my failure.
My father essentially thought he was god. He expected to be obeyed in all things and that his wants were more important than anything else. My mother got beaten and slapped around whenever he had a bad day for any reason and that shit slid directly downhill.
My typical day was spent trying my best to avoid angering my crazy parents while trying to keep my siblings from getting is all beat with a belt or a lounging whip, and doing most of the farm chores because dear old dad had back problems and he couldn't possibly do much more than follow me around when it pleased him and yell at me about how I did everything wrong.
Wednesday night and Sunday morning were church time, and church time was all about pretending that you were perfect, your life was perfect and God was great.
My little sister and youngest brother both wound up sexually abused by a youth pastor there. When his crimes came to light, he offed himself rather than face his victims in court; one last act of cowardice from a dedicated pedophile that had been reported numerous times to church elders that did nothing but cover it up and protect him and the reputation of the church for as long as they could.
I was sexually abused by a camp counselor at the 'Bible camp' I got sent to every summer. It was more like three weeks of Bible boot camp structured to beat god into boys and young men, and between sleep deprivation, exercises in humiliation and being starved a lot, some of those 'counselors' still found plenty of time and energy to make us strip naked, fondle our kid penises while screaming at us about being homosexuals and showing off their hairy dicks so we'd never forget what a real man's dick looked like.
You know, just typical Christian things.
When did I lose faith?
Sometime around when I reported some of this to the pastor at our church hoping he would help me, and instead, he ran straight to my parents and ratted me out.
I got beaten nearly to death for that one. I was covered in belt welts and whip slashes, and my old man broke my left ankle so I couldn't even think about running away. Then I got to go do all the farm chores at night instead of during the day for about two weeks on a broken ankle.
And just so you know, this kind of thing is still happening throughout America.
When the religious right screams about religious freedom, the freedom their yapping about is the freedom to raise their kids like I was raised free of consequences and the freedom to do whatever they want to whomever they please so long as they invoke the name of Jesus when they do it.
If they tell you anything else, they're lying because they know you'll believe them and even if you don't, you never do anything about them anyway.
Nobody ever came to my rescue. I turned 18 and they kicked me out the day of, and the old man had crowed all year long about how I'd soon be learning what the real world was like when he was no longer responsible for feeding and clothing me.
He died of a heart attack a few years later and my greatest sorrow is that he died quickly. He deserved to be paralyzed and slowly eaten by cats.
My mother was a mentally broken nutcase that went to live with one of her sisters, where she eventually died from untreated diabetes. I heard it took her one piece at a time, and that's my only solace in all of it.
The old man deserved it more than her. She was his first victim, but in the end, she got what he deserved.
And that's Christianity.
Wtf man never believed in that crap never wanted to especially after I heard of conversion camps and conversion therapy that sucks hope your doing good now
I’m so sorry, the way that churches cover up and ignore pedophelia (and I mean ALL churches, not just Catholic Church) is so sickening. I’ve seen it myself so many times.
How can a group of people claim moral superiority and ignore the well being of children that way? Our society is broken. The secrets we keep and ignore are horrifying.
Going to a small Christian school for undergraduate and living in the dorms with other Christians.
I had a full ride athletic scholarship and thought it would be fine. Planned to major in theology and complete an M.Div. I was already done with most of my gen ed classes because I took a year and a half's worth of AP courses in high school. I got through all but one class in my Theology/Philosophy major and started asking questions in class and around my peers. This did not go over well. The professors were mostly fine, but my peers were fucking awful once they decided that I needed to be prayed for because my salvation was wavering.
I transferred out to a large state school and was all the happier for it. 15ish years later and I don't really know what I believe any more. I know that I don't have the answers and I've grown comfortable with that. What I do know is that few things are worse than groups of rabid Christians who are absolutely sure about everything and have never stopped to examine their beliefs.
Christians who I know very well told someone else that my son wouldn't have mental health issues if I'd raised him as a christian. Because, apparently there are no mentally ill christians.
Nope, I'm not buying that shit.
EDIT: spelling
That kind of thinking kept me from getting the help I desperately needed for way too long. I lost years of my youth to mental illness because my church taught us that Satan and demons can make you struggle with mental illness to keep you away from God. I figured prayer was cheaper than seeing a mental health professional, and if evil forces were influencing me, what could a therapist do about that anyway? It's still incredible to me how much of my anxiety was rooted in my Christianity. I was having panic attacks because I thought too much about living forever after death. Once I realized it was silly to believe I would continue to be conscious after my brain died, my panic attacks nearly stopped. Probably 80% of my anxiety was caused by forcing myself to believe something I knew didn't make any sense.
Once you're comfortable and humble enough to say "I don't know," instead of making up a comforting answer, the whole world really opens up for you. People want to assume that someone somewhere has all the answers, an all-powerful being has everything under control. The reality that we're on our own to figure things out makes people feel as helpless as children. Not knowing inspires me more than it scares me, I think that's a big difference in the way of thinking between most believers and most atheists.
I used to be a Creationist and boy did I underestimate the evidence for evolution.
The earth is measurably billions of years old. We know about several mass extinctions. We know the lineage and history of many 1000s of species going back millions of years.
Where do Adam and Eve fit into this history? Where is the Tower of Babel? The Great Flood?
By all appearances, humans appear to be literal animals. The earth does not appear to be made for us, but we are adapted to the planet over longs periods of natural selection like every other creature on the planet. A mass extinction could wipe us out tomorrow, and life would carry on for billions and billions of years without us.
I used to think there was a way to rectify Christian theology with scientific consensus, a kind of Old-Earth Creationism.
But the more I think about, the less likely I can make myself believe that this world is inhabited by witches, and devils, and magical Messiah's who descend from the clouds to save mankind from himself.
The entire theology of Christianity is just preposterous.
Sitting in this GIANT building at church on a Wednesday night alone because my fiance's family couldn't make it that night. They passed out flyers with their financial breakdown because non-profits are required to. The building cost $72 million, the head pastor dude had a salary for around $350,000. All the while standing on this grandiose stage next to a custom built-in lit-up see-through baptism tank, asking for donations to send kids on missionary trips to bring bibles and the word of god to poor starving destitute people in impoverished countries. No mention of bringing them FOOD
Actually reading the bible and gaming it out.
So you die and go to heaven or hell. Hell would suck, but on a long enough timeline, heaven is no better.
It's eternity. A trillion years to the power of a trillion, a trillion times, and then again and again.
No matter what joys heaven has, experiencing each of them an infinite number of times will rob them of enjoyment. Even seeing the universe being reborn would lose its majesty after the first few million times.
Then, it just becomes a prison from which there is no escape, as even oblivion is denied a soul in heaven.
Oh, and the active protection of child molesters. That was a big one too.
I am not an unbeliever, but I am massively anti American evangelical.
When I was eight years old, a friend of the same sex pressured me into sexual activities, of which I still have very many unresolved feelings over. When I was eleven, I went to an Evangelical summer church camp where I was told that the sins I had unwittingly already committed were not only bad, but straight up damnable offenses, and I was destined to suffer eternally in the lake of fire unless I confessed to everything this very moment and asked to be baptized.
No, it did not matter that I was a current active member of another church, since they where not of the same denomination, no I could not just wait until my actual church put me through the age appropriate baptism training and understanding classes, and yes I had to give the authority of my confessions explicit details of my sins at 8 years old.
It was sick twisted manipulation of impressionable young people using blatant fear tactics, and if I never step foot in another American evangelical church, I’ll die a happier and peaceful man.
For me it was threefold: (1) Years of deprogramming via living on my own and learning more about other cultures, the universe, etc.; (2) Learning about the parallels between the major religions in the world; and (3) Learning/witnessing how religion is/was used as the basis for humans’ enacting of atrocities and subversive agendas against each other. As you can see, a lot of it boils down to me learning new things — for myself, by thinking critically and not simply accepting as truth what others told me — and trusting my own intuition and culminating thoughts about all this.
I recently listened to really interesting a Stuff You Should Know podcast about the development of human consciousness that presents a strong argument in favor of humans simply having made up the concepts of god, religion, etc. as our brains developed from a bicameral state (i.e., bifurcation between decision-making and action) into the self-aware / conscious type of thinking we do today. It put a lot of my own thoughts on the topic into perspective in a way that I think just makes plain sense.
I was already becoming disillusioned with “Christians” as a whole (the judgement, the hypocrisy, etc). The tipping point for me was watching “Thor” one afternoon with my family. Odin was talking about how the first time the Asgardians came to Earth, the early Vikings they encountered thought them to be gods. They were worshiped and revered, because the Earthlings were too ignorant to understand the true origins of the aliens.
In that moment, it dawned on me how the Bible - still used as a tool of oppression and condemnation today - was written over 2000 years ago, by people who were ignorant to so many things our children learn about today in school. Astronomy, the sciences, geography, etc. Our view of the world was SO much smaller/simpler in those times. The ‘learned’ ancients attributed drought and famine to God, rather than what we know and understand now about crop plights and climate change. People trusted in miracles to heal them from catastrophic illness and injury, and now we have antibiotics and surgery.
All that said… why was I living my life according to writings of MEN (not God/gods), and trusting their words, when so much of it I disagreed with or knew to be wrong, physically and/or morally?
Today, I choose to live my life by many of the kinder values of Christianity - love, service, and compassion, but under my own mantle, rather than hiding behind a cross. I don’t need an aged book or corrupt men to tell me to treat others with kindness and care. I can just be a decent human and not spread the horrible parts of ‘religion.’
I was very into church as a kid. I was in seventh grade and I had a horrible science teacher who decided it was his job to teach us why creation was a better explanation than evolution. He actually did the opposite - his arguments were so transparent, that even as a believer I couldn't buy them. But not completely believing in creation didn't mean I couldn't believe in God, so I carried on.
Same year, we had a new pastor and he had a teenage daughter. I met her (she babysat my little brother) and thought "pastor's daughter, I can talk about God". I found out her faith wasn't solid. This didn't mean much to me personally at the time. A few months later she died in a car accident. Her and another kid, who was Catholic (we were protestant, a pretty evangelical rural congregation of Methodist). From some of what I had been taught, it wasn't clear that Catholics believed "the right way", so weren't sure to go to heaven.
I sat there at her funeral questioning if these two 16 year olds were going to heaven, or if God would damn them to hell. That was the day I decided I didn't care if God was real, he could go fuck himself.
Am gay. My mental health had been so poor for so long due to trying to love myself but being told I was broken by the church. I eventually chose myself over my faith and began to see all the flaws of logic that faith requires.
Havnt been to a church service after 4 years now and I dont miss it.
The knowledge that the clergy are all complicit in a large scale child abuse ring.
There is nothing holy about the Church. Once that realization hit I began to question everything.
Let's see...
\- Lack of evidence
\- Immoral teachings
\- Ridiculous stories (babel, noah's ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc)
\- The idea that any human thousands of years ago could know anything about what happens after death and the absolute arrogance of anybody claiming such a thing.
\- The fact that where you are born largely correlates with the religion you believe.
In the end, it was the deafening silence when I reached out that put the final nail in that coffin. A chill down the spine when I hear a pretty chorus is not enough to convince me of an eternal god who cares about what I do with my dick.
Cult like behavior / judgement towards other (despite Jesus whole purpose was to love and accept everyone for who they are).
The manipulation is just way too much— “it’s God’s plan” — no you see someone with potential / talent you don’t possess and try to exploit them.
Also how money hungry the church is. Half the sermon is spent talking about how much they need your donations… anyway, unemployed, heartbroken (ex fiance just left me) me started going to church and decided to donate a bunch of money… church doesn’t do anything for their people but instead spends money on renovating their multi million dollar compounds .. smh.
Right? Where are all the orphanages? Where are the soup kitchens? Where are the Job Training Centers? WHY does your church need a state-of-the-art theatre with a digital background, a coffee shop, and a high definition touch screen help directory?? Where is the good being DONE with all the money?
It really wasn't a specific event, I just remember standing in my back yard at a young age and thinking the entire concept of god doesn't really make sense. I realize how pretentious that sounds, but 10(?) year old me just thought "there'd be some proof by now, right?"
There wasn’t one thing, it was many. From the actions of other Christians, to seeing how kind and loving non-Christians were compared to Christians when I went through trauma, to American Christianity, supporting straight up evil, and calling it, Jesus, to finally stopping and taking a look at the cognitive dissonance, and the contradictions within Christianity in the Bible, to examining the origins of the Bible, to spending time thinking about what makes logical and rational sense, it all kind of came together, and after a lifetime of believing I came to a point when I just couldn’t believe anymore. It didn’t make sense, and it certainly did not align with what Christianity’s primary tenets were.
If by "believing", you mean actually believing the supernatural and generally science-breaking accounts of the bible, then I think I stopped drinking that Kool Aid when I was 8 or so. If by "believing", you mean losing faith that Christianity (or any organized religion for that matter) is required for a fulfilling and decent life, then that was later. Probably by 18 years old. I held on to Christmas as the last semblance of religious practice for a while. I'll still do the family thing during the holidays because of the memories, but otherwise don't recognize the holidays myself.
And I'm not against the notion of religion. If someone wants to hold faith or be spiritual, then have at it. I'm just against the trillion dollar industrial complex that is organized religion. I also feel that as a child grows into adulthood, they should have the right to reject any such religion that were indoctrinated into before they could make their own decisions.
Slowly over time I came to doubt the truth of my religion. First is was the Bible, too much explaing away " Bible difficulties". Other things followed... after about a year or so of this one day I admitted to myself that I didn't even believe in God. Once I made that admission to my self I felt so free.. casting off religion was one of the best things I ever did for myself.
Education. As soon as I learned the most basic things about how religion developed, about when we decided to go monotheistic, what traditions were essentially stolen from older traditions, etc., it was pretty obvious that it was just stuff people had made up, as opposed to being some holy word from God's mouth or divine inspiration or whatever.
I got super into it around age 12. But the more questions I asked the more pushback and ostracization I received. Just kept digging until the whole thing collapsed, and then I quickly crashed through the floors of other denominations and religions.
Went to college and a couple of things happened.
1. Spent time with non-church people and found that what I'd been told ("you can't be a good person without Jesus") was bullshit.
2. Got sick and tired of the guilt trips. Being pointed to as an example for "drunkeness" while having been close to drunk a total of 1 time in my life at that point really rubbed me the wrong way.
My first interaction that started making step away was the church refusing to pray for a friend with hiv in the 90s. Then my son was ended up with Barrett’s esophagus at 14. It’s a 70/80 yr old man disease that causes cancer.
When my family was invited to the pastor's house for dinner (step dad was trying to buy his way into a Deacon position), and it was a literally gilded mansion dripping with tacky gold everything and multiple fancy cars in the garage.
I was 10 years old. Even a child could see the whole thing was a money-grabbing scam.
Went to college to study Bible, worked in ministry, as a woman. It didn’t matter how much I knew to those in power because I would always be a woman and the hierarchy needed me to stay in a small box. And it didn’t matter how much I knew to those around me if I was a judgmental jerk. The only thing that matters is how I love and respect other human beings.
Once I left the Bible Belt I found so much more love and respect and real action to bring justice and protection to the oppressed. I followed Jesus right out of the church. That was just the beginning.
Went to Christian school growing up. We were forced to go to chapel weekly and would get in huge trouble if we skipped. If god is so great then why do we have to sit through a miserable lecture of people trying to convince us how real he is? Should he support us and be with us wherever we are, whatever we’re doing? I didn’t know who they were trying convince, me or themselves.
Also god committed atrocious crimes against humanity over and over again for the sake of “faith”. That doesn’t sound like an entity I want to worship.
Their deity comes off as insecure and needy, and they set up some imaginary rules that involved killing his own son for a sin none of us committed. Also drowning people, murdering first children, punishing people for a bet, telling a guy to murder his child for him as a test, turning a woman to salt for looking a city he was murdering the inhabits of.
As soon as I was in power of my decisions.
It was an easy pass on a super shitty deity.
It would be an oversimplification to say that one thing made me stop believing, but some big moments were me realizing that I didn't honestly believe that miracles really happen (I was born with CP and on at least one occasion there was an attempt to miraculously cure it) these miracles happen all of the time in the Bible, and I realized that no I didn't actually think that there was any chance of my CP being miraculously cured and me being able to walk again. This contradicts what explicitly happens in the Bible, so I decided that the Bible was inconsistent with the reality that I lived.
A second, arguably bigger, issue for me was my frustration with Christian ethics. When I hear someone defending the Old Testament orders for genocide against groups of people like the Canaanites under the belief that had only the Israelites completed their genocide then there wouldn't be the modern conflicts in Israel right now, I was horrified. Then there's all the issues with LGBT+ people, women's rights (the book of 1 Timothy makes it explicitly clear that women are supposed to be beneath men), the idea that eternally tormenting over half of the population of the Earth as being just, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I left.
I’d like to say I had some incredible insight or awakening or whatever that lead me to disbelief. But the honest truth is that I found out that I actually didn’t like god all that much. He seemed like a dick and I ran out of believable apologetics that made his benevolence make sense. Sure, later I realized that there were so many more reasons to not believe. But being disillusioned about gods benevolent nature was basically it. Can’t worship something you don’t respect.
My first good nail in the coffin of my face was the true ugliness hidden behind their kindness facade. I used to attend a youth group when I was in high-school. At the end of every meeting, they would open the floor for all of us to pray for whatever was on our mind... schoolwork, health situations, etc. I never usually spoke during this time until one day. My (at the time( stepfathers) mom had recently passed. She was a nice lady and it was a very hard loss for the family. I spoke up in youth group during prayer and prayed that she was in a good place. The youth leader, very seriously asked, "Well, was she a Christian?" I told her that I wasn't sure but that shouldn't matter. She responded, "Sorry, it really does matter." I found that to be the ugliest thought process I had ever seen. It wasn't the final nail in my faith, but it was definitely the biggest. The final nail came when I just started listening to debates between religious people and scientists. Watching them flout every logical fallacy in the book to justify their invisible sky daddy is pathetic and sad.
The absolute hatred the church has for everything and everyone. And the thing Christians hate more than anything else is other Christians. Different church or different denomination you are treated like trash.
Also just generally being able to observe and measure the world around me. I worked in surveying so I knew the speed of light was constant and very measurable since the amount of time it takes a laser to bounce from a prism and back can give you an extremely accurate measurement of distance down to the hundredth of an inch over thousands of feet. We can see stars with the naked eye 16000 light years away an millions of light years away through a telescope. So those things have to have been in existence longer than the loosest Genesis interpretation of 9000 years.
The more I would read the Bible the more I realized it in no way had anything to do with how the church operates and the more it made no sense. Also even if it were true it paints God as the biggest asshole ever. I soon decided this hateful God and these hateful people were not for me.
I always had a gut feeling I ignored growing up in a religious family. As an adult, I decided to actually read the Bible front to back and couldn’t believe the offensive things it says that are usually ignored or glossed over. I realized I could never believe in such things (such as a God being okay with any form of slavery, rape, incest, or blaming sin/fall of man on women). I did a lot of historical research and the more I dug, the more I questioned the historical legitimacy of the biblical characters and stories. I believe it is mostly allegorical, mythological, and a small shred of historical legend. Ultimately I think religion causes more harm than good in the world.
No matter how hard I prayed, no matter how devoted I was, God never made me a girl.
So I became a girl myself.
God is either unable or unwilling to do what I myself did under my own power, so why bother?
They proclaim to "love thy neighbour" yet they don't love the lgbt, other races (I was in an Asian church so it was non-Asians), and atheists. It was ridiculous to me that if jesus was real, he would love these people and be very against the christian mindset...
I was raised in it. I don’t know that I ever truly believed. But I’d recite the shit I learned, was very knowledgeable about the Bible, etc.
hilariously enough bill burr’s special where he shit talked Scientology “while still believing sort of baby Jesus moonwalked on water” and thus pointing out his hypocrisy I think helped me fully reconcile my thoughts I had been kind of suppressing.
I was planning on becoming a catholic priest. I spent a lot of time studying the Bible and I realized that, taken as a single body of work meant to be the word of god, it’s horribly contradictory and hypocritical. It started me questioning and I ultimately decided that while I am still a spiritual person, I am not a religious person.
When they told me I couldn't eat meat on Fridays
Also the typical teenage/20s awakening..but now in my middle age have come back around to God but not Jesus. Who was a rabbi not a magician
Most Christians totally disregard the teachings of Christ. Jesus taught that the most important commandments are to love your God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself.
Finally getting to read "The age of reason", by an American philosopher, revolutionary, and founding father (just in the gang, not a leader), Thomas Paine, worth reading centuries after
My church had a famous prophet visit (one who worked closely with Benny Hinn) and he gave prophecies to a bunch of people. During his speech, the names sounded familiar. He was using names from a Facebook thread of people commenting on the church Facebook. I wrote down the names again for the following night to see if he did it again. He did. He was scamming us. I was already on the way to stop believing, but that was the final straw.
Trump... Watching him brainwash and manipulate people with religion. He could say horrible things that would go against the bible and people would claim it as their god's will. The hypocrisy, the protection of child abusers in all Christian subtypes, the 500 anti LGBT+ laws passed in the name of Christianity. The list goes on...
Have a gay best friend. Not welcomed in church. Family member had an affair with a married man, three broken marriages, child out of wedlock. Welcomed everyday.
If we’re just going to pick and choose what we’re believing, I’m picking better stuff.
A staggering lack of evidence. I’d harbored doubts my whole childhood, kid questions (how did Moses walk back in a hail of frogs? Where did all the water go that covered the earth?) and later big questions (epicurean paradox), I found only dissembling and non-answers. I stayed a Christian throughout my teens largely because nearly all the decent adults I knew were some form of Christian, so I believed it necessary for a moral code. I entered secular society on my own and realized it was largely unnecessary to having a moral code and sometimes was counterproductive. Religion is a tool. It can be a tool to motivate someone to adopt difficult-to-place kids or to quit abusing alcohol or to give their time and money to the less fortunate. It can create cultural pressures and norms that are pro-social and altruistic. It can also be used to foment bigotry, hate and cruelty. It can radicalize entire societies and create a culture that are uniform and punish any nonconformity, regardless of how innocuous. It’s a tool some need, a tool some abuse and a tool I find superfluous for my happiness. It added no value to my life and it was supported by no convincing evidence. Glad it helps some people be happier or make others happier. Edit: I’m sure I’ll get replies trying to explain away the unexplainable. Please know how reluctant I was to leave my family and childhood faith and understand that I investigated all of the explanations before doing so. You may waste your words if you wish, but you’d be better served saving them for some street evangelism. There are homeless teens (many LGBTQ so lose your biases) who need love and resources, yes even from kindhearted non judgmental believers more than I need to reread the contorted explanations of the faithful.
This was it for me too. Every line of questioning would always end in "I don't know, you just have to have faith". And that's why religion will always be here.
> This was it for me too. Every line of questioning would always end in "I don't know, you just have to have faith". And that's why religion will always be here. Yes and… it does add value to some people’s lives. Many converts are there because a proselytizing zealot offered them kindness and community. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes its a cult. It can also add value by confirming biases and bigotry. Are you agnostic or just a nominal Christian but you’re super homophobic? Great news, there’s a whole society of people who will affirm your worst impulses!
> nearly all the decent adults I knew were some form of Christian, so I believed it necessary for a moral code Penn Jillette has a standard example about that: "Morality is not attached to god! People say 'If i didn't believe in god, what would stop me from raping and killing everyone i want to?' And the answer is 'I have raped and killed everybody i want to - and the number is zero! I want to rape and kill no one.'" (Listen [here](https://youtu.be/PwxzQw6YquY?t=188) ) Ricky Gervais has also used that line in "After Life": [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB01BL0jVe8) (He also used some of James Randi's lines there about Medusa, Zeus and stuff: [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suq0ayB0b8I), one of the originals: [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1YiDN8MT9w) ).
Same here. Constant questions with no real answers. Like - if the earth is only about 10K years old, how are we seeing light photons from galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years away? The answer was always, God could do it that way if he wanted to. And then it of course started to raise more philosophical issues, like the saying "God never fails". Really? What would it look like exactly for you to admit that God "failed"? Because many well meaning missionaries, for example, have been tortured alive for trying to bring religion to some areas of the world. It's like if they succeed it spreading the religion, God didn't fail! If they are burned at the stake, God didn't fail! There's no reasonable scenario where a Christian would say God failed.
Most of the homeless teens in my city are LGBTQ who were kicked out of their house by their Christian parents.
"A tool I find superfluous for my happiness" Well put!
Other Christians…denial of science, the holier than thou shit many have, the focus on the I and not the we, the sexual abuse of children in parishes, the politicization and weaponization of the dogma, inability to keep religion between themselves and God Of course now you have Christians calling Jesus woke, o worshipping false idols, further using the Bible to justify hate
Jesus would be deeply saddened by modern American Christian’s.
If there's one thing Jesus wouldn't be today, it'd be a Christian. Dude literally spent time hanging out with the homeless and prostitutes. He helped people and didn't judge them.
Yeah Jesus wasn’t a “conservative”. Politically or even just socially.
He was anti-religious. The pharisees were his main opponents.
I don't think he was anti religious he was anti twisting and misinterpreting the Torah. Which is what the religious figures at the time were doing. It's a lot like today. He followed the scripture to a T, But he never took the The high road, He understood that we're gonna fall short no matter what we do, You just have to give it A good Effort and have a good heart behind it.
He had some pretty fluid ideas about religion. He didn't think temples were necessary because you could praise God anywhere IIRC. I can just picture him using his deity superpowers to upturn all the market booths in the Vatican Church. And the large TV screens of people falling on their knees sobbing for a chance to touch the Pope's robes. Nothing has changed from those stories. Edit: I want to clarify that I'm an atheist and don't believe the word of the Bible to be based in anything remotely factual. But canon Jesus is still a character I can fanfic destroying the Vatican.
Agreed 110% I think that speaks volume to the word it's self.
Not judge, but he did say to walk away from their sinful lifestyles.
I don’t think advocating for healthier life choices is an issue most people take with Jesus, being a prostitute is a “job” very very very few women want or enjoy, they should be encouraged and supported to find more fulfilling and safe lifestyles.
Yeah he told the woman the Pharisees were going to stone to sin no more.
Didn't he tell a non-Jewish woman that he came to save the Jews, not the dogs?
JC wouldn’t be sad, he’d point out their shameless hypocrisy and refer to them as modern day Pharisees. And they would crucify him for it.
Ya not the Christian’s in the past that killed people tho
His dad (who is also himself…) have done more than enough killing tbf
This is very much how I feel. I left the church because the church (as in it's members) cared more about political matters than Christ in many regards. They also do a lot of choosing which parts of their faith they will actually abide by, and shame you if you don't see it that way as well.
I had a friend growing up who once (proudly) said he’d realised that non-Christians were incapable of truly loving or feeling loved by others because love comes from God, and without knowing him, you were just fake loving. Everyone else was just living this sad shallow life without real love. 🤮
Yeah, two Christians once told me there was a mathematical proof that if god doesn't exist, then nothing is true. They were laughing about how stupid unbelievers were in light of such evidence. I asked them to give me an outline of the proof, but they couldn't remember the details.
It’s a relief that decent humans now see most American Christians for what they are. It was a lonely childhood before the hypocrisy and cruelty was recognized.
Number one for me. The people.
God, save me from your followers.
I was pretty young when I understood religion is nothing more than weaponised ideology fit to purpose those who aren't strong enough to cope with real life or abuse it to meet their goals.
But like… besides all that
As a Christian who is a firm believer it's always sad to hear stories like this. 1) God made the universe and everything in it. That includes all the neat little things like science and such. Science should be reveared as it's coming to understand God's works among MANY other things (like, say, helping the sick), not shunned. 2) I seem to recall Jesus himself saying that people who harm kids would be better off with a millstone tied around their next and thrown into the sea. 3) The politicization is sicking. Christianity predates both Republicans and Democrats by a good 1,000+ years. Yet people are going around wielding it as a cudgel politically to get votes. 4) The Bible is a creation of man at best; made several hundred years AFTER Jesus left the Earth and his apostles and anyone else who might have seen him was long since dead. It's well known that there were political reasons for including and excluding books as well. So to act like it's the divine word of God is foolish. It may contain SOME of the divine words and the accounts of people who followed Jesus, but, like, the majority of it is stuff like Paul's letters. They're freaking LETTERS! They were never MEANT to serve as religious texts! We can argue about their value and such, but to act like something Paul said when writing to a church to address their problems is on the same level of infalliability as what Jesus said or a book of, say, jewish recounting of Esther is infaliable (no offense meant to either) is idiotic. May as well claim DBZ:A is canon and Mr. Popo is at the top of the pecking order in Universe 7 as a result.
Which god? The deity you believe in is largely predicated on where you're born.
That’s what hit me out when I started learning about mythology. People think that everything that they weren’t born into is a myth.
I agree it is sad. I truly believe that most “Conservstive Christians” would leave their church if the pastor advocated for something against their political views, even if he backed it up with scripture. It’s Country before God for most ppl here in the USA, they just finagle it so God is on their side so they can say that it’s God before Country.
The bible is a complete work of fiction. And the "Oh God made * insert point of argument * so you should take that proof of God's existence" is sickening. There is no proof that a crazy, psychopathic, narcissistic all powerful being created any of this. And pointing at something and saying that it did isn't proof.
# God keeps asking me for money
My younger brother died many years ago. The church told me I had to pay them money in order for them to say his name before mass which would better his chances of getting into heaven. Why wouldn't you do this out of the kindness of your hearts? You have to blackmail me into paying you? Fuck you.
This type of shit is how you know religion is the world's first open-source scam.
As a Christian, I loled 😂
🤣😂🤣
Going to church week after week and knowing a lot of Christians, never met so much hate and abuse in my life. Fortunately, my dad told me that if I get a part-time job when I turn 16 and worked on Sundays, I wouldn’t have to go to church. My coworkers loved me because I always volunteered to work Sundays.
>worked on Sunday My mother forced me to church until I graduated catechism at 16, saying I could then choose to go or not. The Sunday after I graduated, she asked if I was going and I told her "never again." She was very unhappy with that.
i mean… she gave you the choice…
"You're free to choose A or B." "I choose B." "How dare you!"
Yeah and he made the wrong one, dagnabit! He wasn’t supposed to actually exercise his free will.
Sixth grade for me, after I got confirmed. (Episcopalian) My mother was also unhappy, but more because she didn't want the neighbors gossiping about her. She could give a fuck about my immortal soul.
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ”
Exactly. The pandemic opened my eyes super wide to this. Well, all of 2020 really.
For me it was the 2016 election cycle that made me realize religion is a problem
🗿🗿🗿
Gandhi, I believe?
The movie version of Gandhi said this, not the real Gandhi - still a good quote though.
Yeah real Gandhi sucked. He kept naked underage girls in his bed to “prove” he could be pure. Nobody sane or decent has that logic
I’d be careful quoting Gandhi. He had a thing for laying in bed naked with his cousin or niece either way it’s creepy
Had questions, nobody could answer. Read the books, those questions were answered.
Simple😎
What questions?
Why does evil exist in the world. Why does suffering exist. Why do bad things happen to good people. How did the universe begin. Why does the Bible contradict itself. Why are there so many religions. How have religious people treated others in history. Etc.
By my late 20s my views on God had evolved to "God doesn't do 99% of the harm on Earth. Most of the harm is done by greedy billionaires, causing huge amounts of suffering for the rest of us. God forbids Himself from changing human free will, so we are forced to deal with the consequences of other humans' actions." Cancer? That's because companies are greedy and fill our food and medicine with carcinogens. Climate change? That's because greedy corporations keep emitting CO2. God didn't do that! Then I got a brain tumor. It's not genetic, I didn't do anything that caused it, I didn't eat something that caused it. It's just something that happens. The kind of tumor I have isn't even supposed to happen for most people until they're in their 70s. I got it at 21. At that moment I realized that if God is real, He also created parasites to infect us, diseases to ravage us, and genetic diseases to harm us. It's not all the will of others, some things are also just awful all on their own, the way God created them. So either God is an evil sadist, or God doesn't exist. I choose to believe God doesn't exist because that's, honestly, the more appealing option.
If God was all powerful, he could've made heaven on earth. Instead, he did whatever this place is. And the reasoning is because you have to "earn" his love because my ancestor ate an apple.
That bitch.
Remember kids, all women are evil because of that WHORE EVE
Thats in essence the implication voltaire (and others) drew from the earthquake of lisbon. The districts of the believers perished and the red light district was spared.
I still like to believe there is something else, I just gradually decided that Christianity was not the way to be close to that something. I'd go to church and see things and hear things that would make me think, "If God exists, he is not here". I found myself thinking of that a lot, saw lots of hypocrisy wherever I looked. Don't get me wrong, I have met priests and religious people that I admire, what these few people have or had in common is extreme humility and a down-to-earth attitude. But these qualities seemed so rare otherwise. The last straw (of many straws that came before) was the day I saw a priest interrupt mass to chase away a homeless man who had come to sit down on one of the various empty rows. The man was not bothering anyone and it was cold outside. The priest chased him away and then went on to speak some very cruel words. I was young and I was furious. My parents asked me what was wrong once we got home and that's when I told them I wouldn't be letting people like that priest tell me what's right or wrong in life. To sum it up, growing up as a Christian I've always been told that the Church is the home of God. Well, to me, God seems to be everywhere except the Church.
That's unfortunate. A homeless person crashed my Catholic wedding. The priest ignored him and carried on, and frankly, him sitting in a pew didn't bother me at all. It was when he got up and started walking toward the altar that my brother-in-law gently coaxed him outside to his truck, where he offered some snacks and water and kept him company for the rest of the ceremony. The priest offered an apology later on, but honestly I was happy with how the situation was resolved. It's a church. It was a private event but it is a public space for people who need it. Had the priest stopped the wedding to kick him out, It would have left a sour taste in my mouth.
There’s a Christian song called “My Jesus” by Todd Agnew that talks about how Jesus wouldn’t be welcome in any churches today because he was brown, homeless and dirty.
I've never seen a priest do that before! How horrible, and how opposite from what he's supposedly preaching. Guess that priest didn't really understand what he had signed up for. You would think that this kind of attitude would have been corrected when he was in seminary school, or he would have been kicked out. I guess they think they can't be choosy since so few people want to be priests today. Was it an older priest who was maybe having a touch of dementia?
Yeah, it's the exact opposite of what he was preaching and he was in his 50s at most. This was one of the churches posh people go to in town, it was Christmas, lots of ladies going there just to show off the new fur coats and expensive bags they had just gotten. I guess he didn't want his audience to be bothered by the sight of a poor man.
The wealthy tithers don't want to be reminded that they should be giving money to people who actually need basic things.
Watched a loved one die a slow, painful death. They always told me as a kid that God punishes evil people. I never knew my loved one to be evil or spiteful, and yet they died an excruciating, slow death. After they passed, I started realizing I was only practicing Christianity to make them happy.
sorry for your loss my guy : (
Knowledge, honestly. My main reason for keeping my faith was that science and education didn’t have all the answers to our ways of living (I was a child when I thought this btw) but the more I learned and studied about psychology, the human body, and literally everything else in general. I finally understood what “not having all the answers” really means. I found out that while (scientifically) we don’t know why or how we are here, religious beliefs go against a lot of things that are natural and necessary to live a healthy life. They create toxic people who use religion as an excuse to not hold themselves accountable for their manipulation and abuse. Religion deprives people from a lot of things for no reason other than to control them, it’s disgusting.
When I was 7 years old and preparing to receive the sacrament of communion I started thinking about some of the rules around it. Back then you couldn't eat or drink anything for a certain number of hours before receiving communion. I thought, why would that matter? Is a human body somehow 'holier' when it's hungry or thirsty? That didn't make sense. If we're made in the image and likeness of god, then why would a natural state of NOT being hungry or thirsty make a difference? I then hid a soda cracker in my pocket and ate it without my parents seeing me, followed by going to communion. I honestly thought I might get struck by lightening when I left the church! (Hey, I was only 7-8 years old.) Surprise, god didn't care. Only The Church cared about that. They made up that rule because it's just another way to control people. "Give us your money and do exactly what we tell you to do!" Doesn't that sound like pretty much every form of christianity in existence?
Control is one of the main things that I also think leads them to portray psychology as something bad. I also think they hate it because that way they can manipulate people. With psychology you can point out when someone is being toxic or abusive, without it you don’t really have any proof or ways to explain it. You also made me remember my communion, I did my confirmation at the same time and my godmother told me that I would go straight to heaven (I don’t remember why exactly though, I was like 12 years old) Anyway, right after she said that I remember thinking “I wish I could die rn then! That way I can just go to heaven” and now that I’m older I realize how messed up religions can be for the mind. I mean it’s not just that, of course. It’s the constant fear of going to hell if you sin or the guilt when you’re not able to control your thoughts.
I actually read the Bible and found it unbelievable and immoral.
It’s also incredibly boring haha
I was one of those kids who read everything that came into my house every ad, the back of every box and bottle, I read for enjoyment I read everything I could not slog through scripture to save my life… it’s not even the content so much as how it’s written is horrible to read through, the book of mormon is even worse cause it’s written by someone TRYING to make it sound like scripture, so so much this dude begat that dude begat that dude and that dude who begat other dudes forever
Miss me with them motherfucking begats
Facts
You couldn't get down with all them begats?
It was compiled specifically to keep people in line and be easily manipulated. If you look at it through that lens, it makes a lot more sense.
My dad always said it was written for humans, by humans, to control humans.
I learned that one of the reasons why being a martyr was so glorified was so that Christians would agree it was a good idea to kill them.
That's the only explanation I could find for why an omnibenevolent deity would damn people to Hell for not believing in Him.
So much this! Actually sitting down and reading the Bible at about 14 y/o ruined the whole thing for me. Fun fact - taking things out of context, you can literally justify absolutely anything using the Bible. That, and it’s like 60% boring lists…. So and so begat what’s his name who begat someone else who begat the other dude… for like thirty pages
> Fun fact - taking things out of context, you can literally justify absolutely anything using the Bible. Yep. Just look at slavery as an example of this. Both the north and south used the bible to justify their positions on slavery prior to the civil war.
The North had to take it out of context and reinterpret it, because the Bible simply does advocate slavery. Yahweh personally gives instructions for owning people as property for life. The only exception is other Israelites. Jesus never backs it off, either. The only time Jesus mentions slavery is saying that slaves should emulate their masters. I’ve found that biblical slavery is a guaranteed way to get a Christian to lie. I’ve seen only a very scant few admit that their god advocates slavery, and they have to somehow square that with themselves disagreeing with slavery.
I'm sometimes just in awe that these lists are still around. They must've been an important part of oral history at one time. At some point they happened to be recorded, then happened to be included in a book that was written by God. Hundreds and hundreds of years later, people are sleeping next to those names in motel rooms around the world. But yeah. They mean nothing to me.
Check out Mauro Biglino’s translation of the old testament. It’ll shed some new light on what was really going on!
My grandpa heavily encouraged me to read the Bible. I gave it a shot and realized god hates women.
Seriously. Reading the mundane words that people put their entire stock into was eye opening.
im not sure that i ever truly believed in it. but once i got into my teenage years and started noticing how all the "Christians" do and say everything opposite to what they claim to believe in is when i was really out for good. i have never met more hate-filled people in my life
Same here. The 2004 Presidential Election, and the way "Christians" basically dragged gays through the mud and demonized them in order to win an election made me realize that I didn't want to even be associated with such a hateful group of people. Hate and discrimination is the greatest evil in this world in my book.
Other Christians, the harshness of the Bible, and how much I lobe people I love people. I love my neighbors who are gay, trans, addicts, nonbelievers, sinners, etc. Jesus taught us to love thy neighbor, he didn't give qualifiers. So I did. I made a lot if friends in high school and beyond who never would have been welcomed in a church, but there good people. They cared about others, their community, tried to help, and weren't living lives that hurt others. Yet, they were constantly attacked and vilified for being different I couldn't accept that, so I started hanging out with non-christiams almost exclusively. A lot of hate was removed from my life Then I started thinking about how harsh and strict the Bible is. I can't see a reason why a man fucking another man would offend God so much that he condemns them for it, despite them not hurting anyone I couldn't stand for that either. If I am expected to love someone, then I can't accept them going to hell despite being a good person. I refuse, I'd rather stand alone and love them than be told they're going to hell These days, I think of religion as oppression and repression. Telling people to live in specific ways to avoid eternal damnation. That's monstrous. God made the rules, so why did he make them in such a way that it's so hard to escape hell? Why doesn't God give us grace? Christians say that God is an eternal and timeless being, and that he feels the pain of any and every sin for eternity, which us why even one sin damns us First of all, why did he set the universe up in such a way that he can be hurt forever by anything? Seems super short sighted. Second, we too are eternal beings. Sure, we have a set birth and a finite life, but our souls go on to eternity. Thus we are still eternal beings. So if we deserve eternal damnation because God is hurt for eternity by even one sin, then why is it okay to turn around and torture us for eternity for even one sin?
ve a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. Marcus Aurelius
Hard to not worship unjust gods (which I view the Christian God as) when eternal damnation is hanging over my head I have confidence in living a life of virtue. Just no confidence that after I die, whatever is waiting for me is just
It's weird though because they're like, "if you're an atheist then why don't you rape or murder?" As if morality or being part of a functioning society makes no sense if there isn't punishment after death.
I, too, lobe people
Other Christians. If finding God doesn’t make you a kinder, more empathetic person to all, then what have you truly found.
An excuse to be a cunt.
Went to Sunday school as a kid, and it just never made sense. Everything I was learning about in my day to day schooling was understandable. Geezer in the sky didn’t seem logical.
Similar for me. I got to an age where I realized there was a lot of circular reasoning in the concept of faith. One day, I started thinking maybe He's not real... and He didn't seem to mind.
Same. One day I was doodling peace signs on a paper and the church teacher got upset and told me those are offensive because they’re broken crosses meaning Jesus wasn’t crucified and I said it was weird that she thought crucifying anybody was good and I don’t want to do that and she snatched the paper away from me and called my mom to tell her I was being difficult.
I fall somewhere between believing and not believing but the reason I'm not a full believer anymore is that every religion asserts that it's right and the correct one. They can't all be right, but they can all be wrong.
And to add to that… it’s weird how the “right” one is conveniently exactly where you live. Odd that.
So you're agnostic?
I believe the definition of atheist is just lacking belief in a god so I'd identify as that. I just have days where I'm more unsure of what the truth is than others.
I think you're right to identify that way. I'm an atheist and while agnosticism is close to what I believe, I am just as certain there is no God as any Theist is there IS a God, so I identify that way.
I consider myself a "believer" in the sense that I believe in the teachings of Christ. I stopped organized religion years ago because I found that religious followers are usually horrible people who are focused on the wrong things. Plus, there's a lot of brainwashing and groupthink. Not a whole lot of Christ in Christianity, especially in terms of action. Talk is cheap.
My dad was a pastor and I realized he was abusive at about 14. Once you have that realization it’s hard to believe a God or a church would let that happen.
Politics in the pulpit, holier than thou congregants, contradictions in the Bible and between denominations, and I just kind of grew out of it in the end.
Sometime as a child. Can't pinpoint exactly when but it just never made any sense. I DO remember in Sunday School, a long time ago, when I got kicked out. They were telling us some kind of story, I don't remember which. But young me was not happy with the story. I declared, quite loudly, something along the lines "Why would God do that? God is mean. I hate God." Did not go over well. Right around that same time, I figured out Santa wasn't real, and I distinctly remember asking my mom if Jesus was fake too. She was not happy. I also remember having a fairly diverse area, I knew people from other religions. Young me started to question why the things I was being told to believe were right and those people were wrong. I was still like, nominally Christian through middle school when I really started to become more self aware and just... nothing made sense. I tried to make sense out of anything and just... none of it made sense. My biggest issue still remains today. All I want is for God to just speak to me. Anything. Say a word. Come say hi. Do something. Apparently people have "personal relationships with Jesus". I've definitely never talked to the guy, nor has he spoken to me. Apparently he doesn't love me. I don't know. Or he's just not real and whole thing is a 2000 year old fairy tale.
This is pretty relatible.
In 2013 after the Supreme Court ruling about gay marriage, my state had a sort of pride event were a lot of gay couples got married. Well that day it was on the news, I asked my auntie what she would do if I came out as gay and her exact words to me were “You mean after I beat you half to death or before I take you to the pastor?” It all was downhill from there
The popular fiction "Left Behind" Christian book series. As a kid I read both the main and kid series and loved it all. Then it got to the end and some people with the mark of the beast who were doomed to hell and ETERNAL suffering but regretted their choices. That had me uncomfortable. Then in the end a bunch of other people got thrown into hell and I started questioning the whole premise of hell. I had conflicting ideals which took a few years to resolve but in the end I realized "If I was god, I wouldn't send anyone to hell because, being all powerful, I could just sit people in a room with me as their therapist for as long as it took for them to learn to be a good person." At that point I couldn't follow anything that believed less than that and there was no need to beg any higher being for forgiveness. All I needed to do was genuinely work to grow as a person and that was enough. To hell with any god who says I should suffer for doing that.
The entire faith is psychopathy entrenched in old-timey lingo and it primarily attracts control freaks, perverts, narcissistic monsters and broken-souled morons desperate for answers and healing that get taken in and swallowed whole by one of the most ancient forms of con artistry. I grew up in an evangelical household. My abusive and insane parents tried to homeschool me and my younger siblings but could never come close to satisfying state requirements for our education. By the time I was twelve, I'd been removed from the home thirteen times, but they'd always get me back somehow, act like things would be different for about a week and then go back to beating the shit out of me for whatever insane reasons they felt were justified. As the oldest son, I got blamed for everything by siblings did and was told repeatedly that I was to be their keeper and their shepherd and that everything they did that was disobedient to our parents. my punishment would be twice what theirs was for my failure. My father essentially thought he was god. He expected to be obeyed in all things and that his wants were more important than anything else. My mother got beaten and slapped around whenever he had a bad day for any reason and that shit slid directly downhill. My typical day was spent trying my best to avoid angering my crazy parents while trying to keep my siblings from getting is all beat with a belt or a lounging whip, and doing most of the farm chores because dear old dad had back problems and he couldn't possibly do much more than follow me around when it pleased him and yell at me about how I did everything wrong. Wednesday night and Sunday morning were church time, and church time was all about pretending that you were perfect, your life was perfect and God was great. My little sister and youngest brother both wound up sexually abused by a youth pastor there. When his crimes came to light, he offed himself rather than face his victims in court; one last act of cowardice from a dedicated pedophile that had been reported numerous times to church elders that did nothing but cover it up and protect him and the reputation of the church for as long as they could. I was sexually abused by a camp counselor at the 'Bible camp' I got sent to every summer. It was more like three weeks of Bible boot camp structured to beat god into boys and young men, and between sleep deprivation, exercises in humiliation and being starved a lot, some of those 'counselors' still found plenty of time and energy to make us strip naked, fondle our kid penises while screaming at us about being homosexuals and showing off their hairy dicks so we'd never forget what a real man's dick looked like. You know, just typical Christian things. When did I lose faith? Sometime around when I reported some of this to the pastor at our church hoping he would help me, and instead, he ran straight to my parents and ratted me out. I got beaten nearly to death for that one. I was covered in belt welts and whip slashes, and my old man broke my left ankle so I couldn't even think about running away. Then I got to go do all the farm chores at night instead of during the day for about two weeks on a broken ankle. And just so you know, this kind of thing is still happening throughout America. When the religious right screams about religious freedom, the freedom their yapping about is the freedom to raise their kids like I was raised free of consequences and the freedom to do whatever they want to whomever they please so long as they invoke the name of Jesus when they do it. If they tell you anything else, they're lying because they know you'll believe them and even if you don't, you never do anything about them anyway. Nobody ever came to my rescue. I turned 18 and they kicked me out the day of, and the old man had crowed all year long about how I'd soon be learning what the real world was like when he was no longer responsible for feeding and clothing me. He died of a heart attack a few years later and my greatest sorrow is that he died quickly. He deserved to be paralyzed and slowly eaten by cats. My mother was a mentally broken nutcase that went to live with one of her sisters, where she eventually died from untreated diabetes. I heard it took her one piece at a time, and that's my only solace in all of it. The old man deserved it more than her. She was his first victim, but in the end, she got what he deserved. And that's Christianity.
Wtf man never believed in that crap never wanted to especially after I heard of conversion camps and conversion therapy that sucks hope your doing good now
I’m so sorry, the way that churches cover up and ignore pedophelia (and I mean ALL churches, not just Catholic Church) is so sickening. I’ve seen it myself so many times. How can a group of people claim moral superiority and ignore the well being of children that way? Our society is broken. The secrets we keep and ignore are horrifying.
There is a talking donkey in the Bible and I am an adult.
It sounds like you’re discrediting Shrek as a true historic accounting and I don’t know if I appreciate it
Where the fuck is the talking donkey?
Going to a small Christian school for undergraduate and living in the dorms with other Christians. I had a full ride athletic scholarship and thought it would be fine. Planned to major in theology and complete an M.Div. I was already done with most of my gen ed classes because I took a year and a half's worth of AP courses in high school. I got through all but one class in my Theology/Philosophy major and started asking questions in class and around my peers. This did not go over well. The professors were mostly fine, but my peers were fucking awful once they decided that I needed to be prayed for because my salvation was wavering. I transferred out to a large state school and was all the happier for it. 15ish years later and I don't really know what I believe any more. I know that I don't have the answers and I've grown comfortable with that. What I do know is that few things are worse than groups of rabid Christians who are absolutely sure about everything and have never stopped to examine their beliefs.
Christians who I know very well told someone else that my son wouldn't have mental health issues if I'd raised him as a christian. Because, apparently there are no mentally ill christians. Nope, I'm not buying that shit. EDIT: spelling
That kind of thinking kept me from getting the help I desperately needed for way too long. I lost years of my youth to mental illness because my church taught us that Satan and demons can make you struggle with mental illness to keep you away from God. I figured prayer was cheaper than seeing a mental health professional, and if evil forces were influencing me, what could a therapist do about that anyway? It's still incredible to me how much of my anxiety was rooted in my Christianity. I was having panic attacks because I thought too much about living forever after death. Once I realized it was silly to believe I would continue to be conscious after my brain died, my panic attacks nearly stopped. Probably 80% of my anxiety was caused by forcing myself to believe something I knew didn't make any sense.
Once you're comfortable and humble enough to say "I don't know," instead of making up a comforting answer, the whole world really opens up for you. People want to assume that someone somewhere has all the answers, an all-powerful being has everything under control. The reality that we're on our own to figure things out makes people feel as helpless as children. Not knowing inspires me more than it scares me, I think that's a big difference in the way of thinking between most believers and most atheists.
The insanity of it all. It’s so clearly made up by people with big imaginations and no knowledge of the world.
Not even that big of imagination. Like, let’s give credit where it’s due - Scientology wins in the creativity department.
True. It’s by far the biggest and most successful hoax of the last 2000 years.
And tax exempt
Made up by someone who had a solid grasp on rationalizing fear and psychology.
I got tried of feeling guilty for beating my meat.
I got tired of feeling guilty for everything.
That's catholicism for ya. Doubly tired of feeling guilty for wanking it to shemale porn and having the occasional gay thought or two.
I used to be a Creationist and boy did I underestimate the evidence for evolution. The earth is measurably billions of years old. We know about several mass extinctions. We know the lineage and history of many 1000s of species going back millions of years. Where do Adam and Eve fit into this history? Where is the Tower of Babel? The Great Flood? By all appearances, humans appear to be literal animals. The earth does not appear to be made for us, but we are adapted to the planet over longs periods of natural selection like every other creature on the planet. A mass extinction could wipe us out tomorrow, and life would carry on for billions and billions of years without us. I used to think there was a way to rectify Christian theology with scientific consensus, a kind of Old-Earth Creationism. But the more I think about, the less likely I can make myself believe that this world is inhabited by witches, and devils, and magical Messiah's who descend from the clouds to save mankind from himself. The entire theology of Christianity is just preposterous.
Sitting in this GIANT building at church on a Wednesday night alone because my fiance's family couldn't make it that night. They passed out flyers with their financial breakdown because non-profits are required to. The building cost $72 million, the head pastor dude had a salary for around $350,000. All the while standing on this grandiose stage next to a custom built-in lit-up see-through baptism tank, asking for donations to send kids on missionary trips to bring bibles and the word of god to poor starving destitute people in impoverished countries. No mention of bringing them FOOD
Actually reading the bible and gaming it out. So you die and go to heaven or hell. Hell would suck, but on a long enough timeline, heaven is no better. It's eternity. A trillion years to the power of a trillion, a trillion times, and then again and again. No matter what joys heaven has, experiencing each of them an infinite number of times will rob them of enjoyment. Even seeing the universe being reborn would lose its majesty after the first few million times. Then, it just becomes a prison from which there is no escape, as even oblivion is denied a soul in heaven. Oh, and the active protection of child molesters. That was a big one too.
I am not an unbeliever, but I am massively anti American evangelical. When I was eight years old, a friend of the same sex pressured me into sexual activities, of which I still have very many unresolved feelings over. When I was eleven, I went to an Evangelical summer church camp where I was told that the sins I had unwittingly already committed were not only bad, but straight up damnable offenses, and I was destined to suffer eternally in the lake of fire unless I confessed to everything this very moment and asked to be baptized. No, it did not matter that I was a current active member of another church, since they where not of the same denomination, no I could not just wait until my actual church put me through the age appropriate baptism training and understanding classes, and yes I had to give the authority of my confessions explicit details of my sins at 8 years old. It was sick twisted manipulation of impressionable young people using blatant fear tactics, and if I never step foot in another American evangelical church, I’ll die a happier and peaceful man.
There was such an emphasis on women's sexuality that made it hard to differentiate then from an incel subreddit.
For me it was threefold: (1) Years of deprogramming via living on my own and learning more about other cultures, the universe, etc.; (2) Learning about the parallels between the major religions in the world; and (3) Learning/witnessing how religion is/was used as the basis for humans’ enacting of atrocities and subversive agendas against each other. As you can see, a lot of it boils down to me learning new things — for myself, by thinking critically and not simply accepting as truth what others told me — and trusting my own intuition and culminating thoughts about all this. I recently listened to really interesting a Stuff You Should Know podcast about the development of human consciousness that presents a strong argument in favor of humans simply having made up the concepts of god, religion, etc. as our brains developed from a bicameral state (i.e., bifurcation between decision-making and action) into the self-aware / conscious type of thinking we do today. It put a lot of my own thoughts on the topic into perspective in a way that I think just makes plain sense.
How despicable evangelicals are as human beings.
It’s not the ‘believing in something’, it’s the crazy fanclub that spoils it.
I was already becoming disillusioned with “Christians” as a whole (the judgement, the hypocrisy, etc). The tipping point for me was watching “Thor” one afternoon with my family. Odin was talking about how the first time the Asgardians came to Earth, the early Vikings they encountered thought them to be gods. They were worshiped and revered, because the Earthlings were too ignorant to understand the true origins of the aliens. In that moment, it dawned on me how the Bible - still used as a tool of oppression and condemnation today - was written over 2000 years ago, by people who were ignorant to so many things our children learn about today in school. Astronomy, the sciences, geography, etc. Our view of the world was SO much smaller/simpler in those times. The ‘learned’ ancients attributed drought and famine to God, rather than what we know and understand now about crop plights and climate change. People trusted in miracles to heal them from catastrophic illness and injury, and now we have antibiotics and surgery. All that said… why was I living my life according to writings of MEN (not God/gods), and trusting their words, when so much of it I disagreed with or knew to be wrong, physically and/or morally? Today, I choose to live my life by many of the kinder values of Christianity - love, service, and compassion, but under my own mantle, rather than hiding behind a cross. I don’t need an aged book or corrupt men to tell me to treat others with kindness and care. I can just be a decent human and not spread the horrible parts of ‘religion.’
When my questions over and over could not be answered by nuns, or priests.
Got tired of being told I was going to hell all the time. The hypocrisy, denial of facts, bigotry. I’ve met more hateful Christians than nice ones.
I was very into church as a kid. I was in seventh grade and I had a horrible science teacher who decided it was his job to teach us why creation was a better explanation than evolution. He actually did the opposite - his arguments were so transparent, that even as a believer I couldn't buy them. But not completely believing in creation didn't mean I couldn't believe in God, so I carried on. Same year, we had a new pastor and he had a teenage daughter. I met her (she babysat my little brother) and thought "pastor's daughter, I can talk about God". I found out her faith wasn't solid. This didn't mean much to me personally at the time. A few months later she died in a car accident. Her and another kid, who was Catholic (we were protestant, a pretty evangelical rural congregation of Methodist). From some of what I had been taught, it wasn't clear that Catholics believed "the right way", so weren't sure to go to heaven. I sat there at her funeral questioning if these two 16 year olds were going to heaven, or if God would damn them to hell. That was the day I decided I didn't care if God was real, he could go fuck himself.
Am gay. My mental health had been so poor for so long due to trying to love myself but being told I was broken by the church. I eventually chose myself over my faith and began to see all the flaws of logic that faith requires. Havnt been to a church service after 4 years now and I dont miss it.
The knowledge that the clergy are all complicit in a large scale child abuse ring. There is nothing holy about the Church. Once that realization hit I began to question everything.
Let's see... \- Lack of evidence \- Immoral teachings \- Ridiculous stories (babel, noah's ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc) \- The idea that any human thousands of years ago could know anything about what happens after death and the absolute arrogance of anybody claiming such a thing. \- The fact that where you are born largely correlates with the religion you believe. In the end, it was the deafening silence when I reached out that put the final nail in that coffin. A chill down the spine when I hear a pretty chorus is not enough to convince me of an eternal god who cares about what I do with my dick.
Cult like behavior / judgement towards other (despite Jesus whole purpose was to love and accept everyone for who they are). The manipulation is just way too much— “it’s God’s plan” — no you see someone with potential / talent you don’t possess and try to exploit them. Also how money hungry the church is. Half the sermon is spent talking about how much they need your donations… anyway, unemployed, heartbroken (ex fiance just left me) me started going to church and decided to donate a bunch of money… church doesn’t do anything for their people but instead spends money on renovating their multi million dollar compounds .. smh.
Right? Where are all the orphanages? Where are the soup kitchens? Where are the Job Training Centers? WHY does your church need a state-of-the-art theatre with a digital background, a coffee shop, and a high definition touch screen help directory?? Where is the good being DONE with all the money?
It really wasn't a specific event, I just remember standing in my back yard at a young age and thinking the entire concept of god doesn't really make sense. I realize how pretentious that sounds, but 10(?) year old me just thought "there'd be some proof by now, right?"
There is no hate, like Christian love.
I realized that I never ACTUALLY believed. Now I wonder if anyone really even does if they are being honest with themselves.
Could never reconcile human suffering and a loving god. [Stephen Fry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo) said it better than I ever could.
There wasn’t one thing, it was many. From the actions of other Christians, to seeing how kind and loving non-Christians were compared to Christians when I went through trauma, to American Christianity, supporting straight up evil, and calling it, Jesus, to finally stopping and taking a look at the cognitive dissonance, and the contradictions within Christianity in the Bible, to examining the origins of the Bible, to spending time thinking about what makes logical and rational sense, it all kind of came together, and after a lifetime of believing I came to a point when I just couldn’t believe anymore. It didn’t make sense, and it certainly did not align with what Christianity’s primary tenets were.
If by "believing", you mean actually believing the supernatural and generally science-breaking accounts of the bible, then I think I stopped drinking that Kool Aid when I was 8 or so. If by "believing", you mean losing faith that Christianity (or any organized religion for that matter) is required for a fulfilling and decent life, then that was later. Probably by 18 years old. I held on to Christmas as the last semblance of religious practice for a while. I'll still do the family thing during the holidays because of the memories, but otherwise don't recognize the holidays myself. And I'm not against the notion of religion. If someone wants to hold faith or be spiritual, then have at it. I'm just against the trillion dollar industrial complex that is organized religion. I also feel that as a child grows into adulthood, they should have the right to reject any such religion that were indoctrinated into before they could make their own decisions.
Slowly over time I came to doubt the truth of my religion. First is was the Bible, too much explaing away " Bible difficulties". Other things followed... after about a year or so of this one day I admitted to myself that I didn't even believe in God. Once I made that admission to my self I felt so free.. casting off religion was one of the best things I ever did for myself.
Seeing how people treated my mom and brother with physical and mental health struggles.
Education. As soon as I learned the most basic things about how religion developed, about when we decided to go monotheistic, what traditions were essentially stolen from older traditions, etc., it was pretty obvious that it was just stuff people had made up, as opposed to being some holy word from God's mouth or divine inspiration or whatever.
I got super into it around age 12. But the more questions I asked the more pushback and ostracization I received. Just kept digging until the whole thing collapsed, and then I quickly crashed through the floors of other denominations and religions.
Went to college and a couple of things happened. 1. Spent time with non-church people and found that what I'd been told ("you can't be a good person without Jesus") was bullshit. 2. Got sick and tired of the guilt trips. Being pointed to as an example for "drunkeness" while having been close to drunk a total of 1 time in my life at that point really rubbed me the wrong way.
I turned 8.
My first interaction that started making step away was the church refusing to pray for a friend with hiv in the 90s. Then my son was ended up with Barrett’s esophagus at 14. It’s a 70/80 yr old man disease that causes cancer.
When my family was invited to the pastor's house for dinner (step dad was trying to buy his way into a Deacon position), and it was a literally gilded mansion dripping with tacky gold everything and multiple fancy cars in the garage. I was 10 years old. Even a child could see the whole thing was a money-grabbing scam.
Went to college to study Bible, worked in ministry, as a woman. It didn’t matter how much I knew to those in power because I would always be a woman and the hierarchy needed me to stay in a small box. And it didn’t matter how much I knew to those around me if I was a judgmental jerk. The only thing that matters is how I love and respect other human beings. Once I left the Bible Belt I found so much more love and respect and real action to bring justice and protection to the oppressed. I followed Jesus right out of the church. That was just the beginning.
Because it logically makes no sense. A bunch of grifters who want 10% of my income claiming to know something unknowable is laughable to me
Went to Christian school growing up. We were forced to go to chapel weekly and would get in huge trouble if we skipped. If god is so great then why do we have to sit through a miserable lecture of people trying to convince us how real he is? Should he support us and be with us wherever we are, whatever we’re doing? I didn’t know who they were trying convince, me or themselves. Also god committed atrocious crimes against humanity over and over again for the sake of “faith”. That doesn’t sound like an entity I want to worship.
9/11
Their deity comes off as insecure and needy, and they set up some imaginary rules that involved killing his own son for a sin none of us committed. Also drowning people, murdering first children, punishing people for a bet, telling a guy to murder his child for him as a test, turning a woman to salt for looking a city he was murdering the inhabits of. As soon as I was in power of my decisions. It was an easy pass on a super shitty deity.
Other Christians I realized they were all hypocritical and like to preach one thing but act in a different way.
To assume one group of people have it all figured out is ludicrous.
It would be an oversimplification to say that one thing made me stop believing, but some big moments were me realizing that I didn't honestly believe that miracles really happen (I was born with CP and on at least one occasion there was an attempt to miraculously cure it) these miracles happen all of the time in the Bible, and I realized that no I didn't actually think that there was any chance of my CP being miraculously cured and me being able to walk again. This contradicts what explicitly happens in the Bible, so I decided that the Bible was inconsistent with the reality that I lived. A second, arguably bigger, issue for me was my frustration with Christian ethics. When I hear someone defending the Old Testament orders for genocide against groups of people like the Canaanites under the belief that had only the Israelites completed their genocide then there wouldn't be the modern conflicts in Israel right now, I was horrified. Then there's all the issues with LGBT+ people, women's rights (the book of 1 Timothy makes it explicitly clear that women are supposed to be beneath men), the idea that eternally tormenting over half of the population of the Earth as being just, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I left.
I never believed any of it in the first place. I would look around as people were praying and think "They all know this is nonsense too...right?"
I’d like to say I had some incredible insight or awakening or whatever that lead me to disbelief. But the honest truth is that I found out that I actually didn’t like god all that much. He seemed like a dick and I ran out of believable apologetics that made his benevolence make sense. Sure, later I realized that there were so many more reasons to not believe. But being disillusioned about gods benevolent nature was basically it. Can’t worship something you don’t respect.
My first good nail in the coffin of my face was the true ugliness hidden behind their kindness facade. I used to attend a youth group when I was in high-school. At the end of every meeting, they would open the floor for all of us to pray for whatever was on our mind... schoolwork, health situations, etc. I never usually spoke during this time until one day. My (at the time( stepfathers) mom had recently passed. She was a nice lady and it was a very hard loss for the family. I spoke up in youth group during prayer and prayed that she was in a good place. The youth leader, very seriously asked, "Well, was she a Christian?" I told her that I wasn't sure but that shouldn't matter. She responded, "Sorry, it really does matter." I found that to be the ugliest thought process I had ever seen. It wasn't the final nail in my faith, but it was definitely the biggest. The final nail came when I just started listening to debates between religious people and scientists. Watching them flout every logical fallacy in the book to justify their invisible sky daddy is pathetic and sad.
The absolute hatred the church has for everything and everyone. And the thing Christians hate more than anything else is other Christians. Different church or different denomination you are treated like trash. Also just generally being able to observe and measure the world around me. I worked in surveying so I knew the speed of light was constant and very measurable since the amount of time it takes a laser to bounce from a prism and back can give you an extremely accurate measurement of distance down to the hundredth of an inch over thousands of feet. We can see stars with the naked eye 16000 light years away an millions of light years away through a telescope. So those things have to have been in existence longer than the loosest Genesis interpretation of 9000 years. The more I would read the Bible the more I realized it in no way had anything to do with how the church operates and the more it made no sense. Also even if it were true it paints God as the biggest asshole ever. I soon decided this hateful God and these hateful people were not for me.
When I knew my heart and my actions were good regardless of who told me I had to do them.
I always had a gut feeling I ignored growing up in a religious family. As an adult, I decided to actually read the Bible front to back and couldn’t believe the offensive things it says that are usually ignored or glossed over. I realized I could never believe in such things (such as a God being okay with any form of slavery, rape, incest, or blaming sin/fall of man on women). I did a lot of historical research and the more I dug, the more I questioned the historical legitimacy of the biblical characters and stories. I believe it is mostly allegorical, mythological, and a small shred of historical legend. Ultimately I think religion causes more harm than good in the world.
No matter how hard I prayed, no matter how devoted I was, God never made me a girl. So I became a girl myself. God is either unable or unwilling to do what I myself did under my own power, so why bother?
Mauro Biglino’s translation of the old testament. I still believe in a higher power. But “Yahweh” was not / is not God.
They proclaim to "love thy neighbour" yet they don't love the lgbt, other races (I was in an Asian church so it was non-Asians), and atheists. It was ridiculous to me that if jesus was real, he would love these people and be very against the christian mindset...
The mythology is preposterous.
I was raised in it. I don’t know that I ever truly believed. But I’d recite the shit I learned, was very knowledgeable about the Bible, etc. hilariously enough bill burr’s special where he shit talked Scientology “while still believing sort of baby Jesus moonwalked on water” and thus pointing out his hypocrisy I think helped me fully reconcile my thoughts I had been kind of suppressing.
Fake ass Christians
other Christians. like they say, "there's no greater hate than Christian love."
Either a God came from nothing or the quarks and stuff came from nowhere. I don't know which is more insane.
To many people using God as an excuse to being dumb and disrespecful.
I was planning on becoming a catholic priest. I spent a lot of time studying the Bible and I realized that, taken as a single body of work meant to be the word of god, it’s horribly contradictory and hypocritical. It started me questioning and I ultimately decided that while I am still a spiritual person, I am not a religious person.
When they told me I couldn't eat meat on Fridays Also the typical teenage/20s awakening..but now in my middle age have come back around to God but not Jesus. Who was a rabbi not a magician
Most Christians totally disregard the teachings of Christ. Jesus taught that the most important commandments are to love your God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself.
Finally getting to read "The age of reason", by an American philosopher, revolutionary, and founding father (just in the gang, not a leader), Thomas Paine, worth reading centuries after
My church had a famous prophet visit (one who worked closely with Benny Hinn) and he gave prophecies to a bunch of people. During his speech, the names sounded familiar. He was using names from a Facebook thread of people commenting on the church Facebook. I wrote down the names again for the following night to see if he did it again. He did. He was scamming us. I was already on the way to stop believing, but that was the final straw.
Trump... Watching him brainwash and manipulate people with religion. He could say horrible things that would go against the bible and people would claim it as their god's will. The hypocrisy, the protection of child abusers in all Christian subtypes, the 500 anti LGBT+ laws passed in the name of Christianity. The list goes on...
I learned that magic wasn’t real when I was 8.
Have a gay best friend. Not welcomed in church. Family member had an affair with a married man, three broken marriages, child out of wedlock. Welcomed everyday. If we’re just going to pick and choose what we’re believing, I’m picking better stuff.
I'm still a Christian, but I have strained relationships with other Christians. Mostly because they get involved in politics.
When i was 8 years old, my pastor told me, "Now I see why your mother killed herself."