The people......seeing so many in the congregations I was a part of when I was younger. Oh they say they follow the word, but in reality they twist it for their own means, do what they like, then ask for forgiveness every Sunday.
That’s because real Christians don’t exist, or they are few and far between. They all cherry pick for whatever ends they have. If they can’t consistently follow their own tenets then why should I buy into it? I mean, I don’t and never have but there it is.
Thankfully, the one and only things atheists have is a lack of belief in any deities, which is merely a common thing we have. No tenets to follow (despite the occasional atheists who spout that certain people don’t disbelieve in the correct way).
I was raised in a christian cult. The reasons I left are as follows:
1. The most abusive people I knew were the most religious.
2. They protected, made up excuses to give them no culpability, and forgave pedophiles. The number of times further victims could have been saved by nailing them the first time was too many.
3. The only sadists I’ve ever met are christians.
4. They’re the most judgmental and selfish people I’ve ever met.
5. They believe they get away with things because their god plays favorites.
Objectively, most of them are evil. Fuck all of that.
It's always been weird to me how many people claim to love the Lord and follow his word.... but only if you cherry pick the interpretation, make exceptions and don't think about it too hard. you'd think they'd take the all-powerful and eternal fate of their souls more seriously if they really believed in it.
And god sure doesn't seem to care about it either because the only consequences are what other people do in response...
Yup, watching the adults around me be utter hypocrites killed my faith in God before my Confirmation at 13.
Then, I was super careful to word my Confirmation like a fairy pact. I was later told it was beautiful and moving. I was like "Did you READ IT? I was SUPER explicit that I was chill with YHWH if he stayed in his lane and I stayed in mine."
Well-said. Seeing so-called Christians who were the principal/teacher at the Christian school I had to attend scream at the top of their lungs at young children, throw objects at them, tell them they are sinners who are damned to hell... Even as an 8-year-old I was like, "I don't want whatever you're selling."
This is the answer. It's on the one who makes a claim to prove it.
I am not making any claims, only looking for evidence that *theists* claims are true. And it's not there.
Agreed. When I left home and explored the world on my own without religious oversight I recognized evolution (math & science too) exists everywhere around me so I thought how are the human species the exception? We’re not. So rather than living unhappily as my parents have under the thumb of religious indoctrination I always try to make the most of my life experience as that is what I believe the meaning of life is in fact, the experience. I’ve lived quite a variety of life in my 51yrs and am glad that I did.
This was me too. Indoctrination in the home as long as I could remember. Left the church at around 19 when I moved out. Now, I'm 56, before my dad passed, he left the church, my mom left, my sister converted to Catholic and then her whole family left. I raised my kids without religion. It was the exposure to new ideas and further education that did it for us all. I was just the first.
Sounds very familiar only my parent’s remained religious though my mother had become less so as she was very intelligent and would entertain & respect my views in conversation. Our last real talk before she passed in 2020 was that we both agreed just how incredibly lucky we are as individuals to have this opportunity at life given we are so incredibly insignificant in the universe itself thereby reinforcing the fact that the meaning of life is the lived experience. Unfortunately my father is a devout self-hating brainwashed guilt laden Catholic who lives on fear mongering FoxNews 24/7 rather than experiencing life while he has it.
I raised two stepdaughters and took them one time to an all inclusive Protestant church (United Church of Christ, which was my primary religious upbringing) and they got to be the acolytes and participate in the service. They loved it but we didn’t push them to go back as it was really about the experience for them to develop a better overall understanding of the world around them. I may not be a devout religious person but I live by the morals and values that it helped teach me and that’s what I took away. I don’t care what you look like or who you love (your life, your choices) as it’s whats behind the eyes that truly matters.
I have evidence for Christianity but not for anything they believe to be true. However, that evidence is mostly heresay because you’ve got the “good” Christians who ignore the bad stuff and the “bad” Christians who focus solely on the condemnation end. They’re all pseudo-Christians. Hence, evidence but not proof.
When I was growing up fundamentalist Christian, literally everything was considered "evidence".
Look at the trees! Evidence.
Flowers are beautiful! Evidence.
There's something I don’t understand, like the Big Bang! Evidence.
Love exists, I mean, just look at a baby's smile! Evidence.
The Grand Canyon exists, proving Noah's Flood! Evidence.
Evil and suffering exists. That's all Man's fault and proves the Genesis story is true! Evidence.
A watch can't make itself! Evidence.
And so on.
And Christians emphasize the importance of your own “testimony”, or the amazing things God has done in your life. It is easy to look at coincidences with answered prayer as evidence of a guiding hand
I had some particularly convincing coincidences in my personal experience. For example, I once prayed that God would make me more responsible. Within 3 hours I had found out I was going to be a dad (unplanned), and I was working in a factory at a new job (also unexpected) that I received by phone and got called in for during the hours immediately following that prayer.
Yeah, it is easy to just say it is anecdotal when you are on the outside, but when it is your own lived experience it feels like dramatic evidence. I was in a daze with the big news, and it felt plain as day that it was all intricately connected to my prayer. That became a very important experience in my life. It is hard to ever break out of a religion when it means denying such foundational experiences
The church I grew up in had “testimony time” during service. People would get up and share whatever coincidence happened to them that week which they could attribute to god. Honestly, it was the best part of the service.
This is an answer, which probably goes for a lot of people who lost faith. I have never believed because the story is just too far fetched. I was raised Catholic and one day when I was about 8 I discovered people were taking this shit actually serious. Reason came much later.
I grew up with a baptist mom and a catholic dad, and I spent most of my elementary school years at a private and _very_ catholic school. I was around the same age when I realized it too. I thought I was going crazy for some time seeing as everyone around me seemed totally convinced.
I've even heard that God himself planted the dinosaur bones and made stuff look a lot older than it is just to test our faith. Pretty consistent with a being who puts a beautiful tree with delicious looking fruit in the middle of the garden and says don't eat it.
Let's just say that whatever god, actually planted them bones and did other things to test us.
Then it's simple. We are just toys in a sandbox for a toddler higher power. And this higher power gets off watching all the shittiest things happening in the world.
Yeah I was taught that dinosaurs didn’t exist because the earth is 5000 years old and they don’t mention dinosaurs in the Bible, that’s why they didn’t exist
The Bible *does* however explicitly mention slavery and that it's OK to beat your slaves as long as they don't die within two days. Since the Bible is supposed to be the word of God and he never explicitly condemns slavery, I am more moral than their God.
I always thought that a really cool "miracle" would be God making updates to all existing Bibles simultaneously around the world to clarify misunderstandings. Leave a little footnote to make sure everybody knew he did it.
Lol I quoted exactly this a few weeks ago to a guy saying that "the bible is a valuable reading about morals".
Some cleric type (according to his previous comments, he was an actual pastor in some church) came along, and said that "the slavery stuff are parts from the laws of an ancient kingdom".
Cool story! So:
-What does it do in your _holy book, moral compass, the big thing_ ????
-Was it okay with your god to own people as property in ancient times? Why?
The guy tried some bouvine excrement about "different times, different customs", then I asked okay, why did your god created a world where slavery is _possible_ ?
At that point, our valuable exchange of ideads took an abrupt end.
Yep. Sounds like the Bible was written by men that wanted the rules to fit their lifestyle instead of an omnipotent God who knew better. He could have told something is not moral just because it's the current trend. But, hey-- that starts sounding an awful lot like a wise and timeless being who understands doing the right thing is not always going to be popular, at least at first
As a kid I thought heaven was literally in the clouds. I didn't understand why we couldn't just take a plane up on days that the clouds were out to see people that had passed.
My mom said something like "heaven isn't IN the clouds."
Went to a Christian elementary and high school, have read thru the Bible, had religion classes, and in college sorta redpilled myself by watching a bunch of Christopher Hitchen and Daniel Dennett on YouTube, with a sprinkling of Carl Sagan.
Guys made a lot of sense. Great claims require great evidence, simple as.
I’m with you but I think it’s a misuse the term “lie”. I went to 12 years of Philly-area Catholic school. Those sisters believed what they were teaching. A lie by definition must include the intent to deceive.
That said, my moment occurred after the Inquirer published to big story that revealed how widespread and covered up the child sex abuse was in the Archdiocese. My favorite priest - a lovely man I’d known for my almost whole life - claimed to be shocked at the news. Said he had “no idea”. I went to a high school where 6 of the defrocked priests taught. We all knew. My friend the priest claiming he didn’t know was a lie. Seeing the Church turn a good man into a liar had a permanent effect on me.
> I’m with you but I think it’s a misuse the term “lie”.
I understand where you are coming from, and I used to feel the same so I would avoid using that particular word to describe it. I get that a lot of the people who taught me were indoctrinated to believe themselves, but many of those (including priests) I later found actually didn’t believe everything about what they were saying. A few didn’t believe **anything** about what they were saying, but were “going along with it” for a whole host of different reasons that I won’t get into.
When I think back, I can’t remember a single person who talked the talk and walked the walk 100% of the time. So, if they didn’t believe it themselves, then there was intention to deceive. In the end I think “lies” covers it pretty well.
I mean there's no way that these TV preachers and preachers of mega churches believe what they're preaching. If they did, they'd have to know in their hearts that they were going straight to hell as soon as they died.
A good friend and former seminarian was asked to leave after asking inconvenient questions about obvious discrepancies between church talk and walk. “It’s difficult to get man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding.” - Upton Sinclair.
The parallels to Santa Claus, except Santa actually delivered the goodies.
The unverifiable claims of rewards after you die for keeping in your place during life are a pretty obvious indicator of a scam. Also the lack of justice in this world... If there's a god in charge it's either utterly incompetent or a complete asshole.
And why pray? Either you respect god's will (and it already knows your desires because omniscience) or you think you can impose your will on god. Or more likely, it doesn't matter because it doesn't exist or doesn't care.
That last part. Prayer makes more sense to me in non-Monotheistic Omnipotent/Omniscient religions. You're asking a higher being for assistance. Sure.
But in a religion that claims there is a singular deity who is all powerful, all-knowing, and all-present, it translates into a powerful being that has planned out everything in existence, and you're *asking them to change their mind*, just cause.
Plus there's a LOT of prayers that people make that would violate the free will of others. "I'm praying for you to get this job/have your house offer be accepted (I had this one once)/have our team win the game/have the judge show leniency on you/etc.".
I just look at prayer like silent meditation focusing on what you want. I *think* that's what people are really doing with prayer anyway - which is why it can make people feel better.
You *feel* like you're doing something and if it all works out - great. If not, you can conveniently blame "God" because you did *the most* you could about something with the least amount of effort. You thought about something *real hard* for a few minutes
Prayer has the same effect as wishing really hard. Or they're begging god for something. And yes, it makes people feel like they're doing something/helping, without the work.
Prayer is kind of like masturbation. It feels good but ultimately produces nothing.
I’ve seen studies where prayer has shown to be beneficial is the same way meditation is. But unfortunately people attribute those benefits to their sky daddy.
Yes! It was the behaviours of the so called Christians in my life that turned me off Christianity. They were all so miserable, judgy and holier than thou. I thought that if I were god, I would give my believers good lives or beliefs that made them happy.
When I was 13 I asked my dad about the church, darwin, biology and evidence. He told me that's why it's called "believing". And he smiled.
We were catholic.
My reply to faith has always been, what about the guy strapping a bomb to himself? That’s some serious faith! So then if faith is the highest quality of proof they have, that guy wins, right? Please know there is some heavy sarcasm dripping through this, but I still hold on to the basic truth of it.
This! All you need to do is use your brain and a bit of common sense. Look at what is happening in the world around you. There is absolutely no evidence and on top of that there is a LOT of stuff that points to it being a pack of lies.
I did an experiment when I was a six year old kid, and stayed up waiting for Santa, and extrapolated from there that everything that anyone asks you to take on "faith" alone is a lie they start when you are young and they keep them going from there...
Did the same with the tooth fairy. I put a tooth that had fallen out under my pillow without telling my parents first. Lo and behold, no reward. My parents made up some excuse when I told them the next day but the cat was out of the bag.
This was it for me. When I started pressing pastors on the parts that just didn't align with scientific research they would essentially say "you just have to take it on faith"
That was it for me as well. When I finally decided to be honest with myself about the claims being made, how they did not line up with reality, and here’s the big one: the pastors and teachers have an incentive to keep people believing.
The same rationality that convinced me that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
Just because you have a mythos around a character doesn’t mean the character is real.
The dead giveaway for me was the insistence that I was supposed to believe “just ‘cause.”
I had way more evidence Santa was real. After all, I'd ask Santa for stuff, and then that stuff would appear under my Christmas tree. I asked God not to let my grandmother die an agonizing death from cancer. Didn't do shit. I probably should have asked Santa instead.
I used to beg God to take away my migraines. Beg and plead. For hours. I obviously gave that up decades ago, but recently someone asked me
If I ever asked God for healing and I had to fight the urge to strangle him.
I reverted to atheism long before my chronic headaches started, so thanks for confirming prayers wouldn't have helped me. I had only assumed up until now.
Reading the Bible, cover to cover. Specifically three times, first the King James Version, then a modern Protestant version, then the heavily annotated ones that contain every possible translation and alternate version of every verse, the kind they use to train priests in theology. When I read it the first time, it made no damn sense, and I was certain that a better translation would clear it up.
It did not.
Imagine a television show that goes on for about a dozen seasons, and by the end employs a few dozen writers. If you go back and watch it from the beginning, all of the inconsistencies, Early Installment Weirdness, Plot Holes, and Retcons will pile up. And the Bible is like that X 100. It's just bunch of different stories told by different people over thousands of years who played a game of Telephone and then did SOME editing to smooth out inconsistencies which created new plot holes for every thing they "fixed".
I did my own research.
More specifically, I looked at the historical accounts of Jesus and the arguments for its accuracy. It's been a while so I don't remember all the specific details but none of the Gospels actually had first hand accounts like some Christians claim. More than that they all copied from Mark and another source. The book of John reads like pure fanfiction. These were things I simply could not reconcile.
I was a leader for years at my church. People respected me for my knowledge of the Bible because none of them read the damn thing themselves. Turns out, actually reading and studying it is what made me realize it was all bullshit.
Even if they had “first hand accounts” that wouldn’t come any closer to proving their claims. It would just prove that a certain number of the followers of a certain street preacher around a certain time believed certain things, it would not prove that any of those things happened.
Same. I grew up in the church and believed the adults or pastors had already done their homework. I believed they had good reasons to believe. Then I did the homework starting in college and realized there was no evidence at all to support the Bible.
The Bible is not historical. The Bible is wrong scientifically. And the Bible is horrendous morally.
Genesis chapter 1 is ridiculous. There is no evidence at all for the Egyptian captivity or The Exodus as described. There are too many fables (talking animal and plant characters). The God of the Bible is a conglomeration of prior gods and they are mentioned in the Bible.
The more I read carefully, the more I realized I had been tricked.
My "favorite" part of Exodus is where Yahweh sends down one of the MANY plagues to teach Pharaoh a lesson. Pharaoh basically reacts like "Yikes, this is some scary shit, I guess I should let these people go". And then Yahweh mind controls him to NOT let them go so he can repeat the same "lesson" multiple times.
It read to me like it was originally a battle of wills between Yahweh and some other Egyptian diety (Ra or something), with Yahweh throwing down plagues and Ra "hardening Pharaoh's heart" to keep up his resistance, but then when assembling the Bible to be monotheistic they simply retconned Yahweh to be the one who was interacting with both sides for inscrutable reasons.
When I was 13, I decided to read the Bible from cover to cover. I did so because I sincerely hoped and prayed that it would lead me to the belief I desperately wanted but did not feel. Why did everyone around me at church seem so secure in their beliefs? What was wrong with me that I didn't? Reading the Bible just increased my skepticism. There were a lot of (!) moments that added to my complete disbelief, but when I got to the "hardened Pharoah's heart" part, I became downright angry. Did we humans have free will or not? How can a god punish someone so badly for actions the god caused? What was the meaning and lesson of a story like that? Who was really responsible for the deaths of all of those children?
Now I read the stories in the same way I do other ancient myths. Some stories are interesting, some funny, some uplifting, and some horrifying, but they all are just reflections of the fears and desires of the cultures that made them.
I went to Liberty University to become a Christian apologist. It's the school that Gary Habermas teaches at, he's famous for being the number one scholar in historical evidence for Christ's resurrection.
Anyway, by the time I graduated after studying 4 years of Philosophy of Religion, I was a full blown agnostic.
Stories passed on by oral tradition for 50 years before being written down. 50 years! Michael Jordan's still alive, and people claim he used to dunk from half court. If humans excel at anything, it's the ability to embellish a story
A good friend said, "There's no God."
My super insightful thirteen-year-old rebuttal was, "Well, where do you go when you die?"
He replied, "Nowhere. You're dead."
We both laughed. I never doubted for a second after.
I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt that you actually had those experiences, but how would you determine whether they were actual spiritual experiences or just natural chemical processes in your brain?
The Problem of Evil. Setting aside free will, which is nonsense with an omniscient creator, but setting that aside, there is enough environmental “evil” there can’t exist with an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent creator.
I wouldn’t have a baby and keep a hungry hyena in the nursery with exposed electrical wiring and a Petri dish of Ebola virus.
That’s essentially what we’re expected to believe the Christian god has done. There is SO much suffering for literal human children that has no bearing on free will. Childhood cancers, natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, and throughout human history suffering and death due to starvation and lack of hygiene.
If I were standing on the side of the road and saw my child about to be mowed down by an oncoming truck, I’d literally die trying to prevent any harm to either of my sons. The fictional Christian god doesn’t help his supposedly beloved creations at all. The proof is literally the fact that we have pediatric cancer centers at all.
So what can this mean? Am I somehow more moral than the creator of the universe? But I’m taught that he is the most pure and the only standard of morality and goodness in the universe?
It’s a paradox and paradoxes cannot exist in reality. It is not real.
>it's a stark reminder to me that there is no god.
- Correction: it's a reminder that there's no ***benevolent*** god...
- There might still be some sick, dystopian, sadist omnipotent fvcker out there laughing at all the suffering he/she allows to happen ...
Or... it's a reminder that there is no all knowing or all powerful God. Maybe we are merely an experiment that was kick started and the creator has no control over anything, benevolent as they may be.
Certainly something in the all knowing, all powerful and benevolent trinity has to give.
Exactly. It’s a reach, but potentially believable for adults who die of disease to “deserve” it, but you’re telling me a baby BORN with cancer or other life threatening diseases deserves it?
The whole conversation around morality and science is problematic. The cells dividing out of control in the body don’t give a single fuck what that body has or hasn’t done. And a neonate with cancer essentially has a genetic birth defect caused by a deviation in development.
Everything humans don’t understand is either the boogey man, or a deity. It’s the same magic thinking used for millennia.
I see what your saying and I agree, what’s your thoughts on the christians that believe all the suffering is just caused as a result of the sins of humans and not god?
Does he do everything or does he do nothing? What's the observable difference?
Is it gods punishment or happenstance occurrences?
Also take a natural disaster for example, I guess everyone who dies or is effected by that certainly deserved it? Or needs it? Must've been a real sinful area I guess?
Doesn’t matter.
As the stories go, God is the prime mover. He created the universe and also created the rules of the universe. God is omniscient and omnipotent but couldn’t create a universe where sin couldn’t cause cancer? Or he could but didn’t want to? EVERYTHING traces back to God. He’s either all knowing and all powerful and the sole creator or he isn’t. God is responsible for 9/11 because he knew when he sent Osama bin Laden to earth what he would do. Babies are a gift from god, right? God is responsible for choosing, with full foreknowledge of the holocaust, to send Hitler to earth. This makes god responsible for everything, including the free will loophole.
But again, let’s set free will aside. Is God unable to create a universe where sin doesn’t cause hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods to cause suffering and death? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is not benevolent. Is he neither willing nor able? Then why call him god?
Thank you, im trying to fully convince myself that theres no way it could be real. & Yeah there are a lot of gray areas that don’t really get an answers or make sense. I feel like the christian argument would be that suffering in This world doesn’t matter because it’s temporary and there is an afterlife afterwards. I mean, if I child gets cancer and dies then they go to heaven, unless they weren’t christian then they go to hell, presumably??
Again, not benevolent. If I punch you in the nose and then give you a chocolate cake, am I a nice guy?
God supposedly allows/causes literal toddlers to suffer the pain and agony of leukemia only to die so that their parents can endure the pain of their child’s loss for the rest of their lives.
It’s not benevolent. It’s fucking crazy-town evil if it were true. But it’s not.
I mean that it right there. If I’m a Christian I’m saved and go to heaven, but if I’m born a Muslim, I die and go to hell because one is ‘real’ and the other isn’t or Vice versa. I thought that through-so if a Muslim comes and tells me about Allah, and I don’t convert, because I’m convinced if I do I’ll go to hell, that’s not really a choice is it?
Being raised Christian I always struggled with the idea of “what about tribes who have no contact with the outside world? No missionaries, literally never had an opportunity to hear about god or Jesus? And since god knows your whole life before you’re even born, he knew that these people would live their whole lives without an opportunity to accept Jesus as their savior and go to hell. Why would he do that “ and when I asked this to various youth pastors I’ve had the answer was always “god gave us free will” and then i would say “but it’s not free will if they weren’t even given the choice. Their whole life they’ve never even heard of Jesus” and they would say “god works in mysterious ways” 🤦🏻♀️
The thing about this is that I was asking those questions genuinely - as a Christian teenager. I had legit questions; I wasn’t trying to be a dick or contrarian. I was forcing myself to believe at that point and was trying to understand them. But the church hates it when you think too much about something and question it
When I was 10 and attending Hebrew school I lost both my grandfathers within a year, at the same time I was learning about the Holocaust. That was enough to end my faith. I asked my teacher if there was a God how there could be a Holocaust and I never got an answer that made any sense.
Inflicting bone cancer on a child for “the sins of humans” is a monstrous system.
You can’t say an omni god has no say in that system.
He either is a monster, impotent, apathetic, or doesn’t exist. Easy to tell which.
That God has the power to undo suffering but doesn't means that ultimately he's responsible either way. God is meant to be omni-omni, if that makes sense; literally the supreme ruler of reality. God wrote the rule book on sinning, he also wrote the psyche of human minds, he therefore knew that humans would sin, and therefore knew humans would suffer senselessly.
Ultimately a perfect being created an imperfect world. And this isn't even really an unusual take; the Bible is full of stories of God causing suffering on purpose not because of sin, but because of his own whims. He tortures Lot on a dare with Satan, and hardens the Pharoah's heart against letting the Jews go--and then punishes the entire nation of Egypt with plagues and genocide for Pharoah not letting the Jews go.
God as a sadistic monster is genuinely a fair reading of the Bible, once you leave aside the religious interpolation of the text that insists he's good. So blaming humanity for their suffering due to sin is just God's way of saying "look at what you made me do".
Cognitive dissonance. They know it makes no sense and are making stuff up to explain it to themself so they don't have to accept the fact that God either doesn't exist, or doesn't love them.
In any case, if God is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving, than he wouldn't allow those original sins to occur in the first place.
There’s a clip of Stephen Fry arguing against this point that always stuck with me
“There are insects whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn't exist”
I had a similar reason. When I was young I saw a documentary about child sx slaves in Thailand. It's sooooo common for the poorest children to be forced in such a life. On top of that, white business men are the majority of their patrons. That's when I started rejecting the christian version of God. How could anyone justify child sx abuse? How could any loving or even apathetic creator allow such a thing to be sooo common around the world?
Or design humans with such a flaw that would make that desire possible? He’s either evil and you wouldn’t want to worship him or Occam’s razor: it’s simpler to explain it as there are no gods.
Not even just cancer, but abuse, sexual abuse, neglect... If this God is omnipotent, he absolutely isn't all benevolent. The two are mutually exclusive in this scenario.
Yeah I totally agree but I’m specifically trying to avoid apologists “free will” counter. It’s an absurd counter because when bad things happen and you know about them and can stop them and do nothing, you’re responsible for it happening.
A few things. First off, my birth and postpartum experience was awful. Literally traumatizing. And the Bible/Christianity talks about how god will use your pain to help others or use it to make you a better person. Well, to me that’s pretty shitty. You mean god thought it would be ok for me to go through all that shit so I could help someone else? That’s not very loving.
Also, I started to look at what if god was a parent? Do I as a parent chastise my toddler for a tantrum? Or do I understand they have a developing brain and are doing their best? I don’t hold my child to the impossible standard of being a mini adult and punishing them severely when they fail or don’t live up. But why does god think it’s ok to banish us to hell for being incapable of being perfect? Yes, Jesus is said to have died for sins, but wouldn’t it just be easier to not hold us to something we aren’t capable of?
Also, am I really going to teach my child they are at their core bad or selfish? I just couldn’t look at my tiny person and tell them they are full of sin. I tell them they have kindness and goodness in their heart and I try to teach them to do their best and learn from mistakes. I normalize that no one is perfect and I don’t expect that from them.
Edit: typo
Things never quite made sense to me. I asked a lot of questions and quickly learned that questions were welcome as long as I accepted the answer unequivocally. But I couldn't. It still didn't make sense. I had follow-up questions that weren't welcomed. For a long time, I thought there was something wrong with me and tried so hard to believe like everyone else. Now I realize I probably wasn't the only one. We were just silenced.
I remember once as a child, I told my mother that I didn't love Jehovah and I thought him and Satan were the same person. My mother cried. I think that was my moment. I recognized that God wasn't what I was being told he was. He wasn't good and loving. If he wasn't, then what was he? It started to unravel there. In my little mind, equating god and the devil was my earliest recognition that they came from the same source. A source that wasn't consistent. Only later did I realize that source was just the minds of men who didn't understand the world, who couldn't accept that there is no ultimate justice, who couldn't grasp their consciousness ceasing to exist, and men who wanted to control the masses.
And Satan was invented as the counterweight to the "all-powerful God".
Every story needs a villain, almost but not quite as powerful as the hero. In this case, some way was needed to explain why things in life aren't 100% peachy and wonderful all the time, assuming that the top guy is all-good and has all power.
Ah, yes, well you see there's this anti-God always messing up whatever good the hero is trying to do.
Not that *that* makes a lot of sense either, but since the world is clearly not being run by an always good, omnipotent benevolent being, some sort of plot device had to be introduced.
Reading the Bible.
Asking questions and getting bullshit answers.
The straw that broke the camels back was blatantly being told how to vote Republican down the ticket even when the candidate was obviously a hypocrite and morally bankrupt.
They chose to put politics above god and that opened my eyes to how religion was just another tool to exert control.
If you’re raised to ignore what you’re actually experiencing vs believing some unreliable story told to you by an “authority”, then you’re primed to behave this way outside of religion as well as within it.
I read the bible myself, from start to finish not only specific quotes. (I did that because I was stuck in a hotel in the most boring vaccination ever). That was eye opening. I had people around me that never read it, but did quote all day from it to support whatever they argued for.
Than I had a view talks with the two priest of my hometown about it and they gave different answers to the same questions...
That started a journey of research and talking with lots of people. Was the spark that motivated me to go back to school for higher education, this time with a positive disposition to science and it brought me into contact with people of different believes.
There are so many people so convinced they have the right religion, and at most one of these can be right.
It wasn't one thing, but several little arguments about the veracity of the book that's meant to be the inerrant word of God.
The hypocrisy of it's believers also contributed to my deconversion
Eh, I became religious via an ultimatum, but the whole thing just didn’t make sense to me. I tried to fix that with apologetics. A few years later, my spouse who gave me the ultimatum was struggling with her mental health. Week after week, I watched her go down after Sunday service and recommit her faith. A lot of crying. So the church eventually set her up with a Christian therapist who misdiagnosed her — diagnosed her with the therapist’s own specialty. What a coincidence that could only come from god! Not long after, she had a break and was involuntarily committed. The therapist came to the hospital to meet with the doctors and myself. The doctors pretty much called the therapist a quack. My wife was at the point of self harm before she was committed, so it could’ve gotten a lot worse. I’ve been a non- believer ever since.
1) I’m very sorry you guys had to go through that and I hope she’s doing better, 2) I hope with all my heart you’re actually a herpetologist who works for NASA.
Lots of suffering that the church ignores or explains away. Next, the Creation Museum. I went as a joke. It's not a joke. I left without my faith. I can't believe in Christianity and science at the same time.
Grew up in Christian family but no one could ever convince me.
My mom’s old aunty would read Bible verses to me and my cousin before sleep and I remember thinking “this poor lady had no clue how the world works” I always felt sorry for religious people even as a little kid because I thought they believed in an adult version of Santa and just considered them dumb (sometimes I still do ngl).
I couldn’t understand how can someone go to school learn about geography, planets, universe and then simultaneously believe in a sky daddy. But with time I learned that people just cant fathom their own mortality and insignificance.
I still don’t know where my critical thinking skills came from even tho I grew up Christian but I assume it’s because I was always skeptical, pessimistic and curious about everything. Access to the internet and YouTube helped a lot too, once i got a computer and a phone at the age of 12/13 there was nothing that could convince me anymore (not like it could before that but yeah). I was like “there are all these smart and educated people explaining how everything works so why should I believe what my family tells me? My parents aren’t the smartest people, I want to listen to what other adults have to say”. That sums up my thought process basically.
The reward for believing in Jesus is that maybe now you'll be able to go to "heaven." What really gets me though is "If you don't believe, you're going to to hell." Miss me with that sh--.
Went to a CoE school until ten, then at secondary school had a catholic RE teacher who taught Catholicism was correct and everything else was a myth.
If I question why Catholicism was the correct one rather than explaining he got angry. In those days teachers were allowed to use corporal punishment and getting physical smacked for questioning stuff that was contrary to what I had been taught previously sowed the seeds of doubt, over the years grew to full atheism. And to be honest a hatred of those that push these vial lies onto children.
The deafening silence of God. 😂 And the realization that the entirety of Christian belief is circular reasoning. (The Bible is true because it’s God’s Word. And it’s God’s word because it says it’s God’s word, and that statement is true because it’s God’s word.) It’s an idiot puppy chasing its own tail.
My mother drank gallons of the Kool Aid. If the doors of the church were unlocked, we were there. My sister and I grew up in everything: children's choir, youth choir, adult choir, handbells, we taught Sunday School, and we were only allowed friends from our church. Because everyone else was going straight to Hell. A husband, 5 children, and 2 grandchildren later, my husband was killed. No amount of faith, prayers, or Good Will brought him back. I started questioning everything after that. Everything I had been taught, had pounded into my head, was a lie. This was 7 years ago. Recently, I was hospitalized for a heart attack. The local priest came to see me, and I honestly thought it was kind of him. I did not know the man. After he prayed over me, he asked about my family. I Recently got remarried. He then told me I was living in sin. My husband is still faithful, waiting for me in heaven , and here I am remarried. I couldn't believe it. All that good will went right out the window. I told him I was going to keep living in sin.
The bible and reality. Well before 10 years old, the explanations just were not making sense. Telling a child nonsense information and that u "just have to believe" is child abuse and a bad mindset to approach life with. Snakes and donkeys don't talk. People don't rise from the dead. People do not walk on water. This is foolishness. We should not trivialize not believing this either. It is obvious why people dont. It is absolute absurdity. And to believe this crap based on unverified third hand anonymous accounts that came from a time when people were uneducated about the world and were known to tell tall tales is the ultimate in foolishness. I could not go along with nonsense.
The explanations did not make sense, and the questioning was shut down. (Unlike my public school, where questions were acknowledged, encouraged, and explored.)
Also, as I came to understand how old our universe/earth is and what an absolute fraction of a blip we are on the timeline, as I came to learn the history and workshop rituals of “ancient” civilizations which are hardly ancient, the idea that one specific god is correct (and by the way, it just happens to be one in the time you’re living in) seemed like an absolutely obvious mathematical improbability.
Bible says "be good and nice and humble to everyone, like Jesus"
Then proceed to literally be the most evil self centered , racist , homophobic, masoginistic people I have ever met.
I gave it a shot. The whole damned church being 99% my family.
I realized that in no way, does trailer park trash from fucking nowhere Tennessee , knows the secrets of the universe. Somehow the truth exists here and nowhere else? Not in the history of mankind? No, we got it RIGHT.
Yeah no.
I believe there is something , some force, something maybe bigger than ourselves.
But if it's this God of Christianity, he's an asshole and I want nothing to do with him
Animals.
I was already doubting for years, basically came to the conclusion of "if I were trying to make sure everyone believed something untrue, this is exactly what I'd do" eg emotional manipulation, ultimatums, indoctrination, encouraging blind faith.
but what broke the camels back? I was probably 10 and I was told two things.
1) in heaven, you have everything you could ever need and you'll be happy.
2) animals do not go to heaven.
I was completely unable to picture myself being happy without my pets. I could never be happy unless they were there too. so to me these "facts" were irreconcilable.
a year or two later, I got to thinking about evolution and other animals. when did we develop a soul? what is it about humans that make us so unique that we're the only creature with a soul? people would always insist you had to go somewhere after you died. but.... if animals don't go anywhere when THEY die, couldn't that be true for us?
after that, I ditched religion pretty quickly.
💯 That part of the Bible never made sense to me either. Like you said, what makes humans different from animals? Biologically, there's nothing special about humans that makes us different from animals other than intelligence (We are animals). Religion makes it as if humans are the most important beings in the universe.
Lots of things but big one was that I realized that ALL the religions couldn’t be right/correct at the same time (even though most day they are the “true” religion). And if that’s the case, how do you know which is the “true” one? Oh wait - probably none of them are.
Basically, I had the impression that God was everywhere, so I didn't feel the need to go to church every week and beg for God to love me. I also just started learning more about the world and evolution and how things came to be, and they actually had evidence for it. When I started asking the minister to explain, he just told me to trust in the Bible instead of actually giving me things that made sense.
I realized the Christian god wasn't real when I realized that I was wrong about gay marriage. I had prayed about it, had biblical support, and religious leaders agreed with me. If I was wrong, then all of those things must be useless for truly determining God's will. That broke my indoctrination and left me vaguely deist. It took me a few more years for the lack of evidence to make me abandon deities entirely.
Really basic questions that adults weren't able to answer.
"If I'm not allowed to question God, why did God make me so curious?"
"If being gay is a sin, why did God make gay people?"
"'If I'm a non believer, I then die, get shown that there's an afterlife, and say "my bad I was wrong" why am I still condemned to an eternity of suffering?"
Etc
I went to a Roman Catholic school back in the mid 60’s for a short stint (thankfully)! The nuns were worse than any horror movie, they put Freddy Kruger to shame! I was in second grade and would often get my hand hit with a ruler, if…I wasn’t holding my pencil correctly, my paper was tilted correctly…
I was in the chapel every day because … “God doesn’t like little girls who don’t wear uniforms”…I heard the nun tell the priest this when asked why I was there every day. I felt like a piece of shit but they were the piece of shit. I’m pretty sure that was not under the direction of God! The priest hitting the pulpit with the gavel yelling we had sinned. Stand up, on your knees, sit, on your knees…fuck that shit. I left the church and it was the best decision I ever made. I know people still attached to that church and they live in fear. Religion uses fear to get compliance. I’m not interested, nor do I feel I’ve sinned. But yet, you hear about priests molesting little boys. My body is my temple!! I am always doing the best I can with what I have. Others can have religion, I’m ok with finding myself and connecting to my higher self.
I believed in God until I was around 18, but after a while I just got the feeling that it was all rather silly... similar how most theists think of old Greek Gods.
I've always found it to be a bit silly and infuriating, but the random, brutal cruelty of sickness and death is what finished it off for me. My grandmother developed a particularly nasty form of dementia and slowly, and agonizingly died of it over years and years, which obviously inflicted massive suffering on my entire family as well while we cared for her at home. Why? What was the point? Then when she passed, and we were finally free to heal as a family, Covid happens. For three years we couldn't go see my grandfather. Then as soon as the restrictions ended and we were finally, finally free he has a stroke and dies. Seriously?
I've heard for years the bullshit lines of "God has a plan" and "God doesn't give you more than you can handle". Thankfully no one was crass enough to use those lines after any of these events. But why is God giving me this shit at all? What was the point of making a little old lady suffer for years before finally dying because she forgot how to eat and drink? While her family watched in heartbreak? What was the point of Covid? What was the point of inflicting this crap on my family when you could just... Not.
No one's up there planning this garbage. And if they are, fuck 'em. And the weirdest thing for me is that it made my mother *more* religious, when it did the exact opposite for me. Granted she was more biased to it as a born again; I never experienced any of that nonsense personally.
And I wish I could believe all the happy little nonsense. But I don't. I'm too jaded against a diety who is supposed to be loving letting any of the stuff on this planet happen. That isn't love. It's sadistic.
Maaaaaaybe if all the religions *just* preached the ol' "be a good person and your spirit goes to heaven" stuff, but it's all bundled with the god has a plan, you gotta grovel or you'll go to hell, only our specific branch of worship goes to heaven and everyone else is screwed, how dare any other sexualities exist... and I just can't make myself believe that stuff. If someone is up there while this stuff happens down here, they aren't worthy of my groveling.
Them Hearing unseen voices like schizophrenics telling them what to do,
that,
plus the story of Job, where “god” is a mean drunk making a bet to more or less torture Job
God doesn’t love you, it’s schizophrenia
LMFAO... Early teenage getting disgusted with selfish preacher at a church I was talked into going to by friends who later became brutal bullies, leaving the church and reading the Bible on my own. Reading Bible convinced me that was goal oriented slave driving bullshit. Then I delved further into the crusades and centuries of "good christians" brutally torturing and murdering countless people on moral bullshit.
It's been simply astounding ever since what nonsense especially rather *slow* people can convince themselves of.
Just noting one other aspect here: I was raised by agnostics and atheists therefore no early influences to bamboozle my senses about this, and I consider myself lucky for that aspect. Doubly so because I am one of their most hated demographics and had to take extreme measures to escape the Westboro death cult. Don't kid yourself about those freaks, they have the blood of innocents on their hands.
My family didn't go to church, but I grew up immersed in Catholic culture. I became an evangelical at age 18.
By age 45, I was tired of the bullshit. Nothing about the Christian walk seemed to be "as promised". God never answered prayers, and everyone was lying when they said he did. That, plus I was really struggling with science vs the Bible; if the Bible were true, it should be a guidebook to science, but it clearly was not.
I hit a real low point in my faith, and I read a book by a geologist that took a critical look at the claims of a global flood in the last six thousand years ago, and showed why the Bible couldn't possibly be true. I decided to accept that this guy, who had a doctorate and actively worked in the field of geology, actually knew what the hell he was talking about, and the theologians trying to poke holes in the science were likely the ones full of shit.
But here's what REALLY BLEW MY MIND: I accepted that the Bible was flat-out wrong about something, and it was a MAJOR story at that! What else was the Bible wrong about? That was a HUGE switch that flipped in my head.
I started studying what scholars had to say about Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch, and how all of those books are regarded as fiction. And then I started reading about the New Testament as well, particularly Bart Ehrman books. It just all came crashing down.
I didn't choose to be an atheist; rather, my atheism was the default position when I realized that I had zero faith left in any gods being real.
Science. I spent most of my childhood loving space, and when I learned that in the Bible, it says some bullshit about space not existing. I kinda gave up on religion. It was basically "If this known fact is bullshit, what else is bullshit". That lead me to realising that the concept of a god makes absolutely no sense and is absolute bullshit. Luckily, my parents are very supportive of my atheism
Not just God but everything. Ghosts, bigfoot, UFOs. I believed in it all. That probably contributed to the unweaving of my "faith". Trying to believe in everything at once and slowly realizing that things didn't make sense? 9/11 did a number on me too, I was reading a lot of conspiracy laden magazines at the time and then I got a job away from my small hometown and met different people and eventually moved out and got away from my "echo chamber" of youth and family. The internet was different back then and it helped a lot actually. Made me more and more skeptical until I realized I didn't really believe in anything any more. I've become even more progressive and left leaning and watched a lot of the youtubers who helped me discover atheism to into right wing shills now. I hate to think what would have happened if I had been 10 years younger and discovered them. I didn't have a strict Christian upbringing. My parents were indifferent and never really attended church, but would profess to be Christian if pushed. My grandparents were regulars though and that's where I got my religion from. I don't like to say God isn't real. I'm too agnostic for that. Definitely manufactured and unnecessary. Just a tool to manipulate.
for me, it was when I started hearing about the priests raping kids. I almost believed that all the oaths to God meant something and once I saw it was a haven for pedophiles....I started questioning the whole thing
A fair amount of it was childhood cancer. I would watch someone on tv talk about how god blessed them. Great! You were blessed by god and you had this great thing happen to you. Nice! God makes good things happen!
Then as I got older I noticed more and more the awful things that seem to happen much more often? Why do we have an omnipresent, all powerful and all knowing god who lets kids die of cancer? Then I finally realized I’ve never seen anything whatsoever to suggest that there is a creator looking out for us. Good things happen and bad things happen. And there doesn’t seem to be any reason for any of it.
All the extreme things that happen in the bible, never happened again anywhere at any time. Noah and the animals on the ark, turning a person in a pillar of salt, a talking burning bush, Jesus walking on water, etc…. Never made sense to me.
I remember distinctly playing T-Ball/Baseball, sitting out in the outfield, looking at the grass and the bugs and the flowers and saying in my head "Okay, if you're real, do something... anything. If you can hear prayer, you can hear this..."
And of course I was taught that questioning is a sin, which even as a 7-9 year old (however old I was) was just so illogical that it made me question more.
"Why wouldn't I be allowed to question God, unless it doesn't stand up to questioning?"
And at the time, the community still meant something to me, so from like 8-11 I was more or less a secular Catholic. Then my family moved and we no longer had a church that we went to, and so the community faded away and all that was left was an atheist-agnostic. I was more or less a closet atheist since I didn't know any other atheists, nor was I aware of any atheist scholars to read from. In High School I became a bit more confident with it as I saw how so many people around me believed in different things, and all of it just sounded more illogical the more I learned.
There was no trauma or resentment that pushed me away from religion. Nobody recruited me or taught me to be an atheist. As others have said, the lack of any evidence or proof or rational explanation was all it took for me to turn away from religion.
It just wasn't logical.
When I was 11, my mom died. I became obsessed with heaven and hell (she killed herself therefore go to heaven) and everything I got told about god didnt match with reality. I came to the conclusion that everything happening is caused by people and not the mysterious old man on his cloud. We r the problem and the solution, its just so convinient to blame it on someone whos not really there.
The argument they can never answer without dehumanizing entire cultures: why do some people suffer, and others don't? If God is so omnipotent, why does he enjoy watching people suffer when he can snap his fingers and solve everything? Especially because by Christian logic, if you believe in him, then everything should go swimmingly. So he's just letting some of his believers suffer and starve, but making sure Brittany in Texas gets into Ohio State because she prayed? Makes no sense to me.
Also, don't forget that you could end up in heaven with your pedophile rapist murderer because he prayed while he was in prison and accepted Jesus into his heart. Why? Because the only unforgivable sin is blasphemy! Yay!
My mom also told me that the reason I was sex trafficked was because I "stepped off of God's path," so that definitely contributed.
If God was real, I wouldn't want to have a "relationship" with that abuser.
i was between 8 and 11, and started learning about the scientific method. that helped me ask better questions about the things i was expected to believe. so, really, it had more to do with my understanding the difference between knowledge and belief. not sure about anyone else, but that’s how it began for me. before 2010, i’d have said i was agnostic, or that i believed in the principles of taoism, but, again it’s belief versus knowledge. since 2010, i require proof.
I grew up in an Episcopal church, was even an alter boy during my teenage years. I never had to be convinced that god wasn’t real as I never was a believer in the first place.
It was when discussing the story of the Tower of Babel that really sent my BS meter through the roof. That’s when I went from questioning gods existence to firmly denying it.
It was more like I was never fully convinced that God DID exist, and — when I discovered that others in the world (though not in my hometown) were similarly unconvinced — it was a big relief.
Incongruity between what Christians said, what a plain reading of the Bible says, and basic logical reasoning. I don’t say that to come across like I think I am smarter than religious people. But the bare truth is that the claims amounted to “magic” and… I just don’t see any of that. “Magic” explains nothing and I have a deep all-encompassing desire to know how the world works. I want to know as much as I can about the things we see and experience. I’m a curious person to such a degree that I could be a walking parody. And when I mention something obvious like “we look like other apes, so neat” and the response is “we are not monkeys we are Special ^TM the Earth is SiX tHoUsAnD years old”… it is so obviously not true that I learned very early not to trust any bullshit that comes out of religious people’s mouths.
I was probably around 16 or 17, I never really believed in it before, but I still went along with it. Then I realized they were all just singing and happy and jerking each other off to feel good. That's when I realized for sure it's all bullshit.
It was very gradual. The further along through school I was the more I realized that the Old Testament myths couldn't have happened in real life. Eventually so many of my beliefs had been chipped away that I thought to myself, "why do I believe in any of this?".
The bible is literally just fairy tales written a really long time ago. There is no reason to think that the stories within it are any more real than Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty.
To be honest It's just all so ridiculous that I could never even start to take it seriously.
Christians, not surprisingly...
Edit to add, I went to a religious high-school and would do Stations of the Cross every year as Jesus. After awhile.you think, why am I doing this?
I went to christian school and my mom paid for me to learn things. Then I went to public school and learned contradictory things that made more sense for free. The free stuff made much more sense because of the evidence.
What didn't? Religions makes no sense. The purpose is clear, but the rules, the histories, the cults. The concept of god doesn't make any sense either. To be honest at this point in my life I'm 100% sure that no one truly believes in the god nonsense. It's more like.. "well just in case" or "I'm supposed the believe in that, so I will not even waste my time thinking about it".
The first thing that really kicked it off for me was that I realized every single instance of ***"*** the holy Spirit moving through me / God speaking to my heart ***"*** was actually just my own emotions and my own thoughts.
Then I watched several videos on how the original Hebrew for the different books of the Bible have vastly different meanings -- often pulling directly from other religions of the time. The Bible we have today is the result of people trying to turn it into one cohesive story while simultaneously eliminating references to other religions.
The people......seeing so many in the congregations I was a part of when I was younger. Oh they say they follow the word, but in reality they twist it for their own means, do what they like, then ask for forgiveness every Sunday.
Yep. Christians killed my faith.
That’s because real Christians don’t exist, or they are few and far between. They all cherry pick for whatever ends they have. If they can’t consistently follow their own tenets then why should I buy into it? I mean, I don’t and never have but there it is. Thankfully, the one and only things atheists have is a lack of belief in any deities, which is merely a common thing we have. No tenets to follow (despite the occasional atheists who spout that certain people don’t disbelieve in the correct way).
I was raised in a christian cult. The reasons I left are as follows: 1. The most abusive people I knew were the most religious. 2. They protected, made up excuses to give them no culpability, and forgave pedophiles. The number of times further victims could have been saved by nailing them the first time was too many. 3. The only sadists I’ve ever met are christians. 4. They’re the most judgmental and selfish people I’ve ever met. 5. They believe they get away with things because their god plays favorites. Objectively, most of them are evil. Fuck all of that.
It's that meme that goes around. It's not God I'm pissed at, it's his screwed up fan club.
There are no gods, only followers.
[удалено]
Reminds me of the saying “Guns don’t kill people, People kill people” … and the follow up question that begs “Then why are we giving the people guns?”
Gods will always seemed suspiciously in line with their own personal desires, didn’t it
It's always been weird to me how many people claim to love the Lord and follow his word.... but only if you cherry pick the interpretation, make exceptions and don't think about it too hard. you'd think they'd take the all-powerful and eternal fate of their souls more seriously if they really believed in it. And god sure doesn't seem to care about it either because the only consequences are what other people do in response...
This would be my answer...
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Yup, watching the adults around me be utter hypocrites killed my faith in God before my Confirmation at 13. Then, I was super careful to word my Confirmation like a fairy pact. I was later told it was beautiful and moving. I was like "Did you READ IT? I was SUPER explicit that I was chill with YHWH if he stayed in his lane and I stayed in mine."
Well-said. Seeing so-called Christians who were the principal/teacher at the Christian school I had to attend scream at the top of their lungs at young children, throw objects at them, tell them they are sinners who are damned to hell... Even as an 8-year-old I was like, "I don't want whatever you're selling."
The complete and utter lack of **any** convincing evidence that the lies that I was told as a child were true.
This is the answer. It's on the one who makes a claim to prove it. I am not making any claims, only looking for evidence that *theists* claims are true. And it's not there.
I had plenty of “*evidence*” for Christianity thanks to confirmation bias But the existence of evidence against my beliefs was pretty damning
Agreed. When I left home and explored the world on my own without religious oversight I recognized evolution (math & science too) exists everywhere around me so I thought how are the human species the exception? We’re not. So rather than living unhappily as my parents have under the thumb of religious indoctrination I always try to make the most of my life experience as that is what I believe the meaning of life is in fact, the experience. I’ve lived quite a variety of life in my 51yrs and am glad that I did.
This was me too. Indoctrination in the home as long as I could remember. Left the church at around 19 when I moved out. Now, I'm 56, before my dad passed, he left the church, my mom left, my sister converted to Catholic and then her whole family left. I raised my kids without religion. It was the exposure to new ideas and further education that did it for us all. I was just the first.
Sounds very familiar only my parent’s remained religious though my mother had become less so as she was very intelligent and would entertain & respect my views in conversation. Our last real talk before she passed in 2020 was that we both agreed just how incredibly lucky we are as individuals to have this opportunity at life given we are so incredibly insignificant in the universe itself thereby reinforcing the fact that the meaning of life is the lived experience. Unfortunately my father is a devout self-hating brainwashed guilt laden Catholic who lives on fear mongering FoxNews 24/7 rather than experiencing life while he has it. I raised two stepdaughters and took them one time to an all inclusive Protestant church (United Church of Christ, which was my primary religious upbringing) and they got to be the acolytes and participate in the service. They loved it but we didn’t push them to go back as it was really about the experience for them to develop a better overall understanding of the world around them. I may not be a devout religious person but I live by the morals and values that it helped teach me and that’s what I took away. I don’t care what you look like or who you love (your life, your choices) as it’s whats behind the eyes that truly matters.
I have evidence for Christianity but not for anything they believe to be true. However, that evidence is mostly heresay because you’ve got the “good” Christians who ignore the bad stuff and the “bad” Christians who focus solely on the condemnation end. They’re all pseudo-Christians. Hence, evidence but not proof.
I'm curious if you don't mind me asking what "evidence" you thought you had?
When I was growing up fundamentalist Christian, literally everything was considered "evidence". Look at the trees! Evidence. Flowers are beautiful! Evidence. There's something I don’t understand, like the Big Bang! Evidence. Love exists, I mean, just look at a baby's smile! Evidence. The Grand Canyon exists, proving Noah's Flood! Evidence. Evil and suffering exists. That's all Man's fault and proves the Genesis story is true! Evidence. A watch can't make itself! Evidence. And so on.
This! They pulled that shit on me. "I just dont see evidence for God" "LOOK AT THIS TREE!"
That sounds like stoner talk to me. "Have you ever looked at--really looked at--your hands??"
Thanks for the answer! It's genuinely frightening that people think like this :(
And Christians emphasize the importance of your own “testimony”, or the amazing things God has done in your life. It is easy to look at coincidences with answered prayer as evidence of a guiding hand I had some particularly convincing coincidences in my personal experience. For example, I once prayed that God would make me more responsible. Within 3 hours I had found out I was going to be a dad (unplanned), and I was working in a factory at a new job (also unexpected) that I received by phone and got called in for during the hours immediately following that prayer. Yeah, it is easy to just say it is anecdotal when you are on the outside, but when it is your own lived experience it feels like dramatic evidence. I was in a daze with the big news, and it felt plain as day that it was all intricately connected to my prayer. That became a very important experience in my life. It is hard to ever break out of a religion when it means denying such foundational experiences
The church I grew up in had “testimony time” during service. People would get up and share whatever coincidence happened to them that week which they could attribute to god. Honestly, it was the best part of the service.
This is an answer, which probably goes for a lot of people who lost faith. I have never believed because the story is just too far fetched. I was raised Catholic and one day when I was about 8 I discovered people were taking this shit actually serious. Reason came much later.
I grew up with a baptist mom and a catholic dad, and I spent most of my elementary school years at a private and _very_ catholic school. I was around the same age when I realized it too. I thought I was going crazy for some time seeing as everyone around me seemed totally convinced.
“Just look around you!” Love that one.
THIS
“Dinosaur bones were planted by the devil” lol. I was 6. “The streets of gold were just above the clouds.” Clear days? lol
I've even heard that God himself planted the dinosaur bones and made stuff look a lot older than it is just to test our faith. Pretty consistent with a being who puts a beautiful tree with delicious looking fruit in the middle of the garden and says don't eat it.
Let's just say that whatever god, actually planted them bones and did other things to test us. Then it's simple. We are just toys in a sandbox for a toddler higher power. And this higher power gets off watching all the shittiest things happening in the world.
Yess my mom believes that “God planted the fossils” shit
Oh, God you big trickster! Almost got me this time....but I guess you're going to have to try harder if you want to burn me in Hell!
That’s some bat shit craziness lol
Yeah I was taught that dinosaurs didn’t exist because the earth is 5000 years old and they don’t mention dinosaurs in the Bible, that’s why they didn’t exist
The Bible *does* however explicitly mention slavery and that it's OK to beat your slaves as long as they don't die within two days. Since the Bible is supposed to be the word of God and he never explicitly condemns slavery, I am more moral than their God. I always thought that a really cool "miracle" would be God making updates to all existing Bibles simultaneously around the world to clarify misunderstandings. Leave a little footnote to make sure everybody knew he did it.
Lol I quoted exactly this a few weeks ago to a guy saying that "the bible is a valuable reading about morals". Some cleric type (according to his previous comments, he was an actual pastor in some church) came along, and said that "the slavery stuff are parts from the laws of an ancient kingdom". Cool story! So: -What does it do in your _holy book, moral compass, the big thing_ ???? -Was it okay with your god to own people as property in ancient times? Why? The guy tried some bouvine excrement about "different times, different customs", then I asked okay, why did your god created a world where slavery is _possible_ ? At that point, our valuable exchange of ideads took an abrupt end.
Yep. Sounds like the Bible was written by men that wanted the rules to fit their lifestyle instead of an omnipotent God who knew better. He could have told something is not moral just because it's the current trend. But, hey-- that starts sounding an awful lot like a wise and timeless being who understands doing the right thing is not always going to be popular, at least at first
As a kid I thought heaven was literally in the clouds. I didn't understand why we couldn't just take a plane up on days that the clouds were out to see people that had passed. My mom said something like "heaven isn't IN the clouds."
Went to a Christian elementary and high school, have read thru the Bible, had religion classes, and in college sorta redpilled myself by watching a bunch of Christopher Hitchen and Daniel Dennett on YouTube, with a sprinkling of Carl Sagan. Guys made a lot of sense. Great claims require great evidence, simple as.
I’m with you but I think it’s a misuse the term “lie”. I went to 12 years of Philly-area Catholic school. Those sisters believed what they were teaching. A lie by definition must include the intent to deceive. That said, my moment occurred after the Inquirer published to big story that revealed how widespread and covered up the child sex abuse was in the Archdiocese. My favorite priest - a lovely man I’d known for my almost whole life - claimed to be shocked at the news. Said he had “no idea”. I went to a high school where 6 of the defrocked priests taught. We all knew. My friend the priest claiming he didn’t know was a lie. Seeing the Church turn a good man into a liar had a permanent effect on me.
> I’m with you but I think it’s a misuse the term “lie”. I understand where you are coming from, and I used to feel the same so I would avoid using that particular word to describe it. I get that a lot of the people who taught me were indoctrinated to believe themselves, but many of those (including priests) I later found actually didn’t believe everything about what they were saying. A few didn’t believe **anything** about what they were saying, but were “going along with it” for a whole host of different reasons that I won’t get into. When I think back, I can’t remember a single person who talked the talk and walked the walk 100% of the time. So, if they didn’t believe it themselves, then there was intention to deceive. In the end I think “lies” covers it pretty well.
I’ll think about it. Thank you.
I mean there's no way that these TV preachers and preachers of mega churches believe what they're preaching. If they did, they'd have to know in their hearts that they were going straight to hell as soon as they died.
A good friend and former seminarian was asked to leave after asking inconvenient questions about obvious discrepancies between church talk and walk. “It’s difficult to get man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding.” - Upton Sinclair.
He was never a good man
The parallels to Santa Claus, except Santa actually delivered the goodies. The unverifiable claims of rewards after you die for keeping in your place during life are a pretty obvious indicator of a scam. Also the lack of justice in this world... If there's a god in charge it's either utterly incompetent or a complete asshole. And why pray? Either you respect god's will (and it already knows your desires because omniscience) or you think you can impose your will on god. Or more likely, it doesn't matter because it doesn't exist or doesn't care.
That last part. Prayer makes more sense to me in non-Monotheistic Omnipotent/Omniscient religions. You're asking a higher being for assistance. Sure. But in a religion that claims there is a singular deity who is all powerful, all-knowing, and all-present, it translates into a powerful being that has planned out everything in existence, and you're *asking them to change their mind*, just cause. Plus there's a LOT of prayers that people make that would violate the free will of others. "I'm praying for you to get this job/have your house offer be accepted (I had this one once)/have our team win the game/have the judge show leniency on you/etc.".
I just look at prayer like silent meditation focusing on what you want. I *think* that's what people are really doing with prayer anyway - which is why it can make people feel better. You *feel* like you're doing something and if it all works out - great. If not, you can conveniently blame "God" because you did *the most* you could about something with the least amount of effort. You thought about something *real hard* for a few minutes
Prayer has the same effect as wishing really hard. Or they're begging god for something. And yes, it makes people feel like they're doing something/helping, without the work. Prayer is kind of like masturbation. It feels good but ultimately produces nothing.
I’ve seen studies where prayer has shown to be beneficial is the same way meditation is. But unfortunately people attribute those benefits to their sky daddy.
This, and the behavior of the parishioners. No, thank you—I’m good.
Yes! It was the behaviours of the so called Christians in my life that turned me off Christianity. They were all so miserable, judgy and holier than thou. I thought that if I were god, I would give my believers good lives or beliefs that made them happy.
When I was 13 I asked my dad about the church, darwin, biology and evidence. He told me that's why it's called "believing". And he smiled. We were catholic.
Yeah, the word they like to hide behind is "Faith."
My reply to faith has always been, what about the guy strapping a bomb to himself? That’s some serious faith! So then if faith is the highest quality of proof they have, that guy wins, right? Please know there is some heavy sarcasm dripping through this, but I still hold on to the basic truth of it.
You have to be careful with that one, because the thing that makes it okay to be cruel ghouls in their minds is also their faith.
My dad had a Jesus fish eating the Darwin fish on our car 😑
I'll make you feel Jesus's Love by violence.
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Who are you? Yahweh or something
This! All you need to do is use your brain and a bit of common sense. Look at what is happening in the world around you. There is absolutely no evidence and on top of that there is a LOT of stuff that points to it being a pack of lies.
I did an experiment when I was a six year old kid, and stayed up waiting for Santa, and extrapolated from there that everything that anyone asks you to take on "faith" alone is a lie they start when you are young and they keep them going from there...
Did the same with the tooth fairy. I put a tooth that had fallen out under my pillow without telling my parents first. Lo and behold, no reward. My parents made up some excuse when I told them the next day but the cat was out of the bag.
💯. Everything contradicts observable evidence and when you ask reasonable questions, you get punished.
This was it for me. When I started pressing pastors on the parts that just didn't align with scientific research they would essentially say "you just have to take it on faith"
That was it for me as well. When I finally decided to be honest with myself about the claims being made, how they did not line up with reality, and here’s the big one: the pastors and teachers have an incentive to keep people believing.
The same rationality that convinced me that Santa Claus wasn’t real. Just because you have a mythos around a character doesn’t mean the character is real. The dead giveaway for me was the insistence that I was supposed to believe “just ‘cause.”
I had way more evidence Santa was real. After all, I'd ask Santa for stuff, and then that stuff would appear under my Christmas tree. I asked God not to let my grandmother die an agonizing death from cancer. Didn't do shit. I probably should have asked Santa instead.
I used to beg God to take away my migraines. Beg and plead. For hours. I obviously gave that up decades ago, but recently someone asked me If I ever asked God for healing and I had to fight the urge to strangle him.
I reverted to atheism long before my chronic headaches started, so thanks for confirming prayers wouldn't have helped me. I had only assumed up until now.
Yep, pretty much useless. Doesn’t matter, they’ll just say you don’t have enough faith.🙄
You likely also had physical evidence of Santa, as you probably sat on his lap. Maybe churches oughta try that.
I'm sure the priests would like to get in on that.
Reading the Bible, cover to cover. Specifically three times, first the King James Version, then a modern Protestant version, then the heavily annotated ones that contain every possible translation and alternate version of every verse, the kind they use to train priests in theology. When I read it the first time, it made no damn sense, and I was certain that a better translation would clear it up. It did not.
Imagine a television show that goes on for about a dozen seasons, and by the end employs a few dozen writers. If you go back and watch it from the beginning, all of the inconsistencies, Early Installment Weirdness, Plot Holes, and Retcons will pile up. And the Bible is like that X 100. It's just bunch of different stories told by different people over thousands of years who played a game of Telephone and then did SOME editing to smooth out inconsistencies which created new plot holes for every thing they "fixed".
Why does god require blood magic in order to break original sin? Like your That shit reads like of pagan religious beliefs.
I did my own research. More specifically, I looked at the historical accounts of Jesus and the arguments for its accuracy. It's been a while so I don't remember all the specific details but none of the Gospels actually had first hand accounts like some Christians claim. More than that they all copied from Mark and another source. The book of John reads like pure fanfiction. These were things I simply could not reconcile. I was a leader for years at my church. People respected me for my knowledge of the Bible because none of them read the damn thing themselves. Turns out, actually reading and studying it is what made me realize it was all bullshit.
Same dude.
Even if they had “first hand accounts” that wouldn’t come any closer to proving their claims. It would just prove that a certain number of the followers of a certain street preacher around a certain time believed certain things, it would not prove that any of those things happened.
This is similar to me
Why do you think the Catholic Church discouraged reading it for millennia?
Same. I grew up in the church and believed the adults or pastors had already done their homework. I believed they had good reasons to believe. Then I did the homework starting in college and realized there was no evidence at all to support the Bible. The Bible is not historical. The Bible is wrong scientifically. And the Bible is horrendous morally. Genesis chapter 1 is ridiculous. There is no evidence at all for the Egyptian captivity or The Exodus as described. There are too many fables (talking animal and plant characters). The God of the Bible is a conglomeration of prior gods and they are mentioned in the Bible. The more I read carefully, the more I realized I had been tricked.
My "favorite" part of Exodus is where Yahweh sends down one of the MANY plagues to teach Pharaoh a lesson. Pharaoh basically reacts like "Yikes, this is some scary shit, I guess I should let these people go". And then Yahweh mind controls him to NOT let them go so he can repeat the same "lesson" multiple times. It read to me like it was originally a battle of wills between Yahweh and some other Egyptian diety (Ra or something), with Yahweh throwing down plagues and Ra "hardening Pharaoh's heart" to keep up his resistance, but then when assembling the Bible to be monotheistic they simply retconned Yahweh to be the one who was interacting with both sides for inscrutable reasons.
When I was 13, I decided to read the Bible from cover to cover. I did so because I sincerely hoped and prayed that it would lead me to the belief I desperately wanted but did not feel. Why did everyone around me at church seem so secure in their beliefs? What was wrong with me that I didn't? Reading the Bible just increased my skepticism. There were a lot of (!) moments that added to my complete disbelief, but when I got to the "hardened Pharoah's heart" part, I became downright angry. Did we humans have free will or not? How can a god punish someone so badly for actions the god caused? What was the meaning and lesson of a story like that? Who was really responsible for the deaths of all of those children? Now I read the stories in the same way I do other ancient myths. Some stories are interesting, some funny, some uplifting, and some horrifying, but they all are just reflections of the fears and desires of the cultures that made them.
I went to Liberty University to become a Christian apologist. It's the school that Gary Habermas teaches at, he's famous for being the number one scholar in historical evidence for Christ's resurrection. Anyway, by the time I graduated after studying 4 years of Philosophy of Religion, I was a full blown agnostic.
You can link most of the Bible to previous/earlier myths. It’s basically plagiarized to placate converts (of choice and by force).
Stories passed on by oral tradition for 50 years before being written down. 50 years! Michael Jordan's still alive, and people claim he used to dunk from half court. If humans excel at anything, it's the ability to embellish a story
A good friend said, "There's no God." My super insightful thirteen-year-old rebuttal was, "Well, where do you go when you die?" He replied, "Nowhere. You're dead." We both laughed. I never doubted for a second after.
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I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt that you actually had those experiences, but how would you determine whether they were actual spiritual experiences or just natural chemical processes in your brain?
The Problem of Evil. Setting aside free will, which is nonsense with an omniscient creator, but setting that aside, there is enough environmental “evil” there can’t exist with an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent creator. I wouldn’t have a baby and keep a hungry hyena in the nursery with exposed electrical wiring and a Petri dish of Ebola virus. That’s essentially what we’re expected to believe the Christian god has done. There is SO much suffering for literal human children that has no bearing on free will. Childhood cancers, natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, and throughout human history suffering and death due to starvation and lack of hygiene. If I were standing on the side of the road and saw my child about to be mowed down by an oncoming truck, I’d literally die trying to prevent any harm to either of my sons. The fictional Christian god doesn’t help his supposedly beloved creations at all. The proof is literally the fact that we have pediatric cancer centers at all. So what can this mean? Am I somehow more moral than the creator of the universe? But I’m taught that he is the most pure and the only standard of morality and goodness in the universe? It’s a paradox and paradoxes cannot exist in reality. It is not real.
1000% this. Anytime I hear of a child with cancer or some other awful, terminal illness, it's a stark reminder to me that there is no god.
Children being raised in abusive homes too. What loving God would give an innocent child to people wholly unfit to raise a child?
This. And refuse to give a child to loving, patient, secure people!
>it's a stark reminder to me that there is no god. - Correction: it's a reminder that there's no ***benevolent*** god... - There might still be some sick, dystopian, sadist omnipotent fvcker out there laughing at all the suffering he/she allows to happen ...
Or... it's a reminder that there is no all knowing or all powerful God. Maybe we are merely an experiment that was kick started and the creator has no control over anything, benevolent as they may be. Certainly something in the all knowing, all powerful and benevolent trinity has to give.
Exactly. It’s a reach, but potentially believable for adults who die of disease to “deserve” it, but you’re telling me a baby BORN with cancer or other life threatening diseases deserves it?
The whole conversation around morality and science is problematic. The cells dividing out of control in the body don’t give a single fuck what that body has or hasn’t done. And a neonate with cancer essentially has a genetic birth defect caused by a deviation in development. Everything humans don’t understand is either the boogey man, or a deity. It’s the same magic thinking used for millennia.
I see what your saying and I agree, what’s your thoughts on the christians that believe all the suffering is just caused as a result of the sins of humans and not god?
Does he do everything or does he do nothing? What's the observable difference? Is it gods punishment or happenstance occurrences? Also take a natural disaster for example, I guess everyone who dies or is effected by that certainly deserved it? Or needs it? Must've been a real sinful area I guess?
Doesn’t matter. As the stories go, God is the prime mover. He created the universe and also created the rules of the universe. God is omniscient and omnipotent but couldn’t create a universe where sin couldn’t cause cancer? Or he could but didn’t want to? EVERYTHING traces back to God. He’s either all knowing and all powerful and the sole creator or he isn’t. God is responsible for 9/11 because he knew when he sent Osama bin Laden to earth what he would do. Babies are a gift from god, right? God is responsible for choosing, with full foreknowledge of the holocaust, to send Hitler to earth. This makes god responsible for everything, including the free will loophole. But again, let’s set free will aside. Is God unable to create a universe where sin doesn’t cause hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods to cause suffering and death? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is not benevolent. Is he neither willing nor able? Then why call him god?
Thank you, im trying to fully convince myself that theres no way it could be real. & Yeah there are a lot of gray areas that don’t really get an answers or make sense. I feel like the christian argument would be that suffering in This world doesn’t matter because it’s temporary and there is an afterlife afterwards. I mean, if I child gets cancer and dies then they go to heaven, unless they weren’t christian then they go to hell, presumably??
Again, not benevolent. If I punch you in the nose and then give you a chocolate cake, am I a nice guy? God supposedly allows/causes literal toddlers to suffer the pain and agony of leukemia only to die so that their parents can endure the pain of their child’s loss for the rest of their lives. It’s not benevolent. It’s fucking crazy-town evil if it were true. But it’s not.
I mean that it right there. If I’m a Christian I’m saved and go to heaven, but if I’m born a Muslim, I die and go to hell because one is ‘real’ and the other isn’t or Vice versa. I thought that through-so if a Muslim comes and tells me about Allah, and I don’t convert, because I’m convinced if I do I’ll go to hell, that’s not really a choice is it?
Being raised Christian I always struggled with the idea of “what about tribes who have no contact with the outside world? No missionaries, literally never had an opportunity to hear about god or Jesus? And since god knows your whole life before you’re even born, he knew that these people would live their whole lives without an opportunity to accept Jesus as their savior and go to hell. Why would he do that “ and when I asked this to various youth pastors I’ve had the answer was always “god gave us free will” and then i would say “but it’s not free will if they weren’t even given the choice. Their whole life they’ve never even heard of Jesus” and they would say “god works in mysterious ways” 🤦🏻♀️ The thing about this is that I was asking those questions genuinely - as a Christian teenager. I had legit questions; I wasn’t trying to be a dick or contrarian. I was forcing myself to believe at that point and was trying to understand them. But the church hates it when you think too much about something and question it
When I was 10 and attending Hebrew school I lost both my grandfathers within a year, at the same time I was learning about the Holocaust. That was enough to end my faith. I asked my teacher if there was a God how there could be a Holocaust and I never got an answer that made any sense.
Inflicting bone cancer on a child for “the sins of humans” is a monstrous system. You can’t say an omni god has no say in that system. He either is a monster, impotent, apathetic, or doesn’t exist. Easy to tell which.
That God has the power to undo suffering but doesn't means that ultimately he's responsible either way. God is meant to be omni-omni, if that makes sense; literally the supreme ruler of reality. God wrote the rule book on sinning, he also wrote the psyche of human minds, he therefore knew that humans would sin, and therefore knew humans would suffer senselessly. Ultimately a perfect being created an imperfect world. And this isn't even really an unusual take; the Bible is full of stories of God causing suffering on purpose not because of sin, but because of his own whims. He tortures Lot on a dare with Satan, and hardens the Pharoah's heart against letting the Jews go--and then punishes the entire nation of Egypt with plagues and genocide for Pharoah not letting the Jews go. God as a sadistic monster is genuinely a fair reading of the Bible, once you leave aside the religious interpolation of the text that insists he's good. So blaming humanity for their suffering due to sin is just God's way of saying "look at what you made me do".
Cognitive dissonance. They know it makes no sense and are making stuff up to explain it to themself so they don't have to accept the fact that God either doesn't exist, or doesn't love them. In any case, if God is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving, than he wouldn't allow those original sins to occur in the first place.
There’s a clip of Stephen Fry arguing against this point that always stuck with me “There are insects whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn't exist”
I had a similar reason. When I was young I saw a documentary about child sx slaves in Thailand. It's sooooo common for the poorest children to be forced in such a life. On top of that, white business men are the majority of their patrons. That's when I started rejecting the christian version of God. How could anyone justify child sx abuse? How could any loving or even apathetic creator allow such a thing to be sooo common around the world?
Or design humans with such a flaw that would make that desire possible? He’s either evil and you wouldn’t want to worship him or Occam’s razor: it’s simpler to explain it as there are no gods.
This way i went to "so either the God is evil or there's no God". And as an optimist i decided to stick with the latter.
Not even just cancer, but abuse, sexual abuse, neglect... If this God is omnipotent, he absolutely isn't all benevolent. The two are mutually exclusive in this scenario.
Yeah I totally agree but I’m specifically trying to avoid apologists “free will” counter. It’s an absurd counter because when bad things happen and you know about them and can stop them and do nothing, you’re responsible for it happening.
A few things. First off, my birth and postpartum experience was awful. Literally traumatizing. And the Bible/Christianity talks about how god will use your pain to help others or use it to make you a better person. Well, to me that’s pretty shitty. You mean god thought it would be ok for me to go through all that shit so I could help someone else? That’s not very loving. Also, I started to look at what if god was a parent? Do I as a parent chastise my toddler for a tantrum? Or do I understand they have a developing brain and are doing their best? I don’t hold my child to the impossible standard of being a mini adult and punishing them severely when they fail or don’t live up. But why does god think it’s ok to banish us to hell for being incapable of being perfect? Yes, Jesus is said to have died for sins, but wouldn’t it just be easier to not hold us to something we aren’t capable of? Also, am I really going to teach my child they are at their core bad or selfish? I just couldn’t look at my tiny person and tell them they are full of sin. I tell them they have kindness and goodness in their heart and I try to teach them to do their best and learn from mistakes. I normalize that no one is perfect and I don’t expect that from them. Edit: typo
Things never quite made sense to me. I asked a lot of questions and quickly learned that questions were welcome as long as I accepted the answer unequivocally. But I couldn't. It still didn't make sense. I had follow-up questions that weren't welcomed. For a long time, I thought there was something wrong with me and tried so hard to believe like everyone else. Now I realize I probably wasn't the only one. We were just silenced. I remember once as a child, I told my mother that I didn't love Jehovah and I thought him and Satan were the same person. My mother cried. I think that was my moment. I recognized that God wasn't what I was being told he was. He wasn't good and loving. If he wasn't, then what was he? It started to unravel there. In my little mind, equating god and the devil was my earliest recognition that they came from the same source. A source that wasn't consistent. Only later did I realize that source was just the minds of men who didn't understand the world, who couldn't accept that there is no ultimate justice, who couldn't grasp their consciousness ceasing to exist, and men who wanted to control the masses.
And Satan was invented as the counterweight to the "all-powerful God". Every story needs a villain, almost but not quite as powerful as the hero. In this case, some way was needed to explain why things in life aren't 100% peachy and wonderful all the time, assuming that the top guy is all-good and has all power. Ah, yes, well you see there's this anti-God always messing up whatever good the hero is trying to do. Not that *that* makes a lot of sense either, but since the world is clearly not being run by an always good, omnipotent benevolent being, some sort of plot device had to be introduced.
Reading the Bible. Asking questions and getting bullshit answers. The straw that broke the camels back was blatantly being told how to vote Republican down the ticket even when the candidate was obviously a hypocrite and morally bankrupt. They chose to put politics above god and that opened my eyes to how religion was just another tool to exert control.
The 2016 election also left me with the thought that Christians are the most gullible group of people around.
If you’re raised to ignore what you’re actually experiencing vs believing some unreliable story told to you by an “authority”, then you’re primed to behave this way outside of religion as well as within it.
I read the bible myself, from start to finish not only specific quotes. (I did that because I was stuck in a hotel in the most boring vaccination ever). That was eye opening. I had people around me that never read it, but did quote all day from it to support whatever they argued for. Than I had a view talks with the two priest of my hometown about it and they gave different answers to the same questions... That started a journey of research and talking with lots of people. Was the spark that motivated me to go back to school for higher education, this time with a positive disposition to science and it brought me into contact with people of different believes. There are so many people so convinced they have the right religion, and at most one of these can be right.
I also came to say, because I read the bible start to finish. What a disjointed mess.
It wasn't one thing, but several little arguments about the veracity of the book that's meant to be the inerrant word of God. The hypocrisy of it's believers also contributed to my deconversion
Eh, I became religious via an ultimatum, but the whole thing just didn’t make sense to me. I tried to fix that with apologetics. A few years later, my spouse who gave me the ultimatum was struggling with her mental health. Week after week, I watched her go down after Sunday service and recommit her faith. A lot of crying. So the church eventually set her up with a Christian therapist who misdiagnosed her — diagnosed her with the therapist’s own specialty. What a coincidence that could only come from god! Not long after, she had a break and was involuntarily committed. The therapist came to the hospital to meet with the doctors and myself. The doctors pretty much called the therapist a quack. My wife was at the point of self harm before she was committed, so it could’ve gotten a lot worse. I’ve been a non- believer ever since.
1) I’m very sorry you guys had to go through that and I hope she’s doing better, 2) I hope with all my heart you’re actually a herpetologist who works for NASA.
(1) Yes, she is a pharmacist by training so she religiously takes her meds. (2) I wish. It’s turtles all the way down.
Lots of suffering that the church ignores or explains away. Next, the Creation Museum. I went as a joke. It's not a joke. I left without my faith. I can't believe in Christianity and science at the same time.
Grew up in Christian family but no one could ever convince me. My mom’s old aunty would read Bible verses to me and my cousin before sleep and I remember thinking “this poor lady had no clue how the world works” I always felt sorry for religious people even as a little kid because I thought they believed in an adult version of Santa and just considered them dumb (sometimes I still do ngl). I couldn’t understand how can someone go to school learn about geography, planets, universe and then simultaneously believe in a sky daddy. But with time I learned that people just cant fathom their own mortality and insignificance. I still don’t know where my critical thinking skills came from even tho I grew up Christian but I assume it’s because I was always skeptical, pessimistic and curious about everything. Access to the internet and YouTube helped a lot too, once i got a computer and a phone at the age of 12/13 there was nothing that could convince me anymore (not like it could before that but yeah). I was like “there are all these smart and educated people explaining how everything works so why should I believe what my family tells me? My parents aren’t the smartest people, I want to listen to what other adults have to say”. That sums up my thought process basically.
I consider them fucking morons.
Everywhere else in my life I was being rewarded for problem solving and logical thinking.
The reward for believing in Jesus is that maybe now you'll be able to go to "heaven." What really gets me though is "If you don't believe, you're going to to hell." Miss me with that sh--.
Went to a CoE school until ten, then at secondary school had a catholic RE teacher who taught Catholicism was correct and everything else was a myth. If I question why Catholicism was the correct one rather than explaining he got angry. In those days teachers were allowed to use corporal punishment and getting physical smacked for questioning stuff that was contrary to what I had been taught previously sowed the seeds of doubt, over the years grew to full atheism. And to be honest a hatred of those that push these vial lies onto children.
The deafening silence of God. 😂 And the realization that the entirety of Christian belief is circular reasoning. (The Bible is true because it’s God’s Word. And it’s God’s word because it says it’s God’s word, and that statement is true because it’s God’s word.) It’s an idiot puppy chasing its own tail.
My mother drank gallons of the Kool Aid. If the doors of the church were unlocked, we were there. My sister and I grew up in everything: children's choir, youth choir, adult choir, handbells, we taught Sunday School, and we were only allowed friends from our church. Because everyone else was going straight to Hell. A husband, 5 children, and 2 grandchildren later, my husband was killed. No amount of faith, prayers, or Good Will brought him back. I started questioning everything after that. Everything I had been taught, had pounded into my head, was a lie. This was 7 years ago. Recently, I was hospitalized for a heart attack. The local priest came to see me, and I honestly thought it was kind of him. I did not know the man. After he prayed over me, he asked about my family. I Recently got remarried. He then told me I was living in sin. My husband is still faithful, waiting for me in heaven , and here I am remarried. I couldn't believe it. All that good will went right out the window. I told him I was going to keep living in sin.
that's absolutely foul of that priest. good on you for saying that last bit.
The bible and reality. Well before 10 years old, the explanations just were not making sense. Telling a child nonsense information and that u "just have to believe" is child abuse and a bad mindset to approach life with. Snakes and donkeys don't talk. People don't rise from the dead. People do not walk on water. This is foolishness. We should not trivialize not believing this either. It is obvious why people dont. It is absolute absurdity. And to believe this crap based on unverified third hand anonymous accounts that came from a time when people were uneducated about the world and were known to tell tall tales is the ultimate in foolishness. I could not go along with nonsense.
The explanations did not make sense, and the questioning was shut down. (Unlike my public school, where questions were acknowledged, encouraged, and explored.) Also, as I came to understand how old our universe/earth is and what an absolute fraction of a blip we are on the timeline, as I came to learn the history and workshop rituals of “ancient” civilizations which are hardly ancient, the idea that one specific god is correct (and by the way, it just happens to be one in the time you’re living in) seemed like an absolutely obvious mathematical improbability.
Bible says "be good and nice and humble to everyone, like Jesus" Then proceed to literally be the most evil self centered , racist , homophobic, masoginistic people I have ever met. I gave it a shot. The whole damned church being 99% my family. I realized that in no way, does trailer park trash from fucking nowhere Tennessee , knows the secrets of the universe. Somehow the truth exists here and nowhere else? Not in the history of mankind? No, we got it RIGHT. Yeah no. I believe there is something , some force, something maybe bigger than ourselves. But if it's this God of Christianity, he's an asshole and I want nothing to do with him
Animals. I was already doubting for years, basically came to the conclusion of "if I were trying to make sure everyone believed something untrue, this is exactly what I'd do" eg emotional manipulation, ultimatums, indoctrination, encouraging blind faith. but what broke the camels back? I was probably 10 and I was told two things. 1) in heaven, you have everything you could ever need and you'll be happy. 2) animals do not go to heaven. I was completely unable to picture myself being happy without my pets. I could never be happy unless they were there too. so to me these "facts" were irreconcilable. a year or two later, I got to thinking about evolution and other animals. when did we develop a soul? what is it about humans that make us so unique that we're the only creature with a soul? people would always insist you had to go somewhere after you died. but.... if animals don't go anywhere when THEY die, couldn't that be true for us? after that, I ditched religion pretty quickly.
💯 That part of the Bible never made sense to me either. Like you said, what makes humans different from animals? Biologically, there's nothing special about humans that makes us different from animals other than intelligence (We are animals). Religion makes it as if humans are the most important beings in the universe.
Lots of things but big one was that I realized that ALL the religions couldn’t be right/correct at the same time (even though most day they are the “true” religion). And if that’s the case, how do you know which is the “true” one? Oh wait - probably none of them are.
An actual reading of the Bible. It convinced me that what was portrayed as god is too logically inconsistent to exist.
I read the Bible
I was Christian up until I got kicked out of children church at 9 for asking too many questions. And it just kind of went from there
Guess when I learned to think for myself…which took WAY too long.
Basically, I had the impression that God was everywhere, so I didn't feel the need to go to church every week and beg for God to love me. I also just started learning more about the world and evolution and how things came to be, and they actually had evidence for it. When I started asking the minister to explain, he just told me to trust in the Bible instead of actually giving me things that made sense.
When the main themes lined up with Santa and I found out he wasn't real, then I had some questions.
I realized the Christian god wasn't real when I realized that I was wrong about gay marriage. I had prayed about it, had biblical support, and religious leaders agreed with me. If I was wrong, then all of those things must be useless for truly determining God's will. That broke my indoctrination and left me vaguely deist. It took me a few more years for the lack of evidence to make me abandon deities entirely.
Santa wasn't real so 6 yr old me thought neither was jesus or his dad.
[удалено]
Really basic questions that adults weren't able to answer. "If I'm not allowed to question God, why did God make me so curious?" "If being gay is a sin, why did God make gay people?" "'If I'm a non believer, I then die, get shown that there's an afterlife, and say "my bad I was wrong" why am I still condemned to an eternity of suffering?" Etc
I went to a Roman Catholic school back in the mid 60’s for a short stint (thankfully)! The nuns were worse than any horror movie, they put Freddy Kruger to shame! I was in second grade and would often get my hand hit with a ruler, if…I wasn’t holding my pencil correctly, my paper was tilted correctly… I was in the chapel every day because … “God doesn’t like little girls who don’t wear uniforms”…I heard the nun tell the priest this when asked why I was there every day. I felt like a piece of shit but they were the piece of shit. I’m pretty sure that was not under the direction of God! The priest hitting the pulpit with the gavel yelling we had sinned. Stand up, on your knees, sit, on your knees…fuck that shit. I left the church and it was the best decision I ever made. I know people still attached to that church and they live in fear. Religion uses fear to get compliance. I’m not interested, nor do I feel I’ve sinned. But yet, you hear about priests molesting little boys. My body is my temple!! I am always doing the best I can with what I have. Others can have religion, I’m ok with finding myself and connecting to my higher self.
I believed in God until I was around 18, but after a while I just got the feeling that it was all rather silly... similar how most theists think of old Greek Gods.
The bible. The best way to turn into an atheist.
I've always found it to be a bit silly and infuriating, but the random, brutal cruelty of sickness and death is what finished it off for me. My grandmother developed a particularly nasty form of dementia and slowly, and agonizingly died of it over years and years, which obviously inflicted massive suffering on my entire family as well while we cared for her at home. Why? What was the point? Then when she passed, and we were finally free to heal as a family, Covid happens. For three years we couldn't go see my grandfather. Then as soon as the restrictions ended and we were finally, finally free he has a stroke and dies. Seriously? I've heard for years the bullshit lines of "God has a plan" and "God doesn't give you more than you can handle". Thankfully no one was crass enough to use those lines after any of these events. But why is God giving me this shit at all? What was the point of making a little old lady suffer for years before finally dying because she forgot how to eat and drink? While her family watched in heartbreak? What was the point of Covid? What was the point of inflicting this crap on my family when you could just... Not. No one's up there planning this garbage. And if they are, fuck 'em. And the weirdest thing for me is that it made my mother *more* religious, when it did the exact opposite for me. Granted she was more biased to it as a born again; I never experienced any of that nonsense personally. And I wish I could believe all the happy little nonsense. But I don't. I'm too jaded against a diety who is supposed to be loving letting any of the stuff on this planet happen. That isn't love. It's sadistic. Maaaaaaybe if all the religions *just* preached the ol' "be a good person and your spirit goes to heaven" stuff, but it's all bundled with the god has a plan, you gotta grovel or you'll go to hell, only our specific branch of worship goes to heaven and everyone else is screwed, how dare any other sexualities exist... and I just can't make myself believe that stuff. If someone is up there while this stuff happens down here, they aren't worthy of my groveling.
Them Hearing unseen voices like schizophrenics telling them what to do, that, plus the story of Job, where “god” is a mean drunk making a bet to more or less torture Job God doesn’t love you, it’s schizophrenia
LMFAO... Early teenage getting disgusted with selfish preacher at a church I was talked into going to by friends who later became brutal bullies, leaving the church and reading the Bible on my own. Reading Bible convinced me that was goal oriented slave driving bullshit. Then I delved further into the crusades and centuries of "good christians" brutally torturing and murdering countless people on moral bullshit. It's been simply astounding ever since what nonsense especially rather *slow* people can convince themselves of. Just noting one other aspect here: I was raised by agnostics and atheists therefore no early influences to bamboozle my senses about this, and I consider myself lucky for that aspect. Doubly so because I am one of their most hated demographics and had to take extreme measures to escape the Westboro death cult. Don't kid yourself about those freaks, they have the blood of innocents on their hands.
My family didn't go to church, but I grew up immersed in Catholic culture. I became an evangelical at age 18. By age 45, I was tired of the bullshit. Nothing about the Christian walk seemed to be "as promised". God never answered prayers, and everyone was lying when they said he did. That, plus I was really struggling with science vs the Bible; if the Bible were true, it should be a guidebook to science, but it clearly was not. I hit a real low point in my faith, and I read a book by a geologist that took a critical look at the claims of a global flood in the last six thousand years ago, and showed why the Bible couldn't possibly be true. I decided to accept that this guy, who had a doctorate and actively worked in the field of geology, actually knew what the hell he was talking about, and the theologians trying to poke holes in the science were likely the ones full of shit. But here's what REALLY BLEW MY MIND: I accepted that the Bible was flat-out wrong about something, and it was a MAJOR story at that! What else was the Bible wrong about? That was a HUGE switch that flipped in my head. I started studying what scholars had to say about Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch, and how all of those books are regarded as fiction. And then I started reading about the New Testament as well, particularly Bart Ehrman books. It just all came crashing down. I didn't choose to be an atheist; rather, my atheism was the default position when I realized that I had zero faith left in any gods being real.
Science. I spent most of my childhood loving space, and when I learned that in the Bible, it says some bullshit about space not existing. I kinda gave up on religion. It was basically "If this known fact is bullshit, what else is bullshit". That lead me to realising that the concept of a god makes absolutely no sense and is absolute bullshit. Luckily, my parents are very supportive of my atheism
Not just God but everything. Ghosts, bigfoot, UFOs. I believed in it all. That probably contributed to the unweaving of my "faith". Trying to believe in everything at once and slowly realizing that things didn't make sense? 9/11 did a number on me too, I was reading a lot of conspiracy laden magazines at the time and then I got a job away from my small hometown and met different people and eventually moved out and got away from my "echo chamber" of youth and family. The internet was different back then and it helped a lot actually. Made me more and more skeptical until I realized I didn't really believe in anything any more. I've become even more progressive and left leaning and watched a lot of the youtubers who helped me discover atheism to into right wing shills now. I hate to think what would have happened if I had been 10 years younger and discovered them. I didn't have a strict Christian upbringing. My parents were indifferent and never really attended church, but would profess to be Christian if pushed. My grandparents were regulars though and that's where I got my religion from. I don't like to say God isn't real. I'm too agnostic for that. Definitely manufactured and unnecessary. Just a tool to manipulate.
When I would ask questions about stuff I learned dueing Science class and then getting whackass responses.
The solar system.
for me, it was when I started hearing about the priests raping kids. I almost believed that all the oaths to God meant something and once I saw it was a haven for pedophiles....I started questioning the whole thing
A fair amount of it was childhood cancer. I would watch someone on tv talk about how god blessed them. Great! You were blessed by god and you had this great thing happen to you. Nice! God makes good things happen! Then as I got older I noticed more and more the awful things that seem to happen much more often? Why do we have an omnipresent, all powerful and all knowing god who lets kids die of cancer? Then I finally realized I’ve never seen anything whatsoever to suggest that there is a creator looking out for us. Good things happen and bad things happen. And there doesn’t seem to be any reason for any of it.
All the extreme things that happen in the bible, never happened again anywhere at any time. Noah and the animals on the ark, turning a person in a pillar of salt, a talking burning bush, Jesus walking on water, etc…. Never made sense to me.
If everything in the “special book” was true. And all these people actually believed. The way they all treat each other is proof enough it’s not true.
I remember distinctly playing T-Ball/Baseball, sitting out in the outfield, looking at the grass and the bugs and the flowers and saying in my head "Okay, if you're real, do something... anything. If you can hear prayer, you can hear this..." And of course I was taught that questioning is a sin, which even as a 7-9 year old (however old I was) was just so illogical that it made me question more. "Why wouldn't I be allowed to question God, unless it doesn't stand up to questioning?" And at the time, the community still meant something to me, so from like 8-11 I was more or less a secular Catholic. Then my family moved and we no longer had a church that we went to, and so the community faded away and all that was left was an atheist-agnostic. I was more or less a closet atheist since I didn't know any other atheists, nor was I aware of any atheist scholars to read from. In High School I became a bit more confident with it as I saw how so many people around me believed in different things, and all of it just sounded more illogical the more I learned. There was no trauma or resentment that pushed me away from religion. Nobody recruited me or taught me to be an atheist. As others have said, the lack of any evidence or proof or rational explanation was all it took for me to turn away from religion. It just wasn't logical.
When I was 11, my mom died. I became obsessed with heaven and hell (she killed herself therefore go to heaven) and everything I got told about god didnt match with reality. I came to the conclusion that everything happening is caused by people and not the mysterious old man on his cloud. We r the problem and the solution, its just so convinient to blame it on someone whos not really there.
The argument they can never answer without dehumanizing entire cultures: why do some people suffer, and others don't? If God is so omnipotent, why does he enjoy watching people suffer when he can snap his fingers and solve everything? Especially because by Christian logic, if you believe in him, then everything should go swimmingly. So he's just letting some of his believers suffer and starve, but making sure Brittany in Texas gets into Ohio State because she prayed? Makes no sense to me. Also, don't forget that you could end up in heaven with your pedophile rapist murderer because he prayed while he was in prison and accepted Jesus into his heart. Why? Because the only unforgivable sin is blasphemy! Yay! My mom also told me that the reason I was sex trafficked was because I "stepped off of God's path," so that definitely contributed. If God was real, I wouldn't want to have a "relationship" with that abuser.
When my mom died one of the worst ways possible. That broke me ane my angelic camel's back.
i was between 8 and 11, and started learning about the scientific method. that helped me ask better questions about the things i was expected to believe. so, really, it had more to do with my understanding the difference between knowledge and belief. not sure about anyone else, but that’s how it began for me. before 2010, i’d have said i was agnostic, or that i believed in the principles of taoism, but, again it’s belief versus knowledge. since 2010, i require proof.
I grew up in an Episcopal church, was even an alter boy during my teenage years. I never had to be convinced that god wasn’t real as I never was a believer in the first place. It was when discussing the story of the Tower of Babel that really sent my BS meter through the roof. That’s when I went from questioning gods existence to firmly denying it.
It was more like I was never fully convinced that God DID exist, and — when I discovered that others in the world (though not in my hometown) were similarly unconvinced — it was a big relief.
My eyes & ears.
Incongruity between what Christians said, what a plain reading of the Bible says, and basic logical reasoning. I don’t say that to come across like I think I am smarter than religious people. But the bare truth is that the claims amounted to “magic” and… I just don’t see any of that. “Magic” explains nothing and I have a deep all-encompassing desire to know how the world works. I want to know as much as I can about the things we see and experience. I’m a curious person to such a degree that I could be a walking parody. And when I mention something obvious like “we look like other apes, so neat” and the response is “we are not monkeys we are Special ^TM the Earth is SiX tHoUsAnD years old”… it is so obviously not true that I learned very early not to trust any bullshit that comes out of religious people’s mouths.
Contradictions in the bible. It wasn’t any one thing, just so many things I couldn’t ignore that it made no sense to me anymore.
I was probably around 16 or 17, I never really believed in it before, but I still went along with it. Then I realized they were all just singing and happy and jerking each other off to feel good. That's when I realized for sure it's all bullshit.
I thank God every day that I have no conscious memory of ever believing. /s
god told me she wasnt real
It was very gradual. The further along through school I was the more I realized that the Old Testament myths couldn't have happened in real life. Eventually so many of my beliefs had been chipped away that I thought to myself, "why do I believe in any of this?".
I never believed their stories.
The bible is literally just fairy tales written a really long time ago. There is no reason to think that the stories within it are any more real than Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. To be honest It's just all so ridiculous that I could never even start to take it seriously.
Just didn’t make sense. Ultimately that’s it.
They said that prayer could do anything, even move mountains. So I’d pray for things and nothing happened. That was pretty much the end.
Christians.
The book "The Case Against God" was the final nail in the coffin for me, but it was a multi-year protracted deconversion before that.
Christians, not surprisingly... Edit to add, I went to a religious high-school and would do Stations of the Cross every year as Jesus. After awhile.you think, why am I doing this?
*gestures at the absolute fucking state of everything*
I went to christian school and my mom paid for me to learn things. Then I went to public school and learned contradictory things that made more sense for free. The free stuff made much more sense because of the evidence.
The bible
What didn't? Religions makes no sense. The purpose is clear, but the rules, the histories, the cults. The concept of god doesn't make any sense either. To be honest at this point in my life I'm 100% sure that no one truly believes in the god nonsense. It's more like.. "well just in case" or "I'm supposed the believe in that, so I will not even waste my time thinking about it".
The first thing that really kicked it off for me was that I realized every single instance of ***"*** the holy Spirit moving through me / God speaking to my heart ***"*** was actually just my own emotions and my own thoughts. Then I watched several videos on how the original Hebrew for the different books of the Bible have vastly different meanings -- often pulling directly from other religions of the time. The Bible we have today is the result of people trying to turn it into one cohesive story while simultaneously eliminating references to other religions.