68(I realize how close it is) on my phone. My PC gets shut down daily so it cannot accumulate too many but normally I have 2 browsers with ~4-8 tabs unless I’m researching something, then it’s 193,646,691
I kept asking for supernatural things to happen, or to win something like a small school lottery. The fact nothing happened, let alone a clear punishment, did disappoint me.
When I discovered that Santa was fake was when my faith started to really crumble.
Sometimes listening to the Pastors speak gives me a nice sensation on the back of my neck. I later discovered ASMR. I sometimes still listen to old religious people speak, but I’m not actually paying attention.
Here’s the real reasons why:
Finding too many things I disagreed with or did not understand from the text.
Having a religious preacher fail to explain them to me.
Discovering other religions exist.
Learning what a cult is and making 1:1 comparisons to most religious entities.
First drop of doubt for me began at a Wednesday youth service. Not only was I such a strong believer that I went to church in the middle of the week, I drove myself because I was the only one in my family who wanted to go. The youth minister was giving a class on cults and the more he spoke the more it sounded like my entire life was being part of a cult. Following that thread led to me finally admitting to myself that I don’t believe anymore about 6 years later. It was a long road with lots of doubt and denial but that one sermon on how to identify a cult woke me tf up.
The first thing was how the catholic church handled the sex abuse allegations.
The second thing was how they taught that the Bible was “the literal word of God”, then changed church doctrine away from the Bible whenever it suited them.
The third thing was how, when my son died at 15, everyone was ok with that being “part of God’s plan”. What the fuck kind of God has a plan that requires 15 year olds to die?
That’s actually hilarious. By all accounts, religions are definitionally cults. Though colloquially we tend to define cults as ‘dangerous’, even though there are many cults which are arguably more tame than some ‘religions’.
That was basically the answer he gave me when I asked what separated us from a cult. He must have forgotten all the evil done in the Christian God’s name because Christianity also has a history of being dangerous.
In the end, I had a 2 pages-document of pros and cons for leaving church…
Some of them:
If I wasn’t part of Christianity and had the choice to join, would I do it? No.
The scandals
Their actions to keep the scandals under the radar which made it even worse
Wasted money in Germany. A bishop in Germany bought a bathtub for 15k €. That’s a prominent case, but there are a lot more
The fact that the church is literally a throttle of evolution.
Still no equality between men and women (I’m sure, they’ll do that at some point. But it’s the church. So, it’s gonna take 600 years)
No proof of existence of a god or whatever
There are n religions saying, their god is the real one. At least n-1 of them must be wrong.
Only 3-5% of the money you pay as a member via taxes goes to charity (in Germany)
The “Bistum Köln” in Germany has so much money… They started investing it and bought shares of companies.
I became a member of a religion when I was < 1 year old. I confirmed it when I was 13??? Most other live-relevant decisions are 18+. This should be the same here.
Religion lessons in school felt like a waste of time
Church is a black box. No one knows what they are actually doing, how much money they own, …
Church has an own “justice system” in Germany, which is terrible.
Most Christians prefer not acting christian when they are challenged.
I didn’t want to finance an Anti-LGBT group
Ratlines, a.k.a. “How the church helped Nazis to escape Europe after WW2”
… and 10 more points.
Also, I found only 3 or 4 very bad arguments to not quit
And when I realized that the only thing keeping me in there is “fearing” how some people (mostly family) might react when I’d quit, I knew, I had to quit as soon as possible.
Oh wow, I never wrote my reasoning down, but most of your points hit home. Churches guilt people to stay in, and if the collective sees one escaping from the doctrine, they “dispatch” those who are fearful to try to instill the same on you.
I do believe though that church and religion kept communities and societies together, quelling some of the human fear of the uncertainties of life, so there is some value there, but just not for those of us that see all of these cons you listed.
I am involved with a bunch of atheist social groups. In my very anecdotal not scientific observations I have noticed that Muslims have the hardest deconversions. Any thoughts on that? Also is there anything I can do when I meet ex-muslims to help?
In my experience one of the problems is that Turkish society is based so much in religion meaning like you are seen like a deviant or something by people around you when you say “fuck that” about religion. When I was younger another thing that I found shitty was the double standards of people when you try to vent on the internet. ex-christians are allowed to say “fuck christianity” and people will show solidarity but whenever I said “Islam is maybe bad?” People called me an islamaphobe, that closed me off for a while about talking about religion. Both of these peoblems were mostly things that bothered me when I just left religion and nowadays I am more at peace with myself and with people I care about around me. what you can do is probs show them solidatity and understanding.
I befriended a lawyer in a online game years ago. When he found out I took the bible literally, we had debates about it, and he’d break down some of the passages in Revelations and try to get me to justify stuff like dragons. It opened my eyes to how ridiculous some things were, and how there was a reason one of the first things we were taught (Baptist) was not to question anything.
How it seems every religion believes they’re the “One True” religion, and the whole rest of the world is wrong. How throughout history, it’s fueled wars, and been used as a method to control people more than a way to help people.
How some priests garb themselves in expensive robes and surround themselves with gold or drive luxury cars, or preach on TV from practically a stadium while passing around the donations plate through a crowd of poor people while promising a afterlife gated by pearls.
I’ll stop here but yeah. It was actually a pretty devastating realisation for me, as religion was a huge part of my life up to that point.
People. Way too many people are fake Christians that act differently than what they should. But as long as they go to church every Sunday, they believe they are a good person. You don’t need a book or the threat of hell to treat people how you would want to be treated.
That plus having faith in stories of a 2000 year old book written and re-written by humans. Just doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think it ever sat right with me but I couldn’t say why at first. When I was pretty young the problem made itself more clear when we got a new pastor. I didn’t agree with what he was saying and perhaps more importantly what he was saying didn’t agree with what his predecessor was saying. I brought this up to my parents and they said that he wasn’t right about everything. Well that’s a problem then because it means all these beliefs are subjective. The more I thought about any one story parable text or anything, the more I thought that this is just another person who doesn’t really know anything. Even where it says “This is the word of god” Someone had to write it down. Someone had to translate it. The harder I looked for god the more I found men, and I do not have faith in men.
I went down the rabbit hole of the Ancestral simulation, the Boltzmann brain, simulation hypothesis and these shows like matrix and westworld made more sense than any other religious text
asklemmy
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