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
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.
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 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.
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.
TLDR: i did rational thinking due to my scepticisms and stopped believing.
I was born into a middle-class Hindu family in South India. Being from south we werent much religious to begin with. But my mother side of family was tad bit more religious than my fathers side of family. Usually during temple festivals, prior to the main day they would have “parayanas” or like preaching equivalent. Its basically retelling of stories from ramayana or bhagavad gitas and other literature. This guy who will tell the stories does good job at that, in the sense that his aim is to tell us the morals and the leasons we need to learn from it and to not take the story in literal sense. Those were good, those stories did help me have a strong moral compass growing up and instilled a good sense of religion.
When i hit puberty i was still religious, not overly but somewhat in the middle between the level of religion of my father and mother. My mother being slightly more religious and still following “andhavishwas” (read blind belief) which were stuff that people tell you to do or not do. Many of those stuffs do not make any sense, some example which i could think are
to not go out at sandhya (dusk) time when the ritual lamp is lit
to not have a bath at dusk time
to not shake your legs when sitting on chairs or beds.
to not eat anything with oil in food if there was a death in the family (not just close family but extended one too) for the next 18 days
to not get out of house unless for emergencies if there was a death in the family (same) for the next 7 days.
to not apply oil to hair while looking at mirror
And other countless many more stuff which differ from region to region. No one really followed most of this stuff but stuff like this is probably something most Hindu’s probably heard if they have atleast an elder in their family or extended family. Many of this stuff even though not strictly enforced is really annoying cause you get that stare or long advice like why it should be followed from your elder or your mother(in my case). Do understand that its not just these i listed but many many stuff which effects even day to day quality of life. Seeing my christian neighbour and friend not having such restriction on till how much time they were allowed to play outside and lousy me who had to drag my ass inside my home before dusk was always something which bothered me but it was not even a reson to forsake hinduism entirely. But i did try to find rational answers to why those were not permitted, why i should not do something because someone told someone and that someone said the same to their next generation and so on. I did find the reason for some of them eventually before i was 13 or something, for the examples listed if anyone is still reading and curious (or else skip to next para),
I believe the ritual lamp litting thing comes from early age practice of humans lighting fire to keep animals or other things out (Hindus believe lighting lamp will clear out negative energy)
once early humans have lit fire at dusk they stop going ut for resource and wind up with the day, they wont bath since most often ponds or water bodies will often be a little farther from their settlements and its a risk going out to bath at night. That might explain the restriction to not bath at night time.
for point 3, early hindus used to keep jars, baranis (a type of ritual jar) specifically underneath bed or below tables. Shaking your legs would probably hit those jars and it may have been something made up to protect those jars.
for point 4 and 5, i think it was safety practice. In early days a death in the family would mean they have had disease. And since early village hindus life was centered around temples, preventing people from family which recent death would prevent spread of disease. And avoiding oil food comes from this same belief as often oily food are avoided when one is sick. As for the oil on hair in front of mirror, i seriously have zero clue.
Reasoning with my mother over these stuffs was like reasoning with a brick lol. These stuffs never really did affect my stand on religion though, only just snags which made me question stuffs which elders say. When i was 16-17 is when i started doubting my religion. Hinduism sure is the oldest religion and many stuffs in hindusim are borrowed by other other religion like atma and jeeva and tree of life (notice atma and jeeva sounding similar to adam and eve) and the story of manu rishi who took the advice from a fish that the world is going to be flooded and who built a boat. These and many other stories or their equivalent being found in other religion made me think at that time that possibly other religions might have cultural exchanges with Hinduism at some point and may have based their religion of them. As i was a Hindu then I respected other religion,but this realisation made me a bit at unease because at that time it bothered me that not much people were talking about it, but the similarities were many. This made me again look for other similarities, i read about the mahabharatha epic again and the ramayana, this is when thesame rational side i had when i was debunking those “andhavishwas” kicked in.
How the hell could any of those stories be true, an epic on that scale would leave evidences that not even a million year could cover up. And the timelines, those are way off. There is no way we did have that much advancement in the early age and still be a monacrchy based rule . Someone really took their creative lberty and created a fantastic epic story to teach the importance of Truth and morals. And someone took that story and made it a religion refined over thousands of years and still refined even today.
As a lot of these stuffs made me sceptic i began to really see them as stories and fables just something to teach morals and values. I realised most of the limitation that were sett on my life were self bound.
Any last sense of religion i had was lost when i was 20 years old seeing the bullshits happening around the world, even on my locality. Politicians and many so called “peoples leaders” down in north India and other parts doing genocides and atrocities that i would do anything to dissociate myself from them on any similarity i have with them. People destroying mosques, cow vigilantism in north, mob lynching, caste bullshit. None of these are lessons from Hinduism but these people are hiding in its cover and associating how they live and what they do with them, inspiring and conditioning childrens to grow up believing it is what hinduism is. If there ever was a god, that god is dead.
I stopped believing in Hinduism as a religion with that and consider myself an atheists (i have a atheist friend who claim i am not a true atheists, but i dont want to dwell on proper term which best describes me). But i do still believe on some of the morals and lesson in truth it had given me and thats all i keep from Hinduism. Never prayed, lit a lamp, or went to a temple ever since then.
When my pastor told me the earth was 2000 years old but he still uses gasoline made from prehistoric plants didn’t help much to keep me there and that dinosaurs aren’t real, along with science being the main enemy.
Sect/cult stuff. Rules did not add up. Stuff contradicting each other. The people were all preachy hypocrites. They’d go out of their way to twist a law of physics to their narrative. For example, “spiritual vibrations” in sound and radiation. Religion was used to control me. Quackery, conspiricy theories and mlm schemes everywhere. Broke free over time.
I was raised catholic. When the class at school had their confirmation, I refused as religion felt more like a fairytale then something to really believe in. When I saw they got gifts, I was disappointed and wanted to confirm when my sister was doing her’s (to get gifts as well, wrong reason).
For that confimation I had to do bible study, during which I learned what’s in the bible. As I invested all that time, I went trough with it for the gifts, but I learned my 1st impression was right. To me it’s nothing more then a fairytale. That confirmation was my last volentary visit to a church to attend service. (Played tourist a few times, the buildings are still nice)
Till today, I still prefer to know, not to believe anything that is being told.
Survived eight years of Catholic school and read the Bible cover to cover. Between the flagrant hypocrisy and neglect in the school system and seeing the contradictions and bullshit in the book with my own eyes (and how nobody in the church even remotely tried to live up to the good parts), I just couldn't anymore.
Then I read about the Bible and its history, from the Council of Nicea to the confession letters from later translators. I saw that it's essentially a multilingual game of telephone weighted with politics, salesmanship, cultural eradication, and so forth, and it really became laughable to me that any thinking person could possibly ever take it seriously again.
It becomes easy to dismiss the rest when you realize they're pretty much all telling the same fairytales.
Our pastor did a whole six-week long study of Acts, talking about how we needed to give more so we could fund mission trips and whatnot. I got caught up in it all (he was quite the orator, I’ll give him that) and donated a decent chunk of the money I’d been saving up to get a new iPod.
My sister went on one of the mission trips and had to pay for literally everything out of her own pocket. Despite the plentiful donations for, allegedly, that express purpose.
Cherry on the cake was that they soon broke ground on a new youth group building (which we didn’t need), complete with a coffee house (with prices and menu comparable to Starbucks). All I could think of was Jesus getting pissed at the vendors and money changers in the temple and flipping tables over. “‘My house will be called a house of prayer’, but you are making it ‘a den of robbers’.”
I grew up with very devout parents who raised me in a particularly conservative Calvinist Christian denomination, and I bought it all for years for a few reasons. For one, everyone I trusted seemed so utterly convinced by all these things I had been raised to see as fact. Also, the incredibly biased sources I was given for any questions portrayed anyone of different faiths or beliefs as deluded at best or evil at worst, which didn't really make their positions appealing.
I prided myself on faith, because when I ran into something that didn't make sense I'd be like "Wow, it sucks that that might make some people stumble, but I'm going to do my best to just trust God on this one."
The first cracks started to form when I started to realize the sources I trusted might not be trustworthy. Despite all the weird religious special pleading, I'd otherwise been taught decent critical thinking, and I started to see actual rebuttals to the religious apologetics I'd been raised on, rather than the pathetic strawmen conservative Christian writers had constructed, it made me question the apologetics and the writers I'd thought were upfront, honest, and wise.
Still, I held onto the thread of faith. This stuff had been absolutely drilled into me, I had been raised not to let anything shake that, and I was starting to discover I really didn't like the idea of losing my faith when that was the glue of my family and every other meaningful relationship in my life.
Any time I made friends (mostly online, some through college) who weren't within that big Christian bubble I'd been raised in and reinforced, myself, though, it raised this weird uncomfortable thought in the back of my head: "If friends, or really anyone end up suffering for all eternity for not having this religion, how exactly am I supposed to deal with that knowledge for eternity to make heaven the bliss it's supposed to be?" If this eternal soul of mine is perfectly able to be, like, transcendentally happy forever while knowing it's all on the backs of billions of people suffering for eternity, that soul isn't me anymore. In a weird way, the idea of heaven being something that would fundamentally make me something unrecognizable made the concept make a whole lot less sense.... Sooo I tried not to think about it.
This went on for a few years, concerns and doubts growing quietly, and this one day, someone was trying to talk to me about ghosts. He asked if I believed in ghosts in the first place and I said "No." and he was downright surprised because, you know, all these people say they've seen ghosts! He says he's seen ghosts! And, yeah, I don't find that compelling.
I went home and thought about that, then thought about the purported evidence for ghosts, then thought about the defenses various religions made for their beliefs, considered why I didn't buy them... Started to realize a parallel here- and then I buried that line of thinking. I was not okay losing my community. I was less and less certain I believed, but I still wanted to play the part so it would keep my faith going.
COVID happened, as did the BLM protests of 2020, and it suddenly became extremely clear that my community kind of fucking sucked. That popped the lid on my thoughts and I started to look in earnest at what I believed, and why other people with the same general beliefs could think that treating people as other people was optional.
Ultimately, I ended up in an epistemological situation. A number of the "facts" of the Bible were patently untrue, with the same sorts of errors I'd seen as gotchas against other religions. The arguments I'd seen for belief were much more obviously poorly formulated when I compared them to near-identical arguments for other religions. I realized my epistemology had a big fucking problem with it, and that problem was the belief in faith as indicative of truth. Oh, hey, look at that, people can and have believed every possible position on faith. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?
So I let it go. I let the faith go. I let the bad argumentation go. I let myself let go of the morally absurd positions I'd been boxed into by a bunch of ancient writings. I by and large lost that community, but I had started reaching out to make friends outside of it for a bit now. I had something, and that made it easier.
My family is still in my life, though thankfully several hundred miles away. They still are pretty unhappy about the whole situation, even more upset than they are about me being trans, which I finally realized I was able to admit to myself after letting go of the religious dogma.
Anyway, it took me a long time to get here, and I can't help but be upset that 26 years of my life were colored by a view of the world that I find morally unconscionable now, but at least I got to ramble about it on lemmy to almost the character limit.
Was raised going to church each sunday, but approaching confirmation age I realised I couldn't mesh faith with my understanding of the world. That was it for me really, I'm quite open to the idea of god(s), ghosts, magic or other forms of the supernatural, but until there's actual proof, I can't believe in it.
Ex-Christian here, I was in a pretty easy going division of Christianity, main thing was that we didn't believe in hell and were "metaphysical" (hippie way of saying we didn't strictly adhere to the Bible). I would often look after the smaller kids in Sunday school, and one day we put on the veggie tales version of Noah's ark, and I actually watched it while watching the kids, and somewhat considered the idea that if there was a flood, inevitably quite a few children would have been caught up in it and died, which in my mind a kind god would not have even contemplated. The level of cognitive dissonance I experienced kind of made me think about listening to atheistic opinions to double check I wasn't completely off the mark with my beliefs. So I listened to Dawkins, Hitchens, and Carl Sagans arguments then actually sat down and read the Bible. Not gonna say I accepted it overnight, but that is what eventually led me to where I am today as an atheist.
I remember as a tween sitting there and praying and I just sorta realized wtf am I doing. I had always asked too many questions so I thought it weird an imaginary guy could hear everyone and everything at once. Then I was brought to a fmaily member's church where they told me my father was going to hell because he was a soldier, no ifs and or buts about it. So yeah if 10 year old me can realize it, I don't know what the hell is wrong with these fucking abrahamic religious zealots.
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