At 13 I realized one’s religion - and therefore whether they live in paradise or suffer for all eternity - depends almost entirely on the place of birth.
Why would God do it that way? There is only one correct religion and thousands of false ones? I would need to be very lucky to have been born into a culture that spoon fed me the one correct religion while discouraging all the others. What were the odds of me not going to hell?
From around 18 on it was religious people’s behavior and politics. Why do religion’s “morals” support irresponsible and hateful legislation?
Mid to late 20s I got into philosophy and realized “because God” is never the simplest answer.
Where did the universe come from? God made it of course.
But where did God come from? He was always there.
Then why couldn’t the universe just be the thing that was always there? Or at least the conditions that allowed for the universe to come into existence?
Adding God into the mix only complicates the answer and makes it less likely to be true compared to whatever our current best, simplest hypothesis is.
I was up for confirmation, when allegedly the Holy Spirit enters you and you start a more adult phase relationship with God. Post-ceremony, the prep class teacher asked all of us newly confirmed kids if we had felt the holy Spirit enter us. Every single kid but me said yes. It was obvious to me that they were being influenced by each other and the encouragement of the teacher and the specialness of the ceremony. Realizing I didn’t want to be carried away by the wave of group fuzzies was the start of my drifting from the church.
And then the firm end to it all was when I left home and got away from the network of religious friends and family I grew up around and really saw how the church treats gay people and women and children.
When I was doing my sunday school classes getting ready for confirmation, I remember thinking, what if I don’t want to be confirmed? What if I get up there and just say no? I didn’t do that cause my parents obviously pressured me into religion in the first place, but that’s definitely the first time I realized it just wasn’t for me. Took me until college to convince my family I wasnt going to church with them anymore.
Im not a religious bashing person, but you just have to be blind to so many contradictions and horrible events to stay sane and believe it’s all for a better reason and that there is a higher power orchestrating it all. Props to those people cause I just can’t do it.
I grew up in the Christian church. I even went to Bible college and graduated.
There’s plenty of internal inconsistencies in the Bible that people point to. Honestly, while I was always intrigued by those, I didn’t (and still don’t) think those are deal breakers. What did it for me was twofold.
First, the people and their inconsistencies in belief/behavior. There’s plenty of beliefs, practices, and policies that you can argue, but being kind and compassionate are pretty clear callings without room for debate. The most hateful, spiteful, discriminatory people I know can all be found in a church on Sunday, or at least claiming to be Christian. Not to say that all Christians are like this - some of the kindest people I know are Christians. But as a group, they are appalling.
Second is results. I’ve prayed for plenty of stupid stuff I’m sure. If a god is real, I don’t hold it against them for ignoring my dumb asks. But when I look at the serious stuff - prayers for lost people to come home, for severe illness to be healed, for provision for the impoverished, I can’t see any difference at a macro level between praying and not praying.
I questioned what good religion was if it didn’t seem to improve people or the world, and came to the conclusion that it was a wash, so I quietly walked away nearly a decade ago.
It honestly kinda sucks. It was a huge portion of my life. Most of my friends are people I met through church and college. My family is still heavily religious. I met my spouse through church, and they are not in the same position as me. Barring 2 friends, I have never told anyone I know that I’ve even questioned. Even as I’ve moved through jobs, there’s always been someone who already knew me, so the expectations that come with a religious history and degree have always preceded me. I’m effectively in the closet. Anyone who says leaving is the easy route is ignorant and wrong. It’s hard.
Leaving church life behind is very hard indeed. For me most of my social circles were built around church. Home group, Sunday services, university CU. It took a long time to get into new ways of meeting people socially and I’m still certainly not as close to as many people as in my church days.
I have no real advice to pass on here, just saying you’re certainly not alone in finding it tough to leave that side of life behind.
Youth group wanted to split out group into boys and girls, also by age, and start charging. I also actually read the damn book (I had 2 bibles ) found it dismal and hypocritical. That was the final nail in the coffin.
I was raised Methodist, but when I was maybe 7 or 8 I realized that I was only Methodist because I was raised Methodist and that if my parents were a different religion, I would have believed that instead.
It took me until my late teens to realize I was an athiest, but that was definitely the start.
Getting baptized. Before then, I felt no spiritual connection or “heard the voice of god” or anything. I understood that once I was baptized, I’d be one of god’s children and I assumed the holy stuff would kick in after that point. Funny thing though, nothing changed. No matter how hard I prayed or tried to believe, nothing was different.
I spent several years trying to find literally anything to show that any of it was real. But everything lead to the same dumbfounding dead end: you just have to have faith.
As I learned more about Christianity from a scholarly perspective, it became increasingly clear that it’s not real. The oldest book in the new testament wasn’t written until at least a hundred years after the events took place, meaning it was all disparate verbal stories for hundreds of years. The Council of Nicea later just decided to remove parts and add some new parts to the bible, justifying it by the council itself being divinely inspired to have arrived at the correct version of the bible.
It’s clear now that the rich and powerful have historically used religion as a tool to control and manipulate the masses. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s just an obvious scam that has no basis in reality. So for that reason, I’m out.
It was a journey. There were several small things that kept adding up until I couldn’t handle surrounding myself with hypocrites.
Why do Christians get so sad when people die? They act like they’ll never see that person again when their religion says it’ll only be a few years before they’re reunited. Everyone says they believe that, but no one acts like it.
When was the last time the church has been on the forefront of social change, and what was it for? Wasn’t slavery - that’s how Southern Baptists split from Baptists. Wasn’t women getting the right to vote or get divorced… Wasn’t when people were asking for workers rights… Same-sex marriage… You name it. The people claiming to have a direct line to the most potent love in the universe… Kind of suck at spreading the love around.
Mega-churches.
All the pedo scandals and coverups. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Truly horrifying living conditions around the world. There is an amoeba found all over the globe who can eat its way into your eyeball, and then into your brain. Children experience this, and in some places, 30-40% of a population went blind because of it. There is no NEED for this to exist for an all-powerful god, but here they are. If god made nature, they made these amoeba, and I don’t want to associate with someone who created every deadly pathogen to ever exist.
If there is a god, they’re a fucked-up sociopath, not the embodiment of love that I keep being told they are.
Mine was a very similar path to yours. Way too many little observations that alone could have been shrugged off as a rounding error but taken together it was clear that shit wasn’t adding up.
Then I started listening to biblical scholars and now there’s nothing that could convince me otherwise. It’s a collection of human literature. The good and the bad that had come from it is only a reflection of our humanity.
I’ve gone from Sunday attending to more lax and agnostic. Does that count? If so, is because of how inconsistent the actual practical actions of churches I’ve been to. Started protestant, but enough were hypocrites (remind me of the pharisees) so I stopped going. Became catholic and loved it, but the way the church has continually terribly handled the sex abuse pedo cases has disgusted me. Priests should be held to a higher standard, not lower.
Additionally, I don’t wanna be associated with the people who are Christian on TV. All the right wing Republicans in the US govt are terrible people. Whatever they say they are, I don’t wanna be a part of that. It’s hard to reconcile “love your neighbor” and then legislate their live away or give crazy people unfettered access to guns.
On a more practical level, I like a lot of the charity work and compassion taught by Jesus. I’m OK with the spiritual aspects. I cannot get behind the church’s message (mostly protestant) about personal relationship with God. If God intervenes, then that means it’s his responsibility when he doesn’t intervene and a lot of terrible things are his fault. If he doesn’t intervene, then a lot of what the church says is wrong. It doesn’t add up.
Your response caught my attention because I had a similar path, though only in Catholic Church, practicing religion in my 20’s, but moving away after mid 30’s.
At a practical level Jesus was right, showing compassion, living modestly…. but the interpretations of the churches - not only catholic - all the pomp and circumstance around mass, preaching, shrouding secrecy, asking the poor for money, etc. made me question churches in general.
After studying some philosophy, and learning meditation practices, I believe churches play an important role in society, including that prayer enables the masses to experience meditative states that have important health benefits. Religious teachings give something in which people can believe in, instead of facing uncertainties of life alone.
Also in many cases throughout history, churches anchored small communities together.
I believe people should experience church to decide on their own, but not being guilted to staying. Each person should be able to discern, choose their path, but there are always the crazy ones out there guilting and trying to impose their beliefs on to others. That is not right.
One big problem with your last paragraph: Baptism and many other rite to join religions happen at a very young age. These children know no world without the belief almost everyone around them practices. It’s getting their norm how live is. Leaving gets hard, it means leaving your life behind.
It was a slow process, but honestly the liturgy was boring and like out of touch. The narratives felt like they can’t really hold up to a contemporary audience.
That, on top of being very uninterested in being made feel guilty for random things. Sorry but I’m gonna continue masturbating and you insisting on guilt is not gonna make it stop, so what are we doing?
Finally, all the general nonsense and cognitive dissonance sealed the deal.
Fundies. Seeing how ridiculus and backward their beliefs were made me wonder about my own beliefs and one by one they failed to withstand the scrutiny I put them through.
I have never been religious (it was never a subject that came up in my family). What I found strange was when I started studying and moved to a larger city, alot of former christians I got to know told med how they stopped believing.
These were “extreme christians” if you compare them to other christians where I live (Norway, we’re not a religious society at all). When they went out into the world, they found out that they’d been lied to. They’d been told everyone else wanted what they had, and they’d be converting heathens left to right.
One girl I got to know, told me she noticed people physically rejected her and felt sorry for her when she told them about her religion and that they also could partake. The people also asked her very troubling questions she could’t answer, and they seemed to know the religious texts better than her. After that she started to question what she’d been told since childhood
A mix of a generational gap and me coming out. I still like the parts about treating people and animals with respect, but the whole “restoring mana through a church building” parts and going to hell for loving someone just seems strange.
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.
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