I grew up being put in Sunday school for daycare and all the stories they told us sounded completely over the top ridiculous.
The story of Job made my fuckin blood boil as an 8 year old because I could immediately make the connection that god just took everything from this man to win a bet.
God, the all loving all knowing all powerful god. Tortured a man to prove a point.
And not just to prove a point in general but to prove a point to his literal arch nemesis.
Basically Satan tricked god into torturing this man and that was all the info I needed to know god is bullshit.
When the majority of people I grew up respecting decided to use their religion as an excuse to participate in or support a terrorist attack, a lot of things started unraveling pretty quickly. Turns out none of them actually cared about what Jesus wanted, but rather what that news station said.
With so many of my old friends and church leaders telling me hate was the answer, the cognitive dissonance didn’t have any ground to stand on anymore.
Sorry. The Council of Nicea didn’t decide what the Bible is. It was a Bishop who went to the conference. Right after the conference he received a letter asking him which books which were good to use and which weren’t. He made a list and sent it out. The letter got popular and they called a new conference right away, then voted on his list. The Council of Nicea dealt with an issue of the Trinity, declared that there was one church of the Christian people and it was Catholic, and a procedural issue about rules governing Bishops.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was raised in a strict Christian sect and I took my religion very seriously and really wanted to believe for most of my life, but my brain just wasn’t really built for faith and I was a huge lover of science and so I wrestled for years trying hush the voice of reasonable doubt in my head… I prayed and prayed for more faith and never got anything in return. I tried to strengthen my faith by reading through the entire bible, which I did, twice, and that only made it worse because the gaps in reason became so much more apparent. Then during Covid lockdown a good friend of mine left the religion after several years and that gave me the strength and courage to finally say “I don’t believe, I can’t believe, and I can’t do this anymore.” It probably wouldn’t have taken me so long if I hadn’t been raised in a religion that believes in shunning and the fear of losing my family and most of my friends, but by that time a few of my friends had left and I felt I had a bit of a support net outside the religion and could walk out without the fear of losing everything.
It was a long process, I suppose, not one event. When younger I was always fascinated by science, and as I grew older, I suppose I started seeing less and less sense in god fitting into the equation.
I think the turning point of the whole thing was when I was in a religious camp for my confirmation and the last day, we had this… party? It was called Slávy in my language, and it was basically a concert with religious songs, which was so intense that people were fainting, “feeling god,” and whatever.
When my classmate fainted, and everyone was saying, “Oh it’s okay, she’s just feeling god,” and shit like that, that fucked me up. Not only because she fainted, but because I saw right through the bullshit. The loud music, the aroma, and the darkness of the place were overwhelming, but not because of any religious or supernatural reason.
That night, I understood truly and fully that religion is nothing but smoke and mirrors, and I’ve been becoming more secular and, lately, even more anti-religious (because of current events) by the day
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.
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
I was raised Mormon. Mormonism is somewhat unique in that it claims to have a modern prophet and leadership that are directly led by god, and it strongly encourages members to pray to god and ask god for confirmation that this is true. Mormons are also taught that god would not allow their prophet to lead them astray, and that your local leaders are also inspired by god in what they do in their official capacity.
I was a missionary when shit started to break. I had a nervous breakdown; I am on the autism spectrum (although that diagnosis wasn’t available at that time; it was almost 30 years ago, back in DSM-III), and being a missionary was a lot too much for me for many, many reasons. I became suicidal. My leaders–again, people who were supposed to be called by god and led through inspiration from god–insisted that I must be acting in some sinful way, and that it was sin that had led to me being suicidal. They encouraged me to read my scriptures and pray more–as if I wasn’t already doing that a lot as a missionary–and to repent of my sins (whatever they were, because I sure as fuck didn’t know). If I was not sinning in some way, then Satan never could have taken hold in my heart, and Satan was obviously what was causing me to be suicidal. Obviously these commandments did not help, because I wasn’t doing anything ‘wrong’ in the first place.
But that leads to a problem: I believed that these people were called by god, and acting under god’s instructions, because I had received a spiritual witness. However, it was clear that they were wrong; I was not acting in a sinful manner (certainly less so than other missionaries!), and I had nothing to repent of. So these things are clearly contradictory: if I have received a spiritual confirmation from god that these men are led by him, then what they are saying must be from god and therefore true. But I know my own actions, and I know that I haven’t done anything that is sinful under any remotely normal definition of sin. Therefore, the feelings that I believed were spiritual confirmation must not have been spiritual confirmation at all.
Once you realize that feelings can not be a reliable way of knowing if something is actually true or not (or True, for that matter), then all of it falls apart. You realize that ‘answers’ to prayers are just feelings, not communication from the divine. The bible is suddenly a book of myths. Miracles dissolve like fog in the sun. When you look at religion–not just Mormonism, but all religion, and you compare it against things that can be verified empirically, none of the claims stand up.
Even though the foundations of my faith cracked while I was a missionary, I was unable to accept the meaning for several years, because Mormonism is a cult, and it’s very hard to escape even when you know it’s garbage.
Well hello fellow exmo. I gave it up in my late teens. Found myself playing "devil's advocate" too much in discussions with my friends. Tried to pray about it all Joseph Smith style, but just got absolutely nothing. Realized that I had never enjoyed Church, never felt at peace there, and just generally came to the conclusion that the essential problem of free will and comparative religion and the extremely specific truth claims that Mormonism requires weren't holding up. I was also completely eeshed out by the thought of a patriarchal blessing, and I felt no calling whatsoever to go on a mission. I wasn't as traumatized as some, growing up in the Mormon hinterlands of the American south (NE Florida) meant the LDS were a little less high and mighty and I had a circle outside of the church, but the pressure to conform and stay is very real.
I only resigned formally when my mom sicced the missionaries on my never-Mo wife and me after I moved to Texas.
Ultimately, even as religions go, its theology is very silly and its most ardent adherents are real jerks.
True, but there is an almost childlike literalism to the small amount that is unique about Mormon theology, plus it all arose in the era of the printing press and governmental archives, so there are fewer excuses. It's also culturally very top down and high pressure, as you are keenly aware. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the mainline LDS church a cult, but it's definitely closer than, say, the Episcopalians.
When I look at Dr. Steven Hassan’s BITE model for high-demand religions, the Mormon church ticks most of the boxes to some degree. Take behavior control: “4.Control types of clothing and hairstyles”. Okay, you don’t have to wear only white, and a specific model of white sneakers. But you are expected to wear opaque clothing that covers temple garments completely, and wear clothing that is free of an ‘offensive’ imagery or text. Beards and long hair are strongly socially discouraged, and will get you kicked out of BYU, as will visible tattoos and piercings. When you skip to “4. Regulate diet – food and drink, hunger and/or fasting”, well there’s the word of wisdom, and fast Sundays. And it just kinds goes on and on. They don’t do some of the things (murder, rape, etc.), but they do a lot of them to some degree.
At a minimum, it’s an unhealthy degree of authoritarian control.
Went to Jesus camp and got assaulted by a counselor pretty badly, was harassed into keeping silent about it. Would rather not discuss it too much, I did have to go to the hospital. My faith died at that point and I was just going through the motions for years. I was planning on a theology degree of some sort but decided my heart wasn’t in it. Went for engineering instead. Hit a low point right before graduation and was really hoping to feel literally anything, felt nothing.
2018 sat down one night and decided that I was done pretending I was just lapsed, that I was being a coward. I was going to look at the evidence and see where it went. Been an atheist ever since.
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’.”
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