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 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.
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.
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 was already having issues with what the church taught about gay people. One of the priests at my college church likened sex before marriage to child sex trafficking, saying premarital sex directly lead to child sex trafficking. I walked out in the middle of the sermon.
I was still on the fence about if I was Catholic or not afterwards, it was all I knew growing up after all. I went to history class that next semester and learned the Bible was just piecemealed together by a bunch of old white men in the 16th 4th Century during the council of nicea. There is literally no way to tell who actually wrote the stories in the Bible, much less determine their validity because the stories were put together in a single book hundreds of years after they were written. On top of that, if a story didn’t fit what these guys decided the Catholic faith was supposed to be, they threw it out!
The Bible isn’t the word of God, it’s some dudes in the 16th 4th century’s head cannon.
That pretty much sealed the deal for me. If there is some divine force, it certainly wasn’t going to speak to me through this book or this faith.
Then to add insult to injury, in that same class I learned about the history about how the Christian faith came about, and how they basically just chose one of many Mesopotamian gods and decided he was the one true God and propagandized and crusaded their way into making people accept their beliefs. All of it was just decided and shaped by humans, and none of it was “divine” as I was taught. It was all a lie.
Bible was just piecemealed together by a bunch of old white men in the 16th? Century during the council of nicea.
About this…
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which became popular in 2003. According to Brown’s fictional (and historically dubious) narrative, the books that make up the Bible were officially selected and put together by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, under the authority of Constantine I who sought to define Christian doctrine and belief.
Although the Council certainly did meet at a time of crisis within the Church, it did not address the biblical canon, despite what Brown said. This has become a modern myth that has outlasted the book’s initial surge in popularity. In reality, the Council of Nicaea met to debate the nature of the Trinity (that Jesus is the son, and father, and the holy spirit at the same time), among other things.
It seems like influential and powerful individuals and organizations who voiced which texts should the bible include up until the 4th century, and those who disagreed were deemed heretics.
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.
This was a long time ago, but I had to go to the methodist version of confirmation. It was not any one thing that made me stop believing, but many little things. What I could not get over was the “virgin” birth of Jesus. They talked for weeks about this and the “miracle” got more and more ridiculous over the lesson. Joseph got played.
The funny part is how that word supposedly may translate better as "maiden" than "virgin", as in "young girl" rather than someone who has not yet had intercourse. I wonder how many people have been beheaded for asking about such things.
Jesus Himself hated such over-religiosity - "Want religion that is pure and blameless? Take care of widows and orphans!!" - but sadly it seems the natural human condition.:-( The extreme irony is how He went to LARGE efforts to just constantly and consistently give the religious fruitcakes of His day the middle finger ("thou shaltest say to every Karen, fuck ye off"), which ofc got Him killed just like everyone else who tried it previously. So like... was Jesus one of the early atheists then, if you think about it like that...? :-D /s
But I mean, in all seriousness, the gist of Jesus' message seems to me to be to ignore the fruitcakes and just do the right thing, regardless ("the worker deserves his wages..."). So like, wtf does His teenie sexed-up mommy have anything to do with anything?! But Karens gonna Karen, I guess, and get all worked up about whatever drama they can either find or invent.
I went to church as a young kid, but never really believed and by interacting with people from different denominations and religions it became clear that the church I went to claiming to be the right one out of thousands was pretty unlikely. Was able to talk my mom out of taking me around 12 years old, and spent a couple years as agnostic until deciding that science made a lot more sense and if we could prove there was a god, he would just be part of nature and therefore not really a god as taught in church.
So basically thinking critically about it undermined the teachings. I still kept the positive messaging, but also added in the positive messaging from other religions and honestly see them all as more cultural than mystical.
I still kept the positive messaging, but also added in the positive messaging from other religions and honestly see them all as more cultural than mystical.
I kind of relate to this, but I think in certain situations people may feel some spiritual forces akin to schizophrenia, and that religion might also have served for survival purposes since different cultures developed supernatural beliefs. Also, what positive messagings do you keep? Because I also find that Christianism and Buddhism for example have important ethical teachings that I try to follow.
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.
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.
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