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.
The hypocrisy of the religious. Hands down the biggest reason.
The exclusivity, in the negative sense.
The constant premise that there is something wrong with you if you don’t conform or otherwise fit the mold, or bend a knee to those thought of as superiors. Dissent is not allowed.
Pray problems away instead of actually doing something about them. Like school shootings.
The toss in all the rest of the BS like fighting other religions, wars in god’s name, god gave me (the win, the victory, saved my life but it wasn’t the surgeons, spared my house in the tornado but not the neighbor’s, my Mercedes, whatever) but not you because you’re gay or support LGBTQ, liberal, atheist, etc.
There really is so much to despise about people who using religion as a shield for their shitty beliefs and actions.
It was slow, but I remember a major crack occurring watching Stephen Fry being interviewed when he paraphrased David Hume, paraphrasing Epicurus.
If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful. If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good
Things start to fall apart from there. All the other Bible stuff can be explained away as being recorded by imperfect beings, but the core notion of a good God worthy of worship ends with the trilemma.
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.
It was kind of a slow burn. Every time I heard a new argument against the existence of God, I’d repeat to myself, “Just because I can’t think of the answer doesn’t mean there isn’t one.” You can only say that so many times before it starts to feel like you’re being stubborn.
Probably the most compelling argument was, to me, the contradictory nature of an all-knowing God existing in the same reality as free will.
I decided I was an atheist (logically) a long time before I started to feel like an atheist (emotionally). What pushed me over the line there was when it was pointed out to me the sheer arrogance of looking out at the massive, incomprehensible scale of the universe and saying, “the creator of that really cares about me in particular.”
So now I say I’m an atheist, somewhere between gnostic and agnostic. I can’t rule out the existence of something that could be called God by someone’s definition, but I’m confident the abrahamic god, the one I grew up with, can’t exist.
There were just too many contradictions and the more I learned about science, especially physics, astronomy, and psychology, and the way the world works, I discovered that there is always a rational explanation for things, even if sometimes the knowledge necessary to comprehend something is not something I possess personally at the moment. People who would preach in my church would confidently claim things I knew to be fallacies, misleading, or straight up incorrect, not out of malice but their own ignorance as well, and I stopped trusting the words of religious leaders as I discovered they were as human as myself- their faith didn’t protect them from error or make them better people, and eventually I just couldn’t fall back on faith or ideology to be the bedrock of my moral or philosophical compass because it just wasn’t trustworthy.
I was in 5th grade, and I had filled a notebook with questions about the bible and how passages in it contradicted modern science, as well as a bunch of passages from the bible that directly contradicted eachother. My parents took me to a bunch of different christian “scholars” and pastors and none could answer a single question in my notebook, other than “have faith.” It was then that I realized there was probably no god and the bible was a bunch of bullshit. And maybe there is a god, I am not against the idea, but I have still not to this day ever seen or heard empirical evidence that would lead me to believe there is one. Telling your kids they will burn in hell for eternity if they don’t believe in a mystical being is pretty fucked up. I had serious nightmares growing up about what would happen to me in hell. Talk about brainwashing.
My parents didn’t think I was religious enough so I was forced to go to Catholic school. Thus became even more atheist. Also, religious people are the most hateful and dishonest people on the planet based on my experience.
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