Deconversion Stories

[Shadow]

I never believed that God existed. I thought he was just a story that adult people wanted their kids to believe, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny.

[Stark]

My family was never very outspoken about religion, which let me grow up without being blinkered, but what I remember of going to church as a child is VERY different to what I experienced at a celebration for my friends newborn (I don't know the technical term). I didn't think churches here in Australia were of the 'can you feel the POWER' variety.
After going to a church like that I think modern Christianity (which I see pretty much as oldscore conservatism and fundamentalism, but anyway) has rather marginalised itself.

[Lagmonster]

My favourite response to the "you will go to Hell" argument is that the kind of person who believes in a place of eternal torture is the kind of person who deserves it.

I have been told that I was going to hell many, many times by religious folk. Christian people, and this will not surprise many of you, can barely agree on the tenets of their own religion. As a result, people have invented various amusing reasons for me 'going to Hell':

- Killing animals (various variations on this one, ranging from the killing in general to killing in the name of science)
- Pushing down a pair of men in a picket protestor line who are trying to physically hold me from crossing it
- Refusing to take a pamphlet about abortion
- Refusing to acknowledge that the Pope is evil
- Taking my wife to see Harry Potter
- Shoving my way through a Christian 'conversion throng' (Crowds of five-to-six people who wander downtown Ottawa singing hymns at street corners and giving impromptu Bible lessons.)

[Darth Wong]

I never believed that God existed. I thought he was just a story that adult people wanted their kids to believe, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny.

It takes more faith to disbelieve in the Easter Bunny than to believe in him. Haven't you seen the eggs?

[jaeger115]

It takes more faith to disbelieve in the Easter Bunny than to believe in him. Haven't you seen the eggs?

Hmm... Never thought of that before....

[Manthor]

I know this is a hell of a thread necro but after reading this I felt I had to post my own.Found this while googling for "mother teresa" on the board,due to my reading up of existential crisis and what it meant. Hence the relation and thread necro.

Anyway I would consider myself more of a deist/agnostic (stronger on the deist side),after spending several years being brought up in the Roman Catholic faith and being an altar server.Chinese dad and Indian mum,with dad more of a freethinker/deist sort and my mum more of a Roman Catholic. I grew up in a pretty mixed background with exposure to Sikhism,Hinduism,Confucianism or rather Chinese ancestor worship via paternal grandparents and some Islamic influence as well as Buddhism.

I grew fed up with the implication that just because my dad wasn't a Catholic or some of my friends weren't Christian,that they would end up in some "eternal Hell" or that sort of nonsense.Or for that matter that my gay buddies would also end up there besides being some of the most harmless people around.The logical inconsistencies inherent in the Old Testament of what is essentially the Torah,the stupidity of religious conflict and the fact that all 3 Judeo-Christian religions were essentially worshipping the same Abrahamic God were crucial factors.

Oh,and how I'm actually worshiping a zombie.A guy who comes back from the dead?Zombie.So I was essentially worshiping "Zombie Jesus".Too many inconsistencies in the Christian background for my liking,and mostly I dislike the heirarchy of the church. The basic message of "Love your neighbour" and respect for fellow human beings is harmless enough in itself but all the shit thrown up by the church and having Jesus always protrayed as a white guy we must bow down to in a post-colonial period?

Forget that shit.

[Alyeska]

Manthor, Leave dead threads dead.

Post Rule 11: Let Dead Threads Lie. Do not post in old, inactive threads (eg- no activity for more than a month). If you want to resurrect an old subject, it is preferable to make a new thread with a URL reference to the old one. Note: we can be flexible on this rule in very low-activity forums where most of the threads on the first page are old.

Thread closed.