@FORMER Christians: which questions shook your faith?

[Koolaidkirby]

Split from here. This thread is for deconversion stories; that thread is for responses by those who are currently Christians.

Well I remember what converted me slowly from Christianity (I was born and a raised catholic school kid), and the major thing was being introduced and taught about other religions in a way other than "we're right and they're wrong", I remember questioning myself more and more as I learned about hinduism/islam/judiaism/ect. in both my ancient history and philosophy classes and noticed the similarities and trends that all these religions had (basically I started to look at them as institutions as opposed to interpretations of god). The big defining moment I'd have to say was when we were studying the roman empire in ancient history and my teacher was talking about cults that popped up worshiping various and said something along the lines of "during this period there were a lot of small cults popping up that tried to worship various figures as deities, for example there were cults based around worshiping Julius Caesar and *some other names*, actually, this is how Christianity started, it started as a cult worshiping Jesus and only came into prominence when Constantine converted on his death bed to hedge his bets". Now I'm not sure if that's true or not (I may even be misremembering it) but I remember very clearly that it was when I saw Jesus compared to other people (who were quite obviously not deities) in a objective manor I started to really question the legitimacy of Jesus' son of god thing (especially since I knew that he was only decided to be the son of god many many years after he died). And as this happened I started to slide away from Catholicism to Orthodoxy (more emphasis on god than Jesus), then more of a Jewish set of beliefs (I decided there wasn't enough evidence for me believe Jesus was a messiah/son of god), then slipped towards agnosticism (started to question the legitimacy of the bible versus other religious texts, seeing as I was studying all those and realized the only reason I still believed in the bible was because I was brought up with it) then eventually atheism.

Going from my experience, attacking the legitimacy of Jesus seems like a good starting point, comparing the start of Christianity to other cults, and pointing out it was really the declaration of Christianity as the religion of Rome that let it spread so much.

[Rye]

My starting point was (aside from general progressive childish irreverence) some kid briefly intimidating me with a threat of going to Hell. When I realised that that kid had no way of knowing what was after death and was just using it to scare me to get what he wanted, I realised there was no reason that didn't hold true for all priests throughout the ages.

[Eleas]

I realized it when listening to priests as a child and being told not to question them because it would be rude. That, coupled with the annoyingly ham-fisted and self-serving way one priest in particular went about it, told me clearly that the only reason I was kept from criticizing Christian doctrine was that it was particularly vulnerable to criticism. I should add that at that particular time, I was trying to come to terms with undiagnosed ADD. I worked hard at understanding why I seemed to have a large sign on my back, so I had reason to notice manipulation even if I was crap at performing it myself.

Also, of course, that atmosphere of low-level reinforcement we see in some countries simply wasn't present. Here in Sweden, while you are discouraged from mocking a priest to his face, it's not frowned upon to snicker loudly after he's left. I imagine that helped a lot in terms of being able to resist cumulative indoctrination as a child.

[Bounty]

My religion teacher.

He was a philosopher who went into teaching, and very mucuh a hippy-freethinker sort of character (you know - beard, suspenders, sandals, vintage bike with sidecar). He spent his classes mostly on the plight of the poor and the evils of globalisation, but when he did touch upon religion is was mostly that peculiar school of Christian thought that says faith isn't faith unless it is reached through introspection, and when I took that line of reasoning and applied it to my own faith I realised it just wasn't there. I was Catholic, but only because I was raised Catholic and did the rituals, not because I believe in anything the Church taught. I don't mean biblical literalism, because liberal Catholicism ditched that nugget decades ago, but the very basic belief that there is a benevolent god.

I then went through a phase where I thought there may be 'a' supernatural power and all religion is an incomplete attempt to understand that power, but that didn't feel right either. In the end I accepted that I did not believe in the existence of a god; since this belief, which I mistook for "faith", was all the evidence I had for the existence of a god, I had evidence for the existence of a god, and no reason to accept this existence as true.

Later on I started reading up on the philosophical and sociological side of the debate and I think I can now safely say I don't believe in a god any more. I am willing to review that position if the proper evidence is presented, but I will stick to it barring that evidence popping up.

[ArmorPierce]

Father is an antheist, my mother is antitheistic. I was raised without religious influence not to say that I didn't believe in magic and whatnot. Those faded as the belief in santa clause fainted.

[Aaron]

My parents are at best atheists and at worst apathetic towards religion so like ArmorPierce, I was raised without any real religious influence. I had an on/off again interest in religion (mostly if it involved a big-breasted chick) but the nail in the coffin came when a buddy was killed and people started giving me the "it's God's plan" BS. I figured at that point if a loving god allowed a man with three children and a loving wife to die in a pointless training accident that I wanted nothing to do with it. That's gradually changed into atheism over the years as I've paid more attention to the goings on around the world.

[Solauren]

It was a natural chain of progression from realising that Santa and the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny were not real, followed by 'you know, if God really was real....'

[Kanastrous]

Despite the best effort of my parents, I can't recall a time in my life when I ever *had* any faith.

I never deconverted; it just never took to begin with.

[Mayabird]

Yeah, as some others said, I wasn't raised religious in the first place. Dad was agnostic and Mom was a nonpracticing Shinto-Buddhist (which isn't all that active a religion in the first place; as she put it, "For happy times you have Buddhist ceremonies and for sad times you have Shinto ceremonies, and once a year you go to a temple to burn incense and give some money to the monks so they don't starve.") There wasn't faith to shake.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Eternity in heaven was described to me, at around the age of 7, as being an "eternity of praising God". That terrified me to the bone--I ended up rapidly absolutely convinced that an eternity praising God was going to be just as bad as an eternity in Hell, because it would be an eternity of Church services. Or even worse, really. I spent many hours imagining, and sometimes actively attempting to negotiate with God, for easily the next five years, in hopes of perhaps having an imaginary universe of my own, until I found out that's what Mormons got (I came up with it quite independently) and then I figured I was definitely going to Hell no matter what for wanting something that Mormons want. It lasted as long as my parents forced me to go to church, about through Age 14, so during that time I was a dysfunctional neurotic little kid over the idea that no matter what I did I was bound for either the eternal torture of Hell or the eternal torture of praising God, and I couldn't tell anyone this because I was even more terrified that my parents would hate me for it.

Finally at the age of fourteen some friends of the family convinced me that white separatism was a better ideology than Christianity, and I ceased being Christian. That lasted about two years until I'd thought my way through that and realized how I'd gone from one idiotic belief to another. The determination to avoid doing that again and again has stayed with me since, though the application has been imperfect, but once I associated Christianity and white separatism as a teenager I definitely never looked back on the faith again to reconsider it--it's dead to me for good. Christianity has sometimes still terrified me and there's been that echoed thought in your head that you're going to Hell, but that's more or less it.

[Darth Wong]

Changed the thread title to refer specifically to former Christians, not atheists. People who were raised atheists don't have deconversion stories, and you can't assume that all atheists are former Christians.

[CaptJodan]

I fell for the Christianity product hook, line and sinker when I was a kid, despite having some serious reservations about things. Really, I should have listened to the voice that didn't want to read the Bible because I found all the death and pain that god was causing to be rather disturbing. Retrospectively now, I can see where my doubt, or at least distrust, started when I was real young. Unfortunately, I had some effective teachers that used fear tactics to prevent me from examining it further, and I locked up my concerns and tried not to question.

In those years, questions like "Why is god killing so many people, and why is he killing people that didn't do anything wrong?", "why did he kill babies that didn't do anything wrong", "how could there be no one else in that city that was good?", "why can't god just forgive us?", "what about all those people who aren't Christian, are they bad too?" Understand that this was in the context of a single-digit age-group, so the questions weren't terribly complex. And while these questions weren't reexamined until I came to this heretical board, they certainly helped to serve as chinks in the armor where a rational argument could get through.

[Drooling Iguana]

For me, it was the simple fact that the only thing we had indicating that God was real was an old book whose contents looked more like fantasy than reality. Plus, going to Catholic school I always had a Bible in my desk and sometimes when I was bored I'd take it out, flip to a random page and read a bit, almost invariably finding something nasty. This made me a fair bit less inclined to try to rationalise the inherent contradictions of my religion.

Still, after realising that I didn't believe in the Christian God I still thought it was important to have some kind of religion so I started doing some Internet research on various faiths to see if I could find one that I could believe in. I couldn't, of course, and after reading Douglas Adams's essays on the subject in A Salmon of Doubt and Mike's site I realised that being an atheist is nothing to be ashamed of.

[salm]

In kindergarden the kindergarten teacher who was a nun, told us that the devil would get people who do bad stuff. I got home very scared and my parents told me that they have never seen the devil, so they didn´t really believe that he existed.
A couple of days later a girl the same age came up and said something about god and i concluded that god probably didn´t exist because i had never seen him. The girl went home crying and i had turned atheist.

[wautd]

The way I remember (it's been a while):

I think I'm a skeptic by nature because I remember thinking the ark story was silly when I was still a kid (too small - damn Richard Attenborough and his docu's with thousands of species). It boggles my mind there are so many adults believe this literally happend. To me that's equivalent to believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

Early teenage years, history classes showed me the evils of religion (religious wars, crusades, the Inquisition, church keeping the masses dumb so the king could keep them poor, etc...) and put me off organized religion alltogether. Since then I've been an agnostic for perhaps a couple of years but seeing more and more religion as a treath to modern civilization (thank you fundamentalists) it polarized me to the atheist side.

edit: oh yeah, somewhere doing my agnost year, why the hell was Mary still a virgin? I still remember that question being on my mind

[Narkis]

I was practically raised by my very religious grandmother, and was quite heavily indoctrinated in Orthodox Christianity. I was a good little Christian until the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. It got some heavy coverage here, including a major fundraiser, and I wondered just how a loving god would allow 300,000 people to die and millions more to suffer from something that he could have easily prevented with but a thought. The traditional answer, that God works in mysterious ways, was not very satisfactory, and this started me down the path of enlightenment. I studied more the Testaments, stuff I had only a passing familiarity with until then, and what I learned conflicted heavily with what I'd been taught. I thought a lot about this, prayed for guidance, asked my school's theologist, until about a year later I was finally comfortable with the fact I didn't believe in the Christian God anymore.

While researching just how I should call what I now believe about the divine, I found something in wikipedia (Yeah, I know...) that I completely agree with:

* Apathetic agnosticism (also called Pragmatic agnosticism)
—the view that there is no proof of either the existence or nonexistence of any deity, but since any deity that may exist appears unconcerned for the universe or the welfare of its inhabitants, the question is largely academic anyway.

Just like wautd, the fundie's antics have pushed me towards the atheist side, but I can't see how denying the existance of some kind of supreme being is any more rational than accepting it in face of lack of evidence for either.

[Darth Wong]

Just like wautd, the fundie's antics have pushed me towards the atheist side, but I can't see how denying the existance of some kind of supreme being is any more rational than accepting it in face of lack of evidence for either.

See Occam's Razor. It's the same reason you deny the existence of Yoda, Apollo, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You're just failing to apply it consistently. You dismiss certain unscientific ideas because they are "silly", but you don't acknowledge that the idea of God would be "silly" too, if you hadn't been conditioned to think otherwise.

[Kitsune]

It took me a long time for me to go from being Christian to being religious......
I was a confirmed Lutheran but cannot help but think that the only real reason I went to church was because my mother was dying of cancer and saw god in the end.

How Christian I ever was is kind of a debate. I always had some doubt which seems to vary by degrees. When I went to church, it was a "manageable" level though. Some moral values of Christianity, I rejected always, while others came in stages.

I took a long stroll where I considered myself to be a Wiccan as well with the thought that maybe each religion has a piece of the truth. God and Goddess was a way that humans explain a supernatural presence, perhaps the Universe itself is sentient. The problem happened that when I began examining magic and other supernatural ideas that realized most can be explained by just random events and the others likely can be explained by people lying.

I think it actually was reading Flim Flam that gave me the courage to actually finally admit to myself that "There is probably no God"

Conversations with many Christians, Wiccans seem to not be as bad, where even the mildest statement that can be looked at as attacking their religion. Of course I now listen to Dawkins and I find his statements much more mild than I used to interpret them as being.

[General Zod]

I don't think I was ever all that religious or faithful to begin with. My family tried to get me to go that way, but all the stupidity in the Bible combined with people pressuring me to believe that certain things were evil even though I couldn't see any reason for it eventually got me away from religion altogether. I suppose it helps that I've always been critical about things like consistency, and the Bible just wasn't. Having access to all kinds of resources on the internet in the late 90s/early 00s finally pushed me over to deciding all religion was a crock of shit.

[Narkis]

Just like wautd, the fundie's antics have pushed me towards the atheist side, but I can't see how denying the existance of some kind of supreme being is any more rational than accepting it in face of lack of evidence for either.

See Occam's Razor. It's the same reason you deny the existence of Yoda, Apollo, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You're just failing to apply it consistently. You dismiss certain unscientific ideas because they are "silly", but you don't acknowledge that the idea of God would be "silly" too, if you hadn't been conditioned to think otherwise.

Perhaps. But Occam's Razor on its own has failed to break the conditioning, and I'm looking for some other arguement that can do the trick.

[Covenant]

For me it was a combination of factors, and it took a very long time before I finally admitted to myself that I didn't have to believe if I didn't anyway.

I was raised with a mostly pleasent protestant religion but not with a literal Church until I was at least 8 or so and they wanted me to get confirmed sooner rather than late. My father is a strongly believing methodist in the "loving god, non-literal Bible" school of thought, and my mother is a Catholic who left the Church because of their condemnation of the gays, and other liberal politics reasons. So I was taught that belief was mostly personal and introspective, warm and loving, and that God didn't literally make bad things happen, and so forth. Before then my first brush with organized religion that I can think of was a friend's invitation to a Bible camp for the summer. I felt it might be fun, I recall doing other ones which were interesting and you made candles and I fomented dissent against the Romans and other historical things, but this one was a terrifying Evangelical camp full of brimstone and wrath and damnation. To a kid who had been told of a loving diety before then, this was a shock.

I didn't rebel against that, I just had a short time as a mostly horrified child trying to avoid hellfire, before I realized that didn't jive with what else I had been taught. However, the Bible (my Catholic grandmother had given me one with annotations, a gift which I still have much affection for) seemed to fly in the face of all these accounts (especially the warm and loving ones) and plus it was a document filled with absurdities. Taken literally, it was clearly the product of a deranged mind, not divinely inspired. Taken nonliterally and it was full of horrifying stories and no better than any of the Roman and Greek mythology I enjoyed reading, and a lot more brutal. I was in love with history and I also loved mythology and archaeology, and it's really easy to see how lots and lots of other civilizations had very elaborate worship and believed quite sincerely in their gods, but that didn't make any of them real either. Worse yet, the history of Christianity was well documented within the European wars of Religion, the split of the Anglicans from the Catholics, and the Protestants from them, and that was an era of history I much enjoyed. The Crusades were a particular issue to me because they fit smack dab in the area of a religiously motivated war for non-religious purposes. Plus, the Crusaders lost.

The combination of the messy disagreement of Christian doctrine within itself, the Bible as an incomplete document, and the evidence of an amazing, uplifting human story that did not need the actual literacy of gods or mythologies despite their popularity... those things came together to make me see the history of world religions as cultural artifact, and Christian organized religion as mired in corruption, convenient reinterpertation, and war for power and the control of assets. While I still wanted to believe in a diety of sorts, I could plainly see by the historical record how badly doctrine was treated when a ruler wanted to invade a country or extricate himself from the power of the pope or avoid taxation and so forth. So clearly, religion as it stood today was a poor vehicle for faith, and I couldn't trust any of the organizations out there to be honest. The fact that they were always asking for me to give them money, to go out and do things to make them money, and then giving nothing back except a bunch of debatable points of faith... it seemed too shamelessly dishonest.

When I got to college I had basically lost all faith but didn't know it, and wouldn't have described myself without it, just that I was not religious. There was a desire to hang onto that part regardless, in the hopes of a dramatic revelation of faith that would finally show me what the deal was. I met an agnostic girl and found her painfully self-indulgent, incurious and incredibly flippant with regard to faith, so I knew I wasn't that. In discussion with an actual atheist however I realized that the only difference between us was that I wanted to believe and they didn't feel the need, which made it very easy to just set the burden down, since it wasn't genuine anyway. If it was not for the indoctrination about the need and the loveliness of faith itself I wouldn't have worked that hard to justify things. That was in early 2000, and world events moved quickly after that, and I basically gave up the last pretenses to religion even seeming to be a nice thing that people should keep private about, and a lot more books started to get published which said the same thing, which helped give some form to my thoughts.

[Darth Wong]

Just like wautd, the fundie's antics have pushed me towards the atheist side, but I can't see how denying the existance of some kind of supreme being is any more rational than accepting it in face of lack of evidence for either.

See Occam's Razor. It's the same reason you deny the existence of Yoda, Apollo, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You're just failing to apply it consistently. You dismiss certain unscientific ideas because they are "silly", but you don't acknowledge that the idea of God would be "silly" too, if you hadn't been conditioned to think otherwise.

Perhaps. But Occam's Razor on its own has failed to break the conditioning, and I'm looking for some other arguement that can do the trick.

Irrelevant to your comment. You said that disbelief in God is no more rational than belief in God, which is simply wrong. The question of whether you can personally accept that is irrelevant to your false claim that there is no logical principle which allows one to dismiss a vague existential claim based on the lack of evidence.

[General Zod]

Perhaps. But Occam's Razor on its own has failed to break the conditioning, and I'm looking for some other arguement that can do the trick.

Expecting any kind of instant over-night conversion is the wrong way of approaching this. You won't be able to completely shake it off all at once, and you're just setting yourself up for disappointment if you try that approach. A constant exposure to new ideas that don't necessarily agree with your pre-formed opinions and applying critical thought (with a healthy dose of cynicism), is one of the few good ways of dealing with religious conditioning. (That I've found, anyway).

[RedImperator]

I attended a Catholic college which required theology courses for all undergrads. Mine was taught by a Ph.D. holding Augustinian monk who really knew his stuff. And that was the problem--he described, in great detail, this vast, baroque intellectual castle, and it was resting on thin air. It was sorta like a Roadrunner cartoon, when the Coyote runs off a cliff. He can happily run forward, until he looks down. Then he's going to fall no matter what. The class, intentionally or not, got me to look down.

Strangely, the problem of evil never came up during my deconversion. However, the problem of evil did shake and eventually collapse my belief in Santa Claus (specifically, in second grade, we were learning about how half the Pilgrims starved to death over the winter, and I wondered why Santa didn't just bring them food for Christmas).

[Kitsune]

This may me wrong in the exact instances but it is correct in spirit. It is from a lecture by Richard Dawkins about "The God Delusion"

He shows a slide where there are three kids (Four years old I believe) and labels one a Christian, another a Muslim, and a third a Jew. We don't think about labeling children in that manner.

He then switches out their labels for various philosophical views which I believe that one is that of a Secular Humanist. He does this several times with different views of various religious or philosophical subjects.

The big point is that you cannot call a four year old a "Christian." Now what makes me wonder is when can a person actually be considered a "Christian?" When is a child's reasoning enough to actually be considered of a specific religion?

I am unsure if this is related enough to be part of this thread of it it should be its own thread?