@FORMER Christians: which questions shook your faith?

[Narkis]

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.

I should have phrased that better. I never intended to say anything about atheists in general, just indicate a failing on my own part.

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).

I know. It took me a full year to come to terms with my lack of faith, and accept it as something desirable. My dechristianization was like a cartoon snowball that starts small and grows as it rolls down the mountain. It started with a single question, which led to more and more problems surfacing. But progress to full Atheism has been nil ever since. It is not something I've stopped contemplating about, but I cannot convince myself that Occam's Razor is reason enough to be certain of the non-existence of a supreme being that doesn't give fuck about the universe. And I can't find any other reason for that to be true.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The details are a bit vague by now, I was pretty young. But I recall it being several factors.

First, science. The more I read of science, the clearer it became that it was an accurate means of understanding the world - it works, after all. And the clearer it became that there just wasn't any room in it for religious beliefs. That God and souls and miracles and so on just didn't fit into the world science showed us.

Second, once I started actually thinking critically about Christianity, I noticed how baseless and absurd it is. It's followers never have any proof for their claims, and the claims themselves just don't make much sense.

Third, once I started reading the Bible, I noticed that it's neither an especially nice or consistent document.

And fourth, the behavior of believers in general destroyed any purely emotional appeal Christianity had for me.

[General Zod]

I know. It took me a full year to come to terms with my lack of faith, and accept it as something desirable. My dechristianization was like a cartoon snowball that starts small and grows as it rolls down the mountain. It started with a single question, which led to more and more problems surfacing. But progress to full Atheism has been nil ever since. It is not something I've stopped contemplating about, but I cannot convince myself that Occam's Razor is reason enough to be certain of the non-existence of a supreme being that doesn't give fuck about the universe. And I can't find any other reason for that to be true.

Occam's Razor is not the be all end all of critical thinking you know. An important part, but by far not the only aspect you should pay attention to.

[Dark Flame]

I'm another one that's not real sure of how Christian I ever really was. I got dragged to church every Sunday until I was about 16. For a long time I thought it was boring, but I accepted it at face value. It was only when I took Catechism class to be confirmed as a member of the church that I really started wondering why I believed it. I think it was the story of Job that drove home the worst of it. I know life isn't fair, but in my mind, a perfect God would make it fair. However, that doesn't match up with the story of Job at all, and that really bothered me.

That story also made me question the original sin. I never understood being punished for someone else's sins. I also didn't like the pastors I had, and I hated being told how to think and what to do. And that was pretty much the end of it for me.

[Morilore]

Lemme try to take this thread in a more productive direction. I think there have been around four hundred million "why are you an atheist" threads in this board's history, so I'm going to try to answer the thread title's literal question: what distressed me the most when I was still clinging to the idea of Christianity?

It wasn't Occam's Razor, or the Problem of Evil, or the poorly-edited and contradictory Bible that really bothered me. I could handwave all those things away: faith is a choice, God isn't really "omnipotent" in the silly literal sense and/or Everything Turns Out For the Best in the End, the Bible was passed through dirty human hands. What really bothered me was when I seriously contemplated fictional cosmologies with a God or gods of a different nature, like (ironically) Tolkein's Silmarillion universe or fantasy worlds with evil false gods. I think it was because, faith be damned, I couldn't really see how DND's gods or the Force or the like were any less inherently reasonable than Christianity, and in a way I already looked at the Christian cosmology as fiction, but I knew that was a Wrong way to think about it, so either I was deluded, not thinking straight, or (uh-oh) Christianity was wrong because it was equivalent to silly human fantasies.

The above isn't the reason I deconverted. I wrote about that elsewhere. But it's something that shook me up.

[Gerald Tarrant]

I remember sitting in Sunday School one day and the teacher asked how the world was going to end. I raised my hand I'd just read something on astronomy in my elementary school library. The thing I read said the Earth was going to turn into a Red Giant and swallow the Earth (I've never been that into astrophysics, so if the Sun isn't a potential Red Giant precursor, please understand it was just a kids "science" book). I dutifully reported the effects prior to swallowing, oceans boil, forests burn, planet turning into a cinder, all of which my Sunday School teacher nodded through. And then I said, and then the Earth will be swallowed in the new Red Giant and we'll all die and that will be it. At this point she read some stuff from revelations that disagreed on quite a few of the particulars. It was the first time I realized there were contradictions between Science and Religion, other incidents probably could have clued me in to that too, but that one just sticks in my mind. At that point it was just a steady grinding down of my belief, if you have two conflicting methods of viewing the world pick the one that best predicts how things will work. The answer's obvious, and while it took a while to wear away at my belief, it did eventually.

[Darth Wong]

I've always wondered if Christians find philosophical or medical discussion of the nature of personality, individuality, and memory to be disturbing. After all, it's hard to reconcile the Christian notion of continued life after death with the fact that memory and personality appear to be clearly bound up in physical neurons. I still remember the Christians in Philosophy 101 getting really quiet when some papers were discussed in class on that very subject. One philosopher asked the question: is it really life after death if your personality and memories are erased? If we agree that some magical thing persists after death, but it lacks your personality and memory, then how can it be said to be you?

[Edi]

I was seven and in religion class (yes, religion of your own faith is taught in school here) they talked about Jesus and how he was a man yet he did all the things like turning water into wine etc. So, if he was human just like me, I should be able to do the same thing. I could not, ergo I was being lied to, which meant I could not trust anything that was taught about religion and it was all bullshit.

It helps that my family is not very religious at all. My aunt is and my grandparents on mom's side were, but they lived on the other side of the country, so no influence from there. Funniest thing is that my father worked for the church in an administrative role for over 30 years and is the best expert on the legal standing and relations between the church and the government in this country.

[Covenant]

I've always wondered if Christians find philosophical or medical discussion of the nature of personality, individuality, and memory to be disturbing.

I seriously doubt that this would be much of a sticking point for most people. If they've been able to soak up every other qualm until they begin to ponder the findings of the faithless secular medical community or some godless philosopher, the permanence of the soul is probably under safe lock and key. If you're a Christian who is okay with the idea of evolution being the handiwork of a slow Watchmaker, human biology serves a divine function. If you don't believe in evolution, you're already ignoring science overall, so why should you believe medicine or philosophy?

Beyond that issue, we've known that mental disorders affect mood, personality, feelings of individuality, memory, and so forth. If your grandmother has dementia and she dies, does she go to Heaven and have life eternal never remembering the names of her children and grandchildren? Of course not, you go to heaven as your ideal self. It's not your feeble mind, but your immortal soul! Clearly, this stuff is never really well explained or thought out.

It was certainly not something I heard ever mentioned. As cliched as it well is, the amount of death, disease, and violence in the world seems to be the first thing that shakes people's faith in the specific idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving god. I think this is one of the reasons the Evangelicals have been so successful, their faith has a perfectly adequate explination for the world as we see it today, because they believe in a literal interpertation of the Bible (much glossed over) that already includes plagues, famines, disease, genocide and massive warfare as set pieces of the Old Testament. While a moderate Catholic or Protestant has to throw out vast stretches of the Bible and start wringing their hands over what it says or does not say and how to interpert what is there, the Evangelicals can basically take things at face value. They are what you get when you marry the idea of an all-loving god to the story of a petulent fiend who sells his chosen people into slavery, sends a chosen prophet to extricate them, and then deliberately keeps the enemy leader from showing compassion so that the god may be justified in laying waste to an immense amount of innocent children.

[Tolya]

It will look like Im kissing ass, but the truth is I deconverted because PeZook sent me a link to Mike's private website.

I was never a hardcore catholic to begin with. My parents are atheists/agnostics but never ever forced anything on me. My grandma however is deeply religious and every day spent with her (holidays, vacations etc.) were a constant reminder of how God is looking at us from the sky.

In the she managed to convince me that there is a christian God above us who rules and sees all (not a difficult thing to do to a 5 year old kid), but I've always found Church masses to be extremely boring. Many years later, when I grew up, the beliefs stayed with me even though I have abandoned going to Church. I justified myself in a way that yes, Im a sinner for not going to church (and considered hell a terrifying possibility), but I am young and I still have time to make amends later. So I stopped caring about rituals altogether.

And then I started reading Mike's website. I remember that the first thing that caught my eye was the piece on Hitler's being catholic and religious. And so I thought: if such evil people were catholics and even received birthday cards from the freaking pope, then what does it say about christianity? It was the thought that made me read the rest and slowly realize, that I was taking people's word that god exists, while never being presented any evidence. Slowly I began to embrace rationalism.

It took some time for me to become an atheist that is aware why exactly he is an atheist, but some part of my deconversions were really scary. Like the early stages, when I had those thoughts that god doesn't exist, but on the other hand part of me tried to deny that. Imagine a scared teenager that looks up in the sky and imagines horrible things that will be done to him because he has those thoughts that don't want to go away. That was me, many years ago.

Never had the opportunity to properly thank Wong for creating his website. It is one of those things that really changed my life and that's why I am also present on this board from the very beginning, even though Im not the most active participant or the most formidable debater. Thanks Mike.

[AMT]

For me it all began in 5th grade. I had picked up this cool book of ancient Greek mythology, their creation stories and all that for elementary/middle school kid level. While reading it I realized a very simple truth: "The Greeks believed this stuff like I believe in God, yet we consider this to be fiction. This stuff is as valid as any other religion out there: Viking, Egyptian, ours, whatever."

I then spent the next few questioning until a Thanksgiving day dinner where they wanted me to say Grace at the kids table. I couldn't. At that moment, really thinking about it, I realized I just... couldn't believe. A shouting match later, I started on the academic journey to help find the logical proof needed for the insight I gained as a child/teenager.

So far, I've been very satisified about what I've found.

[CaptJodan]

I've always wondered if Christians find philosophical or medical discussion of the nature of personality, individuality, and memory to be disturbing. After all, it's hard to reconcile the Christian notion of continued life after death with the fact that memory and personality appear to be clearly bound up in physical neurons. I still remember the Christians in Philosophy 101 getting really quiet when some papers were discussed in class on that very subject. One philosopher asked the question: is it really life after death if your personality and memories are erased? If we agree that some magical thing persists after death, but it lacks your personality and memory, then how can it be said to be you?

For me, yes. I'd say that's right around the time I was in the midst of figuring this all out for myself that I had an endoscopy. Real simple procedure, right? Nothing terribly mind altering or personality changing. Except it was. The drug they used to put me out allowed me to stay conscious (enough) but not to have any memory of being conscious. I'm told I made quite a few funnies after coming out of the procedure (as a lot of people do) but I have no memory of it. My personality clearly wasn't typical of me, be it slightly altered by the drugs as well. My memory of the rest of that day is fairly fragmented.

That simple procedure led me to actually question memory and the essence of "self" or "spirit". How can I be experiencing something, but have no memory of it afterward? And if the essence of self is so malleable (see Alzheimer's or brain damaged patients whose personalty shifts radically from the original personality) then how does that "self" survive, and what "self" are we supposed to believe goes into heaven?

Yeah, that one shook me up pretty good too.

[Zadius]

The weird thing about my deconversion is that I remember having all kinds of objections to religion when I was a young (<10 years old), yet I didn't become an atheist until 16.

The first thing I remember is telling my mom I didn't feel anything when I accepted Jesus into my heart. That was when I was 5. From the ages 7-9 or so, I remember asking a lot of questions in Sunday school like, "Where did God come from?" Noah's ark didn't make any sense either. I never got any satisfactory answers. Usually they told me I was too young to understand. I took the Bible to school to read during reading time in 3rd grade. I couldn't make it through Leviticus. All the killing and brutality confused me. It was too different from what I expected based on what I had learned about the Bible at church, and I started to think I really was too young to understand. Plus, my classmates thought it was weird that I was reading the Bible.

I should have been an atheist from that point on. It didn't make sense and it seemed like I was the only one trying to take it seriously, anyway. But I think it was the notion that I was too young to understand that prevented me. For the next few years I would just shut my brain off when I went to church. I stopped listening to the sermon, coloring instead. I stopped asking question in Sunday school. I'd only get the same stupid non-answers anyway. I was well on my way to being a typical apathetic Christian.

When I was about 13, I stopped going to church. My parents no longer were forcing me to go, and I chose not to. Mainly because it was boring and I wanted to sleep in. My home life was not very religious at all. God almost never came up at home. So, from that point on I was living basically a secular life and never really thought about religion at all. By the time I was 16, I was so detached from it that it was much easier to look at Christianity from the point of view of an outsider. No longer was I too young to conclude that religion is superstitious man-made crap. This happened in 2001 shortly after 9/11, since the subject of religion was on a lot of peoples minds (72 virgins, etc.). I concluded that what the hijackers believed wasn't any more ridiculous than the crap I'd been taught since birth. I completely skipped the agnostic stage and went right to antitheist instead.

[Adrian Laguna]

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.

This made me realize something, it never occurred to me that I might go to Hell. I did not put much thought into the matter of the afterlife, my ideas of Heaven were vague at best, but I simply never conceived that I might ever go to Hell, not even in the greatest depths of guilt, despair, and self-loathing. Actually, I don't think I ever really believed in Hell at all. For that matter, I don't think I ever really believed any part of Christianity which I had no use for.