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Post by The_L on May 14, 2009 15:06:33 GMT -5
A lot of us here were once Christians of some variety. We didn't necessarily all leave for the same reasons. So I ask: at what age did you abandon Christianity, and why? Also, did you convert to another religion, or go straight from Christianity to atheism/agnosticism?
Yes, I am a nosy bitch. Why do you ask?
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Post by Alexandria on May 14, 2009 15:33:21 GMT -5
the thing that really got me going was, how come Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in the same "god", but apparently Jews and Muslims are going to hell anyway. That and actually READING the bible made me go, ok, this is total shit. Hence why I don't like it now.
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Post by Star Cluster on May 14, 2009 15:48:13 GMT -5
I went from full-on Christian (although not fundie about it) to atheist. In the back of my mind, I always thought the whole religion thing made no sense whatsoever, but I persevered in my faith anyway.
The whole thing came crashing down when I was in my early thirties. I had been praying for a situation to improve but instead it got worse. That is when I realized that if there was a god, he didn't give a shit and the crap in the Bible about him answering prayers was just that...crap. After further reflection and thought, I came to the conclusion that there is no god or deity of any kind and gave up religion.
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Post by The_L on May 14, 2009 15:53:19 GMT -5
Well, since I started this, I might as well tell my story, huh? Otherwise I look like the nosy bitch I am. ;P
When I was a kid, I was a devout Catholic, or at least I tried to be. I remember loving CCD, because it was mostly stories about holy people. Every kid loves stories. Hell, I was reading Pagan mythology at the same time, and loved it too. Yay, stories. But church bored the fuck out of me. (I don't think even Catholics will argue that Mass was written for adults, not 6-year-olds.) I asked my mother, "Why do we have to go to church every Sunday?" She said "To remember the Lord." In other words, a total cop-out answer--if you believe in and worship a deity, HTF do you forget he/she/it is there?!
Things didn't get easier as I got older, only harder. My Protestant classmates didn't think I was a "real" Christian because I was Catholic. I tried to be devout and do the things I was supposed to do, like pray the rosary every day, and never managed to live up to the expectations of the Church. I masturbated. Normal part of being a teen, but I was ashamed of it, and every time I did it I felt guilty.
It got to the point that in Mass, when the congregation recites "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed," I felt the eyes of the crucifix staring at me. "That's right, you little slut, you're not worthy and never will be." So yeah, I was pretty emotionally unstable.
Despite all that, I was confirmed anyway. My reasoning was this: Everyone in the area is either Catholic, Protestant, or atheist. (This turned out not to be true, but I didn't know that yet.) I know I believe in God, so I'm not atheist. And I sure as hell don't want to be Protestant. (Even then, they gave off fundie-vibes to me.) So Catholic it is, then.
In college, I joined the anime club, because I've always had a weakness for it. One of the friends I made there was Pagan. After a while, we became FWB, and that's when I found out about his religious beliefs (he wasn't very open about them except to other Pagans or people he was sleeping with) and started learning more about the various Pagan religions out there.
Wicca felt right to me from the beginning. When I read about it, something inside "clicked." Best of all, no dogma, no pressure to convert others, and no pretending that natural sexual urges are something to fear and repress. So here I am.
tl;dr version: I grew up as a devout Catholic, and part of me hated it. In college, I met an awesome Pagan, and we had sex. I started doing actual research into non-Christian religions, and now I'm Wiccan.
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Post by shelly87 on May 14, 2009 16:47:59 GMT -5
Well I used to be a pretty fundamental christian, I was born into the faith. I think I "accepted Christ" around the age of 5. I used to believe in creationism, the inerrancy of the bible, and yes even the stuff in Revelations. I was anti-gay, anti-stem cell research, and anti-abortion. I'm not proud of it. In high school I started not going to church anymore. I had never really liked going on a weekly basis and the only time I ever "felt" god was at those big revival kind of things like Acquire the Fire (if you were a fundie protestant you know what I'm talking about). I also really didn't like a lot of the mean, hypocritical people in church and convinced myself that if it really all was about a relationship with god then I could just practice my faith on my own time. Mid-high school I transferred from my private christian school to public school b/c I didn't fit in with anyone there and I just felt stifled.
For the next couple years I guess you could call me a lapsed christian. I didn't read the bible, I didn't go to church. I had sex for the first time with my boyfriend of over a year and a half. I still believed in jesus but I was practicing much of anything.
I started really questioning in college, especially after taking a philosophy of world religions class. The class motivated me start reexamining my beliefs and got me to look at the validity of the bible. I started reading books and websites about christianity and science. College bio completely changed my mind about evolution - it made so much sense after it was presented to me in a non-biased way. I had never taken it outside of a christian school. I realize now all the lies they taught me about evolution, and I still feel like my science education suffers from their inadequate and false teachings.
So for the last year and a half I guess I've just been reading more about the bible and the more I do I realize how horrible it all is. I realized that none of the world religions really have it right and a god or gods they describe aren't really any Id like to worship. I guess I describe myself now as an agnostic - I don't think if there is a god that it is possibly for us as humans to know him/her or that he has ever revealed him/herself to us. And if there is one then he/she obviously 'created' the universe to be self-sustaining and to abide by natural processes, without the need for his hand to constantly influence everything. I'm beginning to believe that there isn't any god at all so I guess I'll prolly start calling myself an agnostic atheist soon.
But yeah its just been a slow transition from a conservative protestant fundie to a liberal agnostic atheist. It just takes awhile to break though all that brainwashing!
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Post by malendras on May 14, 2009 16:56:58 GMT -5
I grew up catholic, got confirmed, all that shit. Turned 13, went to high school, started getting my own opinions on lots of topics. I disagreed with the catholic church on a lot of those issues. I also got a few fundie teachers who were completely whacked-out insane. Disagreed even more with them, so I ended up leaving catholicism.
Soon afterwards took a serious look at christianity in general, beliefs and the bible and all that. Kinda figured it didn't make sense. Over the next year or so I looked at a bunch of different religions and forms of religious belief. I kinda went around from non-denominational christian to deist to pantheist to atheist to agnostic to pagan a few times, before deciding none of the religious beliefs made much sense to me. I once said "The idea of a god seemed much less believable without the binds of catholic dogma holding me in." So, seeing as I didn't have any proof of god(s) or higher power(s), I just stopped believing in them. And thusly, I'm now a weak atheist.
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Post by id82 on May 14, 2009 17:20:00 GMT -5
I was raised as a Catholic. My parents made me go to church on sundays and even though I never enjoyed it I just assumed it was the normal thing to do. When I went to church I never understood that I was a Catholic and that their were different denominations of Christianity.
My parents put me in religion classes to learn more about the Catholic faith, and so I could take communion and eventually be confirmed. The classes were fairly liberal, there was never any fire and brimstone preaching, or anything anti gay.
Even though I believed in Jesus at the time I was never really sure if I believed everything that happened in the bible. I just went to church every Sunday and I assumed everyone in town even the whole world went to church. I learned about Jewish people in grade school but never really understood what they were. As I got older I started noticing other churches with different names. I would ask my parents how come we never went to those churches, and they would tell me because we're Catholic and those churches were not. I didn't really understand this at the time. Then I discovered one my aunt is a Jehovah's Witness which I learned was a branch of Christianity but they never celebrated any holidays.
I started wondering why if all of these different churches believed in and read the bible then how come they had different beliefs? I thought the main thing was to believe in Jesus.
Then when I got to middle school I started learning about ancient cultures, and I learned that cultures like Greece and the Egyptians had many God's each with their own back stories that people really believed in, but now people don't believe in them anymore. It made me wonder why these Gods just suddenly didn't exist anymore and why this one God of Christianity is what people believe in now. The church and the bible never really explain this story.
Then I started learning about different cultures and different religions all with thier own seperate beliefs that people still believe in today. I started to realize that Catholicism wasn't some normal thing that everyone in the world believed in. I started questioning my beliefs. If there are all of these different religions with their own beliefs, and even seperate denominations in Christianity with their own seperate beliefs; not to mention the different denominations in other religions, than who is right? Shortly after I was confirmed during my sophomore year in highschool I came to the realization that no one can be right and I started to become agnostic. As I read more into this and discovering the cruelty of religion during history and how people are still fighting over it, and starting learning the unconsistencies in the bible I began leaning more towards Atheism.
I told my parents that I don't believe in God anymore, and even though they are still Catholic they really don't see a problem with this. They told me, "You're an adult now so we really have a say in what you want you believe in."
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Post by Thejebusfire on May 14, 2009 17:31:34 GMT -5
A few things started my doubting during childhood. One time someone told me they boycott Disney movies because Disney hires homosexuals. I was probably about 7, I didn't even understand what a homosexual was. Then a local Christian station started airing ads saying that Disney movies were filled with violence. Even as a little girl I thought that was extreme and even stupid. I also always wondered why different churches beleived different things and always fighting over whose right and wrong. If we are all god's children, shouldn't we be atleast getting along? That started my journey into doubt.
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Post by Jedi Knight on May 14, 2009 17:40:27 GMT -5
I was fourteen or fifteen, I remember I lost my faith the year I became fifteen. I was reading a book on modern physics, and I understood how time and space didn't exist before the universe. I tried to make this fit with other things I knew, and came to the conclusion that God must exist outside time and space. God is omnipotent, omniscient and outside the universe, which means he is able to see the whole universe at once - space AND time. Therefore, everything that happens in the universe is predestinated. If God exists, he created the universe to be a puppet theatre. I asked myself why. Why would an omnipotent being do something so childish? This made no sense to me, so I did some research and talked to some people. I was introduced to logic and reason, and I have been an atheist ever since.
Edit: I wasn't entirely clear here. The "research and talk to people" took several years.
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Dio Fa
New Member
Forgive me Lord for I got caught
Posts: 43
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Post by Dio Fa on May 14, 2009 20:18:34 GMT -5
A long, long time ago, in a...
I was raised in the Catholic church. Confession, Penance, Communion, Rosary Beads, no meat on Fridays and much more. Mafioso throwing large denomination bills into the collection plate; their armed bodyguards standing in the back. All the while to the strains of a priest telling us we[/i] were going to Hell. I believed in a god, but the church was nothing more than a building where we stood in unison, sat in unison, kneeled in unison, and payed in unison. There was no feeling or sense of the spiritual about the place or the religion to me. I felt as if I didn't belong and I didn't.
I went to Catholic schools until I finished Jr. High. Religion classes, church services, bad science classes, and The Strap. The solution to any "problem student" was "more discipline". I can only remember one teacher that I actually liked and respected. The rest seemed just slightly less psychotic than the teacher in Pink Floyd's, The Wall. One had been charged (and somehow, acquitted) numerous times with molesting children. He is a principal now, and according to the news, continues to molest students with impunity. The schools' administrations gossipped about the students to parents and the church, and in a small city, the word got around fast about who the "bad kids" were.
By age 13 and in Grade 8, I was frustrated, fed up, and on the verge of open rebellion against the church and the school system. One day, I got the break I really needed. A priest refused me absolution after an honest and earnest confession. That was enough. I decided I was quitting the church. After getting over the anger, the relief I felt was almost orgasmic. I didn't have to pretend to be one of them anymore.
Slowly, but surely, I began the process of dealing with the guilt that was instilled into every Catholic child in our parish. I began to explore various forms of spirituality, until I finally decided to follow my own truths; the writings and institutions of man be damned.
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Post by Tiger on May 14, 2009 20:36:27 GMT -5
Step 1: Read the Bible as a fundamentalist Christian. Step 2: Realize that the Bible is a load of horseshit. Step 3: Decide that the Bible isn't the inerrant word of God and that you can figure out God's will on your own. Step 4: Notice that when you pray for guidance, you never get a response. Step 5: Get depressed, stop going to church. Step 6: Spend two years as a believer, but uninvolved with any religious activity. Gradually wear down your faith by educating yourself and thinking philosophically. Step 7: Realize you don't believe in God anymore during an argument with a fundie. There wasn't any one thing that made me convert. I just gradually drifted farther and farther away from fundamentalist Christianity until I started debating gay marriage with a fundie, and found myself arguing that God doesn't exist. If you're interested in stories, here's a particularly good one. His story seems similar to mine, though a little more direct.
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Post by antichrist on May 14, 2009 21:51:49 GMT -5
Even at the age of 10 I was asking the "forbidden" questions, like why do we obey Paul when Jesus was the son of God.
After going through a lot of bullshit in life, one day I was praying my heart out, when I realized that nobody was listening. There was nothing there.
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Post by stormwarden on May 14, 2009 22:37:46 GMT -5
I quit sometime after 9/13/01. I was LDS right up to that point. When Pat and Jerry did their hateful tirade, it made me question, so I read the Bible.
Cover to cover.
And it was enough to convince me that the bible was fark all along.
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J-Hay
New Member
fuck it
Posts: 17
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Post by J-Hay on May 14, 2009 22:44:28 GMT -5
This might sound odd to some of you, but I owe a lot of my deconversion from christianity to weed. The first time I ever questioned my beliefs was one night about three years ago after smoking some bud. I was watching the animated movie 'Ice Age' and when I'm high I tend to look at things differently, more deeply, I'm not really sure how to explain it. Those of you who do smoke may know what I'm talking about.
Anyway I was thinking about all the animals that lived during the ice age and how similar they are to modern animals and it got me thinking. I finally said to myself "either evolution is the real thing, or God or the devil is really messing with us" which later lead to more thinking about all the things that I was taught to believe and how retarded the stories of the bible were. It's a shame that it took me getting baked to realize these things. No wonder some like to call it "the devil's weed".
Getting high somehow makes me discover things that I never even noticed before, but when I finally do, it's seems so obvious, yet so profound that I think "how come I never thought of that before?" Though I am pretty confident that I would have eventually come to these conclusions with or without pot, but maybe it wouldn't have been until later on.
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Post by Yaezakura on May 14, 2009 23:09:23 GMT -5
Well, I broke away at about the age of... 13 or 14. About the same time as I was coming to terms with my sexuality and other issues.
I'd never been very devout, though I had believed. Though I never felt "God's presence" like so many other people had claimed to feel. And my prayers always went unanswered, no matter how desperately I needed them to be. After a while, I just couldn't believe anymore.
Later, serious study of what the Bible actually said, instead of the way pastors had always cherry picked verses, cemented in my mind that it was all a bunch of bullshit.
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