Former Christians: What changed your mind?

[J-Hay]

Also, another thing that made me lose my faith was gradually realizing what a gigantic asshole the god of the bible is. I first started to realize this while contemplating one of the most asked questions when it comes to the existence of god: "If god is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-knowing, then why is there so much suffering in the world?"

The usual christian rhetoric goes something like: "without pain or suffering there can be no joy or happiness". First off, that makes no fucking sense. Second, wouldn't that contradict the existence of Heaven? Heaven is supposed to be a place of total, unadulterated bliss, completely devoid of any suffering or unhappiness of any kind. But wait, you can't have joy without grief. So that makes Heaven a paradox.

Thirdly, let's just say that that is true, that there can be no happiness without the opposite, wouldn't that be putting limits on god? I mean, they're basically saying that god can't make it to where there is no human suffering in order for one to experience joy. If he is truly perfect, and all-powerful, and all-knowing and all that other horseshit, then the only conclusion I can come too is that he's a total douchebag.

There was one thing about god that I never liked even when I was a christian. I was always taught that we are to put god 1st in our lives, and then our family 2nd. So, let me get this straight. I'm supposed to put someone who, not only have I never seen or met, but don't even know for an absolute fact beyond all reasonable doubt that they exist, before my own family? My own children? Bullshit. A truly loving God would not expect that of us.

You know, if you took the behavior and personality of bible god, and projected it onto a regular mortal human being, just a mere man, everyone, even christians, would agree that that guy was a cockbite. If a human did even half the things that god did in the old testament, he'd be locked away in an insane asylum, with good reason. But somehow it's okay when god does it.

Which also lead me to believe that most christians don't really "love" god, like they proclaim. The reason they continue to blindly follow is because they are scared of him. Deep down, they know what a monster he is. I mean, that was the numer 1 reason why I believed as long as I did, even when I had questions or doubts. Because I was scared. Shitless. Shitless of God himself. It's funny, as a young christian I never worried much about Satan. I rarely even thought about him. It was the loving, merciful God that scared me into constantly walking on eggshells.

[DarkfireTaimatsu]

Actually, I honestly don't know. Lack of interest, perhaps. I always just used to sit in the back of the church/sunday school class and read or draw stuff. (Not unlike school, in fact.) None of it was ever very interesting. I guess it was so gradual I didn't notice until I already was there and not-believing. I also discovered that swearing is okay around the same time, so there you go. I didn't discover all this stuff about God being a dick and hating gays and everything until after discovering FSTDT here, in fact.

[Hades]

I was 23... and I still am 23. I became an Atheist somewhere around october 2008.

I've always been supportive of gay marriage and abortion, even when I was a fundie. Hard to picture, I know. I couldn't bring myself to hate homosexuals, and I didn't even want to try. Fundie hatred for gays always rubbed me the wrong way.

One of the first things that disturbed me was how blood thirsty and vindictive a lot of my fellow Christians were when it came to unbelievers and end times. A lot of the forums I would visit weren't too different from RR... and you know how RR feels about the end times and unbelievers. The people I talked with couldn't wait to watch comfortably from heaven, as the world spirals into one big clusterfuck of suffering. They look forward to taking part in the judgment of the damned, and watching them get cast into hell. I could never feel that way. Moreover, I could never enjoy heaven knowing that hundreds of billions, perhaps even a trillion or more souls were burning forever... most of them for no good reason at all.

Like a lot of Christians, I had never read the bible. My entire grasp of Christianity came from fellow Christians and sermons. Reading the bible cover to cover was perhaps the biggest push towards Atheism. Not only did it shatter my perspective on Christianity, it was also filled with the most disgusting and literally unbelievable shit I've ever read. This was not the loving, hippy grampa god I was duped into believing in. This was a hateful, childish, bigoted, genocidal, war mongering, vengeful, megalomaniacal, inept, prick. This isn't a god I wanna worship! This isn't a god that anyone should want to worship.

After that I just sort of pushed everything to the back of my mind and didn't think about it. I guess this was my agnostic transitional period. What finally pushed me over the line to Atheism was seeing a commercial for Bill Maher's "Religulous". It's funny how something so simple can spark a wild fire of critical thinking. It wasn't even the entire commercial, it was one 10 second exchange between Maher and a Jesus impersonator. The exchange went like:

Maher: Why doesn't god just obliterate the devil and be done with it?
Jesus: He will -smug smile-
Maher: Well what's he waiting for?

That's it. What IS god waiting for? It made no sense to me. That little question just flipped the critical thinking switch on in my head, and I refuted the story of the bible myself. The whole story falls apart before it even begins, really.

Becoming an Atheist has been the most honest and liberating thing I've ever done in my life.

[trike]

Intellectually the last straw came in my early college years when I learned about Greco-Roman mystery cults. I was always told that Christianity was so very different from other religions, which is flat-out wrong. For such a unique religion it sure does follow the same pattern as a lot of other religious movements at the times, right down to the "miracles".

I went straight to be an atheist, after trying desperately to cling to a liberal Christianity for a time I realized that I just could not be reconciled. So I left.

[Lady Renae]

I like to say it was the realization that Jesus supposedly rose after two days, not three, which made the whole religion a lie by its own admittance.

I like to say that. A lot.

I'm not entirely sure I ever really believed it to begin with other than when I needed SOMETHING ANYTHING to believe in and SOMEONE ANYONE to love me when I was an abused suicidal eight year old and years after. I don't live there anymore (and by "there" I'm talking about the mental state). My physical teddy bear is enough for now. The metaphysical one can wait until I need it again, which I hopefully won't.

[Vene]

I was nominally Christian, I believed in God and Jesus, but I didn't really know much about the religion I supposedly believed in. One day, in my mid teens, I decided to actually figure out what was going on with this Christianity stuff. Me being me, I went to the source, the Bible. I was horrified at how God was portrayed. Evil bastard. I didn't even care if he was real, there was no way I could follow that monster. That prompted me into looking into it more and I wound up calling myself agnostic. Which, was fine for a few years, then I got curious about religion again, found fstdt's mainpage and started learning more and more about apologetics and logic. Slowly I started to see that I was more atheist than agnostic, and that I had, in fact, been living as a de facto atheist. So, that's what I started to call myself.

[Alexandria]

Another thing for me is the fact that if god is supposedly all knowing, all powerful, and ever present, he must have known that the serpent was going to tempt Eve, and must have watched it happen. And the kicker? He could have stopped it. But instead he let it happen. Let people fall into sin when he could have easily stopped it? Loving indeed.

[Sandafluffoid]

May 15, 2009 8:46:14 GMT -5 Alexandria said:

Another thing for me is the fact that if god is supposedly all knowing, all powerful, and ever present, he must have known that the serpent was going to tempt Eve, and must have watched it happen. And the kicker? He could have stopped it. But instead he let it happen. Let people fall into sin when he could have easily stopped it? Loving indeed.

More to the point, why did he put the bloody tree in the garden in the first place?

[Lady Renae]

That's what I wondered too.

[GodIsRealUnlessDeclaredInteger]

You will horribly laugh but for me one reason to leave faith was that on the way to the catholic church my family* went to we passed another church. You will laugh but whenever we passed it I asked my parents questions about the reason why we have to go (walk) further, whether they do not pray to the same God. I also learned about Islam in primary school (my Muslim classmates did not discuss religion with me but they had different RE classes). I read about the different religions later and realized that it was pure chance that I was a christian and not a Muslim or a Buddhist. Well, at one point, I realized that God must be one of these strange things adults do or rather want to do. Religion was to me like cursing: Parents expect a behaviour (not to do it/to follow through the motions of communion and mass etc) while doing the contrary (horrible terms when something went wrong /staying absent). I went through the motions, but I liked the Gods in my book of Fairy Tales from all over the world far better.

At some point in my youth, I realized how messed up my views on religion were and I tried to believe only in the things, people from all religions agree on. At that time, I also loved programming and often pulled all-nighters. Occaionally, sleep-deprivation caused me to hallucinate, which I at that time considered messages from God. I was a Panentheist at that time, even though I did not know that name.

Eventually, I read that sleep deprivation causes hallucinations (these visions were about the only tng keeping me in religion) and became an atheist.

[HoJuSimpson]

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

^That. I couldn't reconcile that, despite the stupid shit in the NT, that our loving god was the same psychopath of the OT. As George Carlin said, "Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a supreme being."

The pastor's daughter at a church I attended was pretty smokin'. My heart nearly stopped when I finally chatted with her because unless she was completely oblivious (this is church, after all,) she knows that I stared at her entirely too much. But I digress...

[carole]

I don't think it was any one thing that led to my conversion from Christian to agnostic, it was a combination of things. I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church and while my parents exemplify all the traits you would think a Christian should have, they are hard working, loving, compassionate, honest and generous with both time and money. Not exactly traits you find in most fundies. I used to think that my parents were like this because they were Christians, now I know that this is just the kind of people my parents are and would probably be this way no matter what their religion or lack of religion. I tried hard as a child and teenager to 'feel' the religion they way other people in the church did but it just never seemed to click for me. Of course now that I'm grown up I know what a bunch of phonies many of these people were. That is part of the reason I am no longer a Christian, but to make matters worse while I was still trying to do the whole christian thing I made the mistake of marrying a Christian man. Christian men are the worse husbands possible if they believe in that whole nonsense about submissive women. And mine did. I suspect that is why men love the Christian religion so much because of the whole stance on keeping women in line and in their place. My husband spent years telling me that if I would just 'get right with god' then I would be the kind of wife I was suppose to be. Even went so far as to tell me while I was pregnant that if I didn't straighten up that god would 'take' my baby to get my attention. I never did figure out just what it was I did that was so bad that god would kill my baby in return for it - but whatever it was obviously god didn't think it was that bad because now my 'baby' is 22 years old alive and well with a baby of her own. It would be one thing if I thought my husband was an exception to the rule, but after overhearing conversations between him and his church buddies about women I realized they were all a bunch of buttholes when it came to dealing with women and just used the religion and male leadership as an excuse. There were also other things along the way, like listening to the sermons on the immorality of homosexuality and knowing how much hatred most of the people in the church held for homosexuals, but when one of the associate pastors left his position after he was caught screwing his own sister-in-law he was allowed back into the fold after just a few months - it was this kind of double standard that really played a part in opening my eyes. Even that is not all I could go on listing things all day, like how my daughter was treated by the great Christians in the youth group because she wasn't one of the 'in crowd'. Personally I was glad she wasn't one of the 'in crowd' because they all seemed to be such a bunch of little jerks. And I have to admit that I took a certain amount of personal pleasure in it when the teenage darling of the youth group got suspended from school and lost her title of home coming queen when she showed up at the home coming dance drunk and passed out right in front of one of the police working security. Also when my best friend was in a terrible car accident and I called one of the ladies who worked in our church office to ask for her to be put on the pray list I was told rather curtly that the church office was closed that day and I would have to call back the following Monday. I guess they only prayed for people during church hours? I had seen many people that were hard working people and had put much time and effort into the church have the members turn their back on them because someone in their family made a mistake. I know more than one family that was almost tarred and feathered by the church people because of teenage pregnancies in the family. Isn't that when the church should be helping them the most? I thought the entire thing was about loving sinners. Guess I was wrong. I could go and on all day listing the ways I have seen the church turn a blind eye to the sins of their own inner circle while condemning others, and how the people of the church were rude and hypocritical.

At some point in my early 20's I decided to read the entire bible for myself cover to cover, I was shocked at some of the stuff that was in there that had never even come close to being preached on at church, human sacrifice, rape victims being forced to marry their attackers, killing babies, none of this stuff was in the sermons I hear on Sunday. I suspect that many Christians have never bothered to do any real in depth study of the bible other than what has been picked out for them by pastors and bible study leaders. There is some pretty nasty stuff in there, and I actually don't see why the religion needed Lucifer to be the evil one when god seemed to do a pretty good job of being nasty all by himself. Of course I do realize that like all mythology the bible as we know it today was written to use god as a way to explain things people didn't understand and 'god made me do it' was a way of explaining certain behaviors. While I haven't given up on a spirit or paranormal realm all together, mostly because of events in my own life, I certainly no longer let anyone tell me how or what I am suppose to believe.


Actually after being raised to believe in this religion it was a long hard road to my conversion but the day I finally admitted that it was all a bunch of hooey I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders that was the weight of trying to live my life the way others thought I should and not what seemed right to me.

[adoylelb90815]

I was never anywhere close to being a fundie, but I eventually realized that the God of the Bible was a real asshole who unless you kiss his ass and that of his son who he basically sent to die, you're going to hell.

I couldn't be Mormon because I ask too many questions, and as a woman, I wasn't going to submit to anyone because they have a penis. Also, the DNA evidence overwhelmingly shows that Native Americans came from Asia through the Bering Strait, and not from Israel as the Book of Mormon claims. I also didn't need a church to tell me that tobacco is addictive and dangerous, and there's too much evidence that tea and coffee are actually healthy drinks. Alcohol in moderation is also good for health, but if one has the tendency to become an alcoholic, then they're better off abstaining.

My church is the church of the G.O.D.(Great Out Doors) as I love nothing more than being outside instead of sitting in some mind-numbing church.

[Rubyfruit]

*delurk*

Short answer: A lot of shit happened, it made me do some soul-searching, and I left.

Long answer: At eleven years old, I was supposedly called to ministry. By the time I was twelve, I was drafting suicide notes along with sermons. A lot of shit happened between then and now, namely having seen the man behind the curtain, the dysfunction and hypocrisy that lurked under the surface. It was practiced in my home when my parents gleefully welcomed back into the fold a cousin of mine who had just gotten out of prison for raping a child, but these same people shunned another cousin of mine because she's a lesbian. I saw it modeled in the church when one woman stole and married her best friend's boyfriend, and everyone in the damn church congratulated this new couple, but another couple was turned away at the door, and had to move. I have watched families fall to pieces because people gave everything for that church, and saw little if anything in return. It was all the broken promises, the lies, the general bullshit, that made me leave. I was bullied lots in school and I was promised that I'd have a divine force field, but such a thing never happened. I spent years praying to God to change things about me--make me taller, make me thinner, make my hair longer, make me less smart so that I can attract a good Christian man, make my voice higher and more feminine--none of it came to pass. By eighth grade, I didn't bother asking God to make me straight, since he didn't fix everything else I thought was wrong with me.

It took another three years to think that maybe, just maybe, there was nothing wrong with me. That if there even was a god and if he created everything, then maybe he created me, big thighs, big butt, bisexuality and all. And even if there is no god, or if there is one, that he or she or they didn't create anything at all, but are merely watchers of this universe, then there is still nothing wring with me.

It took ten years for me to get to the point where I am now, the point where I can say that I'm okay, and that I don't need "fixing", unless I'm the one who wants to do that "fixing".

So a lot of shit happened, I had to do some soul-searching, and I left.

[Alexandria]

May 15, 2009 11:14:31 GMT -5 Sandafluffoid said:

May 15, 2009 8:46:14 GMT -5 Alexandria said:

Another thing for me is the fact that if god is supposedly all knowing, all powerful, and ever present, he must have known that the serpent was going to tempt Eve, and must have watched it happen. And the kicker? He could have stopped it. But instead he let it happen. Let people fall into sin when he could have easily stopped it? Loving indeed.

More to the point, why did he put the bloody tree in the garden in the first place?

So god created the temptation himself, presented it to Adam and Eve, and allowed an angel he supposedly created to get Eve to eat it, then give it to Adam. And of course, he has no problem killing humans and nearly every animal in the whole world (see "flood"), but he supposedly can't kill the devil, the source of all of god's issues. Yeah, perfect sense.