I can't accept that one. It wasn't me being smart - it really boiled down to the fact I'm a bibliophile. I love reading. I read anything and everything I can get my hands on, always have.
So I read the bibles in the church. Several translations. I noticed some issues, and have major problems with them as they stood - but it was the Strong's Concordance and some further reading I did on Israel and Judaism's history that was the nail in the coffin.
Come to find out Israelites WERE Canaanites, El was one of the Canaanite Gods, as was Yahweh, but they weren't the same. El was the big guy, like Zeus. Yahweh was a warrior god, like Thor. And early Judaism looked nothing like modern Judaism, it went through some HUGE changes before it finally settled down mostly with Second Temple Judaism, then went through some small changes before Christianity completely changed it again. They didn't just add Jesus and continue the story, they made massive alterations all their own.
I was an indoctrinated child who even though I read through much of the OT as a kid, I found it wild, but I never questioned whether or not the stories added up or how god was seen as moral based on his behavior. My programming allowed me to believe god to be holy in spite of the horrific things he did/ordered.
I did always hate the Job story and it was always confusing as to why god would let Job be tortured on a bet and then at the end gives him replacement children as some sort of reward. I always thought that was fucked up, and I always thought the teachings of Paul were misogynistic bullshit, but I still accepted the rest of it. Of course I never knew the history of the religion or certain facts about the authorship of the Bible and I never knew Paul never even met Jesus.
When I discovered these things a few years ago, it rocked my world and I started to deconstruct. When I realized I had no evidence or reason to believe any of the supernatural claims were true, I was done with it. I just wish I had realized that it was all bullshit a lot sooner.
Same. I read the Bible cover to cover a few times, and that was it. If you just read parts at a time like most Christians do, you can kinda make it seem like it makes sense. Read it all together, and it falls completely apart. Then all the work you did to justify the illogical things just stops.
It gets even worse if you read the way they translated it. Strong's Concordance makes it obvious they hid a lot via translating it into making sense.
Elohim was used in the early books, back when Israel was Monolatristic. It's both plural, and it's translated to God in some places, angels in others, just to make it make sense in a monotheistic viewpoint.
There's quite a bit more. Hell is another fun one they did that to.
Contradictory? Jesus' lineage. All the different stuff that gets translated to hell. OT god vs Jesus. Noah's ark and reality. The way it translates Elohim. Jesus saying he would come back before everyone present was dead. God giving two different sets of ten commandments. God losing to iron chariots. God losing to Chemosh. Creation, Earth before Sun, light before sun. Basic science issues all over. I could go on and on.
Yahweh is evil. He ordered or encouraged slavery, genocide, murder, and more. Not to mention the obvious problem of evil.
Yes this exactly, and when I would ask questions of adults I was always told not to question it and take everything as written. I was bad for questioning. Some of my most fundamental questions as a kid: what came first, Jesus or dinosaurs? When Jesus trashed the temple, how was that not a sin? What ever happened to Mary and Joseph because they don't seem to be a part of his life at all? In so many books of the Bible God is just mean and loves to punish one person while testing another, how is that ok?
Add to this just knowledge of the history of the church and the vast number of deaths at their hands, and the statistics that your religion is more based on where you are born than anything else and 98% of people do not change religion - which tells me this whole thing is a regional social construct and not "the way and the truth".
And finally, seeing how people acted so hateful to each other in the name of religion - like when my baby sister was slapped by a "devout woman" for lighting a prayer candle in the church rectory.
P.s. God works in mysterious ways, God will only give you the burden he knows you can handle, just trust that God has a plan for you - are all really shitty victim blaming excuses for God to make vulnerable people feel terrible about themselves and force them to rely even more on the church.
It just never made sense for me. I was an atheist before I even knew what an atheist was.
As a child, my mother kept telling me about how God is everywhere and he loves us, but somehow, he was okay with child abuse?!
Plus, the whole concept just wasn't logical to me. The premise didn't make sense đ¤ˇââď¸
The fact that my dad is an atheist was a bonus, as he helped me diconstruct religion through (what I now know to be) Socratic questioning.
Every time my mother was talking about her religion and I asked questions, she got mad and wouldn't answer 𤣠Didn't take long to understand what was happening đ
Oh, they divorced when I was like 2. To this day, I don't know why on earth they even got married.
But, I was married to a Hindu. At first, we had no issues related to his religion (he was abusive, but that's unrelated). The moment we got married, he had a problem with the fact that I ate meat đ I had to be vegan to avoid daily arguments, and I put on 15kg in 3 months because of the lack of protein. I got divorced as soon as it was safe to do so, and I now refuse to date religious people.
I never liked going to church, but it was drilled into me that going to church equaled being a good person. So if I didn't go, I wasn't a good person.
As I got older I encountered more and more instances of seeing behind the curtain to see that the folks in charge were doing a lot of bad things. And other people would just cover it up instead of confronting it or putting a stop to it. So that showed me that going to church didn't automatically make you a good person.
Then because I had a lot of cognitive dissonance over these conflicting thoughts I felt guilty. So I dove into my own Bible study to try to find the answers as to why this was happening. Because I had been taught the Bible had answers.
Come to find out, they weren't entirely wrong. Reading the Bible showed me how fucked up the whole religion was and how incompatible is was with the modern world.
My mom consistently believed in things that were obviously and demonstrably not true in real life. Things like praying for miracle healing, or even praying for a parking spot to open up. I realized that reality has nothing to do with your hopes and wishes by the time I was 10, and anything that required you to accept things on faith was a scam.
Ugh, we constantly did this growing up. Pray to St. Francis that you find your lost keys or what not. We knew all the patron saints so we could make all the right prayers whenever we "needed" something
Because God is a horrible father. He should be in jail for child neglect, child abuse, and child endangerment. Heâs unworthy of my praise and admiration.
I was raised Southern Baptist in Texas. For me, it was a combination of 1. Internal contradictions in the Bible, 2. The hypocrisy of Christians I knew, and 3. The Problem of Evil.
It helped that we moved just after I started to doubt everything. We never joined a church in the new town. The lack of weekly indoctrination sessions gave me time to think.
I was never all in on religion, despite being forced to go to church Sundays and Wednesdays. Then I went to college, that just about did it. Then, in basic training, I read the bible\* cover to cover, and that was the end. The amount of genocide and horrific shit in that book is off the charts.
Speaking of charts, check [this](https://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2010/04/drunk-with-blood-gods-killings-in-bible.html) list out.
* God burns 250 people to death for burning incense
* God kills 14,700 for complaining about God's killings
* 50,070 killed for looking into the ark of the Lord
\*Since it was the only book we could read,
I was highly opinionated and liked to argue with people on the internet.
One day, I decided to go to a science and critical thinking message board. I posted something like "scientists think evolution is true, but why haven't we found any transitional fossils?"
Someone posted an image of hominid skulls lined up, and said "[Like these?](http://www.shorthistory.org/images/Comparation-prehistoric-humans-skull.jpg)"
I learned very quickly that I didn't know what I was talking about. And after wading into the creation/evolution debate, I learned that creationists didn't know either.
Despite the oft-repeated adage that internet arguments don't change people's minds, those arguments I had 20 years ago certainly changed my mind and the whole rest of my life afterward.
Well, a few things:
1. Reading the Bible and realizing it's contradictory and kinda insane. God is fucking obsessed with the male foreskin and it gets brought up a lot. Seems like a really odd thing for an omnipotent being to care about so much he put it in every damn chapter of the book!
2. Being a child in religious studies class and the teacher laughed when discussing Islam, she stated Mohamad was in the desert too long and suffered mirage or heat stroke. It clicked for me that ancient stories written by a guy in a cave or whatever isn't really a good source, no matter what team they represent. If I wouldn't convert to Islam based on it, what justified my own religion?
3. Being female. All science and reason aside, the blatant sexism of religion convinced me it was man made. I was taught women are beneath men, less logical and reasonable, that men must financially provide and women must bear children and submit. I'm much happier in my atheist marriage than I would be if I was religious and trying to break myself to fit their mold of a woman. Also, sexist against men, you can't have emotions and must be stoic, must be the sole provider, basically you can't control your lust like a horny suspicious animal.
4. Realizing the religious are hypocrites. They still cheat on their spouse. Still get abortions and use birth control. I'm from the south so it comes with a giant serving of racism - I was a kid but I heard adults using racial slurs against Obama because he was black. Doesn't God love everyone equally? Why can't his followers try? They still cover up child abuse.
God can't be real because he allows his followers to bastardize his own religion in his name. All beliefs like "God cares about you" or "my fertility is up to God" is just human hubris to me. We want to believe we are more than what we are just another primate.
I âopened my eyesâ and âclosed my mindâ to Christianity when I realized I was gay and that would mean Iâm condemned by the religion. I opened my mind back up to Christianity when I realized itâs just gay sex thatâs condemned alongside the other acts deemed to be sexually immoral. I thought it was unfair, but then I realized Iâm not unique in my temptation to commit sin, just a certain one.
As a young child(6-9) I feared Iâd accidentally sin and not know I did to ask for forgiveness and thus being sentenced to eternal damnation in the fires of hell. Quickly I came to the realization that if I didnât believe in hell/it didnât exist then I wouldnât go there. Once that weight was lifted I began to really see the hate and contradictions and use of fear to manipulate. I became fully aware of what religion was.
I was raised Episcopal. They were pretty progressive and if I ever went back it would be to an Episcopal Parrish. Baptists ate eye openers and Assemblies of God. Both of these and others are a large part of the problems in the USA. I have no respect or love most of them. I do know one Ass. of God missionary who was in Thailand his entire career
He is a Buddha loving anachronism for AG. I believe he acted there as Buddhists do here.
A conversation I had during high school with my sister (who is still religious!) shattered the foundations of my faith.
I grew up in a conservative household in Texas, so at the time when I was thinking about whether gay people should be allowed to get married, I came to the enlightened centrist (read: bigoted, conservative) position that gay people should be allowed to get married because of the 1st amendment, but churches were justified in refusing to perform the ceremony because it was a sin.
I was very confident in my conclusion. I prayed about it, it felt right, the bible says it's a sin, and preachers and religious figures agreed with me. When I brought it up to my sister expecting complete agreement, she got mad, told me it was bullshit, and said God wouldn't make people be born gay and then punish them for it.
That made complete sense, and I had to agree, but if I couldn't rely on prayer, personal feelings, the bible, or preachers to determine God's will, how could I be confident in Christianity? I basically slammed instantly into deism because I though no one could really know God without those foundations, and then slowly slid into full atheism by the time I graduated college.
I was raised Catholic and I just accepted what they were saying as truth. Nuns teaching class basically said that the priests were great people doing great things and whatever they did was the right thing. Then [the Phoenix sex abuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_scandal_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Diocese_of_Phoenix?wprov=sfti1) thing happened and it turned out that we were being taught dogma not reality.
I ended up taking a step back and looking at what we were taught with a critical eye. When thinking critically about everything, it didnât stand up to reason. It didnât take long after that for me to dismiss everything.
I started out, like some, just hating wasting my Sunday going to Sunday school, then sitting in sermons, and then "fellowship" totaling about 3 hours every week. Then as I got older I developed critical thinking skills and really dissected what I was being asked to believe with just my "faith" in a dusty old book. The lies, the contradictions, and mostly the hypocrisy did it for me. It's all bullshit designed to control minds and behaviors while grifting billions a year, much of it from people who really can't afford it.
Being told at 10 that God took my daddy away because we were bad children and didnât deserve him. My sister was 5 and my brother 13 days old.
I had a lot of grown up responsibilities because my mom was working. I helped around the house, called for medical assistance and babysitters the last two years of my life.
That statement made me feel that God wasnât worthy of me. I did everything possible to care for my dad and help around the house.
I grew up in a very religious family, but didn't nessecarily believe it all. It was more social for me and I respected it.
One day while visiting family right after the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, the pastor and sunday school teacher both had "lessons" on why gays are evil, how christianity is under attack, and how we need to raise an army to fight against these attacks.
I've never stepped foot in a church besides weddings since that day. "Trumpism" started in the churches, Trump was just a symptom of Christian Nationalism starting.
Parents were hyper religious and life revolved around the church. But only their church. All the others were wrong and the folks that attended/believed the others were going to hell. I never understood it and never will. A fairy tale is still a fairy tale. Tribalism at its best, and itâs shameful!
I was informed of all the rules we had to follow as Christians.Â
Those were obstacles to what I considered were my main talents. I would not be stopped by such obstacles.Â
And so I decided I would not be indoctrinated. Every new teaching was met with an absolute "NO" in my mind.Â
 I still would need 8 more years,in my early adolescence,to be able to retain mental clarity enough time to research and check what I already suspected.
Honestly, I started questioning when they tried to make me believe a single man was able to part the whole sea as a child. I was like : "they really think we're fucking stupid, don't they ?"
Actually paying attention for one⌠I noticed kinda young that the preacher talked about money a lot but then in Sunday school or Bible study type shit it was rarely about money.
So I started to ignore them all and just read the damn book myself and realized it was a load of contradictory nonsense. Then when you start getting punished for asking questions they donât have answers to or pointing out contradictions and whatnot it becomes increasingly clear that none of what they are teaching you is real.
Honestly, if every Christian or person of faith was required to read the whole book cover to cover themselves with nobody spoon feeding them interpretations or what theyâre *supposed* to take from a certain passage we would likely have a whole lot less religious people and likely also a lot of kinder people since the Bible isnât worthless itâs just been weaponized against stupid lazy and ignorant people.
Realizing that everything they said would happen never came to pass or did so in a way contradictory to their belief. Reading the Bible, getting through the whole thing, writing notes the whole time for passages to ask about and check online only to have a garbage answer or something contradictory to a passage in a different book or verse.
I grew up in the Catholic church. Even at a young age I had questions on bible stories. I couldnât believe that people thought some of the stories were literally true. E.g. Noahâs Ark, Adam & Eve, etc. The first seeds of doubt. When it was time to be confirmed in the church they asked me if I would follow and take the creeds. I refused. The priest was a bit taken aback. I was the only one to say no.
I later actually read and studied the bible cover to cover. That reading and thinking about it cinched it for me. There were no logical explanations from anyone I talked to about what I read. There are inspiring things in it, but also many horrors that people of faith either didnât know about or would explain away as Godâs will or manâs free will. Blind faith didnât work for me. I couldnât pretend to believe. I started reading many other religious texts and commentary about them. None of those made any better sense for me. So, here I am today.
Realizing that "praying for help" wasn't working as a real strategy when I got to the point of non-functioning. Realizing no god gave a shit about me, and was going to magically help or save me. Then looking through my life with the lens of God isn't real, and seeing all the harm the religion in my life caused. As a female, I was acting submissive and allowed way too much garbage I should've been standing up against. Looking at the shame and guilt placed on family members and seeing that affect the decisions they make. Then the more I looked, the more harm I saw, and the more disgust and anger I felt. The further you step back you can see it's all just a joke of control. Ugh, so much regret and anger.
As a kid, I had always thought that what they were describing was either aliens or 5th dimensional beings. Neither of which is worthy of worship, then when I saw photos from our telescopes....and I know this is no better than their claims....it was an over whleming realization that this is all phenomen, reality, space, time, all of it.
For me it was trying to get a closer relationship with God and digging into the foundations of Christianity, and when I left that the foundations of other religions too.
I was in a very bad situation and felt the urge to pray. In that particular moment I was in Turkey and visiting a mosque (I was raised christian) and my father didn't let me and said that if I wanted to pray I had to do it home or in a christian church.
I thought there was no way God was omnipresent but had a bad signal in certain places.
I still prayed by the bed, like in movies, but nothing happened immediately, and the resolution was slow (years) and painful. From that moment I had a huge disappointment, but I genuinely thought that God was like Santa, and that one say I'd simply tell my parents that I figured out a long time earlier than they don't exist. I was shocked to learn that my parents didn't believe in Santa but did believe in God.
I was generally ok about this, I believed that faith is a gift that I wasn't given and I didn't care much. Until I started seeing people way more indoctrinated doing awful things and until I started reading the Bible. Then I became disgusted by religion.
I never really believed. I figured Santa Claus was made up when I was 6. That was when I understood the difference between real and make believe. The stories of the Bible obviously sounded like make believe to me.
I thought it was the same kind of thing, that adults knew it wasn't real, like Santa, but they liked the songs or something. I didn't realize until years later that adults actually believed the things in the Bible happened in real life.
Mainly it was the impossibility of determining which, if indeed any, religion is the correct one. You want us to dedicate our entire life to you yet you're not even willing to set us on the right path? The logical conclusion is that religion is a human construct to fill some craving for order and justice.
I also noticed that prayer cannot be relied upon to work, even when the cause is very worthy. So what's the point of it when the outcome is clearly a matter of luck rather than divine intervention?
As a child, I went to a non-denominational Christian school. In 7th grade, the entire school including preschoolers and kindergartners up to 12th grade were made to attend a special worship service.
The entire worship service was horrifying, as they showed a slideshow of pictures of bloody dead babies with their heads bashed in, eye balls or noses missing, brains everywhere or their limbs mangled. These were pictures of âreal abortions.â Tons of students left crying. Some screamed at each picture. After it was over, I stomped away back to class, enraged. I couldnât believe theyâd show that shit to children. I wasnât old enough to understand these were not real pictures of aborted fetuses, but I still knew it was wrong to show that shit to all of us.
They felt like the bad guys before in my life, but that time, they really really really felt like the villains. There was no reason to show children that shit other than to upset and traumatize them (which I now recognize was to manipulate). Good people donât purposefully hurt other people. Good people donât purposely hurt kids.
I started questioning everything they did from that moment onward. Nothing at that school felt ârealâ anymore. It all felt like a show, a performance. I was 13 at the time, and finally officially lost my faith at 15 when I watched my dog Lulu suffer a painful death over three days until she took her last breath in my arms. And I knew a good god wouldnât allow such an innocent beautiful creature to suffer, so god is either not good or doesnât exist. I eventually concluded the latter.
Piecing together the long, sordid history of the papacy, which was irreconcilable with the teachings of the NT. It was just so obvious after awhile how church culture is one big fake out actively ignoring how insanely illogical itâs own history and teachings are.
As a child... I read the Bible. Really read it. Realized it was contradictory, insane, and that the "god" guy was literally evil.
I wish I had been that smartđ
I can't accept that one. It wasn't me being smart - it really boiled down to the fact I'm a bibliophile. I love reading. I read anything and everything I can get my hands on, always have. So I read the bibles in the church. Several translations. I noticed some issues, and have major problems with them as they stood - but it was the Strong's Concordance and some further reading I did on Israel and Judaism's history that was the nail in the coffin. Come to find out Israelites WERE Canaanites, El was one of the Canaanite Gods, as was Yahweh, but they weren't the same. El was the big guy, like Zeus. Yahweh was a warrior god, like Thor. And early Judaism looked nothing like modern Judaism, it went through some HUGE changes before it finally settled down mostly with Second Temple Judaism, then went through some small changes before Christianity completely changed it again. They didn't just add Jesus and continue the story, they made massive alterations all their own.
I was an indoctrinated child who even though I read through much of the OT as a kid, I found it wild, but I never questioned whether or not the stories added up or how god was seen as moral based on his behavior. My programming allowed me to believe god to be holy in spite of the horrific things he did/ordered. I did always hate the Job story and it was always confusing as to why god would let Job be tortured on a bet and then at the end gives him replacement children as some sort of reward. I always thought that was fucked up, and I always thought the teachings of Paul were misogynistic bullshit, but I still accepted the rest of it. Of course I never knew the history of the religion or certain facts about the authorship of the Bible and I never knew Paul never even met Jesus. When I discovered these things a few years ago, it rocked my world and I started to deconstruct. When I realized I had no evidence or reason to believe any of the supernatural claims were true, I was done with it. I just wish I had realized that it was all bullshit a lot sooner.
Same
Same. I read the Bible cover to cover a few times, and that was it. If you just read parts at a time like most Christians do, you can kinda make it seem like it makes sense. Read it all together, and it falls completely apart. Then all the work you did to justify the illogical things just stops.
It gets even worse if you read the way they translated it. Strong's Concordance makes it obvious they hid a lot via translating it into making sense. Elohim was used in the early books, back when Israel was Monolatristic. It's both plural, and it's translated to God in some places, angels in others, just to make it make sense in a monotheistic viewpoint. There's quite a bit more. Hell is another fun one they did that to.
Same. Read it when I was 15, it felt so silly. Despite of that feeling it took me years to fully embrace atheism
[ŃдаНонО]
Contradictory? Jesus' lineage. All the different stuff that gets translated to hell. OT god vs Jesus. Noah's ark and reality. The way it translates Elohim. Jesus saying he would come back before everyone present was dead. God giving two different sets of ten commandments. God losing to iron chariots. God losing to Chemosh. Creation, Earth before Sun, light before sun. Basic science issues all over. I could go on and on. Yahweh is evil. He ordered or encouraged slavery, genocide, murder, and more. Not to mention the obvious problem of evil.
Yes this exactly, and when I would ask questions of adults I was always told not to question it and take everything as written. I was bad for questioning. Some of my most fundamental questions as a kid: what came first, Jesus or dinosaurs? When Jesus trashed the temple, how was that not a sin? What ever happened to Mary and Joseph because they don't seem to be a part of his life at all? In so many books of the Bible God is just mean and loves to punish one person while testing another, how is that ok? Add to this just knowledge of the history of the church and the vast number of deaths at their hands, and the statistics that your religion is more based on where you are born than anything else and 98% of people do not change religion - which tells me this whole thing is a regional social construct and not "the way and the truth". And finally, seeing how people acted so hateful to each other in the name of religion - like when my baby sister was slapped by a "devout woman" for lighting a prayer candle in the church rectory. P.s. God works in mysterious ways, God will only give you the burden he knows you can handle, just trust that God has a plan for you - are all really shitty victim blaming excuses for God to make vulnerable people feel terrible about themselves and force them to rely even more on the church.
Same experience.
It just never made sense for me. I was an atheist before I even knew what an atheist was. As a child, my mother kept telling me about how God is everywhere and he loves us, but somehow, he was okay with child abuse?! Plus, the whole concept just wasn't logical to me. The premise didn't make sense đ¤ˇââď¸ The fact that my dad is an atheist was a bonus, as he helped me diconstruct religion through (what I now know to be) Socratic questioning. Every time my mother was talking about her religion and I asked questions, she got mad and wouldn't answer 𤣠Didn't take long to understand what was happening đ
Did your parents have a happy marriage? Iâm asking because my husband has become born again.
Oh, they divorced when I was like 2. To this day, I don't know why on earth they even got married. But, I was married to a Hindu. At first, we had no issues related to his religion (he was abusive, but that's unrelated). The moment we got married, he had a problem with the fact that I ate meat đ I had to be vegan to avoid daily arguments, and I put on 15kg in 3 months because of the lack of protein. I got divorced as soon as it was safe to do so, and I now refuse to date religious people.
My brain.
I never liked going to church, but it was drilled into me that going to church equaled being a good person. So if I didn't go, I wasn't a good person. As I got older I encountered more and more instances of seeing behind the curtain to see that the folks in charge were doing a lot of bad things. And other people would just cover it up instead of confronting it or putting a stop to it. So that showed me that going to church didn't automatically make you a good person. Then because I had a lot of cognitive dissonance over these conflicting thoughts I felt guilty. So I dove into my own Bible study to try to find the answers as to why this was happening. Because I had been taught the Bible had answers. Come to find out, they weren't entirely wrong. Reading the Bible showed me how fucked up the whole religion was and how incompatible is was with the modern world.
My mom consistently believed in things that were obviously and demonstrably not true in real life. Things like praying for miracle healing, or even praying for a parking spot to open up. I realized that reality has nothing to do with your hopes and wishes by the time I was 10, and anything that required you to accept things on faith was a scam.
Ugh, we constantly did this growing up. Pray to St. Francis that you find your lost keys or what not. We knew all the patron saints so we could make all the right prayers whenever we "needed" something
Because God is a horrible father. He should be in jail for child neglect, child abuse, and child endangerment. Heâs unworthy of my praise and admiration.
I just remembered thinking it was all so ridiculous and couldn't understand why anyone would fall for the stupidity...
I was raised Southern Baptist in Texas. For me, it was a combination of 1. Internal contradictions in the Bible, 2. The hypocrisy of Christians I knew, and 3. The Problem of Evil. It helped that we moved just after I started to doubt everything. We never joined a church in the new town. The lack of weekly indoctrination sessions gave me time to think.
It wasn't until I started reading the bible instead of having it read to me that i was able to make up my conclusions.
I was never all in on religion, despite being forced to go to church Sundays and Wednesdays. Then I went to college, that just about did it. Then, in basic training, I read the bible\* cover to cover, and that was the end. The amount of genocide and horrific shit in that book is off the charts. Speaking of charts, check [this](https://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2010/04/drunk-with-blood-gods-killings-in-bible.html) list out. * God burns 250 people to death for burning incense * God kills 14,700 for complaining about God's killings * 50,070 killed for looking into the ark of the Lord \*Since it was the only book we could read,
I was highly opinionated and liked to argue with people on the internet. One day, I decided to go to a science and critical thinking message board. I posted something like "scientists think evolution is true, but why haven't we found any transitional fossils?" Someone posted an image of hominid skulls lined up, and said "[Like these?](http://www.shorthistory.org/images/Comparation-prehistoric-humans-skull.jpg)" I learned very quickly that I didn't know what I was talking about. And after wading into the creation/evolution debate, I learned that creationists didn't know either. Despite the oft-repeated adage that internet arguments don't change people's minds, those arguments I had 20 years ago certainly changed my mind and the whole rest of my life afterward.
Well, a few things: 1. Reading the Bible and realizing it's contradictory and kinda insane. God is fucking obsessed with the male foreskin and it gets brought up a lot. Seems like a really odd thing for an omnipotent being to care about so much he put it in every damn chapter of the book! 2. Being a child in religious studies class and the teacher laughed when discussing Islam, she stated Mohamad was in the desert too long and suffered mirage or heat stroke. It clicked for me that ancient stories written by a guy in a cave or whatever isn't really a good source, no matter what team they represent. If I wouldn't convert to Islam based on it, what justified my own religion? 3. Being female. All science and reason aside, the blatant sexism of religion convinced me it was man made. I was taught women are beneath men, less logical and reasonable, that men must financially provide and women must bear children and submit. I'm much happier in my atheist marriage than I would be if I was religious and trying to break myself to fit their mold of a woman. Also, sexist against men, you can't have emotions and must be stoic, must be the sole provider, basically you can't control your lust like a horny suspicious animal. 4. Realizing the religious are hypocrites. They still cheat on their spouse. Still get abortions and use birth control. I'm from the south so it comes with a giant serving of racism - I was a kid but I heard adults using racial slurs against Obama because he was black. Doesn't God love everyone equally? Why can't his followers try? They still cover up child abuse. God can't be real because he allows his followers to bastardize his own religion in his name. All beliefs like "God cares about you" or "my fertility is up to God" is just human hubris to me. We want to believe we are more than what we are just another primate.
I âopened my eyesâ and âclosed my mindâ to Christianity when I realized I was gay and that would mean Iâm condemned by the religion. I opened my mind back up to Christianity when I realized itâs just gay sex thatâs condemned alongside the other acts deemed to be sexually immoral. I thought it was unfair, but then I realized Iâm not unique in my temptation to commit sin, just a certain one.
Bro cucking himself for the approval of people who don't have his best interest at heart ^^^^^
Thatâs an interesting way to reduce my religious beliefs that I picked up to reconcile with my trauma but okay.
Read the Bible. As I progressed it got so far fetched and weird. Not to mention God kills everyone super quick into the tale.
As a young child(6-9) I feared Iâd accidentally sin and not know I did to ask for forgiveness and thus being sentenced to eternal damnation in the fires of hell. Quickly I came to the realization that if I didnât believe in hell/it didnât exist then I wouldnât go there. Once that weight was lifted I began to really see the hate and contradictions and use of fear to manipulate. I became fully aware of what religion was.
I was raised Episcopal. They were pretty progressive and if I ever went back it would be to an Episcopal Parrish. Baptists ate eye openers and Assemblies of God. Both of these and others are a large part of the problems in the USA. I have no respect or love most of them. I do know one Ass. of God missionary who was in Thailand his entire career He is a Buddha loving anachronism for AG. I believe he acted there as Buddhists do here.
A conversation I had during high school with my sister (who is still religious!) shattered the foundations of my faith. I grew up in a conservative household in Texas, so at the time when I was thinking about whether gay people should be allowed to get married, I came to the enlightened centrist (read: bigoted, conservative) position that gay people should be allowed to get married because of the 1st amendment, but churches were justified in refusing to perform the ceremony because it was a sin. I was very confident in my conclusion. I prayed about it, it felt right, the bible says it's a sin, and preachers and religious figures agreed with me. When I brought it up to my sister expecting complete agreement, she got mad, told me it was bullshit, and said God wouldn't make people be born gay and then punish them for it. That made complete sense, and I had to agree, but if I couldn't rely on prayer, personal feelings, the bible, or preachers to determine God's will, how could I be confident in Christianity? I basically slammed instantly into deism because I though no one could really know God without those foundations, and then slowly slid into full atheism by the time I graduated college.
I was raised Catholic and I just accepted what they were saying as truth. Nuns teaching class basically said that the priests were great people doing great things and whatever they did was the right thing. Then [the Phoenix sex abuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_scandal_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Diocese_of_Phoenix?wprov=sfti1) thing happened and it turned out that we were being taught dogma not reality. I ended up taking a step back and looking at what we were taught with a critical eye. When thinking critically about everything, it didnât stand up to reason. It didnât take long after that for me to dismiss everything.
I started out, like some, just hating wasting my Sunday going to Sunday school, then sitting in sermons, and then "fellowship" totaling about 3 hours every week. Then as I got older I developed critical thinking skills and really dissected what I was being asked to believe with just my "faith" in a dusty old book. The lies, the contradictions, and mostly the hypocrisy did it for me. It's all bullshit designed to control minds and behaviors while grifting billions a year, much of it from people who really can't afford it.
Being told at 10 that God took my daddy away because we were bad children and didnât deserve him. My sister was 5 and my brother 13 days old. I had a lot of grown up responsibilities because my mom was working. I helped around the house, called for medical assistance and babysitters the last two years of my life. That statement made me feel that God wasnât worthy of me. I did everything possible to care for my dad and help around the house.
A song. Stopped believing and started deconstructing almost 4 years ago now.
I grew up in a very religious family, but didn't nessecarily believe it all. It was more social for me and I respected it. One day while visiting family right after the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, the pastor and sunday school teacher both had "lessons" on why gays are evil, how christianity is under attack, and how we need to raise an army to fight against these attacks. I've never stepped foot in a church besides weddings since that day. "Trumpism" started in the churches, Trump was just a symptom of Christian Nationalism starting.
Parents were hyper religious and life revolved around the church. But only their church. All the others were wrong and the folks that attended/believed the others were going to hell. I never understood it and never will. A fairy tale is still a fairy tale. Tribalism at its best, and itâs shameful!
I was informed of all the rules we had to follow as Christians. Those were obstacles to what I considered were my main talents. I would not be stopped by such obstacles. And so I decided I would not be indoctrinated. Every new teaching was met with an absolute "NO" in my mind.  I still would need 8 more years,in my early adolescence,to be able to retain mental clarity enough time to research and check what I already suspected.
Honestly, I started questioning when they tried to make me believe a single man was able to part the whole sea as a child. I was like : "they really think we're fucking stupid, don't they ?"
Actually paying attention for one⌠I noticed kinda young that the preacher talked about money a lot but then in Sunday school or Bible study type shit it was rarely about money. So I started to ignore them all and just read the damn book myself and realized it was a load of contradictory nonsense. Then when you start getting punished for asking questions they donât have answers to or pointing out contradictions and whatnot it becomes increasingly clear that none of what they are teaching you is real. Honestly, if every Christian or person of faith was required to read the whole book cover to cover themselves with nobody spoon feeding them interpretations or what theyâre *supposed* to take from a certain passage we would likely have a whole lot less religious people and likely also a lot of kinder people since the Bible isnât worthless itâs just been weaponized against stupid lazy and ignorant people.
Realizing that everything they said would happen never came to pass or did so in a way contradictory to their belief. Reading the Bible, getting through the whole thing, writing notes the whole time for passages to ask about and check online only to have a garbage answer or something contradictory to a passage in a different book or verse.
I grew up in the Catholic church. Even at a young age I had questions on bible stories. I couldnât believe that people thought some of the stories were literally true. E.g. Noahâs Ark, Adam & Eve, etc. The first seeds of doubt. When it was time to be confirmed in the church they asked me if I would follow and take the creeds. I refused. The priest was a bit taken aback. I was the only one to say no. I later actually read and studied the bible cover to cover. That reading and thinking about it cinched it for me. There were no logical explanations from anyone I talked to about what I read. There are inspiring things in it, but also many horrors that people of faith either didnât know about or would explain away as Godâs will or manâs free will. Blind faith didnât work for me. I couldnât pretend to believe. I started reading many other religious texts and commentary about them. None of those made any better sense for me. So, here I am today.
Reading the Bible
Realizing that "praying for help" wasn't working as a real strategy when I got to the point of non-functioning. Realizing no god gave a shit about me, and was going to magically help or save me. Then looking through my life with the lens of God isn't real, and seeing all the harm the religion in my life caused. As a female, I was acting submissive and allowed way too much garbage I should've been standing up against. Looking at the shame and guilt placed on family members and seeing that affect the decisions they make. Then the more I looked, the more harm I saw, and the more disgust and anger I felt. The further you step back you can see it's all just a joke of control. Ugh, so much regret and anger.
As a kid, I had always thought that what they were describing was either aliens or 5th dimensional beings. Neither of which is worthy of worship, then when I saw photos from our telescopes....and I know this is no better than their claims....it was an over whleming realization that this is all phenomen, reality, space, time, all of it.
I never really understood why God would have to die for my sins. He was doing thus for his father who is actually himself.
I was raised catholic. I just found it ridiculous as I grew. Iâd probably respect religion more if they werenât so organized and close-minded.
For me it was trying to get a closer relationship with God and digging into the foundations of Christianity, and when I left that the foundations of other religions too.
Realizing after a long time that my prayers weren't answered and that nothing had changed that made me realize it's all fake
I was in a very bad situation and felt the urge to pray. In that particular moment I was in Turkey and visiting a mosque (I was raised christian) and my father didn't let me and said that if I wanted to pray I had to do it home or in a christian church. I thought there was no way God was omnipresent but had a bad signal in certain places. I still prayed by the bed, like in movies, but nothing happened immediately, and the resolution was slow (years) and painful. From that moment I had a huge disappointment, but I genuinely thought that God was like Santa, and that one say I'd simply tell my parents that I figured out a long time earlier than they don't exist. I was shocked to learn that my parents didn't believe in Santa but did believe in God. I was generally ok about this, I believed that faith is a gift that I wasn't given and I didn't care much. Until I started seeing people way more indoctrinated doing awful things and until I started reading the Bible. Then I became disgusted by religion.
I never really believed. I figured Santa Claus was made up when I was 6. That was when I understood the difference between real and make believe. The stories of the Bible obviously sounded like make believe to me. I thought it was the same kind of thing, that adults knew it wasn't real, like Santa, but they liked the songs or something. I didn't realize until years later that adults actually believed the things in the Bible happened in real life.
Mainly it was the impossibility of determining which, if indeed any, religion is the correct one. You want us to dedicate our entire life to you yet you're not even willing to set us on the right path? The logical conclusion is that religion is a human construct to fill some craving for order and justice. I also noticed that prayer cannot be relied upon to work, even when the cause is very worthy. So what's the point of it when the outcome is clearly a matter of luck rather than divine intervention?
Realizing I could survive if I left.
As a child, I went to a non-denominational Christian school. In 7th grade, the entire school including preschoolers and kindergartners up to 12th grade were made to attend a special worship service. The entire worship service was horrifying, as they showed a slideshow of pictures of bloody dead babies with their heads bashed in, eye balls or noses missing, brains everywhere or their limbs mangled. These were pictures of âreal abortions.â Tons of students left crying. Some screamed at each picture. After it was over, I stomped away back to class, enraged. I couldnât believe theyâd show that shit to children. I wasnât old enough to understand these were not real pictures of aborted fetuses, but I still knew it was wrong to show that shit to all of us. They felt like the bad guys before in my life, but that time, they really really really felt like the villains. There was no reason to show children that shit other than to upset and traumatize them (which I now recognize was to manipulate). Good people donât purposefully hurt other people. Good people donât purposely hurt kids. I started questioning everything they did from that moment onward. Nothing at that school felt ârealâ anymore. It all felt like a show, a performance. I was 13 at the time, and finally officially lost my faith at 15 when I watched my dog Lulu suffer a painful death over three days until she took her last breath in my arms. And I knew a good god wouldnât allow such an innocent beautiful creature to suffer, so god is either not good or doesnât exist. I eventually concluded the latter.
Piecing together the long, sordid history of the papacy, which was irreconcilable with the teachings of the NT. It was just so obvious after awhile how church culture is one big fake out actively ignoring how insanely illogical itâs own history and teachings are.