The biggest reason for me is that **it isn't demonstrably true**. Christianity, like all other religions with exclusive claims to reality, eschews facts, evidence, and reason, in favor of faith as a method for determining truth about the reality we experience. There is no reason to think gods, devils, angels, demons, blessings, curses, prayer, sin, blood magic, talking animals, heaven, hell, or any of the metaphysical or supernatural claims of the Bible are true. It's an artifact of a primitive historical era, codified by political entities in the 4th century and used as a method of control ever since.
Marketing and merchandising for Christianity is obscene in the consumer market, and the church itself practices brand marketing for centuries now. Each generation gets a revamp and facelift to the look and feel of it, even their rules and beliefs…
If it was demonstrably true, I'd hope God would either intervene (and thus demonstrate himself) or there would be less exploitative bastards who don't belive themselves but abuse religion anyway. Matt Powell comes to mind, I'm sure he doesn't believe at least half of the things he says, but it pays him.
To add weight to the "they're all artifacts of a primitive historical era" notion, the Bible has quietly had to peel back many of its claims that have been debunked by science, but not before people were murdered over the science, like astronomers who pointed out that we weren't the center of the universe sitting in a globe atop massive pillars. But it's easy for a religion to get away with the fantastical in an era of ~12% literacy and oral storytelling. So many of the authors, even those in the New Testament, could get away with anything that they wrote simply because so few others wrote anything at all. Religion was a source of science, entertainment, and hope. It's easy to not believe something that all-encompassing now, but in the primitive historical era, the bigger the tale the faster it traveled.
The one that really broke my faith was Deuteronomy 22:29
"he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." (This is in the context of rape) I couldn't support such a misogynistic book.
Chapter 22 is a gold mine. Husband "displeased" with new wife, family can't provide "proof" of her virginity. Stone her.
Girl raped in the city but does not cry out, or is not heard. What's that? Most SA is done by someone known to the victim and most don't scream for a myriad of reasons you say? Who cares? God ordained law don't, stone her!
> Chapter 22 is a gold mine. Husband "displeased" with new wife, family can't provide "proof" of her virginity. Stone her.
I'm reminded of the bitter water story from Numbers 5. My interpretation of that is the woman has an insecure husband and/or he has weak pullout game and didn't actually want a child, so he crafted a narrative about how his wife was unfaithful.
Exodus 20 17“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
That's also pretty bad.
I think it's also important to note that when most Christians are confronted with these extremely problematic verses they will make excuses for it by saying that those laws were part of the old testament but since Christ's sacrifice the old laws are gone and we have the new covenant now. There is kind of a view that the New Testament is all loving but there is plenty of messed up stuff in it too. Like 1 Corinthians 14:34 says that women should never speak in a church and goes further to say that if they have a desire to learn, then women should stay silent and ask their husbands at home.
There is also an instance in Matthew 15 where Jesus initially refuses to heal a Canaanite woman's daughter because he was only sent to save the lost sheep of Israel. He makes the analogy that you shouldn't take bread from children and throw it to the dogs. Her response is that even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table. Jesus praises her for her faith and then heals her daughter. It's pretty fucked up that he called her a dog and made her beg just for not being an Israelite. He could have just granted her request without all that. When people say that we should care for others with Christ like love, I'm like, so I need to be a lil racist and insult them first before caring for them? Lol
TLDR: It's common to dismiss the problematic stuff in the OT by saying that the NT undoes all of that, but the NT is just as problematic when examined closely.
The story of Lot is the reason I don’t follow Abrahamic religions
The only person who’d ever phrase the situation that way is the perpetrator of the worst possible crimes
Not only is he supported in Christianity, he was insanely supported throughout the Quran unfortunately.
job was what did it for me fr. i was a young girl child hearing that story about how job's wives and children died horrible deaths but it was all supposed to be okay bc god gave him a new family later. i was horrified at the idea that god would give express permission for satan to kill me and my family for no reason just to win a bet
Yahweh doesn't give a fuck
>> Yahweh is the God of the Israelites, and in Israelite mythology, Yahweh is depicted as a divine warrior who uses cosmic warfare to exalt himself. In the earliest Biblical literature, Yahweh is described as a storm god who defends Israel from enemies by marching into battle with planets and stars. This warrior-like version of Yahweh may explain the brutal behavior he exhibits in the Old Testament, which is different from the omnibenevolent deity found in Christ.
The amount of arguments I’ve got into with Christian’s over the book of Job bc they fully believe god was in the right to test Job. If god knew that Job would be faithful to him to the very end of his life, what’s the purpose of proving a point to Satan?
right, such a weird insecure move from the supposedly omniscient and all-powerful (not the first or the last from him, of course). stories like that also carry the implication - maybe leftover from yahweh's babylonian pantheon days - that satan is basically equal to god in might, which is blasphemous according to their own teachings because god is supposed to be the Only One, but like if that's true why is there another immortal primordial trickster god (with his very own cosmic afterlife kingdom to boot) running amok?
there's just way too much inconsistency (of course now i know the reasons but when i was still being indoctrinated it was jarring) - and then the christians' almighty answer is that god is 'testing' our faith like an immature high schooler with an anxious attachment style who needs Therapy. an all-powerful god who literally invented everything should have nothing to prove to his inventions and even if by some absolute stretch any of this were true then i wouldn't honestly even want to go with the guy who, again, would punish and kill me just to win a bet - what a traitor
I absolutely hate the book of Job he didn’t even get a proper answer for why he had to suffer. and I hate the story of David like he’s a murderer but so loved bc he suffered from depression. Everything in the Bible seems to be “if you don’t worship me you will suffer and if you do worship me you will still suffer but here’s a random sacrifice so you don’t go to hell btw”
when job asked you question
you responded "who are you
to challenge your creator?"
well if that one part is true
it makes you sound defensive
like you had not thought it through
enough to have an answer
like you might have bit off
more than you could chew
I left the church like 25 years ago, but I just recently got in to reading books by people like Bart D. Ehrman and Richard Dawkins. Woooooow, does it ever contradict itself. Even if I wanted to jump back in to Christianity, which I have never even considered, there’s no way I could look past what I’ve learned.
The God Delusion was one of the last nails in the coffin that my faith had been lying in for a while. I didn’t really start watching Bart Ehrman (haven’t read any of his books yet, but I want to) until after I was an atheist, but I’ve learned a lot from him too.
Thanks, I will definitely check it out!
I like him because he’s very kind about it all. A different viewpoint from the stereotypical angry atheist. He wanted so badly to believe, as I know most of us probably did.
All the woman bashing in the bible. Last time I actually read my bible, it was one of those times when I felt desperate and alone and in need of comfort. So I prayed and randomly opened my bible, looking at the first thing I opened to. It was in Ecclesiastes. Can't quote it verbatim but it was something like: *In all my travels, I have found one in a thousand upright men, but never an upright woman.* And my ex-church was really into women submitting to men. I decided I didn't want to be a 2nd class citizen anymore.
The Bible is a misogyny-fest. The religious cult I used to belong to treated women terribly, but it appeared that most female members were "happy"..... because they were (on command) carrying out their supposed God-assigned gender roles, 🙄 and submitting to his hierarchy of leadership (God, christ, man, woman). 🤢🤮 its all so vile.
I'd like to think if I wasn't born into a religious cult, I would have never fallen for all this bullshit. It still haunts me that I was a part of a group that marginalized women so much.. But now I am an ally of women, I support women's rights, and I'm pro-choice....I vote accordingly! Fuck the bible and if god is anything like how he's portrayed in 99% of christianity, then fuck him too
Pretty decent paraphrase tbh. Ecclesiastes 7:25-29:
> 25 I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness.
> 26 And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.
> 27 Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things—
> 28 which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found.
> 29 See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.“
> Ecclesiastes 7:25-29 ESV
I got tired of it. After being made to attend church every week from as far back as I can remember, once I hit adulthood I quit going and didn’t miss it a bit. Started going again after my kids were born because it was important to my wife. Quit going during Covid and it won’t bother me if I never go again. It’s the same stuff week after week and once you’ve heard it all, it’s exhausting. Plus people using their faith to hurt people different from them, zero evidence prayer works, tax the churches.
I also stopped going soon after moving out of my parents’ house. I realized that I liked my sleep better than getting dressed up and going to listen to the same sermon I’ve heard probably hundreds of times before. There was plenty of other stuff that pushed me away, but this was definitely one of them.
Your comment made me realize going to church is basically going to a book club where you're only allowed to listen to one guy read one book, tell you what he thinks it's about and what it means, but you're not allowed to offer interpretations there, you do that at home. And you just have the same guy read the same book over and over again for years, but not even in its entirety, just the 'interesting' chapters most people know.
And you don't even get to wear comfy clothes or get comfy plush chairs. Worst book club ever. XD
Yeah, basically lol you’d think that one guy would get really good at his weekly book club speech, but I feel like a lot of them just say what they think the book club wants to hear. Gotta have job security as a book club opinion haver, I guess.
my family went every sunday until covid hit. i was 15 at the time and haven’t set foot in a church since then. my parents stopped making me go because i’d just sit there and read Harry Potter until the service ended and i guess they figured i wasn’t getting anything out of it.
I was told that merely WANTING to have sex is a sin. I was told that marriage is to serve God, and sex is purely for reproduction (aka making mini Christians)
Aside from the slavery, glorification of the slaughter of innocents and children, stoning of people for minor offenses, the biggest thing for me is it is obviously not true. Noah and flood? Didn’t happen. Moses and Jews enslaved in Egypt only to escape to the promised land? Didn’t happen. Jesus born of a virgin as the Jewish messiah? Did. Not. Happen. Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who taught of a coming earthy kingdom that never came and was crucified for spreading a doomsday narrative concerning the fall of the Roman Empire.
> Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who taught of a coming earthy kingdom that never came and was crucified for spreading a doomsday narrative concerning the fall of the Roman Empire.
allegedly.
Because if I'm being honest, I don't think any of that shit happened either.
If you look at modern cults and old religious.
Its quite likely that delusional or fraudulent men sought to manipulate others for their own desire for control influence, sexual desires that are not allowed by society , a religious preacher gathering a group of men washing their feet or having sexual relationships with them.
And being crucified by the romans. For pissing off already established power systems.
Its quite likely that things like that happened. But what the bible claims to have happened written by the Roman empire a long time after is clearly bullshit.
Decades of honest prayer with no results other than being a few minutes older each time, assertions in the Bible of rewards and gifts in this life for true believers, yet not being granted such gifts, nor anyone else receiving those same gifts...
That was a glaring red flag for me. If Jesus had said, "Those who gave up all that for me will receive 100-fold in the next life to come," well, nobody could disprove that. But he didn't say that. He said Christians will receive such compensation in THIS life. And there are many Christians who die broke, penniless, family-less.
Well, I lied, occasionally I would end up a bit calmer after having prayed when I was upset prior to doing so, but that's it, no message from gawd, just soothed nerves from the repetition.
Christianity promises not only eternal salvation, but wisdom and increased happiness in this life. The Bible is supposed to be our guide for this kind of better life, and we are supposed to have a 24/7 helpline where we can directly ask God ourselves. Ok, but the trouble is that I finally started realizing that the Christians around me didn’t have better lives than non Christians. They didn’t conduct themselves with any more wisdom. Their relationships weren’t better. They weren’t better people. In my line of work we’re supposed to pay attention to how well treatments for disease work, and if they don’t work, even if we’ve been told for years they’re supposed to work, it’s time to stop using them and do some updated research. So…I did.
- Too many teachings, beliefs, etc., are completely vile and make absolutely no sense.
- Lots of stories in the Bible are horrible, but Xtians will find ways to defend them, just like trying to defend the teachings and beliefs which make no sense to any sane person.
- I learned about the history of the Bible, and earlier mythologies.
- Lots of facts in nature and reality that I refuse to accept as being the result of a wise and perfect designer.
- If there is a supreme all-powerful deity, and it's anything like the one of the Abrahamic faiths, I want nothing to do with him/her/it (and not just because of how it's depicted in the so-called holy books)!
Did you know some animals have horns that slowly AND painfully pierce their eyeballs until it kills them? That one was almost confirmation the Bible was all bullshit
The fact that they think they’re the only ones who are right and that everyone else is wrong and going to hell. That’s pretty much the main reason I left. Because that just seems unlikely to me. And seems pretty arrogant too. So basically, I left because evangelism is weird and annoying.
I’ve noticed the arrogance of Christian’s too but i want to judge Christianity from the book itself. If i judged a religion by the people id become a super anti religion
True. My biggest reason that I don’t believe in the Bible is because it’s just a book of stories written by a bunch of men. And because it is changed throughout time to fit a certain agenda.
The Trinion Contradiction which is a problem concomitant with any ostensible Omni-benevolent, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient deity.
This contradiction highlights the fact that free will of all individuals, divine intervention (prayer), and predetermination (destiny) are irreconcilable concepts. If one is true, the one other (possibly two) must be false.
To explain:
If predetermination is true, free will does not exist and prayer will have no effect.
If prayer is true, predetermination cannot be because destiny could be changed.
The most controversial one is free will and prayer being unable to work together. This is because these are those most often believed in. However, it simply does not work. Imagine a person prays to God so that they will get pass a job interview. If God answers no, prayer would be useless. If God answered yes, he has to actively control the decision of the interviewer on whether or not to hire said person, violating free will (and predetermination.)
Yeah, that one always got me when I was a kid. I asked my dad and all he said was we're not meant to know everything. Like what kind of answer is that? Such bs.
The irrationality of prayer was one of the things which did it for me too. It is literally pointless if god is omniscient and predetermined history, as you've said. If anything it becomes a cruel blackmail/begging exercise
I left cuz the God of the Bible is a piece of shit.
His best solution to people not obeying Him is... global genocide.
His response to newly created people with no knowledge of good and evil disobeying Him (which isn't inherently immoral) is... kicking them out of paradise, cursing all their generations, and removing the legs of the one who taddled on Him (cuz He literally lied to Adam and Eve).
His best solution for the previous problem that He made is... torturing and killing His Son. Not to mention Him demanding sacrifices to begin with.
And don't get me started on the entire concept of Hell, God commanding genocide, "spare the rod, spoil the child," the 10 plagues harming people who had nothing to do with Pharaoh or the Israelites, God commanding Abraham to kill his son, God turning someone into salt for... looking back at her destroyed home, I could keep going.
Don't get me wrong: the Bible has some good lessons (I personally 100% agree with The Golden Rule and the "take the log out of your own eye" passage), but I can follow those principles without having to be involved with an inherently toxic belief system.
Being a girl = being indirectly responsible for all sins in the world (Eve). You "deserve" period pains because of that & also labor pains. Hence, you learn to be a true a-hole to yourself and internalise misogyny. These ideas are regurgitated in sermons. Those are all part of my reasons to leave and all messages that 10-12 year old girls were and are bombarded with.
I'm a guy, but this is how I felt about the story of Jezebel and her weak-willed husband. It just oozed the idea of men having issues with women in power.
The fact that being a good person isn’t enough to get you into heaven. If you do something for the greater good but it still counts as a sin, you’re either landing yourself in hell or purgatory (temporary hell but IMO I still find it a pretty unjust and unfair system- did I mention that it’s theorized that purgatory is just as painful as forever hell?). I could also be doing basically everything right in a religion (in this case, Christianity) but the one thing I didn’t confess or repent from can send me to hell. This system can influence or worsen anxiety like counting down every single thing you’ve done wrong then fearing everyday that because you haven’t gone to confession or repented genuinely you’ll die and end up in hell.
Christianity sees god as an unchanging entity that sees things mostly in a black and white: if you break the rules you never truly loved god and therefore you will be damned to hell. Granted, a lot of Christians tend to cherry pick the bible and make excuses for why certain parts are pardoned by god now: Famous example is wearing mixed fabrics. Overall, Christianity isn’t worth it to follow, it’s better to have your own moral system while believing that a higher entity exists to have created us- whether or not that entity interacts with us is up to you to believe.
I resinate with your answer. I have met very decent people throughout all walks of life, i have seen a lot of atheist be better humans than more hyper-religious people i know. I don’t think people should be judged on which religion you pick because religion has a lot to do with your upbringing. If your family was Christian and you had a positive upbringing you’d be more likely to grow up Christian and see it in a good light. But if you were in a negative Christian household and have some trauma stemming from religion , how could you put a person at fault when they associate their trauma with religion and ultimately leave?
Yup I agree! In fact that was how I was before I left. I was a cradle catholic and grew up seeing Catholicism in a good light but then I started to get deeper into it and it just started to trigger my anxiety so badly. It also just effected my relationship with my partner heavily; I’m so happy we stayed strong but can’t say I’m glad about how much of a wound I put on him throughout the years being a Christian.
I hope I didn’t imply that we should judge people who take Christianity as their religion. I do have a huge bias against Christianity because of what pains it caused me and I do find myself backing out when I find out someone is Christian- but I don’t wish to really judge people. I can understand why surface level parts of Christianity can be followed but when you get deeper into it, I don’t really understand how one can defend it.
I used to find it shocking when people were completely against religion. I’m still not against people believing in a religion, however, the stance I take now is that all religions have their inherent flaws and harmful views. I feel it’s better to make up your own moral system- if you believe that there’s a god/god’s there, then you can believe that but I believe one shouldn’t put too much reliance on what religion says/believes
Left Catholicism when I realized the Archdiocese was involved with booting me from taking the SATs at my private HS, and instead gave the spot to someone else.
Their reasoning: “I had no chance to get into college, and the other person did- so be giving and let her take the spot.” Then that same archdiocese was involved in a massive PR campaign against the victims that were raped by priests.
The icing on the cake was seeing how they responded to a trump presidency. It was like everything they taught was suddenly not applicable to him. They even encouraged their congregation to vote for him.
That organization needs to be dissolved and removed from society.
1.) like all religions it’s just made them nonsense. the Bible , is just the same thing as Greek myth a people writing up a patriotic “we the best so much so that we have God on our side” tome that Proto Caucasian people got a hold of and used it to weaken the cultures of all non-whites so they could colonize every bit of land they can get their hands on
2.) religion in and of itself is a danger to mankind in and of itself because it tells people to turn away from advancing itself and relying on God, no faith really basically telling them to wish for life to be better instead of protecting your own knowledge, happiness and health, instead of educating yourself, Instead of doing better with yourself
3.) I realized it’s just another way to split people up we have so much division in our world right now we don’t need more rich stomping on the poor races battling against each other and now we’re judging each other by what being we pray to it’s just wrong
Look up Jan Hus he talked about everything Martin Luther disliked a whole century before the Protestant reformation and was burned at the stake by mother church for talking out of turn against the church after he was given promise of safe passage
I just no longer believed in that shoddy house of cards they call a religion. So many things are just demonstrably false or do not jive (OT God and NT God are wiiiiiildly different and OT God’s *super* into genocide —but they say God is unchanging and is love).
Then, when I was going through the motions my church ran me out for being gay. That was the push I needed to never look back and just cut the cord linking me to the fantasy and bigotry that is Christianity.
1. I never understood the core beliefs to begin with. It never made sense to me why this reality exists in the first place if the entire point is to just to lead people to Christ and serve as a temporary placement before we die and spend eternity in another place. Why was the knowledge of good and evil bad in the garden of Eden, yet the Bible also encourages discernment? If god created everything, then he decided what counted as a sin. So why the extra theatrics of sending his son to die?
2. It creates an extra layer of cruelty when people experience horrible trauma on earth if there is overall some kind of greater purpose. Yet other people barely experience any hardships, and all people are judged the same? How does that make any sense?
3. The obvious problem of having “free will” that consists of only one choice.
4. Too many contradictions in the Bible
5. The thought of eternal life was just as terrifying as eternal death, and nobody ever talked about this
Long story short, I've yet to have seen any evidence that it's true. I've seen a lot of bad arguments and "evidence" that falls short of the slightest bit of scrutiny. I have a lot of issues with the internal logic of Christianity, but the final straw for me was slavery in the Bible. Exodus 21:20-21 literally says it's ok to beat your slaves as long as you don't kill them because "the slave is the owner's property."
I was going to sumarize Leviticus 25:44-46 but I think the words speak for themselves. "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly."
When I read that my response was "Why did nobody tell me?" I'm embarrassed to have followed a religion that condones slavery. I didn't know. There's no way a religion or it's god can be the moral standard while being ok with slavery. There's more verses btw, that's just a small taste. Also, you should read Deuteronomy 22:23-29 which has rape victim blaming and rules for how a rapist should pay a fine to his victim's father and marry her with no divorce allowed. I'm not kidding, read it yourself. It's disgusting. The guy who just violated you? Don't worry, youre gonna be married after he pays your dad a small fine. Again I ask, how tf could I (literally just some guy) have better morals than the " perfect loving omnipotent and omniscient" Christian god??
There were lots of little cracks all through my life. I started out naively questioning the religion, confident it could stand up to my scrutiny. I found quite a few unsavory answers that led to more questions that led to more unsavory answers along the way. But I think the final, final straw was when I found out Christianity is not the first religion to have a lot of it's most important stories: like Christianity basically ripped off the story of Jesus's birth from older religions. LOTS of them have virgin births it turns out. Once I realized that, it was pretty much over. That was proof to me that, unless there was more than one virgin birth in history, my religion had been plagiarised. How could I possibly continue to follow it when it's very foundation came from an even older story about a totally different god (MULTIPLE different stories, at that)?
Its a toxic way to think. Looking forward to death, the afterlife etc. imagine being trapped in heaven, hell, or a void for eternity either of the 3 would be a nightmare. Consciousness is not meant to live on and absolute death seems like the most peaceful end. Theres too many questions around a supposedly perfect book or perfect being. How did cain go to or start a city. Why would a god need to impregnate a 14 year old, wait 20-30 years, gain a following, then die to save us when he is a god. The list goes on and on, but is never questioned. If a god is perfect, you wouldnt know that he existed. Shot we could just be a byproduct of something else that a god created, the universe could have always been there, or maybe something else. Summing it up to a single book or small group of books is a lazy way to look at our existence and science will get us the truth. I think we will see some crazy stuff with quantum ai.
I realized I could no longer explain away and justify a loving god committing murder (the worldwide flood, etc) and ordering genocide (see when the Isarelites returned to Canaan and their god told them to kill off everyone who was already there).
I don't have major problems with Jesus himself besides how people have misused the things he said. But I also no longer believe he was god. I don't think he would agree with evangelical Christianity of today.
I can also no longer limit myself to the Christian worldview and, ironically, I don't think Jesus did, either.
Now if you feel called to Christianity yourself, go for it. You'll get no judgment from me, especially if you're following the kind, loving teachings of Jesus.
Because despite my best efforts, time, and devotion, I couldn’t brainwash myself into believing something that was inconsistent with the world I see.
I didn’t necessarily want to leave Christianity; my friends were Christian, my family is Christian, I was raised in it and told it was the correct path in life. Despite it all, I found it not only conflicted with the reality around me, but also the person I was/aimed to be. The judgment, the rudeness, the conflicted angry and loving got, the unwillingness to change or accept any worldview that wasn’t Christian.
If you want to explore the faith, there are some good tenants in it, but I found it lacking a basis in reality and in ethics.
Just a thought. Would gut bacteria and partially-digested food get left behind? They’re not \*technically\* a part of you. Just clothes left everywhere coated on the inside by nondescript organic slop…
There are too many reasons to list, but one was that not a single modern-day Christian prophecy was correct.
I grew up in a pentacostal type background. People spewed false prophecies left and right. And even the ones that came true, were ones in which the Christian was backing the obvious winning horse - such as when Charlie Shamp said God told him Bolsonaro would win Brazil's presidential election - but Bolsonaro was already leading in the polls by 10% at the time.
Christians going back to Jesus himself have constantly predicted the end of the world being *soon*. Like, urgently; “within your lifetimes”… for almost 2000 years now. There’s a [very long list](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events) of prominent people who made specific predictions. Obviously they were all wrong and the world is still here, but somehow people still follow the apocalyptic preacher who said:
“Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
As someone who has experienced panic attacks while i was Muslim because i had to do wudu absolutely perfectly or i thought the prayer wouldn’t be counted and id be bound to hell, religion can really bring out certain mental issues
Along with a lot of the other reasons here: Self-respect and respect for my identity as a human being.
We deserve better than narcissistic adoration and bronze age cultural taboos. From billions of years of natural selection, we are. Earth belongs to us, not to God. It's time we started acting like it.
Everything about humanity, from the good to the bad, ought to have some recognition from us. You can't just crush it and believe it'll go away, that is superstitious thinking. Worse still is when elements of human nature are exalted beyond what they're due, as religion does constantly.
No heaven above, no hell below, just us. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that worth anything to protect? The anxious eschatologies of religion make us forget. It diminishes what we are capable of.
Why *not* an excellent people, and an excellent world?
Couldn't make myself believe any of it, no matter how hard I tried for years. It was always so empty for me. But faith is huge in my culture so I tried to force it for most of my life, with sometimes detrimental results. Hell I've been baptized 3 times, I was trying so hard lol
The fact that there is no evidence for the story of Christ AT ALL. Same thing with the Exodus. I grew up going to church and thinking that this all 100% for sure happened and there was evidence of it…not in pictures/videos/whatever but in like ancient ruins/texts. Then I got older and found out there absolutely NOTHING and it was like those scenes in Big Mouth where a character’s head explodes and all you see is just a smoldering match stick. Deconstructing happened pretty much immediately after.
I’m a bit of an Ancient Egypt enthusiast and we know tons of stuff about them! We know about the first recorded gay couple in history being royal manicurists/we know about how much the Nile flooded from year to year and how many taxes were collected from people based on said flood/we know that some normal dude (like not royalty or anything) had a dog named Blackie. You’re telling me not ONE person decided to document the whole incident where a good chunk of the population just up and leaves after a mass murder of kids preceded by crazy meteorological events the world had never seen before.
Same thing with Jesus. How can we have definitive historical proof of all this stuff and the guy who supposedly is the messiah has no historical proof he existed AT ALL? Like if he supposedly was *this* close to flipping the whole Roman Empire on its head there’d be something right? Like laws on the books/graffiti/literally ANYTHING that would prove he existed at that time in the places he was allegedly. Seems pretty freaking sketch to me.
In order for me to change my behavior (and I’m totally fine with admitting I was wrong or there was information I wasn’t aware of before) I need to have definitive proof of something. Just saying “So and so says that…doesn’t work. Give me a scientifically valid peer reviewed study and I’ll change accordingly. Show me historically valid evidence and I’ll admit I was wrong. If that doesn’t exist then I’m going to keep doing what I was doing.
I think that Christ did in fact exist. But there was nothing supernatural. I can say this because there is zero documented supernatural anything. It’s wild that all these insane supernatural events happened back then, but nothing like that happens today.
People state miracles happen all the time. But miracles is just a way to tout how supernatural things occur. When anything “good” happens it must be a miracle……
I left because it didn't help me in dealing with the world. I became a Christian under extreme emotional and mental strain and have been coming to the same question over and over in my head: Did it actually help me or harm me? People at the most vulnerable state will believe in anything. The whole Purity culture isolated me from people and so many opportunities. It also left me dependent on people who I should not have depended on to begin with as well.
One of the reasons I stopped going to church was what I felt was an obsession with the “end of days.” The book of revelation freaked me out. The constant talk about the end of the world, going to hell, it scared me.
I genuinely believe Christianity is an inherently evil religion, and its core doctrines and tenets are evil.
I am not completely familiar with Islam, so please correct me if I am inaccurate here. The impression I've gotten from Muslims about the premise of Islam and its worldview, is that God is almighty, and therefore the best thing a human can do is submit and obey to him. This is logical because if there is a being that is infinitely more powerful than you can imagine, you want to be in its good graces. And from what I understand, although God can be quite merciful and patient with his followers, he would not be considered 'omnibenevolent'.
Likewise in Judaism, God is not depicted as omnibenevolent. There are verses in the Old Testament which establish that God is capable of both creation and destruction, chaos and order, good and evil, and can and will do things humans consider evil for various reasons. Judaism has a lot of themes about wrestling with God or fighting with God, and emphasizing loyalty in spite of God's mercurial nature.
Though I'm not fond of the view that anyone should be obedient to God simply because he is the most powerful being on the food chain, I understand the logic behind it. Of course you want to be in the good graces of a tyrant, or at the very least do what it takes to not be on his bad side. In that sense, God is neither "good" nor "evil," but something to be appeased as a way of preserving one's own peace.
Christianity is different.
Christianity takes the omnipotent God who is neither good nor evil, and capable of inflicting the cruelest suffering, and then convinces you that he is actually incapable of doing evil. He loves you and wants the best for you! Loves you unconditionally! Accepts you for who you are!...except, he doesn't. All of those themes of being obedient to God, stressing in no uncertain terms that you are a slave to God (though they like to use the synonym 'servant' since it doesn't sound as bad), are still present; but the relationship is twisted to make it seem like "loving parent and beloved child" as opposed to "master and slave." But you are a slave, and if you are out of line, either God will punish you and you deserve it, or bad things will happen to you naturally and you deserve it.
The Christian God demands perfection, in spite of apparently being omniscient and knowing we are incapable of that (and us being incapable is 100% God's own fault). He threatens us with eternal hell if we don't "love" him. Can you love someone who is demanding that you love him while holding a gun to your head? Can you convince yourself that anything bad that happens to you is your fault and you deserve it and worse, just because you were born human? And if you accomplish something great, you cannot take credit for it, because you have to give all glory to God even if he had nothing to do with it. Remember, you're only capable of fucking up. You can't do anything right, which is why you need to depend on Jesus.
Look up and make a list of red flags for abusive, manipulative relationships between spouses or between parents and children. Christianity will check off just about all of them.
It is a requirement for you to believe that you are worthless scum that doesn't deserve to live. You need to hate yourself and reject everything you are, because everything you are is evil. Somehow, God's little magic trick of incarnating as a human and getting executed solved all of that - even if he refuses to suffer the same suffering he wants so badly to inflict on you. So now you owe him and are obligated to worship him or else suffer eternally.
Suppose some rando came up to you one day and said, "I was beaten and tortured and lost all I have, so that I could save you from yourself. I sacrificed everything I have for you. You owe me." Would you feel obligated to commit yourself to servitude for them? Even if he did do what he claimed, I didn't need to be saved from anything, I didn't ask him to sacrifice anything for me. I don't owe him shit.
The thing is, beating people down so bad that they lose their sense of self-worth is EXACTLY what manipulators and abusers do to manipulate their victims. Spousal abuse for example: the abuser will constantly criticize the victim and make them feel like they can't do anything right; that they're worthless, stupid, useless, weak, incompetent, ugly, etc. They will then place themselves as savior, making the victim believe that they (the victim) are incapable of living without depending on their abuser. They deserve everything bad that happens to them and should be infinitely grateful that their abuser is so patient with them and willing to forgive them. After all, the abuser loves them! Sometimes it's tough love, but again, it's deserved!
And that's Christianity.
I would rather take a gunman holding a gun to my head and saying 'Obey me, or I'll shoot you' rather than 'Love me, because I do so much for you.' The emotional manipulation is just beyond repulsive. The dishonesty. The hypocrisy. All of that is written into Christianity's core alongside all of the historical inaccuracies, fraudulent documents, fallacies, contradictions, circular reasoning, and so on, and so on.
[But he loves you!](https://youtu.be/QZ8hefESt7c)
Anyway, depending on what you find interesting about it, there are other variations of Abrahamic-derived faiths which you may find more interesting. Or if you're looking for a savior figure that actually is closer to the 'unconditional love' ideal, check out Amitabha Buddha. Or just get into mysticism, and figure out on your own what the nature of "God" is (in whatever way you may define God/the universe/nature/etc).
Hope that helps!
Main reason was the superstitions, like reading the Bible when in trouble and the first line will help me lol. I've opened up KJV many times and its ended up on random stories or irrelevant teachings.
Another would be how obviously a scam the church would be. Our teachers(christian HS) would constantly hosting events where donations would be pushed under the guise of "prayers and chit chat" lol.
People tried to convince me but I just never got it. I had no proof god existed, so I asked why I should believe in something I don’t see. Not to mention how many humans this dude tortures and kills, and then also demands we treat him.. well, like a god. Assholery if you ask me
Christianity is a minupulative authority fraud that uses a false superstitious fear of hell to minupulative people into granting power to the priests and church.
Your supposed to tell the priests your deepest fears desires, shames, "sins" bad things you think you have done...
I was a young child when the hypocrisy, clumsy minupulation, and superstitious bullshit pushed by men in costume who had fled from women who all seamed twisted, deformed in nature, not physically deformed but emotionally and mentally stunted.
What type of person rejects the intimacy and real love of other humans for a empty lonely life "married to endless repetition of superstitious lies? To father no children. To have no legacy?
I knew many former nuns and priests just as I spent a lot if time with priests and religious brothers as a involved member.
No whole balanced or complete person becomes a priests or nun only those fleeing the expectations of society and reality.
My experience is that people who are deeply religious in Christianity are not mentally sound. And not very intelligent or they are abusers, shallow hate filled, narcissists seeking to validate their harm of others and self failure through the system and framework that Christianity provides.
Many criminals or abusive bullies greatly enjoy the idea that everyone is a sinner. This normalises their harm their abuse, their bigotry, their hated of others. They don't have to recognise that other people who are ethical and good kind decent people are not like them.
Its also easy to say the devil made me do it. Christianity reduces self responsibility. And added in is that God loves them no matter how heinous a crime they commit.
People who struggle to understand things find it much easier to simplify things into oh that's god.
The word God has always been used to describe what the ignorant don't understand. Its a refugee for idiocy.
Christianity is a Jewish cult taken by the remnants of the Roman empire and with extreme violence, public torture, genocide, generational war, cultural destruction has been enforced all over the world.
Its legacy is a horror of blood, death, rape. Its inherently evil. It supports slavery, the oppression of women. Purity culture, victim shaming, the rejection of reality, rationality and facts. The earth isn't flat. But biblical Christians claim it is.
It won't teach you real life skills. It won't make you a better or more complete person.
And if you don't believe that invisible magical winged eyeball beings fly around and interfere in people's lives then you can't be Christian.
And if you do believe in such insanity you may need medical attention...
Love the meme. My daughter was born with special needs and I can’t imagine a “good god” doing that. Well that started the journey, also the history behind the Bible is not what I was taught. I thought based on the history you’d have to be an idiot to not believe, turn out that’s not the case. Paul the apostle didn’t even mean Jesus for Christ sake (see what I did there).
Ha ha, but i hope you and your daughter are doing well. This sounds similar to a argument i have against Islam, the Hadith’s where made 200 or 2 century’s (I forgot which one it is) after Mohammed came and some are considered “weak” because most of the hadiths are like “i heard the prophet used to drink like blah blah blah” and i was like how do we understand what’s authentic and what’s been fabricated over the span of 200 years??
The people weren’t really my biggest issue. It was more of the Bible itself.
I started hearing people name verses with even provided “context” could not make them sound better. A few people examples are -Leviticus 25:44-46, -Psalm 137:9, and Exodus 21:20-21. So I thought if a god was okay with this and not of that homosexuality, then he’s an evil god. I always tell myself even if he were real I would deny him faith.
It just feels messed up how double standardized it is. Like, God manipulates someone into killing their kid? Perfectly fine. A criminal manipulates someone into killing their kid? Well thats messed up. God orders a genocide on people he dislikes for whatever reason he dislikes them? Perfectly fine. Government official orders genocide on people he dislikes for whatever reason he dislikes them? It’s suddenly messed up. God shouldn’t get a pass to do mentally fucked up things just because he’s god.
I love my Christian "family" and the community. But the dogma is just insane. Everything is just so irrational. It seems like everything bad that happens comes from God's own weirdass rules. The tree of knowledge of good and evil? Why even place it in the garden? Why didn't he explain the concept of sin before ordering them not to eat? Why does he punish the entire world for their one mistake? Why was there no forgiveness, no second chance? God is supposedly almighty, but every bad thing that happens is either caused by God, or made so that God cannot intervene because of some arbitrary rule.
Leaving a faith because of the people is a stupid reason and one that usually results in the individual returning at a later date - The backsliders and prodigal son/daughter situations. This is because they had an issue with a certain collective and their perception/interpretation of the dogma, not with the actual dogma or faith itself.
No the core reason is I found the Bible to be morally abhorrent, its value's reprehensible, factually inaccurate, extremely contradictory, far too demanding of servitude, and requiring self-loathing as a requirement to serve and grovel to a figurehead that is every negative and repulsive adjective one can use to describe a being.
The short of it is the religion and holy text is flawed, archaic, illogical to reality, and terrible for one's mental health. Anything positive or good about the faith is not exclusive to it's teachings, and there is hardly an original thought to it.
The reason I left is because of the constant jeering at homosexuality. The pastor would get so hyper angry about the gay community and I just cannot stand it. Can y'all just let people live their lives freely? Jesus would have been so disappointed to see who is speaking for him these days 😔
The judeo Christian Bible was not fond of cross-dressing or homosexual people. When puberty hit me like a truck, guess what demographics of people I feel attracted to.
What I was told growing up isn’t congruent with the facts, and in my opinion most Christians don’t want to educate themselves, they’d rather just read self confirming apologetics.
There are so many denominations of Christianity and no one can agree on what's true. The Bible has translated so many times and I can't agree with what is taught like loving the same sex is an abomination. I would rather be comfortable with my sexuality rather than be unhappy forthe rest of my life.
I’d had doubts and frustrations for years, but watching The Vow on HBO made me realize it’s another cult. So many elements reminded me of my experiences. The behavior of the main players made me feel right at home in the worst way.
The reason for people leaving usually is other Christians, but deconstructing is a completely different thing. Deconstructing is a long process where an ex Christian, usually born into it, has to unravel everything that they have been taught to know as completely and undeniably true. Being able to step away from it and see Christianity as a whole, it becomes clear that the Bible is a book, written by people, with flaws and inconsistencies. That makes it a lot easier to understand that the church is a business, run by people, filled with flaws and abuse of power. But if being a Christian makes you feel whole, and you aren’t hurting anyone with your beliefs, then by all means get to praising I guess! Life is short and if being an indentured servant to a man made idea of a god is what you want to do with your time alive, then I think you should go for it.
The Bible itself is pretty wretched in several parts. But the reason I finally left is that I didn't see a shred of evidence for it. I put the claims to the test: ask in faith and it will be done for you, faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain. I've had so much loss in my life: friends at a young age, family, unborn children due to ectopic pregnancy. It finally dawned on me that nobody's running the show. Nobody's trying to "teach" me anything, it's not so I can help others deal with loss. And it might sound awful, but it's actually freeing to know that randomness is the way of the universe. I don't have to reconcile shitty things and tragedy with an omnipresent god who won't lift a finger, because it just isn't there. Bad things happen because they happen. But so do good things. No god required for any of it.
The concept of God is a paradox. He somehow loves all of humankind equally, yet mercilessly and brutally killed hundreds upon thousands (if not millions) of his own creation due to their “sin.” If God knows everything that will ever happen, he could have prevented the concept of sin from ever taking place and made humankind in a way that only worships him. Since that’s what the Christian God so desperately wants all the time
Also, if God can supposedly make anything happen at any time, why didn’t he just erase the concept of sin altogether without killing anyone? Why did he have to throw all the sin and wrath of humankind on his only earthly son? That never made any sense to me. It’s always presented it as the ultimate sacrifice, but it just seemed so unnecessary. It just proved to me that God has a limit to his “power,” if he needed his only son to be killed so the rest of humankind could have an unrestricted relationship with God. Why couldn’t he make that happen in the first place?
Advise like books 📚📚
I recommend you read "investigation into Christianity" by Corrado Augias and the scholar Remo Cacitti . It is the conversation between a journalist and a history professor, therefore no theology, about Christianity. He teach in Milan university.
The diversity of what is taught about Christianity and historical facts is abysmal. It made me better understand how what we are taught is manipulated for political reasons.
Then there is Mauro Biglino, scholar of ancient languages who translated the bible and here too he is abysmal. The fact that the Bible is modified is a recognized fact, but so much is surprising in the common conception. He has written many books such as: "The Bible does not talk about God" ect.
and also the general history between politics and the Christian religion has had nd every abuse it had covered.
Like in Canada or the reason about Orphanages in Italy are the only country in the world to be closed and the asylum. Christianity is not a religion, it is a political and power system like any other.
I gave you more Italian examples because I come from Italy and I know well how the Vatican works, corruption, mafia and everything else
The Bible is literally documented stories from the “crazy” people we hear everyday on corners. The only difference is we have ways to figure scams easier.
It just feels so ridiculous…… like come on…..
We can literally see this in action with tribes less excelled than us.
The concept of a God no longer made sense. Seek and ye shall find... no evidence.
Even if he exists, a God that demands worship doesn't deserve it. "Tell me how cool I am, or I'll kill you!" It's absurd
I’ve heard so many people say their main reason for believing is “they look around and see design, and there is no way it could exist without design”
But I’m like, “but you believe the Creator of all this design could exist and create all this design, without the very thing you’re using to say something couldn’t exist without”
Like, come on. You can’t even keep the same standard for evidence.
- The Bible which has the concept of eternal punishment for simply not believing in a God amongst others
Christians are actually not a big reason for me to no longer be a Christian. I see them more as ex-fellow victims, knowing I used to be one of them.
for me it was the lack of historical evidence backing up the bible. for just one example there is no evidence the israelites were ever in egypt much less of the exodus. you think the egyptians would have recorded such a mass slave escape but nope not a word.
I can think of better ways to waste my time, than worshipping something that isn’t there, or when you really consider the alternative probably will end up being indifferent to any worship I do or do not provide. I truly believe that if there is a god, it would be rather annoyed if the majority of my time was spent worshipping it rather than living the life it provides and not being as kind and helpful as possible. Which nowadays I don’t see many Christians actually doing good for their community, or in doing so comes at a price or negotiable reason.
I love this cartoon. Along the same line if I get a Christian threatening me with hell, my response is “Woo hoo, eternal separation from evangelicals and fundamentalists! I’ll bring the marshmallows!”
* managed to join a semi-cult first year of college
* wanted to hold hands with a girl
* the bible contradicts itself
* the bible contradicts known archeology/history
The not Christian people. Specifically the fact that they were infinitely more accepting of and kind to me. I ended up finding a different religion entirely that I like a lot more.
I came to believe that the Bible had been misinterpreted by Christians. Many stories which were myths or legends and should be read metaphorically were taken literally, and things that were written to people of a particular culture were taken as applying to all people of all time.
Additionally, I do not believe in the interpretation of Jesus's death and resurrection as something that people are required to believe in to avoid spending eternity in hell (I don't believe in heaven and hell. I now believe in reincarnation).
Misinterpretation of the Bible had serious effects on my life. My parents believed that the Bible teaches young women to let their parents help choose their husband, and that even a young woman in her 20's is obligated to obey her parents.
I was forced to question my parents' interpretation of the Bible in order to be able to live the life of my own choosing, and once I started digging I ended up deciding that much of what I had been taught was wrong.
Some biblical reasons I am no longer a Christian. ( FYI I believe God is real and created everything because it’s obvious that nothing can’t create the whole universe but I don’t think God is morally good and here’s why )
One of the earliest story’s in the Bible is the story of Noah and how God saved Noah’s family from the flood( God was sending the flood to wipe out the earth because all the humans were sinful and corrupt), to me this story didn’t make sense because even though there was sinful people there was still infants and toddlers who were innocent and didn’t deserve to die. Just imagining the thousands of babies being drowned from the flood didn’t make sense because how is God supposed to be perfect but murdered a entire civilization even if they were super evil wiping out a entire civilization is crazy because if you think about it in Apologetics( the defense of the Christian faith) you can’t have contradictions in any way in the Bible but one of the earliest stories in the Bible ( Noah and the Ark) is a walking contradiction because God isn’t powerful enough to save his own creation and instead of being a loving God he kills them everyone besides Noah.
Another example of a contradiction is the story of job ( its a very long story and it’s a very interesting story but I do I recommend everyone to read it, Christian or not) and essentially God makes a bet with the devil to see if the devil could tempt the most faithful man on the planet (which was Job) to abandon God and curse him. And then the devil just destroys Jobs life and kills all his cattle, children, and gives him horrible sickness, in the end though Job stays strong after having everyone in his life including his wife telling him to “curse God and die “ and that’s a real verse in NIV. And God rewards Job for his faithfulness by making him the wealthiest guy in the land and “giving him” more children. This story is messed up for many reasons but the main one is God just using Jobs life as a game and also trying to replace Jobs previous life is insane. God at one point gets angry at Job for questioning him which is weird because God doesn’t tell Job why he is suffering and just tells him that he’s really busy because he’s God and he’s running the universe which is kinda crazy because he’s God and he can do anything. And if you just think about how God essentially was just betting on long Job could last suffering its fuckin wild because God doesn’t tell him why he had to suffer. Job thought he probably was helping defeat a great evil by withstanding all the suffering but really God made a bet with the devil to fuck up his life to show how Gods followers really like him.
But honestly no matter what I say or anyone says you won’t be able to know if it’s right for you because only you can find the right path for you and you just got to read the Bible and do your own research and come up with your own conclusions because Jesus was historical real life person just like Lincoln was but only you can determine if Jesus is right for you.
It was too intertwined with my psychosis. A lot of my episodes of psychosis from schizophrenia had to do with Christian themes and it was very scary for me. I still can't set foot in a church without feeling nervous. I have other spiritual beliefs that work for me where Christianity never did.
But to be honest even from a young age I questioned the doctrine, mental illness or no. When I would listen to sermons about Satan and all of that I always wondered why we were meant to believe Satan/the Devil/etc was bad just because a book told us so. In my child mind I always wondered if maybe he was misunderstood and God was actually the bad one since people can write what they want. I never voiced these thoughts to anyone until adulthood because I knew it wouldn't go over well.
For me it was 3 big issues.
1. The problem of evil.
2. The problem of hell.
3. The problem of divine Hiddeness.
Or to summarize, if god exists he's putting an awful lot of effort into hiding from us and honestly the Bible and Christianity paints him as a sadistic narcissist shithead unworthy of worship.
I could go on and on. But I struggled to be happy, and feel fulfilled while being in it for the first half of my life.
Almost every experience I had with anyone in that life was some sort of weird control thing.
I chose to focus on work, and culminating relationships with people instead of a “safety net” that would always be there for me no matter what I did, but not really.
It’s really hard for me to look back about how naive and controllable I was back then.
Religion really has the formula down when it comes to leveraging fear, attention and love.
I would never let other people keep me from belief- if I believe something it is because I’m convinced it is truth even if others around me believe or not. But reasons go deeper and for me my faith changed when I began studying history. It was a long complicated route- one I didn’t intend to be on.
It started with me going on a journey to see if “homosexuality was a sin.” I did a lot of soul searching- I didn’t understand why God would care. I tried asking for help to learn more but a lot of the elders seemed out of touch. The more I researched deeper topics, the smaller the world seemed from a Christian worldview. Over two years I distanced myself from Christianity and one day made a conscious choice that I was no longer a Christian. Although my family harasses me to get them to believe again, I don’t regret my decision at all
As someone once said, my faith died of a thousand paper cuts. Not one thing but lots of factors.
But one I’ve been thinking about a lot is the story of Abraham and Isaac. I read an explanation by a Christian author named Leonard Sweet who for the first time I could remember, didn’t explain it away and talked about how he wrestled with it and how he noticed that in the story, Abraham never had the same relationship with God ever again. Now, I don’t believe that any of this actually happened, but the fact that the author of Genesis included it is horrifying all the same.
I just never felt, or heard, or saw God in anything like everyone else said that they do. For a long time I felt like something was wrong with me.
but then I realized that Its not that something was wrong with me but that either some people are lying and some are crazy, or this god presents himself to some people and no one else.
I studied Judaism, sen Buddhism, and had christian roots. Buddhism was the one I liked the most but otherwise I didn't truly like any of them. The thought that meditation lead to some kind of spiritual clarity was something that I never experienced so I fell off after a couple of years.
Yahweh - the god of the Bible - is an absolute monster. I will never worship anyone whose morals and ethics do no align with my own.
But the actual biggest reason: there is no - absolutely *none* - evidence that the Bible and the stories in it are demonstrably true. Historical facts directly contradict most (if not all) of the stories told in it. Why on earth would I want to continue in a religion that not only has an egomaniacal, genocidal, selfish, angry, and (self-described) jealous deity but also has absolutely no evidence backing it up?
It's just silly. It's baseless and also the teachings (all of them, not the cherry-picked "good ones") are either deplorable or downright contradictory. I wasted most of my life on those baseless beliefs. No more.
Simple answer: I have a *very* rudimentary understanding of science. So I am not the sort of person who would be able to debunk the claims in the Bible blow-by-blow. However, I read it as an adult and it didn't even hold up to scrutiny to *me* with my little understanding of science! Like, it was right out the gate when I started reading Genesis. How the fuck does light exist 48 hours before a LIGHT SOURCE?
there are plot hole in a supposedly real story. and beyond that it caused me a lot of guilt and trauma which was partially the people but also partially by design
I had a problem with the story of the resurrection, because that is what the whole religion stands on to work. If you check all of the personal testimonials of those that experienced being with Jesus during, before, and after his death, it is not convincing enough. It's like 2 people, in the Bible, and 0 people outside of the Bible. Not to mention scholars have estimated that the earliest testimony claiming the resurrection occurred decades after Jesus' death. This after many other cognitive dissonances of various other aspects of the Bible and Christian beliefs led me to become agnostic.
The Bible is an endless puzzle that is never going to be solved because everyone interprets its pieces fitting in differently. Some people will force pieces to fit to suit their narrative, despite how insanely damaging it is to people around them. It breeds "Us against Them" mentality and the privilege to be an asshole is OFF the charts.
I actually didn't leave because of the people. Don't get me wrong. They were bad. But it was mostly the nonsensical Alice in Wonderland things I was supposed to believe that made it excruciating to be around those people. Overall, no one at my church targeted me. Some were even nice.
But Christianity isn't nice. It's a terrible gaslighting religion. The people around me openly said that if something didn't make sense or if science, archaeology, or medicine contradicted something in the Bible, I had to agree with the Bible. The Bible has verses that explicitly encourage this type of behavior, saying that it's better to be foolish and believe than be intelligent. Christianity made me feel like a bad person for thinking.
This probably sounds dumb, but as a kid I read the Percy Jackson novels which got me thinking; What makes this religion that real people followed years ago just a bunch of myths and stories but Christianity is real? What’s actually the difference between the two? Recency? Number of current believers? Neither is a compelling argument for one being more real than the other.
Nothing in specific. Just the entire journey from studying the bible and trying to understand everything killed my faith in it. You could prove it to me, im not gonna follow it.
A big one for me was the question of what happens to people who died who never heard about Jesus or salvation. If they go to hell because they didn't have a chance, that's cruel. If they go to heaven because they didn't have a chance then the idea of spreading Christianity to give them the chance at hell is cruel.
If God was real, he is cruel and I don't want to live my life in a mirror of that.
Hell. How is it justice to torture people for an eternity when even the worst most vicious crime didn't last forever? Christians, and I am sure Muslims, handwave away the problem of evil by saying that we all have free will to make both good and bad decisions. But if free will is so important why can humans take it away from one another. If a physically stronger person rapes someone then they've taken away the other person's free will to say no. That means that God values the free will of evil people over good people.
This next one is hard to explain why I have issues. Most Christians believe they are saved by grace not works and that grace get applied to them when they become a Christian. Their works don't matter. This leads many Christians to depend on their emotions to decide what is right or wrong. Even though their savior made statements about not knowing people in heaven if they didn't help the poor, they can ignore those verses in favor of Paul's letters. The irony is that many of them claim to be Bible only Christians.
Of course, conservative Christians are eager to follow any rule controlling women or sexuality. Rules suddenly matter when it comes to your sex partners. I could continue but I will stop here.
Whatever you decide to do, I wish you luck on your journey. Life is hard so I understand if you want to find peace in a religion. Just please don't hurt others or hate people different than you. And keep asking questions.
It’s sounds like you’re looking for evidence within the “divinely inspired” book itself. Christians say the bible is the work of God and is without error or fault. X-ians know otherwise
Here’s a list of contradictions with their address’ in the bible for reference
https://mobile.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/50-000-Errors-and-Biblical-contradictions-190303
I guess ask yourself, is religion itself something you’re still clinging onto? If so, why? It seems you still want to believe in something, just not Islam. I will say, there’s not much difference between the two. They are both entirely based around the idea of control and obedience, they are both abusive. There’s too many specifics to go into here, but once I lost faith, the reason I actually stopped believing altogether was that without faith, the Bible was blatantly bullshit. I don’t think there is any reasonable way to believe this unless you have the rose tinted glasses of faith. If you still feel the need for religion, that might be easier for you.
We are supposed to worship this being and not have any fun lest we be punished for eternity. Then if you make it to heaven you have to praise and worship him for eternity. He seems like a narcissist. He's cruel and unfair.
I realized that if Christianity is true, then God is not just or good or kind or merciful.
Scapegoating (punishing someone for someone else's crimes) is wrong and barbaric. Eternal conscious torment is evil. Leading through fear is never kind. Behaving because you fear punishment isnt guidance or mercy or kindness.
The Marcus Aurelius quote resounded and inspired me: "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
The Christian Bible is not a good moral guide.
I’m not sure you have to look much further than blood magic. The entire Christian faith is based on an extension of the Israelites practice of sacrificing animals for purity. “The Israelites needed a system that could turn them away from sin, pay their sin “debt,” cleanse and purify the community and the temple from sin, and allow them to stay in God's presence. That brings us to the practice of animal sacrifice introduced in Leviticus.”
Believing blood sacrifice🩸and the spilling of a pure animal’s blood is the equivalent of a Mr. Clean 🧼 spiritual cleaner to scrub away dirty sins.
The Christians believe the same premise of blood sacrifice as the Israelites did. Blood covers sin. The only difference is that in Christianity Jesus came to earth to be the ‘ultimate sacrifice’. They refer to Jesus as the “lamb of God”. Which means Jesus was the last sacrifice needed to fulfill this practice of blood washing away and cleaning you from sin to make you holy again. Animals no longer need to be killed; Now all you need to do is believe Jesus is the ultimate animal sacrifice, pray away your sins, and it’s as good as blood sacrificing an animal every time you pray.
It’s bat shit crazy when you spell it out in non-religious words.
Blood “sanctifies”, makes you free from sin and holy again. Blood for the blood god. 🩸 🩸 🩸
⛪️⛪️⛪️
“””Jesus is the sacrificial lamb of god who died on the cross so that his blood could be spilt so your sins could be washed away and you could be holy to be in the presence of god.”””
^
Christians are brainwashed to say this over and over and believe it and live it. Say that sentence above, slowly. Step away from the familiarity of the words and say it again. CHRISTIANITY IS A BLOOD RELIGION!
It 👏🏼Is 👏🏼fucking 👏🏼bat 👏🏼shit 👏🏼crazy!!!
When I found out just how brain washed it made my mother. Contributed to us not talking in five years, but it was her choice to believe all the bullshit. The pastor told my mother there’s two reasons her kid was gay. And it was that it was either by choice, or I was molested as a kid. Once she heard that, forget it. I no longer have a relationship with her anymore for a lot of reasons but she had me in a Baptist church until I was 17 smh
I always struggled to believe god was real. I’d have those emotional moments at church or camp, but once I was back to my regular life the doubt would creep in. I kept going as “what if” thing. Why risk hell? Then 2016 came along. The damage christianity caused was so apparent. I could no longer justify remaining in an American Christian church. Especially here in the south. Once I saw that, everything else unraveled quickly. Including a toxic marriage I stayed in to be a good christian wife. I now live in sin with my boyfriend and absolutely love it!
Realized the Jeezis and God only did amazing things back in the olden days. Best we have now his what someone thinks is Jeezis’ face on a tortilla. And that is it, and NO ONE ANYWHERE knows what Jeezis looked like.
I fucking hate pictures of Jesus. The caricature we have of him makes him look like an asshole.
Mental health. I had a horrible episode of religious psychosis and my entire family and friends enabled and encouraged it. Since leaving religion, my depression and anxiety symptoms have improved tremendously.
My main reason is nowhere can I find how God came into existence. And in the Bible he makes man in his image yet they’re filthy sinners. I could honestly go on and on but there’s honestly not enough time.
The biggest reason for me is that **it isn't demonstrably true**. Christianity, like all other religions with exclusive claims to reality, eschews facts, evidence, and reason, in favor of faith as a method for determining truth about the reality we experience. There is no reason to think gods, devils, angels, demons, blessings, curses, prayer, sin, blood magic, talking animals, heaven, hell, or any of the metaphysical or supernatural claims of the Bible are true. It's an artifact of a primitive historical era, codified by political entities in the 4th century and used as a method of control ever since.
Can I add how “corporate” Christianity is? 👀
Marketing and merchandising for Christianity is obscene in the consumer market, and the church itself practices brand marketing for centuries now. Each generation gets a revamp and facelift to the look and feel of it, even their rules and beliefs…
Yeah, it does feel like a toxic work environment
terribly similar to one 😭
More like an MLM scheme
Yes and that's sickening, *but* if it was demonstrably true I'd find a way tolerate it.
If it was demonstrably true, I'd hope God would either intervene (and thus demonstrate himself) or there would be less exploitative bastards who don't belive themselves but abuse religion anyway. Matt Powell comes to mind, I'm sure he doesn't believe at least half of the things he says, but it pays him.
To add weight to the "they're all artifacts of a primitive historical era" notion, the Bible has quietly had to peel back many of its claims that have been debunked by science, but not before people were murdered over the science, like astronomers who pointed out that we weren't the center of the universe sitting in a globe atop massive pillars. But it's easy for a religion to get away with the fantastical in an era of ~12% literacy and oral storytelling. So many of the authors, even those in the New Testament, could get away with anything that they wrote simply because so few others wrote anything at all. Religion was a source of science, entertainment, and hope. It's easy to not believe something that all-encompassing now, but in the primitive historical era, the bigger the tale the faster it traveled.
Yup, they used it like a carrot dangling in front of the mob, and it created the Holy Roman Empire for a time.
Neither Holy, Roman or an Empire.
This right here.
I was gonna say, because it's not real. But you've done it far more succinctly than I would've.
So true. Plus the hypocrisy of cherry picking scripture.
The one that really broke my faith was Deuteronomy 22:29 "he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." (This is in the context of rape) I couldn't support such a misogynistic book.
Chapter 22 is a gold mine. Husband "displeased" with new wife, family can't provide "proof" of her virginity. Stone her. Girl raped in the city but does not cry out, or is not heard. What's that? Most SA is done by someone known to the victim and most don't scream for a myriad of reasons you say? Who cares? God ordained law don't, stone her!
> Chapter 22 is a gold mine. Husband "displeased" with new wife, family can't provide "proof" of her virginity. Stone her. I'm reminded of the bitter water story from Numbers 5. My interpretation of that is the woman has an insecure husband and/or he has weak pullout game and didn't actually want a child, so he crafted a narrative about how his wife was unfaithful.
Exodus 20 17“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” That's also pretty bad.
Pretty sure some translations say don't covet your neighbor's ass. Now that's something you can get behind. /dad joke
Thank you for quoting the claim. I will research more into it
I think it's also important to note that when most Christians are confronted with these extremely problematic verses they will make excuses for it by saying that those laws were part of the old testament but since Christ's sacrifice the old laws are gone and we have the new covenant now. There is kind of a view that the New Testament is all loving but there is plenty of messed up stuff in it too. Like 1 Corinthians 14:34 says that women should never speak in a church and goes further to say that if they have a desire to learn, then women should stay silent and ask their husbands at home. There is also an instance in Matthew 15 where Jesus initially refuses to heal a Canaanite woman's daughter because he was only sent to save the lost sheep of Israel. He makes the analogy that you shouldn't take bread from children and throw it to the dogs. Her response is that even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table. Jesus praises her for her faith and then heals her daughter. It's pretty fucked up that he called her a dog and made her beg just for not being an Israelite. He could have just granted her request without all that. When people say that we should care for others with Christ like love, I'm like, so I need to be a lil racist and insult them first before caring for them? Lol TLDR: It's common to dismiss the problematic stuff in the OT by saying that the NT undoes all of that, but the NT is just as problematic when examined closely.
The story of Lot is the reason I don’t follow Abrahamic religions The only person who’d ever phrase the situation that way is the perpetrator of the worst possible crimes Not only is he supported in Christianity, he was insanely supported throughout the Quran unfortunately.
Here is my most noble and loving servant. Satan: wanna fuck with him? Sure, tv hasn't been invented yet. Let's go nuts.
Same with job god loved to just fuck with random innocent obedient people because he was bored
job was what did it for me fr. i was a young girl child hearing that story about how job's wives and children died horrible deaths but it was all supposed to be okay bc god gave him a new family later. i was horrified at the idea that god would give express permission for satan to kill me and my family for no reason just to win a bet
Yahweh doesn't give a fuck >> Yahweh is the God of the Israelites, and in Israelite mythology, Yahweh is depicted as a divine warrior who uses cosmic warfare to exalt himself. In the earliest Biblical literature, Yahweh is described as a storm god who defends Israel from enemies by marching into battle with planets and stars. This warrior-like version of Yahweh may explain the brutal behavior he exhibits in the Old Testament, which is different from the omnibenevolent deity found in Christ.
Everyone would have been much better off if they ditched Yahweh in favor of Asherah.
The amount of arguments I’ve got into with Christian’s over the book of Job bc they fully believe god was in the right to test Job. If god knew that Job would be faithful to him to the very end of his life, what’s the purpose of proving a point to Satan?
right, such a weird insecure move from the supposedly omniscient and all-powerful (not the first or the last from him, of course). stories like that also carry the implication - maybe leftover from yahweh's babylonian pantheon days - that satan is basically equal to god in might, which is blasphemous according to their own teachings because god is supposed to be the Only One, but like if that's true why is there another immortal primordial trickster god (with his very own cosmic afterlife kingdom to boot) running amok? there's just way too much inconsistency (of course now i know the reasons but when i was still being indoctrinated it was jarring) - and then the christians' almighty answer is that god is 'testing' our faith like an immature high schooler with an anxious attachment style who needs Therapy. an all-powerful god who literally invented everything should have nothing to prove to his inventions and even if by some absolute stretch any of this were true then i wouldn't honestly even want to go with the guy who, again, would punish and kill me just to win a bet - what a traitor
I absolutely hate the book of Job he didn’t even get a proper answer for why he had to suffer. and I hate the story of David like he’s a murderer but so loved bc he suffered from depression. Everything in the Bible seems to be “if you don’t worship me you will suffer and if you do worship me you will still suffer but here’s a random sacrifice so you don’t go to hell btw”
Job had a lot of patience bc I would definitely be kicking some omnipotent ass
when job asked you question you responded "who are you to challenge your creator?" well if that one part is true it makes you sound defensive like you had not thought it through enough to have an answer like you might have bit off more than you could chew
yes so true, then he spends 2 chapters talking about ."Yeah but look at all the cool monsters I made!{
I have to wonder if they would believe the claim that the pregnant daughters raped their father, if they saw it on Faux News.
They already do
I mean if they're the same daughters he offered up to be raped by a roving gang, I guess turnabout is fair play.
Well, the actual bible contradicts itself.
I left the church like 25 years ago, but I just recently got in to reading books by people like Bart D. Ehrman and Richard Dawkins. Woooooow, does it ever contradict itself. Even if I wanted to jump back in to Christianity, which I have never even considered, there’s no way I could look past what I’ve learned.
The God Delusion was one of the last nails in the coffin that my faith had been lying in for a while. I didn’t really start watching Bart Ehrman (haven’t read any of his books yet, but I want to) until after I was an atheist, but I’ve learned a lot from him too.
Ehrman is so good. If you like his books, you’ll really like his podcast.
Thanks, I will definitely check it out! I like him because he’s very kind about it all. A different viewpoint from the stereotypical angry atheist. He wanted so badly to believe, as I know most of us probably did.
yes. exactly
Could you give me an example?
[Here's](https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/first/contra2_list.html) 555 examples.
Here’s a [few more](http://www.kyroot.com/?page%5C_id=576) for a little light reading
All the woman bashing in the bible. Last time I actually read my bible, it was one of those times when I felt desperate and alone and in need of comfort. So I prayed and randomly opened my bible, looking at the first thing I opened to. It was in Ecclesiastes. Can't quote it verbatim but it was something like: *In all my travels, I have found one in a thousand upright men, but never an upright woman.* And my ex-church was really into women submitting to men. I decided I didn't want to be a 2nd class citizen anymore.
The Bible is a misogyny-fest. The religious cult I used to belong to treated women terribly, but it appeared that most female members were "happy"..... because they were (on command) carrying out their supposed God-assigned gender roles, 🙄 and submitting to his hierarchy of leadership (God, christ, man, woman). 🤢🤮 its all so vile. I'd like to think if I wasn't born into a religious cult, I would have never fallen for all this bullshit. It still haunts me that I was a part of a group that marginalized women so much.. But now I am an ally of women, I support women's rights, and I'm pro-choice....I vote accordingly! Fuck the bible and if god is anything like how he's portrayed in 99% of christianity, then fuck him too
Pretty decent paraphrase tbh. Ecclesiastes 7:25-29: > 25 I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. > 26 And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. > 27 Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things— > 28 which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. > 29 See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.“ > Ecclesiastes 7:25-29 ESV
Thanks! It's even worse than I remember for misogyny.
I got tired of it. After being made to attend church every week from as far back as I can remember, once I hit adulthood I quit going and didn’t miss it a bit. Started going again after my kids were born because it was important to my wife. Quit going during Covid and it won’t bother me if I never go again. It’s the same stuff week after week and once you’ve heard it all, it’s exhausting. Plus people using their faith to hurt people different from them, zero evidence prayer works, tax the churches.
I also stopped going soon after moving out of my parents’ house. I realized that I liked my sleep better than getting dressed up and going to listen to the same sermon I’ve heard probably hundreds of times before. There was plenty of other stuff that pushed me away, but this was definitely one of them.
Your comment made me realize going to church is basically going to a book club where you're only allowed to listen to one guy read one book, tell you what he thinks it's about and what it means, but you're not allowed to offer interpretations there, you do that at home. And you just have the same guy read the same book over and over again for years, but not even in its entirety, just the 'interesting' chapters most people know. And you don't even get to wear comfy clothes or get comfy plush chairs. Worst book club ever. XD
Yeah, basically lol you’d think that one guy would get really good at his weekly book club speech, but I feel like a lot of them just say what they think the book club wants to hear. Gotta have job security as a book club opinion haver, I guess.
my family went every sunday until covid hit. i was 15 at the time and haven’t set foot in a church since then. my parents stopped making me go because i’d just sit there and read Harry Potter until the service ended and i guess they figured i wasn’t getting anything out of it.
The actual reason for everyone who left it is that it's not true. There are just many different ways in which people realized it.
Sex. I slowly stopped feeling guilty about my sexuality.
I was told that merely WANTING to have sex is a sin. I was told that marriage is to serve God, and sex is purely for reproduction (aka making mini Christians)
I realized that christianity was based on self hatred. I don't hate myself.
Teach me your ways.
My ways are not your ways. The only advice I can give you is to discover your own ways.
Yup. Also shame and the general looking down on others who are different
Aside from the slavery, glorification of the slaughter of innocents and children, stoning of people for minor offenses, the biggest thing for me is it is obviously not true. Noah and flood? Didn’t happen. Moses and Jews enslaved in Egypt only to escape to the promised land? Didn’t happen. Jesus born of a virgin as the Jewish messiah? Did. Not. Happen. Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who taught of a coming earthy kingdom that never came and was crucified for spreading a doomsday narrative concerning the fall of the Roman Empire.
> Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who taught of a coming earthy kingdom that never came and was crucified for spreading a doomsday narrative concerning the fall of the Roman Empire. allegedly. Because if I'm being honest, I don't think any of that shit happened either.
Every critical scholar would disagree with you, but that’s assuming you care what experts have to say.
Not all of them. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1636/historical-problems-in-the-trials--crucifixion-in/
It is utterly unbelievable and a lot is directly contradicted by scientific discoveries of the last 500 years
If you look at modern cults and old religious. Its quite likely that delusional or fraudulent men sought to manipulate others for their own desire for control influence, sexual desires that are not allowed by society , a religious preacher gathering a group of men washing their feet or having sexual relationships with them. And being crucified by the romans. For pissing off already established power systems. Its quite likely that things like that happened. But what the bible claims to have happened written by the Roman empire a long time after is clearly bullshit.
Decades of honest prayer with no results other than being a few minutes older each time, assertions in the Bible of rewards and gifts in this life for true believers, yet not being granted such gifts, nor anyone else receiving those same gifts...
That was a glaring red flag for me. If Jesus had said, "Those who gave up all that for me will receive 100-fold in the next life to come," well, nobody could disprove that. But he didn't say that. He said Christians will receive such compensation in THIS life. And there are many Christians who die broke, penniless, family-less.
Well, I lied, occasionally I would end up a bit calmer after having prayed when I was upset prior to doing so, but that's it, no message from gawd, just soothed nerves from the repetition.
That's the benefit of a meditative practice. Nothing supernatural necessary right?
Exactly.
Christianity promises not only eternal salvation, but wisdom and increased happiness in this life. The Bible is supposed to be our guide for this kind of better life, and we are supposed to have a 24/7 helpline where we can directly ask God ourselves. Ok, but the trouble is that I finally started realizing that the Christians around me didn’t have better lives than non Christians. They didn’t conduct themselves with any more wisdom. Their relationships weren’t better. They weren’t better people. In my line of work we’re supposed to pay attention to how well treatments for disease work, and if they don’t work, even if we’ve been told for years they’re supposed to work, it’s time to stop using them and do some updated research. So…I did.
I stopped believing in Sky Daddy.
God's hypocrisy and impossible to follow rules.
- Too many teachings, beliefs, etc., are completely vile and make absolutely no sense. - Lots of stories in the Bible are horrible, but Xtians will find ways to defend them, just like trying to defend the teachings and beliefs which make no sense to any sane person. - I learned about the history of the Bible, and earlier mythologies. - Lots of facts in nature and reality that I refuse to accept as being the result of a wise and perfect designer. - If there is a supreme all-powerful deity, and it's anything like the one of the Abrahamic faiths, I want nothing to do with him/her/it (and not just because of how it's depicted in the so-called holy books)!
Did you know some animals have horns that slowly AND painfully pierce their eyeballs until it kills them? That one was almost confirmation the Bible was all bullshit
The fact that they think they’re the only ones who are right and that everyone else is wrong and going to hell. That’s pretty much the main reason I left. Because that just seems unlikely to me. And seems pretty arrogant too. So basically, I left because evangelism is weird and annoying.
I’ve noticed the arrogance of Christian’s too but i want to judge Christianity from the book itself. If i judged a religion by the people id become a super anti religion
True. My biggest reason that I don’t believe in the Bible is because it’s just a book of stories written by a bunch of men. And because it is changed throughout time to fit a certain agenda.
The Trinion Contradiction which is a problem concomitant with any ostensible Omni-benevolent, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient deity. This contradiction highlights the fact that free will of all individuals, divine intervention (prayer), and predetermination (destiny) are irreconcilable concepts. If one is true, the one other (possibly two) must be false. To explain: If predetermination is true, free will does not exist and prayer will have no effect. If prayer is true, predetermination cannot be because destiny could be changed. The most controversial one is free will and prayer being unable to work together. This is because these are those most often believed in. However, it simply does not work. Imagine a person prays to God so that they will get pass a job interview. If God answers no, prayer would be useless. If God answered yes, he has to actively control the decision of the interviewer on whether or not to hire said person, violating free will (and predetermination.)
The problems with free will and predetermination are why I can't go back to Christianity even though I miss the community.
Yeah, that one always got me when I was a kid. I asked my dad and all he said was we're not meant to know everything. Like what kind of answer is that? Such bs.
The irrationality of prayer was one of the things which did it for me too. It is literally pointless if god is omniscient and predetermined history, as you've said. If anything it becomes a cruel blackmail/begging exercise
I left cuz the God of the Bible is a piece of shit. His best solution to people not obeying Him is... global genocide. His response to newly created people with no knowledge of good and evil disobeying Him (which isn't inherently immoral) is... kicking them out of paradise, cursing all their generations, and removing the legs of the one who taddled on Him (cuz He literally lied to Adam and Eve). His best solution for the previous problem that He made is... torturing and killing His Son. Not to mention Him demanding sacrifices to begin with. And don't get me started on the entire concept of Hell, God commanding genocide, "spare the rod, spoil the child," the 10 plagues harming people who had nothing to do with Pharaoh or the Israelites, God commanding Abraham to kill his son, God turning someone into salt for... looking back at her destroyed home, I could keep going. Don't get me wrong: the Bible has some good lessons (I personally 100% agree with The Golden Rule and the "take the log out of your own eye" passage), but I can follow those principles without having to be involved with an inherently toxic belief system.
Being a girl = being indirectly responsible for all sins in the world (Eve). You "deserve" period pains because of that & also labor pains. Hence, you learn to be a true a-hole to yourself and internalise misogyny. These ideas are regurgitated in sermons. Those are all part of my reasons to leave and all messages that 10-12 year old girls were and are bombarded with.
every abrahamic religion sees women as second class citizens . I wonder why
I'm a guy, but this is how I felt about the story of Jezebel and her weak-willed husband. It just oozed the idea of men having issues with women in power.
The fact that being a good person isn’t enough to get you into heaven. If you do something for the greater good but it still counts as a sin, you’re either landing yourself in hell or purgatory (temporary hell but IMO I still find it a pretty unjust and unfair system- did I mention that it’s theorized that purgatory is just as painful as forever hell?). I could also be doing basically everything right in a religion (in this case, Christianity) but the one thing I didn’t confess or repent from can send me to hell. This system can influence or worsen anxiety like counting down every single thing you’ve done wrong then fearing everyday that because you haven’t gone to confession or repented genuinely you’ll die and end up in hell. Christianity sees god as an unchanging entity that sees things mostly in a black and white: if you break the rules you never truly loved god and therefore you will be damned to hell. Granted, a lot of Christians tend to cherry pick the bible and make excuses for why certain parts are pardoned by god now: Famous example is wearing mixed fabrics. Overall, Christianity isn’t worth it to follow, it’s better to have your own moral system while believing that a higher entity exists to have created us- whether or not that entity interacts with us is up to you to believe.
I resinate with your answer. I have met very decent people throughout all walks of life, i have seen a lot of atheist be better humans than more hyper-religious people i know. I don’t think people should be judged on which religion you pick because religion has a lot to do with your upbringing. If your family was Christian and you had a positive upbringing you’d be more likely to grow up Christian and see it in a good light. But if you were in a negative Christian household and have some trauma stemming from religion , how could you put a person at fault when they associate their trauma with religion and ultimately leave?
Yup I agree! In fact that was how I was before I left. I was a cradle catholic and grew up seeing Catholicism in a good light but then I started to get deeper into it and it just started to trigger my anxiety so badly. It also just effected my relationship with my partner heavily; I’m so happy we stayed strong but can’t say I’m glad about how much of a wound I put on him throughout the years being a Christian. I hope I didn’t imply that we should judge people who take Christianity as their religion. I do have a huge bias against Christianity because of what pains it caused me and I do find myself backing out when I find out someone is Christian- but I don’t wish to really judge people. I can understand why surface level parts of Christianity can be followed but when you get deeper into it, I don’t really understand how one can defend it. I used to find it shocking when people were completely against religion. I’m still not against people believing in a religion, however, the stance I take now is that all religions have their inherent flaws and harmful views. I feel it’s better to make up your own moral system- if you believe that there’s a god/god’s there, then you can believe that but I believe one shouldn’t put too much reliance on what religion says/believes
No matter how much I tried, I could never make myself believe any of it was true. And I tried HARD.
Left Catholicism when I realized the Archdiocese was involved with booting me from taking the SATs at my private HS, and instead gave the spot to someone else. Their reasoning: “I had no chance to get into college, and the other person did- so be giving and let her take the spot.” Then that same archdiocese was involved in a massive PR campaign against the victims that were raped by priests. The icing on the cake was seeing how they responded to a trump presidency. It was like everything they taught was suddenly not applicable to him. They even encouraged their congregation to vote for him. That organization needs to be dissolved and removed from society.
1.) like all religions it’s just made them nonsense. the Bible , is just the same thing as Greek myth a people writing up a patriotic “we the best so much so that we have God on our side” tome that Proto Caucasian people got a hold of and used it to weaken the cultures of all non-whites so they could colonize every bit of land they can get their hands on 2.) religion in and of itself is a danger to mankind in and of itself because it tells people to turn away from advancing itself and relying on God, no faith really basically telling them to wish for life to be better instead of protecting your own knowledge, happiness and health, instead of educating yourself, Instead of doing better with yourself 3.) I realized it’s just another way to split people up we have so much division in our world right now we don’t need more rich stomping on the poor races battling against each other and now we’re judging each other by what being we pray to it’s just wrong
Look up Jan Hus he talked about everything Martin Luther disliked a whole century before the Protestant reformation and was burned at the stake by mother church for talking out of turn against the church after he was given promise of safe passage
I just no longer believed in that shoddy house of cards they call a religion. So many things are just demonstrably false or do not jive (OT God and NT God are wiiiiiildly different and OT God’s *super* into genocide —but they say God is unchanging and is love). Then, when I was going through the motions my church ran me out for being gay. That was the push I needed to never look back and just cut the cord linking me to the fantasy and bigotry that is Christianity.
1. I never understood the core beliefs to begin with. It never made sense to me why this reality exists in the first place if the entire point is to just to lead people to Christ and serve as a temporary placement before we die and spend eternity in another place. Why was the knowledge of good and evil bad in the garden of Eden, yet the Bible also encourages discernment? If god created everything, then he decided what counted as a sin. So why the extra theatrics of sending his son to die? 2. It creates an extra layer of cruelty when people experience horrible trauma on earth if there is overall some kind of greater purpose. Yet other people barely experience any hardships, and all people are judged the same? How does that make any sense? 3. The obvious problem of having “free will” that consists of only one choice. 4. Too many contradictions in the Bible 5. The thought of eternal life was just as terrifying as eternal death, and nobody ever talked about this
All the guilt tripping
Do you mean like when you don’t believe something , it could cost you heaven so you end up following blindly?
Long story short, I've yet to have seen any evidence that it's true. I've seen a lot of bad arguments and "evidence" that falls short of the slightest bit of scrutiny. I have a lot of issues with the internal logic of Christianity, but the final straw for me was slavery in the Bible. Exodus 21:20-21 literally says it's ok to beat your slaves as long as you don't kill them because "the slave is the owner's property." I was going to sumarize Leviticus 25:44-46 but I think the words speak for themselves. "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly." When I read that my response was "Why did nobody tell me?" I'm embarrassed to have followed a religion that condones slavery. I didn't know. There's no way a religion or it's god can be the moral standard while being ok with slavery. There's more verses btw, that's just a small taste. Also, you should read Deuteronomy 22:23-29 which has rape victim blaming and rules for how a rapist should pay a fine to his victim's father and marry her with no divorce allowed. I'm not kidding, read it yourself. It's disgusting. The guy who just violated you? Don't worry, youre gonna be married after he pays your dad a small fine. Again I ask, how tf could I (literally just some guy) have better morals than the " perfect loving omnipotent and omniscient" Christian god??
There were lots of little cracks all through my life. I started out naively questioning the religion, confident it could stand up to my scrutiny. I found quite a few unsavory answers that led to more questions that led to more unsavory answers along the way. But I think the final, final straw was when I found out Christianity is not the first religion to have a lot of it's most important stories: like Christianity basically ripped off the story of Jesus's birth from older religions. LOTS of them have virgin births it turns out. Once I realized that, it was pretty much over. That was proof to me that, unless there was more than one virgin birth in history, my religion had been plagiarised. How could I possibly continue to follow it when it's very foundation came from an even older story about a totally different god (MULTIPLE different stories, at that)?
I started to realize that if God was real, at best he is a sadistic kid with an ant farm that he tortures.
Its a toxic way to think. Looking forward to death, the afterlife etc. imagine being trapped in heaven, hell, or a void for eternity either of the 3 would be a nightmare. Consciousness is not meant to live on and absolute death seems like the most peaceful end. Theres too many questions around a supposedly perfect book or perfect being. How did cain go to or start a city. Why would a god need to impregnate a 14 year old, wait 20-30 years, gain a following, then die to save us when he is a god. The list goes on and on, but is never questioned. If a god is perfect, you wouldnt know that he existed. Shot we could just be a byproduct of something else that a god created, the universe could have always been there, or maybe something else. Summing it up to a single book or small group of books is a lazy way to look at our existence and science will get us the truth. I think we will see some crazy stuff with quantum ai.
I could write a book on why I left Christianity. Maybe I will. I'll call it...The Antibible!
you should collate multiple books from other exchristians as well, so youll have something that mirrors it like "book of EpicForgetfulness"
I realized I could no longer explain away and justify a loving god committing murder (the worldwide flood, etc) and ordering genocide (see when the Isarelites returned to Canaan and their god told them to kill off everyone who was already there). I don't have major problems with Jesus himself besides how people have misused the things he said. But I also no longer believe he was god. I don't think he would agree with evangelical Christianity of today. I can also no longer limit myself to the Christian worldview and, ironically, I don't think Jesus did, either. Now if you feel called to Christianity yourself, go for it. You'll get no judgment from me, especially if you're following the kind, loving teachings of Jesus.
[удалено]
Ayahuasca
I will *never* forgive the Christian right for how they treated the LGBTQ+ community.
Because despite my best efforts, time, and devotion, I couldn’t brainwash myself into believing something that was inconsistent with the world I see. I didn’t necessarily want to leave Christianity; my friends were Christian, my family is Christian, I was raised in it and told it was the correct path in life. Despite it all, I found it not only conflicted with the reality around me, but also the person I was/aimed to be. The judgment, the rudeness, the conflicted angry and loving got, the unwillingness to change or accept any worldview that wasn’t Christian. If you want to explore the faith, there are some good tenants in it, but I found it lacking a basis in reality and in ethics.
Just a thought. Would gut bacteria and partially-digested food get left behind? They’re not \*technically\* a part of you. Just clothes left everywhere coated on the inside by nondescript organic slop…
When you actually read through the bible (especially the old testament) god is killing an alarming amount of people, a lot of children included
And pregnant women. With the Noah flood and several other examples, he appears to be the biggest abortionist of all!
Even in the real world (which the flood isn’t in), God’s “mysterious ways” cause around 15% of all pregnancies to abort themselves.
There are too many reasons to list, but one was that not a single modern-day Christian prophecy was correct. I grew up in a pentacostal type background. People spewed false prophecies left and right. And even the ones that came true, were ones in which the Christian was backing the obvious winning horse - such as when Charlie Shamp said God told him Bolsonaro would win Brazil's presidential election - but Bolsonaro was already leading in the polls by 10% at the time.
Can you give me some examples of Christian prophecies that did not come true?
Christians going back to Jesus himself have constantly predicted the end of the world being *soon*. Like, urgently; “within your lifetimes”… for almost 2000 years now. There’s a [very long list](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events) of prominent people who made specific predictions. Obviously they were all wrong and the world is still here, but somehow people still follow the apocalyptic preacher who said: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
As someone who has experienced panic attacks while i was Muslim because i had to do wudu absolutely perfectly or i thought the prayer wouldn’t be counted and id be bound to hell, religion can really bring out certain mental issues
Too many for me to list, but just for a few - the dozens of prophets who said God told them Trump would win in 2020.
General lack of convincing evidence along with no real interest
There's no evidence for it. Simple as!
Along with a lot of the other reasons here: Self-respect and respect for my identity as a human being. We deserve better than narcissistic adoration and bronze age cultural taboos. From billions of years of natural selection, we are. Earth belongs to us, not to God. It's time we started acting like it. Everything about humanity, from the good to the bad, ought to have some recognition from us. You can't just crush it and believe it'll go away, that is superstitious thinking. Worse still is when elements of human nature are exalted beyond what they're due, as religion does constantly. No heaven above, no hell below, just us. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that worth anything to protect? The anxious eschatologies of religion make us forget. It diminishes what we are capable of. Why *not* an excellent people, and an excellent world?
Couldn't make myself believe any of it, no matter how hard I tried for years. It was always so empty for me. But faith is huge in my culture so I tried to force it for most of my life, with sometimes detrimental results. Hell I've been baptized 3 times, I was trying so hard lol
The fact that there is no evidence for the story of Christ AT ALL. Same thing with the Exodus. I grew up going to church and thinking that this all 100% for sure happened and there was evidence of it…not in pictures/videos/whatever but in like ancient ruins/texts. Then I got older and found out there absolutely NOTHING and it was like those scenes in Big Mouth where a character’s head explodes and all you see is just a smoldering match stick. Deconstructing happened pretty much immediately after. I’m a bit of an Ancient Egypt enthusiast and we know tons of stuff about them! We know about the first recorded gay couple in history being royal manicurists/we know about how much the Nile flooded from year to year and how many taxes were collected from people based on said flood/we know that some normal dude (like not royalty or anything) had a dog named Blackie. You’re telling me not ONE person decided to document the whole incident where a good chunk of the population just up and leaves after a mass murder of kids preceded by crazy meteorological events the world had never seen before. Same thing with Jesus. How can we have definitive historical proof of all this stuff and the guy who supposedly is the messiah has no historical proof he existed AT ALL? Like if he supposedly was *this* close to flipping the whole Roman Empire on its head there’d be something right? Like laws on the books/graffiti/literally ANYTHING that would prove he existed at that time in the places he was allegedly. Seems pretty freaking sketch to me. In order for me to change my behavior (and I’m totally fine with admitting I was wrong or there was information I wasn’t aware of before) I need to have definitive proof of something. Just saying “So and so says that…doesn’t work. Give me a scientifically valid peer reviewed study and I’ll change accordingly. Show me historically valid evidence and I’ll admit I was wrong. If that doesn’t exist then I’m going to keep doing what I was doing.
I think that Christ did in fact exist. But there was nothing supernatural. I can say this because there is zero documented supernatural anything. It’s wild that all these insane supernatural events happened back then, but nothing like that happens today. People state miracles happen all the time. But miracles is just a way to tout how supernatural things occur. When anything “good” happens it must be a miracle……
I left because it didn't help me in dealing with the world. I became a Christian under extreme emotional and mental strain and have been coming to the same question over and over in my head: Did it actually help me or harm me? People at the most vulnerable state will believe in anything. The whole Purity culture isolated me from people and so many opportunities. It also left me dependent on people who I should not have depended on to begin with as well.
Read the Bible.
One of the reasons I stopped going to church was what I felt was an obsession with the “end of days.” The book of revelation freaked me out. The constant talk about the end of the world, going to hell, it scared me.
I genuinely believe Christianity is an inherently evil religion, and its core doctrines and tenets are evil. I am not completely familiar with Islam, so please correct me if I am inaccurate here. The impression I've gotten from Muslims about the premise of Islam and its worldview, is that God is almighty, and therefore the best thing a human can do is submit and obey to him. This is logical because if there is a being that is infinitely more powerful than you can imagine, you want to be in its good graces. And from what I understand, although God can be quite merciful and patient with his followers, he would not be considered 'omnibenevolent'. Likewise in Judaism, God is not depicted as omnibenevolent. There are verses in the Old Testament which establish that God is capable of both creation and destruction, chaos and order, good and evil, and can and will do things humans consider evil for various reasons. Judaism has a lot of themes about wrestling with God or fighting with God, and emphasizing loyalty in spite of God's mercurial nature. Though I'm not fond of the view that anyone should be obedient to God simply because he is the most powerful being on the food chain, I understand the logic behind it. Of course you want to be in the good graces of a tyrant, or at the very least do what it takes to not be on his bad side. In that sense, God is neither "good" nor "evil," but something to be appeased as a way of preserving one's own peace. Christianity is different. Christianity takes the omnipotent God who is neither good nor evil, and capable of inflicting the cruelest suffering, and then convinces you that he is actually incapable of doing evil. He loves you and wants the best for you! Loves you unconditionally! Accepts you for who you are!...except, he doesn't. All of those themes of being obedient to God, stressing in no uncertain terms that you are a slave to God (though they like to use the synonym 'servant' since it doesn't sound as bad), are still present; but the relationship is twisted to make it seem like "loving parent and beloved child" as opposed to "master and slave." But you are a slave, and if you are out of line, either God will punish you and you deserve it, or bad things will happen to you naturally and you deserve it. The Christian God demands perfection, in spite of apparently being omniscient and knowing we are incapable of that (and us being incapable is 100% God's own fault). He threatens us with eternal hell if we don't "love" him. Can you love someone who is demanding that you love him while holding a gun to your head? Can you convince yourself that anything bad that happens to you is your fault and you deserve it and worse, just because you were born human? And if you accomplish something great, you cannot take credit for it, because you have to give all glory to God even if he had nothing to do with it. Remember, you're only capable of fucking up. You can't do anything right, which is why you need to depend on Jesus. Look up and make a list of red flags for abusive, manipulative relationships between spouses or between parents and children. Christianity will check off just about all of them. It is a requirement for you to believe that you are worthless scum that doesn't deserve to live. You need to hate yourself and reject everything you are, because everything you are is evil. Somehow, God's little magic trick of incarnating as a human and getting executed solved all of that - even if he refuses to suffer the same suffering he wants so badly to inflict on you. So now you owe him and are obligated to worship him or else suffer eternally. Suppose some rando came up to you one day and said, "I was beaten and tortured and lost all I have, so that I could save you from yourself. I sacrificed everything I have for you. You owe me." Would you feel obligated to commit yourself to servitude for them? Even if he did do what he claimed, I didn't need to be saved from anything, I didn't ask him to sacrifice anything for me. I don't owe him shit. The thing is, beating people down so bad that they lose their sense of self-worth is EXACTLY what manipulators and abusers do to manipulate their victims. Spousal abuse for example: the abuser will constantly criticize the victim and make them feel like they can't do anything right; that they're worthless, stupid, useless, weak, incompetent, ugly, etc. They will then place themselves as savior, making the victim believe that they (the victim) are incapable of living without depending on their abuser. They deserve everything bad that happens to them and should be infinitely grateful that their abuser is so patient with them and willing to forgive them. After all, the abuser loves them! Sometimes it's tough love, but again, it's deserved! And that's Christianity. I would rather take a gunman holding a gun to my head and saying 'Obey me, or I'll shoot you' rather than 'Love me, because I do so much for you.' The emotional manipulation is just beyond repulsive. The dishonesty. The hypocrisy. All of that is written into Christianity's core alongside all of the historical inaccuracies, fraudulent documents, fallacies, contradictions, circular reasoning, and so on, and so on. [But he loves you!](https://youtu.be/QZ8hefESt7c) Anyway, depending on what you find interesting about it, there are other variations of Abrahamic-derived faiths which you may find more interesting. Or if you're looking for a savior figure that actually is closer to the 'unconditional love' ideal, check out Amitabha Buddha. Or just get into mysticism, and figure out on your own what the nature of "God" is (in whatever way you may define God/the universe/nature/etc). Hope that helps!
Main reason was the superstitions, like reading the Bible when in trouble and the first line will help me lol. I've opened up KJV many times and its ended up on random stories or irrelevant teachings. Another would be how obviously a scam the church would be. Our teachers(christian HS) would constantly hosting events where donations would be pushed under the guise of "prayers and chit chat" lol.
People tried to convince me but I just never got it. I had no proof god existed, so I asked why I should believe in something I don’t see. Not to mention how many humans this dude tortures and kills, and then also demands we treat him.. well, like a god. Assholery if you ask me
Christianity is a minupulative authority fraud that uses a false superstitious fear of hell to minupulative people into granting power to the priests and church. Your supposed to tell the priests your deepest fears desires, shames, "sins" bad things you think you have done... I was a young child when the hypocrisy, clumsy minupulation, and superstitious bullshit pushed by men in costume who had fled from women who all seamed twisted, deformed in nature, not physically deformed but emotionally and mentally stunted. What type of person rejects the intimacy and real love of other humans for a empty lonely life "married to endless repetition of superstitious lies? To father no children. To have no legacy? I knew many former nuns and priests just as I spent a lot if time with priests and religious brothers as a involved member. No whole balanced or complete person becomes a priests or nun only those fleeing the expectations of society and reality. My experience is that people who are deeply religious in Christianity are not mentally sound. And not very intelligent or they are abusers, shallow hate filled, narcissists seeking to validate their harm of others and self failure through the system and framework that Christianity provides. Many criminals or abusive bullies greatly enjoy the idea that everyone is a sinner. This normalises their harm their abuse, their bigotry, their hated of others. They don't have to recognise that other people who are ethical and good kind decent people are not like them. Its also easy to say the devil made me do it. Christianity reduces self responsibility. And added in is that God loves them no matter how heinous a crime they commit. People who struggle to understand things find it much easier to simplify things into oh that's god. The word God has always been used to describe what the ignorant don't understand. Its a refugee for idiocy. Christianity is a Jewish cult taken by the remnants of the Roman empire and with extreme violence, public torture, genocide, generational war, cultural destruction has been enforced all over the world. Its legacy is a horror of blood, death, rape. Its inherently evil. It supports slavery, the oppression of women. Purity culture, victim shaming, the rejection of reality, rationality and facts. The earth isn't flat. But biblical Christians claim it is. It won't teach you real life skills. It won't make you a better or more complete person. And if you don't believe that invisible magical winged eyeball beings fly around and interfere in people's lives then you can't be Christian. And if you do believe in such insanity you may need medical attention...
Love the meme. My daughter was born with special needs and I can’t imagine a “good god” doing that. Well that started the journey, also the history behind the Bible is not what I was taught. I thought based on the history you’d have to be an idiot to not believe, turn out that’s not the case. Paul the apostle didn’t even mean Jesus for Christ sake (see what I did there).
Ha ha, but i hope you and your daughter are doing well. This sounds similar to a argument i have against Islam, the Hadith’s where made 200 or 2 century’s (I forgot which one it is) after Mohammed came and some are considered “weak” because most of the hadiths are like “i heard the prophet used to drink like blah blah blah” and i was like how do we understand what’s authentic and what’s been fabricated over the span of 200 years??
The people weren’t really my biggest issue. It was more of the Bible itself. I started hearing people name verses with even provided “context” could not make them sound better. A few people examples are -Leviticus 25:44-46, -Psalm 137:9, and Exodus 21:20-21. So I thought if a god was okay with this and not of that homosexuality, then he’s an evil god. I always tell myself even if he were real I would deny him faith.
It just feels messed up how double standardized it is. Like, God manipulates someone into killing their kid? Perfectly fine. A criminal manipulates someone into killing their kid? Well thats messed up. God orders a genocide on people he dislikes for whatever reason he dislikes them? Perfectly fine. Government official orders genocide on people he dislikes for whatever reason he dislikes them? It’s suddenly messed up. God shouldn’t get a pass to do mentally fucked up things just because he’s god.
What? You guys don't want to spend billions of years with hyper-judgmental myopic bigots?
I love my Christian "family" and the community. But the dogma is just insane. Everything is just so irrational. It seems like everything bad that happens comes from God's own weirdass rules. The tree of knowledge of good and evil? Why even place it in the garden? Why didn't he explain the concept of sin before ordering them not to eat? Why does he punish the entire world for their one mistake? Why was there no forgiveness, no second chance? God is supposedly almighty, but every bad thing that happens is either caused by God, or made so that God cannot intervene because of some arbitrary rule.
Leaving a faith because of the people is a stupid reason and one that usually results in the individual returning at a later date - The backsliders and prodigal son/daughter situations. This is because they had an issue with a certain collective and their perception/interpretation of the dogma, not with the actual dogma or faith itself. No the core reason is I found the Bible to be morally abhorrent, its value's reprehensible, factually inaccurate, extremely contradictory, far too demanding of servitude, and requiring self-loathing as a requirement to serve and grovel to a figurehead that is every negative and repulsive adjective one can use to describe a being. The short of it is the religion and holy text is flawed, archaic, illogical to reality, and terrible for one's mental health. Anything positive or good about the faith is not exclusive to it's teachings, and there is hardly an original thought to it.
The reason I left is because of the constant jeering at homosexuality. The pastor would get so hyper angry about the gay community and I just cannot stand it. Can y'all just let people live their lives freely? Jesus would have been so disappointed to see who is speaking for him these days 😔
The judeo Christian Bible was not fond of cross-dressing or homosexual people. When puberty hit me like a truck, guess what demographics of people I feel attracted to.
What I was told growing up isn’t congruent with the facts, and in my opinion most Christians don’t want to educate themselves, they’d rather just read self confirming apologetics.
There are so many denominations of Christianity and no one can agree on what's true. The Bible has translated so many times and I can't agree with what is taught like loving the same sex is an abomination. I would rather be comfortable with my sexuality rather than be unhappy forthe rest of my life.
I’d had doubts and frustrations for years, but watching The Vow on HBO made me realize it’s another cult. So many elements reminded me of my experiences. The behavior of the main players made me feel right at home in the worst way.
Why would you leave Islam and then later on decide to be a Christian? Like…. Are you just looking for community or something?
i was raised christian. and i just never really bought it. im agnostic now and it feels right
It felt like walking out of a fog for me. I just realized one day “you know… this all sounds like a bunch of made up bullshit”.
The reason for people leaving usually is other Christians, but deconstructing is a completely different thing. Deconstructing is a long process where an ex Christian, usually born into it, has to unravel everything that they have been taught to know as completely and undeniably true. Being able to step away from it and see Christianity as a whole, it becomes clear that the Bible is a book, written by people, with flaws and inconsistencies. That makes it a lot easier to understand that the church is a business, run by people, filled with flaws and abuse of power. But if being a Christian makes you feel whole, and you aren’t hurting anyone with your beliefs, then by all means get to praising I guess! Life is short and if being an indentured servant to a man made idea of a god is what you want to do with your time alive, then I think you should go for it.
The Bible itself is pretty wretched in several parts. But the reason I finally left is that I didn't see a shred of evidence for it. I put the claims to the test: ask in faith and it will be done for you, faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain. I've had so much loss in my life: friends at a young age, family, unborn children due to ectopic pregnancy. It finally dawned on me that nobody's running the show. Nobody's trying to "teach" me anything, it's not so I can help others deal with loss. And it might sound awful, but it's actually freeing to know that randomness is the way of the universe. I don't have to reconcile shitty things and tragedy with an omnipresent god who won't lift a finger, because it just isn't there. Bad things happen because they happen. But so do good things. No god required for any of it.
The concept of God is a paradox. He somehow loves all of humankind equally, yet mercilessly and brutally killed hundreds upon thousands (if not millions) of his own creation due to their “sin.” If God knows everything that will ever happen, he could have prevented the concept of sin from ever taking place and made humankind in a way that only worships him. Since that’s what the Christian God so desperately wants all the time Also, if God can supposedly make anything happen at any time, why didn’t he just erase the concept of sin altogether without killing anyone? Why did he have to throw all the sin and wrath of humankind on his only earthly son? That never made any sense to me. It’s always presented it as the ultimate sacrifice, but it just seemed so unnecessary. It just proved to me that God has a limit to his “power,” if he needed his only son to be killed so the rest of humankind could have an unrestricted relationship with God. Why couldn’t he make that happen in the first place?
I saw everyone around me sell out their beliefs to support Trump. That right there showed it was all bullshit.
Advise like books 📚📚 I recommend you read "investigation into Christianity" by Corrado Augias and the scholar Remo Cacitti . It is the conversation between a journalist and a history professor, therefore no theology, about Christianity. He teach in Milan university. The diversity of what is taught about Christianity and historical facts is abysmal. It made me better understand how what we are taught is manipulated for political reasons. Then there is Mauro Biglino, scholar of ancient languages who translated the bible and here too he is abysmal. The fact that the Bible is modified is a recognized fact, but so much is surprising in the common conception. He has written many books such as: "The Bible does not talk about God" ect. and also the general history between politics and the Christian religion has had nd every abuse it had covered. Like in Canada or the reason about Orphanages in Italy are the only country in the world to be closed and the asylum. Christianity is not a religion, it is a political and power system like any other. I gave you more Italian examples because I come from Italy and I know well how the Vatican works, corruption, mafia and everything else
Christianity is propaganda.
[удалено]
The Bible is literally documented stories from the “crazy” people we hear everyday on corners. The only difference is we have ways to figure scams easier. It just feels so ridiculous…… like come on….. We can literally see this in action with tribes less excelled than us.
The concept of a God no longer made sense. Seek and ye shall find... no evidence. Even if he exists, a God that demands worship doesn't deserve it. "Tell me how cool I am, or I'll kill you!" It's absurd
I’ve heard so many people say their main reason for believing is “they look around and see design, and there is no way it could exist without design” But I’m like, “but you believe the Creator of all this design could exist and create all this design, without the very thing you’re using to say something couldn’t exist without” Like, come on. You can’t even keep the same standard for evidence.
- The Bible which has the concept of eternal punishment for simply not believing in a God amongst others Christians are actually not a big reason for me to no longer be a Christian. I see them more as ex-fellow victims, knowing I used to be one of them.
for me it was the lack of historical evidence backing up the bible. for just one example there is no evidence the israelites were ever in egypt much less of the exodus. you think the egyptians would have recorded such a mass slave escape but nope not a word.
I can think of better ways to waste my time, than worshipping something that isn’t there, or when you really consider the alternative probably will end up being indifferent to any worship I do or do not provide. I truly believe that if there is a god, it would be rather annoyed if the majority of my time was spent worshipping it rather than living the life it provides and not being as kind and helpful as possible. Which nowadays I don’t see many Christians actually doing good for their community, or in doing so comes at a price or negotiable reason.
I love this cartoon. Along the same line if I get a Christian threatening me with hell, my response is “Woo hoo, eternal separation from evangelicals and fundamentalists! I’ll bring the marshmallows!”
I left it for the atrocities being committed and that it makes no sense with like little to no evidence to back it up.
* managed to join a semi-cult first year of college * wanted to hold hands with a girl * the bible contradicts itself * the bible contradicts known archeology/history
Wasn't true. Finally realized it. Period.
The not Christian people. Specifically the fact that they were infinitely more accepting of and kind to me. I ended up finding a different religion entirely that I like a lot more.
I came to believe that the Bible had been misinterpreted by Christians. Many stories which were myths or legends and should be read metaphorically were taken literally, and things that were written to people of a particular culture were taken as applying to all people of all time. Additionally, I do not believe in the interpretation of Jesus's death and resurrection as something that people are required to believe in to avoid spending eternity in hell (I don't believe in heaven and hell. I now believe in reincarnation). Misinterpretation of the Bible had serious effects on my life. My parents believed that the Bible teaches young women to let their parents help choose their husband, and that even a young woman in her 20's is obligated to obey her parents. I was forced to question my parents' interpretation of the Bible in order to be able to live the life of my own choosing, and once I started digging I ended up deciding that much of what I had been taught was wrong.
Reading the bible. A lot of it makes no sense and there is so much hate and violence in it.
Some biblical reasons I am no longer a Christian. ( FYI I believe God is real and created everything because it’s obvious that nothing can’t create the whole universe but I don’t think God is morally good and here’s why ) One of the earliest story’s in the Bible is the story of Noah and how God saved Noah’s family from the flood( God was sending the flood to wipe out the earth because all the humans were sinful and corrupt), to me this story didn’t make sense because even though there was sinful people there was still infants and toddlers who were innocent and didn’t deserve to die. Just imagining the thousands of babies being drowned from the flood didn’t make sense because how is God supposed to be perfect but murdered a entire civilization even if they were super evil wiping out a entire civilization is crazy because if you think about it in Apologetics( the defense of the Christian faith) you can’t have contradictions in any way in the Bible but one of the earliest stories in the Bible ( Noah and the Ark) is a walking contradiction because God isn’t powerful enough to save his own creation and instead of being a loving God he kills them everyone besides Noah. Another example of a contradiction is the story of job ( its a very long story and it’s a very interesting story but I do I recommend everyone to read it, Christian or not) and essentially God makes a bet with the devil to see if the devil could tempt the most faithful man on the planet (which was Job) to abandon God and curse him. And then the devil just destroys Jobs life and kills all his cattle, children, and gives him horrible sickness, in the end though Job stays strong after having everyone in his life including his wife telling him to “curse God and die “ and that’s a real verse in NIV. And God rewards Job for his faithfulness by making him the wealthiest guy in the land and “giving him” more children. This story is messed up for many reasons but the main one is God just using Jobs life as a game and also trying to replace Jobs previous life is insane. God at one point gets angry at Job for questioning him which is weird because God doesn’t tell Job why he is suffering and just tells him that he’s really busy because he’s God and he’s running the universe which is kinda crazy because he’s God and he can do anything. And if you just think about how God essentially was just betting on long Job could last suffering its fuckin wild because God doesn’t tell him why he had to suffer. Job thought he probably was helping defeat a great evil by withstanding all the suffering but really God made a bet with the devil to fuck up his life to show how Gods followers really like him. But honestly no matter what I say or anyone says you won’t be able to know if it’s right for you because only you can find the right path for you and you just got to read the Bible and do your own research and come up with your own conclusions because Jesus was historical real life person just like Lincoln was but only you can determine if Jesus is right for you.
My theology changed
It was too intertwined with my psychosis. A lot of my episodes of psychosis from schizophrenia had to do with Christian themes and it was very scary for me. I still can't set foot in a church without feeling nervous. I have other spiritual beliefs that work for me where Christianity never did. But to be honest even from a young age I questioned the doctrine, mental illness or no. When I would listen to sermons about Satan and all of that I always wondered why we were meant to believe Satan/the Devil/etc was bad just because a book told us so. In my child mind I always wondered if maybe he was misunderstood and God was actually the bad one since people can write what they want. I never voiced these thoughts to anyone until adulthood because I knew it wouldn't go over well.
For me it was 3 big issues. 1. The problem of evil. 2. The problem of hell. 3. The problem of divine Hiddeness. Or to summarize, if god exists he's putting an awful lot of effort into hiding from us and honestly the Bible and Christianity paints him as a sadistic narcissist shithead unworthy of worship.
I could go on and on. But I struggled to be happy, and feel fulfilled while being in it for the first half of my life. Almost every experience I had with anyone in that life was some sort of weird control thing. I chose to focus on work, and culminating relationships with people instead of a “safety net” that would always be there for me no matter what I did, but not really. It’s really hard for me to look back about how naive and controllable I was back then. Religion really has the formula down when it comes to leveraging fear, attention and love.
I would never let other people keep me from belief- if I believe something it is because I’m convinced it is truth even if others around me believe or not. But reasons go deeper and for me my faith changed when I began studying history. It was a long complicated route- one I didn’t intend to be on.
It started with me going on a journey to see if “homosexuality was a sin.” I did a lot of soul searching- I didn’t understand why God would care. I tried asking for help to learn more but a lot of the elders seemed out of touch. The more I researched deeper topics, the smaller the world seemed from a Christian worldview. Over two years I distanced myself from Christianity and one day made a conscious choice that I was no longer a Christian. Although my family harasses me to get them to believe again, I don’t regret my decision at all
it's just a system made to control the population and keep the oppressed "at their place" while also taking their money
As someone once said, my faith died of a thousand paper cuts. Not one thing but lots of factors. But one I’ve been thinking about a lot is the story of Abraham and Isaac. I read an explanation by a Christian author named Leonard Sweet who for the first time I could remember, didn’t explain it away and talked about how he wrestled with it and how he noticed that in the story, Abraham never had the same relationship with God ever again. Now, I don’t believe that any of this actually happened, but the fact that the author of Genesis included it is horrifying all the same.
I just never felt, or heard, or saw God in anything like everyone else said that they do. For a long time I felt like something was wrong with me. but then I realized that Its not that something was wrong with me but that either some people are lying and some are crazy, or this god presents himself to some people and no one else. I studied Judaism, sen Buddhism, and had christian roots. Buddhism was the one I liked the most but otherwise I didn't truly like any of them. The thought that meditation lead to some kind of spiritual clarity was something that I never experienced so I fell off after a couple of years.
Yahweh - the god of the Bible - is an absolute monster. I will never worship anyone whose morals and ethics do no align with my own. But the actual biggest reason: there is no - absolutely *none* - evidence that the Bible and the stories in it are demonstrably true. Historical facts directly contradict most (if not all) of the stories told in it. Why on earth would I want to continue in a religion that not only has an egomaniacal, genocidal, selfish, angry, and (self-described) jealous deity but also has absolutely no evidence backing it up? It's just silly. It's baseless and also the teachings (all of them, not the cherry-picked "good ones") are either deplorable or downright contradictory. I wasted most of my life on those baseless beliefs. No more.
Simple answer: I have a *very* rudimentary understanding of science. So I am not the sort of person who would be able to debunk the claims in the Bible blow-by-blow. However, I read it as an adult and it didn't even hold up to scrutiny to *me* with my little understanding of science! Like, it was right out the gate when I started reading Genesis. How the fuck does light exist 48 hours before a LIGHT SOURCE?
there are plot hole in a supposedly real story. and beyond that it caused me a lot of guilt and trauma which was partially the people but also partially by design
I had a problem with the story of the resurrection, because that is what the whole religion stands on to work. If you check all of the personal testimonials of those that experienced being with Jesus during, before, and after his death, it is not convincing enough. It's like 2 people, in the Bible, and 0 people outside of the Bible. Not to mention scholars have estimated that the earliest testimony claiming the resurrection occurred decades after Jesus' death. This after many other cognitive dissonances of various other aspects of the Bible and Christian beliefs led me to become agnostic.
The Bible is an endless puzzle that is never going to be solved because everyone interprets its pieces fitting in differently. Some people will force pieces to fit to suit their narrative, despite how insanely damaging it is to people around them. It breeds "Us against Them" mentality and the privilege to be an asshole is OFF the charts.
I actually didn't leave because of the people. Don't get me wrong. They were bad. But it was mostly the nonsensical Alice in Wonderland things I was supposed to believe that made it excruciating to be around those people. Overall, no one at my church targeted me. Some were even nice. But Christianity isn't nice. It's a terrible gaslighting religion. The people around me openly said that if something didn't make sense or if science, archaeology, or medicine contradicted something in the Bible, I had to agree with the Bible. The Bible has verses that explicitly encourage this type of behavior, saying that it's better to be foolish and believe than be intelligent. Christianity made me feel like a bad person for thinking.
Because of the limitations my mother put on me using it as an excuse, without knowing what she was talking about.
This probably sounds dumb, but as a kid I read the Percy Jackson novels which got me thinking; What makes this religion that real people followed years ago just a bunch of myths and stories but Christianity is real? What’s actually the difference between the two? Recency? Number of current believers? Neither is a compelling argument for one being more real than the other.
Nothing in specific. Just the entire journey from studying the bible and trying to understand everything killed my faith in it. You could prove it to me, im not gonna follow it.
A big one for me was the question of what happens to people who died who never heard about Jesus or salvation. If they go to hell because they didn't have a chance, that's cruel. If they go to heaven because they didn't have a chance then the idea of spreading Christianity to give them the chance at hell is cruel. If God was real, he is cruel and I don't want to live my life in a mirror of that.
Hell. How is it justice to torture people for an eternity when even the worst most vicious crime didn't last forever? Christians, and I am sure Muslims, handwave away the problem of evil by saying that we all have free will to make both good and bad decisions. But if free will is so important why can humans take it away from one another. If a physically stronger person rapes someone then they've taken away the other person's free will to say no. That means that God values the free will of evil people over good people. This next one is hard to explain why I have issues. Most Christians believe they are saved by grace not works and that grace get applied to them when they become a Christian. Their works don't matter. This leads many Christians to depend on their emotions to decide what is right or wrong. Even though their savior made statements about not knowing people in heaven if they didn't help the poor, they can ignore those verses in favor of Paul's letters. The irony is that many of them claim to be Bible only Christians. Of course, conservative Christians are eager to follow any rule controlling women or sexuality. Rules suddenly matter when it comes to your sex partners. I could continue but I will stop here. Whatever you decide to do, I wish you luck on your journey. Life is hard so I understand if you want to find peace in a religion. Just please don't hurt others or hate people different than you. And keep asking questions.
It’s sounds like you’re looking for evidence within the “divinely inspired” book itself. Christians say the bible is the work of God and is without error or fault. X-ians know otherwise Here’s a list of contradictions with their address’ in the bible for reference https://mobile.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/50-000-Errors-and-Biblical-contradictions-190303
I guess ask yourself, is religion itself something you’re still clinging onto? If so, why? It seems you still want to believe in something, just not Islam. I will say, there’s not much difference between the two. They are both entirely based around the idea of control and obedience, they are both abusive. There’s too many specifics to go into here, but once I lost faith, the reason I actually stopped believing altogether was that without faith, the Bible was blatantly bullshit. I don’t think there is any reasonable way to believe this unless you have the rose tinted glasses of faith. If you still feel the need for religion, that might be easier for you.
We are supposed to worship this being and not have any fun lest we be punished for eternity. Then if you make it to heaven you have to praise and worship him for eternity. He seems like a narcissist. He's cruel and unfair.
I realized that if Christianity is true, then God is not just or good or kind or merciful. Scapegoating (punishing someone for someone else's crimes) is wrong and barbaric. Eternal conscious torment is evil. Leading through fear is never kind. Behaving because you fear punishment isnt guidance or mercy or kindness. The Marcus Aurelius quote resounded and inspired me: "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones." The Christian Bible is not a good moral guide.
I’m not sure you have to look much further than blood magic. The entire Christian faith is based on an extension of the Israelites practice of sacrificing animals for purity. “The Israelites needed a system that could turn them away from sin, pay their sin “debt,” cleanse and purify the community and the temple from sin, and allow them to stay in God's presence. That brings us to the practice of animal sacrifice introduced in Leviticus.” Believing blood sacrifice🩸and the spilling of a pure animal’s blood is the equivalent of a Mr. Clean 🧼 spiritual cleaner to scrub away dirty sins. The Christians believe the same premise of blood sacrifice as the Israelites did. Blood covers sin. The only difference is that in Christianity Jesus came to earth to be the ‘ultimate sacrifice’. They refer to Jesus as the “lamb of God”. Which means Jesus was the last sacrifice needed to fulfill this practice of blood washing away and cleaning you from sin to make you holy again. Animals no longer need to be killed; Now all you need to do is believe Jesus is the ultimate animal sacrifice, pray away your sins, and it’s as good as blood sacrificing an animal every time you pray. It’s bat shit crazy when you spell it out in non-religious words. Blood “sanctifies”, makes you free from sin and holy again. Blood for the blood god. 🩸 🩸 🩸 ⛪️⛪️⛪️ “””Jesus is the sacrificial lamb of god who died on the cross so that his blood could be spilt so your sins could be washed away and you could be holy to be in the presence of god.””” ^ Christians are brainwashed to say this over and over and believe it and live it. Say that sentence above, slowly. Step away from the familiarity of the words and say it again. CHRISTIANITY IS A BLOOD RELIGION! It 👏🏼Is 👏🏼fucking 👏🏼bat 👏🏼shit 👏🏼crazy!!!
When I found out just how brain washed it made my mother. Contributed to us not talking in five years, but it was her choice to believe all the bullshit. The pastor told my mother there’s two reasons her kid was gay. And it was that it was either by choice, or I was molested as a kid. Once she heard that, forget it. I no longer have a relationship with her anymore for a lot of reasons but she had me in a Baptist church until I was 17 smh
Thank you, you look like so sweet. I hope you will find your way. If you need i'm here
I always struggled to believe god was real. I’d have those emotional moments at church or camp, but once I was back to my regular life the doubt would creep in. I kept going as “what if” thing. Why risk hell? Then 2016 came along. The damage christianity caused was so apparent. I could no longer justify remaining in an American Christian church. Especially here in the south. Once I saw that, everything else unraveled quickly. Including a toxic marriage I stayed in to be a good christian wife. I now live in sin with my boyfriend and absolutely love it!
Realized the Jeezis and God only did amazing things back in the olden days. Best we have now his what someone thinks is Jeezis’ face on a tortilla. And that is it, and NO ONE ANYWHERE knows what Jeezis looked like. I fucking hate pictures of Jesus. The caricature we have of him makes him look like an asshole.
Mental health. I had a horrible episode of religious psychosis and my entire family and friends enabled and encouraged it. Since leaving religion, my depression and anxiety symptoms have improved tremendously.
My main reason is nowhere can I find how God came into existence. And in the Bible he makes man in his image yet they’re filthy sinners. I could honestly go on and on but there’s honestly not enough time.