Ask Lemmy

My parents didn't think I was religious enough so I was forced to go to Catholic school. Thus became even more atheist. Also, religious people are the most hateful and dishonest people on the planet based on my experience.

The hypocrisy of the religious. Hands down the biggest reason.

The exclusivity, in the negative sense.

The constant premise that there is something wrong with you if you don’t conform or otherwise fit the mold, or bend a knee to those thought of as superiors. Dissent is not allowed.

Pray problems away instead of actually doing something about them. Like school shootings.

The toss in all the rest of the BS like fighting other religions, wars in god’s name, god gave me (the win, the victory, saved my life but it wasn’t the surgeons, spared my house in the tornado but not the neighbor’s, my Mercedes, whatever) but not you because you’re gay or support LGBTQ, liberal, atheist, etc.

There really is so much to despise about people who using religion as a shield for their shitty beliefs and actions.

First drop of doubt for me began at a Wednesday youth service. Not only was I such a strong believer that I went to church in the middle of the week, I drove myself because I was the only one in my family who wanted to go. The youth minister was giving a class on cults and the more he spoke the more it sounded like my entire life was being part of a cult. Following that thread led to me finally admitting to myself that I don't believe anymore about 6 years later. It was a long road with lots of doubt and denial but that one sermon on how to identify a cult woke me tf up.

I learned logic and stopped accepting cognitive dissonance.

Of the things that kept me a Christian, least important to me was the historicity of the Bible, even though, to this day, I still have a high regard for the Bible as a historical document.

The second most important was the evidence of the effect of God in the lives of the people around me at church.

But the most important, beyond anything else, was the subjective experience of "the Spirit". I wasn't pentacostal, but I was all-in as a Christian; It sounds so woo-woo, but I don't know if most people are aware how convincing a truly "spiritual" experience is, even most Christians, since most Christians seem to be cessationist about the most basic interactions with the Spirit (not just healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues, etc.), even if their theology says otherwise. For example, whenever I had a big decision to make or something I was anxious about, I would find a place where nobody could hear me, sing a few hymns, read a few Bible verses picked totally at random, and pray-- not about my decision, just prayer in worship of God-- and without ever actually addressing my issue, within a short time, I almost always had a profound peace about which choice to make, even when that decision went against my insecurities, my rational thought, my will, my perceived abilities, or all of the above. I didn't know or even care the degree to which praying for "stuff" affects the outside world, but I knew prayer affected me and made me a better person.

There are even little "tests" you can contrive out of the Bible to experience "the Spirit". There's a verse, 1 Corinthians 12:3, that says that nobody can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Spirit. (Obviously, anyone can say the literal words, but to actually mean it is harder.) Anyway, I know some Christians who take this literally, and taught me to pray the words "Jesus is Lord", and when I did, something deep inside always responded, "Amen!". Romans 8:16 could be used the same way, i.e. "I am a child of God". Really, any Bible verse or anything I knew with 100% certainty would elicit the same response. But trying the same experiment with any other phrase would only leave me feeling gross inside.

Anyway, I started to have doubts in the mid 2010s. First was the realization that other people's testimony of their spiritual experiences wasn't terribly reliable. For example, I once went to a prayer meeting while visiting friends in a rural, less educated town, and, while for the most part I had a good time, I was rather culture-shocked by the fast and loose way the Christians there used (and meant) the word "miracle" to describe positive but entirely mundane life events. Like I'm glad your brother-in-law saw an incremental improvement in his cancer this week, but, I mean, the rain falls on the just and unjust alike; it seems more superstitious than spiritual that you credit his improvement entirely on last week's prayer meeting. But whatever, it's a small thing and it doesn't really matter.

But then I noticed a similar trend in the Christians I looked up to. This isn't a spiritual example, but my church was politically mixed, and while I didn't care too much that my friends were supporting this candidate or the other, there was a definite uptick in cognitive dissonance from the 2015 political realignments, leading to people convincing themselves of viewpoints they didn't even remember they disagreed with just last week. The ability to rewrite history en masse with no knowledge it was ever rewritten was something I'd never experienced so viscerally prior to that. (I get that people have a tendency to believe whatever they want to believe, but I'd never seen it at this scale and to people so mentally stable and intelligent.) I finally started to understand how so many secular Bible historians could agree that the early disciples of Jesus genuinely believed they witnessed Christ die and rise again yet completely discount the story as inaccurate. Mass hallucinations don't work that way, I always thought.

Then it happened to me too. Now, I recognize that any impression or feeling or answer to prayer from the Spirit is going to be, in many ways, ambiguous. With the exception of those moments of profound peace, you kinda just get a pretty good idea of what you "heard" from the Spirit and accept that there's always the chance you misunderstood. But it was the former, moments of profound peace, that caused me, for example, to turn down work that would've pulled me away from my congregation at home to another town further away, despite already being out of a job at the time. This was a bad move, financially, and eventually I ran out of money and got evicted. Now, the Bible doesn't make that many concrete, single-variable, testable promises about what's supposed to happen to a Christian walking with God, but one of the one's that's strongly implied is that if you "seek first the kingdom of God", your basic needs will be provided (Matthew 6:31-33). I get that there are going to be exceptions to this, and I'm not trying to imply a prosperity Gospel, but I don't live in a third world country and I wasn't being persecuted and there was no reason to be struggling financially in my position short of irresponsibility. I was genuinely "seeking first the kingdom", and the result was personal failure. And whether or not I've taken the Bible too far to contrive a promise that isn't actually there doesn't really matter, because the Spirit said it was a promise, or so I thought. Clearly, I misunderstood.

The problem is, if I misunderstood the most obvious, unambiguous things that the Spirit told me, nothing is trustworthy.

The other problem is that I had been noticing that it didn't seem like I was spiritually growing as much, despite staying out of sin and following the Bible to the capacity I was able. Christianity clearly had made me a better person from the moment I converted from atheism until several years after, but it seemed like whatever character flaws I still had after five to ten years were just "stuck" in place, and, in fact, this seems to be the normal Christian experience. My pastor mentioned to me a book he had been reading-- I wish I could remember an author or title-- that mentioned that the average Christian is good for about seven years, and then they become a warm body for the rest of their lives. He meant it as an admonishment to continue walking with God, but seeing as I thought I was walking with God, I looked around the church and was horrified to slowly realize that this characterization matched my experience of the Church. It's still the same God; He didn't change. So what changed? Some of the best people I ever knew I knew from church, but they still had rough edges that were never addressed. If anything, the congregation was just getting more cult-like and rigid ("rigid" in a religious way, not in any actual adherence to the Bible) over time.

Eventually, I found myself overwhelmed with doubts. I started running little spiritual experiments. Once, I was taking a shower, and I started doing the "Jesus is Lord" experiment, except that I found that with a little mental gymnastics, I could coax the same response from random objects; like, I could say "shampoo", and something inside would say, "Amen".

After that, the idea that "the Spirit" was all in my head seemed more plausible than the existence of God. So that was basically the end for me.

I was a Christian until I was 18. One day I was reflecting on how Jihadist's will blow themselves up because they're totally convinced they're right.

I asked myself if I would do the same, but ended up saying "I don't believe that much", which promoted me to ask myself "then why believe at all?".

Since then I've totally deconverted and I'm now anti-theist. I resent that I was indoctrinated, and I see religion as the main culprit for most of the problems in the world.

I was in 5th grade, and I had filled a notebook with questions about the bible and how passages in it contradicted modern science, as well as a bunch of passages from the bible that directly contradicted eachother. My parents took me to a bunch of different christian "scholars" and pastors and none could answer a single question in my notebook, other than "have faith." It was then that I realized there was probably no god and the bible was a bunch of bullshit. And maybe there is a god, I am not against the idea, but I have still not to this day ever seen or heard empirical evidence that would lead me to believe there is one. Telling your kids they will burn in hell for eternity if they don't believe in a mystical being is pretty fucked up. I had serious nightmares growing up about what would happen to me in hell. Talk about brainwashing.

I was raised a specific way with Christianity at the core of it. My mom was Catholic but didn't really practice, my dad's side had a history of church leadership, but it skipped a generation. Both of them went to a revival right before having kids. By the time I was born and aware, they were very dedicated members of a local Baptist church.

I wasn't allowed to read comics, watch most TV, listen to most music. I couldn't watch most movies, we didn't have cable, we didn't have internet, so I was stuck thinking this is just the way it was.

Even inside the church, I wasn't allowed to play with certain kids, talk to certain adults. I wasn't allowed to talk with girls... A lot of stuff I wasn't allowed or supposed to do.

I was ADHD and an Aspie, but my family didn't really like that kind of medicine so I never took anything. High expectations to meet, and constant disappointment in my failure to meet them.

Nonetheless, I believed the Bible, in God, in Jesus. I listened to the teachings and stories. I learned what I was supposed to be as a Christian: good, kind, caring, putting others first, denying yourself, etc. and I thought that was great. It made me very understanding of others, listening to them and meeting them where they were. It made me generous and kind, offering help with no hope for reward or return. I didn't mind that I never got my way, was always wanting more... That didn't matter, my reward would come later, just like the Bible said.

~

Enter Obama. While I was excited about the advent of a new president but wasn't yet old enough to vote, politics started to creep into religion. People blamed him and Democrats for everything, while reverting to scriptures and other doctrines to say why. After a soul searching moment related to the legalization of gay marriage, I realized that what the government did wasn't at all pertinent or related to the church.

The pastor I had at the time navigated this issue with finesse and grace. He called on our church members to follow the basics: the Bible applies to Christians, not non believers. And believers or not, we should treat everyone with kindness and love. Needless to say, he got subtly pressured to leave over the next year or so. I appreciate him a lot for speaking up and asking for love in a time of growing hatred. Last I heard he became a sports coach for a high school, living the example of showing love by doing, not saying.

~

After that, with Trump on the horizon... My church devolved into the cesspool of trying to reunite religious law with common law. They wanted to outlaw gays because "the Bible says so". They wanted to stop abortion because "the Bible says so". They wanted to get rid of all the immigrants... Because the Bible said so? No, beyond those two points the Bible and Jesus were left behind, and instead the hatred started to pour out of these people. There was no love, it was only hatred and spite and fear. Trusting in God meant voting Republican. Doing his will was reduced to wearing red hats and saying "Lets Go Brandon". Spending money on improving the nation and it's inhabitants was socialism, the very enemy of the American people...

And it was at that point I realized that the religion I was taught as a kid, of love and kindness to all mankind at your own expense... Was gone. You didn't need religion to be a good person and to help others. Religion was being used like a crowbar in the gears of our democracy. And it seemed to be used similarly everywhere else, too.

I had better access to the internet, interacted with more people, and found that my suffering as a kid came from a denial of science by my parents, and holding me to restrictions in the name of faith that did nothing but damage my growth.

~

I like Jesus, the concepts, the teachings, the story. And wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone who claimed to live in his name acted to his example? But nobody really does. I've been spending more time attempting to deprogram myself from religion and faith recently, because I'm pretty sure a day will come where that classic scenario would happen: someone will hold a gun to my head and ask if I believe. But it's not going to be some godless terrorist bent on eradicating the "good news". It'll be some proud American patriot with Fox News pouring from his headphones, following his Republican Party's call to action, killing those who don't believe in what he does because he's been told that's the only way he's getting heaven on earth.

And despite whatever I may think, that day I'll gladly say I no longer believe.

Took a couple decades.

At 13 I realized one's religion - and therefore whether they live in paradise or suffer for all eternity - depends almost entirely on the place of birth.

Why would God do it that way? There is only one correct religion and thousands of false ones? I would need to be very lucky to have been born into a culture that spoon fed me the one correct religion while discouraging all the others. What were the odds of me not going to hell?

From around 18 on it was religious people's behavior and politics. Why do religion's "morals" support irresponsible and hateful legislation?

Mid to late 20s I got into philosophy and realized "because God" is never the simplest answer.

Where did the universe come from? God made it of course.

But where did God come from? He was always there.

Then why couldn't the universe just be the thing that was always there? Or at least the conditions that allowed for the universe to come into existence?

Adding God into the mix only complicates the answer and makes it less likely to be true compared to whatever our current best, simplest hypothesis is.

Here's a couple silly reasons why:

• I kept asking for supernatural things to happen, or to win something like a small school lottery. The fact nothing happened, let alone a clear punishment, did disappoint me.

• When I discovered that Santa was fake was when my faith started to really crumble.

• Sometimes listening to the Pastors speak gives me a nice sensation on the back of my neck. I later discovered ASMR. I sometimes still listen to old religious people speak, but I'm not actually paying attention.

Here's the real reasons why:

• Finding too many things I disagreed with or did not understand from the text.

• Having a religious preacher fail to explain them to me.

• Discovering other religions exist.

• Learning what a cult is and making 1:1 comparisons to most religious entities.

• Discovering how shitty the real world is.

• Science (like, all of it)

• History (also, all of it)

• Discovering philosophy

Haha, mostly been a lurker on lemmy

TLDR: i did rational thinking due to my scepticisms and stopped believing.

I was born into a middle-class Hindu family in South India. Being from south we werent much religious to begin with. But my mother side of family was tad bit more religious than my fathers side of family. Usually during temple festivals, prior to the main day they would have "parayanas" or like preaching equivalent. Its basically retelling of stories from ramayana or bhagavad gitas and other literature. This guy who will tell the stories does good job at that, in the sense that his aim is to tell us the morals and the leasons we need to learn from it and to not take the story in literal sense. Those were good, those stories did help me have a strong moral compass growing up and instilled a good sense of religion.

When i hit puberty i was still religious, not overly but somewhat in the middle between the level of religion of my father and mother. My mother being slightly more religious and still following "andhavishwas" (read blind belief) which were stuff that people tell you to do or not do. Many of those stuffs do not make any sense, some example which i could think are

• to not go out at sandhya (dusk) time when the ritual lamp is lit
• to not have a bath at dusk time
• to not shake your legs when sitting on chairs or beds.
• to not eat anything with oil in food if there was a death in the family (not just close family but extended one too) for the next 18 days
• to not get out of house unless for emergencies if there was a death in the family (same) for the next 7 days.
• to not apply oil to hair while looking at mirror

And other countless many more stuff which differ from region to region. No one really followed most of this stuff but stuff like this is probably something most Hindu's probably heard if they have atleast an elder in their family or extended family. Many of this stuff even though not strictly enforced is really annoying cause you get that stare or long advice like why it should be followed from your elder or your mother(in my case). Do understand that its not just these i listed but many many stuff which effects even day to day quality of life. Seeing my christian neighbour and friend not having such restriction on till how much time they were allowed to play outside and lousy me who had to drag my ass inside my home before dusk was always something which bothered me but it was not even a reson to forsake hinduism entirely. But i did try to find rational answers to why those were not permitted, why i should not do something because someone told someone and that someone said the same to their next generation and so on. I did find the reason for some of them eventually before i was 13 or something, for the examples listed if anyone is still reading and curious (or else skip to next para),

• I believe the ritual lamp litting thing comes from early age practice of humans lighting fire to keep animals or other things out (Hindus believe lighting lamp will clear out negative energy)
• once early humans have lit fire at dusk they stop going ut for resource and wind up with the day, they wont bath since most often ponds or water bodies will often be a little farther from their settlements and its a risk going out to bath at night. That might explain the restriction to not bath at night time.
• for point 3, early hindus used to keep jars, baranis (a type of ritual jar) specifically underneath bed or below tables. Shaking your legs would probably hit those jars and it may have been something made up to protect those jars.
• for point 4 and 5, i think it was safety practice. In early days a death in the family would mean they have had disease. And since early village hindus life was centered around temples, preventing people from family which recent death would prevent spread of disease. And avoiding oil food comes from this same belief as often oily food are avoided when one is sick. As for the oil on hair in front of mirror, i seriously have zero clue.

Reasoning with my mother over these stuffs was like reasoning with a brick lol. These stuffs never really did affect my stand on religion though, only just snags which made me question stuffs which elders say. When i was 16-17 is when i started doubting my religion. Hinduism sure is the oldest religion and many stuffs in hindusim are borrowed by other other religion like atma and jeeva and tree of life (notice atma and jeeva sounding similar to adam and eve) and the story of manu rishi who took the advice from a fish that the world is going to be flooded and who built a boat. These and many other stories or their equivalent being found in other religion made me think at that time that possibly other religions might have cultural exchanges with Hinduism at some point and may have based their religion of them. As i was a Hindu then I respected other religion,but this realisation made me a bit at unease because at that time it bothered me that not much people were talking about it, but the similarities were many. This made me again look for other similarities, i read about the mahabharatha epic again and the ramayana, this is when thesame rational side i had when i was debunking those "andhavishwas" kicked in.

How the hell could any of those stories be true, an epic on that scale would leave evidences that not even a million year could cover up. And the timelines, those are way off. There is no way we did have that much advancement in the early age and still be a monacrchy based rule . Someone really took their creative lberty and created a fantastic epic story to teach the importance of Truth and morals. And someone took that story and made it a religion refined over thousands of years and still refined even today.

As a lot of these stuffs made me sceptic i began to really see them as stories and fables just something to teach morals and values. I realised most of the limitation that were sett on my life were self bound.

Any last sense of religion i had was lost when i was 20 years old seeing the bullshits happening around the world, even on my locality. Politicians and many so called "peoples leaders" down in north India and other parts doing genocides and atrocities that i would do anything to dissociate myself from them on any similarity i have with them. People destroying mosques, cow vigilantism in north, mob lynching, caste bullshit. None of these are lessons from Hinduism but these people are hiding in its cover and associating how they live and what they do with them, inspiring and conditioning childrens to grow up believing it is what hinduism is. If there ever was a god, that god is dead.

I stopped believing in Hinduism as a religion with that and consider myself an atheists (i have a atheist friend who claim i am not a true atheists, but i dont want to dwell on proper term which best describes me). But i do still believe on some of the morals and lesson in truth it had given me and thats all i keep from Hinduism. Never prayed, lit a lamp, or went to a temple ever since then.

I grew up in the Christian church. I even went to Bible college and graduated.

There's plenty of internal inconsistencies in the Bible that people point to. Honestly, while I was always intrigued by those, I didn't (and still don't) think those are deal breakers. What did it for me was twofold.

First, the people and their inconsistencies in belief/behavior. There's plenty of beliefs, practices, and policies that you can argue, but being kind and compassionate are pretty clear callings without room for debate. The most hateful, spiteful, discriminatory people I know can all be found in a church on Sunday, or at least claiming to be Christian. Not to say that all Christians are like this - some of the kindest people I know are Christians. But as a group, they are appalling.

Second is results. I've prayed for plenty of stupid stuff I'm sure. If a god is real, I don't hold it against them for ignoring my dumb asks. But when I look at the serious stuff - prayers for lost people to come home, for severe illness to be healed, for provision for the impoverished, I can't see any difference at a macro level between praying and not praying.

I questioned what good religion was if it didn't seem to improve people or the world, and came to the conclusion that it was a wash, so I quietly walked away nearly a decade ago.

It honestly kinda sucks. It was a huge portion of my life. Most of my friends are people I met through church and college. My family is still heavily religious. I met my spouse through church, and they are not in the same position as me. Barring 2 friends, I have never told anyone I know that I've even questioned. Even as I've moved through jobs, there's always been someone who already knew me, so the expectations that come with a religious history and degree have always preceded me. I'm effectively in the closet. Anyone who says leaving is the easy route is ignorant and wrong. It's hard.

Grew up Lutheran, with a mom who is very strong in her faith. Felt a connction my self for a while but always struggled with skepticism. Always dealt with self-image issues growing up, and the idea of sin turned much of that to into self-hatred. Sure, sins are forgiven, but you are still supposed to try and avoid them, but I always felt at odds with what I felt was just part of who I was (don't really want to go into it, but not anything gender/orientation related).

Eventually, learned to love myself more, but this started the rift for me. The other thing is something I've always been unable to shake: of all the religions in this world, who is to say one is the "real" one? Everyone has their own image of what "God" is.

Much further reflection and family conflict later, that got expanded to the understanding that religion in general is just one of many ways we try to frame or understand things that are otherwise difficult to. Things like Purpose, Creation, our place in the grand vastness and chaos of the universe.

Nowadays, when it comes to spiritualism I align more to a sort of naturalistic pantheism. Instead of prayer, I meditate, and focus on celebrating life and wondering at the beauty of it all.

This got long and I'm not sure it makes much sense, but I tried. Not great at translating concepts/ideas into words.

I was a good muslim kid, than I learned that god hated gay people, I didn't. So that kicked off my questioning.

It was a journey. There were several small things that kept adding up until I couldn't handle surrounding myself with hypocrites.

1. Why do Christians get so sad when people die? They act like they'll never see that person again when their religion says it'll only be a few years before they're reunited. Everyone says they believe that, but no one acts like it.

2. When was the last time the church has been on the forefront of social change, and what was it for? Wasn't slavery - that's how Southern Baptists split from Baptists. Wasn't women getting the right to vote or get divorced.. Wasn't when people were asking for workers rights.. Same-sex marriage.. You name it. The people claiming to have a direct line to the most potent love in the universe... Kind of suck at spreading the love around.

3. Mega-churches.

4. All the pedo scandals and coverups. It's a feature, not a bug.

5. Truly horrifying living conditions around the world. There is an amoeba found all over the globe who can eat its way into your eyeball, and then into your brain. Children experience this, and in some places, 30-40% of a population went blind because of it. There is no NEED for this to exist for an all-powerful god, but here they are. If god made nature, they made these amoeba, and I don't want to associate with someone who created every deadly pathogen to ever exist.

If there is a god, they're a fucked-up sociopath, not the embodiment of love that I keep being told they are.

I was up for confirmation, when allegedly the Holy Spirit enters you and you start a more adult phase relationship with God. Post-ceremony, the prep class teacher asked all of us newly confirmed kids if we had felt the holy Spirit enter us. Every single kid but me said yes. It was obvious to me that they were being influenced by each other and the encouragement of the teacher and the specialness of the ceremony. Realizing I didn't want to be carried away by the wave of group fuzzies was the start of my drifting from the church.

And then the firm end to it all was when I left home and got away from the network of religious friends and family I grew up around and really saw how the church treats gay people and women and children.

Fundies. Seeing how ridiculus and backward their beliefs were made me wonder about my own beliefs and one by one they failed to withstand the scrutiny I put them through.

Went to Jesus camp and got assaulted by a counselor pretty badly, was harassed into keeping silent about it. Would rather not discuss it too much, I did have to go to the hospital. My faith died at that point and I was just going through the motions for years. I was planning on a theology degree of some sort but decided my heart wasn't in it. Went for engineering instead. Hit a low point right before graduation and was really hoping to feel literally anything, felt nothing.

2018 sat down one night and decided that I was done pretending I was just lapsed, that I was being a coward. I was going to look at the evidence and see where it went. Been an atheist ever since.

There's actually very little original about Christianity. Almost all aspects of it had been around similar Middle Eastern religions.

Council of Nicea just decided what the Bible is. Often based on nothing more than politics.

I grew up being put in Sunday school for daycare and all the stories they told us sounded completely over the top ridiculous.

The story of Job made my fuckin blood boil as an 8 year old because I could immediately make the connection that god just took everything from this man to win a bet.

God, the all loving all knowing all powerful god. Tortured a man to prove a point.

And not just to prove a point in general but to prove a point to his literal arch nemesis.

Basically Satan tricked god into torturing this man and that was all the info I needed to know god is bullshit.

I was raised Mormon. Mormonism is somewhat unique in that it claims to have a modern prophet and leadership that are directly led by god, and it strongly encourages members to pray to god and ask god for confirmation that this is true. Mormons are also taught that god would not allow their prophet to lead them astray, and that your local leaders are also inspired by god in what they do in their official capacity.

I was a missionary when shit started to break. I had a nervous breakdown; I am on the autism spectrum (although that diagnosis wasn't available at that time; it was almost 30 years ago, back in DSM-III), and being a missionary was a lot too much for me for many, many reasons. I became suicidal. My leaders--again, people who were supposed to be called by god and led through inspiration from god--insisted that I must be acting in some sinful way, and that it was sin that had led to me being suicidal. They encouraged me to read my scriptures and pray more--as if I wasn't already doing that a lot as a missionary--and to repent of my sins (whatever they were, because I sure as fuck didn't know). If I was not sinning in some way, then Satan never could have taken hold in my heart, and Satan was obviously what was causing me to be suicidal. Obviously these commandments did not help, because I wasn't doing anything 'wrong' in the first place.

But that leads to a problem: I believed that these people were called by god, and acting under god's instructions, because I had received a spiritual witness. However, it was clear that they were wrong; I was not acting in a sinful manner (certainly less so than other missionaries!), and I had nothing to repent of. So these things are clearly contradictory: if I have received a spiritual confirmation from god that these men are led by him, then what they are saying must be from god and therefore true. But I know my own actions, and I know that I haven't done anything that is sinful under any remotely normal definition of sin. Therefore, the feelings that I believed were spiritual confirmation must not have been spiritual confirmation at all.

Once you realize that feelings can not be a reliable way of knowing if something is actually true or not (or True, for that matter), then all of it falls apart. You realize that 'answers' to prayers are just feelings, not communication from the divine. The bible is suddenly a book of myths. Miracles dissolve like fog in the sun. When you look at religion--not just Mormonism, but all religion, and you compare it against things that can be verified empirically, none of the claims stand up.

Even though the foundations of my faith cracked while I was a missionary, I was unable to accept the meaning for several years, because Mormonism is a cult, and it's very hard to escape even when you know it's garbage.

I was raised in a strict Christian sect and I took my religion very seriously and really wanted to believe for most of my life, but my brain just wasn’t really built for faith and I was a huge lover of science and so I wrestled for years trying hush the voice of reasonable doubt in my head… I prayed and prayed for more faith and never got anything in return. I tried to strengthen my faith by reading through the entire bible, which I did, twice, and that only made it worse because the gaps in reason became so much more apparent. Then during Covid lockdown a good friend of mine left the religion after several years and that gave me the strength and courage to finally say “I don’t believe, I can’t believe, and I can’t do this anymore.” It probably wouldn’t have taken me so long if I hadn’t been raised in a religion that believes in shunning and the fear of losing my family and most of my friends, but by that time a few of my friends had left and I felt I had a bit of a support net outside the religion and could walk out without the fear of losing everything.

In the end, I had a 2 pages-document of pros and cons for leaving church...

Some of them:

• If I wasn't part of Christianity and had the choice to join, would I do it? No.
• The scandals
• Their actions to keep the scandals under the radar which made it even worse
• Wasted money in Germany. A bishop in Germany bought a bathtub for 15k €. That's a prominent case, but there are a lot more
• The fact that the church is literally a throttle of evolution.
• Still no equality between men and women (I'm sure, they'll do that at some point. But it's the church. So, it's gonna take 600 years)
• No proof of existence of a god or whatever
• There are n religions saying, their god is the real one. At least n-1 of them must be wrong.
• Only 3-5% of the money you pay as a member via taxes goes to charity (in Germany)
• The "Bistum Köln" in Germany has so much money... They started investing it and bought shares of companies.
• I became a member of a religion when I was < 1 year old. I confirmed it when I was 13??? Most other live-relevant decisions are 18+. This should be the same here.
• Religion lessons in school felt like a waste of time
• Church is a black box. No one knows what they are actually doing, how much money they own, ...
• Church has an own "justice system" in Germany, which is terrible.
• Most Christians prefer not acting christian when they are challenged.
• I didn't want to finance an Anti-LGBT group
• Ratlines, a.k.a. "How the church helped Nazis to escape Europe after WW2"
• ... and 10 more points.
• Also, I found only 3 or 4 very bad arguments to not quit

And when I realized that the only thing keeping me in there is "fearing" how some people (mostly family) might react when I'd quit, I knew, I had to quit as soon as possible.

Pretty recently.

When the majority of people I grew up respecting decided to use their religion as an excuse to participate in or support a terrorist attack, a lot of things started unraveling pretty quickly. Turns out none of them actually cared about what Jesus wanted, but rather what that news station said.

With so many of my old friends and church leaders telling me hate was the answer, the cognitive dissonance didn't have any ground to stand on anymore.

Our pastor did a whole six-week long study of Acts, talking about how we needed to give more so we could fund mission trips and whatnot. I got caught up in it all (he was quite the orator, I'll give him that) and donated a decent chunk of the money I'd been saving up to get a new iPod.

My sister went on one of the mission trips and had to pay for literally everything out of her own pocket. Despite the plentiful donations for, allegedly, that express purpose.

Cherry on the cake was that they soon broke ground on a new youth group building (which we didn't need), complete with a coffee house (with prices and menu comparable to Starbucks). All I could think of was Jesus getting pissed at the vendors and money changers in the temple and flipping tables over. "'My house will be called a house of prayer', but you are making it 'a den of robbers'."

Survived eight years of Catholic school and read the Bible cover to cover. Between the flagrant hypocrisy and neglect in the school system and seeing the contradictions and bullshit in the book with my own eyes (and how nobody in the church even remotely tried to live up to the good parts), I just couldn't anymore.

Then I read about the Bible and its history, from the Council of Nicea to the confession letters from later translators. I saw that it's essentially a multilingual game of telephone weighted with politics, salesmanship, cultural eradication, and so forth, and it really became laughable to me that any thinking person could possibly ever take it seriously again.

It becomes easy to dismiss the rest when you realize they're pretty much all telling the same fairytales.

I grew up with very devout parents who raised me in a particularly conservative Calvinist Christian denomination, and I bought it all for years for a few reasons. For one, everyone I trusted seemed so utterly convinced by all these things I had been raised to see as fact. Also, the incredibly biased sources I was given for any questions portrayed anyone of different faiths or beliefs as deluded at best or evil at worst, which didn't really make their positions appealing.
I prided myself on faith, because when I ran into something that didn't make sense I'd be like "Wow, it sucks that that might make some people stumble, but I'm going to do my best to just trust God on this one."

The first cracks started to form when I started to realize the sources I trusted might not be trustworthy. Despite all the weird religious special pleading, I'd otherwise been taught decent critical thinking, and I started to see actual rebuttals to the religious apologetics I'd been raised on, rather than the pathetic strawmen conservative Christian writers had constructed, it made me question the apologetics and the writers I'd thought were upfront, honest, and wise.
Still, I held onto the thread of faith. This stuff had been absolutely drilled into me, I had been raised not to let anything shake that, and I was starting to discover I really didn't like the idea of losing my faith when that was the glue of my family and every other meaningful relationship in my life.

Any time I made friends (mostly online, some through college) who weren't within that big Christian bubble I'd been raised in and reinforced, myself, though, it raised this weird uncomfortable thought in the back of my head: "If friends, or really anyone end up suffering for all eternity for not having this religion, how exactly am I supposed to deal with that knowledge for eternity to make heaven the bliss it's supposed to be?" If this eternal soul of mine is perfectly able to be, like, transcendentally happy forever while knowing it's all on the backs of billions of people suffering for eternity, that soul isn't me anymore. In a weird way, the idea of heaven being something that would fundamentally make me something unrecognizable made the concept make a whole lot less sense.... Sooo I tried not to think about it.

This went on for a few years, concerns and doubts growing quietly, and this one day, someone was trying to talk to me about ghosts. He asked if I believed in ghosts in the first place and I said "No." and he was downright surprised because, you know, all these people say they've seen ghosts! He says he's seen ghosts! And, yeah, I don't find that compelling.
I went home and thought about that, then thought about the purported evidence for ghosts, then thought about the defenses various religions made for their beliefs, considered why I didn't buy them... Started to realize a parallel here- and then I buried that line of thinking. I was not okay losing my community. I was less and less certain I believed, but I still wanted to play the part so it would keep my faith going.

COVID happened, as did the BLM protests of 2020, and it suddenly became extremely clear that my community kind of fucking sucked. That popped the lid on my thoughts and I started to look in earnest at what I believed, and why other people with the same general beliefs could think that treating people as other people was optional.
Ultimately, I ended up in an epistemological situation. A number of the "facts" of the Bible were patently untrue, with the same sorts of errors I'd seen as gotchas against other religions. The arguments I'd seen for belief were much more obviously poorly formulated when I compared them to near-identical arguments for other religions. I realized my epistemology had a big fucking problem with it, and that problem was the belief in faith as indicative of truth. Oh, hey, look at that, people can and have believed every possible position on faith. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

So I let it go. I let the faith go. I let the bad argumentation go. I let myself let go of the morally absurd positions I'd been boxed into by a bunch of ancient writings. I by and large lost that community, but I had started reaching out to make friends outside of it for a bit now. I had something, and that made it easier.

My family is still in my life, though thankfully several hundred miles away. They still are pretty unhappy about the whole situation, even more upset than they are about me being trans, which I finally realized I was able to admit to myself after letting go of the religious dogma.

Anyway, it took me a long time to get here, and I can't help but be upset that 26 years of my life were colored by a view of the world that I find morally unconscionable now, but at least I got to ramble about it on lemmy to almost the character limit.

It was a long process, I suppose, not one event. When younger I was always fascinated by science, and as I grew older, I suppose I started seeing less and less sense in god fitting into the equation.

I think the turning point of the whole thing was when I was in a religious camp for my confirmation and the last day, we had this... party? It was called Slávy in my language, and it was basically a concert with religious songs, which was so intense that people were fainting, "feeling god," and whatever.

When my classmate fainted, and everyone was saying, "Oh it's okay, she's just feeling god," and shit like that, that fucked me up. Not only because she fainted, but because I saw right through the bullshit. The loud music, the aroma, and the darkness of the place were overwhelming, but not because of any religious or supernatural reason.

That night, I understood truly and fully that religion is nothing but smoke and mirrors, and I've been becoming more secular and, lately, even more anti-religious (because of current events) by the day

I was raised Jehovah's Witness...

I saw absolute human depravity growing up. In my early 20's, I dived deep into spirituality. I found my answers on my own. Most importantly, that religion is poison. Poisonous to the whole world, and largely the cause for war, mass genocide, and to keep humanities progression crippled.

"God created the universe"

"And how do we know God exists?"

"It's in the Bible"

"And who wrote the Bible?"

"God"

The circular reasoning is what really showed me that it was all bullshit and merely a means of control

There were just too many contradictions and the more I learned about science, especially physics, astronomy, and psychology, and the way the world works, I discovered that there is always a rational explanation for things, even if sometimes the knowledge necessary to comprehend something is not something I possess personally at the moment. People who would preach in my church would confidently claim things I knew to be fallacies, misleading, or straight up incorrect, not out of malice but their own ignorance as well, and I stopped trusting the words of religious leaders as I discovered they were as human as myself- their faith didn't protect them from error or make them better people, and eventually I just couldn't fall back on faith or ideology to be the bedrock of my moral or philosophical compass because it just wasn't trustworthy.

I was teetering from logic for years, but I watched the towers fall on 9/11 and it finally pushed me over the edge. It there is a god and he allows this shit to happen, then he is wretched. It was a small shift from there to, no... there is no good, no god

I've gone from Sunday attending to more lax and agnostic. Does that count? If so, is because of how inconsistent the actual practical actions of churches I've been to. Started protestant, but enough were hypocrites (remind me of the pharisees) so I stopped going. Became catholic and loved it, but the way the church has continually terribly handled the sex abuse pedo cases has disgusted me. Priests should be held to a higher standard, not lower.

Additionally, I don't wanna be associated with the people who are Christian on TV. All the right wing Republicans in the US govt are terrible people. Whatever they say they are, I don't wanna be a part of that. It's hard to reconcile "love your neighbor" and then legislate their live away or give crazy people unfettered access to guns.

On a more practical level, I like a lot of the charity work and compassion taught by Jesus. I'm OK with the spiritual aspects. I cannot get behind the church's message (mostly protestant) about personal relationship with God. If God intervenes, then that means it's his responsibility when he doesn't intervene and a lot of terrible things are his fault. If he doesn't intervene, then a lot of what the church says is wrong. It doesn't add up.

Youth group wanted to split out group into boys and girls, also by age, and start charging. I also actually read the damn book (I had 2 bibles ) found it dismal and hypocritical. That was the final nail in the coffin.

Was raised going to church each sunday, but approaching confirmation age I realised I couldn't mesh faith with my understanding of the world. That was it for me really, I'm quite open to the idea of god(s), ghosts, magic or other forms of the supernatural, but until there's actual proof, I can't believe in it.

Getting baptized. Before then, I felt no spiritual connection or "heard the voice of god" or anything. I understood that once I was baptized, I'd be one of god's children and I assumed the holy stuff would kick in after that point. Funny thing though, nothing changed. No matter how hard I prayed or tried to believe, nothing was different.

I spent several years trying to find literally anything to show that any of it was real. But everything lead to the same dumbfounding dead end: you just have to have faith.

As I learned more about Christianity from a scholarly perspective, it became increasingly clear that it's not real. The oldest book in the new testament wasn't written until at least a hundred years after the events took place, meaning it was all disparate verbal stories for hundreds of years. The Council of Nicea later just decided to remove parts and add some new parts to the bible, justifying it by the council itself being divinely inspired to have arrived at the correct version of the bible.

It's clear now that the rich and powerful have historically used religion as a tool to control and manipulate the masses. With the benefit of hindsight, it's just an obvious scam that has no basis in reality. So for that reason, I'm out.

Learned about science. Primarily astronomy and evolution, and the evidence supporting it.

That killed Genesis, and everything else went with it

It was a slow process, but honestly the liturgy was boring and like out of touch. The narratives felt like they can't really hold up to a contemporary audience.

That, on top of being very uninterested in being made feel guilty for random things. Sorry but I'm gonna continue masturbating and you insisting on guilt is not gonna make it stop, so what are we doing?

Finally, all the general nonsense and cognitive dissonance sealed the deal.

The fact that most terrible things in the history of the world were in the name of organized religion...

I befriended a lawyer in a online game years ago. When he found out I took the bible literally, we had debates about it, and he'd break down some of the passages in Revelations and try to get me to justify stuff like dragons. It opened my eyes to how ridiculous some things were, and how there was a reason one of the first things we were taught (Baptist) was not to question anything.

How it seems every religion believes they're the "One True" religion, and the whole rest of the world is wrong. How throughout history, it's fueled wars, and been used as a method to control people more than a way to help people.

How some priests garb themselves in expensive robes and surround themselves with gold or drive luxury cars, or preach on TV from practically a stadium while passing around the donations plate through a crowd of poor people while promising a afterlife gated by pearls.

I'll stop here but yeah. It was actually a pretty devastating realisation for me, as religion was a huge part of my life up to that point.

I was raised Methodist, but when I was maybe 7 or 8 I realized that I was only Methodist because I was raised Methodist and that if my parents were a different religion, I would have believed that instead.

It took me until my late teens to realize I was an athiest, but that was definitely the start.