I was raised in a religious family, went to church every Sunday.
When I realized I had actual questions that they refused to acknowledge, I walked away. I was eight.
Example question:
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 offer two different creation myths. Why? Is one “right” and the other “wrong”?
Genesis one: Animals created first, then people (man and woman created at the same time.) 7 day creation.
Genesis two: Man created first, then animals for man to name, then woman from the rib when god realizes he made a mistake and none of the animals are a fit companion for man. Not a 7 day creation.
Answer:
The reason for it is plain in the original Hebrew. Genesis 1 is the Elohist tradition (the Gods are referred to, in PLURAL, as Elohim.) Genesis 2 is the Jawist tradition where God is referred to as YHWH or JHVH.
Early editors took two different creation myths and mashed them together.
If you can’t, or won’t explain that to an eight year old… well… doesn’t speak well for your faith.
Most churches won’t even employ someone who knows the answer to this.
It’s not even a “Won’t tell you.” thing; more of a “Why would anyone question the good book?” thing.
Whenever I looked too closely, I began to be black-listed and got the, “It’s too bad that’s where you are, because we hoped you would be a great leader.”
Not defending stupidity at all, btw, just further emphasizing the blissful ignorance that is largely exonerated in religious circles.
Which just kills me because the actual answers ARE out there.
For example - What’s the deal with the “begats” chapter and how were people living for hundreds of years?
Answer: They aren’t individuals, they are family lines. Such and such family came from so and so family and lasted 140 years before dying out.
Makes way, way more sense when you read it that way.
Amazing what you can learn by reading Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. ;)
hate.
specifically, there was some small LGBTQ protests that put the hatred into perspective- there were the protestors (who maybe went out of their way to be annoying and provoke things;), assholes, and everyone quietly cheering for the assholes.
it made me look at my own behavior… and I didn’t want to be an asshole (or perhaps, more accurately said: didn’t want to be that kind of asshole. I’m not a perfect person.). This prompted a slow slide from non-practicing through agnosticism into straight up atheism.
It didn’t help that it took 2-3 years before anyone reached out to me about why I left, and then it was because my mom had asked a pastor to do just that… he didn’t get it when I quote CS Lewis Mere Christianity (“That a person ought be a better person as a christain.”…) I was a better person as an atheist; because I wasn’t obligated to be an asshole.
edit to add: it wasn’t just the LGBTQ hate. that was just the nature of the incident that brought me face to face with the ugly truth. It was easy to say, for example, that West Burroughs Baptist’s aren’t real christians. There’s a lot of out-groups that christians hate on. hell, sometimes those outgroups are even other christians (how many wars have been started between catholics and protestants?) more contemporary, look at the hatred for refugees and asylum seekers.
hatred is a pervasive feature of Christianity.
I paid attention to the stories.
The story of Job in particular drove me up a wall.
God took everything Job loved to win a bet he already knew the outcome of. A bet he made with Lucifer.
Basically Lucifer tricked god into torturing an innocent man and god fell for it like a fuckin chump.
He either knows all and willingly tortured Job to prove a point to someone he shouldn’t give a single thought toward or he got duped which shows he’s either not all knowing or just a dumbass.
I always assumed the story of Job was total BS. Job was basically a sock puppet used to gaslight the fuck out of people that would otherwise question god’s motives.
The entire point is “you can’t understand”. which is one of the answers given by narcissists.
another one that annoys me is the garden of eden… the apple. you know. it doesn’t take a genius to see that, two quite literally ignorant humans - they had no conception of good and evil, purportedly- of course going to eat the fucking fruit.
But of course the only fitting punishment for eating a bad piece of fruit is eternal parental abandonment. And childbirth that fucking kills women, cuz she did it first, so all shes deserve it more.
Education. When I was young I grew up in a Catholic household, in a city where being Catholic is the norm, in a country that is very religious and superstitious as a norm. And then I had the opportunity to go on a student exchange and get immersed in different cultures, and I realized “these people have their own beliefs, a different religion, but they have the same ethics as me.” So I started leaning towards agnosticism - let everyone believe in what they want, to themselves. Years later I went to college, and had my first experience of Southern Baptist religion. That one rubbed me the wrong way. There was just so much disdain for anything different, so much “believe me because I said so”. That’s where I realized I didn’t believe in God, or the afterlife - I believed in ethical behavior, and in being good to other humans. The rest just fell into place after that. I really like Penn Jilette’s point: “I have no God, and I murder and rape all I want. And the amount of murdering and raping I want to do is exactly zero.”
I could never find an answer the question: Why is my religion the one that’s real and not all the others?
The money-grubbing and the cultish behaviour.
So our (Lutheran) church would bring all of the kids in the congregation up to the front to discuss a theme or passage during each service. We initially had a pretty cool female pastor (who—I later found out—was bullied into leaving because she was a woman 🙃); she at one point told us that to get into heaven, we only needed to ask God to let us in. It made sense to my naive little brain.
When I was 15, some asshole temp pastor called us up and asked if we know how to get in, and I replied with what I was told; he very condescendingly said “uh, no, you need to believe in God”.
I was irritated by his tone, yes, but I also hadn’t heard that before, strangely. His response really disturbed me. I thought, what about people across the world who have other faiths? Or children who die before they even have a chance to believe?? You mean my amazingly kind, Buddhist Vietnamese friend is going to HELL?? What the fuck???
So I began to research alternate viewpoints online, and discovered the ways in which Christianity doesn’t make sense and how it’s often used as an excuse to spread hate and suffering. I just couldn’t justify believing anymore.
I was 14 and my parents never forced indoctrination. I considered what I knew to be reality and what I had been taught about religion just didn’t fit. I put it on par with Santa.
Granted, you don’t have much confidence in your beliefs at that age, so I kept it to myself for many years (as I continue to do). If the topic comes up, I’m not shy to express views, but generally keep to myself.
So I was raised LDS, and the exmormon community says all Mormons have a “shelf”
Basically everytime you ask a question and the answer is along the lines of “we don’t have the answer to everything, all will be revealed in time” we put that weird thing on out shelf. Eventually, too many things are on the shelf, and it breaks.
Some people who want to stay in the LDS church because it makes them happy have a very strong shelf. Those who want to stay because of fear/social pressure avoid looking at anything that might need to be on their shelves.
Some common shelf items that were on mine:
Book of Mormon describes the natives having very European technology around 0 AD. They have metal swords, horses, chariots, to name a few. Yeah they just didn’t.
Even in a time when it was incredibly common to be anti slavery since the Civil War was around the corner, the idea that black people were inferior to white people and should serve them was heavily recorded in the early church. And black men couldn’t reach full status like a white man until 1978. They preach that God loves all his children equally… but apparently there were a few qualifiers about skin color.
How they treat women is trash.
Prophets supposedly are getting revelation from the same God, but keep contradicting each other. Most famous example is “Adam was God” theory. Most recent high profile example was a previous prophet ran a campaign called “meet the Mormons” trying to sell the idea that being a mormon was super normal. But current prophet says “mormon” is a derogatory term and a win for Satan?
The way they demand super poor people pay tithing, while holding upwards of a hundred billion in reserve for no apparent reason. They could easily end hunger in the US, and maybe even homelessness. And they would if they actually followed the teachings of the loving christ they claim to follow.
They claim that they have magical gifts, like being able to tell if people lie. Given the rapists and worse that have been high ranking members of the church, either they are liars or complicit. But given how often they defend rapists that were obviously guilty, probably just both.
I could go on for awhile… but those were my shelf items. One day it just broke and I was like… huh this is all just nonsense isn’t it.
How they treat women is trash.
I was also raised LDS. I was out as soon as I moved out of my parents house. That was over 20 years ago. Last month I was talking with my mom and she was finally starting to question things. I didn’t want to go overboard with support, but I’m so proud of her for finally starting to think more for herself and abandoning the obedient wife mentality.
I’m not an ex-Mormon specifically, but this shelf analogy resonates with my experience as someone who was raised in an evangelical Protestant church. Eventually you stack up too many inconsistencies and the cognitive dissonance is too much.
Yeah it feels right for a lot of situations!
It’s just how much bs a belief can hold before it all falls apart.
I personally got compounding items on my shelf. Because I would ask “hey what happened to the metal swords the book of Mormon talks a lot about?”
Instead of a reasonable answer, I was more or less told not to ask those questions. So “it’s bad to ask questions” gets added to the shelf. I imagine it was the same for a most people leaving religion.
Yeah it’s wild how many ways humans can express “don’t question the dogma,” both explicitly and implicitly with deflection, body language, etc. I’m a child of clergy, so I very much grew up “in” a church. Consequently, I don’t even have any specific memories of asking questions and being told not to doubt or what have you. I’d never not been immersed in the fundamentalist milieu, so I subconsciously learned to police my own thoughts and actions without realizing it. It’s taken years to recontextualize some of my childhood behavior. Most of it is sad stuff, like realizing “oh I ghosted that friend because I was trying to avoid becoming aware of the homosexual crush I was developing”. Anyway, I guess my point is that we can be good at preventing ourselves from questioning dogma, too. Until the shelf collapses.
I wasn’t very religous to begin with. My whole family is Christian but I was raised in such a way that Christianity was really small part of my identity, most of the time I just didn’t care. Also, science was always really interesting to me. I think it was like 6th or 7th grade when I became atheist, Christianity just didn’t make sense anymore because God isn’t necessary.
Raised in a family that was intermittently transient (living in renovated school bus/rv etc) in order to travel and preach. I was very devout growing up, probably terrifyingly so to anyone who wasn’t in my family. For one thing, I was told and believed that I was a prophet from a young age. I didn’t really believe anyone who claimed to not be a Christian was being honest- the standard line was that “atheists” and so on secretly believed, but didn’t want to stop sinning (or something- the details were a little blurry).
One day, while living with a cult in West Texas, I was riding back to our campsite in the back of a pickup (with a bandana tied around my face to cut the dust), and it occurred to me that, if God were omnipotent, then he always has the option to do something else but get the same effect. So if he wanted to not kill Jesus, but still arrange things so that people had to acknowledge/accept him to avoid hell, then he could.
Omnipotence means you only ever do things because you wanted to do them.
Why this hit me like a ton of bricks, but the idea of billions of ignorant people burning for eternity didn’t, I don’t know. But everything else came tumbling down from that. Cue the lying, the (several years later) inadvertent reveal, sleep deprivation, harassment, years of eggshell conversation, my family skipping important events in my life, etc. etc.
Good times.
Raised Hindu, Primary education was enough to debunk Hinduism. Hindutva politics in India was also an important reason for leaving.
But I could have joined other religions. Probably,Reason for joining atheism was science and rationality.
I grew up in an incredibly conservative, southern baptist town. When people say there is no hate like Christian love, that’s where they were talking about. I’m not kidding when I say part of the reason I have PTSD is growing up in a place like that while being trans and queer. Every bad experience I had there is inextricably tied up with Christianity in my head, because it was a pervasive background factor in all aspects of life in a way I think that people who grew up outside of that environment tend to believe is exaggeration or at least a century in the past.
So, that’s why I’m not a Christian. I did a meandering wander through other faiths for a few years before returning to the same feeling I’d had since I was a child: this feels fake and also vaguely embarrassing to be taking part in because I don’t believe any of it. I didn’t get anything out of the social aspects of any religious stuff so I didn’t see a point in going to something like a Unitarian Universalist church, which is probably where I’d go now if I developed a social interest in religion for some reason.
Raised mormon, I think I knew for a long time I didn’t think the religion was true, but the stigma of leaving was SO high I never allowed myself to consider it might not be true. Moved away for college and without family to make sure I went to church I just started skipping. My parents asked all the time and I eventually got tired of lying. I decided I needed to know for myself and half hour of google later I knew.
God made me. It’s part of His Plan™ that I’m not religious, and I apparently cannot deviate from His Plan™. Plus, Jesus already died to forgive any sins I may commit so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Eta: I cannot deviate from His Plan™ even tho I supposedly have Free Will™
