Asklemmy

For me, it was always the gap between what I read (the gospel) and what the people around me in church believed. I don't know what book they read, but we never were reading about the same guy. The dude I read about would have never been okay with bulldozing the homeless, siccing the cops on people, conflating wealth with righteousness, and the government denying people basic rights. Jesus never would have been cool with a theocracy; following Christianity was always and only ever meant to be a personal choice between you and God. What broke me was when the SCOTUS ruled that gay people could get married, every church we visited was screaming about how they were being oppressed. I gave up on going to church, and, over time, re-examined my beliefs. Today, I identify as a Buddhist. Not a very good one, mind you, but it is something I find helpful for framing my worldly existence.

I don't like to say I quit, more like expanded my belief system to become a human belief system, and not exclusive to a cultural belief system.

I traveled outside my very conservative and religious country, met many different people, learned about a lot of different cultures, and their beliefs. It made me see how "limited" one type of faith can be. How blind I was to the human experiences.

So now, basically, I don't believe there's one answer to rule them all. And that's the biggest change I went through outside of the religion i was raised on.

Hypocrisy, politicization, hellfire, and lack of community I guess.

If religion is supposed to be the opium of the masses, it should at least leave me feeling better after church. The rising ideology was naive and attracted narcissists, and there was less and less space to hold on to the original beliefs. It started looking less like a refuge from the world and more of the world. It wasn't perfect before but there was more flexibility and grace at least.

I didn't quit the LDS church, I was unofficially excommunicated for being born intersex and having a puberty not consistent with my assigned gender.

I have both sets of genitals. Both are small, deformed, and non-functional. The bishop at the time told my parents to keep it a secret and to raise me as a boy. Then puberty came along and I physically filled in as female.

It scared the ward members, it scared the bishop (different bishop than before), ajd it scared me. I didn't know what was happening, nor did anyone else in the church. From their POV, a boy just physically changed into a girl.

The common sense thing to do was to consult a qualified and competent doctor about this, yet no one in the church did that. Not even my parents. The bishop gave my parents an ultimatum. Choose between God or your child abomination.

They chose God and my parents disowned & kicked me out. The church quietly turned their backs on me. They all wanted me to just go away.

I'm older now, wiser, and in a far more stable life. I'm even an ordained Satanic minister now, and I am happy. Our congregation welcomes those who are cast out. Words and deeds are more important than your physical appearance or what's in your pants.

Edit: And before any LDS members respond with attempts to get me to rejoin, don't bother. I no longer believe in gods, afterlives, and magic. Plus I will never rejoin the religion that cast me out for the crime of existing.

The final nail in the coffin for me was looking at a world map and thinking about other religions. These people here were raised on this religion, and they believe wholeheartedly that they are right. But, I also believe that I am right. Everyone believes their religion is right, and that belief is solely based on what you were exposed to in your region. Doesn't that mean it's all bullshit? Only one belief can be right. Religion is shaped by the culture of the land, and if the culture changes, so does the religion. With all the changes to each religion over time, that means the original beliefs are gone, or the original "correct" religion is gone. I suppose a current one could be the correct one. It's just infinitly likely that there is no god since religion is formed by those in power instead of an actual god contacting the people of the world.

I thought doubting God was a sin and I'd go to hell if I died with doubt in my heart, so I avoided atheist material out of fear that it was Satan working through them to tempt me to doubt.

But eventually I just couldn't resist, and figured the atheist arguments would clearly be false, and God's truth or whatever would show through and then I could always refer to that event to shake any doubts.

The first video I watched was a debate between a pastor and Christopher Hitchens.

Absolutely shook my faith to the core. For a couple days afterward, no matter how I tried to twist it, I couldn't find the fault in Hitchens arguments.

After that, I began to research the history of Christianity with a more open mind, and it became clear what a shit show the whole thing was. I became agnostic, and I suppose in a way I still am a bit, in the sense that the existence of reality itself is quite puzzling, but I can say with certainty that no religion on earth has any answers toward that end.

If I'm really honest it was just because I'm a bit of a weird guy and just didn't fit in.

I mean if all church girls loved me I would've probably just ignored the illogical nature of it all, at least for a while.

I used to attend church with a small following (50-60 members). The pastor seemed very kind at the time and still does some charitable things... But when my grandfather was dying in the hospital, he suggested that suffering brings you closer to God and any kind of hospice or pain-relief was a sin.

The next Sunday I attended, the pastor starting mocking the medical staff during a sermon, basically airing my family business and likened my family to Judas. I walked out and never came back.

Some of my family still attends his church. I saw the pastor a few years ago and extended my hand for a handshake and he walked away.

My mom and I talk about this whole situation sometimes (she attends a different church). "If you hear something at church you don't agree with, don't bring it home with you." That was her way of saying that the pastor is just a person, too. Take what you can from a lesson and apply it for good in your life.

Does it count if you live in a very religious state that has pushed religion down your throat all your life but you resisted? For me I think I was about 22 when I started to see religion as not just a personal belief, but as a tool used by power hungry men to hurt and control others. I used to respect my religious peers, now I feel sad for them, because I know that they were raised into it so hard that I can't really blame them. The sad thing is, even though I live in one of the most developed nations in the world. I am still in a part of it where criticism of religion, past not believing it, can come with a high social price.

My super religious wife cheat on me and get knocked up. Followed by all our church friends throwing her a party. All the scandals didn’t help also. So I’m done. I now consider myself an atheist.

My brain started working.

I was a nerd, so I tried really really hard to prove logically that my religion was the correct one... and failed.

The question doesn't directly apply because I'm not an ex-believer, but I am sort of ex-church (attendance).

After years of praying for healing, for myself and others, and seeing nothing happen (beyond the natural healing that would have happened anyway had I not prayed for it), I prayed for someone to be healed and he died.

So that's how healing manifests through me. You aren't or you die. This seems in direct contradiction to Jesus' claim that all who follow him will do greater things than he did, which I interpret to mean at least the same as what he did, one of which was that everyone who came to him got healed.

So my church attendance is on hold for now while I work out why God doesn't want to involve me in his work. I'm still a believer, but obviously I can't preach "God heals" when my only direct evidence is that he doesn't. I'll go back when it's clear what he wants me to do.

It was not answering the questions that science could answer

I was always kinda skeptical but the event that triggered my way out was when I asked my mom how can God expect people, who were raised with other religions, to believe in him instead when they simply have no idea. She said they know about God and it’s their own fault for not believing in him. And that for me was not logical because I knew from my own experience that I only believed in God because that’s all I knew.

But it took a while for me to completely stop believing in any deity or whatever supernatural power because I kept looking for reasons why we exist. Now I don’t care for that. Sure the Big Bang is mysterious and we might never solve it but there is no sense in making things up either. Everything else can be explained by science so let’s just go with that.

If the Christian God wants me to believe in him, he should stop being so vague and contradicting. Turn the moon into cheese. Pluck a mountain out of the ground and float it in the sky. Whatever, he is almighty, he should do almighty things.

I worked as a researcher and started applying the scientific method to the bible and faith, and it fell apart. before i tried to "disable" critical thinking on many issues in the bible and push those issues away. Also, I realized that my faith kept me from accepting responsibility for my actions and kept me externalizing responsibility to god and/or the devil and other people.

I never really was into spirituality much and then over time I noticed Buddhism kept bumping into me and kept explaining things in more and more straightforward ways over the years so eventually I caved in and looked into it more closely and decided to practice Tibetan Buddhism because it felt more closely related to my own personal experiences and interests...it can be tricky to understand at first until you understand how all the symbolism works and then a whole world of information was opened up to me and I feel better than ever.

Those early Tibetan Buddhists really got a lot of things right from the start and still today I see science research come out suggesting the same things they figured out long ago.

From what I can tell spirituality serves an important purpose in our lives and it is to keep us mentally healthy by whatever means we wish, the caveat here is that you don't misinterpret messages and fall into bad negative paths.

At some point I realised that this almighty being that loves everyone either is not actually almighty or just a massive cunt, considering it allows unnecessary unprovoked evil like children dying a long painful death from a disease that this being also happened to create.

I was raised Catholic but rejected it pretty much immediately when I reached the age of reason (~13 or so).

So all I have to do is listen to and obey everything my parents, teachers, and religious leaders tell me and I'll go to heaven, but, if I had been born into a Muslim family in one of the countries we were bombing, doing that would get me sent to Hell and I need to reject everything I was taught, get on a plane, randomly walk into the right church, and believe everything they tell me. Oh, and if I was like some random Chinese farmer a thousand years before planes were invented, I guess I'm just fucked. Yeah somehow I don't believe that an all-good perfectly-just god would have every soul play fucking roulette to determine what their chances in life will be of getting into heaven.

It wasn't until much later that I learned about the history of this contradiction, which goes back to a 400's debate between Augustine and Pelagius regarding original sin. Pelagius argued that it was theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult, to live a life free of sin and therefore not need Jesus' forgiveness. He was also critical of the way Christians were integrating with the Roman empire, with all the same practices but now the social climbers called themselves Christian to win the emperor's favor while otherwise doing all the same shit they would otherwise. Augustine rejected this, arguing that the Father would not sacrifice the Son unless it was strictly necessary, furthermore, Pelagius' arguments would undermine the authority of the church (this was stated explicitly). Augustine invented the concept of original sin as something passed down through generations (despite this making zero sense), cited a mistranslated passage from scripture to support it, and used that to explain how even someone who lived a perfectly innocent life deserved to go to hell. This included, of course, fetuses. It was the Church's position for a very long time that if you have an abortion, or even a miscarriage, then your baby's soul is burning in hell.

What's particularly funny to me about this is that, after Pelagius was denounced as a heretic for saying people needed to actually live virtuously instead of just relying on Jesus to forgive them, he became so reviled that people were often accused of "semi-Pelagianism." All through the Reformation, everyone was accusing each other of being "semi-Pelagians" and trying to position themselves as the true inheritors of the Augustinian tradition. It wasn't until relatively recently that anyone started saying, "Hey, maybe the Augustinian position is actually kinda fucked up."

At about the age of 8 I could tell that Catholicism was evil. So that was it for me. Lots of specific things but just evil overall.

What do you mean "ex-believer"? I still use Linux every day.

I was a child who had been SA'd by an adult man. The adults around me told me to pray for forgiveness. I was 12.

Years later, I went to get a visitor's pass to visit a friend at my old Christian school. They aggressively denied me entrance.

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can't remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I'll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there's a verse that basically goes, "blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks." And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God's explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. "Know thine enemy, right?" So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely "rational" arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

I read the Bible. I started asking questions about things in the Bible that didn't match science, I loved science (still do), but nobody wanted to answer my questions, they'd just get mad, so I started seeking information elsewhere and came across atheist or ex-religious sources who answered the questions I had. Those sources also helped me realise the damage that had been done to me mentally, which I'm still working on overcoming.

The people. Family, their friends, the church people, the religious school people. Everyone. Toxic. And it took me far too long to figure out how wrong it all was and how so much judgement and hate and shame and guilt and manipulation was not normal.

None of my community raised an effective adult. But they sure tried to raise an indoctrinated subservient guilt-riddled sack of shit.

Fuck religion and fuck people who pressure it on others, especially children, and so many of them use it all as an excuse to cover the fact they are ultimately just shitty people.

Thanks to them I feel like 2 decades of my life were stolen from me and I had to relearn and grow up a lot in my 20s to get out of it.

Sure is interesting in religion how there's a neverending amount of pointing at YOUR need to change, but none of those pointing ever seem to change or improve as humans.

I asked the forbidden question too much. "Why?"

My mother refusing treatment for cancer when it was still in early stages, Jesus will cure it for sure