Ex-believers, what made you quit your religion/cult?
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The hypocrisy and manipulation made it impossible to worship with them next to me.
I graduated from oral Roberts University and was full in. But the leaders of the small church were more interested in holding power rather than helping people. Fox News had an article with a headline stating blue eyed people were smarter than brown eyed. Being Latino, I was annoyed at the article and started to question why I even thought that the right wing evangelical establishment cared about me. I was just used for the financial support and votes.
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What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
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I read the whole bible as an adult
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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 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.
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The meanest people I have ever known were church people. My dad left us when I was young, my mom was left a single parent. Seeking refuge in the church, we started attending regularly. In that time I felt things from others, ranging from genuine kindness all the way to pity. However, as things progressed and my mother became more involved with the church, the more people started to talk. From casual mentions, to annoyance that she would show up, to talking behind her back.
Was she super pleasant to be around? No, I think she can be awkward and has a hard time making friends - and those people picked up on that and ran with it. It wasn't so long until she was excluded from certain events, that there were more "special" bible studies that she would her invite would be "forgotten". She wanted so much to be included, but she didn't fit their paradigm of.. I don't even know what.
Oh they preach of acceptance and forgiveness, of not judging, but they are some of the most hurtful people out there. I don't know what I believe personally, but I'll avoid going into a church for as long as I can.
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Took me until my 20s to reconcile my atheism. Maturity, i guess.
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Bad shit happened. When I asked why, the answers were lame. When I accused god of being an asshole, the defenses were the very definition of not even being wrong.
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I’ve left catholicism Because of the amount of bigotry and hate I witnessed in catholic some circles, from celebrating the death of a openly gay person, to calling for a g*nocide of the f slur (yk what I mean),the thing is. These some catholic circles are pretty much common. and I’m like. If this is what you teach. Then screw it, im leaving the church, then I left it and didn’t wasted my time getting around catholics, Then I found refuge in Anglican Church. Now I’m a normal, non-bigoted Christian living my life like how I want to , and now im slowly started to disconnect from my catholic community I used to be part of, no more tradcath nonsense, moral of this story. If your church/religion teaches hate, then you should just change it, or just become atheist at this point,
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I had waited a long time to have any kind of personal experience of God, and finally gave up. Like they said, the holy spirit was supposed to work in you, I prayed for it and looked for it for a long time. Since it didn't appear, no reason to excuse the problematic passages or shitty people.
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Learning about the world, in school and by reading humongous amounts of books when I was a kid and preteen. I eventually realised that "nah, I don't believe that." and that was that.
That's the sanitised version lol. A number of those books were by Erich von Däniken, unfortunately, and that simply "overwrote" Christianity in my young and impressionable science-fiction loving mind. Luckily I continued learning and not TOO long after I realised that was bullshit too and in the process I also actually realised why religion doesn't make sense to me.
tl;dr: HP Lovecraft made me atheist
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Adulthood makes you realise that there is no such thing as justice. Our lives are lived dancing in the palms of the Monetarists looking to make a quick buck. There is no karma and life is suffering as slaves to the elite.
If god exists, there should be no slavery, rape and wars.
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This was the primary reason for me leaving the church, but I had begun my whole "deconstruction" journey years earlier. Between losing my belief and losing my religion, I was there to be a good influence on the true believers. I eventually realised it was useless to do so, that these people who I once considered friends were actually just horrible people. I'm embarrassed how long I really ignored some toxic beliefs and actions just because the people committing them were doing so "for sincerely held beliefs". Trump and Covid were the real catalysts just because the way and the speed of their "mask off" transition made it obvious even to a socially inept person like me that they were just bad people.
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I grew up as a Christian. When I was around 15, someone asked me "if I hadn't be born a Christian, would I be a Christian?"
Considering it, I opened my Bible and immediately a verse popped out (in classic God fashion) saying "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have"So then I felt called even more to really explore, based on that:
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- I couldn't currently defend my faith reasonably
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- If God was actually real, he wouldn't be scared of people exploring arguments against Christianity, because the faith would be based on something ultimately true.
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- By exploring other faiths, arguments, etc, if I returned as a Christian, I would have a much stronger faith.
The more I explored these arguments, as well as gaining a better understanding of what the Bible actually is (in a history sense), more and more unraveled, eventually to the point I didn't call myself a Christian anymore.
Then over the next decade I went back and forth exploring alternative denominations in Christianity, as well as other religions (Daoism, Buddhism, Judaism), especially as I still felt a "spiritual pull" / intuition in a lot of situations. So it took me a really long time to separate that intuitive sense of direction from the belief system around the Holy Spirit specifically, and learn where trusting that intuition is effective, and where it can be misleading. That's been the most complex part of all of this.
I still enjoy exploring other belief systems, components of Christianity, and connecting with whatever that intuition is occasionally, as I do think there is a lot there for human psychological and emotional health that Western modernity sorely lacks. But that's how I lost my faith - God gave me the push I needed
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I learned about Gandhi when I was 12, and thought it was dumb that he would be in hell just because he wasn't Christian. Absolutely could not square that rule with the idea that "God is love". Figured it was all a bunch of bullshit.
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I asked the forbidden question too much. "Why?"
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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.
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What does mean "being SA’d"?
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I admit I haven't read the entire Bible. I'm not a particularly pious Christian, and I certainly don't mean to try to convince anyone towards or against religion. That said:
I also love science. I'm an engineer, not a conspiracy theorist. I know the dinosours existed, I know evolution happened, I know the Big Bang was a thing. However, that doesn't mean Jesus wasn't a man who lived approximately 2000 years ago. It doesn't mean he wasn't a great teacher. It doesn't mean there aren't lessons to learn in any of the Bible's stories.
Because that's what they are: stories. They're not 100% perfect recounts of events that happened. Heck, they're most of the time not even 1% perfect recounts of events that happened. But some of them still have some wisdom worth sharing, just the same. At least, I think so.
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SA = sexual assault
