Ex-believers, what made you quit your religion/cult?
-
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.
-
In Arabic عبادة (worship) and إبادة (extermination) sound nothing alike and are obviously spelled differently. However transliterated into English and many other languages they end up being the same: ibadah. Other words that are sometimes confused by non-Arabic speakers include مكة (Makkah) and المقة (Almaqah) which sound nothing alike in Arabic but has been a source of conspiracies among non-Arabic speakers who think that they are etymologically related.
-
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.
-
You are welcome. Don't feel bad about it, in Arabic p and b, and f and v, sound the same and are often confused. Pepsi gets transliterated as بيبسي bibsi for example, Arabic also doesn't have e or o.
I just wish people wouldn't start conspiracy theories based on transliterations. In some languages election and erection are easily confused, now that could be the seed for a fun conspiracy. -
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.
-
I was raised Mormon.
The first things that's very important to know about the Mormon church is that they believe that they are led by direct revelation from god, and that god will never allow the 'prophet' of the church to lead the church astray. The 'prophet' is the head of the whole church, and Mormons believe he (and the prophet is always a man, because women are always subordinate to men in the Mormon church) receives revelation for the entire church and world. As you go down the chain of authority, each person is supposed to be receiving revelation for the people that are under them. So it is believed that if your bishop--who is a local congregation leader, not at all like a Catholic bishop--asks you to do something in his capacity as bishop, then that's coming directly from god.
The second thing that's critical to know about the Mormon church is that every member is very strongly encouraged to pray and ask god to confirm the truth of things. Members are told to read their scriptures (esp. the Book of Mormon) and study the words of Mormon 'prophets', and then pray about it. A warm, fuzzy feeling is believed to be the confirmation of the holy spirit that those things are correct; a lack of confirmation means that you need to pray harder, because those things are self evidently (</s>) the word of god.
Got it? Good, continuing on.
I didn't particularly want to be a missionary, but it was expected that I would become one, so I did. I did not enjoy being a missionary; I absolutely hated it. The mission president--a man that presided over a specific geographical area and group of missionaries--largely did not believe in mental health, and told me to put on a happy face. I ended up having a nervous breakdown and became suicidal. I remember being told that "the light of the holy spirit has left your eyes", and that the reason that I was suicidal was because I had sinned an allowed Satan into my heart. The solution that was prescribed by religious leaders was to pray more, study my scriptures more, bear my testimony more often, etc., and that I would be fine.
...But I knew that I had not sinned. How could it be that my religious leaders, people that were supposed to have the power from god to receive revelation for me, people that I had been promised would never lead me wrong when they were acting in their religious capacity, would be insisting that I must have sinned? What sin did they think that I had committed? (Spoiler: I'm actually high-functioning autistic, and the lifestyle demanded of missionaries was extremely stressful. That stress was what led to the nervous breakdown.) I was eventually sent to the LDS Social Services, which is a counseling org in the Mormon church; the church as a whole is very skeptical of therapists because they take a science-based approach rather than a religion-centric approach. The therapist decided that I was too preoccupied with sexual matters (which, fucking duh, I was 20, and was cut off from social interactions with people of my preferred gender while I was a missionary), and also counseled repentance, etc., along with some aversion therapy to make me feel even more shame about all things sexual.
Meanwhile, I had a psychiatrist for medication. The psychiatrist had a strictly science-based approach. He said that there wasn't any clear reason why some people would become suicidal and others wouldn't, but some medications might help.
It all eventually got me thinking: I knew that I wasn't sinning, but my church leaders--the people that were supposed to be receiving revelation for me, on my behalf--were insisting that I must be. If I've been praying about the truth claims of the Mormon church, and had believed that the holy spirit has been told me that it's all true, but the people that I believe have the gift of prophecy are completely wrong, what does this mean?
For me, the inescapable conclusion was that feelings were not a reliable indication of 'truth'.
If feelings aren't a way to know truth, then what is? Once you start studying the history of the Mormon church, the whole enterprise starts looking like a very sketchy con, and is certainly not something you would take at face value. Moreover, it turns out that all religions are relying on feelings that the religions say are from god in order to confirm that their religion is the One True Religion. Not only is there nothing that's falsifiable about belief in Mormonism, there's nothing falsifiable in religion in general.
Once you accept that, then the most reasonable answer is to say to say that either the existence of a god is unknowable with what we have right now, or that there is no god at all. I settled on the latter, although extraordinary evidence might be able to convince me.
-
Hello, fellow exmo.
I probably would have been ordained by now, but I left when the new CoC came out (2000, I think?) that--among other things--forbade members from speaking publicly as members about their own experiences within TST. The summary and capricious expulsion of numerous ministers that were agitating for change within the org confirmed to me that if congregations had autonomy, it was only because Doug and Cevin allowed it.
-
Spending time away from it. I was raised as an evangelical Christian and I was fully bought into it. I'd had doubts but was always able to explain them away or suppress them. All it took was not going to church every Sunday for me to finally stop believing.
Because I was raised in such an extreme "all or nothing" way, I wasn't able to fall into a sort of half belief like what I imagine most Christians in America believe who only go to Church on Christmas and Easter. But I think younger people are starting to identify as agnostic or atheist in those scenarios.
There are more specific steps to it, but that's the majority of it was just getting away.
I'll never forget the relief when I finally came to believe that the category of things that were sins but not otherwise morally wrong were things I didn't need to worry about anymore.
-
Pedophiles
-
I was never a believer but I was raised by MAGA Christians. The kind that believe in the rapture and show you bad dystopian movies about it.
I tried to believe it for a long time but eventually gave up. I'm pretty sure the majority of the people didn't believe any of the mythology, they were just there for the racism and child abuse, so I tried to get away. Unfortunately the same stupid bullies have taken over the country. At least I'm not trying to see their side as tolerable anymore.
-
Raised Christian. Christian is supposed to be about love and acceptance, but after all the transphobia and homophobia I saw, it was kind of over for me (sapphic)
A lot of Christians claim that there is only one God and that you will burn in Hell for not believing in their religion, which just sounds discriminatory regardless of “I’m just trying to lead sinners on the right path”. It isn’t the right path if you have to fearmonger to lead people on it.
They also claim they’re trying to gently let people into God’s way or something but don’t seem so gentle when they spam “YOUR DELUSIONAL WOMEN (sic)” on trans men’s social media, or ”DELUSIONAL MEN (sic)” on trans women’s.
-
Hard +1. Physically violent and later sexually abusive priests working in my private Catholic school.
-
Yeah I wasn't joking.
-
Hypocrites, draconian believes and the fact that I never felt the so called “presence of God” or of the Holly spirit or anything really
-
The church's overall support for trump and anti-vax/anti-mask positions were a strong counter to the doctrine of sanctification, especially as support tended to increase among older populations. Sanctification is central enough to Christianity to be one of the pillars that either proves or disproves it.
