For Our Atheists Among Us, What Came First, Leaving Church Or Your Atheism

[atkegar]

As one who is an atheist, but cannot shake off Church completely (I am almost like an old addict who knows that drugs are wrong, but cannot quit, and like it when the young can get out), I wonder if you quit going to Church first and then realized you were atheists, or if you became an atheist first, and then as a result quit going to Church.  I really think that if and when I am able to quit going to Church, I can fully embrace my atheism.  Thanks in advance.

[Orbit]

I didn't attend church regularly after junior high, but remained a Christian until my late 40s. Yeah, I can see how going to church might fly in the face of your atheism. Maybe it's part of your process--you need a social network to replace church.

[Deva]

To me, there are a lot of aspects of church that have nothing to do with belief or lack of belief. Church is a community. I learned that in the liberal denominations there were some there that were actually non-believers. That was a strange thing to me, coming from a fundamentalist upbringing.

 

I might even go back to the liberal church one day because I know no one will ever question my beliefs, yet I can meet a lot of new people.

 

I have never seen a social network that could replace church - haven't found it in ten years.

[Deidre]

I stopped attending church first, then down the road, after about a year, declared to myself that I was an atheist.

[mymistake]

I became an atheist first.  I continued to go to church regularly for a while.  Now I attend only occasionally.  I'm trying to get it down to just twice a year but I have complications due to my Christian wife.

[Deva]

 

To me, there are a lot of aspects of church that have nothing to do with belief or lack of belief. Church is a community. I learned that in the liberal denominations there were some there that were actually non-believers. That was a strange thing to me, coming from a fundamentalist upbringing.

 

I might even go back to the liberal church one day because I know no one will ever question my beliefs, yet I can meet a lot of new people.

 

I have never seen a social network that could replace church - haven't found it in ten years.

Deva's comments are very insightful. She is right. There isn't any other institution in our (western) society that appeals to as many aspects of life as organized religion does. I would never attend a church that is Christian per se, but I might consider checking out the UU church just from curiosity. However, just thinking of being in a churchy atmosphere of any type sort of weirds me out -- such as attending a wedding or a funeral or some other event that isn't a worship service.

 

My experience with Christianity was both deep and broad. I was more into the faith than the church culture. I spent 10 years (basically all during my 40s) going through deconstruction of all my beliefs and casting out God. I was not active in church much during that time. I did return briefly, and in retrospect have come to understand that I did so because I had some unattended issues to resolve. I no longer believed in "God" as such and was very Humanistic in my beliefs. Had I told anyone in church during that time what I truly believed, they would have thought me a heretic.

 

Yes, there is nothing in this society at present, in the 21st century U.S. that can replace the social network of the church. Not if you are involved.  This society does not support Buddhism or pagan religions. It simply does not.  If a person can overcome deep conditioning that says one must believe the scriptures are the literal truth, they can survive and thrive in a liberal denomination - keeping the social part while rejecting the rest privately. Its possible and I don't even think its hypocritical in a way (remember some of the things Episcopal Bishops such as Spong have said)-- I just don't know if I can do it.

[EternalEquinox]

I guess if you can call 5 or so times visiting one church or another before I turned 18 church attendance....hmm. Actually since I was never church active or actively Christian in the sense that I prayed a few times = rare blue moon (my dad had asked me to pray for him a few times) that was about as christian as I got. Never payed it much attention as I was always more preoccupied with video games, cartoons, my favorite tv shows, or the net than anything religious related and didn't have to be pestered with Christianity till I got older. Then I noticed religion much, much more as if it suddenly came out of no where like a swarm of bats. 

So...that puts me...both at the same time I guess. Leaving church=atheist same time pretty much! 

[directionless]

(I'm not sure I have ever been a real atheist, but I call myself atheist sometimes for simplicity.)

 

I transitioned from Christian to atheist twice, and both times the church attendance disappeared years before the faith disappeared enough to consider myself an atheist. I have always hated going to church, so it takes a lot of faith to make me willing to attend.

 

(There is nothing wrong with church, but I had so many bad memories growing-up - uncomfortable clothing, my parents arguing in the car, being bored out of my mind, etc. Also I have some social anxiety.)

[VacuumFlux]

I was attending church and in the middle of a small group bible study when I became/realized I already was an atheist. I just faked it for the rest of the study, because I wasn't quite sure what else to do. I mean, I knew I had doubts and questions I was working through, but I thought I was going to start from the atheist position as null hypothesis and then prove the christian god to myself. I finally managed to wrap my brain around atheism and discovered that I wasn't at all interested in getting the christianity back.

[roadrunner]

I never quit going to church through the entire deconversion. I just started learning on my own. Even things i was learning in church sparked an intrest to look into it further. I was trying to build a fortress but found out i had a house of cards.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

My crisis of faith lasted for two brutal years, during which I not only attended church but was also very active in men's ministry.  Then one night, I had a moment of clarity and could no longer deny the nagging thought that god simply wasn't real, at least, not the way I had been taught.  I never attended church again since then.  It took another two years before I finally realized I was an atheist.  During those two years, I meddled in Deism for a brief time, took a look at pantheism, came up with my own philosophies, and tried a few other avenues of thought.  Nothing seemed to work for me, until, at last, I realized there simply isn't any evidence for anything supernatural and I'm okay not believing in anything.

[Guest]

I stopped going to church as soon as I was old enough (confirmation in 8th grade) but it took me about 10 years to realize I was an Atheist.  It took my grandmother's funeral in July 2001 (my first church service in some 8 years) to realize how ridiculous the robes and chanting were, and the emotional crutch belief provides.  Then 2 months later in September 11, 2001, I was shown the results of what religious belief can do to the mind.  Not just the terrorists, but the American reaction of "jesus can beat up allah" was sickening to me.  

[florduh]

I was going to church and studying the Bible at Moody when I finally realized it was all bullshit. Walked away, no regrets. Looked at alternative beliefs, and though some were interesting and even fun, found no more evidence for them than I had for Christianity. Walked away, no regrets.

 

I always had regular friends and family who didn't require me to share their beliefs, a couple of them were even atheists. There was never a need for an artificial instant church community once I no longer believed in magic. I just had more time to spend with regular, normal people. I want nothing to do with an artificial church "family" no matter how liberal or non-Biblical they seem to be.

[ExCBooster]

[Okay, I'm sorry, this was so much longer than I thought it would be. It's all kind of complicated, though... Skip it if you want, to the last paragraph.]

 

For me, it was actually my parents who deconverted, long before I was born. (Both of them ex-Catholics). I was raised outside of religion entirely, with a general attitude of "some people believe X, some people believe Y, make up your mind however you like." As a moral stance, everything was very neutral and respectful - everyone has a right to believe whatever, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody. So, I never attended church at all, outside of social functions that you invite extended family or friends to, like weddings and funerals, and coming-of-age stuff like first communions or bar mitzvahs. I've probably been to as many non-Christian religious things as Christian ones.

 

Enough background, though. Long story short, the question of "church or not" is one of community and acculturation, really. The difference between a belief and a religion is that a religion is attached to a culture, and reinforces it. A single person can believe that aliens are reading their mind-waves or something and might try to abduct them, but it's not a nascent religion until a group of people get together to form a lifestyle around a system of beliefs. For example, they need to form a commune and pray together on second Wednesdays of every month to telepathically connect with the aliens to get themselves off Earth before doomsday. If that baby religion has enough to offer the wider society, in terms of meeting needs for reinforcement of values and rules, and structure, then it can spread. It's honestly hard to find a better example than Christianity.

 

Hopefully not-too-boring history summary follows:

Christianity spent a long, long time, almost two and a half centuries, even, in the little cults stage, changing, and diversifying, until Constantine adopted one specific version of it as the new ideological backbone of Rome. You can actually peg the Council of Nicea as the exact time when Christianity as we know it was invented. (History protip: if you have to make a list of things that you believe, there's no consensus. If you have to make rules, someone's not following them, and it's a problem.) Note that this weeds out as "heretical" the other little Christianities that don't support the social structure Constantine wanted. Since it was connected to Roman power, when the Empire fragmented, all sorts of chieftains and princelings grabbed onto Christianity as a way to legitimize their power, and that's how Christianity continued to spread, after the fall of Rome. Antipopes, although, on the surface a religious phenomenon, are a result of political maneuvering, and other European powers attempting to co-opt for themselves control over some of the social power of the church. Any schism in the Church is also a political one. Hence Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, etc... and, later, the Protestant reformation becomes leveraged as a primarily political struggle, and some of the nastiest warfare Europe has seen, including the devastating Thirty Years' War. Sheesh, guys: Anglicanism? Henry VIII wanted more independence from Rome to choose his own marriages (an excuse for getting England more political independence: marriages of Kings are never just marriages, they're politics). Martin Luther? Would have just been "that angry heretic with Ideas" without princes that wanted to use his theology to give their own breaks from the Catholic powerbase legitimacy. Listen to the way Christianity is used in modern politics. Religion, by definition, isn't just about belief, it's about social politics.

 

In microcosm, though, people go to church for community. It's about shared beliefs and practices, and the way these weave together to be leveraged for wider sociopolitical ends, as detailed above. If you don't feel that this is your shared belief base anymore, then you are perfectly free to find another community. Join interest clubs, go to lectures or events, or festivals. Find things you like to do, and people who like it too. There's book clubs, game clubs, hiking clubs, clubs about anything and everything, just for the joy of community. Community doesn't have to be about religion.

 

So much of what people believe, individually, has to do with acculturation, the process of absorbing and being taught the beliefs of their community. My first contacts with Christianity turned me off it instantaneously, because I was not acculturated to it. No Sunday school for me. As someone never brought up in the environment and never de-sensitized to the language of sermons, Christianity comes off as a human sacrifice and cannibalism cultus (which, historically, it literally is, even if symbolically):

 

"the Lamb of God" "Jesus died for your sins" "the Body and Blood of Christ" "God gave His only Son"

 

All those images of torture, crucifixes, the stations of the cross, the folk-belief in faith healing... I don't know if it's possible to dis-engage the part of your mind that was acculturated to it, but if you can, imagine that you were never raised to believe in it, never had any contact with the thinking, never internalized any of it, and none of it had any mystical significance to you. These videos come off as completely apesh*t f*ing bonkers to me. (It's not just Catholics, guys: Christianity, when you get down to nuts and bolts, is ABOUT human sacrifice.) It does strike me as hypocritical that Christians have anthing bad to say about other human-sacrifice religions... It's really odd.

 

[TLDR? Start here.]

So, that's why I don't go to church, except for weddings and funerals and family and friends stuff like that. It's not my beliefs, it's not my religion, and ultimately, it's not my community. I have other things I do for community, instead, like meet-ups, and interest clubs. There are some nice perks, too, to not going to church: the Sunday morning shopping. For a few hours, the stores are nearly empty, except for mostly non-Christians, and the roads are traffic-free! I get stuff DONE on Sundays. Like yard work. This Sunday, I'm going to take down the shutters, and change out the screen door for the storm door.

[amateur]

I attended church while an agnostic, then as a born-again xian, and then as an agnostic again.

 

Then I was working a lot and was at work on Sundays all the time, so couldn't go to church, but if I had time I didn't really mind going even tho I'd mainly just sit and question in my head, which I was used to doing during all my agnostic years.  Then I turned into an atheist a year or two after that, and now I have zero desire to attend even one service.  I don't think I could stand the stupid and the overly-sincere looking people.

 

I'd rather go and do something fun and relaxing.

[Neverlandrut]

I became an atheist first. I still haven't completely stopped going to church. My wife is still very involved, and we have friends there. I go mostly to keep up appearances. I haven't decided that I should announce my atheism to any more people than those who already know. I don't mind attending. Although, if it weren't for my family, I wouldn't go.

[Eugene39]

I left church first - am still not what is called a "hard atheist", but certainly don't believe that the god of Abraham exists or anything that has sprung from that god-concept.

[atkegar]

 

 

To me, there are a lot of aspects of church that have nothing to do with belief or lack of belief. Church is a community. I learned that in the liberal denominations there were some there that were actually non-believers. That was a strange thing to me, coming from a fundamentalist upbringing.

 

I might even go back to the liberal church one day because I know no one will ever question my beliefs, yet I can meet a lot of new people.

 

I have never seen a social network that could replace church - haven't found it in ten years.

Deva's comments are very insightful. She is right. There isn't any other institution in our (western) society that appeals to as many aspects of life as organized religion does. I would never attend a church that is Christian per se, but I might consider checking out the UU church just from curiosity. However, just thinking of being in a churchy atmosphere of any type sort of weirds me out -- such as attending a wedding or a funeral or some other event that isn't a worship service.

 

My experience with Christianity was both deep and broad. I was more into the faith than the church culture. I spent 10 years (basically all during my 40s) going through deconstruction of all my beliefs and casting out God. I was not active in church much during that time. I did return briefly, and in retrospect have come to understand that I did so because I had some unattended issues to resolve. I no longer believed in "God" as such and was very Humanistic in my beliefs. Had I told anyone in church during that time what I truly believed, they would have thought me a heretic.

 

Yes, there is nothing in this society at present, in the 21st century U.S. that can replace the social network of the church. Not if you are involved.  This society does not support Buddhism or pagan religions. It simply does not.  If a person can overcome deep conditioning that says one must believe the scriptures are the literal truth, they can survive and thrive in a liberal denomination - keeping the social part while rejecting the rest privately. Its possible and I don't even think its hypocritical in a way (remember some of the things Episcopal Bishops such as Spong have said)-- I just don't know if I can do it.

 

 

These next two messages will have somewhat contradictory thoughts, for I do have them.  This message by Deva does allow me to consider staying in mainline Christianity.  I do know that Borg writes as if there are two different Christianities, one of which I, like most everyone else here has rejected (that he calls heaven and hell Christianity), which is the majority of Christianity.  The other he has a harder time describing, but it is more of a historical-critical metaphorical type of faith.  I would like to stay there, but I struggle with it.  That my friends is my quandry.

 

 

[atkegar]

[Okay, I'm sorry, this was so much longer than I thought it would be. It's all kind of complicated, though... Skip it if you want, to the last paragraph.]

 

For me, it was actually my parents who deconverted, long before I was born. (Both of them ex-Catholics). I was raised outside of religion entirely, with a general attitude of "some people believe X, some people believe Y, make up your mind however you like." As a moral stance, everything was very neutral and respectful - everyone has a right to believe whatever, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody. So, I never attended church at all, outside of social functions that you invite extended family or friends to, like weddings and funerals, and coming-of-age stuff like first communions or bar mitzvahs. I've probably been to as many non-Christian religious things as Christian ones.

 

Enough background, though. Long story short, the question of "church or not" is one of community and acculturation, really. The difference between a belief and a religion is that a religion is attached to a culture, and reinforces it. A single person can believe that aliens are reading their mind-waves or something and might try to abduct them, but it's not a nascent religion until a group of people get together to form a lifestyle around a system of beliefs. For example, they need to form a commune and pray together on second Wednesdays of every month to telepathically connect with the aliens to get themselves off Earth before doomsday. If that baby religion has enough to offer the wider society, in terms of meeting needs for reinforcement of values and rules, and structure, then it can spread. It's honestly hard to find a better example than Christianity.

 

Hopefully not-too-boring history summary follows:

Christianity spent a long, long time, almost two and a half centuries, even, in the little cults stage, changing, and diversifying, until Constantine adopted one specific version of it as the new ideological backbone of Rome. You can actually peg the Council of Nicea as the exact time when Christianity as we know it was invented. (History protip: if you have to make a list of things that you believe, there's no consensus. If you have to make rules, someone's not following them, and it's a problem.) Note that this weeds out as "heretical" the other little Christianities that don't support the social structure Constantine wanted. Since it was connected to Roman power, when the Empire fragmented, all sorts of chieftains and princelings grabbed onto Christianity as a way to legitimize their power, and that's how Christianity continued to spread, after the fall of Rome. Antipopes, although, on the surface a religious phenomenon, are a result of political maneuvering, and other European powers attempting to co-opt for themselves control over some of the social power of the church. Any schism in the Church is also a political one. Hence Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, etc... and, later, the Protestant reformation becomes leveraged as a primarily political struggle, and some of the nastiest warfare Europe has seen, including the devastating Thirty Years' War. Sheesh, guys: Anglicanism? Henry VIII wanted more independence from Rome to choose his own marriages (an excuse for getting England more political independence: marriages of Kings are never just marriages, they're politics). Martin Luther? Would have just been "that angry heretic with Ideas" without princes that wanted to use his theology to give their own breaks from the Catholic powerbase legitimacy. Listen to the way Christianity is used in modern politics. Religion, by definition, isn't just about belief, it's about social politics.

 

In microcosm, though, people go to church for community. It's about shared beliefs and practices, and the way these weave together to be leveraged for wider sociopolitical ends, as detailed above. If you don't feel that this is your shared belief base anymore, then you are perfectly free to find another community. Join interest clubs, go to lectures or events, or festivals. Find things you like to do, and people who like it too. There's book clubs, game clubs, hiking clubs, clubs about anything and everything, just for the joy of community. Community doesn't have to be about religion.

 

So much of what people believe, individually, has to do with acculturation, the process of absorbing and being taught the beliefs of their community. My first contacts with Christianity turned me off it instantaneously, because I was not acculturated to it. No Sunday school for me. As someone never brought up in the environment and never de-sensitized to the language of sermons, Christianity comes off as a human sacrifice and cannibalism cultus (which, historically, it literally is, even if symbolically):

 

"the Lamb of God" "Jesus died for your sins" "the Body and Blood of Christ" "God gave His only Son"

 

All those images of torture, crucifixes, the stations of the cross, the folk-belief in faith healing... I don't know if it's possible to dis-engage the part of your mind that was acculturated to it, but if you can, imagine that you were never raised to believe in it, never had any contact with the thinking, never internalized any of it, and none of it had any mystical significance to you. These videos come off as completely apesh*t f*ing bonkers to me. (It's not just Catholics, guys: Christianity, when you get down to nuts and bolts, is ABOUT human sacrifice.) It does strike me as hypocritical that Christians have anthing bad to say about other human-sacrifice religions... It's really odd.

 

[TLDR? Start here.]

So, that's why I don't go to church, except for weddings and funerals and family and friends stuff like that. It's not my beliefs, it's not my religion, and ultimately, it's not my community. I have other things I do for community, instead, like meet-ups, and interest clubs. There are some nice perks, too, to not going to church: the Sunday morning shopping. For a few hours, the stores are nearly empty, except for mostly non-Christians, and the roads are traffic-free! I get stuff DONE on Sundays. Like yard work. This Sunday, I'm going to take down the shutters, and change out the screen door for the storm door.

 

Dear ExCBooster:  I am somewhat envious of you, that you were raised outside of Church.  I sometimes wish I had done what my siblings did, and when they became of age, quit going to Sunday School, and never started attending worship.  But since I chose differently back then, I cannot change that.  It is not the theology that is hard for me, but that so much of my self identity is tied to going to Church.  We shall see in time.

[directionless]

Atkegar, a few thoughts/questions:

 

(1) What features of church are most important to you?

 

(2) What features of church are most unpleasant for you?

 

(3) Have you looked for atheist churches? They seem to be springing-up in many areas.

 

(4) Sometimes a new style of church will grow on you over time. My aunt didn't like liturgical-style churches when she was younger, but after attending an Episcopal church for many years she has changed her tastes.

 

(5) Is your choice constrained by family members?

[Darkillusion]

I continued going to church after becoming atheist because I taught Sunday school. It was in the middle of the year when I deconverted, and I didn't want to just leave them because I felt like I made a year long commitment and commitments are important to me, and I also thought explaining to them why I was leaving would be awkward.

 

It also enabled my husband to still attend services while I taught. I could do all the fun kid stuff and he could sit through the boring service. Toward the end of the year, sermon after sermon was all about money and giving to the church, which helped to turn my husband off to the whole idea of going. It was perfect timing, my teaching was done and he was at the point where he didn't want to go anymore either.

[ClaraOlive]

I stopped being a True Believer as a pre-teen, so had no choice about going to church. If I had a choice, I wouldn't have gone. I found Sunday school dumb, the service boring, the prayers endless, and  I'm not particularly drawn to music. I wasn't part of a big peer group either - the one girl I liked moved out of state in middle school and the few other kids my age were unappealing. The people who say that only boring people are bored were not forced by their parents to go to three church services every week!

 

After 8 additional years of brainwashing, I thought it was on me to prevent my parents' disappointment, so I kept making occasional forays into churchgoing, hoping that I would miraculously catch Christianity or find THE SECRET that would MAKE me believe. A lot of shit happened and I came out the other side both never going back to church and being open about being an atheist.

[Bayard]

It happened around the same time, I guess. Due to somewhat unusual circumstances surrounding my deconversion, though, I was kind of obligated to attend a few times after deciding I would leave.

[atkegar]

Atkegar, a few thoughts/questions:

 

(1) What features of church are most important to you?

 

(2) What features of church are most unpleasant for you?

 

(3) Have you looked for atheist churches? They seem to be springing-up in many areas.

 

(4) Sometimes a new style of church will grow on you over time. My aunt didn't like liturgical-style churches when she was younger, but after attending an Episcopal church for many years she has changed her tastes.

 

(5) Is your choice constrained by family members?

Directionless:

 

These are very good questions, ones that I can answer.

 

1) I would say what I like most about Church is the fellowship, either before of after the service, with at least some of the other folks there.  I do also like to consider if there is a deeper meaning of life, as well as a connection with others, past and future as well as the present. 

 

2) The least pleasurable is my disagreements with orthodox christianity, and where a creed is said, saying that, for I know that even if I can affirm god in a non traditional way, it would be contrary to the creeds.

 

3)  There are no atheist Churches in my area, but I do live in an area with a UU congregation.  I've been there, but felt after about 9 months there, that it seemed to be an inch deep and a mile wide, and I felt I needed to be in one myth (and yes, I think all religions are based on myths, including Christianity).

 

4)  Completely understood.  I do find that middle of the road mainline worship is best for me.

 

5)  Not really, but in a way, yes, for so much of my identity is based on me being a Churchgoer.  It would not matter where though, and in that way the UU would work.

 

With more thought, I think another concern of mine is, what if I have rejected the wrong definition of god, and maybe folks like Tillich and Spong are right, and that the "Ground of Being" is the true nature of the divine.  I think that has more to do with my going back and forth on considering myself an atheist.  I guess to me atheist seems so final, but agnostic really does not cut it either.

[directionless]

2) The least pleasurable is my disagreements with orthodox christianity, and where a creed is said, saying that, for I know that even if I can affirm god in a non traditional way, it would be contrary to the creeds.

Just in case it helps, I found a website listing the creeds of various denominations.

 

The Christian Church Disciples of Christ has an alternative creed. I think they are fairly mainline stylistically.

"As members of the Christian Church, we confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and proclaim him Lord and Savior of the world.

In Christ's name and by his grace we accept our mission of witness and service to all people.

We rejoice in God, maker of heaven and earth, and in the covenant of love which binds us to God and to one another.

Through baptism into Christ we enter into newness of life and are made one with the whole people of God.

In the communion of the Holy Spirit we are joined together in discipleship and in obedience to Christ.

At the table of the Lord we celebrate with thanksgiving the saving acts and presence of Christ.

Within the universal church we receive the gift of ministry and the light of scripture.

In the bonds of Christian faith we yield ourselves to God that we may serve the One whose kingdom has no end.

Blessing, glory and honor be to God forever. Amen."

http://www.bible.ca/cr-Disciples-C.htm

 

Also from wikipedia there are other denominations like Quakers. I've always been interested in Quakers, but I've never tried one.

Some Christian denominations, and particularly those descending from the Radical Reformation, do not profess a creed. The Quakers, also known as the Religious Society of Friends, believe that they have no need for creedal formulations of faith. The Church of the Brethren also espouses no creed, referring to the New Testament, as their "rule of faith and practice." Jehovah's Witnesses contrast "memorizing or repeating creeds" with acting to "do what Jesus said". Unitarian Universalists, who practice probably the most liberal of all religions, do not share a creed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creed