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Goodbye Jesus

Personal Light-Bulb Moments: That Is Why I Am No Longer A Christian!


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My greatest lightbulb moment was when I learned what the word 'epiphany' meant...

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I was at theological college,it was my first day and i went to the mandatory student prayer meeting.I was asked to pray and prayed a short prayer like what i might do in a church prayer meeting.And there was silence.What i never knew was at this denominational calvinist college the custom was to do very long rambling prayers full of scripture quotes.I caught the group leader giving a 'look' to one of the senior students and another denominational guy giving another 'look' at another student ; you know exchanging 'this guy doesn't fit in' looks.And that was me pretty much,done.I never went back to the prayer meeting,ever,despite it being mandatory.They were all ministerial candidates and are certainly all ministers now.I thought 'well i have put up with shit all these 15 yrs nearly and here I am at what should be the pinnicle of my christian life among people who should know better but nah...they are just the same as the assholes in churches i have been to'.That begun the slide into deconversion and eventual complete unbelief.In my home life I stopped praying and that went on a year and a half before the day I can really put as the day i made a decision to exit the cult.

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Another eureka moment was important too.It was actually after my deconversion but it really anchored the deconversion as i was still listening to some christian podcasts etc more out of ,strangely, comfort lol.

I had gone to a nightclub by myself which is something I had never done before.that night i met so many great people and had an amazing time.When i left and got home I couldn't sleep so  i went for an early morning walk.I had scarce got beyond the corner of my building when i was crying with release and happiness afer feeling so much freindship and acceptance at this nightclub.This si something I never ever felt at church ever.It defo marked a big step forward in the rate of my deconversion.

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I guess mine was that I always tried to find the deeper meanings to things in life. As a teenager it seemed like most everybody around me were just living their lives casually and carelessly... It was like they hadn't ever sat down and just contemplated their existence... They didn't seem to see the "truth" behind what they took for granted, or even had a care to examine it. I was able to interact and get a long with most everybody I met, but this desire to seek out the deeper meaning to things made me feel different from most folks. In some ways, it even made me feel superior to others, even if I wouldn't have openly admitted it. At the time, my desire to seek out the deeper meanings to things in life only left me to conclude my already held bias that a God existed... Ironically enough, it seems that that same desire for deeper meaning was what eventually lead me to ruthlessly examine my own beliefs... And the rest is history.

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2. I looked up all 44 "prophesies" in the old testament that supposedly foreshadow Jesus IN THEIR CONTEXT (listed from an About.com page). It took a super long time but...

 

NOT ONE made sense, in context.

 

I did roughly the same thing. Though I didn't use a reference guide like About.com and I may not have looked at every one on their list, what I did was read through a large chunk of the Gospels looking for claims of fulfilled prophecies, each time looking up the original text and reading it in context. The prophetic fulfillments were supposed to be the greatest proof of the truth of Christianity, so this was my last attempt to boost my faith after a period of doubt, but it had the opposite effect. I saw that over and over again the New Testament authors were ripping Old Testament quotes completely out of context and fabricating fulfillments based on distortions, as well as some other cases where the original text was too vague to be of any real value, and at least one "prophecy" was completely pulled out of thin air (the one about Jesus being called a Nazarene is nowhere in the OT).

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When I was reading a Xian book that said Jesus did not sacrifice himself because he wanted to save us, but because he wanted us to glorify him. Given that Jesus and biblegod of the OT are the same entity, this made sense. Biblegod is always talking about how great he is and how we all need to worship him. Take the book of Job, for instance. I got extremely pissed at this; I'd always been told that Jesus executed himself because he loved us. But reading that explained why biblegod seems so stuck on himself: it's because he is.

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Realising I didn't agree with most of the Bible, especially since I discovered I was bisexual. I was told same-sex attraction was wrong which lead me to praying for god to take these feelings away if he didn't agree with them - he never did.

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The very first question I asked my pastor when I was 20 years old (when I first accepted jesus as my savior) was who was the stenographer who stood outside the garden and wrote down the whole account of Adam and Eve in the garden? Who had the pen and paper?  

 

It was also the same question that deconverted me many years later. I know they claimed Moses wrote this book but he came a long later in the story. It was only Adam and Eve and the talking snake?? No one else was supposed to be there!!!  The more I read and re studied the book of Genesis, the more I realize that if this story is untrue, then the whole bible falls apart because the bible story is built on this one story from the garden... The fall of mankind and the consequence of sin. The whole story is just plain silly. god was a silly god. He was a stupid god. I knew it at 20 and I am positive at 60 that it is all bullshit.I wasn't as dumb as I thought I was as a youngster.....

 

The whole deck of cards fell apart for me. It was the help on Ex-c that helped me to see this clearly.

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There was not just one moment, but several. Almost 2 years ago, it started with my husband questioning what our pastor preached about god having to kill certain people in the old testament. I started questioning why my "unsaved" children would go to hell for not believing in jesus. I started thinking about how all of us are different in so many ways. How could we all become like cookie-cutter beings, blindly following one set of thoughts and rules. The kicker was the scripture that has jesus saying you must hate your family members to be worthy of him....BS!! There were many other links to my chain of deconversion, like many bible inconsistencies, that have led me to where I am today. And I am thankful for the people on this site who have helped me immensely. I have a long way to go to shed alot of indoctrination, but I'm on my own path and it is all good.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My biggest light-bulb moment came about a week or two after my faith abruptly abandoned me in the middle of a church service. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, with the images of dead bodies floating in the streets still on my mind, I finally understood the meaning of the expression:
 

“Shit happens.”


I no longer had to nurse incredulity about Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, a whole lot of angst vanished over the previous year’s Indian Ocean tsunami. These events were tragic, but I no longer had to wonder why they happened. I no longer had to shoehorn them into a worldview where all things were overseen by a benevolent deity; I no longer had to make excuses for God.

This called to mind something I had read while I was still a Christian, which whacked me with a dollop of cognitive dissonance at the time. Someone had either quoted or paraphrased that the universe looks as one would expect if there’s no god running the show. Dissonance resolved!

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I had several light bulb moments before I left the last church I visited once and for all. The first one was realizing I was getting nothing out of the services, and noticing how shallow and fake it all seemed. The buybull study I was invited to sit in on taught me nothing new, but then again, xtianity's a mile wide and an inch deep. After that, there were the incidents between me and some people in the congregation, at least the more severe ones. The lesser incidents just added fuel to the fire. Then there was my great-uncle's funeral. Then there was Sandy Hook. Toward the end, I had a decision to make: was it gonna be my family or this stupid church that obviously didn't give a shit about me? I also realized I would be lending my endorsement of the church's wrongdoing both on the larger scale and on a more personal level, and I couldn't live with myself if I stayed and joined it. My final light bulb moment was realizing that if they were this disrespectful towards me, what was to stop them from doing the same to my kids when I have them? Not a damn thing. 

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One I had which might be unique was in regards to incest.  I had been to a seminar at Auckland Zoo regarding breeding programs and they said a species will rapidly fail to produce offspring if there is no new genetic material entering the gene pool.  This failure to either breed or produce offspring will occur in as little as 3-4 generations of inbreeding.  Whether it is the offspring being sterilized or the females being unable to produce viable offspring the genetic backlash will result in extinction unless more genetic diversity is introduced.  To the point where a species that had dropped under a couple of dozen members remaining was already categorized as extinct because it would be beyond help.

 

My first thought was Adam and Eve.  For the whole species to come from them meant their children had to be breeding, and had to breed in such numbers as to populate faster than the elderly dying off.  Cast into a world with no shelter, no food and no understanding of survival techniques...  Christians would say the first two humans had perfect genes so inbreeding didn't have such an effect back then (almost like they are not human and the rules don't apply).  But then came the bigger problem which is to reset the world with Noah's flood and then repopulate the world a second time through inbreeding.

Now Noah and his family weren't super human with perfect genes (whatever that is meant to mean), so again the inbreeding should have wiped out the human race and again we expect these people with no shelter, food or skills to survive long enough to breed like bunnies.  Add to that the 2 of each kind on the boat meant every single species needed to survive by inbreeding in the same manner. 

Basically the one idea of incest lead to a matching hole in both Genesis and Exodus that I've never heard an answer to fill.

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