Surprises Leading To Deconversion

[Llwellyn]

What are the surprises that softened you up to reject Christianity?  For me, there was no explanation, internal to Christianity, for WHY christian piety was making me sick rather than making me better.  I was feeling anxious, and christian practice wasn't making me feel more secure, it was making me feel more anxious.  As I reflected on my own experience, I could see that the scrupulosity and insecurity that I felt was better explained and solved by Humanism than by Christianity.  I also discovered that other people were experiencing Christianity in the very same way!  

 

Until we are surprised, we will not conjecture that our beliefs are wrong.  We have no genuine doubt of the explanatory power of the Christian hypothesis until some phenomenon is shocking to us.  "A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept;  an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend."  For a long time, I rejected the observations that were inconsistent with my Christianity.  When these observations became overwhelming, I rejected Christianity itself and cast about for a better way of explaining the phenomemon.

 

The explanation of Christianity as a frustrating cognitive "meme" has proved for me more efficacious than other explanations as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of my experience.  We do find that "most theories will work if you put your back into making them work" -- but Christianity was breaking my back!  I can put my back into making humanism work for me, and I find that doing so makes me more cognitively fit rather than debilitated.  All reasoning is motivated reasoning, and I've described my motivations -- health, joy, security, sensibility.  What about YOU -- What phenomena within your experience could not be understood by using Christianity?   

 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

I didn't realize, or rather allow myself to realize, that I wasn't really born again. Like most other believers, I couldn't fathom why, if I am born again, do I still have such drives to sin. And like most, I grew to ignore it most of the time and hope for the best, and other times was overcome with grief and repentance. Over and over and over the cycle repeated. The excuses were lame, but were enough to "make it work" and so I continued.

 

I got my wake-up call when I caught a trusted preacher lying openly about miracles and a dramatic power-encounter with a coven of witches. Several things happened at once. I knew I'd been duped by him, although he may actually believe it himself; I knew somewhere inside that this was going to be a pivotal moment; and the question "Everything he preached is biblical, so why does he have to lie about miracles?"

 

That started the ball rolling and it all came crashing down in about a year or so.

[bleedblue22]

I had always grown up in a kind of "moderate" Christian home. Being exposed to fundamentalists changed my perception of the religion. When I heard that all non-Christians go to hell, I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. Then I asked my parents and more "moderate" religious people what they thought of this and I got all sorts of bluster and sidestepping the question, but eventually they seemed to agree that yes, accepting Jesus as your lord and savior was necessary to go to heaven. Until then I had just thought of Christianity as some sort of do-gooders club that was all about love and turning your other cheek and stuff and after that I began to think of it as some sort of exclusive cult that just thought of everyone else as damned.

 

Finally, reading the Old Testament freshman year in college was shocking at first and then became so ridiculous it soon became comical and I knew this was all bs.

[StJeffTheIncomprehensible]

For me, I'm not sure that "surprises" is the right term, since this seems to indicate something sudden--and my deconversion was anything but sudden--but I get what you mean. In no particular order, since I think for the most part they were happening simultaneously:

 

• The problem of evil. Big issue for me. I stopped being convinced by Christian arguments. No matter how I turned it, I couldn't defend the god of the bible.

 

• The problem of the reliability of the bible. I think the first dogma to go was a belief in hell. It was all downhill from there.

 

• A new-found love for what science was discovering about the universe. I grew up in fundie Christian churches and Christian schools, with Bob Jones University science textbooks and a fundie interpretation of KJV bible as my only window to understanding the world around me. Needless to say, when I started finding real science I had to figure out how it fit in with my faith. It didn't fit so well.

 

• Finding out about other worldviews, both those of other religions and those of the non-religious. Getting to know people who didn't share my views and realizing they weren't so bad after all.

 

• Finding that my faith in god didn't help me when I needed it most.

 

• I realized that a supernatural explanation for anything was always the explanation with the lowest probability.

 

• Realizing that my faith had actually made things harder on my wife and kids--my faith was central to my life, more important to me than they were (I say to my shame). I took lower paying jobs, and sacrificed some education in order to pursue the ministry. I'm 44 yrs. old, just now getting a real career on track and trying to make up for time lost to religion.

 

There are probably some others. I don't suppose these are very shocking, but they all played a part in making me look hard at my faith, and I spent agonizing months if not years on every one of these points before finally deconverting.

[NoOne]

For me, it was the problem of evil (within my own life and from what I noticed in the world), the problem of hell, religion's constant conflicts with science which should really be objective and working in and with everything. Then there are also those contradictions within the Bible. I noticed this all slowly within a span of 2-3 months and almost immediately deconverted when I saw Christianity held no water at all.

[00LukeMan]

Hmm, interesting food for self-analysis. Before my deconversion process I held numerous problems in tension.

 

The Problem of Evil always seemed inadequately answered to me, but the Problem of Hell seemed unanswerable.

My duality of mind when it came to religion and science, that I must believe certain things because they were biblical (I was a fundamentalist) and yet could not help but agree with those rejecting them.

My inability to live a godly life, simultaneously wanting to because it was godly and not wanting to because it's inhuman.

 

All these things caused tension in my mind, but I always answered them with "It must be my fault. I am too ignorant or too sinful to understand or get it right." Every distressing issue I encountered in my university theology class I resolved by repeating "trust and obey" over and over to myself.

The surprise came (interestingly enough) from that same theology class. I was raised (without knowing it) as a solid Arminian, but my teacher was a solid Calvinist. By the end of the semester, he had convinced me that my former Arminian beliefs were downright unbiblical.

 

I had been wrong. About something I had believed and been taught my entire life.

 

Whether Calvinism or Arminianism is the more biblical position I now do not know, nor do I care. What matters is that at the time I was forced to question "how could I have believed something untrue my entire life? What basis did I have for believing this and what basis do I have for my other beliefs?"

This forced me to realize that almost my entire basis for religious belief was because I had been raised to believe. No clear evidence, no well-reasoned arguments, just "well they told me so."

After that came months of research and then, well I'm here aren't I?

[★ Citsonga ★]

My first surprise was finding that there really are irreconcilable contradictions in the Bible. That undermined biblical inerrancy, but in an effort to boost my faith in the core message I turned again to the alleged prophetic fulfillments, which were supposed to be the greatest proof of Christianity. That led to the second surprise, which was in discovering the fact that over and over and over again New Testament authors constructed (i.e., fabricated) prophetic fulfillments by taking Old Testament texts completely out of context and using them in ways that were clearly never intended by the original authors. That second surprise completely unraveled my faith.

 

These days I am continually surprised that I ever actually bought into Christianity. It boggles my mind that I believed it without any doubt whatsoever until I was 29. I'd love to have those years back with the knowledge I have now, or at least with some doubt that would have kept me from forming my entire world around a myth, instead of blindly being 100% convinced of the truth of Christianity and setting my life on the wrong course.

[readyforchange]

Greetings.  This is a great question.  For me, I have had many, many unexpected surprises during this process.  But the first thing that actually made me start to question the belief system I was raised in and that I always had did not have anything to do with me, at least directly.  It was the announcement that Pope Benedict had decided to step down as the Pope, and that the Vatican would need to begin an almost unprecedented process of selecting a new Pope while the current Pope was still alive.  I think it might have happened once or so in the very distant past, but by and large (at least from what I can tell), all individuals who held the papacy remained as the Pope for the rest of their lives, and a new Pope was selected only after the current Pope died.  And my background is not Catholic - always been a Protestant (Baptist, Methodist).  But just knowing church and world history, I always paid attention to whoever the Pope was and how he went about his daily walk of leading Catholics.  I could not understand how someone in the position and in the authority as Pope, in this line of, starting with Simon - being the "rock" that Jesus said he would build his church and Jesus changing his name to Peter - that the person who was in that direct lineage would step down and retire.  I just kept thinking something did not seem right about that.  I kept thinking that if someone retires after working at a plant or factory for like 30 years, they go back to normal, everyday life.  And how could this individual ever be a normal human being again?  And would there actually be two people considered Pope, once the new one was selected?  This is what I could not ever make sense of. 

[Llwellyn]

I was also surprised to find myself agreeing with anti-Christian writers, even at the beginning of my deconversion process.  As a Christian, I was "struggling" with the idea of God's wrath.  The Bible teaches that God's wrath is real when it says -- "what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us? (I am using a human argument.)  Certainly not! If that were so, how could God judge the world?"  When I did a simple Google search for the words "Wrath" and "God," the internet results included opinions from people like Robert Ingersoll, Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken...  on and on.  When I read a few of them, I found myself agreeing with them, to my great surprise!  I would never imagine that there could be an atheistic argument that could have reverberated with me.  But there it was!

[amateur]

I always had questions about the bible stories we learned in childhood.  I always felt like Adam and Eve were set up by god because he put that damn tree right in the middle of that damn garden, said "Don't eat the fruit," then walked away.  Even as a kid, I knew that was dumb.  Noah's ark never made logistical sense with the number of animals and insects in the world, and mingling salt and fresh water would kill all the fish, which I knew even in elementary school.

 

As I got a bit older, I realized some people viewed these stories as something that explained how we had sin or what could happen if we didn't obey god, not as something that actually happened.

 

Then I was confused over what was intended to be real, and what was intended to explain things.

 

Some xians believe those stories are literally true, which boggles my mind.

 

Then you read that Jesus referenced Noah in a way that made you believe he believed Noah was real.  I found that surprising because by that point I was confident lots of the wild OT stories were a myth because there was no way they could match up with the real, physical world.

[wyson]

I didn't realise any contradictions.  I therefore didn't question Christianity or the Bible in any serious way intellectually.  Its amazing the mental leaps the mind can make if you presuppose something is true in advance.  

 

What did it for me was accepting that I was a sinner.  Sure I had heard it 1000 times at Church, intellectually accepted my sinful nature, tried to avoid sin etc.  but one day, it was different.  I was going through a stressful time in my life and I was praying.  Suddenly I realised that sin permeated my whole being, that I was wretched through and through and became really grateful for God's grace.  I felt the need to give my life wholly to the Lord and live for his glory.   Unfortunately, this moment also brought on endless emotional pain that continued day after day.  Somewhere deep down, I thought because I exist, Jesus had to die.  It created in me a really, really deep sadness, way beyond what I had felt losing close friends or relatives.  After a few years, I realised that I couldn't continue living with the crippling emotional pain this brought on so I rejected the faith.  

 

So my exit was brought on by deep unhappiness, not analysis.  The analysis came AFTER the emotional decision was made.  

 

I suppose the "surprise" part was that being "born again" was singularly the most painful experience I have ever had the misfortune to experience.  I will NEVER let an imaginary narrative make me feel so bad about myself and my right to live ever again.

[Lucy]

I was taught that god was all loving, all powerful, and all knowing. The Bible is his holy word and the glorious message from the Creator to us mortals. Like it's some sort of lovingly written instruction book on how to exist in the world as a human. So of course I wanted to read the whole thing. The big surprise for me was finding it full of atrocities that god either allowed, endorsed, or directly caused. To say the least this was rather traumatic for me. I still managed to maintain Christianity by just blocking it out as my own misunderstandings because that's what I was told to believe. God is just so much wiser than me. And to god these things were reasonable and justifiable. I'm being arrogant to even think of questioning god's divine judgement. Questioning god's moral character is a logical fallacy anyway since all morality comes from and is defined by god. In fact, questioning it is probably a sin. I need to stop committing the sin of questioning god's reasoning. 

 

I don't see how people claim to find comfort from reading the Bible. Maybe they are just reading certain uplifting verses over and over again.

[00LukeMan]

I don't see how people claim to find comfort from reading the Bible. Maybe they are just reading certain uplifting verses over and over again.

 

That is still my father's practice. He just picks certain parts and reads them over and over. He advised me to do the same and to not just read it, but to "pray it back to god" that I might come to experience the truth in it. To me this seems like nothing but a desperate attempt to convince himself that it is true and good.

[Insightful]

Llwellyn: I agree with the others that this is a fantastic question.  In fact, I was thinking about starting the VERY SAME thread the other day, but you beat me to it =)   I think, for most of us, we begin our Christian lives giving Christianity the benefit of the doubt (typically because haven't read much of the bible yet and the people who "recruited" us seemed really nice - and probably were).  As we plod along, if we are reasonable, thoughtful people who are paying attention, we come across passages and concepts that seem confusing and even wrong.  We stuff those - finding some way to rationalize them, but increasing in cognitive dissonance.  As long as our explanatory filter works, we'll keep plodding along, patching it as we go, rationalizing away.

 

Until SOMETHING happens that reveals a fatal weakness in our explanatory filter.  There is no rationalizing, no patch to get us through that event/realization.  We suffer an irrecoverable "worldview-fail".  Then our benefit of the doubt switches to a critical examination of our faith.  Having been devastated by this unexpected worldview failure, we naturally have to take a cold, sober look at our belief system to make sure we've been believing the right thing...

 

For me, the THING was biblical parenting:  the way fundamentalist doctrine views children.  All negative behavior is sin.  The job of the parent is to stop that sin by force with a rod - driving away the foolishness bound in the child's heart, saving the child's soul from sheol.  Poorly behaved child = screw-up parent who can't be an elder.  This poisoned my parenting of my two adopted daughters who had already been traumatized.  This pre-conditioning (along with my pastor's "advice" to "break their wills") trained me to see their problematic behaviors as sin and only sin - requiring diligent application of "the rod" - rather than seeing them as NORMAL responses to abandonment and neglect requiring patience and love.  Once I came to the realization that the biblical method of parenting utterly and completely failed in my situation, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a massive crisis of faith...   And (to borrow LukeMan) "here I am".

[Llwellyn]

What I see is that there are a wide variety of kinds of "surprises" that could provoke a change of religion.  Each of us takes as reasons whatever are reasons for us -- whether that is an observation about parenting, catholic church practice, or internal emotion (as in my case).  We each have our own reasons for being persuaded.  While these may not bear directly on proof of whether there is a supernatural Being Yahweh, they cast doubt, indirectly on Christianity -- at least for us.  I don't think we are likely to find any direct evidence that Yahweh is a fiction, but I do think that there are plenty of facts that would create a hunch in us that Yahweh is a fiction, or is irrelevant.  

 

Moreover, I think that every tangible fact, as scrutinized, could either prove that Christianity is true, or is false -- depending on the manner in which it is interpreted, and the attitude of the interpreter.  When we are "putting our back into making a theory work" (as George Bernard Shaw put it), some theories will just take a lot more sacrifice (for us and for our loved ones) than others will.  Christianity is neither falsifiable nor verifiable, and thus it is, in this way "easy to believe."  This is because there are no conceivable practical consequences that must, by necessity, result from its truth:  "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."  Luke 4:12, Matthew 4:7, Deuteronomy 6:16.

 

But a religion that can be called "true" in any relevant sense should be such as to explain surprising phenomenon, such as to render the phenomenon more or less a matter of course if the hypothesis should be true.  "It is by surprises that experience teaches all she deigns to teach us."  My approach is one of hope -- hope that hatred is not an ultimate factor operative in the universe:  "God repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face."  Deuteronomy 7:10.  I hope that anything that is true is true insofar as it can be "put to the test" in support of purposes that I can call "good."  Hope may not be a fact of life, but it can be a norm governing my efficient logical regimentation.

 

[Lucy]

 

 "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."  Luke 4:12, Matthew 4:7, Deuteronomy 6:16.

 

 

 

If god didn't want to be tested he shouldn't have made reality such that testing hypotheses yields the most reliable results. The best way to find information and facts about reality is through testing your hypothesis and observing results of that test. This is how we have progressed in all fields of study. This is how we have developed automobiles, space ships, computers, etc. For some reason god made reality work in this way. So that the mind that desires to test one's reality in a scientific manner will get the most progress. But god forbids the inquisitive mind from testing the most important topic, whether or not god himself exists. This seems like a cruel joke.

[★ Citsonga ★]

 

Christianity is neither falsifiable nor verifiable

 

 

I disagree. The Bible itself is proof that Christianity is false. I would never, ever, ever have turned my back on Christianity if the evidence against it hadn't been completely overwhelming. Whether or not some deity exists is another issue, but the religion is absolutely false.

[Llwellyn]

. This seems like a cruel joke.

 

The hypothesis of Yahweh is a pure idea -- a vagabond thought that tramps the public roads without any human habitation.  He is a "truth eternal and absolute" that does not become operative in human affairs in any particular way.  The hypothesis of God is neither consistent nor inconsistent with any observable fact, logical analysis, or textual interpretation.  How can such a God be disbelieved?  We don't disprove Yahweh, we get over him.