BlindReason Posted July 14, 2015 Share Posted July 14, 2015 Even as a little kid I understood that there was a huge difference between God and Santa. If Santa didn't exist, I still got presents, but if God wasn't real then how could I live forever like everyone always said I would? I knew I didn't want to think about the possibility that God was made up. Besides, Christians were the good guys. Everyone else was either a bad guy or deceived by one of the bad guys. I still struggle with this line of thinking, by the way. I've lived away from my parents for 11 years. That's how long it's taken me to lose the fight against non-belief. I cannot honestly call myself a Christian anymore. None of the events I observe in the world seem to need any help from God in order to happen the way they do. Apostasy wasn't on my list of life goals. It wasn't even on my list of things to never do, because I simply couldn't imagine doing it. Can anyone relate to this? 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VacuumFlux Posted July 14, 2015 Share Posted July 14, 2015 I can sorta relate. I wonder, sometimes, when I actually stopped believing. I know I used to believe, and was really impressed with the people who didn't grow up christian, but studied really hard and discovered The Truth. So I decided I would read all sorts of points of view too, so that I'd understand why I believe what I believe and be better at evangelizing. Somewhere in there, I tried to empathize with atheists and just couldn't do it. That bothered me; I was always good at playing with ideas that I didn't believe in to dissect them, but that one I couldn't. Eventually I decided that to be the best possible Christian, I needed to start with the null hypothesis of atheism (interesting that I'd gotten to the point where I considered that the null hypothesis) and argue my way back into christianity. So I spent a few days reading things on the internet written by atheists, and one day it just clicked - the feeling that there wasn't a god. Instead of going on to prove to myself that that was false, I discovered that everything made more sense that way and I had no desire to go back. It was, somewhat to my amusement, accompanied with a feeling of peace ("that passes understanding"?) that I'd never gotten from the supposed indwelling of the holy spirit. I wonder if a part of my subconscious knew that I was loosing belief and that's why it was so hard to get my conscious mind to think that way even as a thought experiment. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator TrueFreedom Posted July 15, 2015 Moderator Share Posted July 15, 2015 I don't think that many, if any of us imagined that we might stop believing one day. I certainly did not. It took me at least 35 years of life in a Christian context to seriously consider the possibility. Now I'm glad to be rid of it but unhappy with how loved ones view me as an apostate. You take the bad with the good, I suppose. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
♦ Fuego ♦ Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 It kinda grabbed me by surprise one morning. I had every intention of being gung-ho and ran smack dab into a wall. I caught a very trusted preacher whom I had promoted around the world, lying about miracles and witches. I started asking a bunch of questions and wasn't going to accept partial "just trust god" answers this time. It took about a year but it culminated in me finding this website and reading the testimonies of several others, including pastors, who added to my questions and some real answers as well. Once I saw through Christianity, most of it broke off immediately. Some of it took time to weed out of my mind and emotions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HolyGoat Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 I can absolutely relate. I always just took christianity as the default. After all, it was the only thing that actually made sense right? I never thought of apostasy as . . . well anything. However, I am obsessive about forming complete and consistent frameworks. When I find a frayed end I just can't help but pick at it, and that has a tendency to unravel it all. In retrospect, I think I had been a Deist for a while. Eventually, I just realized it all just didn't make sense to me anymore. So I guess I kinda get where you are coming from. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlindReason Posted July 15, 2015 Author Share Posted July 15, 2015 The default - those were the exact words I used at one point. Christianity was my default and it is VERY hard to change a default setting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HolyGoat Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 The only thing I have found useful in times such as that is reminding myself the reasons I let it all go. For me it was two-fold. Even if he existed, I couldn't bring myself to acknowledge, much less worship or love, a god who would willingly, knowingly and with joy allow, and in many cases order things I detest: genocide, rape, infanticide, slavery, etc. Second: a god who refuses to come to the assistance of one of his (supposed) children and offer even a minutia of comfort when he is agonizing and reeling in pain may as well just not exist. Then I go and read more books or watch more videos that remind me of the reasons it is all a load of crap. But I still catch myself, just as you do, falling back into that same pattern. =/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UnFundEd Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 I can relate as well. I would NEVER have envisioned myself reaching this point in my journey. In fact, for several years I continued to grasp at every available straw, hoping to prove that some small part of my beliefs were correct. I had my whole life of 50 years invested in my beliefs. I am now sorry at how misled I allowed myself to be, and wish I had begun questioning these things decades earlier. I would have made better choices over the years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlindReason Posted July 15, 2015 Author Share Posted July 15, 2015 CG, I hadn't read most of that stuff when I started doubting. What seems to help me is remembering all the questions I had that no one could answer. For example in the afterlife, how will we recover all the memories we lost when our brains decayed? Is the soul supposed to serve as a backup? If so, where is it located, and how (and when) are engrams uploaded from brain to soul? Of course Christians aren't discussing this. Another thing that helps me is to contrast how Christians answer questions with how science-minded people answer questions. I'm blind. In school I asked a professor for evidence that the earth was round, and I told him that visual evidence didn't count since I couldn't verify it for myself. He took it as a challenge and later came back to me with a couple ideas. Christians faced with a hard question like that will usually say, "have more faith." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HolyGoat Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 Wow! That is a very interesting point! I guess in my life I have come across a lot of christians who had somehow figured out how to wed their faith and science (I was in that position for a while myself), so I guess I hadn't thought about the fact that many christians would respond that way. You also bring up some interesting points about the afterlife that I never considered! That surely would have thrown me for a loop a year ago! I am glad that you have things to help you remember why you gave it up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GraphicsGuy Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 Apostasy wasn't on my list of life goals. It wasn't even on my list of things to never do, because I simply couldn't imagine doing it. Can anyone relate to this? I found this quite amusing because I can really relate to it. Well-worded! Those who believe never think they could possibly become unbelievers. Fortunately/unfortunately it does happen. To many, many people. Welcome to the forum, Voyager. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ellinas Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 Most of us, I suspect, have a tendency to think that the here and now will continue. We might accept the possibility of change on a purely intellectual level, but it seems to me humanity has a tendency not to look beyond the status quo. Add to that a doctrine that tells you that there is no alternative - let alone any viable alternative - and the default for practically all Christians is likely to be "this is me henceforth and forever". Yes, it's a trap I fell into. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ax345 Posted August 4, 2015 Share Posted August 4, 2015 None of the events I observe in the world seem to need any help from God in order to happen the way they do. ... Can anyone relate to this? Yes! I lived among some of the most dedicated and devout Catholic Christians for years, and nothing I saw or experienced couldn't be explained psychologically or otherwise naturally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geezer Posted August 8, 2015 Share Posted August 8, 2015 I was a Christian for 40 yrs. It never occurred to me that it would even be possible for me to believe that a day would come when I no longer believed that Jesus wasn't my Lord & Savior or that God doesn't exist. Such a thing simply wasn't possible, or so I thought. Then one day I started asking questions & that was the beginning of the end of my "faith". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cousin Ricky Posted August 8, 2015 Share Posted August 8, 2015 Apostasy wasn't on my list of life goals. It wasn't even on my list of things to never do, because I simply couldn't imagine doing it. Can anyone relate to this? I can totally relate; I think most of us can. When your present belief system tells you that apostasy would result in everlasting torture, aspiring to apostasy would be madness. (Ray Comfort says that we cannot find (his) god for the same reason a thief cannot find the police. Aside from the dim view of human nature he projects onto us, the analogy doesn't work: thieves know that the police exist. Other Christians have insisted that we would find (their) god if we weren't trying so hard to disprove it. Wha...? This whole idea of people seeking unbelief appears to be nothing more than wishful thinking by Christians trying to assure themselves that there is no good reason for people to leave the faith.) My apostasy was the fallout from my attempt to strengthen my faith. If Santa didn't exist, I still got presents, but if God wasn't real then how could I live forever like everyone always said I would? I knew I didn't want to think about the possibility that God was made up. This is actually the god of the gaps. Why should eternal life depend on the existence of a god any more than presents should depend on the existence of Santa Claus? Of course, religions want you to think that eternal life—as well as everything else—depends on their god. Nevertheless, there is no more evidence for eternal life than there is for a god. Since both ideas—gods and everlasting life—come from the same source, it's not surprising that neither of them have any substance. Besides, Christians were the good guys. Everyone else was either a bad guy or deceived by one of the bad guys. My realization of the plainly obvious—that Christians, on average, behave no better than non-Christians—was the catalyst for the end stage of my ongoing crisis of faith. None of the events I observe in the world seem to need any help from God in order to happen the way they do. Someone pointed this out (phrased in a different manner) in the amateur astronomy newsgroup. This rang true for me, and it sent me scrambling for a reason why my god should exist in the first place. This was on top of what I was learning about near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and human consciousness: that scientific investigation has sourced these phenomena to our physical brains. A god was redundant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlowerDemon Posted September 5, 2015 Share Posted September 5, 2015 I totally get where you're coming from. It was never in my plans to suddenly leave my faith, over and over again, for 7 years straight. I wanted to stay a believer forever. Every time I came back to God, I made a promise to him that I would stay, but it was a promise I could never keep. I tried to be as faithful as I could but yet I doubted and questioned the whole time. It definitely is messed up to believe that you are on the "righteous" side, while everyone who doesn't follow Jesus is "wicked" or "need to be prayed for." It's like saying, oh I know the truth, but since you believe in a lie, you are wicked and need to be saved. I couldn't go down that line of thinking either. One thing I cannot tolerate about Christianity is how it is so black and white in the way it views many aspects of life. I like to keep an open mind to what is possible...not just cling to a singular idea Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
★ Citsonga ★ Posted September 9, 2015 Share Posted September 9, 2015 Welcome, Voyager! Apostasy wasn't on my list of life goals. It wasn't even on my list of things to never do, because I simply couldn't imagine doing it. Can anyone relate to this? Same here. I had no intention of leaving the faith. I was so convinced (brainwashed) that Christianity was true that I didn't think it was even remotely possible that I could come to discover that it's all a big, fat lie. Once I did start seeing (at age 29) that there were serious problems with the Bible, I did not want it to not be true. When everything completely unraveled, I felt like the foundation had been yanked out from under me and I had nowhere to get a foothold. It was scary and depressing to find that the very thing I had built my whole life on was a sham. It took quite a while to finally be comfortable without Christianity. (It was a VERY different experience from the straw-man version Christians paint of apostates rebelling against God to indulge in sin.) Anyway, I'm glad you're here. Enjoy the voyage ahead of you.... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amateur Posted September 9, 2015 Share Posted September 9, 2015 I can relate to this. After a childhood of church-going, then a few years as born again and taking religion seriously, I spent maybe 20 years as an agnostic, still attending church, but with questions that just never got answered. I tried paying attention to sermons, but just got worse with the voice in my head responding "that point makes no sense" or "that point has been belabored in sermons for the past 25 years of my life" or "can my questions just ever get a coherent answer?" Even after not attending church for a year, due to my work schedule and simply no longer caring, I still figured there was "something" out there "bigger than us." But I had no clue what, and figured it would all make sense eventually, like when I died. Then I read the book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," by Julian Jaynes, a book written by a psychologist about how the human brain has evolved over millenia. It is not a religious book at all, and Jaynes gave no hint as to his own religious or non-religious proclivities. But in it, by comparing literature over thousands of years (including the bible, but also lots of other works) he showed how the human brain had first conceived of a tribal leader still leading his tribe after his death, and how that evolved into a god that first spoke directly to humans then ultimately became silent as the human brain changed and consciousness started in humans. That was the book that answered my big questions about the "why" and "how" of god. My dad had always said that people invented god(s) in order to answer the big questions of life: why are we here?, why do tragic things happen like mass starvation and tsunamis?, what happens after death?, what's the big meaning in life? I understood what my dad meant with those questions, but still wondered how god(s) came about world-wide in different cultures and seemed to play a similar role. This book answered that to my satisfaction and after finishing it (after about four readings; it's rather dense but very understandable) I was done with agnosticism and am now simply an atheist. NO god, no gods, no dead relatives waiting for me. Someday, I will die. I had such a sense of relief after that; I was done with my questions and with religion. This wasn't really the answer I was looking for; I had truly hoped to find some truth in religion. But Jaynes' theory and the book with its myriad of examples that were clear to me (unlike xian apologetics) finally fully answered my questions. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nic Posted September 13, 2015 Share Posted September 13, 2015 Apostasy wasn't on my list of life goals. It wasn't even on my list of things to never do, because I simply couldn't imagine doing it. Can anyone relate to this? Oh, yes I can. I can relate. I was a very involved and devoted Christian. I knew in my heart that no matter what I would never leave God, I would never leave christianity. And then it happened so fast, and yet so slow. Fast because I held onto knowing I would never leave, and slow because it was many things throughout the years together, that when the last thing came, I left. Thanks for sharing, it has helped me. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlindReason Posted September 13, 2015 Author Share Posted September 13, 2015 I'm glad somebody found it helpful. It's interesting to reread this post a couple of months later and remember the state of shock I was in when I wrote it. I realized that I was mortal, and it felt like nothing would ever be okay again. People on here were saying it gets better but I couldn't believe it. Well, it does. Those feelings fade. Perhaps the weirdest part of this adventure is that I haven't really changed. The actions I thought were wrong before still seem wrong now. I have the same interests, the same friends, the same likes and dislikes. School has started again and the only difference there is that I don't pray when it isn't going well. Not that I prayed much anyway - I was too busy studying and coming up with solutions to my problems on my own. Life goes on. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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