Do You Ever Wonder What Makes Us Different?

[Guest Thoth-Amon]

What makes us different?

 

In my opinion, a strong sense of personal honesty is what sets us apart from The True Believers.

[Toxic]

I think there are a number of factors. There was a personality test a while back that someone posted to a thread, and it turned out that a lot of us are introverts. Not all, but a lot. I don't think that's a coincidence. Christianity seems like it was more designed for extroverts.

 

 

I'm quite a solitary person by nature so that might explain why I gave Xtianity up.

[Fonkey]

So many great replies! Here are some of the points that stuck out for me:

 

"a strong sense of personal honesty"

Yes, even when I'm convinced that Christianity would be better for me, I just can't imagine deceiving myself into any kind of reconversion. I just can't lie to myself.

 

"Not only were we not afraid to ask questions... We were ultimately not afraid of the answers"

"I needed to know the truth, however difficult it might be for me"

"I needed to know the truth, even if it was painful, and my friends just needed to be right"

 

I agree whole-heartedly here. It was that realization that, up to that point, I had been trying to change the evidence to fit the theory, rather than vice versa. I had one of those "aha!" moments, like the switching of a necker cube, where it finally hit me in a tangible way that I could be wrong, and that if I was wrong, my pathetic attempts at apologetic defense would never lead me nearer to the truth. In the end, I made the same decision that many people here have: to seek out the truth at all costs, and, once it is found, to accept it for what it is. It's like pocketing a pile og diamonds that others have left behind because they were only interested in rubies.

 

In an odd twist of fate, my commitment to the truth (regardless of what it was) mirrors a prayer I once made as a christian: that God would make me his disciple regardless of the cost. Little did I know what cost I would end up paying...

 

a lot of us were inquisitive as children and very curious

Yep

 

I personally have never been good at taking orders, and blindly accepting everything

maybe we are just more independent and stubborn

I remember as a child getting into big fights with my parents, and they'd say "Because I'm your father/mother, that's why!" I always thought... but what if you're wrong? Also, IIRC, I once asked what someone should do if God asks them to kill someone. My parents said something along the lines of "God wouldn't ask you to do that" (BS) or "God wouldn't ask you to do something that goes against his word" (also BS)

 

"Maybe we just asked one too many times - 'God - are you really there?'"

"i remember one day, realizing that god had never really spoken to me in that 'little voice.'"

Wow, this is pretty much my story exactly. I remember being at a mission camp for kids, and we were told that God would speak to us in visions and stuff. I would squint my eyes really hard, trying to discern some kind of image in the patterns that formed against my retina, but nothing I came up with even came close to the miraculous things my peers seemed to be experiencing. One day, one of the girls said 'no crazy things this time, Paul" No visions ever materialized, and throughout my life, I constantly struggled with the fact that I had never really experienced God or seen him work in a miraculous way (although I had heard plenty of stories, including ones that--while I clung to them initially--came from people who turned out to be pathological liars).

 

"I wasn't getting anything 'nice' out of it"

This was a big one for me. I remember being in a pseudo-bible study where we were talking about evangelism, and how it can be valuable to tell non-believers about the "benefits of Christianity" (although I'm sure it was phrased more poetically than that). I was in tears when I shared how I had never really experienced any kind of transcendent joy or peace, and how I didn't really feel that Christianity had enriched my life at all. While I sometimes chalked this lack of positive experience to the fact that I had grown up a Christian and just didn't know what life was like on the other side of the fence, the fact that I felt deeply unhappy, rather than peaceful and joyful, dogged my footsteps until I finally gave up.

[WakingUp]

The main reason that I left the fundamentalist teachings were:

 

1)The doctrine of Hell. How can a loving God create a place of everlasting torment and then allow most of humanity to go there?

 

2)Lack of answer to prayer in my life and the lives of other believers.

 

3)Learning more about how scripture came about.

 

WakingUP

[Guest dot_is_cute]

What factors do you think pushed you to make your decision?

 

As a single woman - I wasn't taken very seriously by the church elders - in fact they didn't seem to like talking to me at all! So when I disagreed with them they used to fob me off with vague bullshit. Gradually I started to see them as fools - they just seemed to make stuff up (funny that!).

One of the final straws was when my church went nuts over that Mel Gibson film - The Passion of the Christ. "Everyone must see it!" Trouble is - they had not long before given me heaps of grief for watching violent Asian films saying it was ungodly. When they tried to explain that the violence in Passion was Christian and therefore OK something inside me switched over.

I prayed to God that if he really existed he should SPEAK UP NOW. Don't let me fall away and go to Hell I prayed. Speak to me now if I am doing the wrong thing.

There was nothing - no voice. That was the end of my belief in Christian God.

I suppose to answer the original question in a more concise way, like other people here, I was rebellious and had to constantly question everything. I always felt like an outcast in the church. I suppose in a way I didn't mind what the truth was - I just sought consistency.

[dibby]

For me I left christianity not because I studied the bible in the light of modern scholarship, or was aware of contradictions. I left because on some deep inner level I knew that it was no longer working for me. It just didn,t sit right any more. I was consumed with guilt, isolated from people (except christians).....I was suffering...and I gradually let it go. Now it seems like a prison I was in.

People come to let it go for all sorts of outer reasons, but the real reason is that it just doesn,t feel "right" any more.

 

I guess we all grow psychologically and spiritually at our own rate. For me it just felt like the psychological equivalent of a growing child trying to jam itself into the clothes of a previous age.

[ShackledNoMore]

I've often wondered about the same thing. The intellectual honesty answer seems awfully simple, but I'm really inclined to believe it, at least as a large factor.

 

This may not be PC, but I also think that intelligence may be one factor too, albeit intellectual honesty and some other personality factors may be greater factors. It's just my own casual observation, so it's not warranted, and I'm talking merely about a correlation: of course I can find examples of xians who are brilliant, a lot smarter than me and exians who are dumb as an ox. But I thought I noticed the correlation even when I was an xian. I asked a couple of xians about it (at the time, when I was an xian), no more than two or three. None disputed my observation, and their answers were essentially that smart people let their intellect stand in the way of their relationship with god.

 

Intellectual honesty, a tendency to analyze things, introspection, intelligence: they all tend to be factors in making one less gullible.

[The Sage Nabooru]

I think it's good to have a cultural place to start from. I would have to say that being from St. Louis the cultural background that I associate with most is mostly Catholic. I'm not a baptized Catholic, in fact I was brought up to hate them, I don't attend mass on Sunday or go to confession.

 

But if I'm selling a house, I bury a statue of what's-his-face upside-down in the yard, and when I move out on my own I'll probably have a Marian statue in my front yard. Because where I come from, that's what people do.

 

For me the ideal religious expression is that which sees the religious expression as merely a local variant of general world spirituality. Mary's not going to be in my yard because I believe her Son is my only hope of staying out of hell, she's there as a representative of general spiritual feeling.

 

I think a lot of Christians are this way. Think of Europe, for example; people mark "Christian" on the census forms but in this day and age that could pretty much mean anything. One of my counselors had a Muslim husband, and he said that he was a Muslim because where he comes from, people are Muslim and celebrate Muslim holidays. Nothing more, nothing less.

[godlessgrrl]

For me it was a combo platter of a few things.

 

For one thing, I came to the realization that something as big as the existence and nature of god was too important to be half-assed about. I couldn't just buy what I'd been taught or told, I had to figure something like that out for myself, because it was just too big a cosmic topic to take for granted or not think about, or to pretend to believe in.

 

I also never saw doubt as an enemy. I saw it as a valid test of faith, and if my faith didn't stand up to the questions my doubt moved me to ask, then it was a shitty faith and it deserved to go. So I was willing to ask questions and to doubt, too.

 

And I wasn't afraid of what I'd find in the end. And I wasn't willing to lie about it.

 

So it was a few things that sort of combined, really.