Vomit Comet Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 More!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kathlene Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Vomet Comet you really love polls don't you? I always enjoy your threads. Anyway. I only deconverted 4months ago, so its still fairly raw and emotional for me. I do have to say though, that time is making it easier. Im not half as psyched as I was in the beginning. I think though, I have pushed it all to the back of my mind and kind of ignored it for the most part. Because if I looked at it too closely I would come undone. So Ive been going a bit wild living, trying to work out who I am now. Its definately not easy thats for sure. I didn't realise how brainwashed and indoctrinated I was. I think that will take a very long time to get over certain ways of thinking. But for now, I am happy. I just feel relief. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Marty Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Anger. I am angry that such a stupid, and obvious manipulative set of lies has so much control of humanity. And it does seem my anger gets worse and worse with each passing year. I wish I knew how to rid myself of it. I do still remember the exact moment that I allowed myself to think of there being no god. I was getting on my bike to go for a ride, and I just looked up at this cloud floating by and just thought, "what if there is no god? What if it is all just made up?". Once I started plugging in that answer into every "problem" I had with xtainity, I realized it can explain it all away. But the fuse kinda just went pfft. No explosions came untill about 5 years later, when 9/11 happened. The aftermath of that, along with Bush, brought out all my anger. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vigile Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 I had to choose "other" on 5-6 because there was no option for no more residual issues. My Kaboom event was having sex. At first I thought I had really dishonored god and broken a great promise to him. A day or two later I thought to myself, WTF is the big deal? I made myself wait and for what? Yeah, it was great but how was that such a big sin? We liked each other and we did what came natural. Where was the great sin in that. I grew seriously pissed at both myself and xianity that I made myself wait for so long and missed so many opportunities out of shear stubbornness. A short time later I realized I no longer believed though I had serious doubts for a few years before that and hadn't been to church for a long time. I'll always be grateful to that girl for seducing me that night. I was trying to be a good boy but no healthy hetero male could have said no to a gorgeous girl who hung out with me naked with only a pair of sexy bib overalls and then later that evening insisted on modeling her lingerie for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vigile Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Because if I looked at it too closely I would come undone. My advice to you is to go through it at your own pace but don't completely shelve it. There is probably something there that you will eventually have to face. If you avoid doing so it will come out eventually anyway or will just continue to slowly gnaw away at you. There is no rush. It took me years before I realized I was an atheist. But it wasn't until almost 10 years after that that I found this website and through reading and participation also realized that I still had residual issues that had to come out. When I first came to this site 4 years ago I surprised myself at how much anger I had in me over xianity. I got it out here and now I can say it no longer has its claws in me. I still get angry over some issues I read here but I think that's more of a reasonable response to unjust situations than it is something residual buried inside me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
highvoltage Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 My process of deconversion resulted in my leaving the faith three (EDIT: no, it was four, my how the time flies) years ago. Even though it was a multi-year process of study and questioning, those questions and doubts all came to a head over the period of about 3 days. It was a pretty tumultuous time, and I can remember the moment when I realized that I know longer believed in God. Like the answer to your third question, "it was like the fuse burned to the end and then KA*BOOOOOOOOOM." Immediately afterwards, my whole life crumbled around me. I answered "yes" to nearly all of the options in question 4. It took most of these last several years for those feelings to subside. I'm still left with a dull anger about living in a lie for most of my life, and for all of those wasted years, but I don't think about it too much anymore. When I realized that my anger towards god and my ex-faith were detracting from my new life at least as much as my faith ever did, was when I finally was able to start letting go. The anger is natural, but there comes a time when it needs to be let go. These forums helped me quite a bit in the early days of my deconversion process. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skeptic Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 My "deconversion" is pretty complicated. I doubted god's existence from the time I was a kid, but I really did try to believe in god, and I almost had myself convinced a few times. I was one of those kids who got "saved" multiple times because I never felt like it "stuck". People kept telling me about how if you had god in your heart, then your entire life would change, and I never felt that. I got dragged kicking and screaming to church a lot as a kid. I remember my mom had to bribe me to go to church because I hated it. None of it made any sense to me. I tried reading the bible starting in third grade and it was so unbelievably confusing to me. Hell, it still is! I got confirmed when I was in elementary school, but not re-baptized (I was baptized as an infant) and I never took communion. I thought it was barbaric, even as a little kid. In high school, I had the kind of existential crisis that's talked about in this poll. I learned about how the human mind works, and, as a result, I came to the conclusion that souls don't exist. I started to think that life had no purpose, that nothing was really real. That plus a lot of other things, some of which I don't even remember, got me into church. I helped out with VBS at a church in a neighboring suburb. It was the one that I went to for Kindergarten, actually, so the reverend knew me from when I was 5 years old (I didn't remember him, though.) Then, I started going to the youth group there. I met a lot of cool people there, and I got involved in a lot of groups within the church. (Of course, now I look back on this and want to kick myself, but it was what it was.) I tried really hard to believe in god and pray and talk to him, all of that, but it just didn't happen. I was in denial about that until 12th grade. I took a Humanities class and the teacher was an atheist. He was, without a doubt, the best teacher I have ever had. He taught me how to think for myself, which was something that my parents worked hard to repress. He, along with my Latin teacher that I had in 11th and 12th grade, dispelled a lot of myths that I had grown up with and never really questioned. After graduation, I took a break from religion altogether. I stopped going to church functions, I didn't read anything about religion, I was totally unaffiliated. Then I saw the documentary Religulous and that forced me to examine xianity with more scrutiny than I had before. I reread bible stories that I had been told as a kid and found that there were a lot of parts, most of them violent and immoral, that I had never been told. That, plus discovering this site, reading a lot, and watching some atheist documentaries caused me to admit to myself that I'm an atheist. The last step in deconversion for me was committing the "unforgivable sin". Once I did that, I felt different. It was probably the change that xians had spent years telling me came from god. I feel like I can finally be myself instead of trying to fit into a mold that I never did and never will fit into. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vendredie Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 It took reading the Da Vinci Code, and checking its "history" to figure out that I knew nothing of the religion I was following, and that what little of it I did know was all fake. I was 14 at the time. I never once had been taught about other religious myths, or the Nicene Creed, I didn't even know about Mary Magdalene until reading it! Before that, I'd been "liberalizing" my own beliefs, and barely believed in Jesus at all. I was on the very cusp of being agnostic already, but it took realizing what I hadn't known to push me over the edge. To this day I still don't know jack shit about Christianity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ClaraOlive Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 It depends on whether deconverting means no longer believing in Christianity, or if it means coming public and identifying as a non-Christian. For the first part, I don't ever remember having a true belief in Christianity. My mother says that I became a Christian when I was four, and she holds on tightly to that memory, but I consider it about as valid as believing in Santa Claus (which I never did). However, a childhood skepticism in God was mixed with a real desire to please my parents, to not be labeled as different from my friends, and fear of unknown consequences if I stopped believing (social consequences more than hell). I grew up making constant efforts to TRY to believe or to convince myself that I did believe, but I was somewhat conscious that I had to do so because I didn't believe. I was in my mid-20s when I finally stopped trying and started just identifying as the non-Christian that I'd been for a long time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mriana Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 OK my deconversion was a bit slow, but I did have an "epiphany" at one point during a Hindu class. I also questioned during the whole processes as to whether I was making a mistake (not "what if I'm wrong", but a grievous error in Jesus never existing). I had dreams, but I would not call them nightmares. What is getting worse, not better, is fear of other Evangelicals, esp my relatives, if they knew. I'm not sure I can keep it a secret much longer from my mother and when she figures it out, it will be hell on earth. I've seen it before. She and her sister learned from their parents. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bdp Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 What I remember most vividly was fear of actually letting go of all of it - I knew I didn't believe it but I didn't know if I was the only one who ever went from having it all be my total reality to just walking away from it all. This site helped sooooo much... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vomit Comet Posted April 20, 2009 Author Share Posted April 20, 2009 It took reading the Da Vinci Code, and checking its "history" to figure out that I knew nothing of the religion I was following, and that what little of it I did know was all fake. I was 14 at the time. I never once had been taught about other religious myths, or the Nicene Creed, I didn't even know about Mary Magdalene until reading it! I knew it! I just knew the Da Vinci Code would trick believers away from the fold!!! And at the time they told me to "lighten up." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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