♦ nivek ♦ Posted June 23, 2009 Share Posted June 23, 2009 One particular song, did more to kick me out of the AoG mess I was caught in... kL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neon Genesis Posted June 23, 2009 Share Posted June 23, 2009 Hi, Neon. Did you go through one of those homosexual reprogramming clinics, or a secular-world counselor? I'm curious about the reprogramming clinics. Phanta I didn't go through a reprogramming clinic but he wasn't a secular counselor either. He was a fundie psychiatrist that went to our church and I just saw him in one-on-one meetings although he belonged to a local Christian psychiatrist program. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
I Broke Free Posted June 23, 2009 Share Posted June 23, 2009 Hi, Neon. Did you go through one of those homosexual reprogramming clinics, or a secular-world counselor? I'm curious about the reprogramming clinics. Phanta I didn't go through a reprogramming clinic but he wasn't a secular counselor either. He was a fundie psychiatrist that went to our church and I just saw him in one-on-one meetings although he belonged to a local Christian psychiatrist program. I went to a Christian psychologist for two sessions in my last attempt “to change.” I was 19 years old and the two visits were well worth the money. It just two short hours that idiot did more to convince me that I was way more normal than he could ever hope to be. If it had not been for those two sessions my acceptance of who I was would have taken years longer. He was adamant that my parents were somehow responsible for me being gay and he accused me of not being cooperative when I was unable to provide anything to backup his pet theories. No one and I mean no one will ever make me say anything negative about my parents, especially my father. Those two people were the best parents anyone could ask for and I would never make them into scapegoats for anyone. The psychologist had nothing else to fall back on when he could not delve into some horrid story of abuse in my past. I realized right then and there that being gay was just how I turned out. There was nothing wrong and nothing to fix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Midnight-mindwanderings Posted June 24, 2009 Share Posted June 24, 2009 I was brought up in the Church of Christ (I saw someone else reply saying they had been too - yikes!). They thought everyone was going to hell. 75% + sermons were about other denominations of Christianity and why they were wrong and going to hell. I distinctly remember one sermon about how even the majority of the people in that church were probably going to hell (they took a camel going through the eye of a needle very literally). Everything they preached was in the Bible, and they preached it all without reservation. Some very personal tid bits here: I was raped when I was 8 years old. By this time, I knew enough to know that it was bad but felt as though the sin committed was mine. I read up the verses in Deuteronomy about rape (if a woman is raped in the city and no one hears her cry out she is as much to blame as the man) and everything else the Bible said about virginity's all importance in being an unwed female. So I felt surely doomed. Despite the fact that I got baptized to have the 'sin' cleansed from me, it made little difference years later when going through puberty with other Christians who could talk of nothing else but how sacred their virginity was. The most precious gift a woman could give her husband. My church definitely never mentioned talk of becoming a spiritual virgin or whatever some more liberal churches will talk about. It was said over and over, once its done - its gone forever. I never told anyone because I could not stand the shame. I kept is as a matter between me and God and was silent about it for many many years. So yeah, I suffered from depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress etc, in silence continually believing that it must be a lack of faith on my part that I wasn't happy in Jesus and that this thing had happened to me in the first place. By the time I was 14 all of my friends were non christian (or at most light Christian that certainly didn't talk about it ever) and I realized that if any of us were going to hell, then fuck it. The Bible made me feel horrible, made people do and say horrible things when the best people I knew were supposedly going to hell. Christianity tells you to pick a side and I did - theirs. Needless to say the guilt and shame I had been living with lifted considerably. It was a long road to recovery from there, but it all started when I stopped believing in Jesus. I could be my own savior. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neon Genesis Posted June 24, 2009 Share Posted June 24, 2009 I went to a Christian psychologist for two sessions in my last attempt “to change.” I was 19 years old and the two visits were well worth the money. It just two short hours that idiot did more to convince me that I was way more normal than he could ever hope to be. If it had not been for those two sessions my acceptance of who I was would have taken years longer. He was adamant that my parents were somehow responsible for me being gay and he accused me of not being cooperative when I was unable to provide anything to backup his pet theories. No one and I mean no one will ever make me say anything negative about my parents, especially my father. Those two people were the best parents anyone could ask for and I would never make them into scapegoats for anyone. The psychologist had nothing else to fall back on when he could not delve into some horrid story of abuse in my past. I realized right then and there that being gay was just how I turned out. There was nothing wrong and nothing to fix. Mine didn't try the bad parents are responsible argument but he did keep insisting that there must have been some traumatic experience I had in my life that caused me to be gay. But this argument has never made sense to me. If your bad parents or trauamatic experience is what made you gay, then doesn't that mean you didn't choose to be gay because your sexuality was pushed onto you by someone else and so you can't be held resposible for it, the person who caused the experience should be? It's like fundies try to compare homosexuality to a mental disorder, but you wouldn't damn someone to hell for a mental disorder they got from their parents because you didn't choose for your parents to pass one down to you through genetics or whatever. So, by laying the blame on bad parents or whatever, aren't they in fact proving sexuality is not something you chose? Ironically, I did have crappy parents and I still hate my dad, but he surprisingly didn't bring up the parents argument, though he probably would eventually have if I stuck with it, but I fail to see the link between bad parents and sexuality, otherwise every person out there with bad parents would be gay. I was brought up in the Church of Christ (I saw someone else reply saying they had been too - yikes!).I'm also an ex-COC member. My psychiatrist said there were five other members in the COC that were seeing him because they were gay but he wouldn't say who because he wasn't allowed to but now I wonder just how many COCers are also gay or lesbian. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
★ Citsonga ★ Posted June 25, 2009 Share Posted June 25, 2009 Hi. Newbie here. I only discovered this site about a week or two ago, and I've been lurking almost daily since then. Anyway, my faith started to unravel because of some Bible contradictions, and then was completely shredding after realizing that many of the supposed prophecy fulfillments in the NT were contrived by taking OT texts completely out of context. Afterward, other factors also played roles in cementing my rejection of Christianity, and now Christianity as a whole seems so obviously ridiculous that it boggles my mind that I was brainwashed so thoroughly that it took me until age 29 to start seeing holes in it. But it all started with those contradictions in my dearly-loved "inerrant" book. I really wish I had known of this site a few years ago when I was struggling to come to grips with my newfound skepticism. At any rate, hopefully this weekend I can find some time two write up my extimony. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VacuumFlux Posted June 25, 2009 Share Posted June 25, 2009 I marked "experience" because it was the final straw. I started questioning due to inconsistencies in the Bible and the character of God. At one point I prayed "God, I know you're good, so you can't be the shithole church says you are. I'm going to have to dump my old ideas of you, please don't take it personally, and PLEASE come back and show me who you really are." I never did get a good answer. Bye bye, invisible friend. After years of struggling with doublethink, I sat down and tried to come up with a good basis for knowing reality. It's completely ridiculous to think God would ask us to believe because the Bible says we should. My church/school always claimed we had good logical reasons to believe, so I tried to dump my faith and start from scratch (assuming I'd end up back at Christianity). Two songs that went through my head a lot during this were Supertramp's "The Logical Song" (But at night, when all the world's asleep/ The questions run too deep/ For such a simple man. / Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned? / I know it sounds absurd/ But please tell me who I am) and Don McLean's "Dreidel" (What do you know? Nothing but what you perceive. What can you show? Nothing of what you believe. And as you grow, each thread of life that you leave will spin around your deeds and dictate your needs...). So I threw out the BS about "the heart is deceitful" and started with naturalism and logic. I thought about how science makes truth claims and tried to come up with an experiment. I know you can't prove or disprove the existence of God; that was much too big of a question for me anyway. So I asked myself what claims Christianity made and decided my experiment would be to see if any of those claims can stand up to reality. I focused on the claims about how Christians are less sinful than the rest of the world (which is what I wanted most of our religion anyway, to be a better person). I though of all the christians I knew, and realized that they had a wide range of personalities, but in all of them, the more into religion they got the less human (at least in the sense of empathy) they became. Even the ones who were really sweet people otherwise would treat their unsaved friends like shit when they thought they were showing love. Then I thought about the non-Christians I knew. They were none the worse off, and some of them are much more stable, mature, and internally consistent than the Christians. That was when I finally realized that Christians suck because they god they depend on is not real. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HRDWarrior Posted June 25, 2009 Share Posted June 25, 2009 I voted Other in the poll - for me, I think the turning point was the enormous amount of division between the so-called christian faiths, and how they would base their entire belief system on those differences. Finally attending a Church of Christ (seems to be a trend here) was the final straw for me - I went through their entire little introduction, rebaptism, etc, and even after all that I still could not accept that my previous "conversion" was invalid. This was when I finally "gave in" to what I had been thinking since I was a kid - that all these faiths, who claim to be worshiping the same God and Bible must have some major fundamental problems. There were other things as well, but this was probably the so called nail in the coffin for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaggieMae Posted June 25, 2009 Share Posted June 25, 2009 The biggest blow for me was realizing that each religion fervently believed they were the right ones. I couldn't say I was right unless I could back it up somehow. Something didn't add up, so of course that lead me to ask questions and study world religions, and I realized how religion is a social phenomenon, not a divine one. I has always assumed the reasons why Christianity was right and Islam was wrong would be obvious, otherwise why would everyone spend so much time and money on Christianity. But there were no clear answers. It was all a big joke. Ditto! On the first day of class, my world religion professor had us each draw a religion out of a hat, and explained that if our class represented the world population, that random drawing is exactly how the distribution of religions worked. Your beliefs are a product of where you're born. If you're born in China, you're probably Buddhist. If you're born in South America, you're probably Catholic. If you're born in India, you're probably Hindu. It's a huge cosmic crapshoot as to which "truth" you'll grow up "knowing." (I chose "other") Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mriana Posted June 27, 2009 Share Posted June 27, 2009 I picked other, because an education was the number one factor for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gypsy79 Posted June 27, 2009 Share Posted June 27, 2009 I picked other, because an education was the number one factor for me. Me too, specifically the history of ancient religions and how xianity is just a mish-mash of older stories...not something unique as I was taught growing up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mriana Posted June 27, 2009 Share Posted June 27, 2009 I picked other, because an education was the number one factor for me. Me too, specifically the history of ancient religions and how xianity is just a mish-mash of older stories...not something unique as I was taught growing up. Yes, between the study of Psychology and religious studies, that did it, esp learning that Krishna is the I AM and is the incarnation of Vishnu. The more I learn about it all, the more it becomes clearer that today's religions are just an evolution of primitive superstition. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
highvoltage Posted June 30, 2009 Share Posted June 30, 2009 I saw several other mentions of ex-CoCers in this thread, so I'll chime in and say I, too, grew up in the CoC. Part of why I left Christianity is due to the extreme exclusivity and "judgementalness" (is that a word?) in that church. Here's a very short version of reasons why I left xtianity: I voted "Other" in the poll, even though there were a lot of things that came together to result in my deconversion, some of which were choices in the poll. The biggest (and last) straw, though, was when I discovered for myself that the Jews in the Old Testament didn't believe in an afterlife, but yet the afterlife is the centerpiece in Christian theology. Somehow, the Messiah to the Jews came to save them from eternal torment in the next life, but never mentioned before his arrival on Earth that there was even such a place that they needed saving from. It didn't make sense. It's not really a contradiction, but a large inconsistency. It became obvious that we were just making up the story as we went along. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WCrystal Posted June 30, 2009 Share Posted June 30, 2009 I only chose one up there, but if there was an "All of the Above" I would have chosen that. For me, after the feeding, I ended up seeing it as a pile of steaming bullshit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry Spencer Posted July 14, 2009 Share Posted July 14, 2009 It all started when I learned that young-earth creationist leaders whom I had trusted had been lying to me. That led me to question a whole lot of things (where else had I been lied-to?). Of those other things, the lack of any statistical evidence for God granting prayers was the biggest problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdog Posted July 15, 2009 Share Posted July 15, 2009 I voted other as I think it was a bit of everything, over a period of time, but the character of God is up there on the list. Bible study of Genesis got me thinking and questioning, also the bible study type sermons at the church I attended, so that was the head side of things and then was the heart and emotional side of things. Being a 'born again', it got harder to grasp the idea of people being punished because they don't choose jesus. The whole ultimatum approach. I use to cry and pray for my family, because none of them had accepted christ as savior. It was such a 'burden' I carried, I so wanted them "saved". And I got depressed further and further as I would see everyone as potential victims of god's judgement, if they did not repent and choose christ. I just believed people were heading for hell. Somehow things just started tumbling down around me, I became overwhelmed with emotion and distraught with the whole concept of 'god'. I hated the answers I got about god being a 'just' god and we ought not try to understand but just accept that his ways are higher than ours. And I just had to keep praying, trusting and hoping. I could go on and on, because there are so many other reasons too. Having enough faith for healing, but still trying to accept whatever 'god's will' is. I was back and forth on that one, it drove me crazy, I think the whole religion did. This has got me all aaaargh again. I am surprised if anyone has one defining reason for deconversion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iden Posted July 17, 2009 Share Posted July 17, 2009 Simple logic applied to the creation story/flood story. There is a host of species which are endemic to particular area/region which also should have showed up else where had they originated from Mount Ararat (where the ark stood). And then Human and apes share common genetic defects(!).(and suposedly God created them). Most animals is not at all adapted to paradise. There is a host of animals adapted for exstreme climates eating meat, or other 'immoral behaviour'. After it struck me how logically inconsisten the Genesis account was compared to the present reality it didn't take that much more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chefranden Posted July 17, 2009 Share Posted July 17, 2009 Ezekiel 18 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deva Posted July 17, 2009 Share Posted July 17, 2009 I said Bible contradictions, but by that I mean how the stories in the Bible contradicted everyday experience of life. There is a total disconnect. Then the stuff the pastor was saying about women and how they were to submit to men in everything. There is no way I wanted to live like that. It was a cumulative process and it was not overnight. For some time I still believed in the Christian God, but thought he would not have approved of how the church was teaching. It was only much later that I began to question the existence of such a God at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaisedPB Posted July 20, 2009 Share Posted July 20, 2009 I voted bible contradictions, but it wasn't really contradictions with itself, but the incompatability of a literal interpretation of the bible with science and nature. Once I started researching answers to those questions ---- well, the fundies were right. Once you start asking question, it's a slippery slope ---- to reality! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
qec Posted July 22, 2009 Share Posted July 22, 2009 My number one deconversion factor was when I realized that the voice inside my head speaking to me wasn't "God" or the Holy Spirit but my own mind/conscience and that I could actually control it (LOL). I experimented one day and tried to control it and was successful; I quickly realized how I had been lied to (as I could control it on a whim), made to split my own mind in half, and believe that one half was talking to other half and that I was hearing from "God". Religion is an attempt to force people to internalize certain doctrines/feelings/emotions/verses from scripture/things deities might say/, label the thoughts "God" speaking to you, and thus divide your mind in half. Once you realize that everything going through your head can be controlled by you, the illusion/deception reveals itself for what it truly is. The voice of "God" really is one of those cases where it's "all in your head", it's one of the few things that is. Religion is a joke, useful for the elite but still a joke. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hereticzero Posted July 23, 2009 Share Posted July 23, 2009 It was the combination of many things, mostly being unable to reconcile the story of Jesus as the result of the story of the talking snake in a magic garden. Jesus supposedly came to earth to be the 'perfect sacrifice' because of a mythological story. This made me realize, Jesus was also a mythological story. The story of Jesus also contradicted God's claim throughout the Old Testament, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' and that God found no pleasure in their sacrifices. To me, this indicates Jesus could not be god on earth for a sacrifice. The law of Moses was as much an invention as was the creation of Islam. The scribes are liars. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hereticzero Posted July 23, 2009 Share Posted July 23, 2009 No Jew existed prior to the return from Babylon. Even Josephus recorded this fact. The Jew had to prove his religion and low and behold, the Old Testament was written to back-fill the religion's account for Moses and the law. Written in Greek too! Why write in Greek that which is proclaimed in Hebrew? If the spirit is accessible to everyone, especially the Jew, why write the accounts in a foreign language? Isn't god able to transcend language and tell us in our own language what he requires? Why does a person have to learn a different language to know of god--Latin also comes to mind? The disciples claimed the Gentiles performed the letter of the law without the law. They were a law unto themselves and yet Christians insist that we follow the law of Moses too? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greenhunter Posted July 26, 2009 Share Posted July 26, 2009 i'd have to say..my douche bag ex step father, he treated everyone like crap, claimed all this crap about how god loves him and no one else etc. etc, how he went from job to job claiming that "god" didn't want him there (in reality he just doesn't want to work.) the other "christians" i met, who treated me and my mom crap, the friend i have claiming war on this invisible "god" that i'm beginning to take the atheist route on. my mom is cool with it but she's not a practicing "christian" but don't get her started on jeebus not existing, (she thinks she's married to him) which reminds me i got to find that "rock me sexy jesus" single for her. i can go on for a while here but i won't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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