How I Left From The Church

[Steve Albert]

High school is when I began to turn away from religion. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately...I went to a very conservative Catholic high school. Before high school, I prayed a lot and genuinely believed everything the Catholic church and the bible said, or maybe I had just never though about it enough to know if I believed or not.

 

When I got to high school, my freshman religion teacher infuriated me. Her view of the world was that she was right, and everyone else was wrong. If you did not agree with her, you were going to hell. Typical Catholic right? The main thing that made me so angry was her openly anti-gay attitude. She was against gays, and she let you know it. At this point, I was still a strong believer, but I couldn't understand how she, and on a larger scale the church, could be so hateful and intolerant of gays. This was the spark that ignited the fire of my skepticism and eventually de-conversion. Sophomore year I had the one cool religion teacher in the school, so nothing really happened with regards to the questioning of my faith, as my religion teacher that year did not force his beliefs on us, and I really didn't think about it that year.

 

Junior year is when things really started to change. That year, I had the most close-minded, conservative person I have ever met for a religion teacher. When I was in that class, she made me want to do the opposite of everything she said. This is going to sound bad, but if the talk was about abortion, I wanted to get people to have abortions. If we were talking about the devil, I wanted to join a satanic cult. If we were talking about gays, I wanted to be gay. She hit a nerve with me in a way that I cannot explain. It was at this point that I thought very seriously about the Catholic church. Did I want to be like this insane woman, who I often referred to as the catholic Osama bin Laden? I did not think that if god was real, he would want me to be so close minded and hateful.

 

During junior year, I researched a lot of opposing arguments that I could use against my teacher, which is when I began to see the hypocrisy and inconsistencies within the bible and the church. It really got me thinking that maybe what I had been told my whole life up to this point might not be true. At first it was a bit depressing, the thought that god might not be real, or that there might not be life after death, but I began to accept it.

 

After I finally got through morality class senior year (which was worse than pulling teeth) I was free from the intolerance and hate that was circulating at that school. I could finally leave behind my old religion and embrace my new life. At one point I was an atheist, but for a while now I have considered myself an agnostic theist. I do believe that there is a god, but I don't think that humanity can ever know about god, and I am happy with that. I have accepted the fact that we will never know until we die.

[Eugene39]

Thanks for posting your story. Inconsistencies: that's a big one that got a lot of us. Welcome to ex-c!

[Andy]

Interesting story. I also went to a Catholic high school and consider that to be the main cause of my deconversion. However I had quite a different experience. Most of my religion teacher were fairly open-minded and liberal for catholics. There was one who even had some socialist leanings! And we learned about the bible and the church without cherry picking. We read all about the nasty stuff in the old testament and didn't shy away from the cruel history of the church. Honestly I'm surprised more people from my class didn't deconvert.

[true-atheist]

I'm glad that you were able to get out of the prison of Christianity. You have a much better life ahead of you because of it.