What Did It

[Paradox]

I suspect I speak for many when I say that, of all the different kinds of subject matter on this message board, the single most interesting is the accounts of what caused people here to 'turn'. I'm sorry if I am basically asking list members to repeat things they have already said and that I haven't read, but if anyone here is willing to give a paragraph or two saying what it was that did it for them, I for one would be really interested.

 

 

As for me, I read Tony Bushby's Nexus article 'The Forged Origins of the New Testament' (still somewhere online), then, stimulated by that, watched the Zeitgeist production on Youtube, 'The Geratest Story Ever Told' and read bits from

 

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/

 

-- in which the part about Josephus' 'Golden Testimony' had a particularly strong effect on me. And I had long agreed with the closing comments in the Zeitgeist production, about how religion supports bellicose agenda etc.. Despite the fact that I regarded myself as a 'nonreligious' Christian (that is, not bound by scriptural edicts), after all that, I felt that something had to give.

 

 

[Guest I Love Dog]

The vicar did it for me.

 

I was 12 and taking communion classes and my gorgeous dog died. I spoke to the vicar about him going to heaven and was told that only humans go to heaven because god made them "special". Animals don't have "souls"

 

That did it. I thought how ridiculous surely we are all god's creatures? Almost immediately I saw through the whole charade of Christianity and never looked back. Lost the belief in an all-loving deity for ever.

[seeboh]

Watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos and failure of Christians to answer many questions. The universe is much more beautiful without a designer.

[Droptail]

I had 2 deconversions: one from fundamentalism to a more moderate kind of Christianity and then another to atheism. Hearing my Bible professor at the Christian university I attended after fundie high school say that a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account was untenable really shook me to my core and helped to spark my leaving fundamentalism about 3-4 years ago...and then after reading Dawkins' God Delusion this past November I admitted to myself I agreed with him and began calling myself an atheist.

[Suzy]

I had more than one reason.

 

The first one was that Christianity made me struggle emotionally and mentally. I refused to admit it to myself for 20 years that Christianity was my problem, of course. I blamed myself (not being good enough bla-bla) for the constant fear and guilt it struck in my heart and mind (which I never had before converting to Xtianity and don't have now as I deconverted). God is perfect, so it must be my fault, right?

 

About 10 years ago it got so bad that I realized it could affect my sanity. I prayed and prayed to God to give me relief but he never did. The more I occupied myself with God, the worse it got.

 

So I decided my relief would be if I take a step back and stop attending church, so that my mind will have a chance to be occupied with other things besides God. Lo and behold, it helped! I got much better, as I let my mind be occupied with other things.

 

But I still considered myself a Christian for the next 10 years. I read my Bible and prayed daily. I believed in the teachings. Looking back it was fear that kept me holding on for so long. Fear of Hell and punishment if I leave God.

 

Actually Xtianity only gave me 20 years in guilt and fear. But I needed 20 years of struggle to start to admit it to myself. And I needed to get liberated from my fear of Hell and punishment first.

 

The thing that helped liberating me was science. I started to read cosmology books in 2009. Astronomy was my childhood love, but Xtianity made me suspicious of science and I stopped reading those books at the age of 12 when I converted. After all astronomists talk about millions and billions of lightyears, certain atoms of our Earth and out body forming in starts, etc. A lot of things those were contradictory with my fundie beliefs.

 

But as I grew more and more dissatisfied with my inner struggles as a Xtian, finally in 2009 I decided to read a cosmology book, namely the "The Whole Shebang" by Timothy Ferris.

 

It's funny to think back of how I found that book. I was on an astronomy forum and someone recommended it. He wrote it totally changed his whole worldview. I don't know what this person's worldview was before, but at this point I felt pretty certain in my Xtian beliefs (despite of the fact I was emotionally tortured and dissatisfied by it), so I thought to myself: 'OK, I just want to read it, I will just ignore it if there is something "heretic" in it, I will just put it down as a mistake of science, or I will certainly find a way to reconcile it with my Xtian beliefs'.

 

I was fascinated by the book, although I first followed my tactic that whenever a claim was made that was contradictory to the Bible, I just dismissed it as a 'mistake' or something we don't fully understand yet or something that with time will be reconciled with the Bible somehow (even if I didn't know how).

 

But on the other hand I couldn't help thinking this all sounds very convincing....

 

One thing that shocked me was when I learned about the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and how it was discovered. That it was first predicted by the Big Bang theory and then physicists calculated what values it must have (such as it's temperature must be about 3 K) if Big Bang is true. And only then, decades later, and by accident, was it discovered that it really DOES exist and it really does hold approximately the vaules those were predicted (2.725 K)! To me this sounded like a very powerful evidence for BB.

 

This book made me more hungry for science. I kept on reading more books on the subject and by the end I basically came to the conclusion that as a Xtian I have been lied to and kept in the dark about a lot of things.

 

One other milestone was the "Cosmos" DVD of Carl Sagan and especially the part on Kepler. Kepler was pretty confused about his own findings because he thought they didn't fit in his religious worldview. He struggled to somehow reconcile the two but at the end he just decided to respect the facts no matter where they may lead. That pretty much impressed me and I thought: this is what I want, this is what I like, "just respect the facts", don't engage in all kind of mind gymnastics to try to reconcile the unreconcilable! I realized that the more advanced science became the more mind gymnastics defending religion is needed....

 

I also realized that in history whenever science and religion collided, more often than not religion was the suppressor, but then more often than not, science turned out to be right, even if it took hundreds of years for the church to admit it (see Galilei). I was like: why do the church have to behave like this, put their heads in the sand about scientific discoveries, if they advocate the Truth? (A good example is the news we had recently about evangelical Christian churches trying to ban fossils from a Kenyan museum.) So if they are all for the Truth then why do they feel the need to suppress information?

 

Then there's the observation that Xtians are not really better people than other folks. I myself was extremly judgmental and intolerant as a Christian. Also arrogant about how I know THE Truth and everybody else's truth is ridiculous. Judgementalness is a common trait in Xtians and one that really put me off. How they look down on other people. Even when I was a Xtian (and even when I was judgmental too) I didn't like to listen to it when Xtians said things like how this and that will end up in Hell, how this and that lives an immoral life etc.

 

So to summerize it I needed three things to deconvert:

 

- Inner struggles (Xtianity didn't make me feel better only worse),

- Scienctific evidence (to combat my fear of hell by showing the Bible is not true)

- My observations that although Xtians like to think they are better folks than others, they aren't really.

 

I think I needed all three to deconvert.

 

(And I have yet to learn in more detail about evolution or the history of the Bible....)

[Deva]

I believe the single largest factor in taking me out of the fundamentalist Baptist Church I was raised in was how I was treated as a divorced woman. I felt very low at the time anyway, and the Church did absolutely nothing to help. Women in general are considered nothing without a man. Also suspect if you don't have any children. There was nothing for me there. Yes, there was the time when the Sunday School teacher brought a bouquet of flowers to me at home - but later on I was asked to "help out more." In other words - strings attached. The whole thing began to seem like a colossal farce.

 

I could not accept creationism, the literal world flood, and some other ideas of the church. They would continually harp on this creationism, which annoyed me, but I would probably still would have gone on if I could have found some social support.

 

I moved to other more liberal churches in the next 8 years or so, desperately trying hold onto Christianity in some form, but I never thought the liberals took it very seriously. They don't believe it themselves so why should I? This is my personality - I tend to take things seriously. When the priest puts on an act like a clown in church, I know I am done. Yes, there was literally a "clown liturgy" at one point in the Episcopal Church I was attending. It epitomized the farcical nature of this hollow religion that purports to have the truth.

 

Then I became convinced that at the root of it all that it was a purely man made affair and that it was at the core false. I understand metaphor and symbolism, but there came a time when even the underlying metaphor and symbolism did not have any significance for me. I am still looking for meaning, but I know I am not going to find it in Christianity.

[chosendarkness]

I left Christianity because it bothered my conscious. I felt like it was really wrong and didn't want to have any part in it. That didn't stop me from believing the bible though. To get rid of those beliefs it just took time to hash it all out. After weighing the beliefs for a considerable amount of time I finally realized they were unreasonable and let them all go.

[Overcame Faith]

It was a series of events and I don't think there was any one thing "that did it." But one of the benefits of leaving the religion was that I was freed from thinking backwards. That is, I was freed from taking what the Bible said on various issues and coming up with ways to justify them. Now I am able to take what the Bible says and independently think through whether it makes any sense.

 

For example, take something like this well known Biblical concept:

 

38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

 

Matthew 5:38-42

 

Jesus spoke of "eye for eye, and tooth for tooth" as if it were a bad thing. The concept is not bad, though the way it may have been applied in the Old Testament was bad. But the concept itself is quite just. It speaks of proportionality in crime and punishment and we employ the concept today - as we should. It is the concept of proportionality which means that if you speed you get a fine of a couple of hundred dollars rather than being executed.

 

And Jesus' statement that you should "...not resist an evil person" is horrible. If we had applied this in the 1940s, we would never have declared war on Hitler. Rather, not only would we have allowed him to conquer all of Europe, but we would also have turned over the United States to him. And the same applies to Japan on December 7, 1941. After they destroyed our Pacific fleet, we would have been obliged to have invited them to land on our West coast. Ridiculous.

[Guest Xtech]

I was just a kid but it all made no sense. I could see the lack of belief on the faces of those who told me these lies, too. When I saw first hand how religion is used as a stick to beat people with, I was out.

[VacuumFlux]

The short answer is inconsistency.

 

It started when I was young and was told if anyone really searches for Truth and is honest with themself, they will end up being a Christian. That Christianity is the only logical framework that consistently makes sense of the world. Great! So I started thinking about it, and trying to determine what it was about Christianity that was so different, and how other beliefs were wrong. To do so, I'd have to think through other points of view. Then I'd ask questions. Then my parents, who were the ones pushing intelligence as leading to Christian beliefs, would get angry, make fun of me, etc. How dare I question the Truth they had given me?!

 

But I still considered myself a Christian, I just thought my parents were doing it wrong. I really wanted to, after high school, stop calling myself Christian for a while and go to all sorts of other services. I was sure that, just like C.S. Lewis and so many other fundy heroes, I would end up seeing that Truth is only found in the Christian God and would be a better Christian for it. But my parents would never allow that, and were in fact furious that once skipped sunday evening church (I'd gone in the morning) to attend a friend's birthday party. What's up with that?

 

As I quietly let myself explore other ideas and searched for a liberal form of Christianity I could be happy with, I realized it wasn't just the fundy stuff that didn't make sense. None of it did. At all. I was still terrified of god/people being mad at me for having these bad thoughts, but one weekend of reading atheist arguments, essays, stories, and blogs online broke the emotional hold of Christianity.

[stryper]

my advice to you is to first read through the testimonies section on this site.

 

Generally the pattern is:

 

Questions unanswered -> outstide or internal exploration -> inconsistancies -> doubts of validity -> deconversion

 

Sometimes abuse is thrown in for good measure. Could be the cause or could be added in at any point.

 

There are many different things that lead to the question. But once the questions are asked this pattern emerges. Sometimes the questions are about inconsistancies which can cause a feed back loop until the person finally, just accepts and continues being a christian or they admit their doubts and progress further.

 

It also seems the long one is in the longer the whole process is. There is a stong desire to hold on to what we know.

 

 

Personally, it wasn't any one thing, but that is longer story.

[Ro-bear]

For me the explosion of the Santa myth (which was done rather casually) did it. Santa was a lot easier to believe than God/Jesus; if he was made up, why couldn't they be made up as well? There was the Bible, of course. I asked who wrote it. I was told that men wrote it but they were inspired by God. Well, how do we know they were inpired by God?

 

Yep, someone pulled out the Santa yarn and the whole supernatural sweater unraveled.

[AC Skeptic]

Wow, we all have such different experiences. I am always surprised when I read from those who gave it up as children, who simply saw through it right from the start. For me, I believed until I was 30 or 31. I love the Santa story from Ro-bear. My father-in-law, a fundie fundie pastor, had this warning about Santa. "Don't lie to kids about Santa, because if they find out he isn't real well they might not believe you about Jesus!" EXACTLY!!! Because Jesus and Santa have exactly the same amount of presence in actual reality, namely zero.

 

Anyway, it wasn't one specific thing per say, it was a lot of things. But if I had to choose one to be a major foundation in my docoversion it was when I read "Who Wrote the Bible" by Richard Elliott Friedman. It made it very clear the that first five books of the Bible were a compilation of several versions, and at times heavily called into question the historicity of those events. And then there was the overbearing polemics of the P version, so obvious and so . . . human. By this time I had already fully accepted evolution (though I was one of the evolutionary creationists, namely those evangelicals who tried to make evolution fit), and it would still be, I don't know, maybe a year after this if not more that I finally stopped believing that Jesus was a god who rose from the dead. So it wasn't a simple process but the JEPD was a major event in that it was so well supported and really called into question the history of Isreal and the inspiration of the Bible.

[trulyfree]

I started questioning the doctrine of hell after a non believing friend of mine died. A few months later, I started noticing inconsistencies in the arguments of apologetics (that was my thing as a Christian). I picked up my husband's copy of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins (fully intending to argue against the drivel he was trying to feed my husband) and couldn't put it down. I didn't know it but I was ready to hear the truth or I would have put the book down after the first (?) paragraph about how awful the Christian God is. Instead I agreed. I told my husband the next day that I wasn't a Christian anymore because I didn't believe in God. He said it was kind of fast but I can look back and see the gradual process. In the past when I doubted, I'd ask a friend to pray and I'd dive into the bible and definitely didn't share my doubts with my husband. I was trying to convert him, for goodness sake! I'm beyond thankful that I deconverted instead!

[J.P.]

I haven't left Christianity yet, but what's led me to my currently huge levels of doubt and disillusionment is a buildup of questions. Things aren't fitting together, and the explanations I've gotten just don't make sense.For me, if logic is an aspect of God, but the actions of God don't make logical sense, it leads to me to more doubt the existence of the Christian God.

[Suzy]

I suspect I speak for many when I say that, of all the different kinds of subject matter on this message board, the single most interesting is the accounts of what caused people here to 'turn'. I'm sorry if I am basically asking list members to repeat things they have already said and that I haven't read, but if anyone here is willing to give a paragraph or two saying what it was that did it for them, I for one would be really interested.

 

 

As for me, I read Tony Bushby's Nexus article 'The Forged Origins of the New Testament' (still somewhere online), then, stimulated by that, watched the Zeitgeist production on Youtube, 'The Geratest Story Ever Told' and read bits from

 

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/

 

-- in which the part about Josephus' 'Golden Testimony' had a particularly strong effect on me. And I had long agreed with the closing comments in the Zeitgeist production, about how religion supports bellicose agenda etc.. Despite the fact that I regarded myself as a 'nonreligious' Christian (that is, not bound by scriptural edicts), after all that, I felt that something had to give.

 

 

 

A bit Off Topic, but thank you for this link. Like I said in this thread my de-conversion came from a different source and reason than studying the origins and roots of the Bible, so much of this information comes as a suprise to me. I have always thought the historical existence of Jesus, the apostles and other Bible figures, such as David, Solomon etc. is an established fact, so it's really a big surprise to me it isn't and there's little to no evidence about their existence, (or that if they existed they were who the Bible claims them to be) outside the Bible. It was also surprising to me to hear that there is absolutely NO archeological proof that the First Temple of Jerusalem ever existed. Wow!

 

One would think there would be a lot of evidence and accounts on such a big and successful Empire and such a great and widely admired king as Solomon also outside the Bible. Odd that there is close to nothing. A really interesting read!

[Vixentrox]

Reading the Bible and studying the history of Christianity were the prime reasons for ditching Christardery.

[Galien]

Being treated like shit by christians one time too many......

[Phanta]

I pretty much was a skeptic from birth, with the help of atheist paternal family members, but went to church and youth groups for years for my mother and later for social belonging. I never was interested in their spiritual path, though. My mother was extremely emotionally abusive, and the advice I got from the spiritually minded was to "Honor thy mother" and "Pray", neither of which helped ease my distress.

 

Oh well.

 

Phanta

[Paradox]

 

 

A bit Off Topic, but thank you for this link. Like I said in this thread my de-conversion came from a different source and reason than studying the origins and roots of the Bible, so much of this information comes as a suprise to me. I have always thought the historical existence of Jesus, the apostles and other Bible figures, such as David, Solomon etc. is an established fact, so it's really a big surprise to me it isn't and there's little to no evidence about their existence, (or that if they existed they were who the Bible claims them to be) outside the Bible. It was also surprising to me to hear that there is absolutely NO archeological proof that the First Temple of Jerusalem ever existed. Wow!

 

One would think there would be a lot of evidence and accounts on such a big and successful Empire and such a great and widely admired king as Solomon also outside the Bible. Odd that there is close to nothing. A really interesting read!

 

 

-- And despite intensive efforts to find some, there remains not a scrap of archaeological evidence, not a single shard of pottery, to support the idea that the Twelve Tribes of Israel actually existed. None. Nor that Moses ever existed. And one could go on and on.

[MagickMonkey]

For me the explosion of the Santa myth (which was done rather casually) did it. Santa was a lot easier to believe than God/Jesus; if he was made up, why couldn't they be made up as well? There was the Bible, of course. I asked who wrote it. I was told that men wrote it but they were inspired by God. Well, how do we know they were inpired by God?

 

Yep, someone pulled out the Santa yarn and the whole supernatural sweater unraveled.

 

Some similar process happened with my wife.

[TheUnknown]

When I questioned the eternal hell doctrine, it came out that they preach the gospel because they don't know who God has chosen to save beforehand. I then realized that churches used deception in order to gain converts, by saying God loves all when it was a complete lie and a total sham.

 

Which forced me to investigate Xtianity more closely, and I have since discovered

 

They lied about other religions.

 

They lied about atheists.

 

They lied about gays.

 

They lied about being persecuted.

 

They lied about their true intentions.

 

and most of all, they lied when they said that they yearned for the salvation of all people

 

I've only just scratched the surface, and the evidence thus far points to the whole thing being a complete lie, that's only legacy is heartache and destruction............

[Pandora Moon]

I had 2 deconversions: one from fundamentalism to a more moderate kind of Christianity and then another to atheism. Hearing my Bible professor at the Christian university I attended after fundie high school say that a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account was untenable really shook me to my core and helped to spark my leaving fundamentalism about 3-4 years ago...and then after reading Dawkins' God Delusion this past November I admitted to myself I agreed with him and began calling myself an atheist.

 

I have also had 2 deconversions (Although I've never thought of it like that until reading your post) One from a half-hearted Jehovah's Witness (I consider myself half-hearted because I never really followed all the rules thanks to my family) to going back to what I believed before my JW trip basically not going to any church and still praying to Jehovah.

 

Then my mum mentioned a documentary she had just watched involving Bulgarian Orphans,I think, and that the conditions there were awful! she said that all the children were rocking back and forth and that one girl sucked her thumbs switching from one thumb to the other and that the doctors chopped of her thumbs in order to stop her from doing that.

 

I remember praying to god that night asking what on earth does he think he's doing letting that sort of thing go on. Then sometime after that I remembered all the contradictions in the bible that I noticed but which hadn't registered and I pretty much ended my relitionship with god at that point and I now consider myself an Atheist.

[chosendarkness]

Experiencing first hand how intolerant Christians treat other people. I treated a person terribly because they didn't have the same religious beliefs that I did. That initiated the deconversion, then I talked to lots of Christians and realized they had no capacity to be honest.

 

Then as I started questioning and thinking for myself I slowly realized that it's a bunch of bullshit. Quite a turnaround from the person I used to be who's whole world was Christianity, believing it with everything I had.

[seriously]

When was a wee lad I naturally gobbled up anything my parents told me was true. But I started reading at a very early age (my parents say around the time I was three), and I took a great interest in science.

I never had science books taken away (I have had philosophy books taken away, oddly enough), but I was told to ignore anything disagreeable with their religion (age of the universe/earth, anything about evolution, etc.). At first, I scrupulously omitted any bad science-y stuff, but curiosity got the better of me in the end and I read it anyway.

So, my thoughts grew more heretical as the years went by: But don't scientists prove their hypotheses with evidence and/or experiments? Why should I object to anything that's firmly grounded in methodical research and reasoning? Why would my parents make me question good science? Was it that some science was good, but sometimes scientists were lying through their teeth? Of course, after questioning that line of my parents' rules, I began to set my sights on something that was supposed to be inerrant. Eventually, I applied the textual criticism I learned to the Bible, and, predictably, it didn't hold together under too much scrutiny.

So, by the time I was 13 or 14, I was practically an atheist, but I didn't really how to define myself, as I just assumed that atheists were, once again, people trying to prove something they can't. I called myself an "agnostic" instead. But eventually I came across the correct meaning of the word atheist, so that's how I got to where I am today.