The Straws That Broke The Camel's Back...

[BendyLine]

Hey everyone. Another ex-Christian here. I stopped calling myself a Christian about 5 years ago, although for the life of me I can't remember the day I decided. It was a very gradual process, and as I'm sure most of you know, pretty painful too. I feel like I'm just now starting to be okay with it. I'm probably somewhere between an agnostic and a theist right now... while I'm of the opinion that there is some sort of deity/force/origin/whatever out there, I don't think we're ever going to know his/her/its nature, and I doubt he/she/it cares much what goes on in our day to day lives, if he/she/it exists in the first place and is an intelligent being. But unlike my youth spent in Christianity, I'm open to exploring new ideas. The intellectual freedom I'm starting to experience has almost made the years of struggle worth it.

 

I can't really point to one thing that killed my faith. There are a couple of major factors, and a bunch of minor ones, but I feel like my faith might have survived the major issues if there weren't so many little things.

 

I grew up in church, and I've been to several denominations. As a child, my parents went to a Baptist church. I was "saved" at four years old; some of my earliest memories are of my parents reading an illustrated Bible story book to me. So basically, I'd been a Christian as long as I can remember. When I was about 14, we started going to a charismatic AoG church that was heavily influenced by the Word of Faith movement. They were into the whole tongues, dancing around in church, etc stuff, although I'd say the most disgusting thing about that church is the way they shamelessly solicited money from people, and basically promised miracles to the people who gave to the church. There were several pastors, most of which were related to the senior pastor, and they all lived in large houses in the nicest suburb in the area and drove nice cars. Every Sunday they would spend a good hour before they passed the offering bucket around talking about how if you gave to the church, God would bless you. Someone out of the congregation of about 500 or so who happened to get a raise or get a good doctor's report would come up and share how God blessed them because they gave to the church. Then they would pass around a badly written statement of faith that the entire congregation would read together that ended with "Money Cometh". It was beyond retarded, but I guess I was too young and too busy with teenage stuff to put much thought into it.

 

Anyway, it was at this church that the first blow to my faith came. You see, I've had glaucoma since I was eleven years old. When I was about 13, I went blind in my right eye, and while I didn't realize it at the time, my vision in my left was slowly going too. Around this time, I'd also had three corneal transplants in my right eye that failed. I believed that God could heal me, and of course at our church, they preached every week that God could--and would--heal anyone who asked him who truly believed. And I truly believed. I remember once or twice going up for prayer and expecting to open my eyes with my vision fully restored. Of course, I was disappointed when it didn't happen, but that wasn't really the blow to my faith. The blow came when my parents told me that one of the pastors approached my father and told him that I did not get healed because of his (my father's) lack of faith. My parents didn't tell me until about a year later. Needless to say, I was pretty hurt, although I'm sure my dad felt much worse than I did.

 

Around the time this happened, I was taking a freshman level literature class. The professor asked everyone to raise their hand who believed that all people were evil to raise their hands. I knew that according to my Christian beliefs everyone was a sinner, but something held me back from raising my hand. My professor said, "Well, looks like we don't have one Christian in the whole class." I felt ashamed for years afterwards.

 

When I was about 17 or 18 years old, I went to a new doctor who informed me that I'd lost enough vision in my left eye to be considered legally blind. It was mostly peripheral vision, and it had come on very gradually. We started going to another AoG church in the small East Texas town my family had moved to. I was depressed and lonely. The town we lived in was small, I could drive because of my vision, so basically my social life was work and church. But I couldn't make friends at church. Some of it was probably my fault, but the people in my town weren't exactly easy to make friends with. I was lonelier than I'd ever been, and spend most of my spare time secluded in my room playing video games.

 

So I prayed that God would send me friends, and tried to go to all the college and career meetings I could. Nothing happened; I always ended up sitting on the back row alone, and while I did talk to a few people there, they were never interested in doing more than preaching at me. Eventually, I stopped going, and I haven't been to church regularly since. The few times I did go, I usually ended up in tears in the back row. Deep inside, I felt that God had failed me when I needed him most. But I suppressed those feelings and continued calling myself a Christian. Looking back, that was the crack that eventually killed my faith, although I have a feeling that if it weren't for the things I experienced over the next few years I would have eventually gone back.

 

It's been a long, hard road since then. And there aren't many people who I can share my experiences with. Virtually all of my family are Christians (my sister had a similar experience when we were teens, but she converted to Catholicism instead), and I don't feel comfortable telling them. I don't really fear their judgment, but I don't want to hurt them by telling them that according to their beliefs I'm going to hell. I know some wonderful people who are Christians, but they either don't understand or don't want to face the issues I went through. And as I found the loss of my faith to be a harrowing experience, I'd rather not be the one who pokes holes in the faith of people I care about, as I'm of the opinion that it's something that would be easier to face on their own. After I dumped Christianity, I tended to avoid atheist/agnostic resources, because many of the atheists/agnostics I'd had experiences were pretty harsh towards Christianity, and the pain was still too fresh for me to listen to people rail off against it.

 

Anyway, I found this website about a week ago and started reading the testimonies. It was the first time in a long time I felt like there were people out there who could relate to my experiences with Christianity.

 

As for my story, there's a lot more to it, but I'm going to post in more detail later. Looking forward to getting to know you all!

[mcdaddy]

Welcome!!! What you'll find, and what I've found, is that there's so many more ex-C's out there than we ever knew. The thing is, many of us are more or less forced by circumstances and society to keep it a secret, so it's almost impossible to know who's out of the club, so to speak. Coming to terms with the fact that the worldview you were raised in is a complete mythical fairy tale is extremely hard. The more deeply you believed, the harder it is to come to grips with reality. For some it's instantly liberating, for others it's enough to want to die over. All depends on your experience and make-up.

 

I'm sorry for your vision problems, that's a shitty hand you've been dealt there. Maybe one day science will be able to fix it for good, I hope it does. All the best with that.

 

Again, welcome to the site! We're glad you're here! Post anything at all on your mind. It's cathartic and will help you understand things from many points of view. We're all in the same boat - just trying to deal with the cards life dealt us as the only beings that are sentient enough to fully recognize our own eventual demise- a blessing and a curse! This place makes dealing a little bit easier though. And that's a really good thing!

[BendyLine]

Thanks for the welcome!

 

I'm sorry for your vision problems, that's a shitty hand you've been dealt there. Maybe one day science will be able to fix it for good, I hope it does. All the best with that.

 

You know, one of my major problems with Christianity (the charismatic brand in particular) is the tendency to beg and plead God to solve their problems instead of learning to cope with them. I've still got a lot of usable vision, and I've accomplished quite a bit despite my disability. But many Christians look down on people like me, because they seem to think that the fact that I have a disability stems from some sort of "spiritual" issue, like not having enough faith.

 

There is always hope that there will be a cure for glaucoma damage in the future. If there isn't a cure, I'll be okay, because I know I can cope with it. But when I was a Christian, I was always riddled with guilt, wondering what I'd done wrong to deserve my problems. Luckily, that sort of thinking was one of the first things to go when I was losing my faith. I don't think I could have survived otherwise.

[Guest ThereIsNoGod]

Hello. Nice to meet you. Despite my name, I don't call myself an atheist. I just think "God" is a bit of an overused concept.

[mcdaddy]

The problem ALWAYS lies with you.....it's NEVER god/the religion at fault. God or the church have license to be as dick-ish as they want, we should just accept that's the way it is, no ??s asked.

 

Screw that. Everyone is a accountable, even "god". What kind of moral being gives laws and doesn't even stick to them himself?

 

The laws he gave are mostly bullshit anyways. Well we all know they aren't divine anyways, just ideas plagiarized from other mesopotamian cults at the time. It's all a fraud.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

Welcome!

 

I have an interesting idea about deism, why people end up believing in that force/god after they deconvert. I was one once. I think it has to do with going from having a supreme being (God) at the center of your worldview, and everything in that worldview. Then, you just have to come to terms with the fact that you're missing a center to everything in your worldview, on top of the center of your worldview. The brain hates change, and honestly can't handle it so well, so it avoids it no matter what, hence becoming deist for your brain to compensate by keeping that God/force there. I could be wrong. Just a hypothesis.

 

Deconversion is a very long and difficult process. The more fundamentalist you are, the worse it gets. As its all the more stuff in your worldview you have to throw away. While the religious and most of the "moral" ideas are gone for me, I still have remnants that come into mind from time to time. I know that there is nothing wrong with being prideful, but I still feel that awkward feeling as if I'm doing something wrong if I'm not humble.

[GardenerGal]

welcome!

[Guest wester]

It really is a shame about the pastor trying to stick the blame on your dad and your prof pretending to know who or what a good Christian is...

 

Channeling and mind reading "the almighty" - (ya whotever mon) - anthropomorphizing the deity - (yep sure) - acting as gatekeeper (don't we have enough prison guards in America?) These are usually unconscious tactics used by people who have low self-esteem - trying to put their internal interpretations out into the world as facts, givens and absolutes. Claiming that they have all the answers or "know" (fer dang sure) exactly what Jesus had for breakfast last Tuesday. It's complete balderdash, hog wash and a pathetic attempt to justify what amounts to illegitimate authority.

 

Good for you for seeing through it. You have every right to feel the way you do.

Stay strong and keep up the good work.

[2Honest]

Welcome, BL. Another fellow Texan!

 

I'm so glad you found the forum. I could relate to much of your story. I was part of a charismatic church that believed in healing and miracles, too. They had left the AoG and WoF movements, but that was still a big part of the make-up of the church. I fully believed god would heal me. But I had to finally face the reality that it wasn't going to happen. I first had to get past the feelings of guilt (that it was somehow my fault I wasn't being healed). Once I got over that, I had to face the reality that god wasn't who I thought he was. The next step was realizing he was never there at all. That's when my real life began. (I have some posts and blogs about my deconversion process. You can find them by going to my profile.)

 

It's can be a hard road, but sounds like you're over the worst of it now. I'm glad you've made peace with things and wish you all the best with your health. I agree with what you said about your own ability to cope and manage illness. That's what I have discovered, too. I'm much more capable than I thought I was. And my health is improving now that I'm making better decisions and being more proactive (instead of waiting on gawd to heal me).

 

Btw, there are some good meetups in Texas for atheists/freethinkers. If you're interested you can go to meetup.com and do a search for the city you live in to see if there are any close to you.

 

The people here are very supportive, so just let us know if we can help you on your journey.

 

2H

[buffettphan]

Welcome to Ex-C! As a long time ex-christian, I find that with each new member here, I'm a little more optimistic that the last days of christinsanity are right around the corner. Thanks for posting!

[jblueep]

Welcome from another Texan stick around and make some friends. You are in good company here!

[Positivist]

Welcome, Bendy!

 

Sorry to hear about your glaucoma. It sucks to have a genetic predisposition to stuff like this. I have a migraine disorder, a genetic gift from my mother. (All hail GlaxoSmithKline for giving me my life back .)

 

It sucks even more when you are a Christian waiting on a miracle.... I've been there, too. Gawd, it hurts to think that God is putting the screws to you because "he's trying to teach you something" or because "you've sinned". We punish ourselves when God doesn't come through! It sucks to be us, the ones who actually believed this pile of crap called WoF. It almost made me insane.

 

Great to have you on board, Bendy! Ex-C is a great place to recover from the crazy-making of Christianity!

 

Peace.

[Spectrox]

Welcome BendyLine. I especially liked this bit.

 

Around the time this happened, I was taking a freshman level literature class. The professor asked everyone to raise their hand who believed that all people were evil to raise their hands. I knew that according to my Christian beliefs everyone was a sinner, but something held me back from raising my hand. My professor said, "Well, looks like we don't have one Christian in the whole class." I felt ashamed for years afterwards.

 

 

That was you suffering from a sudden attack of humanity!

[BendyLine]

Thanks again for the welcome! The incident with the prof was one of the first times I actually stopped and thought about what I believed. Was the average person really evil--so evil that he or she deserved an eternity of torture after death if he or she didn't jump through the Sinner's Prayer hoop? I hope I didn't give the wrong idea about the prof; he wasn't a Christian, and it was my Christian background that heaped on the guilt.. you know how churches encourage people to take every single opportunity to stand up for their faith? I felt like I'd failed God for not raising my hand. There were lots of other similar turning points throughout the next few years. For example:

 

Reading the Harry Potter Series

 

When I was in my early 20's, I worked retail, and Harry Potter had just been reaching the height of his popularity. I never really had much of a desire to read the books, but of course living in East Texas at the time, I constantly heard stories about how it was full of evil witchcraft, and dangerous, and... well, I'm sure you all have heard it before. Now, after hearing again and again how bad the books were, my curiosity was piqued. I'd met a few Christians who had actually read the books (imagine that!) before passing judgment on them, and they said they were harmless. So I decided to check it out for myself. I read a few Christian articles on why Harry Potter was dangerous, then I picked up the first couple of books in the series and read them myself.

 

And you know what I found? The Christian articles were complete and utter bullshit. It was obvious that most of the people spouting off against Harry Potter hadn't even read the books at all; at best, some had probably skimmed the books looking for things to take out of context and blow way out of proportion. And if that wasn't bad enough, some of the things the articles said were absolutely untrue. One guy used a quote from Voldemort as an example the kind of morality that Rowling was trying to push on children.

 

Of course, the funniest ones were from people who claimed to be former Satanists. They would take something completely innocuous and claim it was some kind of Satanic symbol. I shit you not--one guy claimed that Rowling's use of the color green in one chapter was a reference to Satanism, because green was Satan's color.

 

And these weren't nutty fringe ministries that were buying into this shit, it was major Christian organizations like Focus on the Family linking to these articles. Not all Christians bought that Harry Potter was bad, but the ones that did ate this shit up without bothering to question the source.

 

So that's what ruined my faith in popular Christian media. From then on, I started looking at things written from a Christian perspective with a much more critical eye. I also got a taste for reading ridiculous websites from the fringes of Christianity for entertainment. Now, my faith was still pretty intact at this point, though I was bitter and disenfranchised with the church. I just figured it was time for Christianity to take out the trash, so to speak. But it was a pretty big turning point for me.

[2Honest]

Ah, yes. The dangerous Harry Potter! Every time a new one came out we had people around here actually picketing outside of movie theaters. Idiots.

 

I was kind of worried about the movies at first (we were still believers). But our kids really wanted to see them so we decided to rent the first one and watch it with them. They were like 8 and 10 at the time. Half-way into it I was totally engrossed in the movie and we were all enjoying it. I couldn't believe the big deal everyone had made about it. We proceeded to rent the next 2 and watched them back to back. Shockingly none of us became witches or warlocks afterwards!

 

But then, we are a family of atheists now...so maybe those demons that came into our house with the movie have taken over our bodies!

[TrueFreedom]

Welcome to Ex-C, BendyLine! Thanks for sharing your story.

[FeelHappy]

Howdy and welcome, another Texan former WoF member here. I used to hate the money for miracles crap, we'd read something too every time we gave offerings, it went something like:

 

As we give this day's offering we're believing god for:

New jobs and better Jobs,

Raises and Bonuses,

Gifts and surprises,

....blah blah blah...

Its offering time, Hallelujah!

 

I'd cringe every time I'd hear it. I really hate the WoF stuff, they prey on the poor and focus on materialism, when god didn't heal it was because of someone's lack of faith, completely worthless belief system.

 

 

When I left the faith I was a deist for a while, but then one day I realized who cares if the deist god exists? He sure doesn't care of I worship him so why bother, therefore a deist god is no god. As for the interventionist god, I'm fairly certain he doesn't exist.

[AnnaNymity]

Bendy,

 

Welcome, from another newbie at ExC! Your posting touched me in many ways.

 

For one thing, I know what it's like to have to deal with health problems, and have people judge you harshly because you somehow haven't "managed" to be healed. I've got some people in my life right now that are really mad at me because I "refuse to be healed," and strangely enough,some of these people are christians, but others are new agers.

 

Personally, I started out as a Buddhist on my own at six, then ended up joining Calvary Chapel when I was fourteen. After that, I went through almost all of the different denominations of protestantism in an effort to find logic (ha, yeah, right). I then finally ended up as a (now-failed) Catholic that came very close to "marrying god." Then, I simply went back to being a Buddhist.

 

The only reason that I bring up this last, is in an attempt to help you to feel better. Meaning that, whatever you've done that makes you feel silly for having believed it, I think that I outdid you on the "Oh wow, do I ever feel stupid because I believed THAT--what the HELL was I thinkin'?" meter.

 

No kidding: I should have just had "cognitive dissonance" tattooed on my forehead--in neon green--and been done with it.

 

Hang in there. Things will get better. There are some really decent people here, and as you've already noticed, they're very welcoming.

 

However, unlike your former church members, they actually mean what they're saying here.

 

Oh, by the way, as someone who also has glaucoma (among other things): I love your ID!

 

 

Anna

[BendyLine]

Thanks again everyone for the warm welcomes.

 

Howdy and welcome, another Texan former WoF member here. I used to hate the money for miracles crap, we'd read something too every time we gave offerings, it went something like:

 

As we give this day's offering we're believing god for:

New jobs and better Jobs,

Raises and Bonuses,

Gifts and surprises,

....blah blah blah...

Its offering time, Hallelujah!

 

I'd cringe every time I'd hear it. I really hate the WoF stuff, they prey on the poor and focus on materialism, when god didn't heal it was because of someone's lack of faith, completely worthless belief system.

That sounds very familiar. Maybe we went to the same church. I just remember ours ended in "MONEY COMETH!" I guess they thought "Money Comes" sounded like the name of a porno actor.

However, unlike your former church members, they actually mean what they're saying here.

Hi Anna, thanks for the welcome

 

Yeah, one of the first things I noticed when I stopped going to church all the time were that all the non-Christians I met tended to be a lot truer friends than a lot of the Christian "friends" I grew up with. That's not to say that I've never had good Christian friends. It's just that in church, half the time you get the feeling they're only being nice because they're "supposed to," and they usually only tend to do the bare minimum for you anyway.

[Akheia]

Welcome, BL! My heart went out to you for suffering like that all the time you did. It's gruesome and evil that the Church actually told your dad that he'd stopped you from getting your miracle--God doesn't punish sons for the sins of their fathers, except when he does, right? I'm glad you found your way here and that you're doing so much better--no thanks to that cruel, barbaric myth.

[inorbit]

 

Yeah, one of the first things I noticed when I stopped going to church all the time were that all the non-Christians I met tended to be a lot truer friends than a lot of the Christian "friends" I grew up with. That's not to say that I've never had good Christian friends. It's just that in church, half the time you get the feeling they're only being nice because they're "supposed to," and they usually only tend to do the bare minimum for you anyway.

 

Yes, yes, yes! I'm a recent de-convert myself and this is one of the best revelations I've had. At those times when I truly need a friend, it's my "heathen, Satan-texting, puppy-kicking" friends who are there for me, above and beyond. My Christian friends are most often too busy doing spiritual things, or who make some lame excuse. Or, even worse, agree to help with a project, only to look miserable and guilty during the whole process.

 

And, welcome! Your story really struck home.