Leaving the Faith

[Hellbound Alleee]

Maybe people become christians because they were once hurt by a Hindu or something.

[SkepticOfBible]

For me it was learning the true history of the church and the about the culture in which Christianity originated; There is no historical evidence for Jesus and when the Bible was written and by whom. One little fact or even a few facts could not have shaken my faith. It was the compilation of many upon many facts that Christianity is simply not true. I had no choice but to no longer believe in it.

I was like a jury making a verdict. I wanted Christianity to be true, but all the evidence gave no reasonable doubt.

 

Taph

Although I never joined the faith, but pretty much these were the reasons that put me off from joining christianity. Although my research into christianity compelled me to divorce from hinduism too. I just couldn't apply double standards for my beliefs.

[Lanakila]

Bible discrepencies, and my inablity to prove Jesus rose from the dead beyond a reasonable doubt was what got the ball rolling quickly. I mean if its true the evidence has to be there somewhere. It can't be all just some magic faith in something, can it? Well it was. I also realized intellectually that I had believed the whole thing based on emotions. That has originally used Christianity as a crutch, and that I not only no longer wanted or needed that crutch, but that if the crutch isn't real, it was me all along anyway.

[Guest Maggie]

I left for many reasons. My main one was because I just didn't believe that any God would send all those people to hell. Then I also didn't believe in the whole original sin garbabe and on and on. Then I got reading church history and discovered how the Bible came into being and that sealed it for me.

[Medjool]

I guess it just made less and less sense to me, so I drifted away. In particular, I just couldn't figure out why the resurrection was so crucial, why it HAD to be true, what relevance it had to anything. I mean, why is Jesus' death, and not his teachings, the central everything to Christianity? I just don't get it.

 

Well, that and also there was this guy at church who was really creepy and was stalking me. But that was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back.

[Lilith]

As I've said many times before : A bible study gone too far.

 

I wanted to know about Messianic *coughChristianitycough* Judaism cuz my MIL and her husband suddenly decided the Catholic Church was evil and so they became Messianics. As I was studying it, I couldn't see much difference between core beliefs there and Christianity. So then I wondered, what is it about Judaism that Christians disagree with and more importantly, vice versa?

 

Once I was able to see why Judaism rejects Christianity, I started looking at the history of how Christianity came about. The "bricks to the brain" moment of realization came when I read comparisons between Christian beliefs and pagan beliefs of various religions. It was pretty much downhill from there.

[thunderbolt]

In short, the fact that 30,000 Christian sects all believe their flavor of Jesus is the only correct one made me wonder who is right. And because I have such an inquiring mind, I had to find out for myself, not anticipating the outcome that they are ALL wrong. And as appellation said, it was pretty much downhill from there …

[thomas]

Other:

 

After being a christian for many years, I had the opportunity to study theology in a distance learning program in my denomination. The program was supposed to prepare me for better service of the good lord, and I was very happy about it. I thought I would get a much better understanding of the bible, get answers to all the nagging questions such as why god had to kill his very own son, why god would send people to hell and what all this end time stuff was all about.

 

In the beginning I found the studies very interesting, although they just raised more questions. A theme in many of there courses was the question "how will you present the gospel to people in your culture?" The idea was, that the way the gospel was presented had to be adjusted to the audience, while the holy truth of course should remain unchanged. This of course lead to the questions "what is the core message of the gospel?" But no one of the teachers could relly define that core.

 

In one of the courses, the teacher suggested, that the idea of having a "core" was based on Greek philosophical categories that was foreign to the gospel. In another course we discussed, if it was okay to go to the far east and preach that "Jesus is the fith Buddah". The teacher thought this would be to go too far, but he couldn't really tell why!

 

The last course I participated in, was about christian doctrine. Here it finally dawned to me, that there is no core in the christian message. The christian messages is constantly adapted to varieous times and places. Christianity is an organization (or should I say a network of organizations), that tries to get followers just for its own sake.

 

Christianity is like the fairytale "The Emperor's new clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen. Here a King is decieved by two tailors to order new quality clothes with a certain feature, that makes it invisible to stupid people. The King cannot see the clothes himself, but won't admit it. Actually nobody can see the fine clothes. But since nobody wants to be counted as stupid, everybody just praises the new clothes. But one day, when the King is out in town to show his new clothes, a little boy says: "Look he is naked". And then another in the crowd says, "he has no cloth on" etc. etc.

 

Concerning the christian church we need more people to say. "Look, it is naked".

[AgnosticBob AtheistPants]

I ultimately lost my faith fighting atheists and agnostics. I was VERY big into Creationism and fought tooth and nail in message boards and chat rooms against the heathen! But once I really started paying attention to the Bible and the evidence in the world around us, it became obvious that Creationism is the modern day equivalent of the ancient belief that the world was flat. From there, I went on to belief in simple “Intelligent Design” with evolution as God’s method of creation. However, this didn’t fly with any Christians. So, after continued study, I began to SEE the discrepancies that so many of the atheists and agnostics had been pointing out. And finally I came to the realization that I could not spend another moment as a “Christian.” I felt foolish for having spent so much of my life as one.

[Ouroboros]

Welcome CJ_A! Good to have you here. Looking forward to your insights.

 

I guess we need to toss TxViper in your general direction, because he's one of the Creationist/ID fundamentalists that keep on getting stuck on our windshield while we're driving here. Considering that you went through the process that he needs to go through too, you might have some good pointers to add, and maybe, just maybe he would listen to you.

 

 

To answer the poll, combination of two-or-more of the reasons.

 

There were different reasons, and actually I'm not quite sure exactly why and how, only that I lost faith one day.

 

I think my problem was that I couldn't reconcile what I believed (from years of indoctrination and teachings) and what I experienced in Real Life. The fantasy world didn't match reality. Certain teachings were stuck in my head from years of exposure of different kinds of Christianity, and in the end the house of cards fell, and I was not able to build it up again. It all became so obviously ludicrous.

[XtianChris]

#1, #9 and # 10 are the reasons for me leaving the faith

 

Ditto. At first it was discovering atrocities in the Bible that made me question God's morality, then it was the errancy of the Bible, and the tipping point was pondering Hell. I finally ended up saying "Fuck God and to Hell with him. If Hell exists, I'd rather go there than be anywhere near such a sadistic tyrant." Then of course I held my breath for a bit waiting for my sentence, which never came. That was enough proof for me to be convinced that it's all bologna.

[Jessica Sideways]

I am going to list these in the order that they happened to me.

 

I was hurt by a Christian or Christians at one time or another - Miranda Littel and Dusten Dixon conspired to hurt me. You see, Miranda lured me into believe that she loved me and when I tried to date her or go out with her, I was constantly burned or put on hold/given some sense of false hope. But later on, I saw more things happen. I saw Dusten and Miranda walk out of a restaurant together after Miranda said she had to go home (I wanted to go on a date with her). Finally, she broke up with me and started some shit with the school.

 

I was hurt by a Christian in a position of authority - Mr. Frasier, the director of Alberta Bible College and a teacher at Alberta Bible College, Mr. Pringle acted very unsavoury and he decided to try to remove me from the school with no basis. I tried to tell him this and point out that his points that he had for removing me from the school were fraudulent. But he would not listen and he forced me to go to a psychiatric evaluation and publicized this fact. After I went to this psychiatric evaluation, the data from the evaluation was disseminated to the other students. Then, they forced me to go to another one and they disseminated untrue data to get me out of the college.

 

I read the bible and noticed discrepancies and no matter how hard I tried, they couldn't be reconciled - After being forced out of the college, I was forced to find some sort of peace and I decided to read the bible from front to back. And it is a VERY evil book. Truly disgusting in every way and I decided that I could no longer be a Christian because of this. I could not support a terrible, bloodthirsty dogma that has the sole intention to harm non-believers. A dogma that allows gossip and other such things from it's members. I could no longer follow the bible and I decided that it would not be a good thing to worship this evil book anymore.

 

I could not worship the evil god of the bible - Because I discovered that the God of the Bible was evil, I could no longer worship that egotistical, maniacal asshole. I mean, even at the end - what is heaven? It is about worshiping this asshole as he slaughters millions that are still left on the earth. I could not support the killing of others just because they weren't of the faith nor for other reasons that the bible declares.

[Guest Saylavie2u2]

My dd was born with cerebral palsy and mental retardation. For the first 12 yrs. of her life I believed with every fiber of my being EVERY scripture that promised healing and that nothing was impossible with god. At the time I was heavily involved with the word of faith movement, so you can just imagine the hellish nightmare that was my life. Every day that passed that dd wasn't healed made me feel like I didn't have enough faith or I was denying some hidden sin in my life. Anyway, I heard WOF minister Jesse Duplantis talk about how he had a passing thought one day of wanting a pen knife to carry and how god was so good that a few days later someone gave him a pen knife. This really got under my skin because I couldn't understand how god could give some rich preacher a pen knife he only thought about in passing, but god wouldn't heal my child even though I'd been confessing and believing for her healing for 12 years. Surely my dd needed healing more than Jesse Duplantis needed a pen knife! This incident got me away from the WOF movement and gradually over the next 4 years I started really questioning what the bible had to say. Naturally my research uncovered the inconsistencies, contradictions, and downright ignorance in the bible. As I've been going through the deconversion process I also see how hypocritical the majority of Xians and most religious people are and even the seemingly nicest Xians ALL have their own agendas and adjust scripture accordingly.

[WCrystal]

Numbers 8, 9, and 10 for me.

 

I just lost it at how I was going to go to hell for eternity.... ALL THE TIME... no matter what they talked about, they always seemed to give me the eye.

[Kurari]

I spent my Christian years in a constant state of perpetual confusion and was spooked because I couldn't figure it out and didn't know if I was pissing off God or pleasing Him. I'd be told one thing and "This is how it's done and what God said and will do if you disobey Him." and then somebody else would come along and say "That's wrong. That's a misinterpretation of scripture. THIS is what it meant....and you won't be saved unless you do it THIS way."

 

I felt like I was constantly running around and around in circles. On top of being sick of being confused and a lot more reading, I finally realized it was all bullshit anyway and became a pagan. The God and Goddess made a hell of a lot more sense.

 

Since then, my faith and perceptions of gods went through many metamorphises until it became very generic and finally last Autumn I just plain stopped believing. Outside of personal emotions, I haven't seen any kind of change in my life or suggestion that being a theist or an athiest makes a hill of difference.

[Jun]

I need an "All of the above" option, too.

[Brother Jeff]

I left the Faith because through much research and thought I became aware of the fact that neither the Bible nor the Christian religion is true.

[Requiem]

I voted "Other."

 

These are my reasons:

 

The multiplicity of religions. What makes mine special and everyone else's wrong? They seem to advocate generally the same thing: ethical behavior, an explanation of suffering, what happens after we die. As I grew up (I was 21 when I deconverted), I met more and more people from other religions who were not the depraved, satanic, deluded "lost souls" that christianity had taught me they were - they turned out to be just fine. Jesus' redemption seemed not to matter a hoot to them, and it made absolutely no difference in their lives. In fact, they appeared happier not being saddled with the fanatical religion that I was burdened with.

 

People use religion more as a tribal identifying marker. I studied history at college and found that religion is a very strong "glue" to hold people to one group, particularly when war came around. Religion made the killing of others EASIER, since they were lost anyways.

 

Specific problems with christianity:

 

The entire lack of agreement within christianity when such agreement MUST happen if the bible is true. The bible claims that god is not the author of confusion. This is simply not the way christianity has ever been. Lots of groups, no agreement. Usually it's a contest of "I'm right and your denomination/sect/whatever is going straight to hell."

 

The schizophrenic nature of the deity of the bible. Lots of talk about love and peace and joy and the fruits of the spirit blah blah blah. But then you have a god that'll order the Jews to annihilate entire cities during the conquest of palestine (see Joshua and Judges), what's all that about? It's not a metaphor. It's genocide. Yuk. Turned me off. And I couldn't just keep on saying, "God's ways are not my ways, he'll help me understand later."

 

Christianity's rejection of homosexuality. I'm gay and god never changed my desires when I asked him to. I found this truly alienating...love was not for me. Only for others. Sorry, but I'm as sexual as any red blooded man and this rejection of me at a most basic level was intolerable. I tired of the "it's your fault you're a homo" line, that I had done something intrinsically wrong as a child to make me that way. I hadn't. And when I tried to escape, do all the right things, pray, devotions, mission trips, scripture memorization, nothing changed. (See my rather angry thread "Pray for me and cure me of my homoness" for the full frontal rant in the Lions Den.)

 

The teaching on eternal damnation. Sort of ties in with other points made. This all knowing, all loving god created billions of souls just to torture. When I actually considered this, I again stopped the "God's ways are not my ways" rationalization and bagged it. This was the last straw for me, but it was all of these elements that made me to simply lose faith.

 

Hope this helps someone out there in godland trying to make sense of it. And to all you gay guys and lesbians out in bibleland who are going crazy with what christianity is doing to you, don't give up! There is a way out, and it's better on the other side. I survived - you will too.

 

These are my experiences too. Right now I'm a dutch guy aged 26 y. Especially the first point that you wrote rang my bell.I lived in a not so very religious small city near the Dutch Coast. But my parents and a few friends were religious. (Although especially my dad always took the bible not as Gods literal word, for which I am thankful.). I started studying and living in Amsterdam (even as I speak ). Over there I am doing a college education in Business Economics. I found out that there were a lot of muslims, hindus, atheists, agnostics, and almost all of those people were nice to work with and good people in general. Then it dawned on me: If you are born in Iran, you're probably a muslim. Born in the US: probably a christian. Etcetera. You have no control over where you are born. So that so called loving god sends people to hell for being born in the wrong place and wrong time. That was what made me start thinking, and later on all those other reasons Curtdude names came into play too.

 

First I started asking questions on a popular dutch christian forum because someone in the church recommended it to me. I got IP banned twice (first they banned my original IP, then my proxy, and the reason they gave me, was that my questions weren't constructive, but destructive for the faith!

Then I started Lurking ex-c.net. Via EX-C I came across a great website which gave me also a lot of verbal ammo: www.whywontgodhealamputees.com I told my parents and my few christian aquaintances that I could not lie to myself anymore so I left the baptist church we went to. After a good long chat (6 hours lol) about the bad sides of christianity with my parents decided to stop going as well. Quite a number of people in the church I knew were the most racist people I ever met. God loves you, except when people are black, indian, maroccan, turkisch, or different in general.

 

It wasn't a big problem for us, because we always liked to hang out more with non christians secular people than the very religious ones. All my really good friends are secular people. I also date a secular beautiful girl for 3 years now who I met at college named Patricia, and is an Indonesian girl. I don't mind about that at all that she is foreign and all.

 

She Pawns all those christian fundie bitches between age 18 and 30 that go to church every sunday with their hats on (for the angels!!) and their fking creepy 20's design dresses!

 

I consider myself a lucky bastard, rid of the fear and the guilt traps Christianity plays on people.

[Rhia]

I thought god left me, so I spent a year in a constant state of depression and questioning. In the end I figured out that god never actually left, because he was never actually there, and wouldn't ever be. So yeah, I guess that works as "other".

[smellincoffee]

I realized that the character of God was an asshole and walked away from religion. Later I joined a forum for Ex-Pentecostals, discovered freethought, and de-brainwashed myself. It took a few months to go from "completely discouraged Christian" to "happy humanist", and most of that was spent growing numb to the threat of Hell. Once I realized I really had nothing to lose by asking questions, I did.

[Luke Wolf]

God pissed me off. The most simple way I can put it.

[Kalidasa]

It never made sense to me. I'm very logical by nature, and I could never reconcile anything said in the Babble with pure logic. It pretty much confused the hell out of me. Plus I never really felt like I belonged, anyway.

[Guest BFD_Zayl]

#2 #3 and #9 are my choices, when i left, i felt free.

[CelloChick]

I went through a lot of questioning why God never answered prayers for healing, too. So, I did what any good Christian would do when life is hard. I read the Bible. But, not the sanitized Bible chunks in pamphlet Bible studies. I read the Bible cover to cover. I’d probably still be a Christian if I hadn’t read the Bible.

 

Look, a talking snake! Wait a second. I’m an adult. Do I believe in talking snakes? No. Look a huge boat with two American Bison from North Dakota, two 17 year periodical cicadas from Illinois, two kangaroos from... Do I believe there ever was an ark? No. Talking bushes? No. Talking donkeys? No. Fish swallowing human beings? No.

 

Then I got to things that bothered me morally. Lot offering his own daughters to be gang raped by a mob is NOT a sin? WHAT? Detailed instructions on how to sell your daughter into unending sexual slavery. Wait, selling your daughter? That's NOT a sin, either? WHAT? It's a horrible thing to offer a child to Baal. Anyone who does this is evil. However, it's NOT evil for an army to come into a city and kill hundreds of children, toddlers and infants in the name of Jehovah. WHAT? The more I read the Bible, the more disgusting it became.

 

I went through a period of really struggling to reconcile what I was reading in the Bible with what I was hearing in church. God loves you. God is love. Abortion is a sin. The flood is real. Wait, if the flood happened, God drowned millions of pregnant women. Wouldn't that make God the greatest abortion provider in history?????

 

The Bible is 100% free of error. But, I found errors. Bats are a kind of bird. No, they're not. Hares chew the cud. No, they don't. The earth has pillars. No, it doesn't. The mustard seed is the smallest of seeds. On which planet? Not earth!

 

Understand, I read the Bible WANTING to believe it was true. I started reading the Bible as a Christian, believing it was true and longing for truth. By the time I was done reading it, I was an agnostic. Church became surreal. All these people ordering their lives around a book I couldn't believe in anymore... I quit going to church in January 2001. At the time, I still thought I was a Christian.

 

But, the kicker was a commercial for "The Passion of the Christ." I didn't even see the movie. I was quietly watching TV and then there was this blood covered man being beaten on the screen. Instead of feeling, "WOW! I'm a sinner! Look at all Jesus had to go through to save me. I love you Lord!" I thought, "What have I personally done that was so terrible, the only way for God to love me is for this innocent man to be murdered in my place?"

 

I just sat there dumbfounded, watching this commercial, feeling more and more disgusted by the doctrine. I've done NOTHING so horrible that I deserve the death penalty and eternal damnation in hell. Nothing. I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket! Instead of feeling the weight of my sin, I felt the weight of dogma. It was like a light went on in my mind. A clearing of a deep, dreamy fog. In that instant, my Christian nightmare was over.

 

No more struggling to figure out why God didn’t answer prayers for healing. Even if I fasted, cried, begged. No more worry about sin. No more reading the Bible and trying to ignore the parts that bugged me. I was just… free at last.

 

Cello Chick

[Brother Jeff]

My dd was born with cerebral palsy and mental retardation. For the first 12 yrs. of her life I believed with every fiber of my being EVERY scripture that promised healing and that nothing was impossible with god. At the time I was heavily involved with the word of faith movement, so you can just imagine the hellish nightmare that was my life. Every day that passed that dd wasn't healed made me feel like I didn't have enough faith or I was denying some hidden sin in my life. Anyway, I heard WOF minister Jesse Duplantis talk about how he had a passing thought one day of wanting a pen knife to carry and how god was so good that a few days later someone gave him a pen knife. This really got under my skin because I couldn't understand how god could give some rich preacher a pen knife he only thought about in passing, but god wouldn't heal my child even though I'd been confessing and believing for her healing for 12 years. Surely my dd needed healing more than Jesse Duplantis needed a pen knife! This incident got me away from the WOF movement and gradually over the next 4 years I started really questioning what the bible had to say. Naturally my research uncovered the inconsistencies, contradictions, and downright ignorance in the bible. As I've been going through the deconversion process I also see how hypocritical the majority of Xians and most religious people are and even the seemingly nicest Xians ALL have their own agendas and adjust scripture accordingly.

 

I've heard the "pen knife" story. I think I heard it for the first time when I heard Brother Jesse preach at a church in Texas back in the late 1980's. I'm quite sure that it's "feel-good" bullshit of the sort that preachers love to come up with, just as his alleged trip to heaven obviously is. He did his "trip to heaven" story when it was popular for well-known preachers to have such an experience. Back then, I had been a Jesse Duplantis fan for a good while, and my level of respect for him went down considerably when I heard about his obviously bullshit "trip to heaven" story. I just couldn't believe that Brother Jesse would do something like that just to make a quick buck like those other terrible televangelists! Of course, now I know that although he is funny and he has a powerful stage presence, he is no better than your average televangelist. Jesse makes a fortune pedaling his religion to gullible people who are soon separated from their money. They're all just in it for the power and the fame and the money, but mostly just for the money.

 

Many more doctrinally and biblically informed Christians view the WOF movement as a pseudo-Christian cult, and a dangerous one at that. I couldn't possibly agree with them more! Their brand of "Christianity" is dangerous, false, and harmful, and it should be avoided at all costs!