How Long Did It Take You To De-Convert? *poll Added*

[dichotomy]

A couple of people's stories shared on here recently have made me think over my deconversion process and just how long it took.

 

From complete beginning to end I think it took me around three years to properly move from a place of faith to a place of atheism, or the point where I finally admitted to myself I had indeed lost my faith and was okay with that. The last year of that was when I joined here as I was struggling so much, it was gritty torturous emotional turmoil where I moved beyond the doubting phase and basically went through the stages of grief; denial, anger, despair (repeat numerous times) and then finally acceptance. 

 

That means that I've been an atheist for around six years now, although it took another year to feel comfortable telling people I was no longer a Christian. Even so, that means I've been an atheist for pretty much half my adult life, my children have no real concept of faith and church is something the grandparents and cousin's do.

 

I still struggle with the Christian legacy of damage a fair amount, but on the whole those three gruelling years were damn worth it!

 

How about you?

 

ETA: It was this week 9 years ago when my journey to atheism began. Triggered by a conversation with my brother in law. Really should thank him some day.

 

Added a poll just for interest.

[Chikirin]

I'd been Christian since I was a kid, but then I began a slow process starting at age 24 and not completed till age 38. But I would say the bulk of it took place between age 32 and 38.

[Geezer]

The process began in the late 90's for me, and progressed slowly until somewhere around 2005. Things happened around that time that accelerated my doubts & my doubts encouraged me to seek answers. It was then that l began to study & research religious history. That process continued until somewhere around 2012. It was at that point that I actually decided to walk away from religion & openly acknowledge that l was no longer a believer. I had stopped believing the Bible was true several years before I took any action to actually leave the church, because I thought I could still be a Christian without believing the Bible is true; but I eventually realized I couldn't do that.

[Mythra]

I'd say two years for me.  Between 2004 and 2006.

 

I'll have to thank my former pastor.  Three straight weeks of sermons telling the congregation that none of us were safe from the fires of hell, and that we were robbing God by not putting enough in the offering plate.

I sat there in the pew and had a mental crash. Walked out of the church and never returned.   

 

So, thanks, Pastor.  I appreciate what you did for me.

[BlindersRemoved]

There was a two year period where I gradually became less and less religious. Then it got to the point where I began questioning if God really existed. Nine months later, I set foot in church for the last time. That was Easter Sunday, 2010.

[★ Citsonga ★]

From the time I started questioning until I was convinced it was a sham was probably less than a year, but it took a few more years to be comfortable with disbelief.

[DivineBlasphemer]

It probably took me 3 years. It subtly worked away at me, it wasnt sudden. Over the 3 years, i saw more and more flaw in the divine god i was trying to kiss up to. My prayers seemed more like i was thinking, not praying. Different chapters all over the Bible give the same story but with different details, derailing the entire story. The hate for homosexuality. The flimsiness of everyone elses belief once questioned. The mere existence of dinosaurs, lol. The fossil record. The absence of God. Ect.

 

Once i found The Amazing Athiest and i started to watch his videos, his influence changed my belief entirely. I started to see how most Christians have no idea about the religion they follow, and how little they know about the alternative.

 

Once i had seen these things, along with the evidence of evolution and the lack of evidence for god, i said FUCK IT

[dichotomy]

Interesting to see that it took only a couple of years for some but that others were over a ten year period. I find it hard to imagine what it must've been like for faith to just slowly disappear like that over such a long period of time.

[qadeshet]

From beginning doubts to complete de-conversion took about 4 years.

[violetbutterfly]

It was a little less than a year for me.

 

However, my faith was subconsciously being chipped away for a while. Right before I deconverted, I went through a pretty traumatic time and was hardcore searching for comfort in Christianity. I found the opposite. My initial thoughts of "this is bullshit" turned into "maybe this really is bullshit." One night I allowed myself to think "maybe it's really NOT true"...And for the first time ever I didn't backpedal. I didn't freak out that I was opening myself up to Satan, I didn't start begging God for forgiveness...I just went to bed. The next day I woke up alive, well and happy. After that it was just a matter of reading up on some facts to shake off the indoctrination that had kept me scared all those years. It didn't take very long. I'd say I was fully recovered in 6-9 months.

 

Looking back though, it was much like my divorce. I went about my daily life for years knowing it felt wrong. One day I was just DONE and there was no going back. Once I let go I realized that it had been coming undone all along. What had been wrong was now corrected.

[traveller2]

Spent nigh on a full year of neither praying or reading bible then the next yr was too busy with deteriorating marraige and other matters although these all impacted how I felt.by the 3rd yr I was really deconvert ing faster and by the end of it was verbilising that I had left it.after those 3 yrs it was just about exploring life as a non christian.

[Orbit]

6 months to get through the basics and another 6 to truly make peace with it.

[flockoff]

It's interesting for me to think that I was actually deconverting the whole time. Little by little as I grew up I started going through changes and experiences that may have had to happen leading up to it.

 

But basically it happened when I was 25. A friend had converted to Calvinism and I was really put off by how quickly he accepted the concept that god just "chose" certain people and left the rest of us with no hope, or that Jesus didn't die for everyone, just him and a small number of people lucky enough to be part of the club and agree with him on enough things. I was pretty disgusted that anyone could believe that. But when I really thought about it, what I believed in wasn't much better. The whole thing made me really question god's character and I came to the conclusion that he wasn't worth my respect. In June of 2007 I decided I was done with Christianity and that whether god was real or not he could go fuck himself. I was "agnostic"/didn't care for a while and then that December I read the God Delusion. It gave me a clearer explanation of what atheism was and introduced basic concepts on how a godless universe was possible. It didn't so much make me an atheist as help me understand that I already was one, now that I didn't have a vested interest in faith.

 

So about six months.

[florduh]

It's hard to pin down. I guess for about a year I ignored most of the nagging doubts. The final blow to my religious beliefs happened, ironically enough, over the last few weeks of my Moody studies. We were examining Revelation at the time. As if the last puzzle piece was laid in, I suddenly saw it was all fantasy. I realized I had made a mistake, turned away without regret, and gave no more thought to Christianity. I was none the worse for the experience, though Christian relatives and some old church friends weren't too happy about it. I had an easy exit from the madness.

 

As the religious right rose up in political power and began their relentless encroachment on secular life and law, I became anti-theist and now take any opportunity to promote separation of the religious and secular and I am eager to help others find their way out of the cult and magical thinking. The church could have just stayed out of politics and the secular social scene and I would have continued to never give them a thought, but they've made me their enemy.

[directionless]

"I don't actually know" was my vote.

 

I began considering myself an atheist around 1991 when I graduated from college, but my atheist view came from having no good evidence for God as opposed to having good evidence against God. So I would occasionally attend church a few times or read my Bible for the next 15 or 20 years in hopes of some sort of spiritual confirmation. I probably attended only a dozen church services during that time, so it wasn't often, but God was a nagging issue for me. I also had a few seemingly paranormal experiences like synchronicities and other weird things that kept me wondering about God.

 

Then in 2009 I had a mental breakdown I guess. It seemed that I finally had good evidence for Christianity, so I joined an Orthodox church for 2 years, but doubts and questions crept in until I finally couldn't stand it and quit abruptly. Then I spent a year reading every UFO book I could find in hopes of finding answers. Finally I learned about psychosis, but I struggled for a couple of years to accept that answer. Certain things trigger delusional paranoia, but that is mostly gone for the past year.

 

I learned a lot about reasons to disbelieve in Christianity and God on this website, so I am more atheist than I have ever been before. However, to be honest, I have been aware that I still believe at some level, and I don't know what to think about that fact.

[Mythra]

So, about 2 years from knowgod to nogod.

 

What got me over the hump?  In this order:

 

1.  Ex-Christian.net

2.  Robert M Price (author)  (The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man) (The Reason Drive Life)

3.  Earl Doherty  (The Jesus Puzzle)

4.  Carl Sagan (The Demon Haunted World) 

[Tsathoggua]

I had my doubts since I was just a child in the 1960s, never took it so seriously intellectually even though I attended services.  I stopped attending / pretending completely in 2013. So, in some sense, it was a long process. No real drama there, though...

[Margee]

I checked off  'more than a decade' because that's when I really, really started to put  the hard questions to the pastors. Deep, deep down, as much as I pushed all my doubts away, I was very leery from the beginning about the book of Genesis. I remember when I was 20 asking the pastor, ''who wrote that book'' because if it was just Adam and Eve and the talking serpent in the garden...then who stood outside the garden walls and wrote the whole account down?? He just go me I had to go on faith because it was god's word. And that's the book that finally help me to deconvert completely..... Along with EX-c answering my other million questions!!

 

Love you guys!

(hug)

[Lilith666]

If I recall correctly, I started having doubts when I was 12; I would push them down and they would pop back up again. I had a "mental crash" like Mythra described when I was 14: I was reading a Christian book that said Jesus died for our sins primarily to glorify himself, and all this time I had thought it was his big love-sacrifice. The book's claim made sense, based on how much time biblegod spends talking about how he is the lord and created everything. So that revelation made everything else immediately unravel, and boom! that was that. Spent the next few weeks to months high as a kite on all the cool stuff I could do now and all the stuff I didn't have to do anymore. Going from Christian to not-Christian in about one second was really such a weird feeling.

 

Mythra: Isn't it strange how the right-wingers who hate high taxes encourage you to give all you can to the church and guilt you for "robbing" god? What did god do that he has a right to your hard-earned money? Screw up the whole human race and then come up with an idiotic plan to fix the problem that he caused? Maybe they just want you to keep your tax money so you can give it away to Pastor god.

[amateur]

I had to vote for "I don't actually know," because I don't.  I was raised by parents that were agnostic but took us to church every week.  I pretty much shared my dad's view that "Religion was made by people to give them answers to the big questions of life:  why are we here, why do we suffer, where do we go when we die?"  My mom, who told us her parents left the Old Country because the catholic church was demanding money from peasants and who subsequently refused to ever enter a church again when they got to the US, would tell us, "Don't take religion too seriously."

 

But they took us to church every week.  We didn't really discuss religion at home.  If we had questions, my dad generally answered with either "I don't know" or he would explain things like how rainbows are created when he gave us a prism to play with.

 

So on my own, and probably this was my teenage rebellion, I became born again when I was around 13.  It did help with a lot of crap I was going through at that time, but years later I realized that my maturing had been what really helped me, not god.

 

My mom died when I was 18, and I think I was back to being agnostic by that point.  I always went to church.  I had friends at my childhood church.  When I got married and had kids, we went to church.  But it was like with my family, I answered like my dad when my kids asked questions, we were up on lots of science information, and I found out after we got divorced that my ex-husband was actually an atheist, which I hadn't totally known but didn't shock me at all.  My kids, both adults now, are non-believers, so I guess they worked it out on their own while we took them to church, but answered their questions honestly.

 

Generally, as an adult in church, I sat in the pew and came up with tons of questions on the sermon and found faults in what was being said, but I knew that nobody in the church would actually ever answer me honestly, so I never brought anything up with anyone.

 

After getting divorced, I worked on Sundays, so I haven't been to church in about 12 years now.  Haven't missed it at all.

 

A few years ago I read, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, and that finally answered my questions. I had always believed what my dad had said about religion being made by man to answer the big questions of life, but how did people all over the world come up with the idea of a "god" or "gods"?  That book finally answered to my satisfaction, and I was completely atheist at that point, no more lingering agnosticism.

 

But I'd been atheist since before then; it was just nice having an actual sensible answer to my question.

[dichotomy]

Thank you for all the replies. Always good to read different people's experiences and journeys.

[mymistake]

It's hard for me to pin down when my deconversion began.  Even at the height of my fundamentalist days my beliefs were in direct conflict with my very own life and that was what was planting seeds of my doubt.  I was banging my head against a brick wall, noticing how much it hurt and wondering why this wasn't working.  There were a lot of milestones along the way but which one was the biggest or the most important?  For me the most shocking were the day I realized the Bible wasn't the word of God and also the day I realized that I don't believe in any Gods.  But all the stuff leading up to that was quite a journey.

[milesaway]

Looking back, I had one foot out the door before I found the last church I visited, and that one dealt the final blow to my faith. I had some doubts long before then, before church became a part of my life. It's hard to say when it all started, but it accelerated during the last year I was at that church. 

[Mythra]

 

 

Mythra: Isn't it strange how the right-wingers who hate high taxes encourage you to give all you can to the church and guilt you for "robbing" god? What did god do that he has a right to your hard-earned money? Screw up the whole human race and then come up with an idiotic plan to fix the problem that he caused? Maybe they just want you to keep your tax money so you can give it away to Pastor god.

 

 

You know, I hadn't really thought about that. Tea baggers:  Lower taxes, lower taxes!  We're paying too much already!  But the same people give away beaucoup bucks to their religion du-jour to build bigger and more lavish homes to house their deity in.   

Every church I was ever in (in 20 years of being a christian) was always in the middle of some critical project that required an "extra offering" followed by an "extra offering" the next week.  On top of the tithe everyone was already paying.  Salvation is a free gift from God?  Not so much.

[Mythra]

If anyone is in contact with Jesus, tell him I want a refund.  Especially since I'm going to hell anyway. 

 

Surely God offers a warranty as good as Home Depot.