any ex-orthodox who would be willing to talk to me?

[looking4help]

hello there, I have been part of the Eastern Orthodox church for the past 5 years (converted at 22) and the past 6 months have been hell sort of waking up and being honest with myself about the cognitive dissonance it takes to adhere to this faith. I say i'm like 1.5 feet out the door right now, mostly what keeps me from fully deconverting is the intense fear of hell and disappointing people/my priest. I'd like to talk to others about your experiences and what brought you to leave yourself. Honestly I feel like my mental health has been further damaged by Orthodox spirituality as well as staying in monasteries. Thank you for your time

[nontheistpilgrim]

Welcome from an ex-minister of the middle-of-the-road sort - so can't help you except to say I found real liberation when I finally left. It's been about 15 years but I'm still fascinated by my past and present 'pilgrimage'.

[older]

Hi Looking:

While I’m not ex-Orthodox, I can say that what you are going through and where you are is quite common. Originally, you were told that there is this God up there somewhere who knows everything, can do anything, and made everything, and that he sent himself to earth and then killed himself in order to avenge himself for a curse he put on us because one of our distant ancestors and a rib woman ate fruit off a magical tree after being told to do it by a talking snake. You believed this because other people convinced you that bad things would happen to you if you didn’t. You know now that it’s just Santa Claus for grownups. And scaring you with hell is just a way for other folks to control you. Christians believe that people are inherently bad, but many of us believe that people are inherently good, and good people do good things as best they can and accept that they will make honest mistakes from time to time.

 

You’ve discovered the cognitive dissonance and, as you wrote, are almost all the way out. I think many of us got to that point and then held back because of a lingering doubt, or perhaps to hedge the bet, so to speak. But as Mark Twain wrote, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

 

You wrote about disappointing your priest and other people, but there is no need to waive a flag and parade down the street during your departure. Quietly stepping out the back door, figuratively speaking, is often the best way to handle this, and the majority of folks won’t notice that you’re gone. If family is part of the issue, it can be more difficult, but again, just backing off, slowly perhaps, may be the best method.

 

It will take time to move those final six inches out the door, but you will get there. There will be a day when you wake up and realize that it’s all gone, and the weight will be lifted from your shoulders.

[◊ Weezer ◊]

How did this post of March 29 slip past me/us?  I usually watch for new comers, but missed this one.

 

My leaving was years in the making.  The inconsistancy between the old and new testament "god" bothered me for years.  If Jesus message and an afterlife were "the way", why hadn't those messages been presented from the beginning? The questions kept building until I finally did a study of how we got the bible and then of the history of god(s) and religion(s).  I decided all religions are man made.

[Joshpantera]

On 3/29/2022 at 11:53 PM, looking4help said:

hello there, I have been part of the Eastern Orthodox church for the past 5 years (converted at 22) and the past 6 months have been hell sort of waking up and being honest with myself about the cognitive dissonance it takes to adhere to this faith. I say i'm like 1.5 feet out the door right now, mostly what keeps me from fully deconverting is the intense fear of hell and disappointing people/my priest. I'd like to talk to others about your experiences and what brought you to leave yourself. Honestly I feel like my mental health has been further damaged by Orthodox spirituality as well as staying in monasteries. Thank you for your time

 

We have at least a few eastern orthodox members here. One Romanian. We were just recently discussing it. His views are that most of what we discuss here about the bible is something that would be lost on a lot of eastern orthodox thinkers because unlike protestants here in the US, Eastern Orthodox don't stick rigidly to the written scripture and just sort of 'make shit up' as they go along under the guise of tradition. As in the community is held as more authoritative than even the bible. 

 

So we can discuss your issues here and try and help, but keep in mind that the majority of members here are former protestants who base a lot or most of our reasoning on looking at what is written in the scriptures and where the contradictions, inconsistencies, and generally non-parsimonious content can be found. Personally, the claims of eastern orthodox tradition going back to some idealized assertions about early christianity, I don't buy at all.

 

I think it's entirely possible that they're outdated by gnostic types anyways and it started out esoteric and only became exoteric and "orthodox" later. And that the eastern orthodox, like the proto-catholics, were a secondary movement to what was probably originally something else entirely. Claiming authority now from the perspective of looking backwards and stopping short along the way. 

 

So, there's a few issues to start debating around with if you'd like. 

 

Welcome aboard!!!

[pantheory]

On 3/29/2022 at 8:53 PM, looking4help said:

hello there, I have been part of the Eastern Orthodox church for the past 5 years (converted at 22) and the past 6 months have been hell sort of waking up and being honest with myself about the cognitive dissonance it takes to adhere to this faith. I say i'm like 1.5 feet out the door right now, mostly what keeps me from fully deconverting is the intense fear of hell and disappointing people/my priest. I'd like to talk to others about your experiences and what brought you to leave yourself. Honestly I feel like my mental health has been further damaged by Orthodox spirituality as well as staying in monasteries. Thank you for your time

 

I experienced a similar disconnect with Catholicism. I was raised a Methodist In the US, my father's religion. Religion to me was simply going to church, singing the songs, and listening to sermons that were based almost solely on the New Testament and doing good for yourself and family, and for your fellow man. I went to church instead of Sunday school for children because my father's mother (my grandmother) thought Sunday school for me was too childish, even though I was still a child. My mother was strongly religious but didn't like the simplicity of the Methodist church and started studying Catholicism.  I was the oldest of her 3 children so she asked me if I would study Catholicism with her. I went to catechism (Catholic studies) with other kids my age, about 10-11, and it appeared to me that there was a lot more logic to Catholicism because it seemed to be conscience based. I still liked the Methodist church better because I was with adults, and Catholic catechism I was with immature children. But there was no sermon, just an appeal to conscience which I liked. Then there was confession, the virgin marry, and many new prayers of memory. And the Catholic Mass was in Latin at that time, and too much pomp and non-thinking in church. There was an Eastern orthodox church down the street from us which was similar to the practices of the Catholic church. I went there with a neighbor and her son several Sundays.

 

I was a good kid so it was hard for me to find something to confess to a priest (confession is required to receive communion), but in time I came up with a kind of sexual confession,  -- where I personally believed there was nothing wrong with masturbation at age 11, and that I liked watching young ladies, my babysitter, etc. with "impure" thoughts-- so that too I could confess as a sin.  

 

My mother was a school teacher and i talked to her about our Catholic studies, but it seemed to me that she didn't understand Catholicism any better than I did. Since much of the way they were teaching catechism (Catholic children's studies)  I could confess to a priest what I thought were failings of the Catholic church and its teachings, thinking he would consider me sinful for that, but he didn't. He said to question what you are being taught is not a sin. I liked that part of what he said and my related Catholic teachings at that time relating to conscience. I didn't mind Catholicism, but thought it was way too dogmatic.  My continued Catholic studies, and studies of many other Christian and non-Christian religions at the library which my mother encouraged, was leading me away from religion rather than toward it.

 

I never had a bad experience with any religious folk or religious relatives, just what I considered a failure of logic and proof concerning religions in general. Sometime, about age 15-16, while considering Biblical creation and also the book of Revelations,  I had a eureka moment concluding that all religions and their Bibles were man-made fantasies -- that there was no God of any kind. That religion provided a moral fiber needed by some children -- but that Bibles and testaments were BS as a whole. That was more than a half century ago.

 

My mother always blamed my college science education for my becoming an atheist as an adult, which really bothered her a lot.  I never told her that it was ultimately her encouragement of me to study and think for myself as a child which was the real reason I became a confirmed atheist as a teenager still in high school. In light of Darwin's studies and belief that humans were just another type of animal, became obvious to me also.