(Via Jason)
I don’t remember the exact moment I became an atheist (I think it was more of a slow draining away, but I remember why.
I was raised Catholic, spend a couple of years as an agnostic, and then became a born-again christian my second or third year of high school. I was desperately wanting to belong to something, and they found me first. *laughs*
Mostly as a result of attending this particular christian missionary alliance church, the idea of a christian god just stopped making sense to me. My mind could no longer accept the idea of an all-powerful god who allowed the type of suffering I saw in the world; around this time, I think I saw a story of a five-year-old boy who was raped and murdered, as that is the specific example I quoted the most relating to my new found non-acceptance.
I spent a short while believing in the idea of a “watchmaker god”, then – finally – logic took over and I just decided not to spend time thinking about something that was a non-topic, as it could never be proved or disproved. I had recently started working at a Children’s Science Center, and fell in love with the idea of science and the natural world. I realized real science was so much more amazing than anything any human could dream up.
On a side note, for some reason I held on to other supernatural beliefs for a wee bit after becoming an atheist; after working at the science center for a while, all of the fell away as well. I am now a full-fledged, proud skeptic.
(Via Constantine)
De-conversion 1.
My parents were “born again” when I was five years old. They quickly became zealots. They used our house for church gatherings and backyard bible study. People were constantly coming and going. My parents became extremely active in their zealotry, witnessing door to door and going to church three times a week This was the mid-seventies and I have nostalgic memories of the long-haired Jesus freaks coming over with their sandals and guitars. At this age I picked up and filtered the messages I was hearing at church: we are the best church, we are saved and others are not, we are good and they are bad. I was five when I formally accepted Jesus Christ into my heart. In elementary school, I was an active crusader, genuinely concerned about my schoolmates’ souls.
When I was about seven, my dad and two other guys from our church broke off and founded their own church, which rented out a space at a private school. It was exciting to me. After intense worship with the Jesus freaks on their guitars, the “elders” would gather after the sermon and have adamant theological discussions. Of course I was far too young to understand what they were talking about, but I imagined that they were spiritual explorers constantly testing the endless bounds of the universe in search of the ultimate truth. This was great, because, I never understood the concept of God. My parents taught me how to pray but I never felt like anything like “God” was out there. It seemed as foreign as learning the alphabet – a system that you are taught, rather than something innate that you are connecting to.
Around this age I developed a fascination with nature and especially animals. I picked up every book I could find about animals and learned as much as I could. One day in Sunday school when I was about 10 or 11, the teacher opened up a strange new kind of “animal” book. This book had nice illustrations but the concepts it was showing were very different from the animal books I had been reading. On top of that, it showed its arguments in a clumsy and artificial way. It was attempting to show that all of the animal species were “created” and couldn’t have “evolved.” I couldn’t accept this. It seemed contrived and dishonest. Because of that I began to be skeptical of the other concepts taught at that church. I paid close attention at the sermons. I became suspicious and would silently challenge the teachings of the “elders” in terms of logic. I gradually became horrified. These people weren’t spiritual explorers – they first decided what they wanted to believe in and then employed everything and anything to try to support their beliefs. Almost everything they said appeared to be circular. I can’t tell you how betrayed I felt. Not only were their beliefs defended with circular arguments but if anyone disagreed with their beliefs they lied, bullied, threatened and used anything in their power to overcome. Not only all of this, but I started to become aware of the dark side to the born-again experience. They seemed to prey on the emotionally weak. They had a systematic way of latching onto the unconverted and circling like vultures, waiting for a breakdown, which they helped set in motion by constantly telling them about their sins and guilt and how Jesus would forgive them if only they accepted him. They went to hospitals waiting for the alcoholic or severely depressed to give in, they would pile people in a van and drive to someone’s house who just reached “bottom” and have an “intervention”, and list goes on and on. Inevitably these broken people would show up weeks later completely “changed.” Endless testimonies were given about how people accepted Jesus.
There I was, an early adolescent, totally alone, estranged from my parent’s church, suspicious, distrustful and no one to turn to. My thoughts remained absolutely secret. You have to understand the terrible vulture mentality of this church. These people are finely tuned to a person’s demeanor. If they detect the slightest deviation they LOCK ON TO YOU. So I learned to be a spy behind enemy lines. I thought my parents would disown me if they knew the truth. This was such an unhealthy way to grow up. I learned great stuff – how to stuff my feelings, how to hate, how to be subversive, deviant, cynical, manipulative and angry. I learned how to reject religion and all things “spiritual” without learning how to adopt anything positive.
By High School I was a terror. I couldn’t hide my rebellion at this point. I took to punk rock like second nature. I loved the most destructive kids. I hated religion with a passion. I pretended to go to youth group on a Wednesday night but before the session began I would collect as many kids as I could and go to the park and hang out instead. I tried to convince these kids about the lie of Christianity.
De-conversion 2.
My life went from bad to worse. By my junior year of High School I was drinking every day. I was always in trouble. My parents were convinced I was on drugs (and possessed by the Devil – I was fond of items deemed Satanic by the church- black T-shirts with skulls, skull rings, anything shocking!). In spite all of this I still managed to go to college. But after three semesters I dropped out and moved to a large city. There I drifted in and out of homelessness and disaster, in a complete alcoholic haze. To make another long story short, I eventually sobered up and went to AA.
A couple of months after sobering up I had an extremely intense experience. For as long as I can remember alcohol was all I could remember that I cared about. When it was suddenly taken away I had a terrifying, empty, scared feeling. I had no coping skills to speak of. At the place where I lived I knew these two girls who were hard-core Christians. One night we spent all night talking about my experiences with the church, alcohol and my sobering up. Afterwards by myself at 4 o’clock in the morning I had this sudden, intense feeling of total, unconditional love. Then I had this thought: What if I had been wrong about Christianity and who am I to say there is no God? It was absolutely crushing. My whole world changed.
I carried this experience with me and at the time I think it was exactly what I needed. It helped me get over the initial hump of trying to get and stay sober. I was still extremely distrustful of organized Christianity. This time around I decided to do an experiment – I am not going to commit to a church. I am not going to surround myself with fundamentalists. The parts that I have trouble accepting, I’m just going to not question for now, and the parts that other Christians are telling me, I’m just going to try to keep an open mind and try to understand where they are coming from.
At that point I had a nominal belief in Jesus Christ and a vague belief in the God of the Bible. I’ve gotta say, this helped me incalculably for a couple of years. I tried never to let my mind question too much, but at the same time I did not associate with fundamentalists. My life got better – significantly better. I could keep a job, I went back to school, I became more responsible, my clarity of mind started coming back, my relationships with others got better, etc, etc. In essence I was “growing up.”
After about three years or so things started to bubble up. Internally I never really stopped questioning religious ideas. Somehow I began to realize that Christian beliefs were hard to maintain because there is a hard-to-ignore concept of “fooling yourself.” There are concepts in the religion that deep down I found extremely hard to accept –not because they are super-spiritual or fantastic, but because they seem so artificial. Anyway, about this time I became involved with a girl who was a hardcore Christian. It was a short, intense relationship. It bothered me how intolerant she was of anything not Christian, but was very quick to ascribe the most mundane events to the work of demons and angels. She was also a very fearful, unstable and unhappy person, filled with a lot of guilt.
Everything came to head around this time. I just couldn’t accept the concept of Hell. If God is an all loving, omnipotent being who only wants the best for all creatures, then why Hell? When I honestly and thoroughly thought about this, it just absolutely did not make any sense – nor could I ignore it. I don’t want to believe in a God who could do this to people. This began the quick work of the whole thing unraveling again. It wasn’t long before I was a non-believer. Not just Hell, but many other concepts seem to me to be artificial, disjointed, self-serving and obviously created by humans over time.
The difference in de-conversion this time, was that I had developed coping skills, I was stable and I had all my intellectual and emotional capacities intact. I didn’t feel like I had to belong to this religion or that religion. I began a journey of trial and error. I learned to just keep an open mind and that it’s okay to let life and spirituality just be an unfolding process and my beliefs never have to be set in stone. I feel this life is one of exploration and growth. I cannot stagnate in a crazy religion that seeks to limit a person to arbitrary boundaries unquestioningly. In fact I think that is absolutely the worse thing a person can do to themselves and others.
The intense experience that I had when I first sobered up, never said to me, “I am the Holy Spirit “, or “Now you have to believe in Christ.” It was simply a pure feeling of love, which opened me up to the possibilities of the universe. Even though I was not a Christian before this experience, I was as closed and narrow-minded as any fundamentalist. Christians think that the born-again experience is a trump card which proves their religion, but they don’t realize that it is also common to a variety of other religions, spiritual awakenings and even non-religious realizations.
I feel extremely lucky that I got away and found a path that seems appropriate for me. However, fundamentalist Christianity, my experiences with it and my getting away from it are the biggest issues in my life, sometimes eclipsing alcoholism. Because of the way I grew up and the fact that my whole entire family and extended family (excluding an atheist grandfather), are fundamentalist Christians, I feel as if the whole thing has left a huge scar that is healing slowly. Sometimes it’s no big deal and sometimes it hurts a lot. The same way some ex-Catholics have the famous “Catholic” guilt, I think that I suffer from some kind of ex-fundamentalist “you’re still going to Hell!” syndrome. Sometimes Christian propaganda is clumsy, but some of it really, really tries to burrow it’s way inside your brain and break you down. It feels sometimes like recovering from a disease.
Sometimes I want to tell all of those people off, and sometimes I feel sorry for them. If there’s one aspect of that religion I wish I could change it is the concept of the fact that they think there is only one path. I don’t care what people believe in. As far as I’m concerned, that’s for each person to decide for themselves and has nothing to do with me. The thing is, when people start believing that their way is the only way and others are damned, causing others to be damned and sabotaging eternal life, things get ugly. I can’t change that. This is what we as ex- or non-believers have to deal with.
(Via yunshui)
My parents were, and still are, fervent Baptists, and so I was raised in the Church from birth. I was something of a sceptic as a child (my mother still recounts how, aged 3, I announced that I no longer believed in Father Christmas because, “there are too many children for him to visit in one night”. Admittedly, this doubt was quickly quashed by the realisation that no Santa meant no presents…) but I was nonetheless so heavily indoctrinated that I happily accepted as truth the stories, with their accompanying pretty pictures, in my Children’s Illustrated Bible. After all, Mummy and Daddy said it was true, and so did the pastor at our church, and so did my teachers, and my friends, so what was to question?
My friends and I were regularly dispatched to various Scripture Union holiday camps – the basic premise should be familiar to anyone who has watched “Jesus Camp” – and it was at one of these that I became “born again”. Aged about 10, I sat down one evening with one of the youth leaders and announced that I was giving my life to Christ. I have to confess, I don’t remember much about the conversation – there were a number of pamphlets to be read, and a prayer I had to recite, although I don’t recall the specifics – but I do remember the youth leader asking me how I felt at the end of the process. My reply was, “I feel sort of… lighter.”
But I didn’t. In fact, I felt nothing, save for a vague sense of silliness. Suddenly it seemed a bit ridiculous to be sitting in that room, surrounded by Christian literature, looking into the beaming face of the youth leader as I asked a long-dead Palestinian to make me a better person. Nonetheless, I pushed this mild feeling of discomfort aside, and, beatific smile firmly in place, went to rejoin my friends, all of whom had been through a similar process in the preceding years. Their support, I rationalised, would help me through this moment of doubt. It did. I was baptized the following year, and spent the next half-decade or so raising my hands in church services, speaking in tongues and generally getting over-emotional in the cause of religion. I proselytised to my long-suffering atheist/agnostic schoolfriends, on one occasion giving a memorably incoherent rendition of Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument to my evolution-subscribing friend on the bus home. It should have suggested something to me that I, a member of the debating society and widely-regarded as one of the smartest kids in a highly selective school, should have had my argument so thoroughly demolished by a boy who had got into said school on a hockey scholarship. But I was a believer…
The vague sense of silliness had stuck with me though. I always felt a bit self-conscious praying aloud, or speaking in tongues (it didn’t feel particularly divine, and I never seemed to be able to speak in French or German, or even Latin, which would at least have had some practical applications – just “bagahabfalamalabollifilliblahashmaz etc”. If that’s the language of Heaven, it’s no wonder God has a hard time making himself understood…). Things came to a head when a visiting pastor to our church (can’t recall his name – he was from Singapore, I think) held a real humdinger of a fire-and-brimstone service. Lots of people were “slain in the spirit” (ie. got over-emotional and fainted), but the high point was when one member of the congregation, whose name I shall keep anonymous to preserve his dignity, went up to the front of the church and announced that, owing to the demonically-inspired TV programmes he had watched as a child, he was possessed by the spirit of He-Man.
That’s right, He-Man. Not Beelzebub, or Azazael, or Mephisto. He-Man, the Most Powerful Man In The Universe. Unfazed entirely by the fact that He-Man is A FICTIONAL CHARACTER*, the visiting pastor proceeded to “cast out” this evil spirit; a process of much shouting and wailing, culminating in the possessed man raising a hand and shouting, “By the power of Grayskull!”
Weirdest. Thing. Ever.
After that, I found it impossible to take church seriously anymore. I started to be the lone voice of dissent in the Youth Group – having actually read the Bible in its entirety, I was in a much better position than any of the other members (or the leaders!) to qualify my arguments. I took particular issue with St Paul, who, to my teenage mind, had perverted the original teachings of Jesus and created a Church entirely out of step with its original premises, and had great fun debating with the rest of the group. In retrospect, I think they had rather less fun than me. Finally, I stopped going to church altogether, and by the time I went to University you would have been hard pressed to recognise a modicum of Christianity in my personality.
The departure of Christianity from my life had left a large, God-shaped hole in my psyche, however, and I was ready and willing to fill it. For a while, hard-left political ideology served as temporary Polyfilla of the soul, but eventually I had to admit that the other Socialist Workers scared the crap out of me. Through my newfound practice of t’ai chi ch’uan, though, I discovered Taoism. Now here was a religion I could get behind! No actual god as such, just a vague, undefined and nebulous “force of nature”. No dogma save “follow the Tao”. No priests and catechisms, no evangelising, no afterlife to aspire to or live in fear of. I have of course, since learned that Taoism has all of these things, but even now, I retain a soft spot for the most basic “Tao of Pooh” form that I originally encountered.
The problem with the sort of New-Age spirituality that I gleaned from Taoism, though, is that it comes with a lot of baggage. As a t’ai chi practitioner (and later instructor) I was encouraged to believe in the “chi” energy that Taoists say infuses the universe. This led on to Reiki (I’m a fully qualified Reiki Master, y’know – meaning that I paid a few hundred quid to hold my hands above some equally deluded hopeful for half an afternoon), crystal healing, kinesiology, dowsing, naturopathy, and a whole slew of others. (To be fair, my personal jury is still out on a couple of these: acupuncture, for instance, seems to work even if only as a placebo, and t’ai chi is still one of the best martial arts and forms of physical exercise that I’ve encountered). The irony was that I nonetheless looked down my nose at practitioners of those esoteric arts to which I hadn’t subscribed. Homeopathy came in for serious criticism (it’s WATER, FFS!), as did iridology, astrology and palmistry, and don’t even get me started on yogic flying… but I failed to realise the hypocrisy of my position for quite a while. When enlightenment came, it came slowly – but my trusty inner cynic won through in the end. I think the final straw was quite recent; an online debate with a very old and dear friend (whose personal journey had paralleled mine, but resulted in quite a different outlook – he’s a very devoted churchgoer) on the reason for our diametrically opposed views prompted me to re-read The God Delusion et al. I sat down, took a look at my thinking, and changed my religion on my Facebook profile to “Atheist” – you don’t get a more sincere declaration of nonbelief than that!
*re-reading this, I see now how that wouldn’t have been a problem.
(Via Cassandra)
I would like to share a bit about myself.
I was raised to believe. We attended church, but it was sporadic.
My father was a Vietnam veteran with dependency problems. He was a drug addict and alcoholic. As children, we were exposed to, and even allowed to use drugs and alcohol by our father and later our step-father.
My parents divorced when I was 6. My father eventually ended up in prison for attempted murder and my mother remarried, another alcoholic, this one highly abusive, mentally and ,at times, physically.
My father became “born-again” in prison. And when he was released he had arranged for me and my siblings to be “saved”. We went through with it. I was nervous about it even then. I wasn’t sure “why” exactly, I just knew that the people at his church scared me with their loud, erratic behavior. They spoke in tongues, fell on the floor, flung their arms up in the air, and dang near did everything short of drooling all over themselves. That was unlike any church I had ever been to. I didn’t know what had come over these people to make them act like this and then after the service they were “normal” to talk to. I didn’t want any part of that. But I went through with the “saving” because I feared telling the adults that I didn’t want to do it. I felt that if my heart wasn’t into it, that it wouldn’t mean anything anyway. It was just words I was saying. I did still believe in God, just not the way these people did.
I was taught as a child to take the bible literally. My father would tell me that if you were not afraid to ask god for things out loud in front of people that he would grant your prayers. The only thing I ever recalled asking for was my grandmother not to die of cancer (which she later did anyway).
I started having doubts then, around the age of thirteen. I would entertain the “what-if’s” in my mind more and more frequently until I had decided that it was a definite possibility that the Christian God did not exist.
I struggled in my teens. I had an abusive step-father and a mother that let him get away with it. I wasn’t understood. I couldn’t see any way out of my problems. God surely didn’t help me any. I ran away, started using drugs and drinking regularly. I ran with a crowd of kids that was into satanism and gore. I thought that I was angry at god. Then I started to realize that satanism was just as pointless as Christianity. I wasn’t angry at god, I was angry at the people that portrayed him this way. I was angry that I wasn’t told that I had a choice. None of what I WAS told made any sense. And I was hurt that I had been betrayed, that I loved something that was a figment of my imagination and that I was lead to it by humans that loved me.
When I started college and attended various science classes was when it all settled in. I finally decided that I did NOT believe in a god. I soon found out what word defined that. Atheist. It took a little while longer to be comfortable with saying it.
But now I am a proud atheist. I have since strived to lead a normal, healthy life. I have been drug free for over 15 years, and even so I never had any addictions to any of them. I have a college education, a good full time job with benefits where I have worked for almost 8 years. I am married to the man of my dreams, we have a beautiful son together. We have a house, life insurance, medical insurance, etc. We are not rich but we are comfortable and independent. I have some personality issues due to my past that I acknowledge and have put great amounts of effort into to change for the better. We are healthy, happy, productive members of society, and if I were never to tell anyone of our “lack of religion” they would never guess it on their own, for we are not the “barbaric heathens” that so many creationists portray us as.
Thank you for allowing me to tell you the short version of my story. And thank you for taking an interest in it. I hope you get many responses to your request. We need to let others know out there that they are not alone in their thoughts.