Religion had never had a firm grip on me, but the movie Ghost finished it off once and for all.
Like other dopers who’ve posted here, Hell was the first stumbling block for me. I was raised Southern Baptist, and they believe in Hell very seriously. Hell and Hellfire, eternal torment and gnashing of teeth, etc. For everyone who hasn’t been saved by Jesus Christ and made him their personal Lord and Savior. I’ve always read quite a lot, so early on I figured out that this was a majority of the world, especially when you count the Catholics, who our brand of religion said was going to Hell for no reason I could make sense of, despite believing in Jesus.
Then there were the attrocities, as others have mentioned. No loving, just God could do that. It’s impossible. Over and over in the bible, innocents were made to suffer by God’s decrees. I can’t say His treatment of Job impressed me much either.
By the time I was about fifteen or so, I was deeply unhappy with the entire concept of Christianity: salvation through Faith, not through works. The way I was taught it, you could be a heartless murdering child rapist for sixty years, but if you asked God’s forgiveness and believed, you would be saved and go to Heaven while the person who had lived a good and selfless life was going to Hell.
Once I pulled away and started looking at it from the outside, the whole thing is clearly preposterous. There are hundreds of creation myths, deities, belief systems, all with their devotees. Looked at objectively, none of them has anything to really set it up as superior, except individial taste. I can look back on it and remember the warm glow of being a believer and in retrospect I realize that it’s the same warm glow you get from being accepted by any group you want to belong to. You make the sports team, win a scholastic prize, etc. People applaud you and chant ‘one of us, one of us’, and there is that same ‘Jesus loves you’ glow.
These days I take what teachings I want from all religions, but I don’t believe in any supernatural forces.
standing ovation for Cuckoorex
What about Ghost put you off religion? I don’t remember it being especially faith-based, just sappy and with entirely too little Demi Moore boobage.
Family was Christian.
I gave it up for Lent. 
Guess I didn’t need to pick it back up.
I was raised Presbyterian by very religious parents (I actually taught Sunday School, if you can believe it, after I came out as an agnostic to my parents because it wasn’t like going to church was a choice or anything), but the older I got the more I realized I didn’t buy it. No big life-changing event, and I had been, like most children of pious people, sincerely religious as a child. I was 16, I think, when I told them how I felt. It really upset them. My mom got over it but my dad, I think, is still very much in denial. He thinks I don’t go to church because I don’t like getting up early.
Currently I describe myself as a secular humanist. I very much resent the idea that many religious people seem to have that if you’re not religious you cannot be a moral person. I feel very strongly that you shouldn’t need religion to keep you behaving ethically, and I do kind of look down on people who seem to think you do.
For myself, I don’t know. When I was in the 4th grade, I was pretty religious, mostly on account of being a huge JCS fan. By 8th grade I was off religion altogether, and was sort of pulled back in by a friend. But I don’t think I ever truly believed, especially after 4th grade. None of it made much sense to me.
Oh, and Cuckoorex, thanks for that post. It was so enlightening, and yet… So much information.
This board does have a lot of atheists (which is good really). I am not sure that I am one myself, but I have gone through that phase- the militant atheist phase anyway. I have slowly come to the realization that I am not SURE if God exists, I just really, really want to deny his existance, stick my fingers in my ears and say LA LA LA really loud. I almost despise the Christian God, and what makes it even worse is nobody wants to discuss it, certainly don’t want to find me answers.
I was raised strict Baptist since birth. My parents went to a Baptist Bible College here in Missouri (BBC), and are pretty hardcore fundementalists, though they have mellowed out with age. They are also young earth creationists and don’t know about my “belief” in evolution. Yes, I hate that word, but that is how they see it so that is why I am expressing it as such. They also don’t know about my phases, my pagan, Hindu, Budhist, and Atheist phases.
I started Questioning at a young age, perhaps 8 or 9, but quickly learned nobody will answer questions, nor do they like to think about things. I wondered why a God that knows everything, has complete power to do anything he so desires, would create a flawed creature he KNOWS is going to screw up, and them condem the sons and daughters for the crimes of the mother and father. I also asked many times why God would create a hell for people to burn in eternity in horrendous torment for minor sins like never actually hearing about God. They always said “God didn’t create Hell for man, he just happens to go there.” HAPPENS? God is omnipotent, if he ALLOWS something to happen, which is a concious choice in somebody that knows everything. Chosing to allow something when you have power to change it, is no different than making it that way in the first place.
For what it is worth, I see the Christian God as the ultimate Machivelli. He creates us to worship him. Talk about an ego problem. Hell, when we die, he expects us to sit around in heaven for eternity praising him. He knows exactly what is going to happen, but tells us we have free will, which is a joke, because you don’t technically have a choice if you are coerced into making one particular decision by making the alternative ETERNAL DAMNATION. So if he exists, he is a cruel and merciless god that created us to stem his ego problems, plays games with our lives, and lights us on fire and watches us run around screaming for kicks if we displease him.
Yeah, somebody I want to worship and love.
So yeah, I HAVE migrated towards a Deist sort of belief that no real similarities to Christianity. Sort of Deism and Transhumanism rolled into one.
Now, if God does exist, and he is the way I infer him from the bible, I would rather burn in Hell than give him my love. Am I evil for not loving a Tyrant? Gotta wonder if Satan came to these same conclusions…
The trouble is when you consult the theologians and philosphers and discover there are entire genera of athiests and agnostics which themselves could be neatly sub-divided into their own species as if any realistic human thinker had a distinct list of about 40 attributes with which to discretely catagorize them. When I think of myself, I think “agnostic sumfin’r’other”, but it takes about three seconds for someone to swoop in and “Tut tut! You, sir, are neopositivist eliminative reductive physicalist atheist” or something equally burdensome and opaque. “Faithless” works for me, but it sounds so damn negative to some ears.
And your mother dresses you funny.
And makes it sound like you lack something.
I also hate materialist and naturist. Since I’m technically both, it sounds like I seek to obtain all wordly posessions except clothing.
Dopers, y’all drive me crazy! I read threads like these (I don’t want to, really, but they kinda pull me in…) and feel like something’s wrong with me, because I’m intelligent, but not an atheist. I’ve read the arguments against the existence of God. I’ve thought hard about them. They make sense, even. But I find I can’t -not- believe.
I’m a Christian. Specifically, an Episcopalian (Polycarp is my hero!) I take it seriously, and my faith and my church are very important to me. But I’m not a stupid, gullible, brainwashed zombie who just passively accepts everything I’m told. (I don’t appreciate that so many of the shriller atheists continually imply that).
It just seems like my default-setting is “belief.” I’ve wandered away many times, but I always come back to God. I’m not a Biblical literalist or a Creationist. I’m gay-friendly and have friends who follow different “paths” than mine, and I don’t believe they’re damned for eternity. I believe in God and do my best to love my fellow men & women.
Tell you what? How about we call a truce for awhile? I won’t try to talk you into my religion if you don’t try to talk me out of mine, okay?
A few things, PerditaX:
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Not everyone in this thread is an atheist; I’m not, f’instance. I just said that I’d left the faith of my childhood.
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Nobody’s trying to talk you out of your religion. Please point me to a single post that has said "Persons who believe in the Bible/Torah/Koran/etc are idiots and it is our duty as agnostics/atheists to show them the error of their ways lest they continue to waste their lives.
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If you read the first thread, you’ll see that you’re more than welcome to tell the story of your leaving your faith and then coming back to it; I’m pretty sure I specifically invited former unbelievers to tell the story of their conversions or reconversions. If I didn’t, then as OP I’m inviting you to do so now.
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Why does people telling the story of their disillusionment threaten you? Why do you take it as an attack on what you believe?
Oh, one thing more: I agree that Polycarp rocks.
Keep in mind, not everyone posting here is an athiest or agnostic. Like myself, I follow a spiritual path just not one that involves the christian god and am still an intelligent and wellread person. (I know I know, you wouldn’t know it from my grammer)
Another point, you have a much more liberal, for lack of a better word, outlook on your faith then the background a lot of us come from. If I had been raised with the set of beliefs you profess, I might have been more inclined to stay in that belief system.
So far as this thread goes, no one is trying to talk anyone into or out of anything.
You raise an interesting point about “default settings”, which has grown into a more powerful suspicion of mine because of when I recall allowing my worst instincts to get the better of me on the Dope, and witnessing similar behavior in others: Perhaps at least some of us just can’t help it. We’re not really convinced. We kid ourselves we had a choice, that we reasoned it out, but the fact is, when exposed to the exact same set of information, one person goes one way, and another the other despite remarkably similar backgrounds. We’re somehow primed, quite outside of our conscious will, to react a particular way, and it’s much like any innate proclivity we’ve no real choice in. How did I lose my religion? I’m not sure I ever had it, or ever could.
Did you deliberately come into this thread hoping to be offended?
Perhaps I was unclear in choosing the word “apostates” as the first word in the thread title. Awful close to “apostle.” :rolleyes:
Or perhaps by moving the thread from IMHO to GD, Czarcasm encouraged a debate to start, which is what I specifically sought to avoid.
Next I’ll start an IMHO thread on diabetes, asking how many people are on tight control, and somebody can move the thread to GD and then we start arguing with Kevin Trudeau.
Concerning point #2 (also made by Loopy): You’re right; nobody has on -this- thread. I was unfairly extrapolating from the postings of others (Der Trihs being the first name that comes to mind) on other “religious” threads which, by carefully enumerating the ways in which religions and the religious are wrong/misguided/unscrupulous/evil, seem clearly intended to “deconvert.” I apologize for not being clearer.
On point #4, I never said I was attacked by it, again, in this thread . It’s more as I said originally, that others make disillusionment sound so obvious and logical - as though anyone who read the Bible would come to their conclusion. I’m not sure any of them had any kind of “YMMV” attached.
And, if anyone wants to hear about my 10 years trying to be a Fundie (my ex-husband was an Independent Babdist - why I married him is a puzzle even to ME!), I’ll be happy to elaborate, but will probably need a Xanax afterwards! 
I’d reply, but that would further the transformation of this thread from a sharing of anecdotes to a debate. Feel free to relate your fundamentalist tale, though.
Where did I say I was offended? It just bothers me that (as above, in “religious” threads in general, not this one in particular), people who have no faith seem to be as zealous about “enlightening” religious people about the error of their ways as are the groups they’ve pilloried are zealous to convert -them-.
I came into the thread thinking it might include posts from people who changed religions (perhaps from Eastern to Western or vice-versa), rather than mostly “how I lost my faith entirely” stories. Sorry I came in and started a debate in a “Great Debate” thread. My mistake, apparently…