I’m not uncomfortable in the least. I feel great pity for those who turn their backs on tradition and family.
I was raised Catholic, and went to a Catholic elementary school. I think that until I was 18 I had missed one or two Sunday/Holy day of Obligation masses. I was conservative in a pretty conservative area. I was very involved in the church community. I must say though, that although I was very religious, I think I was not at all spiritual. I do not remember feeling much awe, and I didn’t pray much if at all outside of church.
I remained very devout throughout college, although I was in that way unique among my college friends. I went to college in southern California, and I think the very very liberal nature of the college church meant I didn’t feel odd as I became much more liberal minded myself. Oddly enough, in college I became a hard agnostic while still being quite devout. I even took quiet pride in believing without any rational basis.
When I graduated and moved to Texas, I joined my local parish and continued to faithfully attend mass. But it was different. I noticed two things that I had not seen at home or in college.
1)Anti-gay sentiment was not omnipresent, but was very jarring especially when I heard it from the pulpit. People who seemed to be otherwise caring individuals would say things that made me question their compassion and their ability to keep their noses out of people’s private lives.
2)I don’t think I heard a word a week about Satan before moving to Texas. Here, everyone had a testimonial about how Satan led them down the wrong path or seduced them away from God. I found it very distasteful, and it seemed to deny that they had any agency.
This abrupt change forced me to recognize that the priests and other church leaders were saying things that were not only disagreeable but false. Because the church makes such absolute claims I began to doubt everything else they were saying. There was a period of time in which I continued going to mass but skipped the eucharist, then I stopped entirely.
For a while I wished that I could believe, it was very unsettling to lose the whole supernatural safety net I had been raised with. The idea of my father’s death (8 months after my deconversion) being meaningless and permanent was quite a blow.
Now, I am at peace with my self. I don’t have a rock solid, logically validated sense of epistemology or moral code, but I am as “good” a person as I ever was by either my old or new standards. I have accepted the idea of “me” being a phenomenon of my brain rather than an enduring disembodied self, and I don’t worry much about not existing forever in any form at all.
I do miss the community, but I wouldn’t go back for that. My atheism still causes my mom some heartache, and there is some friction there but not what I feared.
Excuse me? My parents, and especially my mother, encouraged my pursuit of knowledge, and introduced me to the wonders of the adult section of the library and the American Museum of Natural History. I attribute my small success as a researcher to this wonderful upbringing. The very first story in my Hebrew School “history” book was about Abram doing an experiment to falsify the theory that the gods of Ur came down to eat the food left for them. Pretty nifty story for religious school, I think.
I too left religion because of the evidence, not because of any bad experiences with it.
Are you seriously saying that our parents and teachers should have crippled our reasoning ability in order to have us believe?
Not that I didn’t have some bad role models. My grandfather, when his oldest daughter wanted to marry a Catholic, welcomed him into the family, not disowned her as real religious people would have done. Such tolerance is no doubt intolerable to the truly religious.
Some families accept you even if you don’t believe exactly as they do.
And I feel great pity for those who are so set in their traditional ways, so unwilling to think for themselves and challenge anything their family has told them, that they blindly go through life dismissing anyone who tells them anything to the contrary.
So when people convert from their family’s traditional religion to Christianity you feel great pity for them?
You are quite fortunate, all families should be so understanding.
While I think my post was on topic, in retrospect I feel my comments are taking away from the intention of the post. Gonzo is looking stories from those with an assumed frame of reference, ie loss of faith. I’ll be moving on.
When I was in Jr High or so, I realized that the chances of me being born into the correct religion was incredibly small, that made be doubt my particular upbringing (protestant Christian). When I realized that what we called mythologies were simply religions that few if any people still believed, that led to me to think that they all are mythologies, even the ones people still believed in.
I went to public school and never served Mass as a kid.
When I went into service…for some reason, the religion bug bit…and bit hard. I ended up learning the servers part of the Mass…and served Mass for several different Chaplains from the end of 1955 until the end of 1957.
Ended up being quite good at the Latin…got lots of compliments from the priests…and from the Catholic prelate, Cardinal Somebody (cannot remember the name)…for whom I served as an acolyte during a special High Mass for American servicemen serving in Europe.
I was lucky enough to serve Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican…Captain (Fr) Kevin J. Heyburn, an Air Force Chaplain, received permission to offer Mass in a side chapel of the Basilica…and I served as altar boy. We later went to Castel Gondolfo and had a general audience with Pius XII, who I later found out was a boyhood friend of my maternal grandmother. He was Eugeno Pacelli at that time.
Discovered women in a big way in my early 20’s and decided a vocation as a priest would not be good for me or for the church.
At some point, I got to see the silliness of the whole thing…toyed with atheism, but my logic brought me to agnosticism.
I now think religion is a huge net negative for society and humanity…and would like to see non-theists join forces and actually make a concerted effort to eliminate religion. I am convinced that it cannot be reformed…and cannot keep its most destructive elements under control…so elimination is the only avenue I consider reasonable. I don’t want to see war or killings…but I would love to see somebody come up with a way to get religion out of our hair.
If there is a god out there…we oughta tell him/her/it to go to some other galaxy and let us handle our problems and morality in our own way.
I was nominally raised Catholic but never attended church. I realized as an early teenager that I was being asked to believe something with no evidence.
It wasn’t a bang, it was a gradual letting go of childish things.
My mother was a devout Catholic and up to my 12th year me and my older sister meekly followed and bought it all.
I remember the moment I lost faith.
I prayed very hard for the life of an aunt of mine, thet was slowly dying of skin cancer.
I prayed every day that God would not let her die. He did let her die…
That was the exact point I started started “the Questioning”, wondering why, asking questions and that, as we all know, is the end of true belief. I started noticing all the information that is out there, which confirms your initial feelings that some things just don’t fit.
I remember one day in front of church, I must have mentioned I didn’t think I believed any more and that I didn’t fancy going to church anymore. My sister was quite mad at me, “Who was I to question it all when so many people did believe?” That’s no argument, I thought and that closed the door for good.
More and more reading and thinking led me to the contradictions, to the notion that the bible was written by men, that it had a history, that stuff had been nicked from elsewhere etc, etc… that hardly anything fits at all. Finally I concluded it is all just made-up.
Made -up in the sense that it was not THE TRUTH, just stories.
Mine was on the ropes already when my daughter was born with a heart defect. I, also, prayed for her to get better, as did my entire family. When she died it was pretty devastating to me and I lost it for several years. Still haven’t ever really recovered…just learned to fake it really well. At any rate, it wasn’t that I prayed and she died that killed faith for me…it was my family, the priests and sisters, and well wishers telling me ‘it was Gods will’ or ‘she will be happy in the arms of Jesus and the saints’ and things like that. I was SO angry at it all that from that moment I decided that it didn’t really matter whether there was a god or not…I wanted nothing more to do with such a being regardless.
-XT
For those who describe “losing your faith” in childhood, how certain are you of your belief before your loss?
I ask, because I was going to add that I was another Catholic who was converted by grade school catechism classes. I vaguely remember a lot of it not making sense to me, but the thing that I remember thinking especially silly was the idea of heaven being an exclusive club that only catholics got into, and that a supposedly loving god would send perfectly kind and loving hindu and buddhist folk to hell for the simple fact that they do not believe in him.
But just before I started to type my answer, it came to me that I don’t know how much I ever believed in any of it. I mean, I’m pretty sure that when I was a really little kid I thought there was a point to saying my prayers, same as I thought santa knew who was good and bad. But I’m pretty sure that by the time I made my communion in 3d grade or so, I thought the ideas of “miracles” occurring here and there in response to various practices and the utterance of certain words was pretty silly.
This is incredibly insulting and naive to boot. My mom is one of the more religious people I know (raised Protestant, converted to Catholicism, and has raised a very upstanding Catholic family) and is also one of the better human beings that I know. In fact, probably the reason I still have a relatively high opinion of Catholics is because she was so honest and decent about it. When it became clear that I no longer considered myself religious (though it still has yet to be extensively discussed openly) she made it clear she supported my investigation into finding religious truth rather than get angry (although she does have faith that I will eventually come back around). So to suggest that I was “let down” by her because I lost my religion is nothing but insulting to the both of us.
In regards to the OP, the deconversion itself was pretty gradual. While I don’t think I ever “really” believed, I definitely wanted to and over the course of years ran into a few points that eventually led to me just discarding religion entirely.
- When I first understood the argument that if God didn’t need a reason to exist, we could just skip a step and say the universe doesn’t need a reason to exist
- When I realized most of the world is/was not Catholic and that I was inventing my own “subdogma” that would allow them to go to heaven if they were good people.
- When I actually started reading/listening to Dawkins and realized he is not a bitter old man who hates God and Christians.
Pretty sure. Getting bored during sermons, noticing sillyness in stories like Noahs Ark, the questioning all came after that first moment of realisation that God wasn’t the being of love He was held up to be if he could be so cruel and unfair.
You’re not the only one who feels that way but it’s pretty much impossible to measure.
One thing to keep in mind is that mankind has continued to progress and grow on a social basis even though we remain predominantly religious. Will mankind eventually outgrow all religion? I don’t know. Certainly not in the foreseeable future. I’m satisfied to see a move toward more religions understanding the difference between their beliefs and facts, traditions and truth, and to work in that direction.
I was raised super-Christian and my whole family except for me and my two sisters is still very religious. It never felt right to me, since I was tiny. I remember trying to ‘ask Jesus to come into my heart’ over and over again age 6 or 7 and I never felt any different - at the time it bothered me a lot that I couldn’t seem to have the same feelings about god that my family did. I had particular trouble with the concept of the afterlife. The Christian god is pretty much a manipulative maniac and this didn’t sit well with me - I would rather burn in eternal hellfire than kowtow to a guy who would torture me and other perfectly good people forever simply because they didn’t think he existed (while refusing to provide any real evidence!). No one could answer any of my questions and although I tried hard to reconcile Christianity with my actual life, the whole concept just started to seem silly. I was a bookworm, so I learned early there were other options, and being a fairly unspiritual person I was agnostic by the time I was a pre-teen, and fully an atheist by 15 or 16.
My family finds this pretty much unacceptable but I hardly talk to them.
My belief in god was more or less a default. Everyone I knew said God existed, (or didn’t dispute it) the papers said it, the President said it, so I just assumed it was true. Oddly, I was far more certain that the Davidic Empire actually existed than I was about God, since it seemed a lot more plausible. Finding out it almost certainly didn’t exist was more disturbing then figuring out God didn’t exist - and I had been an atheist for decades by this point. I accept it, but it is still disturbing. David was always my favorite Biblical figure.
Mine was a similar experience. Even though neither of my parents attended church and we didn’t as a family the talk of God and Jesus was around as if it was a matter of fact like the moon and the sun. Just out of high school I had a particularly powerful experience and understandably gravitated toward the religion of the good people closest to me. I think this happens to more than a few people. The sense of belonging and purpose in a group can be very powerful and influence how you examine and judge the details of belief.
Eventually I left that church because of personal failings of mine and carried around some unnecessary religious guilt for a long time. Years later I began to explore my spiritual beliefs again but this time with a different outlook and a commitment to the truth where ever it led.
At this point I’d say I am as close to agnosticism as I can get without actually claiming to be one. There may be a something more but I don’t believe in any god who wants to be obeyed, feared, or worshiped.
I converted after studying the Greek/Roman gods in school. It dawned on me that people worshiped Zeus as if he were a real god. I thought this was silly since there was only one real god. Then this little voice in the back of my head said, “What makes your god different than Zeus.” Lost all my faith slowly over about 6 months after that.