I think I just outgrew it. As I got older, it just seemed like a fairy tale, only one that made people do dreadful things to each other.
The Bible did it for me, or, more specifically, reading the introduction to the Bibles we had stored in the English book room in High School, which outlined current theories on who really wrote the Bible. Before that I pretty much had assumed it was Moses, as I was taught in Hebrew School. After the insight I got from reading the true story, the whole thing pretty much fell apart.
I think that I grew up rejecting a lot of what others accepted (Christianity) helped, since it made it clear that what the majority of people said about religion didn’t have to be true.
I later read the whole Bible, with an open and logical mind, and that clinched the deal.
I agree with Dex that there is something satisfying and comforting in the traditions and prayers I grew up with. There just isn’t any God behind it.
Many reasons. Looking at the effects religious people have on the world. Looking at the effects religion has on the religious. Actually reading the Bible and seeing how incoherent and ignorant and outright evil it is. Seeing how empty religion is of actual information. Looking at the world and seeing the evils caused by religion massively outweighing the good, by orders of magnitude. Watching religion systematically oppose what I consider good. Watching so many of the religious oppose any form of happiness save malice. And so on.
For me, it took going to college and reading Nietzsche, and realizing not everybody accepted God as a given… hell, I was even surprised to learn that Christianity wasn’t even the most dominant religion in the world. I found it impossible to judge these other people that were equally as fanatical about their own faith… thus I realized the whole ‘‘certainty’’ part of it was really kind of silly. I feel more rational now that I admit I have no idea what’s going on or why we’re here.
[QUOTE=jayjay]
I was raised Catholic (and that’s go-to-church-every-week/go-to-Catholic-school Catholic, not Christmas-and-Easter Catholic).
It’s going to sound silly, but the thing that first started me away from it was masturbation. Specifically, that the Church actually considered that it had the power to tell people not to do it. Also the idea that the Church could keep two people who love each other from marrying (straight people, at that!) because of different religions, or infertility. It just inflamed me that anyone would allow an outside entity to dictate to them about that sort of thing. That was the thing that actually caused my break from the Church.
I always have had a problem with authority…
[/QUOTE]
Doesn’t sound silly to me; I think ‘rubber meets the road’ types of incidents/experiences like masturbation are often the place where the church gets rejected. When something taught is suddenly shown to be wildly at odds with common sense or seemingly based on nothing credible. I can see that.
[QUOTE=Baldwin]
I don’t remember a specific moment when, as Michael Scott might say, “I had an epiphery.” But by age ten I found I had no religious beliefs. I think it just goes against my nature. There are lots of things that would be comforting to believe in, but I just can’t without any evidence. So maybe a lot of our discussions on this topic come down to basic personality differences.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve wondered that as well about personality differences. For me, some aspects of my expressed personality were literally different when I was a believer. Maybe to some degree what’s changing is the personality (so to speak; I actually thing core personality traits don’t change much but let’s use the term ‘personality’ for lack of a better term) and that’s why debates get so heated.
As a believer, I was devout, dogmatic, and certain of black/white morality. Now, I’m open-minded, relativistic, and uncertain about most everything. This feels true. The earlier me lacked metacognition about those held beliefs, I never looked at myself.
[QUOTE=DrFidelius]
Organized religion seemed to be mostly for the benefit of the organizers.
[/QUOTE]
Ah, yes. The good ol’ cynical view. 
Nonetheless often true, however. Thanks for the answer.
[QUOTE=HazelNutCoffee]
Me, too.
I haven’t exactly rejected my faith, but I’m no longer a devout Catholic. As a child my biggest problem with the faith was the idea that people who didn’t believe in God would not go to heaven. Even at that age the idea seemed incredibly petty. Why wouldn’t a just God judge us by our acts, rather than whether we thought He was real or not? As I grew older, I could never reconcile the idea of an afterlife with the idea that we are born and die only once. Some people are born in terrible situations; some are born with things handed to them on a silver platter. The child who grows up to be a drug addict might have grown up to be someone different, given the right circumstances. I just think it’s horribly unfair to condemn someone to eternal suffering based on less than a century of living. Now, as an adult, this is all compounded by my disagreement with a lot of the Vatican’s policies on numerous issues (abortion, homosexuality, masturbation, celibacy, etc).
I’ll still answer “Catholic” if questioned about my religion, but in reality I lean heavily towards agnostic.
[/QUOTE]
In answering “Catholic” when asked, you think that would then be more of a ‘cultural’ identification for you than an ideological one then?
[QUOTE=want2know]
I was also raised Catholic and attended Catholic school straight through high school.
I originally rejected Catholicism for a variety of reasons–the Church’s stand on birth control, the infallibility of the Pope, their view that sex is a sin unless engaged in for procreation (and then only by married couples), etc.
But the day I completely lost any belief in a supreme being is still etched in my mind. About 20 or so years ago, I read a news story about a church group returning from a day trip to an amusement park. A drunk driver slammed into their bus, causing an explosion and fire that consumed almost all the passengers (mostly children).
These were people who had dedicated their lives to worshiping God and Jesus Christ, only to die in the most excruciatingly painful way possible. At that point, it became clear to me that if such a horrible thing could happen to God’s most fervent disciples, then obviously such a being could be neither omnipresent nor omniscient, to say nothing of all-powerful. And if he is none of those things, then surely he doesn’t deserve the dedication and fealty demanded by him. Rather than believe that such a malevolent being could exist, I came to the conclusion that he surely must not exist, and that things happen randomly with no “plan” at all.
I know I will probably receive many responses about “questioning God”, “God’s plan”, “free will”, and so forth. Sorry, I can’t accept any of that.
[/QUOTE]
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing it. It’s interesting that you felt at the time that logically you’d have to believe in a malevolent god at that point after that incident – and so, since that didn’t seem possible/reasonable/attractive, you went for no belief instead. I think many people probably arrive at their rejection of belief that way. It’s almost an epiphany of sorts, isn’t it?
[QUOTE=Fear Itself]
I think I just outgrew it. As I got older, it just seemed like a fairy tale, only one that made people do dreadful things to each other.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, that was something that occurred to me later – to think of other such tales like Santa Claus and so forth and if that’s a fairy tale then why not religion just a more sophisticated, effective fairy tale? Religion ended up seeming like childish, wishful thinking. Something adorable about it and innocent but just basically a parable.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
The Bible did it for me, or, more specifically, reading the introduction to the Bibles we had stored in the English book room in High School, which outlined current theories on who really wrote the Bible. Before that I pretty much had assumed it was Moses, as I was taught in Hebrew School. After the insight I got from reading the true story, the whole thing pretty much fell apart.
I think that I grew up rejecting a lot of what others accepted (Christianity) helped, since it made it clear that what the majority of people said about religion didn’t have to be true.
I later read the whole Bible, with an open and logical mind, and that clinched the deal.
I agree with Dex that there is something satisfying and comforting in the traditions and prayers I grew up with. There just isn’t any God behind it.
[/QUOTE]
I’ll third Dex’s feeling in that regard. My religion had a Sabbath on the seventh day and I still can feel real peace by acting as if Friday is the beginning of the holy day and lighting candles and not working, relaxing, etc. But it’s just a ritual without any specific supernatural to it and it can soothe my mind and comfort me but so does meditation and other types of exercises. It doesn’t require God, at least not a specific one which is why I’m agnostic. To be otherwise seems almost arrogant to me.
[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
For me, it took going to college and reading Nietzsche, and realizing not everybody accepted God as a given… hell, I was even surprised to learn that Christianity wasn’t even the most dominant religion in the world. I found it impossible to judge these other people that were equally as fanatical about their own faith… thus I realized the whole ‘‘certainty’’ part of it was really kind of silly. I feel more rational now that I admit I have no idea what’s going on or why we’re here.
[/QUOTE]
Same here; I’m embarrassed to realize how naive I was.
[QUOTE=Dinsdale]
I was baptized and raised catholic, attended catechism, and was confirmed.
[/quote]
Me, too, except I also went to Catholic Schools for most of grade school. Total of 6 years in Catholic Schools, including one year of HS.
Yeah, that was pretty much my experience. Starting in 4th/5th grade, what the nuns were telling us just didn’t seem fair. And if God wasn’t fair, then he wasn’t “good”. There was just so many other inconsistencies, too. And when I looked at other religions, I saw pretty much the same thing.
I was about 14 when it finally hit me that I just didn’t believe in God. Ironically, it was one of my (lay) teachers at the Catholic HS I went to (just one year of Catholic HS, the rest public) who got me thinking about it. He was actually very helpful (ie, non-judgemental) about it. Looking back, I think it’s quite possible that he was a non-believer, too, and just took the job because it might have paid better or something.
As I started studying science in college, it became abundantly clear that God was
just a superfluous layer we added on as we tried to understand the universe. At this point, the only definition of “God” that I can accept is:
- God = The entire universe
- God = That which is unknowable and imperceivable by humans.
Number 1 is pretty meaningless, since it just amounts to renaming of the “the universe”. Number 2 is, in effect, the same thing as there being no God. If we can’t perceive or know God, then how does that differ from there being no God?
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Me, too, except I also went to Catholic Schools for most of grade school. Total of 6 years in Catholic Schools, including one year of HS.
Yeah, that was pretty much my experience. Starting in 4th/5th grade, what the nuns were telling us just didn’t seem fair. And if God wasn’t fair, then he wasn’t “good”. There was just so many other inconsistencies, too. And when I looked at other religions, I saw pretty much the same thing.
I was about 14 when it finally hit me that I just didn’t believe in God. Ironically, it was one of my (lay) teachers at the Catholic HS I went to (just one year of Catholic HS, the rest public) who got me thinking about it. He was actually very helpful (ie, non-judgemental) about it. Looking back, I think it’s quite possible that he was a non-believer, too, and just took the job because it might have paid better or something.
As I started studying science in college, it became abundantly clear that God was
just a superfluous layer we added on as we tried to understand the universe. At this point, the only definition of “God” that I can accept is:
- God = The entire universe
- God = That which is unknowable and imperceivable by humans.
Number 1 is pretty meaningless, since it just amounts to renaming of the “the universe”. Number 2 is, in effect, the same thing as there being no God. If we can’t perceive or know God, then how does that differ from there being no God?
[/QUOTE]
I agree. As for #2, I’d only tweak it to indicate a difference between being certain there is no god, and simply leaving it an unknown (for me). As for “unknowable” or “imperceivable” I personally allow for the possibility that maybe there is a god and he is knowable and perceivable but just not by me, at the present. Maybe others know and perceive it. I don’t know. Hence, I’m an agnostic. I can’t even assert for sure that there is no god, but I know that to me it starts to get weird when I see people/religions trying to ‘specify’ the notion. It seems the most honest to simply leave it the way you have. The universe, parts unknown (and maybe actually even unknowable to boot).
My parents took me to Church (English Protestant Congregationalist) every week. (They weren’t fanatical - I think the social side mattered as much as anything.)
I attended Sunday School and even won the Religion prize at school.
But the complete lack of evidence, plus the various contradictions (e.g. Judaism says Jesus is not God; why does a loving God let so much pain happen to us?) bothered me.
When I was 15 I asked my Sunday School teacher (a decent, honest man) about proof of God. he said there wasn’t any, but that you had to make your own mind up.
So I did!
Rejecting God on current evidence has never worried me since.
(I even had the pleasure of refuting a fundamentalist who frightened the pupils at my School with talk of eternal damnation. He didn’t know the Gospels were written decades after the event, for example.)
[QUOTE=glee]
My parents took me to Church (English Protestant Congregationalist) every week. (They weren’t fanatical - I think the social side mattered as much as anything.)
I attended Sunday School and even won the Religion prize at school.
But the complete lack of evidence, plus the various contradictions (e.g. Judaism says Jesus is not God; why does a loving God let so much pain happen to us?) bothered me.
When I was 15 I asked my Sunday School teacher (a decent, honest man) about proof of God. he said there wasn’t any, but that you had to make your own mind up.
So I did!
Rejecting God on current evidence has never worried me since.
(I even had the pleasure of refuting a fundamentalist who frightened the pupils at my School with talk of eternal damnation. He didn’t know the Gospels were written decades after the event, for example.)
[/QUOTE]
It is a little delight to be able to enlighten now and then, isn’t it? 
[QUOTE=9thFloor]
It is a little delight to be able to enlighten now and then, isn’t it?
[/QUOTE]
Your use of that smiley suggests you think I did something wrong. 
I was able to comfort crying pupils from frightening ignorance, so I have nothing to apologise for.
My father’s family was catholic, mother’s was methodist, though I was baptized lutheran. Not sure how that came about, too young to remember. I grew up with a couple of different viewpoints, and the general understanding that faith was good, go to any church you want. So I did. None of them really fit, and I never felt comfortable. Too many contradictions, depending on where you stood.
My last attempt at organized religion was as a young teen. I was attending a baptist church in town, I had been introduced through a school friend who lived next door to the minister and his wife. She picked us up every Sunday, we went to Sunday school, (more to help with the younger children) and then attended the 10:00 service.
I lasted about 3 months until the day, on the way to church, the minister’s wife said some truly unkind things about a mormon family that lived in our area. One of their kids was in my grade (7th grade IIRC), though not my class, and I just remember thinking to myself, “I know this kid, he’s just perfectly normal. Plays sports, isn’t overly popular or snobby, isn’t a bully, he’s just another kid from the neighborhood. And this woman is convinced he and his entire family are going to Hell for believing something different than her.” Talk about two faced…
I didn’t set foot in that church that day, and I walked all the way home, close to 4 miles.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not smearing the baptist faith, it was one small-minded woman that was the proverbial last straw for me.
20 some years later… I don’t label myself an atheist, nor do I believe in any faith or higher power. If you want to believe, as long as you don’t force it on me, I’m happy that you’re happy.
I don’t know whatever became of the minister’s wife. I can pity her, but I can also be thankfull that she opened my eyes.
[QUOTE=9thFloor]
In answering “Catholic” when asked, you think that would then be more of a ‘cultural’ identification for you than an ideological one then?
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I suppose. In a lot of ways my Catholic upbringing is as much a part of who I am as my Korean heritage. I disagree with a lot of Korean traditional beliefs and I wouldn’t move back there if you paid me, but if someone asks me where I’m from I’ll still say Korea. I suppose that’s similar to how I feel about Catholicism.
Polls belong in IMHO, even polls about religion.
With no debate to keep it in GD, I see a wonderful future for this thread among the humble opinons of the Teeming Millions.
[ /Modding ]