I don’t get the prayer thing either, and I was raised in the Baptist church. I don’t see how any of us can make things change or happen through prayers.
I also can’t see why anyone should have to suffer eternal torment for what they did wrong in the temporal world.
Baptists were enough to turn me away from organized religion.
I do like the daily readings at www.christianagnostic.com, but it’s more like Universalism.
I have been reading the De-Conversion site, too, and the person who asks “Why Doesn’t God Heal Amputees?” raises a number of interesting questions.
I have to go for common sense. Sorry, I don’t have a more complex answer.
Sweet Poontang! 
No, really. I was raised all churched up and didn’t really question it too much as a kid. When I got older, and found “the good stuff” and was made to feel guilty for enjoying my life, I began to really think about the teachings and question the nature of religion. I quickly realised it was all bollocks. None of it made any real sense to me. Just a way of placating those who have nothing (with the promise of “heaven”) and keeping them down and preventing them from murdering those who have everything and taking a little for themselves. Heap on lots of guilt, misery and time-wasting church attendance.
Screw that. I’m going skiing on Sunday morning. I can think for myself, thank you.
Raised in a Catholic family of the weekly mass variety. Went to a preschool called “HIS Kids”, CCD classes up through 8th grade, mom taught Sunday School, etc. I never put any thought into it. Seriously. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that the His in ‘His Kids’ was referring to Jesus or god (or both I suppose). It was easy enough to day dream during class*, study for 20 minutes, ace the test, get $10 bucks, and not rock the boat.
Then I went to Jesuit high school and started taking actual theology courses. In the first year they pretty much undermined everything I had ever been taught about religion. This was disconcerting. After all, the people I grew up with who claimed to be religious had little to no idea what they were being religious about.
I lost the faith completely on the second or third day of Sophomore year. We were being taught how to do an exegesis and were given two examples of biblical errors:
- John 6:16-21 - the whole Jesus walked on the sea story could have just as easily been translated to Jesus walked on the sea-shore
- The parting of the Red Sea was probably a mistranslation of the Sea of Reeds, which at some points is no more than waist deep.
*The ability to look interested at all times is probably the most useful thing I learned in all my religious schooling
Once I found secular answers to questions previously answered by religion I decided the secular versions were better.
I was born Jewish, but in the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to practice religion. My family learned how to be Jewish when they came here, when I was three years old. I was never really under the influence in my childhood.
Right now I can understand certain religious rituals that have some sort of mental benefit. Anything were you change your life for approval in the afterlife I think is pure quackery.
Around the same time as my grandma tried to introduce me to biblical stuff and even Sunday School, I was reading lots of books from the local library about Greek, Roman and Norse myths. I think that’s why I don’t treat one type of story as myth, and another type as some kind of historical and/or faith-based “truth”, just because one isn’t Christian and the other is. They all seemed the same to me – so, I failed to take in the Bible as anything more than just another book.
As my family weren’t active church-goers, that habit never took hold, either, so it was strike two for organised religion as far as my upbringing went.
Seeing how many so-called Christians don’t exactly “walk the walk” was strike three. Although I have Christian friends who are great people, and who do care about helping their neighbours, the community, being decent folk – but that really comes from who they are, not the creed they follow.
My initial doubt began in Catholic school in the first grade when we were taught that “pagan babies” that died without receiving the sacrament of baptism would go to “limbo”. I couldn’t understand how a god would be so cruel.
I attended religious services as a teen, then young adult with different friends, and got the basic message, “us vs. them” - "us (the believers who practiced whatever that particular faith required) were “saved” - “them” (the other BILLIONS in the world) were going to hell. I couldn’t understand praising a god who treated heaven like security at an exclusive club. The “VIPs” were allowed behind the velvet rope and the rest were condemned to look on.
Babies with AIDS or brain cancer - “god’s plan”. I can’t get with it.
I’m Catholic. I was raised Catholic, going to Catholic school all my life, and especially and most influentially to a really, really good Catholic (and Jesuit – it makes a difference) high school.
I am still a Catholic. I still go to Mass most Sundays. I believe the teachings of the Church, while at the same time recognizing that the Church has often, maybe even mostly, been run by venal, corrupt, ignorant, stupid people (I mean, just look at some of the Popes). But my real education about what the Church really teaches (as opposed to what many Catholics believe the Church teaches) kept me going.
By the way, the Church doesn’t tell us that non-Catholics are condemned to hell (there are even theologians and mystics who tell us that nobody goes to hell). Anyone who was taught that in the course of a Catholic education, at least this century, and certainly post-Vatican II, was and is misinformed.
I don’t know why I believe what I do. There’s no proof, I know. But I do. And I’m not stupid, superstitious, or poorly educated. I am capable of critical thinking. I know evolution is real (and the Catholic Church has no problem with evolution).
So. . . is there a set of circumstances that could cause me to stop believing? Perhaps. My sister, who is a highly intelligent and thoughtful woman, stopped believing in the Church, if not God, because of the abominable behavior of the Church hierarchy in the course of and the aftermath of the sex abuse scandal. My grandfather, an immigrant from a country where Catholicism was part of the very air he breathed, stopped believing, or at least observing, because the then-cardinal archbishop of New York (Spellman?) ordered seminarians out to break a gravediggers’ strike at Catholic cemeteries. Being a hard-core union man, he couldn’t accept this. I don’t think he stopped believing in God, but he certainly stopped believing that the Church had a monopoly on truth, and he never set foot in a church again.
Perhaps I’ll stop believing some day. I’ve seen people whom I love, admire and respect stop. Are they less intelligent, or were they less faithful, than me? I doubt it. Maybe they’re right. I admit the possibility.
Crawlspace – I too went to Jesuit high school, and had the same experience with actual theology courses. In my case, it had the opposite effect, though.
Where did you go to high school, if you don’t mind me asking? No problem, of course, if you don’t want to answer.
! Oh no, I wasn’t suggesting you did anything wrong I was agreeing with you and smiling about how nice it is to be able to do what you did once in a while.
Thanks for that; I think you’re one of the first to post that is still a believer. By the way, did you mean “more intelligent” in your 3rd to last sentence/question or did you mean to wonder if they might’ve been “less intelligent”?
I didn’t grow up with any religious conviction. When I was a little kid, I said prayers before bed, to some unfathomable concept called “god.” As I learned more about religion, I used to pray to this god to make my father stop beating me up. It never happened until I left home.
Being homeless for a long stretch, I had little option but to seek food and shelter from the religious organizations. I began to notice that, while the concept of what they were doing was noble and good, these christian people treated the poor with the utmost of contempt. They all seemed to have an air of superiority that’d make you gag. How could they reconcile this with what the bible teaches about being good and honorable and selfless? They were doing it for the tax breaks and the free stuff that people donated, the best of which went to the people in charge. The people who staffed the dorms at the Salvation Army hostels would steal the belongings of those who had the least amount of possessions of anyone in the world, if you left them sitting anywhere long enough to turn your back. And they’d laugh about it.
I was brought before a SA captain because I didn’t seem to be getting it, this religious indoctrination I was supposed to suffer for the privilege of sleeping with bums. I questioned him on these observations, and asked some extremely pointed questions about how they could preach one thing and do the opposite; how they could treat people like they did and still look at themselves in the mirror. He got so red-faced and flustered, he threw me out of his office. That’s when I decided it was a sham. I mean, I was already leaning in that direction anyway; his display clinched it for me.
I’ve come across numerous people personally, but read about many more who say that god talks to them. Well, no god ever talked to me, or anyone I knew. There’s a name for that in the DSM IV, and you get medication for it, and maybe a stretch in the loony bin. What’s more baffling is, that a lot of the people who say this are in charge of some heavy-duty stuff. Stuff that affects the outcomes of the lives of millions.
There’s all the rest of it, which people here have articulated so well. Why would god allow such suffering and calamity? Why would you pray to someone who can’t stop the bad things in the world from happening? Why would you give your life to some cause that has been killing others in the name of its perpetuity (convert or die) for centuries? How can there be only one god, if there are so many religions that have their own idea of what or who god is? How can any religion be the right one, and all the others be wrong? It doesn’t make a grain of sense to me.
Now you’ve got people who want to teach children that the earth is a couple thousand years old, and that dinosaur bones were “Jesus horses.” Is there a bigger load of bullshit in existence? I mean, come on. How can total ignorance wash over a whole section of the populace like that? I’m supposed to trust people whose minds work like this? Give me a freakin’ break.
I’ve never felt it. I don’t feel it now. I’m reasonably certain that I never will.
It just stopped making sense. It’s like i spent my whole life believing 2 + 2 equals 5. Not only did I believe it, I let it dictate my life. I paid my bills, went shopping, everything, believing that 2+2 equals 5. Then one day, while balancing my checkbook, I realized the error in my math. Once I realized my mistake, I laughed and fixed it, feeling foolish for believing something that just doesn’t make sense. That’s all. God stopped making sense to me, and I couldn’t figure out why I ever believed in the first place.
It is rather stupefying, looking back, isn’t it? I felt the same.
What are the chances of mankind being developed in the known universe? We have so many to be grateful of and we directed that gratefulness towards something. Not a being, not anything we can comprehend, we simply call it God.
Religions attempt to teach us about God, but failed miserably because humans corrupted the teachings for their own agenda. I believe there is a true religion (I prefer the term: belief system) for each and everyone of us, and it wont be preached by others, we simply have to find it ourselves. It’s simply because we need to have a purpose so that we don’t live in vain. From what I’ve learned, our purpose is simply to “experience the good without causing any suffering”.
I haven’t left my religion.
Thanks for your post.
So what, if anything, would cause you to stop believing as you do? To believe, for example, that we do live in vain and we have no purpose?
God stopped making sense to me, and I couldn’t figure out why I ever believed in the first place.
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I know I’m just going to discredit myself by defending ‘God’ here. Consider this, how lucky are mankind to have survived long enough to be able to evolve a brain that could start a debate about something like God. The chance that we exists is one in a quadrillion or something. The chance we sustained is even slimmer. To me it’s mind boggling. We’ve been so lucky and we haven’t ran out of luck yet.
Some of our good lucks: We have the moon that keeps the earth in good orbit. The distance of earth to the sun. Intelligent mankind haven’t been wiped out by asteroid. The earth’s crust move along with the earth’s center with the help of mountains/volcanoes. The dinosaur extinct and let the intelligent man inherit the earth. The solar system haven’t collided with another star system.
Even if you don’t believe in God, at least you have to believe that we are so goddamn lucky.
Even if I do acknowledge we are “goddamn lucky” what does that have to do with God? And what if you just think we’re lucky because this is the only existence we know? What if things had been slightly different, and we were all born with super-strength and the power to move things with our minds? What if we were somehow reptilian in nature with whatever benefits that meant? And if we had never existed at all, then we wouldn’t regret not existing, so it wouldn’t make a difference either way.
It’s an argument based on hindsight, and not one I find terribly compelling.
It’s hard to come up with such example, I’ll try.
Even if the whole mankind existence is just a natural phenomenon, my belief that we should live to ‘experience good without causing suffering (to us and other)’ is just as valid. So it doesn’t matter if God exists or not. Lessening suffering is still a purpose of life. Those against such purpose will cause suffering towards their fellow man. Okay, that didn’t exactly answer your question… I’m sorry I can’t think of any. I’ll post if I could came up with something.
Thanks for being open-minded to my posts.
Thanks for participating. I agree that experiencing the good and not causing suffering seems like a valid perspective and it doesn’t matter if god exists as far as that’s concerned. The trouble comes, I think, when some people define “the good” in a way that causes suffering in other people whether directly or indirectly.
In practice, we probably live our lives pretty similarly. 