I believe in God, but my belief in religion has eroded away gradually over the years. As I’ve grown and become both more intellectually mature and independent, the ideas behind the religion concept–particularly Christianity–have posed major stumbling blocks for me. Some of these ideas:
Mankind is born naked and illiterate–a complete blank slate. So what does God do? Make our salvation from eternal hellfire dependent on us believing in people and things that can only be known (directly or indirectly) through a book called the Bible. This has never clicked with my sense of justice, goodness, and simplicity.
God is omnipotent and omnipresent and most importantly good, and yet evil exists. We are to accept that the devil sets traps for us and poisons our world with badness, and sometimes, if it is His will, He will intervene and save us from the wickedness. But for some reason, He chooses not to do away with the devil altogether. So He not only created evil, but keeps evil alive. But God is to be seen as the epitome of good. Why so much emphasis on God is Good?
Hell. A place of eternal suffering. Eternal. My objection to it not only involves those who get sent to hell, but also those who make it to heaven and will live knowing that less blessed loved ones are suffering eternally. Who’s idea of heaven is that? I can not accept that.
Christianity requires the belief of layers upon layers of “facts” that have to be taken on 100% faith, starting with the Bible’s divine origins. When I hear people say it’s a simple religion, although I understand where they’re coming from, it bothers me. It’s not simple at all, because a package deal of complicated beliefs are required to subscribe to the Christian faith in totality. Belief that God is this way and not that way, belief in the concept of original sin, belief in Jesus’ divinity, belief in all the lore surrounding his birth, belief that the people involved in composing the Bible were of pure motives and weren’t under the influence of culture, politics, and their own personal agendas.
You have to sift through a lot of beliefs before you get down to what I can consider the practical “what are we supposed to be doing here” stuff. And while I think the practical stuff is important and I believe the world would be a better place if everyone tried to follow it, there’s nothing really so elusive about the basics of what Jesus’ taught that would require one to be a Christian to get it.
So in sum, I rejected religion because I found it unnecessary, confusing, and needlessly complicated.
I was a pretty bright and devious kid, and being a con at heart I recognized one when I saw one. The Catholic church I was raised in seemed to be more of a fear based political organization than an institution of peace and love and the people who actually went to church seemed more interested in a fashion show of wealth and ugly pants than anything else. They even out and out asked for money right in the middle of the service, the cheeky bastards, which is the best con of all.
The after school programs like CCD and the like seemed a way to let the most horribly busybody types inject themselves arbitrarily into the lives of whomever they chose in ways that public school teachers wouldn’t ever dream of. The whole thing was an enormous falsehood based more on what I *saw * as hate, fear, and intolerance than what I understood as love. My parents raised me with the concepts of love, fairness, acceptance and tolerance. I’ve rarely, if ever, seen these concepts demonstrated by a religious group in the way that my mother taught them to me. Frauds, the whole lot of them.
I stopped believing in the Christian God (and, hence, stopped self-identifying as a Christian) when I realized that, if I actually met God, I would be very hard-pressed not to try to put boot to ass. I refuse to worship any creature I don’t think I could get along with for fifteen minutes, no matter how much he/it/they may bluster about that worship being the only path to salvation.
It felt weirdly like realizing that my Dad was a human being, and that I could disagree with him without being wrong. That alone tells me something about the kind of relationship I had with the religion of my upbringing.
I have many many reasons, but I will try to keep this as short and to the point as possible.
For starters, I’m comfortable with saying “I don’t know”. Just because science hasn’t answered the question of how we got here, beyond the shadow of a doubt yet, doesn’t mean “god did it”. The story of genesis, and all the other stories in the old testament were there for a few reasons. Some of them are there to teach lessons of morality (which is certainly a good thing), others, like Genesis, are there to explain an unknown phenomenon. Keep in mind, these stories were written well before humans even knew the world was round, and before anyone had ever dreamt of carbon dating, so it was perfectly acceptable that the world was only 5,000 years old. They had absolutely NO scientific basis for this story.
Every religion believes they are the one true religion. Most of the division in religion is geographic. If you grow up in China, you might be a Buddhist, if you grow up in NA or Europe, you might be a catholic or some other branch of Christianity, if you grow up in the Middle East… well, you’re a Muslim, or you die. So for every religion to have something possibly similar, but mostly different made up to explain how they think things came to be, and for everyone to believe it so strongly, requires great amounts of brainwashing. You believe it because you’re taught it from a young age, and that everyone else is wrong. It’s a lack of independant thinking. I for one, reject the idea of sacrificing independent thought and simply accepting what was (attempted) to be brainwashed into me, which, by the way, was catholicism.
Religion is a direct cause of many major wars, and to the over population of our planet. Now, before you go and say “well that’s simply ignorant, because war kills people, and killing people decreases population!”, I will explain. Many religions believe it is their god given responsibility to have as many children as possible. Other religions don’t believe in birth control because it is “spilling the seed”. Well guess what? That’s why you have 19 children, and they will each have 10-20 children themselves. Gee, I wonder why world population is growing so fast…
Now you have all these extremist religious people raising their 20 children to be the same way, and there are so many children that you can’t possibly teach them that religion is ok, but must be practiced in a non-violent context. (See: Bin Laden, 1 of what? 30 kids in his family?)… So now what we’re seeing is the violent, extremist relgious people out in the middle east growing in numbers, and overpopulating their living space. If you put too many rats in one cage, they kill each other. That is what is happening. Instead of having 20 kids, and having war control the population (war is not quite enough population control btw), why not just accept that rejecting birth control because your religion says it’s wrong, is a very stupid thing? If we each have 0-4 children instead, then world population growth stabilizes. So we’re pretty much seeing world wars, global warming, and horrible horrible violence all over the world in other forms because of 1 thing: extremist religion. Thanks a lot, religion (jerk.).
I recently saw these three videos, which seem to be a pretty good theory on how religions started in the first place (these are fascinating to watch):
I plan to watch these again in the near future to gain a better understanding of what they’re saying, and so that I can do some digging to see if I can successfully play devil’s advocate on them.
My first doubts are crystal clear in my mind. I was in my first day of Presbyterian Sunday school at about age seven or eight, and looking at the pictures on the walls. They were near ceiling height and made a progression around the room. I only remember two of them, near the end. One was labeled “Jesus”, and had a picture of a kindly-looking gent with a beard. The next one was labeled “God” and was a blank piece of white paper. Looking back, it’s apparent that the attempt was being made to say “God is unknowable”. But to my young mind, it equated to something like “we worship nothing”. Throughout the class, my eyes kept being drawn to that blank frame, as I struggled to come to terms with it, without success.
Later in life, the obvious hypocrisy, greed, exclusion, prejudice, and self-righteousness, along with a close up and personal acquaintance with the 3rd world, ruled out my ever being associated with any of the organized churches. I’ve known some good people who work in the name of their particular church, but then there is also the minister that lives a half-block from me in a $500K house; both he and his wife drive Mercedes/Lexus cars and his son drives an Escalade. He ministers to the poorest area in the city.
One last thing: There are much better theories that science has come up with than “God did it”. Are they correct? Maybe so, maybe not, or maybe they’re close, but not quite there yet. They make a hell of a lot more sense than “some dude did it in 6 days” though, I’ll tell ya that much. Scientists even have a pretty decent theory on how life begins (underwater hot vents), and if you’re not born and raised religious, you’re probably going to reject the idea. If religion didn’t ever exist, you would accept their theories as borderline factual.
It took being 13 and a devout believer who had questions that no one could/would answer. It took nearly 7 years of research trying to find the answers to those questions, and in so doing, stumbling over the basic, fundamental truth that religion is a lie from start to finish.
It seemed like as I learned more, my concept of God would continually diminish. It’s like I was always saying “The Bible is true… except that part… and that… and that… and that…”
People would say that some of the stories weren’t meant to be taken literally, and were instead supposed to be metaphorical or poetic, and I would accept that because it was what I wanted to hear, but then I realized that much of the Bible isn’t even what I would consider particularly good metaphor. I didn’t think the creation story was an accurate account of events, nor did it contain any profound insights into the human condition, or anything that I found artful or compelling. And most of the Bible is like that. Sure, there are a few good tidbits here and there, but none of them are exclusive to Christianity. I guess I just have pretty high standards for what I would be willing to call “The Word of God”.
So then I considered myself an agnostic for a while, but then realized that I was just clinging to the scraps of my previous religion, and have become an atheist.
Very beautifully written and I commend him for the fact that the rituals sustain him in the absence of belief. I am just the opposite in that regard. The rituals mostly bore me, although I do participate in a few of them (seders, my wife lights Chanuka candles, and I join her in fasting on Yom Kippur mostly out of solidarity, to prove to myself I can do it, and I just cannot glom food when she is fasting).
As for belief in god, no that is beyond me. I cannot recall a time, ever, even when studying for Bar Mitzvah, that I had any belief in god. Or gods, for that matter. I recognize that it sustains some people, but not me.
I was raised Catholic, went to church every Sunday at the insistence of my parents. I never really had that much faith, I just kind of went along with it because it’s what I was supposed to do.
It wasn’t until high school that I started to realize why. It just didn’t make any sense. You had all of these ‘truths’ that were held up as indiputable, but every single person you talked to gave a completely different answer about them. I realized one day talking to a priest that he didn’t actually know anything. All the stuff he’d studied, all the stuff he was telling me, everything I’d learned was just made up. People believed it, but didn’t know any of it. They were arguing over what color hat god wore, but didn’t even know if god was real. I remember feeling sorry for him, and suddenly seeing the Catholic church as a huge house of cards. It wasn’t really bad, I wasn’t losing anything, it was more likely realizing why I felt this way all along.
In college I did a lot of reading. Read about all kinds of religions. Talked to wiccans, and muslims, and shintoists, and buddhists, and jews, and even a sikh. Read the bible from cover to cover. All it did was confirm what I thought: religion, religious belief in general, was empty. Looking around the world at what religion has done, and what it is now, I felt really alone. It took a while to find other people who were athiests.
I didn’t tell my parents for a long time, and my mother took it the way I predicted: badly. To this day she still tries to convince me to pray or go to church.
This is sort of how I feel, but not exactly. It’s obviously hard to explain. I was raised Baptist, but when I got out into the world a bit, and read/heard/saw a bit more of what others believe, and learned a bit of critical thinking skills (which really weren’t terribly valued or taught in my public high-school) I just…fell away…from religion. Not necessarily away from a belief in a Presence or Power, but definitely from religion. Some days I doubt the Presence or Power, some days I feel that it’s there. I always hope that it’s there, as I’d really like to believe this isn’t all there is. But I wouldn’t be surprised (duh! I wouldn’t exist to BE surprised!) to find that it was.
I wouldn’t exist to BE surprised!) to find that it was.