fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2286 ]

[ SECRET POST #2286 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2286 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If you've abandoned your faith for whatever reason, why? What caused that?

I was bullied really badly so I figured that god didn't exist because he would never let me suffer like this if he did.

I was 8 I think

I was raised in a fairly religious environment - not, like, aggressively so, not evangelically so, but very much an environment where religion was taken for granted - predominantly Roman Catholic - so I just kind of assumed that there had to be some sort of god. Then in high school, during religion class, we did a thing where every day, one or two students would go and say what their religious beliefs were - what kind of god they believed in, what sense they had of religion. And I was one of the last in the class. And people would go through and explain their concept of god, and every time, I would think, "No, that doesn't seem right, I don't believe in that." And by the time it got to me, we had gotten through pretty much every alternative possible, and I realized that I just didn't believe in God. And that's what I said in my presentation.

That's... a pretty badass thing to do in a catholic school religion class. Good for you.

No, not really. It was a very, very liberal catholic school. Jesuits, and all that. In fact, I wasn't even the first one to do it - as it happened, the guy who went right before me said the same thing. And his mother worked for the school - in the religion department as it happened.

I went to university and read philosophy. It quickly became apparent to me that even the most sophisticated arguments for god relied on faith I'd never experienced. I wad raised Catholic and to me God had always been somebody in your head all of the time watching you, whom you should beg for good things from, but not rely on. Getting rid of the God/prayer thoughts was the most freeing experience of my life. Still working on some of the shame/guilt subroutines, but at least now I don't live in fear of even thinking the wrong thoughts.

I wouldn't say I abandoned it. My sense of religion was always very faint, so it's more like I stopped trying to pretend I believed at all. My immediate family was raised Chatolic, but my parents, outside of telling me there was a god and what he stood for, never really tried to force me into being religious. I prayed but we didn't usually go to church and I skipped my first communion out of pure, unadulterated laziness on my mom's and I's parts. We didn't want to take/take me to classes.

As I grew older I started to rationalize it more, and the more I thought about it, I could not believe that a concept so questionable as a god was responsible for creating the universe. God (gods, in general) seemed too convenient to me; too centered on human needs and wants to be responsible for something that is billions of years old and so vast we can't ever be sure what's actually out there. Too easy an explanation for creation and purpose. At first I said I was Agnostic, but when I realized that I was saying it "just in case" of the consequences of not believing, I didn't find it fair that something that's supposed to be merciful only keeps my faithfulness because of the threat of punishment.

As a child, I've been taught my whole life that God loves me and angels are protecting me. When I turned 8, my mother remarried and her husband turned out to be a violent drunk. The first time he got drunk and beat my mother and me, I kneeled in a corner and prayed to God for help. But nothing happened. The next 10 years of my life had been hell on earth and I never got anything from God, not even the smallest sign that he can hear my prayers and gives a damn. Then, when I reached adulthood, I finally moved out. And it was over. I was finally safe. But the man who ruined my life is still living comfortably and he will continue to live this way for the rest of his life, while I suffer from so many mental problems that I will never be capable of trusting another human being.

Realizing this is what made me understand that it doesn't really matter if God exists or not, because ultimately I can only count on myself. And if he exists and all this time he had the power to help me but refused to do so, then fuck him.

ex-Christian here.

Probably due to a mix of adolescence, coming to terms with gender dysphoria and sexuality, connotations with abusive father, and the part where placing your life and choices in the hands of some invisible fairy that might listen is ass-backwards stupid. Also, knowing that I'm basically considered worthless due to race and a bunch of other noise just made me bitter about the whole thing.

I just sort of went through the motions when I was a kid being raised Catholic. My parents sent me to Catholic high school after being in public school until then, which made me really look into and study my religion. After getting really gung-ho about it for about a year and being miserable about it, I started questioning dogmas and by freshman year of college, whatever belief I had was gone.

Church was boring. I couldn't keep focus. After I graduated high school and moved out I just went "fuck it" and never went to church on a regular basis again. At some point I just stopped believing.

I think I've been to like maybe 10 services since I graduated high school. Now the whole idea of going to church and going through all the motions is just weird to me.

A mix of seeing the harm it did to my friends and family, of being in a sect that believed in the Literal Truth of the Bible whilst being heavily interested in the sciences myself, and just coming to the conclusion that there's no evidence for any kind of God, and even if Bible!God did exist, I would not worship him anyway - he's a murderous tyrant, more petty and flawed than many human leaders. Just holding him to the same standard I do a judge or a supervisor, he'd fail. So... not so much interested in that anymore, really.

I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school, and always just kind of went along with it. In middle and high school there were some things I strongly disagreed with the Church on--birth control and homosexuality (and this was before I even realized that I'm queer myself) but I still bought into the whole god thing, and found the traditions comforting as well.

College introduced me to people and ways of thinking that I hadn't been exposed to before (yay feminism!), and I gradually started realizing that there was more wrong with the Church than I'd thought. I distanced myself from it more and more until by the time I graduated I was just done with the whole thing. At this point I think there may or may not be a god, but religion does more harm than good.

I never actually had any faith. It all seemed kind of boring and pointless as a kid, and mean, and hypocritical and i just...didn't feel it. Seemed like a waste of time to pretend, so i just stopped when i was...in my early teens, i guess. But i hadn't ever really had any notion that any of it was 'real' as a kid.

I never believed, not even as a little kid. My earliest memories of church are sitting there thinking, "LOL, seriously?" I put on a good show of going through the motions because I realized it made the adults happy and that made my life easier, but once I was off on my own, I stopped going to church and never looked back.

I have no idea how that happened. Oher kids at my church were told all of the same things I was and some of them wound up being very devout.

I was raised loosely religiously - my mom took me to church, and I was baptized (Methodist) when I was like 5 or 6, but at some point I said I didn't want to go to church anymore (I don't remember when, so it was likely because I didn't see the point of getting up early to be bored for an hour). She didn't make me, and I haven't gone to church for probably seven years.

For a while I hung onto the idea of there being a God, until I was around 14/15 years old, when a) I realized that it didn't make a lot of sense, b) every time I built a world for my writing (sci-fi and fantasy) I both was effectively a god and created gods of my own, so it seemed a little silly to believe in a real one, and c) realized that the main reason I liked the concept was because I wanted to be owned and kept, and a Domme would be much more likely to give me positive feedback (or any feedback) than the invisible bats in the sky.

Checked out The God Delusion from the library, read it cover to cover and realized that it made a hell of a lot more sense than the religious... let's go with dogma... that my mother kept spouting, and that was the end of that.

I'm looking into and researching Satanism currently, to see if it makes sense and matches how I want to live my life, and so far the philosophy part seems sound. Technically Satanism is a religion, but I dunno if it counts as far as OP's definition of "religion" goes.

I was skeptical about Christianity even from an early age, despite being raised as part of a very warm and welcoming church community. So much of it just doesn't make any damn sense. Why would a loving god allow terrible things to happen to good people? It seems like such a cruel, unfeeling way to teach them a lesson, and the whole "God works in mysterious ways" just sounded like a total cop out, even to a kid. At the very least, it was very obvious to me that if there was a God, he wasn't involved in our lives and he doesn't intervene to save us from anything, so there wasn't much point in praying.

Then as I got older, the behavior of the religious right in politics just made me more and more disgusted with religion in general. People are quick to point out that oh, there are "good" Christians who don't believe in persecuting gay people or punishing women for daring to have sex, there are good Christians who don't hate people of other religions (or no religion) and who don't believe in complete bullshit like Intelligent Design, etc. etc.

And I thought well, that's great, but how come they're being so quiet while the assholes run the show? How much of a pass are we supposed to give them for being enlightened if they're not doing anything to curb the less enlightened members of their religion? So I decided I was done with it forever, and I've been much happier ever since I made that decision.

I never grew up in a religious house hold. We never went to church, we never said grace, nothing. But it was sort if assumed that we were Christian? But I never really felt it. The only time I "felt" religious was when I was in daycare (a christian one) and it was essentially forced on us kids. When I got too old for it, all that stopped. I thought I believed, but I just didn't FEEL anything. Plus all my prayers were never answered and I ended up realizing I was pretending with out getting it. So by my junior year of high school, I was agnostic.

Because my beliefs don't gel with the religion I was raised in.

I was raised Roman Catholic, went to Catholic School from Kindergarten all the way until college, and kept with the teachings until I realized that my views and that of the Church simply weren't the same anymore. It started with birth control and homosexuality (considering that I now recognize that I'm pansexual, and have always been pansexual), then the rift just grew bigger as I realized that I believe in reincarnation. Not to mention my firm belief that the Catholic saints are in direct correlation to the gods of pantheistic religions...

Yeah. So, I'm spiritual, but I'm too lazy to set up my own religion, so non-affiliated I shall remain.

When I was a kid my mother would take my brother and I to church on Sundays. I can't remember the exact denomination, but it was pretty liberal Christian. So I grew up with the idea of a Christian god, and in my childhood I guess that's what I believed. (Having spoken to my mother I have since found out that she didn't take us because she was religious - she took us because she wanted to give us some semi-formal form of moral education. And certainly to this day I can't find myself disagreeing with any of what I learned in Sunday school - I think she picked the church pretty carefully, with that in mind.)

When I became a teenager I found myself becoming more unsure (we didn't go to Church anymore, and also I was beginning to be exposed via the news to some of the ideas that radical Christians espoused), but I decided that I probably didn't have enough life experience to decide what religion, if any, I wanted to follow. I couldn't consider myself an atheist, because I knew I did believe in some form of higher power, but I basically thought to myself that I'd figure it out later.

In my early twenties I found that I no longer could believe in any God. I will still, on occasion, find myself 'praying' (which is to say, saying something like, 'Oh, jeez, please let this work') or find myself feeling like I deserved something due to karma, or whatever - but then the rest of my brain points out that no, cause/effect doesn't work like that.

I find it hard to say why I don't believe. I've been sitting here trying to type out why, but I keep deleting my answers because they're incomplete... I suppose, in the end, I just don't.

I was raised Catholic, in a family that just sort of took it for granted that God was real without much analysis or inquiry into the subject. I went to Catechism classes for nine years, did First Communion and Confirmation, but never really learned much about the history of the Catholic Church or much at all about what other people believed; I had only the vague sense that there were such religions as "Protestantism" and "Judaism," but little idea of what they meant. I knew about mythology, though, and was really interested in it. Eventually I realized that all these "myths" used to be actual religions, like mine, that real people really believed in. So what made those beliefs "myths" and mine "true," I wondered. And I realized that I couldn't see a difference. It just made more sense to me that the Christian God was another myth invented by people to explain their world, than that he was really out there watching everyone and caring about whether some kid lied to their parents about something trivial.

Eventually I realized that I'd spent most of my childhood living in a state of perpetual suspended-disbelief with regard to God, and that the whole thing had never seemed "real" to me to begin with, but I tried to force myself to believe anyway since everyone around me took it for granted that God was real. When I found out that atheism was a thing and that there were people out there who just didn't believe, it was such a relief, because I felt like it gave me permission to not-believe too -- that not-believing was an option.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2286 ]

Losing your religion

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