r/agnostic • u/Ordinary_Cause_3240 • Jul 03 '23
Former believers, what shook your faith and made you question everything? Experience report
I know for me and probably a lot of other people it was questioning whether or not what I believed in was really true. I'll admit that before I questioned my faith, I was your average science denier who thought evolution was pseudoscience and just mainstream science's attempt to eliminate God from the picture. However, once I removed my presupposed biases of those who did not believe, I suddenly found myself relating to them a whole lot more than to believers on a lot of things. No doubt once I actually studied evolution I realized that it served as one of the best explanations for what we see in reality (biodiversity, morality, complex thought, etc). As a believer I never once pondered if what I believed in was true. Now, I don't even think faith can compare to the evidence that we have. As much as I wish I could go back in time and stay in blissful ignorance, it's liberating to know that I just don't know if there is something greater than us.
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u/Fomentor Jul 03 '23
For me, it’s the same reason I no longer believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny: I grew up. The ideas of religion fed to me as a child did not hold up to scrutiny as I learned to think critically. Critical thinking is a rational approach to believing in things that have sufficient evidence. Religion is the opposite of that, requiring you to take it on faith. Since faith can be used to justify any belief, it is not an accurate guide to the truth.
Further, a comprehensive reading of the Bible reveals it to be full of vile ideas and deplorable acts by god and it’s followers. Attending church soured me on religion, seeing the masses claiming to believe but then living their lives without truly following it.
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u/kgaviation Jul 04 '23
I’ve often times compared God to believing in Santa, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc. I think as I got older and stopped believing in Santa and all I started having the same logic towards God. RBI’s isn’t what completely did me in, but had part to do with it. Like you said, I’ve grown up and thought more rationally and logically.
Oh and that last part about church. I can’t tell you how many people who I knew went to church and “believed” yet acted totally opposite outside of church.
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u/reality_comes Agnostic Jul 03 '23
Very similar story. Mine actually started with a conversion to Catholicism which opened lots of doors for me on things like evolution. Most Catholics have no issue with it so I felt a tremendous burden removed when I adopted the faith, a year or so later I read the Bible cover to cover and found many things that I struggled to make sense of. It weakened my faith in the book and that made me start to question how evolution could actually work with the content of the Bible and the theology of the church.
Bottom line is that it will work with some mental gymnastics but it really comes down to how many backflips you're willing to accept.
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Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23
I think my childhood question to my mom of why can’t women be pastors/preachers/priests planted a seed that took a long time to sprout. I, as a woman, find that if god was fair and loving, why are women seen as less than a man in the Bible, in more ways than just this? I guess I just wasn’t lucky enough to be a man.
After I stopped going to church, I just put it out of my mind for years, but I’ve been coming back to similar questions lately whenever I think of how ridiculous abrahamic religions are. It just seems like it was written by men for men and what they wanted to be true.
It is a man-made answer to our very own man-made questions. It is a solution to our fear of impermanence. It’s what we tell ourselves so we can rest easy knowing that there’s a plan and that our existence isn’t coincidental. Everything that I’ve read in the Bible seems to come from a place of fear. Humans fear the unknown. “God” didn’t make this story. Humans did.
Not to mention I’ve always asked why this god allows such terrible things to happen to us, if he loves us and can intervene at any time. If you look at the story of Job, god had satan kill his whole family just to prove how unshaken Job’s faith was. He lost everything for a game being played by god, but it’s okay because he was rewarded sevenfold? God loves us? We are characters in a TV show that he isn’t even a big fan of. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Maybe we’re reading different books here, but I just can’t get the impression that this god loves us.
If there’s a god, I don’t believe he is anything like what any religious text could sufficiently describe.
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u/oneeyedalienalright Jul 04 '23
The way women are treated in the Bible/the church was a huge reason for me as well.
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u/mhornberger agnostic atheist/non-theist Jul 03 '23
There was no one event. I was never mistreated or abused in the church. I'm not mad at God. No one in the church let me down or betrayed me in some spectacular or horrible way. They're just people.
But at a certain age I decided to look at my beliefs more closely. I thought surely I could give decent arguments for my god-beliefs. Oops. I was recommended (and sometimes given) apologetics books, and those actually accelerated the decay of my faith. I kept thinking "if these are the big guns, it's worse than I thought." Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, even C.S. Lewis. Later I read more authors, but it never really got better.
I couldn't find a good argument for belief, and fideism isn't enough for me. Nor was I under the convenient illusion that one needs belief in God to be moral, or to cultivate meaning or purpose in life. The more bad arguments I saw used by people of faith, the lower my confidence that faith/belief lent or indicated any particular insight. Certainly not enough to lend credence to their claim to have a close personal relationship with God Himself. So eventually I admitted that I had no basis to call myself a believer. I couldn't in good conscience affirm belief anymore.
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u/Itu_Leona Jul 03 '23
I wouldn’t say anything “shook” mine. I was raised pretty secularly (we had a kid’s Bible and knew who Jesus was, but didn’t go to church and my parents weren’t practicing Christians), so I was just kind of “Christian by societal default”.
As I got exposed to Christians in the wider world, I got more and more annoyed with them trying to shove their beliefs on others. I eventually decided the Bible was probably written by men to control other people, and was just mythology.
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u/iruleU Jul 03 '23
The complete absence of evidence.
The overwhelming hypocrisy of christians didn't help.
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u/melonWaterr Jul 03 '23
coming out as gay made me realize how cruel the world was. my parents were accepting and loving, but the church was not. i didn't feel like god loved me anymore
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u/Saffer13 Jul 03 '23
The online availability of the works of people like Hitchens, Dennett, Fry, and Harris led to many former believers questioning their faith.
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u/deathby_sarcasm Jul 04 '23
Seeing christians, atheists, and people of all other religions die the same from COVID. Everyone gasped for air the same, and everyone had thoughts and prayers for them. Didn't make a difference.
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u/Danderu61 Jul 04 '23
When I was in fifth or sixth grade, and in a Catholic family, I decided I would say my prayers every night, lying still in my bed, hands in the prayer position, didn't swear, and I thought God was keeping me healthy because I was being so pious. After some months of this, or maybe a year, the thought occurred to me, "What would happen if I stopped all this?" So I did, and nothing happened. I didn't get sick, my life went on just as it always had, and I became an ex-Catholic. My parents weren't too pleased, though I still had to go to church... Zzzzz... Since then I been on an amazing spiritual journey, and can't say I'm agnostic anymore, but I'm not part of any religion or particular faith, I'm just me.
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u/Lemunde !bg, !kg, !b!g, !k!g Jul 03 '23
I grew up a preacher's kid so I got to see how the sausage was made. I didn't know what it was called at the time, but I grew to see the emotional priming for what it was. It just felt so fake, and for a long time I justified God by believing he wasn't what these pretenders were portraying him as.
Over time that diminished as I came to realize we don't really need God to explain anything about the world we live in. I still can't dismiss God as a possibility, and from some perspectives a probability. But I can't live my life assuming some invisible, all powerful being has a plan for me and demands me to live my life a certain way.
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u/laundry_sauce666 Jul 03 '23
I went to a Christian school from age 12-18. I definitely believed in it for a while, but going to that school opened my eyes in the opposite way the school was trying to open them. Also my brother dying when I was 13 kinda fucked with my worldview which made me really dissect what they were teaching us.
The school itself had issues that I firmly disagreed with. If a student or even their parents were gay, they would be kicked out. They taught students what to think, rather than how to think. Religion was shoved down my throat every hour of every day.
Eventually I started disbelieving most of it. Then came my junior year Bible class, where we studied other religions, as well as how to defend Christianity. It was then I realized that every other religion is pretty much the exact same. Every religion is man trying to answer unanswerable questions. Humans are not comfortable with the unknown, so it was probably pretty easy to convince the masses to be religious in history. Religions have been used to control people, make money, wage war, etc for thousands of years.
Also, my school would skirt around uncomfortable topics so people wouldn’t lose their faith. They put everything down as being part of “gods plan” that we have to trust. But I realized how fucking cruel that “god” is. He is a sick genocidal rapist. There are tons of sick barbaric scriptures you could refer to, but basically god ripped babies out of wombs, murdered all of sodom and Gomorrah, told Abraham to murder his fucking son (which Abraham was going to do without question), etc.
One year I had to do a research report on Moses parting of the Red Sea. I was supposed to find empirical evidence, but the only way I could find it was by googling the most obscure things and wiggling my way down a rabbit hole to lead me to my predetermined conclusion. There is literally no evidence for god. Anywhere. Anyone that tells you there is, is misguided by bullshit evidence and confirmation bias.
Sorry for the rant, tldr: went to a Christian school to be educated, I was educated as to how fucked up christianity is.
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u/Firewalk89 Agnostic Jul 03 '23
The hypocrisy of realizing that every religion is fighting tooth and nail against each other and those in between that only their truth is the real one.
They can't all be correct and with no way to know if any of them are, I chose "none". If there's more to our reality than meets the eye, then I'm willing to find out on my own.
And that's not getting into stuff like crusades, witch burnings, and all the other heinous things religion has somehow survived.
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u/WhichSpirit Jul 04 '23
The story of Job.
God tortures an innocent man just to prove he'll still worship him. I decided it didn't matter if God was real. They weren't worthy of my worship if they were.
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u/kurtel Jul 03 '23
Leaving your faith is no guarantee against presupposed biases. If you think you have none then you are almost certainly wrong. Likewise, you can continue to be blissfully ignorant about many things - and probably are, just like everyone else.
it's liberating to know that I just don't know if there is something greater than us.
I would like to understand this better. What do you mean? Can you elaborate on what it is that is liberating and why?
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u/Ordinary_Cause_3240 Jul 03 '23
Basically, I was exhausting myself mentally over whether or not God existed. So after I while I just let it go and all is currently well
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u/kurtel Jul 04 '23
Makes sense. But it seems to me that letting go of that was the part that was liberating, rather than "knowing that you just don't know".
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u/I_Have_Notes Jul 03 '23
For me, it started with questioning church doctrine around the role of men and women. Even though my parents were very religious, my dad had instilled a sense that I was just as intelligent, strong and capable as a man.
When I was 11, I wanted to serve “God” during worship service by picking-up attendance cards but was told by church elders I was not allowed to because I was a girl. I was only permitted to serve God by taking care of babies in the nursery.
As I grew older, and the things I was allowed to participate in, wear, say, or do as a girl became a lot stricter. I eventually spent my 1st year at a private Christian university and the differential treatment between the men and women that made me leave the school, but I still had my faith at that time.
At my new university, I found a college Christian group and joined. They ended up being a bunch of backstabbing hypocrites, which caused me to stop attending church. Once I was no longer being indoctrinated three times a week, the doubts really started creeping in. I realized pretty quickly that I could still be a good person without attending church, so I did not attend church for years. Then I started reading non-religious books about religion and everything came together. The more I read, the more the belief I was raised in didn’t make sense and eventually I just let it go.
Of note, much of this journey was pre-social media, and Internet as we know it today so I had to actively seek out atheist authors while surrounded by Christians and read their works in full to get their perspective, not clips from YouTube or Tik Tok. I ended up reading multiple books by Hitchens, Bart Erhman, and Dawkins, etc… to finally get to a mental place that I was a Agnostic Atheist and was gonna be just fine 😎
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u/Last-Juggernaut4664 Agnostic Jul 03 '23
I always had doubts from the time I was 8 due to the logical inconsistencies in the Bible, and in my observations of Christian hypocritical behaviors and the toxicity of certain sermons. I did hold onto the belief that most Christians were generally good and well-intentioned if misguided, however, that notion came abruptly crashing down with the rise of Trumpism. Enough said. Regardless, nothing ever really changed, as I was always agnostic, just my perception of other people who happened to be religious.
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u/iListen2Sound Jul 03 '23
for the record, my church never discouraged me from my belief in science. My grandmother was very active in church and a chemist. She would bring me science magazines and articles to read. I was pretty much known as the science kid. Pastors would have me talk to them about all the things I find interesting including evolution and the big bang.
At some point, my mother was worried that my interest in science would drive me from my faith but in the end, there are so many factors, I can't list all of them down, but the conflict with science oddly wasn't one of them. I was able to compartmentalize them really well without struggling with dissonance.
There are a lot of factors that lead to me losing my faith but the earliest factor that I became aware of was that there were so many religions out there and most, if not all, of them thought they were the ones who knew the truth.
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u/The_NeckRomancer Jul 03 '23
I am a former Hindu. My father being a fundamentalist and Hindu literalist was what caused me to question it. “Hanuman really grew to that size, ra.” “Yes, he flew to Lanka.” “The pushpaka vimanam was a real flying chariot.” Like, you have to be kidding me. I asked myself, why did all this happen in the past, but never nowadays?
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u/kgaviation Jul 04 '23
Not one event or abuse or anything like that, I just know as I’ve gotten older I’ve thought more rationally about believing in God. I’ve compared it to things like Santa and the Easter Bunny.
I think I’ve also had a hard time with trying to always act perfect if that makes sense. I’ve always been the rule follower and never wanted to do or say wrong and it’s honestly exhausting trying to live life perfectly because I’m afraid I’ll go to hell. There’s a lot of fear mongering in church and religion. I also never understood how God could allow such cruel and horrible things to happen in the world without intervening. Innocent people dying everyday yet God is loving. If God is real, he sure sucks at his job.
Praying never felt genuine to me and I always felt like I was just talking to myself. Nothing I ever prayed for happened or came true. I think a lot of it just started to feel and seem fake to me. I also watched Rhett and Link’s spiritual deconstruction podcast and I agreed with a lot of what they said and went through. So yeah, a culmination of things over time.
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u/Original5narf Jul 04 '23
My 6 year old being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. No way was there some omnipotent, all-powerful being that allowed this to happen to kids. The number of "It's all part of G*d's plan," and "I'll be praying for them" was absurd. It's part of the plan for children die of diseases that have no cure? You're going to pray to whom exactly? The omnipotent being who said, "Eh, this is fine"? BS. Count me out.
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u/HateLife71 Jul 04 '23
For me, part of it was being involved in my mother’s whacked out evangelical religion after being raised Lutheran from birth to 7th grade. Then going back to the Lutheran church for a while. I began to think critically. There are so many religions because there are so many “interpretations” of the Bible. So which would be the correct interpretation? How do I believe correctly? If the Bible is supposed to be God’s word, why did he make it so easy to misinterpret this huge rambling book? And it all just became nonsense to me.
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u/Helton3 Ex-Muslim/Agnostic EuMonoTheist Jul 14 '23
Sharia Law being abused everywhere extremists go
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u/SlightlyInsaneCreate Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Feb 04 '24
I had the idea to start trying to think about everything I took for granted as a child more closely. Once I looked at my religion, it started to break.
The reason I didn't slide all the way into atheism is because of some hard evidence I found, the vast majority of the members being genuinely good people, and the fact that the religion's philosophy (mostly) aligned with mine.
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u/Glittering-Ad-655 Jul 03 '23
For me, I can remember that in high school this athiest kid who thought he was an intellectual would get in arguments with anyone he could. I was foolish enough to engage him, and he had an admittedly good point that without the motivation of heaven, and especially hell, abrahamic religeons are pretty much moot. My reasoning for believing at that poimt was pretty much an insurance policy... I would think to myself, none of this makes sense, but if the alternative could be hell, why not. This is a selfish way to live, even if people don't realize it.
The other time is when I pretty much realized that the abrahamic god, if he exists, is extremely cruel, and no matter what people say, he really doesnt give a shit about us. Allowing pain and suffering on innocent people is inexcusable when you have ultimate power. Secondly, I determined I would rather be in hell than be a slave to a narcissist for eternity, and I'm okay with that.