What Made You Lose Faith In Your Religion? (Reddit Stories r/AskReddit)

serious Christians turn atheists what made you lose your faith lack of evidence supporting the existence of any of the thousands of God's people have worshiped over humankind's existence tell me why you don't believe in other religions and there you have my reasons why I do not to believe in your religion the church did it for me when I started to understand that it was a business for profit and for power and for influence when it started to become political the final straw was when I started to see how much hypocrisy there is by way of prejudice and hate I think this what gets a lot of us like once you grow to see just how things actually are then it's kind of suffocating to stay in an environment like that taking a mythology class in college and realizing all the different religions had similar origins stories of how earth and man were created and evolved but the details differed based on the environment the people lived in and how far along they were technologically anything science couldn't explain was the will of a higher power not saying higher powers couldn't exist just realized people are killing each other because theirs is the right God but the people don't realize that for all intents and purposes they are all following the similar lesson stories I also believe religion is separate from its organization structure I think being spiritual and believing in a higher power is okay it has helped mankind cope with the terrifying unkown anybody telling you that God wants you to donate money to them so that their leader can live in a super mansion or Ronan airplane is a freaking liar last I checked none of that money ever gets trickled up to a deity oh my god yes finally someone who can put my exact view into words that actually make sense short-answer grew up Southern Baptist when I started getting to the age where I could think critically about things I just started noticing some inconsistencies specifically I was told that people who believed in other religions would go to heck because they followed the wrong religion what when religion is based a lot on where you are born I just could not truly believe that people would be sent to heck for being born in the wrong country ricky gervais made a great point about church and religion who bTW is an avid atheist loosely quoted to saying isn't funny how you are always born into the right religion I was in a hard time for me and I started praying attending Catholic activities and doing lots of other things like these I wasn't feeling better years after I gave up doing these things and started taking care of me by myself and now I'm happy so the faith gradually went away I'm not fully an atheist though I may be an agnostic but I'm not sure I just started thinking how did I happen to be born in the right religion and a believers of other religions feel the same way I do when praying also I happen to read about cargo cults then I thought to myself wouldn't some people on a desert want to feel special wouldn't they want to be the chosen people of God also I realized that they are basically forcing you to believe something with no evidence or else you will suffer for the rest of eternity and that was pretty much when I stopped believing the funny thing is that I still attended Sunday school when I was slowly turning away from religion after reading online about other people's experiences I'm very glad everyone was okay with me changing my belief and we're still hanging out going to Catholic school did it for me they were teaching us things that contradicted what they had taught the year before and you couldn't really ask questions if you did the theology teacher would yell about that what faith is for don't question the Bible what really really made me discussed it was that the teachers were adamant that suicide sends your soul straight to HACC because you took the life of one of God's creatures a schoolmate had a father who took his life and the way they handled it was horrible and basically made mental health issues or Nothing burger three years after the above incident my brother took his own life and these butthole teachers had the audacity to show up to the visitation to pay their respects I had to walk away so I wasn't rude my mom and dad are really really Christian they are the ppl who would attend the make America straight conference my dad are the worst of the family he think he has somewhat of a childhood trauma that's made it worse my dad thought it was okay to for example hit me my siblings into my I grew up in a family as the middle child of five two older sisters and two younger brothers we did all of the things that Christian families do like go to church like every day and praying and had all sort of rules I believed that hardcore I was always kinda left out of the family and that I think made me question a lot and it gave me a lot of consequences well life went on when I we're 11 my older sister married a massive a-hole when she got 18 and he was like 20 idk the dude he married was the pastor's son so it was all over my mom and dad she always said to my mom and dad that he didn't treat her well sexual abuse and stuff but they did never believed her and said that that's a part of the marriage she changed a lot got more sad and didn't talk as much as she used to I didn't meet her for like two years and she got kids and stuff one day we got a phone call from her man she was dead she had had enough and took her own life my family didn't like it at all suicide and mental illness was not okay and we didn't talk about her anymore at this time of my life I found this youtuber named mr. atheist and he opened my eyes a bit the final straw was when I couldn't play in my handball team cause one of the players mums were gay and they wanted me to stop playing we had I fight and some months later I didn't have any faith left my family didn't talk to me again I was 14 now I live with my mom's sister and sometimes they come to my matches but never talk to me that's really sad hope you are doing better now when a deacon told me that disability was an abomination of God and the disabled were a burden to us all and a mistake Hitler is calling he wants his political views back I was raised Roman Catholic around 12 I started to read the Bible that did it for me I'm fully convinced that reading the Bible with an open mind is the most effective way to become an atheist it's batshit crazy you're not alone in that belief most atheists in predominantly Christian country is a firmly of the opinion that actually reading the Bible and doing so with the intent of looking at what it actually says is the leading cause of atheism many of them that used to be Christian will tell you that they lost their faith the same way you did I started to read the Bible then it was gradual first I did not believe that the God in the Bible was good and created my own personal God then I realized that I was making up a godom started to question if everyone else was doing the same that's when I started questioning but felt guilty about it and had conversations with God like you cannot be angry that I am questioning if you wanted me to believe you shouldn't have left all of this gaps and contradictions eventually I became an atheist was heavily indoctrinated with young Earth Creationism as a child stopped believing in the little truth of the Bible in college when confronted with extensive evidence to the contrary was still very religious with faith in the moral truth of the Bible got engaged to a conservative Christian in medical school it ended badly realized after the fact that Christianity did nothing to prevent the emotional abuse I had suffered by the hands of my mother growing up and my ex as an adult in fact faith actively facilitated it in many ways hence not a reliable source of moral truth - subject to personal interpretation put faith on hold a year later realized I was happy and not going to church about another year later just recently discovered my beliefs aligned much more cleanly with secular humanism this quote from Jefferson question with boldness even the existence of a God because if there be one he must have proof of the homage of Reason more than that of blind fell did fear I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use Galileo Galilei I stopped believing because of Santa Claus as a kid I wanted magic to be real I needed it to be and everyone told me it was just have faith and believe in magic and it will be real that's apparently all it took but finding out Santa wasn't real was a major bummer to my child self and it literally made me question everything else I've been told especially because when it came to talk of God as everyone told me the exact same thing have faith believe just let him into your heart yet you guys Femi the same lines about Santa look how that turned out eight-year-old me just discovered skepticism I ended up going to a Christian home school in my teens I lived in Germany and it was the only way for me to get an American education I never stopped that discerning questioning attitude eventually I just started to roll my eyes at a lot of the claims in the teachings and the excuses of why things were the way they were just felt like people trying to fill in the blanks for example nobody could provide proof God existed and they just point to the Bible as proof just look at it it's all the proof you need I'd counter the Bible was written by man and they could say anything they wanted oh but God guided them to write it so let me get this straight God's all-powerful yet can't write his own book why does he need regular people to do it for him couldn't he just will it into existence likely did the Ten Commandments and second if God were all-powerful wouldn't the Bible be written in a language every human could understand and didn't need to be open to interpretation over the years my spirituality grew less and less all because I asked basic questions and nobody could ever give me an answer that didn't ultimately end up coming back to Santa Claus you just have to have faith I can't stand the Santa Claus BS and had the exact same thought process along with anger at being light and me blindly defending Santa in great school to the santur denies lol I went to a highly religious Christian school every single day we would pray and worship the higher power I got so sick of it that I just gave up on Christianity and decided to start making my own choices my mother was a very religious person and when she found out I got a beating that made me lose my faith in Christianity even more so I grew up a Lutheran Christian which was fine that isn't the weird part I was invited to a Pentecostal Apostolic as they like to be called church by my elder sister when I was around nine years old but apostolic have a few core beliefs the main one is centered around act 2:38 but a lot of those beliefs are focused around women and how they dress and behave I wasn't allowed to cut my hair wear jewelry Oh pants it's listening to typical pop or secular music was banned as well I lived like this for about two years when the pastor's wife decided to start a private school in the basement of this congregation me being the overachiever and naive 11 Yael I was I thought it was a great idea if this was a one-room school with about ten students I have a twin sister so I could always go back to her when I needed someone my own age this is where the mental abuse started taking place I was told every day that the only purpose I had was to please my husband major homophobia by these people remember I was 11 at this time my brother has mental illnesses rats Bitola anxiety disorder and so on and they would treat him terribly one time the pastor's wife beat him with a baseball bat and threatened that I would go to heck if I ever spoke out sexual abuse was everywhere in this church they had investigations done on them in the eighties and nineties but because they're so spiritual and this was a church the police didn't take it seriously about a year and a half ago when I was 13 I had a major panic attack in the middle of worship service to this day idk what triggered it but I turned really pale I was crying I could barely stand and I couldn't hear or breathe we left that exact day and I went back to public school a few months later the first day of school was also the first time I had worn pants in three years now I'm going into high school in the top 10% of my class I cannot even explain how difficult it was to relearn science after thinking the earth was 6,000 years old but now I'm happy and doing very well surrounded by atheists and secular humanists I'm glad to now identify as an atheist and it's made my life so much easier holy crap I am so sorry you had to live that I'm sure those people will rot on heck instead of the heaven they want to go to I spent my early childhood education years in a Christian school that age is easy to manipulate the economy tanked when I was entering fifth grade and I had to go to a public school because my parents couldn't afford to send me to a private school I gradually started to doubt my faith as I was exposed to people from different and religions I was told by teachers to be wary of people at public schools because they are awful people who will poison my mind as I got older the lies fell apart I became an atheist at 18 and unfortunately I lost a lot of people I thought were my friends I used to be a Christian when I was little till about the age of 12 I stopped believing and got you to a mixture of personal things losing people et Cie and it was around the time in school where we actually started to read the Bible and the God and the Bible is no God I want to believe he is not benevolent in any way and any argument you used to say why you think God doesn't exist a Christian will tell you well that's what faith is for I've also never encountered any snakes giving me apples or burning bushes I read too much of the Bible to believe it I think there was a study that showed that atheists are generally more aware of the contents of the Bible than Christians I could be wrong I was raised Southern Baptist well known for being one of the more regressive branches of the Christian faith I began to turn away from the church around age 13 as a result of moral disagreements everything from gay marriage to abortion to tattoos these moral differences planted in a father seed of doubt that I no longer felt threatened enough by the idea of Hector blindly accept Church doctrine I stopped going to church in late high school and have considered myself an atheist since you have been visited by the donkey of good jokes comment I'm not a clown but I make good jokes so they always laugh at your jokes if you are new to the channel you can subscribe I publish new videos every day until then check another video or don't either way have a great day you magnificent people

Channel: Reddit On Tap

Views: 47,183

Rating: 4.8885522 out of 5

Keywords: #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, sub, reddit cringe, memes, comment awards, dankify, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, chill, story, stories, reddit on tap, religion, faith, lose faith, Christians, atheists

Id: 9tAAuvAw38w

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2019