Went to Afghanistan. Saw mutilated kids, kids with no legs from landmines, burned alive, dead ones. No God is watching over anyone. We are all there is.

In the words of Bob:

“Most people think great God will come from the sky Take away ev’rything, and make ev’rybody feel high But if you know what life is worth You would look for yours on earth And now you see the light You stand up for your right”

Everyday, stand up for your right to live in a peaceful world, or be stood upon.

I used to be super religious. I even studied to be a priest. Married a super religious lady. Then like five guys I went to seminary were in jail for pedos. Last one hit too close. It devastated my faith. Then my wife cheated on me. We had a lot of catholic friends. When she got pregnant they threw a party for her and turned their back on me. That was enough of that. I’m now an Atheist. Christianity is a cult. Not just one denomination. All are cults. Fuck that.

People have been vocal about me being an atheist. My health is not well. Talked to my mom about death. Pretty much she told me she would give me a catholic funeral even if I don’t want it.

One thing I can tell you. Women all are looking for that good Christian man. So I’ve been single since the. I had a fling with someone after the divorce but I think that was a mistake.

Still not over my piece of shit wife. Catholic friends refer to her as my wife. Not my ex. Married for ever thing.

Honestly I miss going to church and involved with everything. But never going back to that. Amen

Raised catholic, did religious ed, catholic high school, made to go to church every week and on holy days of obligation. Then I went off to college, and dutifully got up the first sunday and went to church. While I was mumbling along with the Nicene creed, I thought, “But I don’t believe this stuff; in fact, I disagree with most of it.” I left quietly before the creed was over, and never voluntarily went back. I guess realizing I’m an atheist helped. 😄

It’s very interesting honestly. I swapped from Catholic to evangelicalism at 14 (just me not my family, tho they supported it) and stuck with it till I was 20. It was super about it. Youth group 2 days a week plus 3 hour mass on Sundays, God was ALWAYS on my mind, every decision, every action, every goal. Then my friends went to college, and I didn’t, I stuck around now forced to interact with the older crowd. They weren’t just hypocrites, they were cruel and controlling and pointlessly manipulative. It became clear that the church I was at wasn’t the place It was for me for years so one day I decided to just stop showing.

It was the first addiction I ever quit. The anxiety I felt was… Immense. It took two weeks for me to start thinking clearly about it, and it was wild how easily I recognized I was literally brainwashed. I no longer needed the mental gymnastics to justify myself.

My life didn’t improve or anything after that, and funnily enough I only ever saw one of my, off to college, friends again, many years later. He did try and get me back in but I was way past that stiff by that point. Surreal experience in hindsight

I actually read The Bible when i was a kid. That is what got me off of religion. That book is all kinds of fucked up, if you actually read it.

The more I travelled as an adult and reflected on what I’d learned about Jesus, the more i began to believe he was actually Buddhist.

Now, I believe the person we call “Jesus” was actually Caesarion…the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.

I was raised mormon and steadily lost faith in it all through my 20s. I had a bunch of mental dissonance for awhile trying to reconcile the whole love your neighbor stuff with the LDS churches campaigns against gay marriage and disgust towards trans people.

What broke the camels back was ironically a philosophy or religion course at BYU. It tries to teach you how to justify all the religious paradoxes in a way that lets you keep your faith. One of the units explored an idea on if God was worth worshipping. And that question brought it all tumbling down. At the end of the day it didn’t matter if God exists because based on the world he wouldn’t be worth worshipping anyway.

Most of my family has distanced themselves from Mormonism so generally things have been good. My mom was a bit disappointed but we still get along just fine.

Mine was from Christianity, US evangelical flavour. It happened in stages, but really in the end I just stopped going to religious activities.

What made it happen? A lot of things at each of those aforementioned stages, but the most common theme was other Christians. They just were overwhelmingly awful.

I grew up in the Church, so it was all I knew. Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, youth groups (extra brainwashing sessions from a special church leader for kids) once a week, etc. The only thing outside of religious activities was school, and thankfully I was in public school.

I grew up curious and questioning, which the religious leaders did not always appreciate, but because I was serious about understanding things, I was given a lot of early “apologetics”, which I understood to be attempts to prove the unprovable, and quickly came to realise that the point was to take things on faith… don’t prove, believe. And for that, I needed a “religious experience”.

Evangelical churches are good at manufacturing believable religious experiences, so eventually I had what I believed was one. This was the first thing to go when I “deconstructed”, realising that this experience wasn’t supernatural, it was manufactured. Once that was gone, the rest was easy to mentally deconstruct and all that was left was the social.

The social took longer, but I was in the US south, so everything revolved around church activities for me and there wasn’t a clear alternative. What encouraged me to cut ties though was my sense of justice. I accepted a lot of the “christ” teachings like loving your neighbour and providing for those less fortunate, caring for those who can’t care for themselves like the sick, children and those struggling in other ways, and Christians just seemed to only care for those who were close to them, not everyone, and especially didn’t care for very specific groups.

This got very clear with the rise of the alt-right political movement in the US and especially when Covid-19 hit… all these people who claimed to care about their neighbours wouldn’t do the bare minimum to help. For the few years before this I was already in a “missionary” mindset: I was attending these religious activities in order to help these Christians be more christ-like. At that point though, I realised it was a lost cause. These people didn’t want to be christ-like, they wanted to “win”. So when covid came and nothing around me locked down, I locked down myself, stopped attending everything, and moved out of the US entirely as soon as I could. My own parents wouldn’t wear a mask, or even spend time outside to spend Christmas with our kids, and were so deep in the far-right rabbit hole that it made it easy to move. So many people revealed they were just hateful shells, their insides rotted away and either I didn’t notice or they never were filled to begin with.

It was sad, but I have a much more fulfilling life now. If you are looking for resources or community to kind of get some confirmation that you’re not alone, the freedom from religion organisation is pretty good for some things… but can be a bit too much so I recommend just dipping in for specific things you’re thinking about. I found things in that community well after deconstructing and used it to put terms to what I experienced. Like the word deconstructing wasn’t a word in my lexicon until well after the fact.

Good luck!

-My pastor got up in the congregation and started asking for more money to support his family. Dude lives in a gigantic house in an expensive area.

-At summer camp my youth pastor put me and my best friend in an “at risk youth group” with other kids who seemed to be “straying”. I took it as an insult.

-my youth pastor was a huge fan of George Bush Jr. I kept pushing that Jesus espouses “left wing” ideas of helping the needy, speaking out against the rich, etc.

-My youth pastor was super flagrant about not giving a shit about school. He was proud somehow that he failed intro Greek, twice.

-My other pastor on my grandmother’s side shunned me because I had long hair. Literally pretended I didn’t exist when he saw me in the Christmas parade for the first time since I grew out my hair.

-The message of the pastor changed as I got older. He was super nice to kids, but as late teenagers he started using tough love to teach us to rebuke worldly sin.

Fuck the lot of them lol. I keep in touch with my shit family simply for the inheritance. That’s the level of anger I have for them and what they did to me as a child. I reduce their relationship with me to money.

Raised Catholic, as in Catholic schools all the way through high school. In high school I started learning about other religions, especially ancient ones, and Christianity started looking like just another example of mythology. The central belief that Jesus “died for our sins” is based on the ancient idea of using sacrifices to gain favor with the gods. The “holy trinity” aspect was what really boggled my mind. God sends his Son (i.e. himself) to Earth and lets the Romans execute him, thereby sacrificing himself - to himself - to persuade himself to forgive humans for Original Sin - which we didn’t even commit, it supposedly happened in the Garden of Even, long before we were born.

Somehow a Supreme Being intelligent enough to create the whole universe decided a sin committed by an ancestor should bar the human race from eternal salvation. Even as I type this I’m still amazed people can actually believe that nonsense, but to ancient people it did make sense. Back then whole families were often punished for the misdeeds of a family member. This is where we got the concept of disowning somebody - casting them out of the family was a declaration that the family wasn’t responsible for that screwup’s actions anymore. It was self-defense against getting everybody thrown in prison or exiled to the desert. But I don’t think most religious people bother to question their indoctrination or reduce it to essentials. Maybe they’re afraid if they think about it too much it means the Devil is trying to steal their soul, I don’t know. It just seems childishly silly to me.

Grew up in lots of religions. Settled into Mormonism at 16. Went on a mission. Got married. Raised my kids in the religion. Always had my misgivings and issues. Was always called to teach. Adult Sunday school, children, men, etc. Always taught from both sides and left it open to others to see. Not fully white, so always had that going as well with perspective. When my oldest came out as trans and gay, I could no longer in good conscience continue to support what the church taught so left and never looked back.

It was a fucking struggle to leave, let me tell you.

I suddenly suffered from a crippling disease (made worse because I was 10 and generally healthy before that, so it was mind boggling at the time), and no one in the church gave a hoot. You’d think a community of people who believed in a loving god would care that such a god would randomly punish a kid… so when everyone just told me to accept it I understandably grew pissed. That then blossomed into asking questions about others with diseases, famine, war, death, bla bla bla, and every answer was just stupid.

Buuut, I was in a super religious family, and went to a religious school, and was a part of a very community focused church, so it took until I left at the age of majority to really leave religion behind. I argued with every single dumb christian I could find for my teenage years, because I wanted to find someone who actually had a good argument. Humorously enough, the best argument ever made to me was by someone who didn’t even care about christianity except that he ‘was’ one by dint of other people being christians: maybe it was necessary for god to send people to hell and have a shitty life… except obviously that’s a shitty god that I wouldn’t care to worship, so finally in college I said good-fucking-bye to the entire mindset.

As for what happened, while I was still under the parents’ control and the school’s control, I was labeled as a troublemaker and generally ostracized. My mother would wail (reasonably) about the situation, but stopped making me go to church as I entered high school. The extended family that still cared about religion just chalked it up to attention seeking and ignored it, which was fine by both parties.

I was a simple lad. Sleeping in on Sundays was a pretty compelling reason for me to listen to the alternative theological arguments.

Raised in religious schools from an early age until early teens. Decided it wasn’t for me for multiple reasons, though the idea of the surety offered by religion is still something I miss despite the negatives of that same surety.

Nothing happened after I left. I just stopped associating with people that used religion when I could, and simply just nod and “uh huh” with those that have to talk about it. Me disagreeing with them isn’t going to change their mind. Yes, things are fine with the family, they weren’t fanatically religious to begin with. Nobody tried to drag me back.

I realised i like guys too. That then slowly pushed me out of my quite right wing bubble.

Also critiquing the catholic church and leaving it with all the pedo alligations and how none actually christian they are yk

I read the Bible