What's Your Background?

[DeistPaladin]

I'm always curious about how many freethinkers are ex-christians, ex-muslims, etc. I've found that about 80% (roughly) are formerly religious. I'm also curious about stories of how people broke free of their faith (I prefer to put it that way than to say "lost your faith"), so please share if you are an ex. Thanks.

If, on the other hand, you were never a believer but were raised with religion, please share how and why it never took.

I'm interested in hearing because my story is so boring, having the great fortune of being raised by skeptical parents. I'm hoping if we share enough, we might understand how to help others break free. I know, there's no "silver bullet" as all stories I've heard so far regarding leaving the faith involve a long and difficult process but more knowledge can't hurt.

Clarification: For the purpose of this poll, please don't count yourself as a former believer if you just went to church with your family for social reasons or you counted yourself as "Christian" simply because your family was.

By "ex-Christian", I mean you were a believer. You believed in the Bible as a source of revelation, that you would see Heaven when you die, etc. You don't necessarily have to have been rolling on the ground "speaking in tongues" or practicing faith healing but I am talking about a belief in at least some of the teachings of these religions.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

ooh, look, I voted.

My parents were and are religious, but I never was. I had bad nightmares and read lots of mythology, so my parents explained to me the difference between fiction and reality. They also gave me a bat to whack things with if I felt scared at night. They told me Santa wasn't real, in order to save me the disappointment of believing that a magic man could give me things that my parents couldn't afford. Santa was just a story parents told little kids. They didn't mean for me to wind up atheist, but I did.

I didn't find out for YEARS that Jesus wasn't just another story parents told children. I was horrified when I found out that adults believed that stuff too.

 

[richi1173]

I was born into a Pentacostal family. Although my father and mother did not like the faith, my aunt was crazy into it; she claims to this day that she spoke in tongues.

However, a couple of years after I was born, we formed our own church called "Camino de Fe" or "Way of the Faith" with a family friend from California; my father and grandfather eventually became pastors for that church. We belonged to the Messianic sect of Christianity/Judaism. The Messianic holy book is the Torah, and most of the church, including me, rejected most of the new testament except those portions dealing with Jesus Christ. The Messianic faith believes that Yashua, or Jesus Christ, is the only true Messiah.

I was deep into it. I enjoyed observing the Sabbath and all the tenets set down by the Torah. I enjoyed the story of creation, and believed firmly that this is the way things came to be. I also believed in the story of Noah's Ark (which was my favorite) and generally accepted the Old Testament as literally true.

All of my family felt that we belonged there, that we could finally reconcile our particular point of view with an organization; it was empowering. It sort of feels when you first found Thunderf00t and his debunking VenomFangX or/and when you joined the League of Reason. Just the feeling of belonging is enough to dissuade any skepticism. However, I did not hate any other sect of Christianity or Judaism or any other religion: I viewed them as brothers/sisters who called God by different names.

My faith took a lapse since I arrived at age 10 in the US. However, I still firmly believed the stories of creation. That all changed when I entered 9th grade and became utterly disgusted with religion after learning about its murderous history. I have developed intellectually since then and I found the "controversy" after watching a couple of videos made by DonExodus about a year ago.

 

[Josan]

I'm not really sure what I used to belive to be completely honest. I guess I was sort of un-decided. I went to curch from time to time (3-4 times a year perhaps?) and I actually got confirmed in curch - which I never really understand why I did. At the time I thought of myself as an agnostic deist... but in retrospect I realize I had just misunderstood the labels "agnosticism" and "atheism".

 

[DeistPaladin]

At the time I thought of myself as an agnostic deist... but in retrospect I realize I had just misunderstood the labels "agnosticism" and "atheism".

Interesting. I had always mislabeled myself as "agnostic" until I discovered I was a deist. It sounds like you had the reverse experience?

 

[Ciraric]

I'm going to fess up to something I don't tell many people.

i went through a Christian phase. It hurts to think about it. I was brought up in a family without religion and have some very fundamentalist friends. One thing lead to another and a few months down the line I was being asked why I was leaving the church.

My response? "Read the God Delusion."

 

[Jackcreed]

I was raised in a very irreligious house hold and have always had a fondness for the study of religion and culture. Though I have never been a member of any Abrahamic faith I was a practicing Wiccan for a number of years. The problem was, however that I never stopped studying. So my gods progressed from actual beings to spiritual archetypes to ancient myths to completely useless. It seemed the more I learned the less "faith" I had.

 

[TheDorian]

Hello everybody,

I was raised in a christian orthodox family allthough not a very fanatical one.
As a rational thinker I always asked myself questions such as why would an
omnipotent god do this or that and why is there so much evil in the world and so on...
But never really reached any - now obvious - conclusions.
My field of study is computer science but I always had an interest for cosmology
and physics in general, and while watching science documentaries online i stumbled upon
some Richard Dawkins documentaries... and then some thunderfoot videos... and then
I realised I was actually "sitting on the fence" all my life and finally got the push I needed
to join the Atheist - Agnostic side... As I am instinctively shy and not really outgoing I cannot describe what
a relief it was not to have to put up with the big bully in the sky anymore, but also to realise that
the source of all my morality was within me!!!

 

[Marcus]

I said I used to believe, but you really need more options. I kind of believed as a kid more through lack of thought than anything else. I never went to church, though I occasionally prayed in the selfish way that kids do (please, God, help me get that toy/bike/girl). I think there are a number of different types of "life stories" that one could classify:

There's ones like mine - vaguely religious as a child, grew out of it in adolescence.

You could have been very religious (e.g. raised in a fundamentalist household, church every week, Sunday school and so on) but grew out of it in adolescence.

You could have been either of those but continued belief into adulthood, but shaken it later on.

Alternatively, you could have gone through a religious "phase" - irreligious as a child, converted to some religion in adulthood and then deconverted later.

Or you could have never been religious.

Each of those is, I think, rather different. The strength of religious belief before one comes to think about it has a bearing, and one's age at deconversion - one has different reasons for believing as an adult than as a child. People who have joined a religion as adults also have a very different psychological attachment to that religion than people who were "born into" it.

 

[Entropic Particle]

It is hard to say, really. My story may be quite common.

I was technically raised in a fundamentalist baptist home, but most of that early conditioning faded during adolescence. I don't know if I should count accepting what I was told when I was very little as actual "belief" in my parents' religion. I picked "no" in this thread, because once I began to seriously think about such things as a teenager, I didn't really have a choice to not believe in it. It was just a natural progression of my development as a thinking person; it's sort of like realizing that Santa was merely Mom and Dad all along (though I don't really remember believing in him either, but I am told by my parents that I did).

 

[WarK]

Hello everybody

I was brought up in catholic family. I never liked going to church. Whenever I was told to go to church alone I would end up in a forest or near by quarry.
I think my belief in god was similar to my belief in Santa Claus, I don't remember when exactly I stopped believing in either. I didn't give it any thought, I didn't know there was something like atheism or other religions for that matter. I just wasn't interested in any of it.

When I was 13(more or less) and my friend died in car accident I remember using it as an excuse to communicate my lack of belief to my father but at that point all faith was long gone.

Just before high school I got into metal and found that there were people who denied god and religion and basically took piss out of it (to put it mildly :twisted: Deicide anyone? :lol: ) I think after that I first thought of myself as an atheist.

Cheers

 

[DontHurtTheIntersect]

At the very most, I was deistic for my childhood. Never really had any faith, never even thought about god, the one time I prayed outside church I felt like an idiot aftewards. Gradually, I casually slipped away from it all, and found that I had been atheistic for quite awhile.

Actually, it was probably television that had an impact as well. Always in tv shows I'd see subtle hints about the nonexistence of gods and such. It's also how I learned there was no Santa.

 

[Lira]

Hello everyone !

My family is all very religous, Christians, and I remember I used to believe in god and the bible when I was a kid. But at some point, I have no idea why, I started to have some nightmares with Jesus and saints. They were really bad, for some years I was scared to go to sleep, whenever I had one of those nightmares I would wake up terrified, couldn't even move, was scared even to call my mother. I was scared of god and religion.

At that point I started to hate it, I didn't want to go to church but my parents made me go every sunday. At that time in school I had a really nice History teacher and she was an atheist, she used to tell us all the bad things religion did along the centuries. So all that made me think about it and then it was easy to understand that religion is just some fairy tale.
I read alot of books also, ironicaly one of the books that made me change my mind was offered to me when I had some religious party, Sophie's World from Jostein Gaarder. There I could learn that humans invented gods to explain things that happened in Nature and they couldn't understand. Since then I didn't believe anymore. It was just hard for my family, they still think I'm crazy and can't understand how can I live and be happy without god...

With time nigthmares went away, it was hard even when I didn't believe, I was scared sometimes that maybe god was watching me and would punish me. It's sad to think what teaching religion to children does, my family traumatized me with it but they tought it was all good for me. I wonder how many people in this world are scared like I was.

Today I feel free, there is no spying god listening to my toughts and ready to punish me. I try to make my cousins change their minds too, some did already wich is a good thing, but their parents hate me for that

 

[pyxzer]

The only relative I know to have been religious, is my great-grandmother and that is derived from the words: "Teach your children to read from this book!" written inside the covers of a bible we have at home, adressing my mother. (For some strange, unknown reason, we have 4 bibles.)

Besides her I know exactly three people who are religious. And since of our small country 76% of the population is non-religious, I am quite happy about the fact that I was born here.

So yeah, not the most interesting story from me.

 

[DeistPaladin]

I said I used to believe, but you really need more options.

You have a good point and one that I did consider. The problem I ran into was the temptation to split the hairs in increasingly fine ways, especially since I had different factors I was trying to guage (childhood background, how much that affected your thinking, whether you adopted religion later in life as an adult, the extent of what you believed, etc.).

Even one of these factors is a complex issue. Take the issue of childhood indoctrination alone, for example. I say I grew up in an agnosto-atheist home with an especially anti-religious father but I wasn't exactly isolated from exposure to Christianity. Here I am in the middle of "red state" America. Christianity is all around me. My grandparents were religious and disappointed that I would not go to church with them. I had religious friends, Jewish, Protestant and Catholic. My sister later converted. Even my parents at Christmas time had nativity decorations, angel X-mass tree ornaments and played Christmas carols like "O Holy Night" around that time (yeah, go figure, only in 2004 did I finally throw out all of my Christian-themed Christmas decorations, making a point to be consistent about not celebrating what I don't believe in).

Whether it was the right choice or not, I decided to keep it a simple "are you an ex-christian or not?" and let everyone elaborate in their posts.

 

[salko7]

as a child growing up in saudi arabia its easy to see why god was more of a fact rather then a "faith" thing.
there are alot of things that can make a person start to doubt the idea of god,

i don't remember exactly the first of mine but what really got me thinking of god and his "knowingness" and "mercifulness" is the things that god finds "harram"(sin or wrong) that to me seemed not
so sinful or evil ( not wearing a hijab , sex out of marriage, alcohol, pigs meat )- these things effected the knowledge of god)
and stuff that god seemed to want and order us to do (try to make muslims out of people at any cost(even tho people don't try it but its in the quran) call his name while killing an animal or that animal will become sinful to be eaten)
i went into detail about these stuff without the bias of religion and found out that god does not seem to know what he created
and isn't so merciful when he orders people to be killed and then punished in hell... god never seemed loving to me.

after that i still believed in a god but not a god from any religion (theist) and after a while the idea of a god or something created us seemed silly to me and i started seeing life as real as it is no "religious goggle" to control what i think of stuff only facts,reason and understanding do that now.

 

[TheOtherSide100]

My family had a bad history with religion.

Grandma was Catholic and grandpa was Protestant. They were told by both sides that they couldn't get married because it was "wrong." They knew of many dysfunctional marriages that were endorsed by the church, recognized, the bull, got married anyway and had six kids.

One of them was my mother. She chose to be Catholic after learning about it, but ran into a similar problem when she wanted to marry my dad. The church couldn't get behind it because he was divorced. She ditched the church, and I was the first of 3 born.

I guess you could say it's a "miracle" that I'm here (haha).

While I wasn't indoctrinated as a child, I had a feeling that I SHOULD believe in something when I was young. I privately tried to believe, but I was unsuccessful in swallowing the huge amounts of BS. Ultimately, I had to ask myself, "Why do you NEED to believe in any of this?"

 

[Dusty341]

Make more videos DP!

 

[buzzausa]

I come from a place where either you're a Christian (catholic as it were) or you're confused, rebellious, silly...going through a phase.....know what I'm saying?
I grew up believing in god, for the same reason that I learned one language over all the others. It was taught to me, it was part of our culture and I didn't have any say in the matter....nor did I want one, I couldn't. At a young age whatever your parents, teachers, mentors say is IT and you don't really have the ability to critically question it.
Of course it all changed when I got a bit older and started to ask myself and others questions. It didn't take long to view the catholic church for what it really was: the largest profit business corporation on the planet. But at that point I still felt that a higher power must exist...it just wasn't the bearded guy with a short temper whom I was raised to worship. I then spent several years trying to reconcile this feeling that a higher power existed, with something tangible..and invariably and consistently came up empty-handed and disappointed.
Abandoning my religion was easy and painless, a relief really...letting go of my "faith" if you'll allow me the term, was a much longer and more emotionally costly process. I think I am now what you would call (if you're into labels and categories) an "agnostic atheist"...I don't know if a higher power exists......I just don't believe it does.

 

[kouchpotato]

Up until this year I was a Christian. Didn't go to Church often (only at Christmas). Prayed sometimes (when life got really shitty and I wanted it to get better). I even debated against Atheists online. Than, I saw George Carlin's 'Religion is bullshit' stand up routine. I started to question stuff, looked it up and realized there was no way an all powerful sky man appeared from nothing (which is ironic because Creationists can't accept the universe starting at the Big Bang because "lol therez nothing there dummi lulz" but they can accept an all powerful being coming from nothing), creating everything. I couldn't see how humanity could have originated from two people, that just sounded messed up to me. Eventually, a few months ago, I became a full atheist and not just an agnostic.