Why Did You Loose Your Faith? (Poll)

[Josiah]

I would like to conduct an informal poll from those who have lost their faith in here. When the results are in, I will tally up the numbers (maybe in a month or so) and the info will be there for everyone's enjoyment and edification.

This is a survey only for post-Christian atheists. Please tell us - in one-sentence, bullet-points - what the major reasons were that you lost your faith. PLEASE DO NOT WRITE PARAGRAPHS because that would be impossible to tabulate at the end. Write something like this:

Lost my faith five years ago because:

1) Disallusioned by Christian hypocrisy

2) Evolution seemed to be true

3) Saw all the errors in the Bible

Please keep it short and sweet! As I said, I'll then be able to collect the data in a month or so, and put that as a post of the "top-ten reasons people loose their faith" or something like that. We can all benefit from this information, I think, and it should be fun to collect.

Thank you!

[Christoff]

Josiah,

OK, I'll go first. I was raised Protestant here in South Africa. I stumbled upon Pascal's Wager once and it made me think: OK, so if I have to believe to get into heaven, then I'd have to make damn sure that I believe in the correct god, for if I'm believing in the wrong one, I'm also damned, together with all the non-believers. So is it the Christian God? Or Allah? Or Vishnu? Or any of the ten-thousand odd gods on offer?

After trying to prove the correctness of my faith (the Christian Protestant flavour) through self-study, I ended up proving (to myself) that it's nothing more than any of the other thousands of religions that came and went. I've been an atheist since (15 years and counting)

Regards

[JustJim]

Here's how I introduced myself regarding my beliefs back in November of 2006, when I first came to the forum:

Here’s where I think I am at present, for the moment, theologically speaking, and why I consider myself probably to be a deist, believing in a god rather than no god – so far:

(1) Literally billions of people throughout history, across all cultures, have claimed to have had what they believed to have been some kind of personal, intimate experience with some kind of energy, force, being, etc. that they believed to be a ‘god’ (or other identifiers to that effect).

(2) Nothing for me has been able to adequately explain the origins of matter, space, energy, components of a “Big Bang” event, etc., resulting in the incredible proposition that the universe simply ‘sprang’ into being, uncaused, out of nothing, which seems to me far more preposterous than a ‘god-cause’ of the universe.

(3) The existence of an infinitesimally detailed order in the physical and biological universe, on micro and macro levels and everywhere in between, rather than the greater likelihood of random chaos, as well as the “laws” of nature and science as we observe and understand them so far, are for me much better accounted for by a ‘god-caused’ universe than by other explanations.

(4) Nothing for me has been able to adequately account for the transition from non-life to life, given the ultimately improbable odds against survival of any initial life forms that might have ‘accidentally’ formed as single events, let alone on any scale even remotely close to what would have been required for life to survive and propagate, even given the billions of years over which that would have had to occur.

(5) Still thinking….

NOTES:

(a) The ‘god’ in which I believe is not an anthropomorphic, intervening, “super heroic” kind of ‘person’ god of any of the religions people have developed in their attempts to make sense of their experiences, nor any non-personal object or force of nature to which people have assigned ‘deity’ status. This would include the Judeo-Christian-Islamic gods of Abraham (Yahweh and Allah), all the gods of all the “Eastern” religions and philosophies, all the gods of the ancient and primitive religions, all the Greek and Roman gods, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the wind, golden calves, crystals, etc.

(b) There is no “answer” to the question of where ‘god’ came from. For me, god transcends time and space and is personal without being a ‘person.’ Time and space began with the coming into being of the universe. Before that, there was no time or space, and therefore no such things as ‘infinity’ or ‘eternity’ or other time-related words like the first word in this sentence. There was no “before that”………………..

(c) I could change my mind on all of this at any time.

For reasons I can't quite explain, even for myself, I think I probably still feel the same way as I did back then most of the time, even though I no longer think of things like the universe or evolution having anything much really to do with chance, except where individual specific events are concerned.

I still don't believe there is a god anywhere that is anything like the traditional understandings of god in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic views of their God(s), or any of the other gods I mentioned, primarily because they just don't jive with what I see, feel, and 'sense' around me in the world. I also still feel like "I could change my mind on all of this at any time," as I did back then.

What took me away from my original Lutheran and later Pentecostal understandings of God was, so far as I can put it into words, REASON... i.e., none of that stuff made any reasonable sense to me anymore, and I had to let go of it and find something that did make sense. I'm still searching..... (Sorry, SS... didn't mean to imply I'm you... LOL...)

Jim

[StillSearching]

What took me away from my original Lutheran and later Pentecostal understandings of God was, so far as I can put it into words, REASON... i.e., none of that stuff made any reasonable sense to me anymore, and I had to let go of it and find something that did make sense. I'm still searching..... (Sorry, SS... didn't mean to imply I'm you... LOL...)

Coming from you, Jim, there is absolutely no need to apologize. In fact your post sums up quite nicely where I am as well, and why I chose my nom de plume.

[Keep The Reason]

I started off being born in a RC tradition, grew dissatisfied with it and moved over the Protestantism (I was in the Full Gospel Massapequa Tabernacle Church which leaned towards Pentacostalist and it's where a young lady named Jessica Hahn was first introduced to Jim Bakker by the Pastor -- how's this for a name -- Gene Profeta. For a dopey review of all of this, see this link.

Anyway, Full Gospel Massapequa church was where I started to really doubt because people would all be testifying how they could feel god and Jesus and so on, and I would often claim these things as well but I never felt them at all. I became ardently evangelical, and approached the whole thing with a "Don't push it" attitude. I didn't ever want to be accused of not being ready or open to it or trying to test, etc. I just... was. I tied into the Hal Lindsey "Late Great Planet Earth" and watched for every possible sign of prophecy coming true (and some seemed to do just that).

But after a number of years it was plain to me that I was just not getting it. I was, in fact, miserable. I felt that humanity was a sinful entity that was effectively hopeless without salvation outside of us. I saw people as not being worth very much; that we were more of a nuisance than anything else. I saw the future as meaningless because none of this mattered; it was all going to get wiped away anyway, so what was the point? The physical realm was a way station and really just a place to suffer. And my suffering was that the god that seemed to be dancing with everyone around me remained a silent abyss when it came to me.

So I began to drift away, and some friends took me to task for it, some didn't; nothing particularly traumatic but I decided to just go at it without a church mechanism in place. I tried to "build a relationship with Christ". And of course, this was all pretty one sided. I would speak to Jesus or god all the time, but never got anything in return. Sure, a minor coincidence here or there, nothing that wouldn't be attributed to low level luck, like discovering a $5 bill tucked on a pants pocket when I was low on funds, and asking god to see me through... that sort of thing. But any sense of spirit or connection or response to "ask of me and it shall be given"? Nothing. Zero.

Eventually I decided to investigate other religions, and so read the qu'ran, the bhagavad gita, the upanishads, the book of mormon (sheesh), and even dabbled in dianetics (sheesh again) and the bible a few more times... and every time I read the bible, the doubts grew larger and larger. It read more like myth every time I read it. Less likely, less true. It made strange claims that I knew weren't true. And the idea that "ask and thou shalt receiveth" seemed to be a mocking. I was actually jealous that guys like Moses and Abraham and Adam and so on were actually able to deal with Yaheweh -- at least they would be able to say they knew he existed; but I didn't have that luxury. I was "angry at god" for awhile but after a bit that just felt stupid as well. It was like being angry at a fictional character, and so that went away as well. So at this point I was without religion, without gods, and without much of anything else.

Then I was shown Carl Sagan's Cosmos by a friend on video, and I couldn't believe what I was hearing and seeing. I remember being moved almost to tears by his last epsiode/ chapter (I read the book as well), "Who Speaks for Earth?" and finally I started to get those feelings of wonder and awe that there was something to this life that was really remarkable and wonderful.

I read everything i could by Sagan (I have all his books now) and then I found "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins and that was an eye opener as well. Then I read the Dawkins' "Origin of Species" and was amazed yet again. I felt liberated. It was ok not to hear from these characters because they didn't actually exist. they didn't need to exist -- we had the means to understand our world so much better than what these ancient superstitious folks were saying. I never blamed them for it-- it was just what it was given the time, but I had a really hard time seeing what point there was in taking these beliefs into the 20th/21st century. There were far better explanations of how things worked, there was no need to demand the universe owes us "purpose", religion itself was morally corrupt and ethically bankrupt by making claims it was "sure of" that it was nothing of the kind, faith was merely an excuse to believe something you just wanted to believe in anyway, and modern theism, with a few superficial differences, was not something one could distinguish from superstitious god claims made through out human history.

Atheism was the consequence, but materialism, reason, and rationality are the ideological and ethical foundation upon which my worldview rests.

That's m'story.

[NH Baritone]

I grew up in an extremely religious family, the son, grandson, nephew, and cousin of Methodist ministers. In high school I used religious community as a way of coping with social awkwardness and suppressing sexual feelings. (Oddly, the need for such suppression grew out of the religion).

Methodists teach that faith should be based on Scripture, Tradition, Personal Experience, and Reason. Here are the questions that show how I ceased to be duped:

• I majored in religion (chiefly biblical studies) in college and briefly attended seminary. Textual criticism of the Bible and exposure to the full volume (not just the bits disclosed in sermons) convinced me that the Bible was a flawed and entirely human set of writings that Christians mine for pithy quotes and morality stories. What gives the Bible greater authority than any other book of mythology?
• Church traditions vary widely and only reflect the culture of their time and place. Women and slaves were oppressed for centuries, and "tradition" has been employed as justification for the suffering inflicted. How can trusting in such traditions have greater validity than trusting in any other cultural artifact?
• My personal experience as a gay man demonstrated that the church, the Bible and almost every manifestation of theism had (and still has) among the most inept, outdated interpretation of human sexuality. If Christianity and religion is wrong on this basic aspect of human experience, how can belief in God help anyone get anything else right?
• Reason had always been my friend. I loved science and was easily convinced that evolution had the greatest explanatory powers regarding human speciation. But until early adulthood, I had never fully applied reason to examination of my theism. When I did so, it became evident that religious faith was merely wishful thinking, primarily employed to deal with the limits of human power and the reality of death. When nature appears to function exactly as one would suppose if no god were to exist, why impose such an unhelpful and superstitious concept on the universe? And when Christianity has no adequate answer for Epicurus' riddle, how can it justify encouraging anyone to believe in any god?

[marcuspnw]

Well, first of all I didn't lose my faith like a set of keys or glasses. I killed it by not nourishing it. I thought it to be the humane thing to do. To put it out of its misery. Some of my reasons are as follows:

1. Mutually exclusive truth claims made by or within various religions without any satisfactory framework for examining them outside of personal preference or bias. Science and logic aren't
very useful when examining religious ideas and theology is as practical as throwing darts when trying to select from among alternatives.

2. The Bible is a good read but apart from some counter-intuitive suggestions by Jesus, it is not brilliant. It is definitely the expression of human beings not the divine.

3. I've never experienced Jesus in my life even though I've knocked at His door and "left milk and cookies on my porch" in case He showed at mine. I'm comfortable with
the idea that he no longer exists. Time to move on.

4. Several life-threatening situations from which I have concluded that no One is guarding my back. If I have a guardian angel, he or she is pathetic! And FIRED (Ode to the Donald)!

5. The poetry of Shelley, Arnold and Housman among others seduced me. Shakespeare convinced me that any god lacks the emotional depth and delicate frailty that is a human being and is therefore inferior.
I can pity the gods but I can't worship them.

6. The gods of religion can't keep up with human communication technology. They are incompetent in comparison to one's dear old grammy trying to text on a cell phone. And my grammy is dead.

7. Any god that demands worship is not deserving of any. A god that commands silent, submissive obedience is a tyrant who should be resisted.

8. I feel better, am happier and a more congenial, even-tempered person except when assembling equipment where the instructions are vague or fixing faucets that leak. I am still learning
patience in those instances.

9. Life is short. I'd rather do something like golf, backpacking, gardening, home-brewing etc. than sit on my bum for an hour listening to somebody else who is just as lost in god-thought as me trying to convince
us that god is so real, the most real thing/being that is. I've experienced the real. God ,in my experiences, isn't real.

Cheers.

[Brad]

Don’t have time to answer the “poll” right now, but would like to throw in a couple of brief comments.

First, those are some great, sincere, thoughtful, and good humored posts above.
Atheists (and agnostic deists) can do “testimony,” too! Hallelujah! Praise the FSM!

Josiah,
Good on you for posing your questions. I suppose your underlying motivation is probably to work on refutations for use in debating and perhaps returning ex-believers “to the fold.” Still, many Christians don’t want to hear, don’t want to know, and in at least some cases, don’t want to think at all outside the bubble / echo chamber of their particular faith group. It takes a bit of courage, if not more than the average bit of curiosity, to pose your questions and to consider the answers at all.

However, while most if not all of the writers above have managed to be remarkably concise, asking us to be short and sweet really doesn’t allow the question of how most of us really lost our faith to be properly answered. Very often, it just wasn’t that easy or simple, despite the simplistic sorts of answers you might get even here (we can’t write life stories in forum posts, don'cha know**), not to mention the explanations peddled by pastors, priests, and apologists to explain away non-believers.




**Although “heaven knows,” I’ve made posts of equivalent length!

P.S. If you really want to explore this beyond accumulating a few talking points, I'd recommend a couple of books, just off the top of my head. First, Losing My Religion by William Lobdell would tell you a lot. Second, Godless by Dan Barker is quite good.

[Kiwi]

Howdy

I proactively deconstructed and abandoned my faith about five years ago. It was a long process which I'm still consolidating (quite happily I might add). Among the dominoes that fell were:

- The doctrine of hell. I thought, hang on, this is all a bit too unreasonable for the God I think I know. (Reading Brian McLaren actually helped me along that path.)
- The historical reliability of the bible. I'd been wrestling with this for years. Issues about the way the bible was pulled together, edited, myth versus 'truth', the historical integrity of the Old Testament stories...
- The compelling evidence for evolution and my inability to reconcile evolution's implications with how I understood God to have become involved with humanity.
- A growing awareness that personal experience doesn't stack up as a reliable argument against all of the above.

For the record there was no bitterness or fall-out with the church, in fact I'm still involved... as an undercover atheist.

Kiwi

[Josiah]

Hello, All!

I just wanted to send a quick note that I AM reading these, and very much enjoying them! You are right, Brad, that I am hoping to use some of these objections as fodder for my apologetic FOR Christianity. Hey - I'm a Christian, what can I say. My feeling was that after several people posted, it would begin to be evident that there are really five to seven issues which are the REAL issues that people in our culture "fall away." So of course I'd like to talk about those things here, but also for my own education, I'd like to take a look at those and spend most of my time on these "really big" questions, rather than puttering away at questions that don't really matter for people's faith.

I just graduated from Seminary (wo ho!!) and have been struck of late by the fact that after 10+ years of post-secondary Christian education, I don't have many answers to these questions. Or, rather, I DO have answers, but they are answers which I have had to come to myself with much pain, tears and sweat. My college banged away on conservative orthodoxy, and didn't even allow us to ask the questions. My seminary opened us wide to the wide world of doubt and questioning, but provided little or no answers, and have strongly discouraged my attempts to find truth down the paths that I have. (They would rather that I "wrestle" and remain "post-modern" rather than "modern." I think this is all code for, "We wish you were an agnostic, rather than a fundamentalist") So for myself, as I am going into Christian teaching, I would like to be the one who both asks the questions and guides people towards the good answers that are out there for these very important objections. It has also occurred to me to write an e-book, titled for example, "Seven Questions My Seminary Didn't Help Me With" or something along those lines - but that's along ways down the road.

I should probably add that yes, Brad, my initial "rules" were probably a little too constricting. But people seem to be just writing how they want to irregardless, and that has been good. When I tally this up, I think I will just try to summarize people's words into a few sentences so that I can fulfill my initial purpose of seeing which ones are the most common. As you can see, there are already some common themes emerging.

Thank you, Brad, for your kind words about my supposed courage. I'm not sure how courageous I am, but many (most?) Christians I know are running terrified on these topics. So their fear makes me look good, maybe? Here's a poem I wrote about that the other day, called, "must we run?" http://nolongerbechildren.wordpress.com ... st-we-run/

I don't think Christians need to run from the truth, because we are right. If we just have courage to pursue truth, we will see that the truth will set us free, and will lead to a deeper and stronger faith, and a wider and more powerful impact on society. That has been my experience, and is my belief at any rate.

Thank you all and keep em' comin!

[tirtlegrrl]

Josiah wrote: I don't think Christians need to run from the truth, because we are right. If we just have courage to pursue truth, we will see that the truth will set us free, and will lead to a deeper and stronger faith, and a wider and more powerful impact on society. That has been my experience, and is my belief at any rate.

Hey Josiah,

I don't exactly claim to not be a Christian anymore, as the faith I accepted is pretty much burned into my brain in a sense, but I "lost my faith" in the sense that I no longer would consider myself a fundamentalist, or even an evangelical really. I've "accepted Jesus as my personal Savior", back when I hadn't really thought about the issues below, but I no longer wish to be associated with the movements that go by those terms. Here are some of the reasons why that happened.

1) Christian teachings on the nature of morality appear to conflict with the character of God. For example, I was taught that most human beings instinctively know right from wrong; i.e. possess a moral conscience, and also that objective morality exists and we know what it is. If that's so, then many of God's actions in the Bible are wrong and therefore either the Bible is wrong or God is a rather unsavory character I would not care to worship. If, on the other hand, human beings CAN'T recognize right from wrong or our moral sensors are faulty, then we have no basis to judge the God of the Bible, or the God of the Koran, or Zeus, or any other being with a claim to deity, and we're just trying to brainwash ourselves when we get together and sing hymns about the goodness of Yahweh. We'd have no way to know for sure and for all we know we could be worshiping a divine Hitler.

2) Apologetic responses to these issues are terrible. They range from basically arguing the Bible doesn't really say what it appears to say (not a great way to defend the Bible, btw) or they make God out to be a moral relativist. So mass killing of men, women, and children is wrong when people do it of their own volition but it's ok when God says to do it.

3) the Bible contains technical contradictions in its recounting of certain events, such as the death of Judas. Again apologetic reponses to this story are ridiculous.
There's also Jesus' claim that if you have basically any faith at all you can move mountains, etc. This obviously doesn't happen and again the explanations for it are either awkward or insulting. There's also his claim that God will take care of his people the same way he "clothes the lilies of the field". If tons of Christians starving to death, getting tortured and persecuted, and going through the same crap that everyone else goes through is God "taking care of them", I'd hate to see what God NOT taking care of them looks like. The only way this claim is true at all is in the idea that Christians get cushy homes in heaven for all their trouble here on earth. So this promise of Jesus' gives me no earthly practical comfort whatsoever.

4) All information I have received about God has come not from something that I'm convinced is God, but from people. You can claim God beamed down the Bible from heaven, but even the fundamentalists teach that people wrote it. We know from experience that people are often wrong, they make things up, and they believe what they want to believe (in other words they're NOT INFALLIBLE) so the claim that the Bible is inerrant, infallible, whatever, is pretty hard to confirm and the people who try basically focus on coming up with horrendous excuses for why the problems with it aren't really problems.

You talk about the value of truth, of believing true things, yet I think that in many matters, people conflate the truth with what they want to be true and this mucks things up pretty severely when you're discussing things like religion. So I can't tell you exactly WHY suddenly I decided to view the Bible more critically after marching in theological lock-step for two decades. And even if I did, there's a pretty good chance you won't take my explanation at face value but will find some way to spiritually psychoanalyze me to find out the "real" reason I started having trouble with the Bible ("I have sin in my life!" "I wanted to please my unchurched peers!" "I was rebelling against authority!"). I will tell you this though...my doubts turned me into an angry crying mess every time I went to church or talked to my parents or pastors, and that's definitely not what I was bargaining for the first time I decided to cross-reference a NT "fulfillment" of OT prophecy and discovered it was totally taken out of context.

[humanguy]

All notions of god vanished once I became well and truly convinced that god is nothing more than an ancient human invention.

[Josiah]

Hi Turtle Girl!

Great response! Thank you! I was just wondering if you remembered that first, decisive passage that you first cross-refrenced? I know that I found this troubling as a younger person too, and it's definitely a real apologetic question that needs to be addressed.

The issue of Judas was actually a decisive issue for me. For years, I thought I was the only one who noticed the incongruity between Matthew and Luke. I was afraid to tackle it for fear that it would destroy my faith - and afraid to mention it to others for fear it would destroy theirs! Then, finally, on my second-last class in seminary, I tackled the topic in a short paper, and found out that it's actually not hard to see how the two apparently contradictory accounts could be written about the same events. Actually, seeing how this was possible was one of the turning points to my turning to an inerrantist view of Scriptures, against the wishes and instruction of my professors!

[Josiah]

All notions of god vanished once I became well and truly convinced that god is nothing more than an ancient human invention.

Human guy - do you remember what it was that convinced you that Christianity is merely a human invention? Was it science, or textual criticism - or did you just wake up one morning and say, "this is stupid. I'm going home"?

[VickiRW]

1- I stopped fearing hell. (A friend pointed out that the Bible doesn't claim that incorrect doctrine sends you to hell.)
2- That let me give myself permission to think and be honest with myself about what I thought.
3- Jesus dying so God could forgive my sins made no sense, so I stopped being Christian.
4- The fact that God is clearly not interacting in with the physical world (to a statistically noticeable degree) made me a deist or panentheist. (It varied)
5- Building a life outside of the church led to a slow loss of belief in belief and ,therefore, the need for non-invasive views of God. It is just more simple to not believe.