My mother refusing treatment for cancer when it was still in early stages, Jesus will cure it for sure

What do you mean “ex-believer”? I still use Linux every day.

I read the Bible. I started asking questions about things in the Bible that didn’t match science, I loved science (still do), but nobody wanted to answer my questions, they’d just get mad, so I started seeking information elsewhere and came across atheist or ex-religious sources who answered the questions I had. Those sources also helped me realise the damage that had been done to me mentally, which I’m still working on overcoming.

I never believed, I was told I had to be christian or I would go to hell.

Many experiences over many years. My own curiosity and love of learning really helped save me. But for me it was all made to finally click together by psilocybin.

Withdrawing from it for a while and not going through the motions

I went to a Church school.

Haven’t. Curious on the experience of others.

I read the Bible. I watched the wah believers treated others, and leanred how they saw the world. I realized out poorly adjusted I was for interacting with anyone besides other believers. I left the church and learned how to become a better person. It was a tremendous amount of work, and frankly, I’d rather have learned it earlier.

I consider myself someone who is always in search of truth.

When I realized evangelical Christianity has some hardcore lies and hypocrisy, I left it.

I did eventually find my way back to a more traditional version of Christianity that is interested in truth and love.

I just gave it up 1 day. No life changing event, no bad experience, just a shift in perspective happened, and I basically realised that I did not really need a god. I still practice some things which were part of my religious activities (donating, or serving others), but that is more of general good citizen thing rather than being religious

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

They tried too hard to make me join, but instead I got annoyed

They weren’t very kind to my family.

The hypocrisy and manipulation made it impossible to worship with them next to me.

I graduated from oral Roberts University and was full in. But the leaders of the small church were more interested in holding power rather than helping people. Fox News had an article with a headline stating blue eyed people were smarter than brown eyed. Being Latino, I was annoyed at the article and started to question why I even thought that the right wing evangelical establishment cared about me. I was just used for the financial support and votes.

I read the whole bible as an adult

The people. Family, their friends, the church people, the religious school people. Everyone. Toxic. And it took me far too long to figure out how wrong it all was and how so much judgement and hate and shame and guilt was not normal.

None of my community raised an effective adult. But they sure tried to raise an indoctrinated subservient guilt-riddled sack of shit.

Fuck religion and fuck people who pressure it on others, especially children, and so many of them use it all as an excuse to cover the fact they are ultimately just shitty people.

Took me until my 20s to reconcile my atheism. Maturity, i guess.

Bad shit happened. When I asked why, the answers were lame. When I accused god of being an asshole, the defenses were the very definition of not even being wrong.

I’ve left catholicism Because of the amount of bigotry and hate I witnessed in catholic some circles, from celebrating the death of a openly gay person, to calling for a g*nocide of the f slur (yk what I mean),the thing is. These some catholic circles are pretty much common. and I’m like. If this is what you teach. Then screw it, im leaving the church, then I left it and didn’t wasted my time getting around catholics, Then I found refuge in Anglican Church. Now I’m a normal, non-bigoted Christian living my life like how I want to , and now im slowly started to disconnect from my catholic community I used to be part of, no more tradcath nonsense, moral of this story. If your church/religion teaches hate, then you should just change it, or just become atheist at this point,

I had waited a long time to have any kind of personal experience of God, and finally gave up. Like they said, the holy spirit was supposed to work in you, I prayed for it and looked for it for a long time. Since it didn’t appear, no reason to excuse the problematic passages or shitty people.

Learning about the world, in school and by reading humongous amounts of books when I was a kid and preteen. I eventually realised that “nah, I don’t believe that.” and that was that.

That’s the sanitised version lol. A number of those books were by Erich von Däniken, unfortunately, and that simply “overwrote” Christianity in my young and impressionable science-fiction loving mind. Luckily I continued learning and not TOO long after I realised that was bullshit too and in the process I also actually realised why religion doesn’t make sense to me.

tl;dr: HP Lovecraft made me atheist

Adulthood makes you realise that there is no such thing as justice. Our lives are lived dancing in the palms of the Monetarists looking to make a quick buck. There is no karma and life is suffering as slaves to the elite.

If god exists, there should be no slavery, rape and wars.

I grew up as a Christian. When I was around 15, someone asked me “if I hadn’t been born a Christian, would I be a Christian?” Considering it, I opened my Bible and immediately a verse popped out (in classic God fashion) saying “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”

So then I felt called even more to really explore, based on that:

• I couldn’t currently defend my faith reasonably
• If God was actually real, he wouldn’t be scared of people exploring arguments against Christianity, because the faith would be based on something ultimately true.
• By exploring other faiths, arguments, etc, if I returned as a Christian, I would have a much stronger faith.

The more I explored these arguments, as well as gaining a better understanding of what the Bible actually is (in a historical and literature sense), more and more of the belief system unraveled, eventually to the point I didn’t call myself a Christian anymore.

Then over the next decade I went back and forth exploring alternative denominations in Christianity, as well as other religions (Daoism, Buddhism, Judaism), especially as I still felt a “spiritual pull” / intuition in a lot of situations. So it took me a really long time to separate that intuitive sense of direction from the belief system around the Holy Spirit specifically, and learn where trusting that intuition is effective, and where it can be misleading. That’s been the most complex part of all of this.

I still enjoy exploring other belief systems, components of Christianity, and connecting with whatever that intuition is occasionally, as I do think there is a lot there for human psychological and emotional health that Western modernity sorely lacks. (I suspect this hole in our culture is why a lot of fundamental US Evangelism has flourished btw)

But that’s how I lost my faith - God gave me the push I needed :P

I learned about Gandhi when I was 12, and thought it was dumb that he would be in hell just because he wasn’t Christian. Absolutely could not square that rule with the idea that “God is love”. Figured it was all a bunch of bullshit.

I asked the forbidden question too much. “Why?”

I was a child who had been SA’d by an adult man. The adults around me told me to pray for forgiveness. I was 12.

Years later, I went to get a visitor’s pass to visit a friend at my old Christian school. They aggressively denied me entrance.

I dunno, it just made no sense. If people find out you’re an atheist, they don’t argue with facts, they argue with morals.

I’m sorry you need to believe in something with zero evidence to be a good person/find beauty in the world/be at peace with yourself/whatever, but I can just do those things anyway. I don’t need to convince myself of certain facts for it.

I was raised Catholic but rejected it pretty much immediately when I reached the age of reason (~13 or so).

So all I have to do is listen to and obey everything my parents, teachers, and religious leaders tell me and I’ll go to heaven, but, if I had been born into a Muslim family in one of the countries we were bombing, doing that would get me sent to Hell and I need to reject everything I was taught, get on a plane, randomly walk into the right church, and believe everything they tell me. Oh, and if I was like some random Chinese farmer a thousand years before planes were invented, I guess I’m just fucked. Yeah somehow I don’t believe that an all-good perfectly-just god would have every soul play fucking roulette to determine what their chances in life will be of getting into heaven.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the history of this contradiction, which goes back to a 400’s debate between Augustine and Pelagius regarding original sin. Pelagius argued that it was theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult, to live a life free of sin and therefore not need Jesus’ forgiveness. He was also critical of the way Christians were integrating with the Roman empire, with all the same practices but now the social climbers called themselves Christian to win the emperor’s favor while otherwise doing all the same shit they would otherwise. Augustine rejected this, arguing that the Father would not sacrifice the Son unless it was strictly necessary, furthermore, Pelagius’ arguments would undermine the authority of the church (this was stated explicitly). Augustine invented the concept of original sin as something passed down through generations (despite this making zero sense), cited a mistranslated passage from scripture to support it, and used that to explain how even someone who lived a perfectly innocent life deserved to go to hell. This included, of course, fetuses. It was the Church’s position for a very long time that if you have an abortion, or even a miscarriage, then your baby’s soul is burning in hell.

What’s particularly funny to me about this is that, after Pelagius was denounced as a heretic for saying people needed to actually live virtuously instead of just relying on Jesus to forgive them, he became so reviled that people were often accused of “semi-Pelagianism.” All through the Reformation, everyone was accusing each other of being “semi-Pelagians” and trying to position themselves as the true inheritors of the Augustinian tradition. It wasn’t until relatively recently that anyone started saying, “Hey, maybe the Augustinian position is actually kinda fucked up.”

As a kid religion seemed like make believe, still I followed it and thought of myself as Catholics into early adult hood. Eventually I just started referring to myself as an atheist.

At some point I realised that this almighty being that loves everyone either is not actually almighty or just a massive cunt, considering it allows unnecessary unprovoked evil like children dying a long painful death from a disease that this being also happened to create.

At about the age of 8 I could tell that Catholicism was evil. So that was it for me. Lots of specific things but just evil overall.

I never really was into spirituality much and then over time I noticed Buddhism kept bumping into me and kept explaining things in more and more straightforward ways over the years so eventually I caved in and looked into it more closely and decided to practice Tibetan Buddhism because it felt more closely related to my own personal experiences and interests…it can be tricky to understand at first until you understand how all the symbolism works and then a whole world of information was opened up to me and I feel better than ever.

Those early Tibetan Buddhists really got a lot of things right from the start and still today I see science research come out suggesting the same things they figured out long ago.

When I was 10 my dad committed suicide and my grandparents told me we’d never be able to see him in heaven. Pretty much broke my little brain for awhile trying to understand how a just and loving God could separate a young boy from his father for eternity.

Never could, and now I’m a proud atheist disappointment to my grandparents.

I was always kinda skeptical but the event that triggered my way out was when I asked my mom how can God expect people, who were raised with other religions, to believe in him instead when they simply have no idea. She said they know about God and it’s their own fault for not believing in him. And that for me was not logical because I knew from my own experience that I only believed in God because that’s all I knew.

But it took a while for me to completely stop believing in any deity or whatever supernatural power because I kept looking for reasons why we exist. Now I don’t care for that. Sure the Big Bang is mysterious and we might never solve it but there is no sense in making things up either. Everything else can be explained by science so let’s just go with that.

If the Christian God wants me to believe in him, he should stop being so vague and contradicting. Turn the moon into cheese. Pluck a mountain out of the ground and float it in the sky. Whatever, he is almighty, he should do almighty things.

I worked as a researcher and started applying the scientific method to the bible and faith, and it fell apart. before i tried to “disable” critical thinking on many issues in the bible and push those issues away. Also, I realized that my faith kept me from accepting responsibility for my actions and kept me externalizing responsibility to god and/or the devil and other people.

I was a nerd, so I tried really really hard to prove logically that my religion was the correct one… and failed.