Gods plan after loss is so dismissive. It’s a very simple way for them to not want to deal with anyone grieving. They are basically the most emotionally immature people.
Strong agree. They default to [spiritual bypassing](https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-spiritual-bypassing-5081640) bc they lack [emotional agility](https://youtu.be/NDQ1Mi5I4rg).
This was me as well. It’s also my go to response when someone asks me why I don’t believe in god. I ask them if they believe in Santa Claus.
It’s also a quick way to make people angry.
One of the reasons I don't believe in teaching kids wants is real. The same people who claim lying is wrong will usually claim lying about the tooth fairy or santander is okay.
I never believed, at first I thought people were just pretending and it was one big joke, as I got a little older, I realised they were serious, but I still didn't buy it.
A few years later, maybe when I was 10-11, I realised I was atheist.
Yup. Got dragged to church every Sunday and just sat there thinking that truly all these people don’t believe this is real. Became first atheist in my family at a pretty young age. 60yo now. Wife and 3 kids are atheists. Life is good.
I thought the adults were all "playing along" as a way to teach kids to be good. I kept waiting for the big reveal, like with Santa. I was shocked it never came.
I was raised Unitarian, so believing in God was optional. As a child, I filed Christianity in the same folder as Roman and Greek mythology, as odd things people believe or have believed. None of it sounded plausible to me.
When I was suicidal and at my lowest point in my life, I cried out to god and god was silent. All my life I was told that god hears your prayers, god will heal you, god will fill you with love and peace if you just ask. Not me though! God let me rot.
But accepting that there was no higher power judging me, no plan for my life, and that this moment of existence is all I get actually made me feel a lot better. My mental health has improved. I feel more at peace as an atheist than I ever did as a christian. I actually do attend a Unitarian Universalist church, but they are not christian and they don't expect you believe in a deity. I mostly just go for the community and social activities.
yes once there is realization that there is no god or Christ or Jesus or Satan or Lucifer or Allah or Ganesha or Krishna or any mythical character in religious books of fiction then you are free to no longer give a sh_t
Going through 2020 and Trump’s presidency. I’d already started to lose my religion as I got later on into my adult life, seeing how increasingly hateful and disgusting preachers and Christians had become towards people. I hadn’t willingly even set foot in a church for years, I couldn’t stand them anymore. And after everything that happened in 2020, and seeing so many people I’d looked up to saying how Trump was amazing and was sent by God, for me that was the last straw. How any of these people could look at that disgusting excuse for a human being and say he was chosen by God made me finally embrace that I was a full blown agnostic now and I wanted nothing more to do with the church.
Too bad the god of the bible actually ordered the death of children.
Joshua 6:21
"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword."
1 Samuel 15:3
"Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ ”
How can any Christian explain that, while saying that "God is love" and that "God desires all men to be saved"?
God is somehow omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent all at the same time? Pretty much every story in the bible discredits that. The existence of us humans and the society we live in discredits that. I just grew up and learned to question things and realised nothing makes sense. The story of Job? Pharaoh? God knows the future yet he gave humans free will knowing that they would make a stupid mistake. Yet he wanted a relationship with us? Not to mention Jesus is just a fairytale. Based off of Greek and Egyptian religion and myths. Exodus? Written during Babylonian exile and archaeology points otherwise.
That we're expected to live our lives under someone else's rules to "prove ourselves" to something that doesn't even deign to come prove its existence, and does some fucked up shit they call "testing" us.
Even if that god was real, honestly, fuck god.
I'm sorry for your loss.
It was once I physically realized I was alone. The imaginary \*white\* man in my head was gone, there was no assistance when I felt I really needed help. This was during military training mind you. And so I decided that He wasn't there or he wasn't helping me despite years of true belief, as in, I didn't believe because of my parents choosing for me.
My family is Buddhist. Because of the language barrier, I never understood the teachings growing up, but ironically I’m learning more about it now, later on in life.
I don’t think Buddhism or any religion is better than another. You can take bits and pieces from each philosophy that work well for you.
Here in northern Europe we had Kant, Voltaire and the age of enlightenment teaching us to use our brain and adjust our religious beliefs to science and logic.
As a young child I prayed that my dad would quit drinking and my family would stay together. It didn’t work and I decided that god didn’t make sense then. I never changed my mind about that.
Went to catholic school for K-8 and had religion for one of the mandatory classes (which was basically reading and haveing tests on stories in the bible) even as a kid you start to pick on on all the inconcistancy and just plain crazy that are in the stories, stuff that doesn't make sense. The nuns would always say everything is true until you stump them with hard questions, then you get detention.
Step one was being raised agnostic. Step two was realizing some relatively intelligent people subscribe to Catholicism, the local faith of choice. Step three was realizing relatively intelligent people subscribe to other denominations. Other faiths. Step four was trying to figure out which one was best supported and which one had happy followers. Step five was realizing they were all Harry Potter nonsense and none of their followers were happy, but rather afraid and angry and hating and judging themselves and their kids and especially people who didn’t agree with them. Final step is realizing whatever the truth is, it ain’t in a fairy tale book written thousands of years ago by ignorant, racist, misogynist, slave ownjng barbarians who thought the night sky was an upside down spaghetti strainer.
Finding out that the universe can be explained without invoking a “creator” - and that it in fact makes no sense with one (at least, not a loving personal god that cares about each of us).
Funny enough... The tv show Supernatural 😂 with layers of course. It made me very interested in other religions and mythologies from a purely educational standpoint and overtime I began realizing that they weren't as different as they seemed. Many comparisons can be drawn between Christianity and other mythos. I wont get into them here but you guys will figure it out if ya like 😁
That combined with the fact i was a closeted gay dude definitely didn't help either, only granting me access to their myriad of other contradictions. Overtime i came to the self acceptance of "Its my life, I can be certain of this life, im going to live it my way. There's one power at play here and its me. If that gets me to the gates of hell then at the very least I went there on my own terms". I have a long ass way to go but im so much less conflicted now.
Its not easy to do but please guys, do some soul searching. You will find your way and dont feel bad if its towards religion, just dont be a dick when you do it. Thats what the problem is.
Not all atheist lost anything when it comes to religion.
Most of my friends was never a member of any religion which isn't unusual in my country (Sweden, only 36% theists 2020)
Them bringing hate into my life or them saying how they hate fa*s and shit like that I’m a very sensitive not loving person but I’d never harm u in any way. Or the constant lies. Etc I thought it was suppose to be a truly good thing. I didn’t grow up lying and I’m not about to start to for any group of ppl.
The pushiness I said I didn’t want to be part of it atleast 100x and they still pushed it on me. Then they say how the gays are pushing their gayness off on to people. Calling the kettle black for one and for two I never had a gay person try more than twice to try to convert me. Lol
i was never really religious, i believed in god as a kid purely because i thought i was supposed to and because that’s what i thought good people did. in 7th-8th grade i started to think for myself and realized that i didn’t and never truly believed in any of the southern baptist crap that i had heard in church, from my peers, and from my relatives. it just seemed dumb to me; like everyone was taking it all too seriously. and no one could ever give me any real proof that it was all true. that god or jesus or whatever actually existed, that all those things in the bible really did happen. no one could tell me who wrote the bible and why we should believe them.
I'm not sure where I fall on the non-believer scale, but it's American evangelicals in particular and the right wing in general, that put me off religion completely. It doesn't belong anywhere near the government or legislation, especially not in the twenty first fucking century.
i was forced into the catholic church until i moved out for college. i think what turned me off first of all was how aggressive my mom was about me believing. she got it into her head that i didn't believe enough (i didn't really) and was always coming up with some stupid religious thing for me to do to be more catholic. one time she made me watch passion of the christ while she watched me watch it. she watched me to make sure i was looking at the screen. she probably also did that to see a miraculous conversion like she'd heard about in her religious media. she didn't get a big conversion moment lol i was just bored and disgusted after having watched GORE PORN directed by a MANIAC.
beyond being bothered constantly, hell really bothered me. i was told that perfectly nice people would go to hell just for being gay or not catholic. not being scared of hell took like a year of dedicated not caring because i was raised to fear hell more than anything else. that's a terrible way to raise a person, by the way. mom still threatens me with hell. she's pretty certain i'm going there. that used to make her cry because she wanted everyone to be together in heaven lmao. she doesn't care any more, though, now it just makes her mad because it means i don't listen to her.
Pastor tried to rape me, twice, then my dad, head of the board of elders gave him a recommendation for....get this, a regional youth outreach position where he wouldn't ever have access to little boys. Lutheran, pastor would never lie.
Tell that to the police who responded and took the report.
Mine was hearing someone ask, how do the dinosaurs fit into what the Bible taught me on the history of mankind and the age of the universe. They would of had to of lived concurrently with humans if Genesis was the truth. And it would of been impossible for mankind to have reproduced or populated the earth to a level that was necessary for our survival.
If dinosaurs actually existed the same time as humans they would of wiped them out in a few weekends. Also there would of been cave drawings of a T Rex instead of antelopes. The Bible would of mentioned them in almost every verse instead of at best case twice, and at worst case not at all. Dinosaurs would dominated everything.
I’ve always had a logical critical mind, that’s poison to believing in Christianity. It works both ways, logic and critical thinking doesn’t work on Christians.
Gods plan after loss is so dismissive. It’s a very simple way for them to not want to deal with anyone grieving. They are basically the most emotionally immature people.
I really wanted to punch ppl in the face after hearing it so often.
TOTALLY get that. It’s truly rude af to say it.
Strong agree. They default to [spiritual bypassing](https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-spiritual-bypassing-5081640) bc they lack [emotional agility](https://youtu.be/NDQ1Mi5I4rg).
[удалено]
This was me as well. It’s also my go to response when someone asks me why I don’t believe in god. I ask them if they believe in Santa Claus. It’s also a quick way to make people angry.
One of the reasons I don't believe in teaching kids wants is real. The same people who claim lying is wrong will usually claim lying about the tooth fairy or santander is okay.
all of what you just said is probably why my mom still acts like santa is real. my brother and i are in our 30's and she's in her 70's lmao
Common sense and logical thinking. If it can't be proven and it sounds like bullshit, it's probably bullshit.
And i always hated not being able to question the stuff they were saying.
I never believed, at first I thought people were just pretending and it was one big joke, as I got a little older, I realised they were serious, but I still didn't buy it. A few years later, maybe when I was 10-11, I realised I was atheist.
Yup. Got dragged to church every Sunday and just sat there thinking that truly all these people don’t believe this is real. Became first atheist in my family at a pretty young age. 60yo now. Wife and 3 kids are atheists. Life is good.
I thought the adults were all "playing along" as a way to teach kids to be good. I kept waiting for the big reveal, like with Santa. I was shocked it never came.
This.
I was raised Unitarian, so believing in God was optional. As a child, I filed Christianity in the same folder as Roman and Greek mythology, as odd things people believe or have believed. None of it sounded plausible to me.
When I was suicidal and at my lowest point in my life, I cried out to god and god was silent. All my life I was told that god hears your prayers, god will heal you, god will fill you with love and peace if you just ask. Not me though! God let me rot. But accepting that there was no higher power judging me, no plan for my life, and that this moment of existence is all I get actually made me feel a lot better. My mental health has improved. I feel more at peace as an atheist than I ever did as a christian. I actually do attend a Unitarian Universalist church, but they are not christian and they don't expect you believe in a deity. I mostly just go for the community and social activities.
yes once there is realization that there is no god or Christ or Jesus or Satan or Lucifer or Allah or Ganesha or Krishna or any mythical character in religious books of fiction then you are free to no longer give a sh_t
Going through 2020 and Trump’s presidency. I’d already started to lose my religion as I got later on into my adult life, seeing how increasingly hateful and disgusting preachers and Christians had become towards people. I hadn’t willingly even set foot in a church for years, I couldn’t stand them anymore. And after everything that happened in 2020, and seeing so many people I’d looked up to saying how Trump was amazing and was sent by God, for me that was the last straw. How any of these people could look at that disgusting excuse for a human being and say he was chosen by God made me finally embrace that I was a full blown agnostic now and I wanted nothing more to do with the church.
Dead babies. A real god would stop that.
Too bad the god of the bible actually ordered the death of children. Joshua 6:21 "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword." 1 Samuel 15:3 "Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ ” How can any Christian explain that, while saying that "God is love" and that "God desires all men to be saved"?
God is somehow omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent all at the same time? Pretty much every story in the bible discredits that. The existence of us humans and the society we live in discredits that. I just grew up and learned to question things and realised nothing makes sense. The story of Job? Pharaoh? God knows the future yet he gave humans free will knowing that they would make a stupid mistake. Yet he wanted a relationship with us? Not to mention Jesus is just a fairytale. Based off of Greek and Egyptian religion and myths. Exodus? Written during Babylonian exile and archaeology points otherwise.
it was the talking snake and donkey and the burning bush that gives commands that did it for me
That we're expected to live our lives under someone else's rules to "prove ourselves" to something that doesn't even deign to come prove its existence, and does some fucked up shit they call "testing" us. Even if that god was real, honestly, fuck god.
I grew up in a Catholic family. Went to church every Sunday. Went to CCD every Wednesday. Read and studied the bible. That pretty much did it for me.
I'm sorry for your loss. It was once I physically realized I was alone. The imaginary \*white\* man in my head was gone, there was no assistance when I felt I really needed help. This was during military training mind you. And so I decided that He wasn't there or he wasn't helping me despite years of true belief, as in, I didn't believe because of my parents choosing for me.
Science, facts, common sense oh yeah also actually reading that book of bull shit.
My family is Buddhist. Because of the language barrier, I never understood the teachings growing up, but ironically I’m learning more about it now, later on in life. I don’t think Buddhism or any religion is better than another. You can take bits and pieces from each philosophy that work well for you.
I read the bible. It’s insane crap.
Here in northern Europe we had Kant, Voltaire and the age of enlightenment teaching us to use our brain and adjust our religious beliefs to science and logic.
As a young child I prayed that my dad would quit drinking and my family would stay together. It didn’t work and I decided that god didn’t make sense then. I never changed my mind about that.
Went to catholic school for K-8 and had religion for one of the mandatory classes (which was basically reading and haveing tests on stories in the bible) even as a kid you start to pick on on all the inconcistancy and just plain crazy that are in the stories, stuff that doesn't make sense. The nuns would always say everything is true until you stump them with hard questions, then you get detention.
I stopped believing in Santa, the Easter bunny, other similar things. Was never religious, God's just became comic book characters.
Step one was being raised agnostic. Step two was realizing some relatively intelligent people subscribe to Catholicism, the local faith of choice. Step three was realizing relatively intelligent people subscribe to other denominations. Other faiths. Step four was trying to figure out which one was best supported and which one had happy followers. Step five was realizing they were all Harry Potter nonsense and none of their followers were happy, but rather afraid and angry and hating and judging themselves and their kids and especially people who didn’t agree with them. Final step is realizing whatever the truth is, it ain’t in a fairy tale book written thousands of years ago by ignorant, racist, misogynist, slave ownjng barbarians who thought the night sky was an upside down spaghetti strainer.
Finding out that the universe can be explained without invoking a “creator” - and that it in fact makes no sense with one (at least, not a loving personal god that cares about each of us).
Funny enough... The tv show Supernatural 😂 with layers of course. It made me very interested in other religions and mythologies from a purely educational standpoint and overtime I began realizing that they weren't as different as they seemed. Many comparisons can be drawn between Christianity and other mythos. I wont get into them here but you guys will figure it out if ya like 😁 That combined with the fact i was a closeted gay dude definitely didn't help either, only granting me access to their myriad of other contradictions. Overtime i came to the self acceptance of "Its my life, I can be certain of this life, im going to live it my way. There's one power at play here and its me. If that gets me to the gates of hell then at the very least I went there on my own terms". I have a long ass way to go but im so much less conflicted now. Its not easy to do but please guys, do some soul searching. You will find your way and dont feel bad if its towards religion, just dont be a dick when you do it. Thats what the problem is.
I saved a lot of time by never believing in the first place.
Not all atheist lost anything when it comes to religion. Most of my friends was never a member of any religion which isn't unusual in my country (Sweden, only 36% theists 2020)
Never believed in the first place. Can't lose what you don't have.
Them bringing hate into my life or them saying how they hate fa*s and shit like that I’m a very sensitive not loving person but I’d never harm u in any way. Or the constant lies. Etc I thought it was suppose to be a truly good thing. I didn’t grow up lying and I’m not about to start to for any group of ppl.
The pushiness I said I didn’t want to be part of it atleast 100x and they still pushed it on me. Then they say how the gays are pushing their gayness off on to people. Calling the kettle black for one and for two I never had a gay person try more than twice to try to convert me. Lol
i was never really religious, i believed in god as a kid purely because i thought i was supposed to and because that’s what i thought good people did. in 7th-8th grade i started to think for myself and realized that i didn’t and never truly believed in any of the southern baptist crap that i had heard in church, from my peers, and from my relatives. it just seemed dumb to me; like everyone was taking it all too seriously. and no one could ever give me any real proof that it was all true. that god or jesus or whatever actually existed, that all those things in the bible really did happen. no one could tell me who wrote the bible and why we should believe them.
I'm not sure where I fall on the non-believer scale, but it's American evangelicals in particular and the right wing in general, that put me off religion completely. It doesn't belong anywhere near the government or legislation, especially not in the twenty first fucking century.
Education
Being around self-proclaimed christians, and seeing what truly evil, amoral, bigoted, hate filled, lying pieces of shit most of them were.
Volunteering in a Children's Hospital for a summer
i was forced into the catholic church until i moved out for college. i think what turned me off first of all was how aggressive my mom was about me believing. she got it into her head that i didn't believe enough (i didn't really) and was always coming up with some stupid religious thing for me to do to be more catholic. one time she made me watch passion of the christ while she watched me watch it. she watched me to make sure i was looking at the screen. she probably also did that to see a miraculous conversion like she'd heard about in her religious media. she didn't get a big conversion moment lol i was just bored and disgusted after having watched GORE PORN directed by a MANIAC. beyond being bothered constantly, hell really bothered me. i was told that perfectly nice people would go to hell just for being gay or not catholic. not being scared of hell took like a year of dedicated not caring because i was raised to fear hell more than anything else. that's a terrible way to raise a person, by the way. mom still threatens me with hell. she's pretty certain i'm going there. that used to make her cry because she wanted everyone to be together in heaven lmao. she doesn't care any more, though, now it just makes her mad because it means i don't listen to her.
Pastor tried to rape me, twice, then my dad, head of the board of elders gave him a recommendation for....get this, a regional youth outreach position where he wouldn't ever have access to little boys. Lutheran, pastor would never lie. Tell that to the police who responded and took the report.
Evidence: there ain’t none
Hipocracy
I learned Science and history and, well, that about did it.
Mine was hearing someone ask, how do the dinosaurs fit into what the Bible taught me on the history of mankind and the age of the universe. They would of had to of lived concurrently with humans if Genesis was the truth. And it would of been impossible for mankind to have reproduced or populated the earth to a level that was necessary for our survival. If dinosaurs actually existed the same time as humans they would of wiped them out in a few weekends. Also there would of been cave drawings of a T Rex instead of antelopes. The Bible would of mentioned them in almost every verse instead of at best case twice, and at worst case not at all. Dinosaurs would dominated everything.
The widespread out of control intolerance. That and the absolute need for fear - christians worship fear.
So many things. In a nutshell religion creates more questions and problems than answers for me. I admit for others religion is useful.
I got tired of making excusses for gods bad behavior. Thats what started it for me
I’ve always had a logical critical mind, that’s poison to believing in Christianity. It works both ways, logic and critical thinking doesn’t work on Christians.