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Question 12

Did you have a bad experience with your former church or religion that caused you to reject it and become an atheist?

• The only bad experience I had in church was extreme bordom. The entire religious thing is sooooo incrediblely unbelieveable that it always put me to sleep immediately. (Jim #574)

• In sunday school the teacher told my little sister it was a sin for her to go to college and get a job - her place was in the home. (Matthew S. Cramer #846)

• No. Other than seeing the members of the church live in total conflict with what I know is good. (Jay Cole #30)

• I was raised Roman Catholic by a devout Catholic father. I went thru communion, catechism, confirmation .. the whole bit. I made the decision to leave the church because I just could not follow their rules, especially the rule forbidding the use of birth control. I also could not understand the hypocrisy displayed by my father and other theists. Sin all week then go to confession on Saturday and communion on Sunday, and on Monday they're all pure again and ready to sin some more.

  I spent most of my life as a closet atheist, afraid of conflict if I admitted to my friends and family that I was an atheist (I'm not a good debater). I credit the people here on this newsgroup for giving me the courage to speak up. I don't post very often, but I enjoy reading the discussions. (Sally #939)

• Even though I have been an atheist prior to my memory, I can't say that I ever rejected christianity (the only option where I am from), but the actions of christians certainly kept me from considering christianity. The hatred that these people were willing to have in the name of god astounded me to no end. Their moral beliefs contradicted everything I was taught as a child. The fact that I can honestly say that I love where I grew up, but hate what the people stand for is a testement to this. The fact is, I would have faced extreme physical harm had I revealed my atheism to anyone. The fact that I have not revealed my atheism to anyone outside this NG (not even my parents, though I'm pretty sure they know I've rejected organized religion, if not the fact that I am an atheist) is a testement to the psychological torture fundamentalism has done to me. It is a wonder that I am not cynical about human nature. Luckily, the actions of the people I spent the first 17 years of my life around only made me cynical of religion. (Van Isaac Anderson #716)

• When I was in 8th grade and taking confirmation class, the pastor said that the moon was not a solid body and man could never go there. Well, I had already built a telescope that could resolve the craters. I knew right then that the man was an idiot and a liar.

  When I was in my twenties I was manning a console at the Cape Kennedy launch complex during the launch of Apollo 11. I thought of him then and wished that I could rub his nose in it. (Larry Mudinger #451)

• I actually had very pleasant experiences with religion when I was young, 12 - 15. A family friend would take my sister and I to different churches. I was fortunate enough to be able to experience many different types of religion without the pressure to actually subscribe to any of their beliefs. This is why I would like to see a comparative religion course taught to children, including a section on atheism of course.

  I rejected all of the beliefs I had developed by being shown the ridiculousness of the beliefs. After my initial "eye opening" I began to question everything. To this day I still am amazed at what people will believe. (Clark Nova #474)

• Watching the leaders of our Church try to set my father up as a fall guy for a bad business deal. After which, visiting our house with the intent of buying our belongings as they assumed he would take the fall. Luckily, he is made of sterner stuff and they failed.

  Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.

  That's only one, but perhaps the biggest that comes to mind. It takes more than one event to really condemn an entire group. I have seen the gamut from what I would call "false charity" (see above) to downright hypocritical actions. They had a "no jewlery" policy (including wedding rings) yet the Pastor got to sport a Rolex, as it was "functional". Overt xenophobia in the ol' church really stuck in my mind (don't forget I was an impressionable youth). These guys condemned the Catholic Church as the "Whore of Babylon", thus condemning my Grandparents to "hell".

  Recently, I attended an Anglican funeral service for a friend. It seemed to me that the Reverend (who had never met her) was more interested in winning converts than honoring the memory of a great (IMHO) woman. Sure, the last instance wasn't "my" church, yet it kind of backed up what I knew/thought about religion in general.

  I could keep going on the conflicts I have had with my/various churches, but we all have better things to do. (Paul MacDonald #537)

  I can remember thinking the Methodists were a bunch of hippocrites. Ohio at the time had a referendum going on repealing the blue laws and I can remember a lot of preaching on how sinful it was to do some things on the sabbath.. It just never made and sense to me why buying gas was ok, food at a restaurant was ok, but food at a grocery store was not ... and the attitude when you asked for an explanation !!! Because God says so was even less satisfying than "Because I said so " was from my father. (Suzane #62)

• Personally I didn't really have any bad experiences, apart from that I did not really believe everything (this was when I was studying the bible in group being sixteen years old) the priest told me. I tried to pray over and over again and went through a quite hard time trying to figure out why I wasn't worthy of an answer from god.

  Our priest told me I was not sincere enough and I had to try harder so I did. In the end I was feeling very very alone as everyone else in the group seemed to have all these long and intellectual conversations with Jesus. Or so I thought they had.

  After a while I started talking to this girl who I had known since we where perhaps six or seven years old, and she confessed she never got an answer from either god, Jesus or the holy ghost either. I told her what the priest had told me, that I wasn't sincere enough and she told me that she had been told the same thing as well.

  After a couple more weeks, we discovered another student that shared our problem, and we where now three who did not get any answers from any deity whatsoever. We did not tell the priest that we had these "blasphemic" thoughts at the time, and he was convinced that everyone (except me) got answers from god when praying.

  In the end I left. Hypocrites never was what I enjoyed spending time with anyway.

  This is what agravates me when people like Frank the Fundie bleats that everyone gets answers if they pray. Everyone does _not_ weither he wants to believe this or not, I never did event though I have never ever wanted anything more then get rid of the doubts I had. Instead they grew, and a few years later I said to myself, "you don't believe in a god, why pretend or try to?" so then I sort of in my own mind declared myself an atheist.

  Been one ever since. (Ichimusai #769)

• It deprived me of my mother. She truly believed that I would suffer eternal torment in Hell if I didn't fully accept Jesus into my heart. My wavering and very weak faith clearly disturbed her, causing her a great deal of torment on a daily basis. Since I deeply loved my mother her suffering hurt me, so I tried my best to believe in God, accept Jesus, etc.

  That proved to be too hard of a cross for me to bear and led, I believe, to a mental breakdown on my part. I woke up one day and my mother was a stranger to me. Oh, I knew her name, and what she was like, but I had absolutely no emotional reaction to her. I couldn't love her, trust her, fear her, or even hate her. I just felt a calm indifference to her.

  As you can probably guess, this had to have huge repercussions in the emotional development of a pre-teen boy. I suspect that is why I've always been a loner, had such a weak sex life, don't have any close friends, don't want to have any children, etc. All because some "fire and brimstone" Lutheran minister infected my mother with the Hell meme. (Thank you so much, Pastor Westcott, wherever the fuck you are.) (Carl Funk #1229)

• None. As I've said before, I was heavily involved with my religion (Christian, Methodist). I was active in my church, studied for the ministry, and actually served as assistant pastor at a church while in seminary.

  I didn't leave the church because of a bad experience but because I found it impossible to maintain the "suspension of disbelief" that had made my religious faith possible. Once I began seriously examining the assumptions on which that faith was based, I began a process that led inexorably to my becoming an atheist.

  There was no tragedy, no disappointment, no anger involved, just a bit of sadness that I had wasted so much time on such abject nonsense. I felt as though I had recovered from a long, lingering illness and, for the first time since I was very small, had been restored to full health and vigor. Even though I'm beset by some physical infirmities these days, that attitude has not left me in the 25-plus years since I first felt it.

  I know theists would like to believe that there must have been some terrible event or disappointment that pushed me to leave the church, but that simply wasn't the case at all. I'm an atheist because, given what I now understand about the nature of god-belief and religion, I cannot be otherwise. (George Ricker #146)

• The bad death of a nine-year-old boy in Southeast Asia, followed closely by the carpet-bombing of that boy's native land.

  Understand, that was only the start of my doubting. I did a lot of work before finally reaching atheism. (chib)

• For me, it wasn't tragedy so much as disappointment. When I was a believer, I sought answers to questions that were usually handwaved away by the religious authority figures in my life, and they couldn't or wouldn't provide them honestly. I began to see the church (my independent Baptist church, as well as the "church" in the larger sense of all xianity) and the bible as being very hypocritical by violating the first rule of creative writing- show, don't tell. God is love, even though he murders untold numbers of people for minor or nonexistant violations. My church's goals are to spread peace, joy, and equality, even though the congregation had a falling-out and split into two churches over an archaic Taliban-ish church regulation about whether or not women could be deacons. (In my church, all the deacons did was hold bible studies and pass the collection plates, and a whole half of the congregation was dead certain that God didn't want women to do that. F-ing stupid, if you ask me.)

  Anyway, I just got sick of all the hypocrisy and I got sick of being told just to "trust in God" when I would ask why people who were never told about God got to spend eternity in hell. Yes, my old church believes this. Part of the whole guilt trip- since you didn't tell them about Jay-sus, it's your fault they're going to hell, you damn sinner. Even if they're eskimos, or martians, or whatever, it's still your fault.

  There's a ton more, but I won't waste anymore bandwidth. (Leo #1941)

• I wouldn't say that it was any one particular bad experience, but a long series of events and realizations that led me to atheism. One instance that I do remember happened shortly before I acknowledged my own godlessness. I attended a Catholic college in my freshman year. Of course, we were required to take a religion class. The priest teaching the course told us that it was a sin to doubt one's religion. I raised my hand and asked if it was OK to question one's religion even just for argument's sake. The good father told me that it was a mortal sin to question or doubt ones religion for any reason. On the way back to the dorm, that really started me thinking...

  Not that long afterwards, I was an atheist. (John Hachmann #1782) (/FONT>