How did you feel after leaving your religion and becoming atheist?

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Permalink Reply by Sentient Biped on October 2, 2012 at 9:39am

Nice topic Ibrahim.

My own exit from fundamentalism was gradual, and so long ago I don't remember all of the details any more.

As others state it was liberating.  

I was amazing to know that I had full responsibility for my life.  Not just in religious rules but all aspects.

It was like I someone had removed a hood from over my head,  letting in light, and air, and vision, and hearing.

I gave me a chance to discover how others became who they were.

That inspiration resulted in living a life, far different from what it would have been.

Instead of eating pork, I would up vegetarian, but that is my choice.  You have yours.

You are right about sexual liberation.  And dietary liberation.  And thought liberation.

I learned that, having one life, it was my responsibility to make it matter.

I am more forgiving of others.  We are only human.

Enjoy your life Ibrahim!  Make it count!

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Permalink Reply by DarkBlack on October 6, 2012 at 6:25pm

I had a feeling of freedom (from fear of wrath and the chains that had held my mind), clarity (I realised how much I had twisted my own mind to make religion fit) and pride (I was not a useless sinner who could not get anything right without god's help, my achievements are my own).

It was a little scary, because there is no plan, no powerful being looking out for me, on god to call on in a time of need and I had to be responsible for my own fate.

Then I realised what I could do and achieve with that responsibility and all I had to do was step up and accept it. 

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Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on October 6, 2012 at 8:03pm

I just woke up one day and realized theism hadn't made sense to me for the past two years. I just discovered that I was already an atheist. Just an acknowledgement of wholeness and authenticity which I'd achieved somewhere deep in my brain, then making a minor adjustment in thinking to accommodate it.

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Permalink Reply by Liz on October 7, 2012 at 11:37am

I'd have to echo the other posters' feelings of freedom and relief.  But my exact feelings were closest to yours, Ruth.  I had drifted farther and farther from my "born" religion, flirted with some others, but nothing fit.  But I hadn't "said the word" to myself. That took a few years, but when I did, I realized that I had let belief go years ago.  It was, if I may say so, graceful :)

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Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on October 7, 2012 at 5:24pm

A good way to put it, Liz.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on October 29, 2012 at 6:08pm

Kalliope, I don't know you but i'm happy for you. Welcome to our world.

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Permalink Reply by Two Cult Survivor on October 31, 2012 at 2:13pm

I think I was sad, really. Then angry, not only at myself, but at those whose critical thinking skills I respected, leading me to conclude that I was wrong about them or that I was right and they have to know they're peddling nonsense. I was shunned by my faith for divorcing my first wife (we had no kids; it was no one's flipping business but our own). I had people telling me my second marriage was adultery by Christ's definition (who asked him?).

But I was sad to realize that I had wasted so much time studying and devoting myself to the understanding of a conflicting mess of fairy tales served up as holy truth. All the time I spent trying to figure out if Noah's Flood was true or false, worldwide or regional, could have been spent training a telescope to the sky or really getting a firm grasp of the truly awe-inspiring process of evolution by natural selection.

The worst thing about believing a fiction is the opportunity cost: you waste time doing something useless that could have been spent more wisely doing something constructive.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on October 31, 2012 at 8:58pm

"...the opportunity cost...."

Thank you, TCS, for the reminder. I wasted much time and energy trying to comply with Catholicism. My healing required me to see that the time and energy Catholicism demanded had been doing something constructive for Catholicism: making me easier to control.

BTW, I minored in economics and your using the term 'opportunity cost' moved me to look for its first use. In Wikipedia I found this: The term was coined in 1914 by Friedrich von Wieser in his book "Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft." My mother spoke German but she didn't pass her knowledge to her kids.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Pianko on October 31, 2012 at 7:52pm

I felt about the same as you did, free from all the guilt of not doing the religion and free to do activities or work in the time I would have had to go to religious services. I'm a lapsed Jew and my parents sent me to religious classes at their synagogue and the classes taught a higher level of Judaism than what my parents did so a vacillated between feeling guilty for not doing orthodox Judaism and just going along with what my family did or didn't do and in college I had to go to Hillel (a Jewish college organization) and Chabad (a sect of Hasidic Judaism) often and to weekday afternoon/evening services in addition to 2-3 hour long Saturday morning service and the Saturday afternoon/evening service, all in order to avoid feeling guilty for not doing it, so I would feel that I was doing my sacred duty to keep the Jewish traditions. I came out as an atheist in October 2009 but was still afraid to talk to non-Jewish girls or go to non-Jewish event until August 2010.

Now I am well familiar with what is wrong with religion and I say Judaism and probably religion in general also, is a system of bizarre, inherited, maladaptive, abusive, time-wasting, obsessive-compulsive behaviors and beliefs, a mental disorder people inherit and sometimes modify a little and have to do and pass on to other people in order to avoid feeling guilty for not doing it.

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