How did you lose your faith?

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Permalink Reply by Andree Saxby on February 26, 2011 at 5:44am

I happened all at once on my 25th birthday. It had been brewing for awhile, I guess, beginning in early college. Away from home, I knew religion was now my choice, and I chose to stay on the path of Christianity. I didn't know anything else, and the was afraid of not attending church, drinking alcohol, having premarital relations, etc. Guilt (which I interpreted as the voice of the Holy Spirit) kept me from those things. I went to church weekly but began having problems really feeling the presence of a god. People would get up front at Week of Prayer and testify about God leading in their life, how God spoke to them, but I could never hear God talking to me. I wished I wanted to pray and wondered if there was something wrong with me that kept me from understanding divine guidance. Sometimes I'd get jazzed up about having a friend in God but my life always regressed to the mean, which was me making things happen for myself with no supernatural intervention whatsoever.

 

I began to let myself do things that made me feel guilty (tattoos, beers, skipping church). Soon those things became familiar and normal, but I retained little twinges of remorse about these things. I still felt that someday, I would understand what all the believers were talking about when they said they had a relationship with God but I had no idea how that was possible. To have a relationship with something that was invisible and increasingly imaginary.

 

After graduation when I got a job as a nurse, it happened that I had to work every other weekend. I wondered whether to request Saturdays off.  Not that I had been to church in the last two years, but I was still waiting for that adult time, when my childish indiscretions would seem less appealing and I would really gear up and get Christian. I ended keeping quiet about wishing I had Sabbaths off and proceeding with a basically secular lifestyle.

 

The self-sufficiency I experienced as a member of the work-force cemented my secular habits. It was easy to see that I could be well-fed, happy, and comfortable even though I didn't commune with God. I was taking care of myself. I still really wanted to want God, though. I was touched with the idea that I'd see my sick old patients in heaven someday, newly restored. I still attributed the beauty of the earth to a divine hand, and had no problem accepting the creation story.

 

Bit by bit, though, I began to question biblical lore. Was I really supposed to believe in a talking donkey? That we got our languages from the Tower of Babel? That there were invisible angels helping us? That when we got to heaven, everything would be perfect and amazing and we could fly to other planets and ride lions and see dead loved ones? Whenever I thought about belief in God, it was to wish I could accept these things like a good Christian should.

 

Meanwhile my dad was getting sicker, and that brought up questions about the possibility of an afterlife. Is Dad going to go to heaven? Am I going to go to heaven? How do we get to heaven? Do I really want to be alive forever?

 

My boyfriend (now husband) had been reading Dawkins et al. and making his own switches from belief to atheism but kept his ideas to himself because he knew it bothered me. I was worried about what would happen if we ever had babies. I didn't want to fight about how to raise them. It seemed that this possible future was when it was really going to be crunch time, when I would start needing to nail down my convictions and get some gospel in me. But I didn't know how I was going to guide others to God when I couldn't get behind him myself. I figured it was probably a bad idea to every have babies, since how could I fight with myself and my husband over these things?

 

Everything about Christianity, or any supernatural belief for that matter, was getting harder to believe. Religious people had to be less and less extreme before I wrote them off as kooky nutjobs. It came down to one thing I held onto: The complexity of life. The world and the universe seemed too big and intricate and beautiful to've happened through natural means. But every time I thought about evolution, it made more and more sense . . . but at the same time I was afraid, because I knew it would teach me things I wasn't ready to accept.

 

I finally worked up the courage to do a previously blasphemous thing:  Learn about evolution. I wanted a book about evolution that was basic and non-abrasive and not too advanced because I knew next to nothing about how evolution worked.

 

I picked up Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True from the library, and that was it.  I finished it the day before my birthday. It was the most exciting thing I'd ever read. The simplicity of it all. How could life have happened any other way? Evolution wasn't about chance at all, I realized, but the opposite. It was perfect. The volumes and volumes of evidence for evolution were overwhelming.  I felt connected with every living being as a peer, as part of a dynamic system of growth and life - Not as a ruler or master.

 

The next day was even more exciting: I realized that I didn't have to believe in God. No one had ever told me that before. I didn't have to try anymore.  I was an atheist! No longer was that a dirty word. It was wonderful and right. I realized that when my dad died, he was just going to die--and that was okay, because I when I died, I would just die too. Suddenly all these questions, even silly ones (why does fruit taste so good?) were answered (because it evolved too!)

 

Suddenly information wasn't a scary thing that I had to shut out for fear it would intrude on my beliefs. Suddenly my worldview was open to modification, to reason, understanding . . . to observable facts, testable proofs . . . science.

 

I became free of guilt. I was in love with the possibility of a future . . . I realized that if I ever had babies, I could teach them to think and feel and be aware, and I would never tell them lies.

 

I have been high on knowledge ever since.

 

Permalink Reply by clinton lopez on March 16, 2011 at 8:11am

great testimony ;)

 

Permalink Reply by Ariel on February 26, 2011 at 7:27pm

Well, like I said in my other post, my family moved away from our church when I was about 8 years old. Between the ages of 8 and about 15, I didn't bother with religion really. I just don't remember it being a big part of my life.

When I entered my teenage years, I became severly depressed. So, like many people, I turned to God and Jesus to help me feel better. I prayed daily, went with my friends to church youth groups, and actually read the Bible. What a horrible book, btw. Nothing I did made me feel better, and I couldn’t swallow some of the things that the pastors were telling me. I felt an empty space inside myself, and I only knew to fill it with religion.

But God was not answering me. I never felt him, I never heard him, I never had any sort of connection to him. So I went looking elsewhere.

I researched religions. I looked into Buddism, Taoism, Hinduism, anything I could find, and I started comparing them all. I finally came across Wicca, which, though not a religion rooted deep (it was founded in the ’50s) in history, I liked the idea of finding an older religion. I tried the ancient Greek and Roman gods, but finally settled on the older Celtic gods. I felt a family kinship with them, and I was settled on my gods.

Looking back, I know that my life between the ages of 17 and 26 were not happy or blessed in any way. I moved around a lot, slept with different people, drank like a fish, and basically put my life in all sorts of harms way. I was actually able to feel okay about all that, because as a pagan, sex was sacred and something that should be sought out and shared, and there was no taboo against mind-altering drugs. I shed as much of my christian upbringing as I could. Perhaps I was rebelling, perhaps I was acting out due to trauma from my childhood, I don't know. But it's not my favorite time in my life, and I have guilt for things I did to people who I called my friends.

A year or so ago, I crashed mentally. I was fighting with anxiety, and had been on and off so many different anti-depressants that I can't even remember them all. I had a prescription of Xanax for the anxiety, and after I got sent home due to my response to a customer verbally abusing me at work, I took the rest of the Xanax. I was just trying to stop the anxiety and paranoia, but I ended up getting taken to the hospital, and I guess I spent a night there. I lost a day, and I had to promise not to hurt myself after I was released. Duh, but every therapist says the same thing, so whatever. I got sent a recommendation for a different mental health facility. So I went and talked to a couple different doctors, and they decided that I wasn't depressed. I had Bipolar Disorder II. That revelation put so many things into perspective. Why the anti-depressants weren't working, why I wouldn't sleep for three days, and then spend a week in bed. It was like a light-bulb.

I wanted to know everything I could. I finally had an answer as to why I didn't feel right most of the time. But I also wanted to know more. I read a lot about evolution, science, theology, morality, and how it all works together. And for a while, I was very angry about religion, and would have held the title "New Atheist" quite well. But the more I read, the more mellow I become. Mellow does not mean complaisant. I still feel that religion is a horrible thing for anyone to have to go through, but I also recognize it for what it usually is. A coping mechanism; a security blanket, or imaginary friend. So instead of telling them how they need to wake up to reality, I try to understand why they need it. Sometimes, people just need someone to talk to.

Permalink Reply by Dustin Williams on March 6, 2011 at 9:57pm

Wow, quite the roller coaster! I've known a few people, OK they were family, who would bounce back and forth from hyper-religiosity to nearly atheist. I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised that it was because they were bipolar. Religion really can be a crutch.

Permalink Reply by Ariel on March 6, 2011 at 11:33pm

It can be worse than a crutch, it can be a total misdiagnosis, or in the very least, an non-diagnosis. Of course, here in Oregon, I'm a bit biased against religion when it comes to medical stuff. Can BPD be compatible with religion? Sure, but there's a lot of questions that it brings up for me that can't even be attempted to be answered.

Permalink Reply by Diana on March 4, 2011 at 1:48am

I was having a conversation with a Christian stranger about religion. He asked me the difference between Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists. He had spent some time in Utah and knew a bit about LDS. When I told him that both churches emphasized health, he asked me why SDA's didn't drink coffee? Not wanting to mention that we had a prophet, in case he didn't know, :), I gave him the "your body is the temple of God" shpeel. His reply: "O.K., because the Mormon's prophet Joseph Smith told them that coffee was bad for them before science indicated that it was, and then that helped verify to them that he was a valid prophet." My entire universe shifted right there, because I knew SDA's felt EGW had the inside scoop on the health message. My mouth literally fell open and I had no response. I think I finally said "Oh", and then excused myself from the conversation.

That got the ball rolling. Two weeks later PBS had a special on Mormonism. The whole feel of it seemed familiar. The people high up in their church that were smilingly defending their history could just have easily been GC public relations big wigs. They showed little Mormon children being indoctrinated at a young age, by singing "Someday I'm going on a mission!" in their Sunday School classes. It could just as easily have been SDA kids singing "Sabbath is a Happy Day!" I had done some childcare for a Sunday church during college, and suddenly I realized that "normal" churches just had nurseries. It was really cultish to have a baby class that introduced doctrine from birth.

I started reading voraciously on the internet and several months later we met with our pastor to resign our church offices and tell him we had to follow our conscience and leave the church. It was another year before we left Christianity altogether, realizing that though (to quote a friend) "it was a larger and more grace filled box, it was still a box."

Permalink Reply by Dustin Williams on March 6, 2011 at 9:52pm

When I had just left the church and got a job people where I was training kept on thinking I was Mormon. I hadn't yet lost the sheltered innocence and hadn't started drinking coffee yet. I finally stopped it by talking about going to the bar more.

What should discredit both prophets is that coffee and alcohol in moderation can do wonders for prostate health and cholesterol, respectively. 

I live in Idaho now where just about everybody is either Mormon or ex-Mormon. Pretty crazy stuff.

Permalink Reply by Andree Saxby on March 7, 2011 at 2:13am

Funny, isn't it? I think many Adventists would agree that the whole Joseph-Smith Top-Hat thing, the Angel Moroni, the bogus 17th-century English, etc. is laughable, but Ellen White and the visions . . . That I can get behind? Hmmm . . .

Permalink Reply by Dustin Williams on March 7, 2011 at 1:48pm

Brain damage + extreme emotional distress of a religious nature =EGW visions.

What's interesting is that Joseph Smith and Ellen White were both from the same part of New York and he was only about 10 years ahead of her. Something sure wasn't right about that area.

Permalink Reply by Diana on March 7, 2011 at 2:11pm

It was so interesting for me to discover all the similarities between the prominent belief systems that started in North America in the 1800's, the Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists included.

When I was first sorting all this out (surely, it can't be true!), I found it embarrassing to learn that Joseph Smith came before EGW, so if anyone had the original "in" on things, it was him, not her. Lol.

Permalink Reply by Dustin Williams on March 12, 2011 at 2:20pm

What's worse is that the JWs and SDAs are Millerite brethern with the split being over the sabbath around 1850.

Permalink Reply by clinton lopez on March 16, 2011 at 8:13am

only we didn't get magic underwear

 

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