Political Crossfire Forums

[The Comrade]

was raised roman catholic against my will, and after a little research and deep thought i picked judaism.


i just really couldn't stand christianity and the constant contradictions i found in it's teachings.

[Corona]

The Comrade wrote: i just really couldn't stand christianity and the constant contradictions i found in it's teachings.

Amen, brother.




(chuckle)

[toddytodd]

Corona wrote: My damn computer froze so I'll try this again.

Previously- Christian (I was not a hardcore christian, and I often missed church, but I believed strongly in the ideals of Christianity)

Currently- Athiest

Reasons for changing:

-Reason. I accepted reason over faith. I won't detail my steps unless you ask me to do so.

-Sin. I hated how everything pleasurable was a sin. When I first rebounded I took up hedonism for a while, but I have since overcome it.

-Self-mutilation. I used to place the welfare of others above my own welfare. Now I do not, I hold myself as my first responsibility. Others can fend for themselves, I can fend for myself. I am not obligated to make ANY sacrifices to improve their welfare. They can improve their own lives, I can improve mine. However, I still will help others if the reason for their problems is injustice. I feel that every man has a duty to fight injustice, everywhere.

Great post. Good to see another honest reply, without the sense of feeling shame that many like to project on others when they don't fit the (in their minds) necessary 'niche'.
I particularly liked this: "I hated how everything pleasurable was a sin."
That is somewhat how it seemed to me as well. Seems like 'sin' is a word used by people to show their dislike for something. It doesn't seem to be how the word is actually meant to be used.
It is funny how "God's sin" has changed, over time, to 'people's sin".

[feederband]

Actually we are all Atheist at birth ...Then we get mind warped one way or another untill we are what we are...

[Katsumoto]

feederband wrote: Actually we are all Atheist at birth ...Then we get mind warped one way or another untill we are what we are...

WOW!! I never met anyone who actually remembers their religious outlook at birth!

[feederband]

Katsumoto wrote: feederband wrote: Actually we are all Atheist at birth ...Then we get mind warped one way or another untill we are what we are...

WOW!! I never met anyone who actually remembers their religious outlook at birth!

I had no outlook ...I was just told what I had to believe...

[Dragoon]

I was not raised in a specific religion. My family attended Catholic church for a while, but htese days my dad is a buddhist and my mom is something of a non-practicing Christian.

For myself, I lost any faith I had after five years of Catholic school and examining the contradictions of the Christian religion and the bible. I have, at times, drifted towards becoming an indepdent Christian (mostly influenced by what I read of Sholtz's arguements with John on these boards) but I keep coming back to the fact there's no actual proof. So I declare myself an athiest.

[John]

Dragoon wrote: I was not raised in a specific religion. My family attended Catholic church for a while, but htese days my dad is a buddhist and my mom is something of a non-practicing Christian.

For myself, I lost any faith I had after five years of Catholic school and examining the contradictions of the Christian religion and the bible. I have, at times, drifted towards becoming an indepdent Christian (mostly influenced by what I read of Sholtz's arguements with John on these boards) but I keep coming back to the fact there's no actual proof. So I declare myself an athiest.


What do you mean by independent Christian?

[Katsumoto]

feederband wrote: Katsumoto wrote: feederband wrote: Actually we are all Atheist at birth ...Then we get mind warped one way or another untill we are what we are...

WOW!! I never met anyone who actually remembers their religious outlook at birth!

I had no outlook ...I was just told what I had to believe...

No matter what we are told, we all choose what we believe.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

F'losrix wrote: I'd like to learn more about other people's experiences with changing faiths, especially if there's anyone else out there who once thought they were a 'born again' Christian but have since left the faith entirely.

Beyond that, if you've switched religions, as from Chistianity to Buddhism; or if you've merely changed sects, as from Roman Catholicism to Episcopalian, I'd be interested in hearing more about your reasons for doing so.

This doesn't need to be limited to discussing moves from or within Christianity. I just use that as my base example because it's my own frame of reference.

What I don't want this thread to become:


I'll try not to be long-winded... and as I look back over this to edit it, I see I have failed miserably.

My parents are devout Roman Catholics. My mother's extended family was Catholic as far back as we can trace the family tree; my father's is a mishmash of different Christian sects, but the majority of them are Roman Catholics. I was raised in the faith. Some of the first books I read were religious in nature, the Bible included. All of my parents' close friends are strongly faithful Catholics. In short, I was surrounded by Catholics my entire childhood and I can't think of more than one person who has been significant in my life up until high school who wasn't Catholic.

While my parents were and are solidly devout, and basically center their lives around their faith, they always encouraged me to learn about any subject I wanted to. I was a voracious reader, and through my deliberate devouring of every book I could get my hands on, I became what might have been called a precocious child. At the age of six, I explained to my father the essentials of human reproduction, discovered in a book I read. Throughout grade school I was an avid reader. I completely bought into the assertion that knowledge was power, and set out to increase my power by increasing my knowledge as much as possible. I never watched anything but PBS and sporting events until I was eight or nine. I never owned a CD of popular music until I was thirteen. I lived almost solely within my books, and later within turn-based conquer-the-world computer games. To this day I think it was through my books that I first learned that there was a world outside Catholicism.

At the age of ten, I remember taking a shower one day, daydreaming as I usually do, and stumbled upon the gut-wrenching question: what if there is no God? It was like a bolt of lightning from the sky. I felt ill. I wondered, if there is no God, how did all this come to be? And I thought then, even if there were a God--what was his origin? Something had to give. I remember realizing at this time that for me to be standing here thinking these thoughts, something had to come out of nothing. I think now that this was the first step in a gradual, onerous journey towards the discovery of a worldview that allowed me to be content with whatever turns out to be the ultimate truth about existence--secular humanism, specifically, the idea that what we do in this world, that affects this world, matters most.

Later that year I met my best friend, also a very devout Catholic, in CCE, and as we grew up we sort of became mutual questioners. We challenged each others' knowledge of the Bible first, and later of science, and history, and everything we could think of. I can pinpoint exactly when I first became really uncomfortable with religion--when our church hired a new youth minister, who was very much into what I like to call the "happy Jesus." I can remember learning as a young child that Jesus died for our sins, and that we were supposed to be good and work for a sort of harmonious Christian world by doing good works and witnessing, etc. But this new youth minister was all about "getting the kids into Church" and filled what was once a very conservative Catholic environment with clapping, dancing, tambourine-shaking fun, and I f*cking hated it. Questioning exactly why I hated it so much is what led me to become very introspective about why I believed the things I believed.

This new introspection, a questioning of my own values if you will, came coupled with two external happenings: a political dispute at my church, and my best friend's mother suffering from what I now think was some kind of postpartum depression after the birth of her fourth child. In the former, my father, fed up with how the "new regime" in the youth ministry of our church was corrupting the youth with new age bulls**t, complained to our happy-go-lucky pastor about it all. However, this happy-go-lucky man told my father that he was going to have to deal with the "new regime," typified by a nice but incompetent education director and her ex-hippie New Age-influenced husband dubbed "Deacon Dirty-Needles" by the wags, or my father would just have to leave. Apparently the exchange ended with my father leaving in a huff after being told that he should never show his face again at our church.

We bounced around to various churches for months, until the old pastor got replaced by the diocese. Then we came back to our church, and by then I had lost the faith. I was frankly disenchanted with the politics and the hierarchy of Catholicism, while basically fine with Christ and God and all of the fundamentals of Christianity. However, I did not become a fundamentalist because I had a strong dislike for fundamentalists. In my mind they were people who shut their mind off to reason and knowledge and simply sought some sort of emotional fulfillment from religion--and I was never one to give up my reason just for the emotional high of charismatics. I was also disgusted by the world of celebrity pastors and end-times fanatics that I saw outside of the RCC. So I decided to continue to attend church and internally consider myself a sort of "philosophical Christian."

Rewind to my friend's mother--she began to become a conservative catholic zealot. She only attended Latin Mass in the old style, she forced very stringent rules on her children, and she began to come home from church with thoughts that the Jews were taking over society and that Vatican II was the direct result of satanic influences on the Roman Catholic Church. Her beliefs were essentially ripping her family apart. So as you can see, this was the time in my life that I became wary of religious fanaticism of all kinds.

To make a long story short, I read a lot of philosophy, a lot of history, and too many books on theology and religion. What made the most sense to me was agnosticism, because I thought that it was the most logically tenable position. After adopting agnosticism openly, my mother flipped out. I "reconverted" to Catholicism in an attempt to preserve my family life--and I must say, it nearly worked. But the rituals and all the trappings of organized religion were simply lost on me by that point. I tried to find solace in some other religion, some other tradition, but in the end I came to the conclusion that it was possible to live a moral life, not only outside of Catholicism, but outside of religion entirely. I saw in religion a lot of good people doing a lot of good things. But I also saw a lot of good people doing terribly damaging things to their children, and believing some incredible s**t. I also could no longer find any logical, rational reason for believing in a supreme being. It seemed to me that people only believed in a God because they wanted to, not because they had a rationale.

Anything beyond this is more personal than I would like to share on PCF, but suffice it to say that I am far happier without religion than with it. Religion can do fine things, but it can also be a source holding back people from learning and making decisions for themselves. In retrospect, the most important problem with religion was that it told me how to act--and I found this intolerable. I had trouble believing that the source of all moral knowledge could be found in a hierarchy, a religion, or a book--that the most reliable, and the most trustworthy guide to my actions was the entity closest to them--me.

Anyway, so I now answer to either atheist or agnostic--for while I do think that within the infinite possibilities of the universe, there is room for a God, I think it's ludicrous for any religion to claim they hold its truth. So a am agnostic in that I think we cannot know whether or not a God exists, I am atheistic in the sense that I disbelieve in any specific revelations. While "nonbeliever" is my standby, I've recently taken a liking to self-identifying simply as an "infidel."