Any nonbelievers that used to believe...?

Question

What happened, tell me your story, if you want. I don't understand because I KNOW that God is truth and I could never believe He did not exist, please tell me how your heart changed!

Answer 1

being non-Christian does not make me a "non-believer." other people have beliefs, too, you know.

that's part of my beef with christianity - the pretense that you are the only ones that count.

Answer 2

I didn't feel that way because of any one personal experience. It came slowly. I can't control the way I believe, it's not like belief is a switch that I just turned off voluntarily one day. I was raised a Christian, and had a very strong faith growing up. It has just, over the years, started to seem more and more ridiculous to me to think that there's some sort of "being" out there. It's like the way most people think now when they're taught about Greek Myths in school. You hear about Zeus, and Aphrodite, and Athena, and you think it's silly that people actually BELIEVED in this stuff. I just started wondering why their beliefs were silly and ours weren't. They believed in gods, we believed in a God. I just started to feel that we were stuck in a sort of primitive mind-set. The stories of the Bible seemed more and more non-sensical to me. (You can be a rapist and thief and murderer and child molester every day and go to Heaven if you accept Jesus on your last day of life, but you could spend your entire life doing good and generous things to help others, and then burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity because you don't "believe" the right thing.) That makes NO sense to me. What kind of God has those kinds of rules, and yet claims to love you? It sounds like it was made up by some crazy, schizophrenic people.

Answer 3

I think it was more my mind that changed. By that I mean that I had to admit to myself that it did not make sense. I was basically believing that the universe was run by a giant, jealous psycho. And I agree with the first answerer. Using terms like "non-believer" for anyone that's not Christians, as if no other belief systems exist, talking about how Christianity is a "relationship" as opposed to other religions that are just "religions." It made me embarrassed to be a part of that.

Answer 4

When I was about ten I believe in God and I was very interested in God and would ask a lot of questions about him. However the answers I got didn't seem to make much sense. So after awhile I became skeptical about God until I just to stop believing.

Answer 5

Even if some of us are raised that way because of family heritage that does not necessarily mean we automatically believed. I was raised Baptist and I always had questions and doubts which were swept aside by the Reverend and the Sunday School Teacher who just termed me as difficult. I have never believed in the christian deity even when I was being forced to worship one. The last time I went to church was 1984 and honestly I couldn't be happier.

Answer 6

Through critical thinking and acknowledgment of what is and is not possible, I came to the only logical conclusion.

Read "Atheism: The Case Against God" by George H. Smith sometime. Also read "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris. And pretty much anything by Richard Dawkins. Carl Sagan too.

Answer 7

I ran into two key problems: the problem of evil, and the problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom. Wrestling with these problems led me into nontraditional forms of theism, such as process theism; and once the dogmatic shell was cracked, and my mind was open to infinite possibilities, there was no going back.

There was also an existential dimension to the whole struggle: feeling that traditional theism divested the cosmos of any value and placed all that value in a transcendent being. I needed to find a way to be at home in the world, to value it for what it was in itself, and not because of its relationship to a creator.

Lately I've been reading a lot of new paradigm science, and I am completely taken with the idea of an emerging synthesis of science and spirituality. But there's no place in such a synthesis for traditional, dogmatic belief.

Answer 8

What makes you think that all non-Christians are atheists? Not all of us are you know. There are other religions besides yours. Why don't you believe in Thor?

I don't worship your God for moral reasons. How could you worship a God that would burn people alive for all eternity just for not believing in him? I frankly could care less whether or not he really exists or not, I can't stomach the idea of bowing down and worshiping such a sadist.

I also do not believe in a omnipotent god because I find the idea to be very illogically and omnipotence rises too many paradoxes.

Answer 9

I was raised in a conservative evangelical Christian church (Church of Christ). I was “born again” and was quite fervent in my beliefs for Christ. Much later, (about 40 years of age) I began to question the Bible. Mind you, I had previously believed that to question the veracity of the Bible was sinful. However, I had always been skeptical about things such as present day miracles, modern-day revelations, etc.

I had been studying with some Jehovah’s Witnesses in hopes of planting a seed of doubt in them about their accepting the Watchtower as an authority in religious matters. We were specifically dealing with Matt. 24 and the fact that it listed certain signs of “the end.” I pointed out that Jesus said that all those things would happen before that generation came to an end and that his remarks must have been referring to the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in A.D. 70. They agreed that Jesus was speaking of that, but they said that this passage was a “dual-fulfillment prophecy” such as Hos. 11.1 and some others. I told them that I understood the concept of dual-fulfillment prophecies but that I had no reason to believe that Matt. 24 was one of them.

To make a long story short, our studies ended shortly after that and I never saw them again. However, I began to wonder about the concept of this type of prophecy. Why should anyone believe in them? Why should anyone accept that explanation rather than the more obvious explanation that this was an error by a biblical author?

This doubt began to grow and I finally decided to test the Bible’s accuracy in other places. To be sure, there are places where the Bible is quite accurate, particularly in how the people lived at that time. After all, much of the Bible was written by people living in the times that were dealt with in the Bible. However, not all of it was accurate. There were contradictions, something that one would expect in a collection of literature written by different men at different times. But it was not INERRENT.

There are many Christians who believe in God and Jesus who do not accept the inerrancy of the Bible. However, if the Bible has error in something that can be checked out, (Isaiah’s failed prophecy about Damascus’ being destroyed in Is. 17.1 is one such case) then how can one be sure that it has no error in something that CANNOT be checked out. For example, the Christian knows that Jesus was born of a virgin. How? As the old song says, “For the Bible tells me so.” But if the Bible has error in other places, how can we be sure that it doesn’t here? The answer is “We can’t!”

With my confidence in the Bible gone, it was just a short step to questioning the existence of God. I thought of the evidence for his existence and found it sorely lacking. So while I realized that the existence of God cannot be disproved, I realized that it cannot be proven either.

So here I am. Not believing in God or Christ or the Bible.
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Answer 10

I actually read the Bible. The more I read the less sense it made. Then I took some history classes and things started to fall into place that disproved more than proved. Once doubt started tho whole idea did not make sense. It only worked as long as I didn't question anything.

Answer 11

In reading the details of your question, it seems you have an agenda in mind here. I believe in "god' just not the christian version. My MIND got changed after studying history and finding that there is no historical evidence that Jesus ever existed. From there, it was easy to understand the blatant contradictions between the "old" testament and the "new", as well as contradictions with science, history and common sense.