Are atheists really just abused Christians?

Question

Are atheists really just abused Christians that got sick of the hypocrites at church and all the religious politics and power within a small church that people play to boost there own self-esteem? Come clean now. I'm kinda tired of the church/religion. But I still love Christ/God.

Answer 1

I am not an atheist, but I have noticed that most atheists I have come across seem to be simply anti-christian, rather than anti-god in general.

Answer 2

I am one.

But then again, most Christians, ex or not are abused.

I didn't become an Atheist because of the non Christian behavior though.

I became a non practicing Christian because of the actions of most of the leadership in most of the churches I attended.

Becoming an Atheist took allot more than a nasty old lady or a self righteous young man.

Becoming an Atheist took a few years and brutal honesty. It had nothing to do with anger, or being upset. It was a non emotional search for the truth. I learned through studying the bible and thinking through the doctrine there, that much of what I was taught about God and being one of his followers couldn't be true. I learned that the theory of a loving God is not supported by the bible, until the New Testament, and even then it was just a theory presented, based on the fact that he sent his Son to die for mankind.

This sounds like a loving act, but when you understand that God created Lucifer, with a foreknowledge of everything that would happen as a result, you start to see that it isn't a loving act at all. When you read through the Old Testament, you start to see behavior that is anything but loving to mankind.

Then after getting rid of all the 'teachings' that corrupt one's opinion of God, you are able to start taking an objective look at the claims in the bible, and then comparing them to what we know to be true about the world. That makes it easier to see that most of the stories about God are just not true, which means that the whole theory about God is most likely an evolved myth.

After realizing that, you can find examples of that religious evolution throughout history books. You can see where humans, adopted the God story and evolved it into the systems we have today.

Atheism is allot more than just being upset at hypocrites.

Answer 3

I've never been a christian, or had any belief in god what so ever in my entire life. My parents didn't brainwash me into a religion or the belief in a god or gods.
There are also a lot of atheist people in the Middle Eastern countries that are mostly islamic. Buddhism is basically an atheist religion (I think they'd better scrap buddhism from the list of religions and put in in the list of "philosophies of life").
So the answer is no. There are a lot of christians who have come to their senses though. They really read the bible, and then became atheists.

Answer 4

No, because not all Atheists were Christians. Christianity isn't the only religion. Believe it or not man, people actually believe in other gods. And sometimes those people become atheists. So what your saying is a generalization.

Answer 5

I cannot speak for all atheists. For myself, I was never treated badly. It just doesn't make sense. I had questions that nobody had good answers for. I had confusion that nobody could give clarity too. And I saw that in historical context, you could watch the evolution of a changing religion be pushed and molded to suit the zeitgeist from its beginning to the present day.

I discovered, with very little digging, that religions were made by people, not gods.

Answer 6

People keep telling me that I wasn't really a Christian. I only went to church for about 3 years when I was very young. So maybe they have a point. Hard to believe in the Bible when you aren't being force fed it over a prolonged period of time.

Answer 7

That is actually pretty close to my experience. When I first ran away from the church, I ran screaming in the complete opposite direction. Eventually, I grew up a little and did some research on many different religions and decided that in my opinion none of them had it right. So I ran screaming, then approached it with an open mind, and my decision to deny any god(s) stood.

Answer 8

Some people don't like image of God they have grown up with, or what their religious leaders present to them as the image of God, or simply the paraphernalia, rituals and practices of their faith, that is when they seem to reject that image of God, but in truth what they are really rejecting that particular way of approaching God or divinity.

Divinity or a notion of our personal sacredness is what we are all born with as a child. It is only a matter of time, and looking when we find it again.

Later in life, many rediscover God on their own, through spiritual practices or through other religions that they feel comfortable with. Some might even mix various aspects of different religious philosophies, and belief systems, to make their own personal mix of belief system.

Many people rediscover their birth religions in a more authentic way, when they try to approach it through their own spiritual journey.

We truly come of age, when we discover God or the spirit, on our own.

Collective faith can become dogmatic or a mere intellectual pursuit while personal faith has to tried and test and practiced every day, no way out of it.

Personal faith, doesn't afford us with the comforts of rituals, or traditional symbology and totems, but it keep us away from the illusion of being faith-full, while we just might be spiritually empty.

Answer 9

I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a Christian. No...that is not why I left the religion. I left because I don't believe. There may be some type of higher power, there may not. I can't go my whole life trying to convince myself that things I've never seen or experienced exist.

But all of the corruption in religion certainly helps keep me away from it.

Answer 10

I have never been religious. My distaste for religion is based on the assertions made in the face of contradictory evidence. I also dislike the system of patriarchy and submission to authority. Ultimately it boils down to the idea that I'm supposed to believe just because my dad believed. But he believed because his dad believed, and so on. So it's wouldn't be anything more than a tradition were there not the *threat* of eternal damnation for failing to comply.

Answer 11

That may be one reason.

Religion is very strict. It is right and everything else is wrong. You literally have to escape religion before you can truly research creationism in an unbiased way.

And it can be any number of reasons whether a person left religion, or was never involved.